WarriorsandLovers

by Alysha Ellis

  He walked to the door. “There is a call button on the desk behind you. Press it when you’ve finished.”

  The door shut. Lije booted up the computer, tapping out a repetitive rhythm on the desk as he waited for the programs to load. When they did, the files he opened left him reeling. Like most people, Elijah knew what could be achieved with Photoshop and computer graphics, but the evidence Hopewood presented combined with the quiet certainty of the man himself quelled most of Elijah’s doubts. After all, weren’t his own abilities proof there was more to life on Earth than science could explain?

  Case after case of missing persons, some of them world famous—aviators, explorers, ordinary men and women, husbands, wives, children. Hopewood had accumulated evidence, cross-referenced and footnoted. At the end of each document, Hopewood had an appendix to link the information to his overarching theory. These people were victims, killed to prevent news of the Dvalinn’s existence from being broadcast to the rest of the human race or for some malevolent purpose linked to the Dvalinn plan to destroy the human race and claim the surface world for themselves.

  One file in particular nailed home the reality of the battle Hopewood claimed was being waged. Fifteen years ago in Venice, the Dvalinn had launched a devastating attack on Hopewood and his group, known as Gatekeepers—killing them, leaving Hopewood hideously injured, presumed dead. The pictures of the destroyed laboratory and the medical reports from the hospital where Hopewood had been taken removed many of Elijah’s doubts. If the Dvalinn existed and were capable of this malevolence, they had to be stopped.

  Elijah had seen enough. He pushed the button on the desk.

  “Are you convinced?” Hopewood asked as he re-entered the room.

  “Convinced might not be the right word,” Elijah hedged, “but there is some interesting information here. Since I have nothing to lose and half a million dollars to gain…yeah, I’m in.”

  “I’ve had my lawyers draw up a contract.”

  “One that binds you to giving me the money but which allows me an out.” Elijah narrowed his eyes. “That contract?”

  “I haven’t changed my mind,” Hopewood replied. “As long as you complete the training period, the money is yours.”

  Elijah held out his hand. “Give it here.” He took the contract and the offered pen.

  “Don’t you want to read it first?” Hopewood asked.

  “I’ve got nothing else to do for the moment. I can complete any training you want me to. After, I’m free to go if I want, right?”

  “That’s correct,” Hopewood said.

  “Fine.” With a quick slash of the pen, Elijah scrawled his signature across the paper and watched as Hopewood added his and dated it.

  * * * * *

  “Shit!” Elijah shook his fingers then stuck them in his mouth to relieve the tingling burn. When Hopewood had told him he’d be undertaking weapons training, he’d envisaged rifles, target practice , given Hopewood’s insistence that Elijah’s physical fitness was an asset, some kind of boot camp. He had not expected to find himself in a laboratory, learning to put together this odd appliance.

  He had no idea what it was supposed to do, other than give him a painful electric shock every time he put things together slightly wrong or if he broke one of the fragile glass globes. Yet Hopewood insisted this was Elijah’s primary weapon, one he would have to be completely familiar with. Most of the time he could assemble the device in seconds, even with his eyes shut. But not now.

  He looked up at the clock. His heart rate escalated and his hands fumbled. His muscles cramped as another surge of electricity hit.

  “It’s time.” David strode across the room, sweeping the components of the device out of Elijah’s hands. If David suffered a shock, no sign of it registered on his grim face.

  Elijah had never considered himself a coward but the thought of what came next made him sick. Compared to it, the pain he’d just experienced was no more than a pinprick.

  “Move it!” David ordered.

  Elijah pushed himself up from the workbench. His knees were stiff, his gait jerky.

  David pushed open the plain white door and waited for Elijah to step inside.

  The smell hit him first. Sour bile flooded his mouth. He swallowed the rush of nausea. He’d attended fires where people had died, inhaled the foul odor of ash and charring, and it hadn’t filled him with this sense of dread.

  He would never smell lavender again without wanting to vomit.

  The steel frame loomed like a mediaeval torture device. Hopewood stood beside it, his face impassive, watching as David fastened the cuffs around Elijah’s wrists, shackled his ankles and closed the cage around his ribs.

  And then the voices came. “Freak! Monster!” Male voices. Female voices. Whispers, shouts. Endless. Inescapable. “We are the Dvalinn. We will destroy. Freak. Monster.”

  “You can stop them, Mr. Denton.” Hopewood now, speaking as he always did. Soft, emotionless, relentless. “Press the button. The voices will stop. Put your hand on the button. So simple. Stop them.”

  The first time he’d been locked in he’d felt strong and in control. The repetition had irritated him and three hours tested his patience, but Lije had withstood it. He’d made a halfhearted effort to do what Hopewood wanted and teleport himself out of the restraints, over to the switch on the wall to turn off the speakers, but nothing had happened, nor had he expected it to.

  At the end of the session David had released him and wiped down the metal with lavender-scented disinfectant. The next day the entire scene had repeated itself, and the next and the next. Slowly, Elijah had found himself dreading the moment he walked into the room, the scent of the disinfectant making his gut clench. He wanted to clasp his hands over his ears, shut out the hateful litany.

  And every time David came to get him the ordeal became harder and harder to bear.

  Today Hopewood’s comments were contemptuous. “Too weak to manage it, Mr. Denton? I expected better of you.”

  The voices on the wall chanted, “Weak. Weak.”

  “I wonder if we need to try physical force. Perhaps the devil is in you. We need to beat the evil out.”

  The voices on the wall took up the refrain, a hideous, impossible echo of his mother’s words. How could Hopewood know? Wasn’t it enough that he had infiltrated every aspect of Elijah’s life? How could he stand having him plunder his mind?

  His control snapped and he roared, “Shut up! Shut the fuck up!” He twisted and turned but the restraints held firm. He wanted to kill, tear the walls apart, anything to stop this. Rage boiled up in searing darkness.

  The voices went quiet. Silence fell, broken at last by the soft sound of one pair of hands slowly clapping. “Well done, Mr. Denton. I knew you could do it.”

  Lije opened his eyes. His hand was splayed out on the red button on the wall. The wall opposite his steel prison. He turned. The cage was still, there, the cuffs locked, ankle shackles still in place, chest plate closed. But he was free.

  His chest heaved. Sweat ran down his cheeks.

  “Now you know what you’re capable of,” Hopewood said. “A few more days to hone the skill and you’ll be ready.”

  * * * * *

  That first traumatic escape smashed some bond holding Elijah back. Within three days he could teleport himself anywhere in the complex as long as he’d previously seen it. Upstairs, downstairs, into Hopewood’s office and back to the lab. He refused to think about the torture chamber. He never wanted to go back there.

  He was considering whether to try to materialize outside the building when Hopewood summoned him to his office. Elijah chose to walk. He hadn’t got to the point where he felt comfortable using any of his abilities in front of Hopewood. Maybe it was the man’s coldness or his determined refusal to call Lije anything other than the formal “Mr. Denton.” He hoped his revulsion had nothing to do with Hopewood’s scarred appearance.

  He knocked on Hopewood’s door.

  “Come in.”
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  Lije turned the handle and entered. Hopewood sat alone at the head of the table. “You’ve mastered all the skills you need. It’s time for your final briefing. Sit down.”

  He waited, his fingers steepled in front of him, until Lije was seated. “Fifteen years ago I would not have needed you or your skills, Mr. Denton. I had the ability to detect Dvalinn when they came to the surface. I had a device allowing me to piggyback onto their teleport and enter the Dvalinn underworld.” His lips twisted, and with his sagging facial muscles he looked less than human. Elijah had to control the urge to flinch. “I lost the ability when one of my employees betrayed me.”

  “So you need me,” Elijah said. “You forced me to learn to teleport. You told me you want to take the fight to the Dvalinn. This is the only way it can happen.”

  “I’m pleased you worked it out for yourself.”

  “I haven’t worked everything out.” Elijah clenched his fists until the knuckles went white. “There are a few questions I should have asked before this.”

  “But you didn’t, did you?” Hopewood smirked. “Why do you think that is?”

  “Because I didn’t believe you. I didn’t think I could teleport and I didn’t think the Dvalinn were real.”

  “And now you do?”

  “Now I do.” Sometime in the hours Elijah had spent listening to those voices, he had come to believe. Hopewood knew Lije’s strengths and weaknesses. He’d known he could learn to teleport. He’d shown him the evidence he’d amassed. He’d been right about everything he’d told Elijah. If the Dvalinn existed, as Elijah now believed they did, then Hopewood was right about them being the enemy of humankind. They had to be destroyed.

  “Ask your questions. I will do my best to answer them.”

  “How can the Dvalinn live inside the Earth?” He’d done a little geology in his science projects at school. He knew what the core of the Earth was made up of. How could another race possibly exist there?

  “It’s not as difficult as you might imagine.” Hopewood pressed a button on the desk and a panel in the wall opened to reveal a screen. “Watch.” The lights dimmed and documentary material about underground cavern systems played. Some Elijah had heard of, many more he had not.

  “Deep within the Earth’s mantle is a huge cavern system shielded against detection by most human devices,” Hopewood said over the commentary, “These are the dwelling places of the Dvalinn. You will use your telekinetic ability to enter these hidden caverns.”

  “I can’t visualize somewhere I haven’t been,” Elijah pointed out.

  “Visualization is helpful but not necessary.” Hopewood used a pointer to indicate several places on the map. “There are portals where the power of ley lines or dragon currents is particularly strong. This will act as a channel to let you enter specific points in the Dvalinn world.”

  Hopewood stood and paced back and forth in the space between the table and the back wall. “Before the piggyback method became unviable, I destroyed several Dvalinn cities. Given the scale of destruction and Dvalinn cultural behaviors, it is extremely likely these cities have remained abandoned. The portal can be manipulated to insert you into one of these.”

  Easy enough for Hopewood to say. He wasn’t going, was he? “What if it’s not deserted?”

  “When I found you I was looking for a particular combination of attributes. It was an unexpected bonus to discover your physical appearance meant you would be indistinguishable from the average Dvalinn. Unless you materialize directly in front of a hostile group, you should be able to pass yourself off as one of them for long enough to get the job done.”

  Elijah looked down at the exposed light-brown skin of his forearm. His color was so much an accepted part of him that he didn’t think about it much. For his grandparents or great-grandparents it might have been an issue—it hadn’t been important in his life. He wasn’t sure how he felt about it being a factor in his fight against the Dvalinn.

  Before he could ask anything else, Hopewood, his eyes gleaming with the light of fanaticism, continued. “With your help, I will make one last definitive strike. The device you have spent so long learning to assemble is a delivery system for a penetrative gas somewhat like the sarin used in the Tokyo subway many years ago. In the enclosed caverns, there will be no escape. Once detonation takes place the entire Dvalinn race will be wiped from existence.”

  A heavy weight settled in Elijah’s stomach. He folded his arms on the table. During the propaganda sessions, he’d managed to close his mind to what was required of him, but this was genocide. No matter how evil these Dvalinn were, Hopewood had told him they were human in appearance—they looked like Elijah—he could pass as one of them.

  “This is not the time to be squeamish,” Hopewood said, accurately reading Elijah’s expression. “The strong must sometimes make harsh decisions. Mercy can be the greatest weakness. Prepare to leave early in the morning. You will be taken to the most powerful natural portal in the world. There you will concentrate on projecting yourself into the Dvalinn caverns. Your telekinetic powers will start the process—the natural power lines of the Earth will do the rest.”

  “Where is this natural portal?” Elijah asked.

  “At Stonehenge. Right in the middle of the standing stones.”

  * * * * *

  “So, Eora—you wanna share this plan with me?” For three hours Nieko had trudged through the stone corridors beside Eora without saying a word. He’d hoped she might get the message that he was angry, but if she had, she hadn’t cared. The damn woman was singing!

  He knew she was waiting him out. As always, she won. She won because she was stronger than him. Nieko had a weakness Eora didn’t know about. He would rather die than reveal it to her. Eora’s fascination with humans was unusual for a Dvalinn—Nieko’s flaw branded him as a freak, a misfit, a creature with more in common with the hated humans than with his own kind. The UDBC would lock him away for life if they knew about his un-Dvalinn behavior.

  Nieko loved the feisty woman marching alongside him, and a true Dvalinn didn’t love anybody—ever.

  If he ever needed to be reminded of how unacceptable the concept was, all he had to do was to think of the two men Eora was so determinedly marching in search of. Huon and Tybor should have been Dvalinn heroes. They should be living in a major city, basking in the adulation they deserved for having killed the hated Gatekeepers and their leader, Brian Hopewood. Instead they lived in exile, reviled and rejected. Why? Because they had not only brought one of the humans back with them, but they claimed to love her and each other.

  A shock wave had raced through the entire Dvalinn world when they’d announced they were setting up a home together in a ménage arrangement. They challenged every principle the Dvalinn believed in.

  The two men knew it and had taken steps to ensure the safety of the woman they claimed to love. Tybor and Huon had stashed the human in an isolated outpost before they appeared before the Council to make their report. While the council members had still been assimilating the details of their mission to the surface, Tybor had made his extraordinary statement about the way they intended to live their future lives, then he and Huon had teleported away.

  Whether due to shock, distaste or some lingering gratitude for the service Tybor and Huon—and yes, even the despised human—had done the Dvalinn, no search party had been sent to track them down and bring them in for punishment. They’d disappeared into the depths of the cavern system. Everyone seemed content to leave them there.

  Everyone except Eora.

  “Do you know where we’re going?” Nieko asked her. “Or are we going to wander around calling out ‘here, human, here, human’ until we get an answer?”

  “Smart ass,” Eora said, punching him in the arm, making him stagger into the wall. The girl packed quite a punch. Nieko needed warning if he was going to withstand one of her playful attacks.

  She grinned up at him. “I know where they are.”

  “You know? How the hel
l could you know?”

  “Well, I sort of know,” she said. “I got someone I know to run a trace on the records of their teleport. It pointed to Ogof.”

  “The entire population of Ogof was killed. There’s nothing there anymore. The council blocked teleport ability within a fifty click radius of the city to stop the risk of any further incursions.”

  “The infrastructure is still there. It’s a ghost town, the perfect place to hide from the rest of us.”

  “How could they do it? Live where so many people lost their lives. With a human?” Nieko swallowed down a surge of acid bile. “When it was a human who killed them—every man, woman and child in Ogof and in two other cities.”

  “The human probably doesn’t know or understand. Tybor and Huon are Dvalinn.” Eora’s brow wrinkled. “They wouldn’t let messy emotions get in their way.”

  “The reason they’re in exile in the first place is because they succumbed to messy emotions,” Nieko replied.

  “This is one of the reasons I need to talk to them. I want to know how this love thing happened. What it felt like.” She shook her head. “I don’t understand it.”

  “No, you wouldn’t,” Nieko agreed, trying to disguise the bitterness that tinged the words.

  “I think it might be some influence of the humans.” There she went with her damn fascination with humans again. “Tybor and Huon spent time up there with them. Maybe feelings are contagious and Dvalinn can be infected or something.”

  Nieko knew better. If feelings were contagious, Eora would have caught his disease long ago. Since they’d been kids, something about her had stirred Nieko’s soul.

  His lips curled in self-disgust. His soul. No Dvalinn would ever admit to having such a thing. He was a complete disgrace to his people. He hated the way his love for Eora made him feel. Because his culture had taught him soft emotions were a human affliction, he despised humans the more. Hated them because he feared he was like them.