by Quil Carter
“I need to talk to Mantis,” I said as I stared into the bedroom; that was the first thing that jumped to the front of my mind. “Take me to him.”
My eyes temporarily shot to his and I saw that his grin had become a crooked half-smile, and as if the smile was weighing down the side of his head, he tilted it. He looked at me with false affection and winked, then took a step closer.
And then, to my surprise, he spoke.
Or… the worm spoke?
“I’ll take you to Mantis, but first you need to do something for me,” Nero said sweetly. His expression, even when holding a smile, looked menacing. He had an oval-shaped face, eyebrows trimmed to have arches, and a strong chin and jawline speckled with black stubble. That face had such a resounding effect on me now, I felt my mind stop and go like someone was pressing fast forward and pause at the same time. The psychological effects of my time with him was fighting with my pride, a fight to the death in front of my eyes but the only physical sign I let show was a hard swallow.
“What do you want me to do?” I managed to say, and my eyes deflected to the grey carpet in the bedroom to my right.
Nero chuckled, and this time when he took another step I saw brown loafers. He was close enough to me that I could see his feet.
“Why can’t you look me in the eye, Reaver? How can I tell you if you won’t look at me?”
My eyes widened. I realized then that he was right. I was doing everything to avoid looking him in the eye, and when I did I found any excuse to look away, just like the weak piece of shit I had become in his bedroom. Seconds after being face-to-face with Nero, not even real Nero, parasite Nero, I was plunging back into being that caged animal.
So with a clench of my teeth I looked up at Nero, and looked him dead in the eye. Fireworks exploded throughout my vision as I stared at him and he stared back. Looking him in the eyes filled me with such a rage I felt my body shake, unable to contain the physical feelings he was drawing out of me.
Sensing my state, a cold laugh rolled from his lips and he tilted his head again. This time when he did, I saw the shadows of the scab behind his neck again. My hands twitched at this, the knife was on my belt, I just had to get to it.
Nero closed the last foot of space and looked down at me with a lurid grin. “Kiss me,” he growled. He flicked his tongue in a perverted, lewd fashion and bit down on it before he wiggled his eyebrows at me and continued to devour my body with his eyes.
But I kept my cool, I let him have his dominance. I calmed the beast screaming and throwing itself against my rib cage, and though I felt like I was floating on air from the sheer anger it was filling me with, I nodded.
I fucking nodded and motioned him towards me. “Come here.” My words didn’t sound like my own, solely because they were never words I thought I’d say, but they spilled from my mouth regardless.
And to further hammer in my compliance, I put a hand on his waist and drew myself to him.
Nero grinned at me and put a burly arm behind my back, slid it down to my ass and grabbed it roughly.
Red filled my pulsing skull to the point of bursting, and my body continued to shake from rage. I was surprised the fabric of the universe hadn’t torn itself to shreds from this crime against nature I was about to perform, but the world kept on turning.
And, as such, I kept performing. With the red now translating to an intense pressure that tried to push my brain out from behind my eyes, I did it. I let Nero wrap both of his arms around me, pulling me to him in a firm embrace, and before I closed my own eyes I saw his close, and those thin lips surrounded by stubble, inch towards mine.
Our lips met and his immediately encouraged mine to open up more. I hesitated to give him a challenge, and let him start to suck on my mouth and lips. In an oddly and confusingly gentle way, he softly pushed his lips against mine, nudging them open like he was lightly knocking on my bedroom door.
I had him, excellent. Discreetly so I wouldn’t alert him, I grabbed the combat knife and pretended like I was hooking his upper arm. I opened one eye to get the angle right, then, with as much precision as I could, I drove the tip of the knife into the back of Nero’s neck, right into the scab.
Nero bellowed and pulled away, but to my shock and confusion, when he jerked his head back… I saw what looked like a black cord between his lips–
–and it was leading into my own fucking mouth.
I inhaled sharply and dropped the knife, right as Nero stumbled backwards and lost his balance. The cord that went from his mouth to mine stretched, and I could feel it tugging behind my throat as it became taut; then, with a sharp spasm of pain and the sensation like a cactus was getting pulled from my mouth, the cord shot out from between my lips and landed on the fallen Nero like a severed rope.
Without thinking, I snatched my combat knife, and while Nero rolled on his back, gasping and groaning with his hand clutching his bloody neck, I grabbed the worm thrashing and writhing in Nero’s mouth and cut off its head. I then wrenched it like I was pulling the cord of a lawnmower, and as Nero bellowed, trying to grab hold of the worm as well, I drew out the parasite.
It was long, fuck was it ever long. By the time the tip of it was withdrawn it was in ten pieces. There was no time to waste though. I grabbed Nero’s shoulder and rolled him onto his stomach like I had Ceph. Nero swore at me and tried to get up but with a sound kick in the head he groaned and, for the moment, lay stunned.
Then I heard a shout from Killian downstairs and gunfire. I looked down the hall, horror rushing through me, but my attention was diverted when I saw a churn of movement inside the bloody gouge I’d made in Nero’s neck. My eyes took me towards it, and though my mind screamed at me to run towards the gunfire, my attention was only on the contorting snare of black rope that was currently spilling out of Nero’s wound.
Like Ceph, there were a lot of them, all of them seemingly braided into each other. I wasted no time, I punched Nero in the head to keep him down, and I started grabbing the strings like I was yanking out spaghetti, and started cutting and pulling, fucking cutting and pulling.
More gunfire downstairs and I heard Kiki yell something. “Killian, come upstairs!” I hollered. I wrenched out a long braided cord and slashed it with my knife; my hands quickly becoming covered in the brown-red liquid that was the worms’ blood. I gritted my teeth and threw the cut up cords into the corner of the hallway and continued my extraction. “Killian?” I shouted, yanking more strings out of Nero. At least it seemed that all of the worms ended at his brain, so when I got the last of them, that should be the last. There wouldn’t be any hidden ones in his fucking legs or anything.
“Killi?” I bellowed. I growled and snatched out another braid before slashing it, my knife cutting the red rug underneath us as I did. I looked inside the wound and opened it with my fingers to look for more but all I could see was blood and twitching muscle and tendons.
“You… I think you got ‘em all,” Nero suddenly croaked. He started to shift and somehow I trusted that it was him enough to jump off of his back. I looked towards the hallway, the hair on the nape of my neck prickling at the deceptive calm downstairs. There was no more gunfire, no more yelling, everything had become dead quiet.
Nero stood up. I turned to him, not knowing what to say, and as I stared at him I saw that his left eye was now missing, just a bloody hole with a loose eyelid. He seemed to have his mind still intact as well; mine had been scrambled after the parasite got into me but maybe he didn’t have that much of a brain to begin with.
“We can talk about this shit after, pup,” Nero said when we made eye contact. He must’ve seen the disdain in my eyes. “We gotta get our boys first. Truce?”
My mind screamed at his comment. A fucking truce? I didn’t want a truce! I wanted to lunge at him and drive my knife up his ass. I wanted to fucking torture him and give him the nightmares for the rest of his immortal life. I wanted to turn him into a fucking flashback-suffering, weak fucking bitch he’d made me! A truce
? Fuck you!
But as my inner voice shrieked this, and called me every derogatory name in the book, my head only nodded before my body turned and ran down the hallway. I heard thumping behind me as Nero quickly followed, that and metal clicking against metal.
When I got to the top of the stairs, I saw my M16 creep into my vision. I looked and realized Nero was holding it out to me, a sober expression on his flushed and blood-covered face. Without a word I took it, and ran down the stairs.
I stopped at the bottom of the stairs. “Killian?” I called, forcing down the anxiety that was clawing its way up from this overflowing pool of bad emotions currently holding me hostage. I looked around and swallowed hard when I saw nothing but an empty entrance and empty hallways. “Kiki?”
“You… you have Kiki?” Nero said behind me.
I nodded as I glanced over to the hallway where the laboratory door was, but before I could answer my body froze over what it saw.
The carpet runner was bunched up like there had been a lot of activity in the hallway. I sprinted to the hall, my eyes fixed on the ground, and when I saw blood splatters I let out a loud FUCK!
They can’t kill him.
Keep calm. They can’t kill him.
It wasn’t much blood but it was there, a steady trail of it like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs. I followed it, and my eyes travelled to the closed laboratory door. Even though I knew it would do nothing, I tried the handle but it was locked.
Then I looked down, feeling something sticky on the handle, and realized my hand was coated in blood. It was all over the door knob.
I started pounding on the door. “Open the fuck up!” I yelled. I kept slamming my fists against it and once again pulling on the door knob. “Open the fucking door!” I swallowed down a scream of frustration and decided to try and keep my cool in front of Nero.
That lasted for about five seconds; I shoved the metal door with both hands. “Killian?” I pressed my ear up against it but I heard nothing, only Nero behind me also swearing colourfully. “Killian?” I shouted as loud as I could, but finally I shook my head and gave up. “There’s no getting into that fucking door.” Then something occurred to me, something my mind didn’t want to even flirt with being a reality. “By the living room,” I said. “I killed Ceph and Mantis…”
I turned around and saw Nero for a fraction of a second, before he disappeared back towards the entrance. “Cephy?” I heard him call. “Kiki?” I let him yell, knowing they weren’t anywhere near us anymore, and re-traced the mysterious blood splatters. They took me to the kitchen, then into the living room, and then…
The foreboding I’d felt was correct.
“The bodies are gone,” I said grimly. I looked around the living room and realized a struggle had taken place here. A side table had been overturned and broken, and a lamp was shattered beside the couch. The worms I’d cut out of Ceph were still there, lying dead, and the empty cat tin too… but that was all that remained from our initial assassination. Someone either came and managed to overpower the boys and get the bodies, or else… did I miss a parasite in Ceph and it had reanimated him?
Nero sprinted back. “Kiki?” His voice echoed throughout the mansion. “Come out, pickles. It’s okay, it’s me.”
“He wouldn’t hide from me. Killian wouldn’t either.” I shook my head at him and walked towards a puddle of blood, now with many smears and streaks, and kneeled over it. The puzzle pieces continued putting themselves together and I knew exactly what happened.
“I shot Mantis and the boys shot Ceph. I pulled the worms out of him. Maybe I missed one?” I said to Nero. I put my fingers in the blood and tasted it. I wasn’t Elish though, or a blood-fiend, I couldn’t taste the difference between chimera and greywaster blood, not yet anyway. “I’m guessing a worm reanimated Ceph and he overpowered the boys. There’s a lab here, right?”
When I stood up I saw Nero, looking stressed and still bleeding heavily from the neck, nod and wipe a hand down his sweaty, flushed face. He wasn’t the brute monster I’d seen in that bedroom. It was strange and unsettling to see him as a person and not that cackling, cocksure piece of shit I’d been imprisoned by. “Adler and Spike were in Adler’s bedroom when you came,” Nero said.
“Adler and Spike?” I asked. I didn’t want to know, I didn’t need another two people to worry about but I knew I didn’t have a choice. Know your enemy; that was why I wanted to snoop around this place in the beginning. I wanted to know who Mantis was and…
Angel Adi… Adler. Well, that answers that.
Nero nodded. “Adler’s a born immortal like you. Ceph was encased in concrete when Silas thought he’d failed the born immortal test, but it looks like you were the second Sky baby to get smuggled into the greywastes. He’s a nice kid, I think, from how Mantis spoke of the servant I asked about, but unfortunately that isn’t going to matter since technically… we’re the bad guys in this.”
“And who’s Spike?”
“Spike… Spike’s a part of your generation. Like Jade, he was supposed to die after Silas had his mental breakdown but like Jade… that didn’t happen and he was sent away to live in the greywastes. He’s a stealth and either science mixed in, or intelligence, I’m not sure which but he’s a genius. Both he and Adler have been Mantis’s lab rats. They heard what was going on out here and I’m guessing once the kittens were left alone they pounced. It couldn’t have been Ceph if you gutted him. There needs to be multiple proxy worms to control a dead body; they work together and are all in your insides. If you took them out of Ceph, he wouldn’t be able to come back.”
Great. Elish had a nice little faction here apparently. This was dangerous. There were more chimeras here than I originally thought. Not just a scientist and a born immortal, but developed ones who knew how to fight and defend their home.
But this mansion was mine now. I couldn’t just abandon the plan halfway through. I had to imprison the immortals, kill the mortals, and take this place over. Both because I wanted to get back at Mantis for what he did, and to keep my secret a secret.
“Is there an exit to this underground lab?” I asked. “Any way for us to rush it while Mantis and Ceph are dead?”
I saw Nero’s teeth clench together then he shook his head. “No. I was down there, this is the only escape. They’re locked down there until they surface and we’ll be here waiting.” He turned with a shake of his head and motioned for me to follow him. I did, and traced his steps into the kitchen, one with black cabinets and a stone island with stools lined up on the outer side. I leaned against the kitchen island and tried to steady my heart. It was in the process of trying to escape from my chest, just continuous thrashing beats that were sending jolts of adrenaline to my brain. A brain that kept telling me that Killian was going to die, and I had to burn the world to save him. It was wringing me like a damp washcloth, and no matter how many times I told and reassured myself that Killian wouldn’t die, the voice was persistent.
Even if he was immortal though, I didn’t want the kid far from me. At least, even if I hated it, he was getting stronger. Killian would be okay, maybe he’d be the one opening the door and coming out covered in blood, with a grin on his face and a story to tell me.
Fuck. It was hard not to worry about Killian dying. That had been my life since I’d started following him around. My existence had been keeping Killian alive, but now I just wanted to make sure he was safe and not… full of parasites.
I looked up when I heard a fridge door open, followed by the tinkling of bottles. Nero turned around with two bottles in-hand, and before he closed the door, I saw fruit, vegetables, and containers of food mixed in with the other bottles of beer.
As Nero approached me, I felt my body automatically stiffen, and when he offered me the beer I was frozen on the spot and unable to take it. I stared at it, the bottle already open and with vapour coming off of the spout like mist.
“It’ll help. It’s good stuff,” I heard Nero say. I wanted to look up at him
, stare directly into his eyes and glare him down but it was like I’d been thrown into suspended animation. “I got a shit ton of drugs too. We can do some and figure out just how the fuck we’re going to get the kittens back.”
When I didn’t take the beer, he put it beside me and I heard his lips close around his own, then break away. “Thanks for not killing him.”
My body stiffened like it had become stone. I’d rather face a roomful of parasites coming at me than be in this room with him. So badly did my mind scream at me to get away from him, but here I was, welded to the spot and useless.
“You… you are so about to fucking kill me though,” Nero chuckled dryly. I saw a hand enter my vision and he picked up the bottle and tried to get me to take it. “Look, bro. It wasn’t personal, alright? You just were the closest thing to a dude I really hate, and it got me off to finally get my hands on him. And, honestly, you fought too, which kind of drove me wild.”
I looked up at him and saw him tipping the bottle of beer from side to side.
“Silas?” I asked, trying to talk through the knot in my throat.
Nero shook his head and took another drink. “Nah,” he said when he lowered the bottle. “Sky. I hate that dude. Never met him but the entire family fucking despises him for what he did to Silas.” His eyes, or his remaining eye anyway, looked at me, and I refused to look away this time.
But focusing on his face accelerated this growing storm inside of me. It was like staring at the sun, my eyes fucking burned, the temperature of my body was shooting to the sky. It infuriated me to feel these emotions, ones that I had used to never feel, be thrust upon my body without my say.
Why the fuck was I such a weak bitch now? Look at him, Reaver. LOOK AT HIM!
I kept staring, forcing myself to grow used to his presence. Like taking small sips of arsenic, I needed to build up an immunity to him. I couldn’t fucking act like a pussy now. I couldn’t show him that what he’d done had any permanent effect on me. If I did he’d look down on me and I’d rather die than have that son of a bitch think less of me.