by Quil Carter
Silas laid me down on his bed and took me into his arms as I cried.
And I cried for a long while as he soothed me, petted my hair back, ran caring fingers down the side of my face and my jaw line, heated fingers to both relax me and dry the tears soaking my face. Eventually I became too exhausted, and all that was given to me to show my emotional destruction were chattering teeth and a shaking, cold body.
“My poor baby,” he whispered. “Too young to know just what he almost did. You’ll understand one day, my love.”
Too late to know what I almost did…?
I knew what I did.
I almost gave away what he saw as his. My first time with another man. That was Silas’s to take.
My own body wasn’t even my own. Everything – everything – belonged to King Silas. I wasn’t made to be his heir, nor was I made to be his husband. I was his precious belonging, a trophy child to trounce around and show off.
I was his property.
No control. No power.
And none of this would change, ever. I would obey him, I would give myself up, mind, body, and soul, to him… and if I didn’t… he’d either kill me… or kill everyone I loved.
No more than in that moment did my eyes open to what I really truly was.
I would never have my own boyfriend, my own life outside of him. Silas would rule all of me, and because he was the born immortal ruler of the world, he would get what he wanted. Silas was above the law, a veritable god. There was no one to tell him no… Silas literally ruled the world, and this world revolved solely around him.
I closed my eyes and accepted this with a guttural feeling of defeat. Silas said something to me, I believe about waking him if I needed him, and he was quiet.
Once I’d had so many plans for myself… I was delusional then. I thought I would rule Skyfall when he was absent, eventually marry this man. I thought that one day I would be his equal, once I was grown up and had become my own person. We would work side by side and rule the world, I’d have his respect, his love.
But now, it wasn’t even like my eyes had been opened, my eyelids had been sliced off. I was a slave. I’d been born into slavery, and I would die in slavery.
No… I wouldn’t die. If he got his wish I would be made immortal, and the rest of my immortal life would be spent in this servitude. Not even death would release me from this blood contract I’d made with Silas before my artificial conception… I was Silas’s slave for life.
Loveless. Powerless. Miserable.
My eyes opened and I saw Silas sleeping beside me. I wasn’t sure if I myself had fallen asleep or if he’d just succumb to fatigue quickly, but he was out.
He looked so… innocent while he slept. I’d never realized before just how celestial this man was. Adonis resurrected, with his wavy blond hair that looked like the back of an angel’s wing, and a soft face that seemed sculpted by some great artist. Silas was an angelic being in every way physically.
But yet he never looked so when he was awake. It just proved how much of an overbearing presence he had on those around him. When Silas walked into a room, he didn’t just take control of it, he became the room, and there he would stand with that overbearing air of superiority and a smirk that turned defiance into submission. He was an immortal king who had surpassed all the mighty titans that ruled before the Fallocaust, who trumped Alexander the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Caligula, who turned Genghis Kan into a lowly peasant… not even six-foot tall with the face of an angel and a body slender and light, yet behind him were the graves of over six billion people, and a race that had survived even the greatest tyrants and the deadliest of plagues.
And here I was, a boy of thirteen, who foolishly thought he could eventually stand on top of him.
I would never be strong enough to be Silas, therefore I had no hopes of ever being free of him. This was my life.
No, it was his life.
I have control over nothing, not even my own damn death.
Then I paused.
And a dangerous thought crawled past the despair and rooted itself dead center in the middle of my mind.
… The last thing I have control over.
The very last… is…
I reached into my pocket and felt the OxyContin pills that Nero had given me. I moved them all into my hand and pulled them out.
Fifteen of them. I had fifteen OxyContin pills.
I stared at them, for god knows how long, I stared at them.
Then I looked at the sleeping king. The false angel with his head resting only inches from my own.
I will make you suffer like you’ve made me suffer.
The only way I know how.
I will take back my control.
The only way I know how.
I will rid myself of you, and find myself peace.
The only way… I know how.
I rose from King Silas’s bed and walked to his en-suite bathroom. I stood in front of the mirror and stared at my own reflection, barely recognizing this battered boy looking sadly back.
He looked tired. He was only thirteen… but thirteen years was an immortal’s lifetime when you’re living with Silas Dekker.
I think I wish for silence… I believe… that perhaps this isn’t the life I want to lead.
And I also believed that I only had a short window of time before I no longer had a say in what life I was going to have. Soon Silas would make me immortal and never would I be able to escape him. All I loved would be carried away by the hands of a jealous king who spared no empathy for the boy he had created, and the boy he continued to torture.
Before I could fully think it out, which perhaps was exactly why I did it so quickly, I put the pills into my mouth five at a time, and drank water from the facet to swallow them down.
When I was finished, I turned off the water gasping. The reality of what I had just done sent a shockwave of live energy through my body, from my head to the tips of my toes. It made me close my eyes for a brief second and swallow through the tight muscles locking my throat, then my eyes opened and I saw the boy in the mirror – a mosaic of both fear and disbelief on his face.
Then tears sprung to my eyes. Not for myself… but for my brothers and my sister, for Sacario.
But it would be okay… they would be okay. Silas was already going to make more chimeras… he was even planning my replacement.
However, the fear of the unknown gathered inside of me still, but I kept reassuring myself that it was for the best. Billions of people had walked this dark path, and many of those souls had found solace in the nothingness that I would soon experience firsthand.
But even with my own consoling thoughts, when I left the bathroom I crawled back into bed with the man who had pushed me to this.
Why? I don’t know why. I wouldn’t admit it, not even to myself, but I believe a part of it was just being scared. And like how a beaten dog finds comfort with his master, even if it was his master who had abused him, I curled up next to Silas and tried to stifle the tears.
It’ll be over soon.
I must stop crying. I mustn’t cry… this is a good thing.
This is a good thing.
I’ll be in darkness soon, and never again will I experience such horrible things. No more screams will rock the walls of Alegria, and no more will I swallow sorrow and loss.
Everything will be okay, Elish. It will be scary for a little while longer… but then…
Peace.
I waded around in a mental soup after that, at first feeling more stoned than I’d ever felt before, but finally I felt a pressure weighing down on my chest.
I pulled away from Silas as the nausea hit me and tried to roll over, but a dizziness took me and I fell back onto the bed with a low groan. My limbs felt like solid weights, my chest compressing my lungs like a beast was sitting upon me. I was paralyzed, and once my breathing began to shorten, enough for anxiousness to spring, I knew that soon the curtains of darkness would drape down in front of my vision
.
And all I could do was wait, but my brain did not want to lie quietly with me. It was struggling, shooting panicked signals to every area of my body. It wanted me to scream and thrash, it wanted me to struggle for life, but the voice of the tired thirteen-year-old chimera was louder, and he was holding my hand and watching me in silence, drinking in my shallow gasps like he was sipping a fine wine.
This was it.
I was dying.
Out of the corner of my eye, Silas shifted. I saw his head rise. “Baby love, don’t cry.” His hand stroked my cheek caringly… but suddenly it retracted.
“Elish?”
“Elish??”
His face was in front of me, it was blurry and he was spinning around like the ceiling above me. He slapped my cheek, which I did not feel, and his eyes became large.
Large like Ryan’s… like mine, like Cristo…
No matter what, we all end up having looks of terror on our faces.
Silas screamed for help, his voice a hysterical cry that infiltrated even the darkness that was consuming me.
He was the last thing I saw, everything around me was fading to black.
“NO, YOU FUCKING IDIOT. HE TOOK SOMETHING.”
“He… he took something…”
“Elish? Love. What did you take? Elish, baby, what did you take?”
“Don’t do this… not forever.”
“I can’t handle forever. Elish, please… don’t leave me.”
I will take back my control…
The only way I know how.
BOOK 2
The Wolf
CHAPTER 25
“Don’t light the candles yet, Silas isn’t here!”
I looked over as Ellis said this and watched Nero flick the flint on the lighter, a round birthday cake in front of him covered in white icing with blue trim. There was a single candle in this cake, surrounding different coloured balloons, and the words Happy Birthday written in red sugar gel.
My gaze turned from Nero to the two steel mothers in front of me. Inside the first steel mother was a fat little boy with a frock of auburn hair. He was sleeping, which he loved to do, and had a thumb pressed against his lips, no doubt slipping out of his mouth once fatigue had taken him.
Then beside that baby in the second steel mother were two skinny, gangly twin boys. They were face-to-face with each other, their faces squished and their limbs intertwined. These two were identical in every way, the only difference being that we made one of them have straight silver hair, and the other, wavy.
Not only had I watched these children grow from zygote to fetus, I had been the one to carefully implant them into the synthetic womb that would give them everything they needed to survive to birth. They’d both been my first successful chimeras, and for many months it had been me and Perish taking care of these three boys.
I was almost fifteen. It was January… and my birthday was a month away.
But today was not my birthday. Today was the day our first baby brother was born.
Cepherus Thor Sasha Dekker, or Ceph for short. He was a brute chimera, or brute chimera 2.0 as we called him just to bother Nero. The boy would be strong, powerful, six-foot-seven with muscles that will be able to snap any enemy in half. He was a marvel of engineering, and my first success.
“How long has he been asleep for?” Nero asked, excitement radiating from him as if it was his birthday and not the chubby little baby who napped so peacefully in his watery world.
“A few hours,” I said to him, and I looked past Nero to see Garrett and Ellis, both with smiles a mile wide.
My brother and sister had gone through quite the physical transformation. Six or so months ago they decided together to become goths. They were now deeply enlightened poets who held poetry meetings with their other goth friends in the chimera cave, and watched the movie The Craft over and over until the tape was worn.
Nero was still normal, thankfully, however he now only wore legionary-issue cargo pants.
Our family had changed greatly in the past two years, and yet so much of it was still the same. My siblings and I looked like adults now and we were already picking up a lot of Silas’s duties as king. Garrett was shadowing the president of Skytech and was doing college courses at the College of Skytech, Ellis was now a black belt and Silas was going to allow her to start shadowing Commissioner Talbot when she turned fifteen, and Nero was spending every weekday in Cardinalhall with the top leaders of the legionaries, including the Imperial Commander.
And me?
I was either studying alone in my room (I was taking college courses as well, but at home) or spending days on end in the laboratory doing chimera research, the daily paperwork, and monitoring for the twins and Ceph.
I sighed and tried to push the melancholy away from my mind. I was rarely happy. I was suffering from depression and I knew it, but I tried to fake happiness for the family. It was a special occasion.
They were all so happy. I was surprised at how much this child’s birth was bringing the family together. My three siblings were giddy, looking as if they would tear the child limb from limb just fighting over who got to hold him first. I was sure this sentiment would eventually fade, probably around 3:30 AM, but that would only be my problem on Tuesdays and every other Saturday. That was when the child would be sleeping in my room for me to take care of.
I didn’t mind. I spent a lot of time in my room and decided it might be nice to have some company. Hugh was wonderful company but he’d only gotten lazier throughout the years, and he didn’t really speak back. At least when I spoke to the children I could be confident that they were indeed listening. I remember so much about my childhood I could write a book about it.
“I want to light the candles!” Nero whined. He looked around the room, then to the door. “Where’s Silas? He said he was right behind us.”
Even at the mention of his name my body dropped in temperature. I hid the pull of my lip and crossed my arms over my chest, my eyes forcing me to make fleeting glances to the open laboratory door, knowing that he was going to walk through it at any time.
I’d been drowning myself in the creation and care of the children for the past year now, and though I saw Silas regularly, I could distract myself with work or use that as a discussion point when he wanted to speak to me. The children growing inside of their steel mothers had been a topic of excitement for the past nine months, and distracting him with that freed me from his tormenting.
Now Ceph was being born this day… and the little twins, who Silas and I had decided to name Apollo and Artemis, were to be pulled from their steel mothers late May to early April.
And not only that… I would be turning fifteen soon.
I knew what was going to happen on my fifteenth birthday… and I was terrified.
Absolutely terrified.
“Hello, lovelies!” Silas called happily. At the sound of his voice, my heart jumped to my throat. It stayed there churning and crawling like it was infested with maggots.
I heard him approach, my eyes were fixed on Ceph as the baby dozed with no cares in the world. I tried not to look at Silas as I saw the king approach out of the corner of my eye, but then he placed his hand on my shoulder.
“Good job, sweet boy,” Silas said, his voice bursting with pride; however, to me that burst did nothing but spray fetid liquid onto my face. “He looks amazing. It’s like seeing my baby Nero all over again. Light the birthday candle, bellua. I want to hold my little Cephy in my arms.”
The flint flicked and I smelled the flames as Nero lit the candles. “Okay, everyone start singin’… Happy birthday to you.”
I, of course, did not sing. But I stood there beside the steel mother as Silas lifted up the metal lid, then reached down into the cloudy white liquid and grabbed the child from underneath the shoulders. He lifted out Ceph, then put the chubby infant onto an awaiting blanket, and as the child’s dark green eyes flew open with shock, Silas cut the cord and tied it off.
Ceph
looked around at all of us. Garrett cooed and jumped up and down, and Ellis waved, but when he looked at Nero holding the birthday cake his eyes enlarged.
͠
Nero will declare later that Ceph was looking at him with such an intense look, as if that held some sort of importance considering their eventual paring. The family would later joke that Ceph was looking at the birthday cake since he would become quite the glutton. But if you want to take the fun out of everything, the child’s advanced sight was focusing on the fire of the candle. Naturally because of its vividness it would attract the child’s gaze.
͠
“He’s not even crying,” Silas exclaimed with a glowing smile. It always disturbed me how much his moods could change. This was the king at his happiest, his highest state of euphoria, but yet as quickly as a flash of lightning, that mask got ripped off and you saw what lay beneath.
Never was I off my guard when I was around him. I’d become a prey animal without even realizing it, never calm in front of the predator, constantly vigilant. I hated it, yet I was too depressed, too defeated to do anything about it.
Silas had saved me. He’d saved me that night I overdosed. This man had left me to die when it was by his own hand, but yet when the control was taken from him, suddenly to lose me would be his greatest sorrow. I despised him for that; I despised him so much my blood heated up every time he was near, my body tensed in anticipation of him touching me. I hated this man.
No… I was scared of him.
And I hated myself for that.
“Cake?” Nero waved a piece of the birthday cake at me. I tried to decline but he pushed it into my hands. “I cut off the purple balloon just for you.” His eyes then lit up. “Can Cephy have cake? I bet he’d love it already.”
Silas gave him a flat look. “Have those classes I’ve been making you attend taught you nothing?” We’d all been forced, literally forced, to attend classes on taking care of children. We weren’t the only students as well, four sengils were currently in training and taking the same classes as part of their education. I was supposed to get one of those sengils, but Silas refused to tell us which ones were to go to who.