by Quil Carter
For manipulating Sanguine in the first place.
For being about to be handed all of his dreams, and more, on a silver platter.
It was for everything. Everything. For every smug look, for every toy he broke, for every time he battered his cicaro and tormented him, only to have that STUPID BOY LOVE HIM MORE!
Jack looked down as he heard a low toned beep. He checked his watch, and when he saw Sanguine’s name pop up, with the longitude and latitude of the place where he died being where Jack knew Jasper’s house was, Jack let out a hackle-raising, terrible scream of both madness and pain – and the Grim broke off into a run towards Olympus.
When he sped down the greenery of Olympus, towards the emergency exit he knew the code to, he found himself stopping in his tracks. Another flare of rage searing him when he saw two familiar people standing front of the door.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Jack snarled. It was an odd sight that made little sense, and it suggested that Jack was walking in on something. It was Drake and he was sitting on the concrete steps with Luca.
“Pet’s inside doing pet things,” Drake said casually, a marshmallow candy stick half-finished in his hand. “We’re guarding the door ‘cause Jade’s ex-boyfriend keeps trying to get in and Silas says we can’t kill him, which I think–” Drake jumped to his feet with his eyes wide as Jack let out a snarl of rage and started running towards the stairs to the metal door.
Then something caught him. Jack whirled around and took a swing at Drake who was holding him back.
“Why are you crazy? Why are you Crowing? Why are you mad?” Drake asked hastily, his words said so rapidly and squished together they were almost indiscernible.
“Because I’m going to rip out the throat of that little yellow-eyed piece of shit in front of Elish,” Jack roared. He pushed Drake and he fell backwards down the stairs. The boy landed on his shoulder and did a flip, before slamming down onto the grass.
“What?” Luca cried from behind Jack. Jack turned around just in time for Luca to punch him in the face.
Jack barely flinched, and when Luca saw what little impact his hit had on the Grim, his face fell.
But the sengil was determined. He lunged at Jack but this time Jack was waiting. He grabbed Luca by the hair and pushed him over the railing of the landing the metal door was on, and jumped over the side on top of him.
Jack raised his fist and punched Luca in the face, then rapidly delivered him several more blows and, to top off the insane state he was in, he bit the sengil on the neck and gave him one last vicious hit right in his eye socket.
When Jack rose from his assault on Luca, the sengil wasn’t moving. Jack fixed his eyes on the exit door, and without a lucid thought inside of him, only blinding rage, he walked up the concrete steps and into Olympus.
Unbeknownst to him, someone else was following him inside.
Chapter 16
Elish
Earlier that evening.
Elish squeezed the sponge over Jade’s head and watched as the water ran over the boy’s eyes. He was no longer blinking or reacting to the water, that had stopped yesterday.
Even though he was done bathing Jade, he picked up a handful of water and flicked it onto Jade’s face to try and get a reaction… but there was none.
The boy had almost fully regressed. The only thing he could still do was breathe and even Elish was waiting for that ability to be taken from him too. He had his breathing machine and the tube ready for when that day came at least.
Elish picked up Jade and dried him off, then put him into clean pajamas. Elish’s mouth downturned when he saw the skinny frail frame laying on the bed. Jade was losing more weight but Lyle had said it was just his muscles wasting away. Supposedly the boy was getting all the nutrition needed, but Elish had his doubts.
He was having doubts about a lot of things. From the odd-eyed man never returning, to if Jade could make it to next month, let alone two years.
The constant thought in his head had been that two years would mean a lifetime. That those two years would disappear and be forgotten, but the rewards would stay forever. Elish had told himself this over and over until he could recite it like gospel.
But in truth, the cold chimera was also having second thoughts about that. Perhaps it was because Jade had been confined to a hospital bed, and when he had come home he was better. Now Elish was seeing him regress back into a completely vegetative state, and since he was now Jade’s caretaker, he himself saw what Lyle saw.
Jade was dying.
And it was his doing. Garrett had been right, as much as it filled Elish with bitterness to admit – Garrett had been right. It was he who weakened the boy and it seemed that Jade forever eighteen would have to be the penance.
Maybe it won’t be that bad?
Not for the boy, because nothing would change between us… ever. He’d be my cicaro and I would be his master.
Elish laid Jade onto the recliner, read to him for an hour, and then turned off all of the lights. He wasn’t tired yet but he had found himself in a state of contemplation… and had decided that perhaps it was time to think things over.
Time to… let go of this futile hope that that strange man was in Skyland, or even Skyfall. Time to fix what he could already fix, so he can move on to collecting his seeds. Jade would be an asset in swaying the cicaros and sengils; he’d be no doubt wanting in on whatever plans Elish had.
Though as Elish drew up a thousand reasons pertaining to his own personal seeds or vendettas, he knew deep down he was only drawing them up to mask the real reason he wanted Jade back.
Because I so dearly missed that boy. I missed having someone I can trust completely.
Elish rose and turned on the light. Jade’s eyes were still open, still blankly staring.
“I think… I will be speaking to Silas tomorrow,” Elish said to him. He brushed back Jade’s bangs and nodded as if confirming it to himself. “Whatever he requires, I will do it. I think it is time I pick my battles.” Elish leaned in and kissed Jade’s forehead. “If we’re lucky he’ll not delay. Maybe I will have you back in a matter of days. Then we can get to more important matters, like picking up these shattered pieces. You’re a nuisance, Cicaro, and I’m growing tired of being your sengil.”
He turned off the light soon after and laid back down on the couch. Out of habit, he lit and smoked an opiate cigarette, and soon after that he felt himself fall into sleep. One not so troubled.
Sometime later Elish opened his eyes, his ears picking up on a familiar sound… the apartment door opening. He stayed silent and listened, picking up the quickened breathing and anxious heartbeat of someone creeping into his apartment.
The mysterious person stepped slowly and carefully, and Elish realized just from the way he was moving… that he didn’t have the night vision that every chimera and Silas had. This sparked a curiosity inside of him. He watched without fear of being seen, and waited for the man to make his appearance.
The electric fireplace was on in the sitting room, but it had been turned towards two chairs so only a faint glow was on Jade. Elish had done this deliberately to give the odd-eyed man easy access to his cicaro, and it looked like it was about to pay off.
And it did. Elish became a statue as the man he’d seen over Jade’s hospital bed slipped into his vision like a forgotten shadow. He looked surprisingly good, his hair was cut and groomed, his white frock now styled into a wave which made bangs over the left side of his forehead, and he was clean and looking like any normal man.
Not only that…
He was wearing… Jade’s black Iron Maiden shirt? No, no, I had made Jade give that to Drake. He was wearing Drake’s clothes.
Elish slowly locked his teeth together as the realization came to him.
Hey, do you want to see my new pet? That damn mental case had been keeping him the entire time.
The strange man looked around the living room before his eyes found Elish’s feet and then travelled u
p to his face. He looked at him for several moments, then affirmed to himself that Elish was asleep, and turned to Jade.
Elish watched him intently, waiting to spring into action if he did anything to hurt his cicaro, but the man did exactly what Elish thought he would do… he rested his hands on both sides of Jade’s head… and his single blue eye turned black to match the other.
The same thing that happened to Silas. Yes, this boy was definitely something.
When Silas had healed Jade it had taken several minutes, if he correctly recalled. But Silas’s abilities were full of bugs and glitches, he couldn’t do much without it killing himself, so he used his powers sparingly. He’d even told Elish that Jade was beyond his own repair and Elish knew he wasn’t lying.
This boy, however, didn’t seem to suffer from the same debilitating repercussions of empathic abilities like the others did.
What an interesting specimen. His release from his concrete tomb could prove to be beneficial to my campaign. If I have this boy at my side, and Jade healed and back in his prime… there’s no telling what I could achieve.
Then suddenly something strange happened. The subtle noises in the house, the hum of the cable box, the whir of Elish’s laptop, and the lights in the apartment, went out. Everything around Elish died and fell to an eerie calm.
The power had gone out. Elish turned to the boy to see if it had been something that he’d done, only to see the odd-eyed man jump up in shock, look around in a panic, and dash towards the door.
Elish scrambled to his feet, and as the low-toned emergency alert beeped around him, he ran after the odd-eyed man.
“E-Elish?” Jade’s weak voice sounded.
Elish hesitated, and made a choice in the moment to keep pursuing the man who was dashing to the stairs. He opened the door and disappeared into the stairwell, now bathed in a red glow from the emergency lights.
Elish turned and ran to the elevator. He stopped in front of it and rapidly pushed the button. If he could get to the bottom, he could shut off all of the exits and the boy would be trapped in Olympus. It might take a week to scour every floor, but they’d find him.
Elish looked at the elevator, wondering why he wasn’t hearing anything – and hated himself. The elevator wasn’t going to work, the fucking power was out!
With a frustrated growl he ran to the stairs, but as he dashed down the first flight he heard the oddest of noises. It sounded like an angry scream, a snarl from the lips of some beast. It was coming from… Elish walked to the metal door leading to the floor he was on, and opened it.
Another scream. Elish felt perplexed when he realized it was someone trapped in the elevator, and whoever the man was, he wasn’t happy about it. Elish exited the door and kept running down the stairwell, pausing to listen for any noise the boy could be making.
His ears filled with static, and the alarm that kept beeping its protest to Olympus’s power outage. There was nothing; where was that damn man?
“I’m not going to harm you,” Elish called down the stairwell. He got to another landing, the eighteenth storey and stopped to listen again.
He heard a squeak and a whine of a door opening, followed by a soft click. “Wait!” Elish shouted. He ran down the steps, wishing in that moment that he was a stealth chimera and about ten years younger.
The low beeping around him, and the distance, made Elish unsure of which floor the strange man had disappeared to, but it had to be one of three. Elish made a guess on the sixteenth floor and opened the door.
It was an empty floor full of storage, just his luck.
“I’m not going to harm you,” Elish said again. “I’m the husband of the young man you’ve been healing. I just want you to go and finish it. All I want is for you to heal him, and I will have never seen you.”
Elish opened the double doors and looked inside. All around him was furniture and musical instruments covered in plastic and sheets. There were boxes stacked high to the ceiling in scattered rows, and shoes and spilled contents on the ground. The windows’ curtains were thin as well, but the city lights in front of him did little to light the area. It was a maze of boxes with barely enough room to navigate, like a child’s greatest dream for hide and seek but right now it couldn’t have been a worse room.
“I just want you to finish what you started,” Elish said again. “I don’t know who you are and my life is quite complicated enough as it is. Heal him, and I’ll give you all the money you need. I’ll give you a place to live far from Silas…” He paused, then reached into his sleeve for the last and most powerful ace he had. “… and if it is your desire – I will help you kill him.”
Elish swiftly turned around as he heard a crunch of papers. He crept past a stack of five blue totes and peeked into a small alcove that had been made in the clutter.
It was only a radrat sitting on a nest of pink babies. Elish growled and, purely out of frustration, tipped the totes right on top of the little family. He stalked out of the apartment, down the hallway, and made his way to the fifteenth floor; the red lights above him stunting his night vision and making everything look like a low budget horror movie.
And to this boy I might as well be the monster chasing him through the haunted skyscraper. But this monster will be nothing compared to the one I’ll turn into if he slips from my grasp once again.
Elish opened the door to the fifteenth floor and saw that this was a sengils’ residence. He looked down the plain green hallway and noticed that the door was slightly open.
Then Elish smelled something… it was cologne, Drake’s cologne. No doubt the dumb idiot had been grooming his pet, and right now the boy’s path was as visible as a glowing trail.
Elish quietly walked into the room and closed the door behind him. After the click, and with the alarm in the stairwell becoming muffled, he listened.
His head snapped to the left when he saw a flicker of shadow in the sitting room. There were two bookshelves arranged to closing in the area, two chairs in the middle, and behind that, a large window. It was the same floor design as Elish’s own apartment and it looked like the sengils living here had borrowed how his sitting room was arranged. Another plus, he would be able to charge in there and grab the boy before he wiggled out of his grasp. If he had to kill him to keep him from escaping, he would.
Elish remained as shrouded in shadow as he could. He crept to the wall, then to the bookshelf, and when his ears picked up a thrashing heartbeat, Elish knew he had found him.
Elish took in a deep breath and decided to try and settle this the easy way. “I know you’re in here,” he said loudly. He heard a startled gasp before it was muffled by the boy’s hand; the boy was terrified, this was good. “My name is Elish. I’m Jade’s husband. I just want you to finish healing him and I will never mention you being here.”
The silence was a physical weight on Elish’s shoulders, each moment passed by at a desperate crawl, prolonging the anticipation that felt like burning venom in his veins.
“Please,” Elish said through his teeth. “I don’t know who you are and I don’t care. Just heal my husband. He’s all I–”
The boy suddenly made a run for it. He tried to dash out of the sitting room and towards the double doors, but Elish whirled around and grabbed him. The odd-eyed man screamed and tried to rip himself away.
Then Elish felt a strange feeling in his skin, an odd prickling sensation that was getting more and more concentrated as the milliseconds went on. Elish looked down and realized it was sinking into his muscle, his bones…
The cold chimera looked at the odd-eyed man, and his heart dropped.
“NO!” Elish bellowed. He grabbed the man and let out a desperate yell when he saw the back of the man’s skull start to glow white; the bright light lighting up his veins and his skull like a well-carved jack o’lantern. It was a horrific and terrible sight. The white light made the orbs of his eyes turn black, and the fillings he had inside of his mouth darken as well. He was a glowing skull that quick
ly became a skeleton as the light ripped through his veins and bones.
Elish lunged at the man, but the moment he touched him, he exploded. Elish was flung backwards and towards the window. It shattered upon impact and Elish was thrown out of the fifteenth storey of the apartment; the bright light following him like an aftershock, and in its rippling, air-disrupting waves, Elish could see shards of glass.
Elish looked up as he fell, and for a moment, time slowed and he was able to see the beautiful picture above him. A light that held shades of white Elish had never seen, and colours he had never known existed. They shone like opal ribbons of aurora borealis above him, with the sparkling shards of glass acting like their twinkling stars. Elish wanted to reach up to touch them… as if he knew that this iridescence would be the last beautiful thing he’d ever see.
Then the twisting and weaving streamers of white faded, and the glass falling around him stung and stuck to his face. The wind screaming in his ears became unbearably loud, and darkness covered all but the white flames he was seeing engulf his tower.
Elish’s eyes widened as he saw the fire burst through the windows, but as he opened his mouth to scream… he hit the grassy ground below and he succumbed to the darkness.
The next thing he knew he was being shaken awake. His mind encouraged him to ignore it, but just when he was about to fall back into unconsciousness, reality hit him and his eyes snapped open.
And it seemed during his time unconscious, the bowels of hell had opened and spilled their fiery contents onto the dead world. He could smell smoke, and see the flashes of emergency lights.
Elish looked around and saw Big Shot shaking him, his Geigerchip reading so much radiation it was like an angry wasp was inside of the half-raver’s chest. “Jade! They not let me in. They not let me in. Jade’s inside. King Jade inside!”
“Jade?” Panic flared inside of Elish. He jumped to his feet but fell to the ground when his back and hip gave a horrible pang. He got up again and tried to take a step, but though he managed a limping walk, he could hear bones grinding together.