by Quil Carter
“Yeah,” he said weakly back.
I laid down beside him and Silas immediately shifted into my arms. I held him tight, and as I thought of Reaver, thought of Killian, his cheerful smile and innocent nature now never to be seen again, I started to cry, and I heard Silas start to cry too. He wrapped his arms around me and clutched me tightly to him, his wraith-like frame shaking underneath my hold.
We stayed in each other’s arms, for a long long time, unleashing all of the feelings inside of us that we’d both thought were dead, soaking each other in tears and snot from running noses. When our crying eventually turned into shuddered gasps for air, and trembled aftershocks, we kept our embrace.
I felt his body relax in mine, and with my eyes closed, I gently stroked his hair. I didn’t realize I had been waiting for him to sleep until I heard his steady, shallow breathing, and once I knew he was, at least for the moment, free of his anguish, I fell asleep too.
I woke up to someone caressing my hair. I opened my eyes and saw Garrett put a finger to his lips. He was sitting behind me where there was still some space left.
Silas was still in my arms, his head on my chest and one arm was around me, the other tucked up near his chin. He wasn’t snoring, just breathing heavier; he was completely winked out.
“When I didn’t hear from you I became worried,” Garrett said, and to prove just how loving and not possessive he was, he smiled. “He looks so at peace. What happened?”
“I…” I paused, trying to find a way to word it. “I saw Silas… the real Silas.” When Garrett’s already large eyes widened at my admission, I sighed and looked down at the sleeping king, his face smushed against my chest. “We talked and I didn’t feel like I was talking to the Ghost. I talked to him and we both… connected. I think I might’ve helped him.”
Garrett stroked my hair back and rubbed my cheek caringly. “I think he might’ve helped you too, love. You sound better.”
“I do?” I said surprised. I wasn’t expecting that.
Garrett nodded. “You’re talking to me,” he laughed lightly. “Are you okay here? I’d hate to wake him. I don’t believe he’s been sleeping well.” A flicker appeared in his eye. “Was he violent with you at all? Lovely, would you think he’d like it if…?”
“I stayed with him?” I said. I searched my heart, and though I’d just woken up, I didn’t feel like that was a bad suggestion. Truthfully, I felt flattered that he’d been comfortable enough to fall asleep with me. “I don’t feel threatened at all with him. He’s so depressed, Gare. He’s just given up. A part of me feels shitty for feeling it, but… I don’t hate him. He explained what happened and it was all an accident. He didn’t purposely…” I hated mentioning them. I still couldn’t handle it. “… purposely kill… them.” I took in a deep breath, held it, and exhaled.
“I think I might understand him. I feel awful for him,” I continued. “He’s fucking two hundred and fifty-five years old and it’s taken a toll on him. I think he’s just done.”
Garrett stopped moving his hand, which was making small circles on my cheek. His calmed face fell to the depths. “He said that?”
I nodded. “It was like watching someone actively getting torn in two in front of me.” I shook my head. “I know I should hate him… but… fuck. I think I want to help him be happy again. I think that if it’s me, and not one of those chimera assholes who’ll only manipulate him, or take him out killing as a way to make him happy. If it’s me… Garrett, I think I can steer him in a better direction. I think I can help him repair the family with positive things, not threats and fire and brimstone. If it’s me… I can do what’s right.”
Garrett took in a sharp breath. He looked at Silas. “You… love, you really think so?”
“I do,” I whispered. “He opens up to me, and I bet you’ll tell me that he hasn’t spoken to practically anyone about what happened since he came back.”
“No… he hasn’t,” Garrett admitted. The hand that had been hovering over my face, so close I could feel the heat from it, trailed to Silas’s and he gently ran his fingers through Silas’s greasy, but still wavy, golden hair. “It’s been exceptionally worse since he banished Sanguine, and the last straw was Jade dying and Elish leaving. Silas would never admit it, but he did love Jade.” Garrett’s eyes welled at the thought of the yellow-eyed cicaro. Mine didn’t, but I did miss Biter. “It was just another tragedy to further fracture the family. Otter, love, if you think you can help him… please, please do all you can. I’ll help in any way.”
“You wouldn’t mind me staying here?” I asked. I was happy he wasn’t upset, but honestly sometimes I wish he was a bit more possessive of me when it came to his family. If it was someone who wasn’t a chimera, like poor Jesse Saint James in Tintown, he was a maniac but I bet I could flirt with any of his brothers and he’d just sit there with his proud smile.
Garrett thought for a moment. “Why don’t I temporarily move into one of the old apartments downstairs? Ares and Siris have been bored silly since they returned from the Dead Islands, and I can put them to work moving our things. This way we can see each other all the time.” He leaned down and kissed the corner of my lips. “This actually would be splendid, love. It’ll give me more time to devote to Skyfall. I was wanting to organize a holiday before fall hits, something to bring the city together and show our people that we are still a united force. Think of a name for it, sweet Otter, perhaps Silas will be well-enough to give us some input.”
I saw such a look of hope in his eyes, it made the black ice that had encapsulated my heart start to crack away, revealing the damaged, but still beating, organ inside. My heart beat hope into my bloodstream, and longing, longing for some shred of happiness, for something to make this pain go away.
Maybe doing this would be my first step on the path of repairing what I had previously believed was permanently broken. Maybe helping Silas would help me too, and fixing this fractured family would give my lost and depressing life some purpose.
I raised my free arm, Silas still breathing rhythmically with his face against my chest, and I drew Garrett down to my lips. I closed my eyes and we kissed, the taste of his mouth and the warmth it brought to me adding more determination to this weak heart.
It wasn’t without its conflict though. A part of me wanted to turn my back on this life and Skyfall, and go back to Aras to live in misery. I’d love to say to myself that Reaver wouldn’t want me to be sad in Aras, but he was Reaver and not a cliché. For all I know he’ll hate me for further sewing myself into this tapestry that was the Dekker family, but maybe Killian had changed him enough in his last few months for Reaver to want me to try, at least try, to be happy.
And I was the most happy when I was helping other people be happy; whether it was making them laugh, or just being the goofy guy I was. I had proven that from bouncing back after my time with the Crimstones. I was resilient; I was made out of tougher stuff than I thought I was.
It looks like I was about to take on my biggest challenge yet. I was going to bring Silas back from the darkness he was lost in… and in turn, I was going to repair his family.
“I know I can do this,” I said to Garrett when our lips temporarily parted. “I think it’ll help me to feel… useful again. Like I have a purpose. My life’s purpose had always been–”
Garrett kissed me again, more passionately this time. I knew why he was doing it. He didn’t want the consequences of me mentioning Reaver’s name. He knew it always made me sad.
When Garrett pulled away, he rested his forehead in the crook of my neck. I rubbed his back and looked down at the sleeping king.
I had a purpose in life again.
Chapter 26
Jade
“The fact that you actually think something like this will work, just shows how insane you are,” I said. My voice was scratchy and raw from screaming and flinging every curse at him that I could think of. Every time I swallowed it felt like I was trying to push down little fish bones;
everything hurt.
I braced myself when I felt the tinkling of chains, and gasped when the collar around my neck tightened, digging prongs into my bleeding neck. The blood was dried to my bare chest like I had been dipped into a vat of it and hung by my neck to dry. I must look like a pretty piece of art right now. Though who was here to see me?
“I didn’t tell you you could speak,” Kerres said in a cold tone that did nothing to emulate my master’s.
Kerres, you’ve gone crazy.
“I didn’t tell you I fucking cared,” I snapped, baring my teeth in the direction I had heard his voice. I was blindfolded, chained to the bed with my hands tied behind my back and my legs out in front of me. I was completely naked, and the smell of Kerres’s bedroom was now thick with the heavy aroma of blood.
And it was about to be joined by more. A hard slap to my face rewarded me for my attitude, and in return I spat blood in his face.
Or I tried to anyway.
My molars ground in frustration and spectrums of colour flashed in front of my eyes as if my own aura reading was illuminating my own frustration. I didn’t know how he knew to do it, or if he even realized what he had done – but being blindfolded had rendered my newly blossoming ‘I will kill your fucking mind’ empath abilities useless.
Because if I could see him, and I could use the trick I now knew how to harness… I would kill him. Without a fucking doubt, or a shred of sadness, I would melt his mind and stomp on his head until his eyes popped out. I would twist his head off of his body and piss down the fucking hole in his throat.
All in all – I was going to fucking kill Kerres. My master was missing, he was fuck knows where thinking I was dead; and here I was chained to Kerres’s bed unable to kill him with one of the only useful advantages to having this brain destroying ability.
The frustration multiplied and I let out a yell. Kerres hit me again, and I felt the snap of his whip against my chest. My lips peeled back into a vicious snarl, like a cat spitting, and I started pulling and struggling to try and get myself out of these chains; or at least get this blindfold off of my head.
Kerres laughed when my zapped energy left me panting and wheezing. I took in sharp and deep inhales and felt panic burn inside of my chest when I started breathing in my own recycled air. That, and the fact that my burning throat was further preventing me from taking a deep breath, was filling my head with an anxious heat.
“I can’t fucking breathe! Let me breathe!” I gasped. My head was throbbing, the blood its own pulse behind my eyes. I was desperate to take a deep breath of cold air; my brain demanded it in order to relieve the anxiety that anyone slowly being suffocated felt.
“Ask me nicely and I might.”
I am going to fuck your fucking skull.
“Please, Master, take this fucking thing off of my head!” I yelled, trying to grab my throat but my chains only tensed, recoiling my hand back. There was a thin razor’s edge between keeping my sanity, and going completely off the rails, and I was walking on it barefoot.
“I didn’t hear you.”
“Take this fucking thing…” I inhaled my own stale breath, my lungs screaming in response. I started hyperventilating, and it was then that I felt Kerres roll up the black cover he had over my head.
I gasped, and started filling my painful lungs with the smell of copper and dirty clothes, but it was a welcome breath compared to the covering over my head.
“See… you worked yourself up into a rage and you punished yourself for it,” Kerres said; his tone was just dripping satisfaction. I could see Elish doing this to me in the beginning, but Kerres was nothing like him. No one could match the control Elish had over me, even in the beginning. When my hatred for him was at its worst I still shuddered under his touch; I still ached for his praise.
Each word that spilled from Kerres’s lips lit my brain on fire. I could feel the grey matter melting into a pool of bubbling lava inside of my head. It was dissolving so it could be reconstructed, built up into something stronger, something impenetrable.
Kerres only knew me as being weak. He didn’t know what I had gone through in the greywastes. He didn’t know that I had survived when everything was thrown against me. I had survived Perish, I had survived ravers, and not only that, I was their king. I had survived my mind overloading to the point of being brain-dead. I had been marked for death inside of a burning skyscraper and even that I – fucking – survived.
I kept inhaling, every breath I took strengthening me, curing the coating I had inside. I was patient, I would wait for my moment and then I would strike.
I was a chimera – and I’d act like it.
“Thank you, Master,” I said through gasps. My mind was taking me back to when I had to pretend I was under the control of scopa. When Perish was trying to get those passwords from me. If there was one thing I fucking knew how to do… it was to fake it until I made it.
“That’s better,” Kerres said. I tried to hide the grimace when I felt his hand touch the side of my face, and it took all of me not to recoil when I felt his lips press against mine. I wanted to bite him, rip his lips off of his face, but if I did that I’d never get this hood off of my head.
“Kerres, this is insane,” I said when he separated our lips. “Did you really save my life just so you could torture me in your bedroom? Come on, you have to see how crazy this is.”
His heart rate didn’t even change from my direct call out of what he was doing. I knew he was batshit insane before, from the Crimstones, but I was starting to get insight on just how bad he’d gotten. Silas had commented in a singing voice how Kerres was camped outside of Olympus watching me. I’d be lying if I said it hadn’t made me feel pity for him, sadness that he couldn’t move on. I hid those feelings from Elish to avoid his scornful and patronizing looks, but it was what it was. I’d felt bad for him… and… maybe kind of flattered?
But now… now I realized he wasn’t following me like a disabled, injured puppy… he’d been downright stalking me. If only I’d have been smart enough to recognize how unstable he was before I opened my big mouth and started screaming at him about how much I loved Elish.
If only Gage hadn’t beat it out of there as soon as he saw things get loaded between me and Kerres. He was a god amongst the empaths, surely he could’ve killed him with one look? Or maybe he didn’t want to see his new friend in this state. It seemed like those two had become pals.
“Kerres?” I called again when he hadn’t answered me. “Come on. Unchain me, this isn’t good for you, and it isn’t helping me. Unchain me so we can just talk about it. Remember all the times you fucking wanted us to talk? Here’s your chance.” This is why I loved Elish. Both of us would down a shot of arsenic before we sat down and talked about our feelings. It only happened when he’d pushed me to my limits, or I had pushed him to his, and then we just yelled our feelings as we tried to beat each other to a pulp. I hated feelings.
“You’ve already said enough,” was my response from Kerres.
“Yeah, well…” My mind scrambled for a fish to throw him. He was a starved animal right now and a crazy one as well. I could do this. “You pissed me off, okay? I said some things I maybe didn’t mean. Hitting me and trying to be Elish, which I assure you, you’re not, isn’t going to fix this. If you want to work on this relationship…”
“Don’t bullshit me, Jade!” I felt a smack across my face and I fell to my side on the bed; the chains rattling behind me as they rubbed up against the metal frame. I had hoped it was wood but while Kerres had been sleeping last night I tongued it, and nope, fucking metal.
I swallowed the growl and tried to force the hood over my eyes. If only I could just see him… if I could see him I just know the rage would trigger the empath death stare, or whatever the fuck Silas called it.
“What the fuck do you want from me then?” I shouted. Once again, Kerres was crushing my every last nerve. There was only so much I could take, and this crazy whackjob had already brought me to t
he end of my rope, and was now stepping on the fingers that clutched to the shredded fibers. “Tell me what you want? Do you even know what you want?”
The room settled around us until all I could hear was his heartbeat, and the stale aromatic smell of unwashed clothes and drying blood. I knew he didn’t know, and I didn’t know either. Kerres had been clinging to the rotting remains of our relationship like those chimps on nature shows who carried their dried-out babies around after they died.
“Ker.” I hoped his silence meant vulnerability, but I wasn’t sure. I held out my arms as if welcoming him into them. “What if I got you help?”
There was no shifting towards me, but I did hear a jump in his pulse. “Gage says he can’t help me. It’s physical alterations to my brain, whereas yours was… different, I guess.”
So… he was admitting something was wrong with him? I wasn’t sure if that was new; I just didn’t know shit about what was going on in his head. He was a jar of shaken liquid right now, too cloudy and full of bubbles and whirlpools for me to see anything.
“Yeah, but… we have real smart doctors. Sid, one of the chimeras, he can do some really neat shit. He was genetically engineered to be a doctor, I think,” I said slowly. I knew I was once again treading on dangerous ground. “Look, K. There is no end game to this… end game is you killing me through suffocation, or something like that. But if you just fucking unchain me… I can help you.”
“Yeah, and then what? I get to be a fugitive in Moros being lorded over by you mutant pieces of shit, while you get to continue being Elish’s little sex doll? Fuck you, Jade.”
And like he’d stepped onto the pressure plate of a landmine, I exploded.
“THEN WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU WANT!” I screamed.
I felt like crying. I was so fucking frustrated, and my heart was physically hurting for my master. I couldn’t let him believe I was dead. I knew his dignity would never allow him to show that it had affected him, but he loved me and I knew he’d be sad.