by Quil Carter
“He’s a brute chimera,” Nero snorted. He was poking Ceph in the cheek, the baby’s eyes fixed on Nero as my brother made faces at him. “I would’ve flipped out good-wise if you’d have given me icing for my zero birthday.” When Garrett tried to get near the baby Nero shielded Ceph from my brother. “Nice try, Dracula, go suck the youth out of something else.”
Garrett gave Nero a dirty look, before saying rather aloofly, “We don’t believe in violence against those not intelligent enough to articulate their emotions through means other than their fists.” And at that, my brother walked away from him, Nero giving the back of his head a puzzled, confused look.
“When are you going to forbid him from dressing like such a weirdo?” Nero complained to Silas. He took the baby from Silas’s arms and stuck his tongue out at him. “And the chick too. They’re making us look like the fucking Suicide Squad.”
“He’s allowed to find his own individuality,” Silas said in a nonchalant tone. He started walking to the stairs. I stayed behind, but to my dismay, he snapped his fingers and pointed to the door. That meant he wanted me to follow, and I would because I was just his fucking dog.
“They look like idiots. It’s all those four witches Ellis hangs out with’s fault.”
“I’m right here!” Ellis said exasperated. She was following behind me, flicking off light switches as she went. Ellis was sporting black eyeliner like my brother was, and she had purple and red streaks through her chin-length black hair. Her garb was what you’d expect a wannabe witch to be: a black skirt and a long sleeve shirt with lace, and more bracelets, necklaces, and hair pieces than one could count. Whatever, it wasn’t me who was embarrassing themselves.
We got to the apartment and put Ceph in a bassinet that was in the living room. Nero and Garrett now lived downstairs on the floor I myself was staying on, and Ceph and the twins would be taking their rooms.
“Elish? I’d like my tea now.”
I was halfway down the hallway, the stairs and the lower apartment right in front of me, taunting me with promises of silence and tranquility. I’d been so close to escaping having to be in the same room with him that it was almost cruel.
Silas wanted his tea. This would usually be the job of a sengil or a cicaro, but since Silas had neither at this current moment, the slave work fell to me. I’d grown to love tea over the years of my solitude. It was easy to have an electric kettle and teabags in my bedroom, and it meant I didn’t have to go upstairs if I was wanting something hot to keep me warm during the cold winters. Usually if I wanted something hot, I’d have to go and call the sengils or root around the kitchen until I found something acceptable, but tea required little and didn’t ask much in return.
Unfortunately for me, Silas loved tea as well, and he was now using it constantly to force me to spend time with him.
And that was, quite frankly, the last thing I wanted to do. But did I have a choice? No. So the blond dog got his master his tea, and because it was what he knew he wanted, that same dog sat beside him with his own mug as he drank.
Silas leaned against me so his back was against my shoulder and arm, and placed the baby length-wise on his lap. “It’s been so long since I’ve had a baby in the house,” he said in a content yet patronizing voice. I don’t believe he knew how to speak to me normally by now. “I want lots more. I’ll be speaking to Perish about it after the twins are born.”
I looked down at my tea mug as I pulled the teabag floating around inside. Sometimes I’d imagine I was dunking King Silas’s screaming head into my near-boiling tea. He’d burned me so many times from his anger I would enjoy burning him in the same manner. He’d even thrown the tea at me several times when I hadn’t made it right. “Will the sengils be ready by then?” I asked quietly. Up and down went the teabag and up and down went Silas’s head, the string to which the teabag was attached to could even be the noose I’d wrap around his neck. Up down. Up down.
“Yes. With what I want to do for the next two chimeras… it may take a while for us to create viable ones. I’m in the throes of inventing a new type of chimera. They’ll be called stealth chimeras and they’ll be assassins and bodyguards. Tough chimeras with lanky, thin bodies, strong bones. Like their name suggests, they’ll be fast and sneaky; they’ll disappear into shadows and strike fear into the hearts of everyone they look at.” Silas sat up and when I glanced over to him he was beaming. “Want to know a secret, love? My plans for those two?”
I didn’t. I just wanted to go to my room, but I knew I had no choice. “Okay,” I said, taking another drink of my tea. The hot liquid was burning my throat because I was drinking it too quickly.
“I’m going to make their teeth pointed,” Silas said proudly. “And for one of them, I haven’t named him yet though, I’m going to make his eyes red. He’s going to be a demon, love, and my personal bodyguard.”
I stared at him.
My seemingly endless reservoir of rage was tapped, and it flared and boiled hotter than the tea I sipped. A red-eyed, pointed-toothed chimera? He wasn’t trying to create a chimera, he wanted a fucking monster. That wasn’t human. Silas was sounding like a mad scientist rather than a fucking king. What an idiot.
I tried to force my anger down with a swallow but it was no use, my lips were pursed tight and my teeth a locked cage… and he noticed.
“What?” Silas asked flatly, the smiling mask slipping off like his anger was a solvent.
“Nothing,” I said and I found that smiling mask and put it onto my own face. I was great at pretending. “What will the other one look like?” I didn’t want a fight tonight. I didn’t want him to throw his tea at me, burn me with cigarettes. Or even worse: burn me from his own thermal touch which he’d done only last month after I’d raised objection to his new plans to flood Moros with greywaster refugees.
I just wanted to be left alone.
Silas’s smile made a second emergence, either he bought my fake smile or he himself didn’t feel like beating on me. “Silver hair and black eyes,” he said, his tone banishing the hostile air that had began swirling around him. “His job will be a unique one. One he’ll be raised for. You see, love…” He leaned his head against my shoulder and settled in, my skin crawled. “Being a born immortal like me, you start to have unique problems that no mortal would ever know was an actual problem.” Ceph cooed as Silas tickled his cheek, the king chuckled happily. “As you know, once I die, I am incapacitated for a varying amount of time. I’m stuck within those white flames, flames you’ll one day experience yourself, and if I was murdered, I could easily remain in my enemy’s possession. While I’m dead, I’m helpless, at the mercy of friend and foe, and since there will one day be many immortal chimeras… I decided that one of them will have the job of being our Grim Reaper.”
My god this man was either an idiot, or he was insane.
“Each chimera, mortal or immortal, will have a chip inside of them that will be synced up with a special device, either a remote or a wristwatch, and an alarm will sound with a longitude and latitude, or some sort of GPS coordinates, of where that chimera is. This love’s job will be to collect our bodies, bathe and wash us, clothe us, so that when we wake up… we’ll be safe, clean, and ready to continue our duties.”
What an idiot.
͠
It wouldn’t be until I was much older and immortal myself that I would see that this was indeed a necessary job for one of the chimeras to have. Chimeras have been killed in many different fashions and a portion of those times do render the immortal chimera in continued danger once he resurrects. The future legion chimeras would utilize Jack hundreds of times, and of course, the Skyfall chimeras had their own ways of dying in the enemy’s hands, or just randomly through fate.
Yes, Silas was right to create a chimera for this job. I don’t mind admitting when I was wrong, it’s a rare enough occurrence for it not to bother me.
͠
“Sounds creative,” was my response. “He’ll certainly look the p
art. Won’t he?”
Silas laughed and nodded. “Yes. Perish’s cloning and chimera research has been advancing at a tremendous rate. I have you to thank for that, golden boy. See, isn’t your intelligence better spent in that laboratory and not wasted with your penchant for chasing older men?”
And there it was. There was the jab. It was always there waiting for me whether I saw it or not. A cloaked figure in the shadows holding hidden blades, waiting for me to walk by unaware, then he’d spring out of the darkness and lay multiple blows on my unsuspecting body.
He was never far from me.
“Yes,” I said quietly. I brought the tea to my lips, and though it seared my throat, I managed to drink the entire rest of the mug. “Perish will be coming back from Cardinalhall soon… would you like me to speak with him about these new chimeras? The twins are doing fine and we’ll have some extra time on our hands with Ceph being here now.” I put the tea mug down onto the coffee table, slowly so he could see it was empty.
It was obvious that I was trying to avoid him. Maybe he knew, maybe he didn’t care. Either way…
“Sure, lovely boy. I’m going to feed this little one before he starts to fuss. I have a feeling he’s going to eat us out of house and home.”
Either way I was free of him… if only for the evening.
We had many visitors over the next few days to fawn over the baby. Sacario was the most frequent but that hadn’t changed. Sacario was living the life on the sixteenth floor. He’d managed to win over Silas with his odd nature, and since Silas had never found out about the drugs that Sacario readily supplied us with, he had no reason to hate our weird Morosian friend. He was still attending school, I obviously wasn’t, and would come here often with Tiberius, who’d also become a friend of the family’s.
“He’s so alert!” Sacario gushed, two weeks after Ceph had been born. My friend was laying on the day bed holding Ceph with arms fully extended. He was swaying the baby back and forth and smiling at him. “He’s like a fucking super baby, I bet he can do fractions already.”
“Him? No. The twins perhaps,” I said. I was sitting on the couch with my homework on my lap. I was supposed to be helping Sacario but Ceph had sucked up all of his attention. “They’re already forming permanent memories. I remember looking out the glass of my steel mother and seeing Silas.”
Sacario gave me a wondered look. “Really?” he said in awe. He lowered the baby and got up off of the day bed. “So you remember a lot of your childhood?”
“Unfortunately,” I said blandly.
Sacario sat on the other end of the couch, cross-legged and turned towards me, and laid Ceph down onto the cushion in between me and him. He then began playing with Ceph’s chubby pink cheeks. “I remember seeing television specials about you,” he said, then his face adopted an expression of wonder, “Who would’ve ever thought I’d be Master of Friend.”
I rolled my eyes. He’d coined this phrase last year after reading fantasy books. Since the royal family had subjects with titles such as Master of Arms, Master of Coin, and so on, he decided he’d be Master of Friend.
Yes, Sacario was still an idiot. But he was our idiot.
Sacario fell quiet. I tried to go back to my studies but after a few minutes of silence I got an eerie feeling. Sacario was rarely quiet, he hated tranquility with a passion, he saw breaks in conversation as a personal assault on him.
I looked over and saw that he had a troubled expression on his face.
“What?” I asked slowly.
“Anything bugging you?” he asked. He asked it almost timidly, a tone unheard of on my friend. “You’ve been… bad the past couple of weeks. Worse than usual.”
Worse than usual…
Sacario had been by my side since the incident. He’d never left… he was the most loyal friend I could ever ask for and I loved him dearly.
He knew me, and he didn’t judge me… or beg me to be happy again like my siblings did.
Or treat me like a dog like Silas.
Sacario just… knew me.
But I still couldn’t tell him what I was so scared of. What I knew was coming in two weeks. I couldn’t… I couldn’t tell anyone.
“I’m just going through a… bad patch,” I said quietly. “It happens every once in a while… you know how I work.”
Sacario didn’t look convinced. I couldn’t help him though. I loved my friend but what went on between me and Silas… it was personal. I didn’t want to drag Sacario into it and I didn’t want him to know the terrible things that Silas was going to do to me on my fifteenth birthday.
Every time I thought of it I felt Silas’s fingers shove themselves inside of me… I felt him grab and crush my genitals. I could feel his hot breath in my ear, the anger swirling around him like the emotion itself knew he was the center of the solar system. I couldn’t… I just couldn’t bear the thought of him having sex with me. It was… terrifying.
What’s worse than rape? Knowing the day it’s going to happen and having to watch each day slip into the past, with the moment of reckoning coming ever so closer.
And there was nothing I could do about it because Silas was king; I was his slave, and the entire world bowed to him. I was his creation, and as such, I held no rights – only the right to obey him.
I was nothing but his tool to use, and though I knew this, I still felt sick over the thought of him inside of me.
He’d taken everything from me… and now he was preparing himself to take something new.
Before Sacario could answer me, the double oak doors flew open and Silas glided in, my siblings behind him holding bags of items. They’d been out shopping; I hadn’t wanted to go so I’d stayed home with the baby.
“Put the baby’s supplies away, Elish,” Silas said, and he said it without even looking at me. He appeared behind the couch and reached down to pick up Ceph. “And how’s my little man?” His face brightened upon looking up at that child and he made a strange smiling face. I knew that smile, and all I would need to be reminded of it was to look through old photo albums. Silas had this strange puckered squinty face he made whenever he was cooing over something cute, whether it be one of his chimera babies, a kitten or a puppy, it was always that same scrunched face.
Unfortunately, those babies eventually grew up, and then they got tortured and tormented, beat on and stripped of any and all dignity. Ceph didn’t even know what he was in for, nor the twins who slept in Skytech tower several miles away.
“It’s so much different only having one to care for,” Silas said. He had his back to the couch so he wasn’t addressing me. I rose to do as he asked. “I’m used to forever counting to four and having one in each arm. You four were such adorable little babies.”
Oh he was in a good mood. I wonder how long that will last?
I walked past him and picked up the bags that remained where my siblings had dropped them, and went to put away Ceph’s supplies. He drank a lot of formula, an ungodly amount, so he needed cans upon cans of it per week, and diapers for four-month-olds even though he was only two weeks. It was going to get busy and noisy here once the twins arrived, Ceph could already out-scream us all.
I put away the things I was supposed to, but instead of making my way back to the living room, since Silas was here, I decided to spend the rest of the evening in my room. No one bothered me which I appreciated, I opened up several textbooks and decided to do some of my Skytech courses, and eventually after I’d completed a good amount, I rewarded myself with practicing my violin. It wasn’t the first instrument I’d learned, not long after my suicide attempt I’d started playing the piano. It had helped me release some of my ingrained sadness, but Silas often got upset with me when I played, since all I played apparently were sad, depressing songs.
Silas had never forgiven me for trying to kill myself. I knew he hadn’t. He’d seen it as a grand offence to him that I’d tried to take that control away from him. For months afterwards, Silas danced in between his relief of me be
ing okay, and his hatred because of my attempt, and I spiralled deeper into this depression that was a constant dark weight on my shoulders.
Eventually my depressed attitude made him angry. He’d demanded for me to cheer up and had even tried forcing me to take antidepressants; I was on two of them right now, but they were nothing but sugar pills to me. He kept me on them however, since they killed all sexual desires that any near-fifteen-year-old would have. Another way to control me.
How hard was it to control some loser who never left his room and hated touching foot on solid ground? That was like tethering a rock to a bannister out of fear that it would run away.
Well, whatever, I cared not. There was no desire inside of me to improve myself, or to make myself into a better person. Yes, once the drive to make Silas proud of me had pushed me to incredible lengths. I’d attended high school, forced myself to be social, I’d even made my first friend outside of the family. But that drive was dead, absolutely dead as a doornail, and I couldn’t care less what Silas thought of me.
It was sometime during the night that there was a knock on my door. Usually I would ignore it, but since Ceph had come into the house I’d been answering those nighttime knocks. It was Nero’s night with the baby and since he was Nero, we always had a mild concern that he might grow frustrated if Ceph wouldn’t stop crying and throw the baby off of the balcony. I was patient and a crying child never overwhelmed me, so I rose and opened the door.
However, it wasn’t Nero…
It was Silas.
And from the glassy look in his eyes and his swaying posture, I knew he was drunk.
Great.
“Let me in… I want to talk to you,” he said with slightly slurred speech. He didn’t wait for me to welcome him into my bedroom or even say okay, Silas walked right into my room and claimed the space as his own. He sat down on my bed with his legs stretched out, and I noticed a bottle of whisky in his hand.