Fallocaust (The Fallocaust Series) (124 page)

The next thing he knew Luca was helping him sit on the bed. He quickly stitching the small hole in Jade’s arm.

Luca wasn’t a chimera like the rest of the family, nor was he a pet like Jade. He was a tall, lanky boy with feathery gold hair and a pair of costume cat ears that rested on his head with a head band (Jade had asked many times why he wore them but had never received a real answer) he had been born and raised into servitude. Luca didn’t often speak, but not by choice, it was the nature of a sengil. They were pretty, rarely talked unless spoken to and was in all respects the only man who didn’t out rank Jade. He was Jade’s maidservant, though being called that outright always made the corner of Jade’s mouth turn.

Though Jade never hid his feelings, both physically and on the inside. Luca showing emotion was a rarity, Luca was quiet and obedient, whatever emotions he still felt usually never defied his features. He reminded Jade of Elish in that way, though Elish’s unmoving face radiated ice and authority, Luca’s was servitude and obedience a personification of the old adage
‘better seen not heard’.

Jade didn’t mind Luca now, though in the beginnings of his forced slavery he hadn’t been impressed having a servant around. Now though they had become friends and Jade didn’t mind him doing his duty and serving him, it hadn’t taken that long to become used to someone waiting on you hand and foot.

Jade winced as Luca pulled the silver thread, in response the next jab was gentler. It was those small acts that showed Jade that Luca didn’t mind him now either.

“Leave us.” He heard Elish say in the doorway.

In a move that shocked even Jade, once Luca left he saw Elish’s soft hands pick up the towel and wipe the edge of his lips. It was only in their bedroom he would get such a gentle caress. Jade didn’t complain or raise issue. Any touch by Elish, especially in their privacy was welcome with a shiver of anticipation. Elish had been so cold and closed off since Silas learned that Reaver was alive, Jade had gotten used to him being short tempered and cruel.

“Everyone will think I gave these to you,” Elish murmured, his hands ran along Jade’s neck. He flinched as a raw pain boiled under his touch. Elish continued to stroke the broken skin. “They will scar, but you have earned their removal once we arrive back home.”

“For what? Letting Lycos’s feral chimera hold me hostage?” Jade grumbled under his breath. “I knew Silas was putting me in there to hurt me.”

“For
surviving
the feral chimera holding you hostage.” Elish brought his blood tipped fingers up to Jade’s face, he wiped his lips with them. “And I will say. Silas was smart to bring you.”
“Why?” Jade asked, his brow knitted together. Elish had seemed in silent defiance over Silas’s decision to bring him.

“Because he needed someone for Reaver’s partner to shoot at.” Elish’s mouth curled in a slight smirk. “Our king knew something would go wrong. Killian would snap, or Reaver would. Silas needed an easy target for them to go after first. If not you, it would have been me.”

“He’s darkness just like Silas.” Jade tilted his head as Elish washed his neck gently. “But you were right, Killian is good for him. I saw silvery strands in it this time.”
Elish thought of this for a moment and Jade saw the smirk turn into a smile. “It has turned out rather well.”

Jade winced as he ran the rough towel over the chain burns. “It looks like everything is coming to a head, though not how we originally planned.”

Elish’s mouth pursed and formed a thin line, Jade cowered a bit wondering if he had gone too far. Sure enough Elish pulled his hand away from his neck and rose.

“We can still... he’s ready now, master. It will be fine, you did well. King Fuckface has no idea-”

“Do not forget yourself, cicaro, not in this house, not with him near.” Elish’s voice turned from a silk touch to steel. “I will have no need for you tonight, you may sleep.”

There was a pull inside his chest as Elish left their bedroom, it tugged at his heart like there was an invisible thread between them. Pulling him closer to his master even as he was leaving him to sleep alone.

As the door closed he sat in darkness, before laying down on the bed, his neck still a burning ache. In the silence he could hear Reaver’s low, hostile tones, and the boy’s desperate cries.

He wished for his master’s touch, and his security, but Elish was different, when he was angry he closed himself off even more than normal and shut Jade out. He wished he would talk to him like he used to, but the absence of Elish in his bed told Jade that would not happen.

Perhaps it wasn’t going as well as Jade had tried to convince himself.

Chapter 52

Reaver

My boots hit the ground, Killian was already in the basement he was still trying to muffle his own crying. I could see Perish looking at us from the couch, the cat jumping off of his lap as the silent basement was filled with activity.

When I closed the tank hatch I didn’t know what to do with myself. I found myself just staring at the painted grey wheel, my blood stained hands still holding onto it.

I was a chimera.

I was one of
them
.

They had been hiding my origins from me my whole life. Telling me I was an orphan, my parents dying only a day after arriving at Aras.

It’s harder for you to be a good person, to make good decisions.

Reaver you’re different.

In some places the blood was still red, contrasting against skin still goose fleshed from the night air outside. Other places it had already dried in brown streaks. Underneath my fingernails and seeped into the pores of my skin. Where this blood had come from wasn’t important, I had several wounds from my brief tangle with-

-with my fellow chimeras, my blood.

My throat seemed to be filled with little needles, I tried to swallow but they prickled and stuck me every time I tried.

Greyson had been a part of it... Leo couldn’t have just shown up with a newborn, explained away the time bomb he cradled to his chest and gotten a free bunker to raise him in and a new husband. Greyson had known Leo before hand, they had planned to... to steal me.

They stole me from Asher... from Silas. In all respects Silas was my creator.

My hand was holding the wheel, my knuckles white in its grip. I still hadn’t moved. Killian’s wails and Perish’s rapid consoling buzzed the corners of my ears. A sound I had heard many times through the audio of the surveillance room. These muffled voices sounded like white noise though, my mind was too much of a blizzard to comprehend nothing more than the brief feeling of recall.

As much as I tried, with every shred of mental will I had carved from that grey mass behind my eyes, I couldn’t expunge the gnashing teeth of reality picking apart the world I had lived in for almost twenty years.

Everything I knew had been a lie. I choked back the frustrated scream on my lips, hating my own mind for reducing myself to such a primal expression of anger. But what else could I do to release the boiled frustration inside of me? How else could I mourn the life I once knew. Dripping to the abyss like water through my fingers, I watched it die as Greyson mouthed those words.

You were born in Leo’s lab. You’re one of Silas’s chimeras.

But my tempered mind in the end, didn’t allow me such a brash expression of pain. All I could do was stand with my hand on the tank hatch’s wheel and stare. My inner torment masked in a stoic expression that didn’t waver.

A chimera.

What did that mean? Before I had learned that Perish was one. It was just a word on the lips of merchants, travellers, refugees from Skyfall. It was used usually after
‘that fucking’
in conversation complaining about Elish’s policies or Kessler’s Legion. They were genetically enhanced people bred to Silas’s perfection.

Genetically enhanced with Silas’s own DNA.

Greyson had corrected me on that. They weren’t a clump of cells randomly taken from some empty canvas of a man and woman and stuck into a tube. The chimeras had been genetically engineered from Silas’s own juice. They had all been with different levels of interference, for whatever they were being created for. Some scientists, others military geniuses, some even as slaves to serve their masters.

I hadn’t asked what I had been born to be. From who I was now? Probably the antichrist.

“Love?” His soft voice brought me back, my head immediately tilted towards him though the rest of my body stayed still.

His hand laid on top of my own. “I have some drugs waiting.”

Killian’s hand was so soft, his fingers delicate, such a divergence to the gnarled blood soaked talons I saw my own as.

“It’s too dangerous for me to be your boyfriend now.” My voice was dead. I stared at those perfect, slight fingers. He had once been from a world so far away, now he was the boy next door. “But I know your feelings towards me have probably changed.”

I expected tears, and I expected a lot of them. Instead I heard a sharp intake of breath and silence. I looked at him, feeling the first crack go through my heart. My mind had once again stooped to levels I had deemed primitive. I realized I hadn’t said that to Killian because I meant it, I had said it because I needed reassurance that he was still my lantern in the darkness.

“I’ve known for over a month, hun.”

The buzzing in my mind stopped, like the beehive had been submerged in water. His sapphire eyes, stared back at me unblinking. He squeezed my hand, and pursed his lips. I felt his hand rubbing mine now. Even during trying times his first instinct was always to touch and sooth. 

“After I found your baby things, I snooped further and found his lab coat and a baby photo of you, only a few months old, with Leo in disguise,” he explained, “the lab coat said Lycos, the onesis were burnt like you had been caught in a fire.”

I stared at him, wondering how many more secrets he had.

“Please believe that I would have told you right away.” Killian’s voice turned to pleading, he must’ve hear my thoughts. “But Leo found out that I knew. He told me that if you knew, you wouldn’t stop until you knew everything and it would kill you. He said he had just gotten Greyson to leave you to run your own life, that I had to leave it be. You were safe and that was all that mattered. I was a liability now and if I breathed a word of it to you, he would kill me. Leo put a gun to my head.”

I stared back at him, my tongue frozen and dead in my mouth. I was so taken aback with what Killian was saying I found myself rendered speechless.

“I decided to keep you safe, and do what I believed was right. I... I don’t regret anything but having to lie by omission. I didn’t think it would do you any good to know and... and he made it clear if any breath of your existence got to Skyfall, Silas would come for you.”

“He did come for me.” My voice didn’t sound like my own. “Asher came for me.”

But how did he know?

At the same time, our gaze both turned to the scientist on the couch.

Perish was coiled into the position of a child awaiting a beating. His light blue eyes stared at the both of us in anticipation for what he knew was coming.

“Did you know who I was, Perish?” I asked.

He shook his head back and forth so hard it looked like he was trying to shake away fleas. “Not until Lycos told me.”

“Did you help Ash... Silas hide in the prison cells?”
“I was already dead.”

I started to lose my patience, I broke my hand away from the wheel and started quickly walking towards him.

Perish’s eyes widened and he shifted to the side of the couch, trying to get away from me. As I got closer he gave up being on the couch and instead let his body rise over the arm of the couch and drop, successfully wedging himself in-between the couch and the wall. Small pitiful whimpers escaping from his mouth as he did.

As he looked around fearfully and crossed his arms over his chest in anticipation of his eventual punishment. I felt something I never thought I would feel in this flurry of emotion.

My tensed chest relaxed under the trickle of pity. I knelt down in front of him.

“Did you recognise me?”

Perish scrunched back as far as he could, he shook his head again. “But I caused this.”

“How?” I felt Killian’s heart behind me, a un-oiled machine revving with every word I spoke to Perish. Waiting for my patience to wear thin with this mentally unstable chimera.

“I liked you... I wanted to use your DNA in my experiments. Nero took my research when he came,” Perish said faintly, he flinched and twitched waiting for me to start beating on him. “The research had your blood sample, I sent for testing. In case you had hereditary diseases or impurities. I only wanted to use your makeup as a base for my whipwolves, I didn’t know you were my brother. I really didn’t.”

My brother.

I heard Killian swallow those words with me. Both of us taken off step by hearing the scientist say them out loud.

I reached my hand down, in a forgiving gesture, towards where Perish was hiding. He took it with shaking clammy hands and I helped him to his feet.

“You didn’t know.” And I believed him too. Though his heart was already racing; if he was lying I couldn’t tell, but I knew he wasn’t. “It’s okay... we’ll... we’ll think of something.”

Perish looked at me with shocked eyes, he didn’t let go of my hand. In fact he looked down and stared at it as if he had never seen it before.

“People evolve according to their environments.” Perish squeezed my hand with both of his. To my confusion he opened my hand up until it was resting palm up on his.

With his right hand he traced the lines of my palm, his light touch brushing each crease. “This is what we did with our newborns. Some of them, we raised underfoot, like Garret and Elish, others we sent to Moros like Jade, and the twins. Some we sent to Nyx, and rarer still... we gave Caligula and Tim to Kessler and his husband.”

Perish’s eyes fell on mine. They didn’t twitch off into different directions, or lower under my gaze. They fixed on me, like ice blue water trying to mix with black oil.