The Suicide King Volume 1 (The Fallocaust Series Book 3)

by Quil Carter

  When Jack was in the elevator, however, he paused for a moment and closed his eyes. It was then he realized that his family had indeed pulled him into their game. He’d been enjoying a peaceful life with Juni and his cat, no one bothered him or forced him to take sides. Jack was merely the Grim who collected the dead, bathed them, made them pretty, and then sent them back out into the world. That was all he had ever wanted.

  Never more than during the ride to the top floor of Alegria, did Jack wish to press the emergency stop on the elevator and just go home… but Crow’s frightened eyes and his desperate pleas had permeated his thick skin and had stained it black and red.

  I am around creatures of madness, and here I am as the only sane, level-headed one in the family. Maybe luck will be on my shoulders and I can walk out of here with our family’s issues resolved and us at peace.

  This used to be Elish’s job… we always depended on him when Silas was at his most manic. He was Silas’s rock. How sad that under that cold countenance was a man with a thirst for power and an obsession with vengeance.

  Hell hath no fury like Elish Dekker scorned.

  The elevator doors opened and Jack stepped out into the hallway. He wasn’t sure what he was expecting but it wasn’t the peaceful atmosphere that had greeted him. Everything was silent, all but the hiss of the elevator doors closing behind him.

  Jack gently knocked on the door and waited. There was no answer, but Jack was half-expecting that. Sanguine was gone and Drake was probably off entertaining himself somewhere.

  Jack debated his options but decided to throw caution to the wind. He tried the handle, and when it opened, he walked inside.

  Still quiet… still oddly quiet. Jack looked around the large apartment, and though messy, it was lived-in mess, not the mess of someone trashing things out of anger or agony.

  “Silas?” Jack called lightly. He walked through the living room and saw a generous amount of drugs on the coffee table. There were even a few needles and burnt spoons – Well, that made sense if Silas was on a bender but it could’ve been Drake too. That boy loved drugs, sex, and eating, and when no one was watching him he usually did them all until he died.

  Jack pattered to the hallway and turned to Silas’s door. It was open just a crack but dark inside.

  Well, since he’d already swallowed the poison by just being here, he might as well give himself a second dose.

  Jack opened the door and closed it behind him.

  When his night vision clicked on, Jack’s heart broke. Lying on the bed, staring into nothing, and with his arms wrapped around a stuffed leopard… was King Silas.

  “Silas?” Jack walked to him and kneeled in front of his bed. The king was just as bad as he was when he’d first woken, if not worse. Even though Jack hated to shed any other light but a negative one on what Silas had done to Sanguine… the king at least been alive in that moment. It may have been fleeting but the fire had come back to him.

  Now it seemed that fire had died.

  “What do you need, love?” Silas asked in a dead voice, his eyes not even focusing on Jack.

  Jack gave him a faint smile and stroked his hair back. It was greasy and unkempt, he hadn’t even been able to bathe.

  “I wanted to come and spend time with you,” Jack said lightly. He knew how Silas felt, because he’d been the same with Sanguine – both times.

  Jack managed to keep his smile, even though his heart hardened over Silas sending Sanguine to Jasper’s basement. Especially since no one seemed to know just who Sanguine and Nero had freed, and why Silas was so angry about it. No one knew still who it was, and the family was completely buzzing with gossipy rumours. Everyone had their own conspiracy theory, but Jack had been too upset and comatose from Sanguine’s punishment to give it much thought.

  “With me?” Silas said faintly. His brow knitted like he couldn’t understand. “I didn’t call on you… did I?” Silas sat up and pressed his golden hair back with his hand, then he wiped his nose and stared down at his legs. “No, I called for… for Elish but no one is around to fetch him for me.”

  Jack’s jaw clenched at this; he found himself biting the inside of his cheek. He watched Silas look around before his grip tightened on the leopard. “I need Elish, lovely. I need to speak with him.”

  Jack’s pointed molars dug in further to his cheek. Elish? You blind man, you fucking blind man. He doesn’t want to see you, or have anything to do with you. You have dozens of men who love you unconditionally and this is the one that you call for? This is the man that you lean against? Silas… Silas, you foolish king.

  “Elish… is busy tending to Jade,” Jack said slowly. He watched as Silas made the leopard stuffed animal look back at him. Jack tried to keep his smile and sound encouraging, but his teeth were clenching too hard. “Why do you want to speak with him?”

  Silas made the leopards head turn back and forth with his fingers. Then, oddly, he reached inside of it with his thumb and index finger. Jack watched as Silas pulled something shiny out, and he realized it was a ring. It had a silver band and three stones embedded in it: one green, one white, and one blue. The king turned it around in his fingers before a deep sadness washed over his face.

  “Because Sky is gone, love,” Silas said; his voice a wisp, a breath of cold air easily consumed. It was like the Ghost was finally evaporating into the darkness. “And I think… I think I’m ready to accept it. The last of my Sky hates me with such a fiery rage that even the white flames that char his bones would stand no chance. And once he realizes Killian is dead…” Silas brought the ring up to his lips and kissed it. Jack saw tears well in the corners of his eyes.

  “I have tortured my family for years because of my own misery,” Silas choked. He closed his hand around the ring and rested his chin on top of it. “I have mistreated my babies and I’m sorry.” Jack’s mouth dropped open, but he couldn’t move, or even speak. “I turned away a man that loved me because he wasn’t exactly what I wanted. Because he wasn’t Sky. I turned him away and shamed him, and he’s slowly grown to hate me ever since. Don’t think I don’t see the veiled disdain in his eyes every time he looks at me.”

  Oh… fuck… no.

  “I… I have a device, something that Perish made, and if I can find his backed up hard drives I can perfect it. It’ll make Jade still age until its removal. I’m going to make Jade immortal; I will make him into a cicaro again…

  … and then I’m going to marry Elish.”

  “What?” Jack’s tone hit the floor and continued to fall into the abyss. “You… you want to marry… Elish? Why… why not…” Jack wracked his brains trying to think of someone but ended up blurting. “… anyone else?”

  “Because he’s the one that I need to repair things with the most,” Silas replied dully. He slipped the ring onto his finger, and Jack realized he’d been wearing the ring’s twin.

  And Jack would bet anything that the other ring belonged to Sky.

  “I need to fix our relationship… I need to make him happy,” Silas said. “He’s been so loyal to me, so helpful. I’ve spit on it, and I wish for him to look at me with the same love as he used to. If I make Jade immortal with the spiderwire to have him still age… I can achieve that.”

  So Elish gets everything he could ever want? He would jump at the chance to marry Silas, I know it! He would be king. He would get Skyfall and the greywastes used to only seeing his face. And he will grow stronger with his immortal cicaro he can age to whatever number he wants.

  Elish gets everything. Ever since I was a child I have witnessed that fucking bastard get everything. I have seen him cripple people emotionally and physically. I’ve seen him destroy people for denying him the slightest of things…

  … I have been a witness to his plans of destroying Silas. He wants to send him away – No, Elish would never just send him away; Elish would encase him or worse. And when Reaver woke, the very born immortal Sanguine told me he was helping…

  Reaver… who was fo
und in Aras with Lycos.

  Jack’s eyes widened as a realization came to him. Did perhaps… he hide the born immortal Silas yearned for, to begin with? It wasn’t solely L-Lycos taking the boy and fleeing…?

  That is exactly what Elish would do. He would manipulate us into believing Silas was an insane tyrant with one hand, and drive Silas to be that insane tyrant with the other.

  That fucking bastard.

  “You can’t marry him!” Jack blurted. He put a hand to his mouth and shook his head. “You can’t… you can’t give him that much power. You can’t give him control over you like that. He’ll destroy you.”

  Silas stared at him, before chuckling dryly. “I’m centuries old, love. Elish is no match for me, you know this. I am not as helpless as I look in this bed.”

  Yes, you are! You can’t even see what’s right in front of you. How long Elish has been playing you!

  Silas’s eyes narrowed at Jack’s expression. “Don’t look at me like I’m an idiot, Jack. I’m smarter than you, and I know your brothers more than you. Now, why are you here?”

  Jack flinched at Silas’s change in tone. Once again Silas’s personality had come through; from being sullen and depressed to staring at him with flashing eyes and an accusatory glare. This was the king through and through.

  “I was here to check to see if you’re okay…”

  Silas rose and shook his head. “I know when you’re lying, lovely Grim. You’re here to beg for Sanguine’s release and I will tell you right now: no.”

  Jack surprised himself with the injection of rage that seemed to have been stabbed into his heart by a hypodermic needle. Anger was a foreign emotion to him, he never got upset, least of all towards his king that he loved. But as Silas stalked away, seemingly leaving the husked shell of his sadness behind in the bed, Jack’s brimming glass spilled over.

  “You just fucking said you would stop torturing us!” Jack snarled; his lips peeled back and his stance like a man ready for a fight.

  Silas turned around, the corner of his mouth raised in a half-smile. “I always wanted to ask if you yourself had an imaginary friend. You get so different when you enter that little state of mania,” he said in a taunting voice. “Admit to me you were only here to ask about Sanguine. Admit it.”

  “Why wouldn’t I be?” Jack yelled. “You locked him in the place of his nightmares. The cruellest thing you’ve ever done! You’re going to erase over fifty years of his healing! And for what? No one knows what he did, who he let out, because you keep secrets from us! You lied to us.”

  “Lied?” Silas spat. He took several dangerous steps towards Jack but Jack stood firm in his stance. “I lied? I’ve been in the living world longer than you’ve been alive, and the dead world for two hundred and thirty-two years. My first generation is ninety-one. I had been in the Fallocaust without chimeras for a hundred and forty-one years. Do you think during that time I sat around with my thumb up my ass with nothing happening? Do you think life for me just suddenly got dramatic and interesting once you became old enough to see it? You moronic fuck, I’ve lived a century and a half in the dead world and believe me… I have secrets that would make your hair turn white.”

  Jack stood stunned where his king’s verbal lashing had left him. Silas turned around with a shake of his head. “You think my life only began when records started being kept?” Silas walked to his laptop, picked it up and shook it at Jack. “I am the only one in possession of records dating back before my first chimeras were born and I intend to keep it that way.”

  “Why…?” Jack whispered.

  “Because I’ve done a lot of bad things to a lot of people,” Silas replied. His face darkened. “I made mistakes… and I wish for that one mistake to stay swept under the rug.”

  Jack took a step towards him and tried to find his eyes, but Silas was staring blankly at the window in front of him. “He was… a mistake?” Jack asked slowly. “You made a… he had to be a born immortal, you didn’t perfect immortal-making until the first generation was thirty-three.”

  Silas shook his head and picked up an empty syringe; he tossed it away and the lines on his face deepened.

  “He’s a born immortal but not of my creation. Perish told me he remembered him but his childhood memories were taken from him by me as well. Another mistake.”

  “Perish knew him?”

  “Yes,” Silas said to him. “His name is Gage Kohler, a living bomb of radiation. Not only that, he has mental techniques that trump mine tenfold, and suffers no ill effects from using them. He was sent by the military scientists who created us to…” Silas’s voice trailed off and there was no indication that it would pick up again.

  Jack gaped at him. “No ill effects from using his mental powers?” He looked over his shoulder in alarm, and his heart jumped to his throat as a new reality hit him. “He’s loose in Skyfall?”

  He didn’t understand when Silas just looked at the floor. Why wasn’t he tearing Skyfall apart looking for this man? He could cause a lot of problems for the family; he had to be stopped. “He’ll be angry at you for locking him up, angry at the family. We need to find him before he hurts one of the mortals.”

  “I don’t believe he’s a danger, not yet anyway. He came to Skyfall years ago. He was filthy and skinny, but… friendly,” Silas said. His brows touched as he scowled. “I had seen him before the Fallocaust and he was entirely different. He was tough, confident and arrogant, ruthless and without mercy. Everything you’d expect from an…” Silas once again paused, and Jack knew then he was leaving something out, something important. “The man had the most bluest eyes too. But when I saw him again, he had one blue eye and one black eye. He was also polite yet unstable. His personality was entirely different, and he remembered nothing of who he was before. But… I couldn’t risk it, he was too powerful. I put him in concrete.”

  “And he’s been in concrete ever since?” Jack whispered. The world was spinning around him. He desperately needed to sit down and take in all of this information.

  Silas nodded. “I made a special one for him… coated the inside in Mag-strips so he couldn’t use his radiation to make the concrete explode. It would only kill him. There was nothing else I could do with him… even if he seemed to have a different personality now – he’s too dangerous to be let free.”

  “Do you have anyone looking for him?”

  Silas shook his head. “He doesn’t know who he was before the Fallocaust, or the terrible things he did to my previous family.” Silas laid down on the couch. “If he wants to destroy me… he can.”

  Jack was quiet for a moment. “If… if I find him, my king. Will you bring back Sanguine?”

  The silence shifted over to Silas and there it remained for a solid minute.

  “You dare bargain with me? Like my punishments are given so flippantly that you can buy their removal?”

  Jack’s jaw locked again. “I love him,” he hissed through his teeth. “You cannot expect me to act rationally when Sanguine is currently being tortured with his own psychosis.”

  “You may leave now, Jack,” Silas said dully. “Go to Olympus and fetch me Elish. I need him tonight.”

  “NO!” Jack suddenly screamed. He clenched his fists and snarled as Silas rose to his feet.

  Jack glared at him from under his brow, his black eyes glistening spheres of darkness. The stress of hearing about this mysterious Gage, coupled with Sanguine’s agony, was boiling him alive. “You will release my boyfriend. You will release him to me.”

  Silas chuckled and crossed his arms. “What bite you have, Jack Anubis. Or would you prefer just Anubis? Elish’s little nickname for you. Please tell me this anger is perhaps because… you love Elish?”

  Jack exploded at this. “Nothing could be farther from the truth!” he raged. “You blind, insane, self-deprecating little insect! I have been naught but loyal to you, and you’re dumb enough to marry the one man trying to bring you down? You stupid mania-” Silas lunged at him, and when Jack f
ell to the ground Silas raised his fist and brought it down onto Jack’s face. He struck him several times, each time his fist connecting and crunching against bone.

  Silas jumped off of him, his chest rapidly heaving and his fists, now spotted with blood, clenched. “Get out and bring me Elish like I told you.” Silas then spat on him. “And for my own pleasure… you can call him King Elish from now on, just to amuse me.”

  Jack staggered to his feet, his left eye bloodshot and a trickle of red running down his nose. “So Elish gets what he always wants then? And I get what? I get what for my loyalty and love for you?”

  “You get to walk out of here without me encasing you,” Silas said and turned his back to him. “Get out before I change my mind.”

  Jack stalked out with his sleeve to his nose. Leaving a trail of blood behind him, he walked to the elevator and pressed the button for the lobby.

  He’d never felt so much rage inside of him, and the throbbing in his face where Silas had struck him only made it worse. Never before had his anger burned him like this, it was a blistering wound that was already festering and boiling. Every thought Jack had infected it further, until he found himself shaking with an unholy rage as he walked outside of Alegria and directly towards Olympus. There were people walking on the sidewalk, but every one of them jumped out of the way when Jack stalked by. He didn’t even hear Juano when he asked Jack if he wanted his car.

  There would be no need. Olympus wasn’t far. Jack kept his pace steady and quick, his eyes fixed and never leaving the skyscraper he could see coming closer and closer.

  The lights in Elish’s apartment were turned off. Elish was sleeping. Good. Jack was glad he was because it would have to be quick. It would have to be silent.

  No, Jack… you can’t do this, don’t do this. Jade is innocent. Jade is practically Sanguine. You cannot use him to hurt Elish.

  But this is the only way I can pay him back.

  For hating Silas.

  For Silas, in his deepest of depressions, still loyally trusting him.

  For letting Sanguine get taken back to Jasper’s.