by Quil Carter
“No. I’m almost done,” Elish replied. It wasn’t that difficult to feed Jade. He had a tube sticking out of his stomach and all he required was a supplement mixed in with milk. “Do you have any useful information for me?”
Luca put his hands behind his back and fixed his green eyes to the window; a habit he fell into when he was about to deliver news. “Jack hasn’t left Black Tower, or the couch actually. Juni confided with me that he was like this after Sanguine left him for Silas. Jack doesn’t look like he’s going to be doing anything but being catatonic and depressed, Master. But…” Luca’s chin rose. “But Juni ended our relationship and he says I will no longer be welcome in Black Tower.”
“I figured as much,” Elish mumbled as he handed Luca the now empty feeding syringe. “You did well, Luca. You may see Chally tomorrow and move onto the next phase of our plan.”
Luca bowed and gave Elish a slight smile. Elish looked back questioningly.
The sengil’s smile widened just slightly, almost looking coy. “I just like being a part of your plans. That’s all.”
“You just like the perks of having relations with whoever I sic you on,” Elish said casually. “You can start your cleaning now. I have work to do. Skyfall still needs to run even with half the family sulking like beaten dogs.”
“Is there anything specific you’d like me to find out about Garrett and Reno, Master Elish?” Luca asked. He walked into the kitchen and Elish could hear rummaging as he got out his cleaning supplies.
“I want to know if I need to keep a better eye on the two. Their wedding is next month. If Garrett isn’t talking about it and draping his entire apartment in colour swatches and bolts of fabric, that means he has other things on his mind. If he is, it means he’s fine and most likely not trying to turn the others against me,” Elish said. “Reno is unable to hide his emotions. Bring me up randomly and gauge his reaction.”
“What do you recommend I do with Chally?” Luca asked.
“You know what Chally likes, people who don’t treat him like he’s an idiot. Get him alone in his room and have your fun, but I want him locked to your hip by Sunday. Understand me?” Elish said. His gaze was fixed on his sengil, and Luca both straightened up and got smaller under the purple flames.
“I won’t let you down, Master,” Luca said firmly.
“No, you won’t,” Elish said with a single nod. “I need to count on you, alright? You need to be my eyes and ears, Luca. I am counting on you.”
Luca stood in Elish’s shadow, forever looking up at his master, but under Elish’s smouldering gaze Luca found himself receiving his master’s energy and using it to strengthen his faith in himself. Never in the history of Elish’s sengils had one been treated as more than a devoted servant, and here Luca was spying for his master. It was enough to make him want to jump up and down once or twice.
“Yes, Master. You can count on me,” Luca said. “I have become quite talented over the years. I’ve had good instructors.
Elish gave him an apathetic look. “I do hope you mean in the art of stealth, and not what I think you’re implying.”
Luca bowed, completely straight-faced. “Of course not, Master.” And the sengil was off after that.
Elish sat down on the couch nearest to Jade and got out his laptop. He then reached to the side table where a stack of black portable hard drives were, and beside them, a desktop hard drive and a laptop hard drive. Elish grabbed the top black portable one and plugged it in. There was a lot of information to sift through still, and he hadn’t had much luck locating any of Perish and Lycos’s files on Reaver.
And what he did find was after the child had been created: birth weight, length, and progress pictures. Elish watched the little baby grow a frock of black hair, then get bigger and longer, finally there was a photo of him with his large insect-like eyes, the white pupils barely seen until he was one and a half. Lycos loved him though, that was seen with how many pictures Elish saw of the two of them together.
Forgetting what he was supposed to be looking for, Elish continued clicking on the photos. This looked to be Lycos’s personal hard drives, so it came from the bunker near Aras. All of Lycos’s personal photos and videos were on here.
Elish clicked on a video file. The file loaded a video of a skinny little baby with black eyes, stumbling towards the camera before he fell, to everyone’s cheering. “This is baby Chance walking! He started walking today.” Lycos’s voice was cheerful and bubbly.
Elish scrolled down and clicked on another one. This video recording was waving back and forth until it centered on a teenage Reno Nevada. Then it lowered and Elish realized Reno had his boot on a legionary’s neck. The legionary was gasping, blood running down his nose and puffs of grey ash flying in the air from his breathing.
A smirk came to Elish’s lips when he heard Reaver call Reno over, then the camera exchanged hands. Reaver was fourteen with short black hair and a smile that belonged in a horror movie. The boy looked positively nuts in that moment, but as alive as Elish had seen him when they were killing the merchant and bodyguards back in the greywastes.
Elish scrolled the video ahead, and watched in fast motion Reaver stabbing the legionary rapidly in the neck; then eventually sawing his head off and holding it up to the camera with a laughing grin. This video was obviously not supposed to have gotten into Lycos’s hands, but well, parents will be parents and Lycos was always sticking his nose in people’s personal business. He probably poked through Reaver’s room daily.
I hate how much I miss that boy.
I hate how much I enjoyed my time with him.
Elish closed the window and unplugged the hard drive quickly. “Luca,” Elish said and rose to his feet. “We’ll be expanding my plan. I want you to manipulate Chally but I’m also going to start you on Drake. Drake will be difficult, do you think you can do it?”
Luca walked into the archway separating the kitchen from the living room. He looked nervous as he wiped his hands on a towel. “D-Drake too? Even with King Silas… and Sanguine? Master, you know Drake follows King Silas’s moods. He’s so violent when upset.”
Elish shook his head rapidly, garnering a confused look from Luca. He stopped wiping his hands and watched his master pace the room, something that Luca had never seen him do. Elish looked unsettled and was far away from the graceful god Luca was so used to seeing. The sengil watched, perplexed but mute, as Elish walked to the window and nodded his head again.
“If you think we can sway Chally… we will. If my brothers will betray me I will take their servants’ loyalty out from under them, the cicaros too,” Elish said firmly, his eyes narrowing to small slits.
Luca swallowed a tightness in his throat. “Master Elish… the sengils and cicaros love their masters. They–”
“I can offer them better,” Elish said darkly. “I can offer them freedom…”
“But… we don’t want freedom, Master–”
Luca’s words faded to silence when Elish gave him a scathing and searing look. “Do not doubt my abilities to manipulate those I have use for, Luca,” he said coldly. “Can I rely on you or not, sengil?”
Luca shifted nervously on his feet and nodded. “Of course.”
Elish nodded stiffly and turned around.
Then his eyes flickered down to Jade.
Jade’s face was white and his lips blue, his yellow eyes staring blankly off into the distance. Elish swore and grabbed Jade by his shoulders and shook him. The boy’s muscles were spasming and his left arm twitching.
“He’s not breathing, run ahead and open the door,” Elish barked. He picked up Jade and ran to the door. “Call Lyle.” Then flew down the hallway, to the elevator, and pushed Lyle’s floor. He put Jade into the ground, blew air into his lungs, and started pumping his chest.
The elevator ride crawled even though it was only several floors down. When the two doors opened Lyle was waiting. Elish ran past him and put Jade onto his hospital bed then stepped back as Lyle and Nels wo
rked.
Elish stared at the chaotic scene in front of him, his eyes pools of anxious energy. If he wasn’t so fixed on Lyle pushing on the boy’s chest, he would’ve realized that he was forgetting to breathe.
Then Jade’s chest heaved and his eyes opened wide. He looked around the room like a lighthouse searching for a ship, until his gaze found Elish’s. They locked on Elish’s own purple eyes and seemed to plead with him to help him.
The boy was Elish’s responsibility and yet here he was helpless. He had picked up a bird chained around the neck in the slums of Moros, and had proceeded to make him fly into dangerous situation after dangerous situation, and allowing him to continue to fly free even though he kept returning with broken wings.
And now this little black and yellow bird was crippled and no longer able to fly, and Elish had no one to blame but himself. Because the boy had done everything Elish had wanted him to do, and Elish had given nothing back but pain.
Elish stared at Jade, and the boy stared back. What Jade could see, Elish didn’t know, but he was seeing enough for the both of them.
Jade’s eyes deflected to Lyle, who was pushing a small needle into his arm, and Elish saw his chest slowly rising and falling. He was breathing again.
And that’s all I need. I just need him to breath. He will survive the surgery. He’s strong.
“Elish…” Lyle began after Jade’s brain had been hooked back up to the EEG. “He’s still breathing on his own but… it looks like the increase in brainwaves we saw is dissipating.”
Elish tried to steel himself against this information. But as he tried to dismiss Lyle’s words, they instead became all the more concentrated and condensed inside.
Lyle’s eyes were still on him, the hesitation on the doctor was apparent and Elish did nothing to encourage him to say what was on his mind, on the contrary, his own gaze turned cold.
“Master Elish… may I speak freely,” the doctor said; his words stifled as if they had trouble penetrating the tension between the two.
“You may make the attempt,” Elish said coolly.
Lyle looked at Jade. The boy’s eyes were distant and dazed, but he was breathing and he was alive.
“It’s time, Elish. It’s time for you to speak to Silas about making Jade immortal,” Lyle said. He had a way of nudging his controversial words towards Elish like a child shyly handing a parent a bad report card. “If this happened at night…”
“I would’ve woken,” Elish said, his tone hovering on dangerous.
“Even so, it doesn’t change his state. What progress we saw is disappearing. Elish, please… it’s time. It’s past time,” Lyle pleaded. “I was first your sengil and now I consider you not only a boss, but a friend… Elish, it’s time. I know you wish the boy to be older but I fear he won’t survive to nineteen, let alone twenty.”
Elish looked to Jade and felt his limbs stiffen.
“Master Elish… I don’t understand why you’re so set on him being older. I don’t understand how you can continue this suffering over… over a small detail in your bigger plan. I think you need to let this one go and just… do what’s right for the boy.” Then Lyle paused, though his words lingered like an overpowering smell.
Then finally, he let out a breath. “Why is this so important to you?”
“You’re not permitted to ask such questions,” Elish said. He turned and started walking towards the exit. Then he paused, and as he looked into the hallway his eyes widened as if something had occurred to him.
Elish nodded to himself as if confirming whatever thought had entered his mind. “Once he is stable you’ll be moving him back to my apartment. His breathing machine will go with him. The only reason he wasn’t hooked up to the alarm was because I’d just finished feeding him. He’ll be fine.”
“Elish…”
Elish whirled around. “No questions, Lyle!” he snapped.
Lyle didn’t flinch, or even bat an eye under Elish’s anger. He only nodded stiffly. “Yes, Master Elish.”
Elish walked to the elevator but he didn’t press the button for his apartment, instead he rode it down to the lobby. When he exited, he made a beeline for the two thiens guarding Olympus.
They opened the door for him and bowed, then gave Elish equally surprised looks when he stopped to address them.
“You will be taking leave tonight,” Elish said to them. Then he turned around and looked to the view in front of Olympus’s entrance. There was a grassy lawn with a large granite walkway leading to the polished clean stairs, and further on the sidewalk, and the road. Past the road was a building that doubled as a parking lot for chimera storage for everything from old musical instruments to cars. There were shrubs in front of the building and trees, but little else.
“Yes, Master Elish. We’ll call our replacements,” one of the men said, but Elish shook his head.
“No replacements. I want my doors sparsely guarded tonight. You–” Elish looked at the second thien, a young burly man with a short blond beard. “–will be the only man guarding Olympus’s entrance tonight.” Elish dropped his voice as the guard looked at him perplexed. “You will be doing the entire round of the grounds. I only want you to pass the entrance every half an hour on the dot. Am I understood?”
The thien’s puzzled look deepened, but he knew not to question so he nodded. “Yes, Master Elish.”
Elish snapped his finger at the other thien and pointed to the stairs. Then, with a single blink, the thien bowed, and walked off to wherever off-duty thiens went.
Elish turned back to the blond guard. “If you see a man lurking with black and white hair, and two different coloured eyes, I want you to ignore him and let him enter Olympus.”
The blond-haired thien nodded and saluted Elish. “I will, Master Elish.”
Elish had to give the man credit for that. His instructions were bizarre but necessary. It was that man, the same man that King Silas had sent Sanguine away for freeing, that had healed Jade before he had interrupted him. He wasn’t sure if Jade’s decline was because of the seizure, or if the odd-eyed man’s influence was temporary, but in the end, it didn’t matter. There was hope that if Elish had scared him away… perhaps he’d return to finish the healing.
If Silas wasn’t sulking about that damned O.L.S being destroyed Elish would’ve been able to ask him just who that man was, but there was no part of him that thought it wise to engage the king right now. Silas was on a rampage, and if he would send his beloved Crucio, his Sanguine, to rot in the birthplace of his madness, there was no telling what he would do if Elish became his next target. No doubt Jade would suffer and Elish had done enough to Jade already.
Elish didn’t like it but he had no choice. Jade wouldn’t die, and right now there was a man on the loose who seemed to want to help the boy. If born immortals were attracted to one another, perhaps empaths were too, and it was obvious that strange man had some talent inside of him.
It was also obvious that Elish wouldn’t be able to find out on his own just who that man was. Silas’s laptop was locked up tight, even if Elish could get his hands on it, which he couldn’t. If Silas had been successfully keeping the odd-eyed man from the family… it was folly to believe Elish could find out who he was now. He wasn’t created after the first generation, that much was for sure. So who was he?
Perhaps a born immortal that Silas created, but I saw no similarities to any of my brothers’ features, Elish said to himself as he made his way back to his apartment. He looked like a completely separate genetic entity. I saw no Sky and Perish in him, and no Silas. The chimera gene pool was diverse now, but the first generation were pretty much arians with chimera enhancements. They came from Silas’s stock with slight infusions here or there to genetically diversify them. Then technology changed and Silas got more mad in the head, he started creating stealths, intelligence, brutes, and science-types.
So was this perhaps… the first chimera? Or did Silas have an even bigger secret kept tucked under his cloak. A
nother born immortal?
Elish dwelled on this for the rest of the evening while he distracted himself with work. It wasn’t until nine that Lyle came down with Siris behind him. Siris was holding Jade in his arms, the boy wrapped in a fleece blanket.
“I gottsa little rabbit,” Siris said in a jovial voice. “Where do you want him, Master E?”
“On the recliner,” Elish said as he motioned towards it. “Lyle, hook him up and you may have your leave.”
Lyle did as he was told with a scowl on his face. Elish ignored him and continued working on his Skyfall work without being bothered.
“Aw, it’s so sad seeing him like this,” Siris said. Elish glanced up to see the brute chimera leaning over Jade and staring right into his eyes. “He was so full of piss and vinegar before this Aras-Reaver shit. He got real hurt there, eh?”
Elish nodded. To the rest of the family, save a few, Jade had gotten hurt in Aras and his mind had been failing ever since. “Unfortunately yes, but he’ll be fine in time.”
“I hope so,” Siris mumbled. “It’s weird seeing you without him now. It’s like you’re literally missing your shadow.” Siris chuckled at this and pinched Jade’s nose and shook it. “Wake up soon, bunny beans.” Then, with a gentle slap on the cheek, he followed Lyle out.
The rest of the evening was spent in silence. Luca had been shoo’d out by Drake since apparently the odd boy was busy with things, and was at home sewing a new outfit for the cat. The poor cat in question was sporting a black vest with a green bowtie, which had been altered more than once to make him not lose any of his mobility and to make it comfortable. Elish had been planning for quite a while to forbid Luca from putting clothes on the cat, but it kept the sengil busy, and he needed the distraction since Jade was no longer something he could nurture.
After Luca went to bed, Elish stayed up until Jade fell asleep in the recliner. Then Elish prepared himself a bed on the couch and left the apartment door unlocked. It was a long shot but right now that was all Elish had.