Severing Sanguine: A Companion Book to The Fallocaust Series Book 2 (32 page)

As that thought crossed my mind, I realized he was.

I stood there and looked at Barry’s dirty, matted head and didn’t say anything back. There was nothing really I could say so I stood there until he made the first move.

And that first move was him turning around, making predictable slow movements.

He opened the bedroom door and walked into the dark, dimly lit living room. Slowly I followed him, ignoring the temptation to turn around and duck back under the bed.

I walked into the decorated living room, with the clean fabric furniture and the stained wood desks, coffee tables, and other furniture I didn’t know the name of. I looked around it to make sure no one was hiding in a corner or behind the curtains and, to appease my paranoia, I listened as well.

But it seemed like it really was just King Silas and me. So I walked into the area of the living room where the couches were. There were two of them, and a wingchair, surrounding a large television set.

I stood there. I looked longingly at all the bookshelves that he had and mentally picked out several I wanted to investigate when I had the chance.

“Sit down, lovely,” Silas said. I saw him walking towards the kitchen out of the corner of my eye so I decided to follow him with my gaze. I disliked turning my back on people. “Make yourself comfortable.”

Comfortable? I looked down at the couch I was nearest. Dark brown with what looked like a soft texture. There were no stains, it was pure and without a single blemish. It was new, or at least refurbished.

I wondered if this couch had ever been abandoned in a house alone. I wonder if it ever felt sad like the other couches in the greywastes when the roof started to leak onto it, or the radrats started to come. Knowing there was nothing they could do to escape the fates that time would eventually bestow on them. They were frozen where their masters had left them, forgotten and cold and at the mercy of time.

And when time was your only god, there were no happy endings.

But not this couch… this one had been lucky.

“I don’t want to,” I said slowly as Silas poured some hot water into two mugs.

Silas glanced over to me with a puzzled look. “Why? You may stand but you don’t have much strength to you. Your heart is weak, I can hear it.”

“I’m dirty… it’s clean. I don’t want to contaminate it,” I replied honestly. “It would make it unhappy.”

The king smiled faintly and started walking towards me with two cups of tea. They smelled neat and I found myself anticipating what it would taste like. The coffee had tasted wonderful but it made my hands shake.

“Love, the couch doesn’t have feel-” He paused and I saw him glance at Barry. Then to my confusion he didn’t finish that sentence, only started saying something else. “Well, would you like to have a long bath later? I have a tub that five people can fit into in my personal bathroom.”

A bath? I took the tea from Silas but he didn’t sit down, instead he walked down the hall and I heard one of the closets open. He came back a moment later with a red fuzzy blanket with swirling gold patterns. He threw it over the couch and gave me a smile before motioning for me to sit.

I suppose a blanket could be washed. My sad blankets were still in the basement forgotten. I wonder if they had ever seen daylight.

I sat down on the couch. It was just as comfortable as it looked. I settled in with my tea and drew my knees up to my chest. “I haven’t had a bath since… since I was eight,” I said. “How old am I now? Nan says my birthday is in the spring.”

“You’re going to be twenty in March,” Silas said. He grabbed a box of something before he sat down on the couch beside me. He then opened the box and handed it to me. To my happiness the inside were filled with cookies. A blue and white Dek’ko package with black cookies with white in the middle. I tested one out on my teeth before diving in.

Silas made a noise and I looked at him.

“Slowly, love.”

I looked over at Crow who was checking out the paintings on the walls. He could tell I was watching him though, he immediately looked over.

“Slow eating…” Crow said with a nod. “You don’t want to throw up, mihi.”

I nodded and took out two cookies before closing the box to keep them fresh. Silas nodded at this, looking content and grabbed a cookie for himself. I wanted them all for myself. I wanted to hide them in my closet or perhaps the space behind the dresser. My instincts practically screamed for it, but I pushed my own will ahead of my survival instincts and only started eating the two cookies I already had.

“Now, I know we’re at the beginning of your recovery and I want to tell you what I would like to have happen,” Silas said.

This piqued my interest. Though in the greywastes we never really planned our futures; we weren’t sure we would even have one. I didn’t know what was going to happen to me or what their plans were for me in the first place.

I had been a greywaster boy and all I knew how to do was survive. I think it might take me awhile before I learned how to do anything else.

Silas took a sip of tea and so did I. It burned my mouth but I enjoyed the pain.

“As I said before… no one knows you’re here except for my first generation of chimeras and Ceph. You’ve met Elish, Nero, and Ellis and the man you’re going to meet soon is named Garrett. You have eight other brothers around your age: Jack who is like you, Valen, Rio, Ludo, Felix, Ceph who you’ve briefly met, and the twins Apollo and Artemis. All of them, except Ceph, attend my college my first born runs: the College of Skytech, and avoiding them will be rather easy. I don’t want them to know you’re here until you’ve had some time to heal. I feel it would be too much for you.”

I nodded at this, overwhelmed by the information but still receptive to it. “I don’t want a lot of people around.”

Silas held his tea mug in his hands. “I understand. You’ve been alone for most of your life, haven’t you?”

That question made my shoulders slump. I looked down at the cookie, with jagged little bite marks and said quietly, “Even when I was with Nan, I was alone. The other kids didn’t like me, just Nana. When I was exiled… I was all alone.” I looked over at Crow. I almost smiled as he picked up a purple flower that was resting in a ceramic vase and smelled it. “Until Barry came, and when Barry died… Crow came. For a long time… it was just me and him.”

“Perhaps… since you’re with your family… you won’t have a need for Crow,” Silas said lightly.

My eyes shot back to King Silas, I narrowed them. “Crow is my best friend. I won’t abandon him just because you finally decided to come find me. Crow was there for me when Jasper left me to starve.” My voice started to rise. “Crow was there for–”

“
Shhh-shh
.” Silas made a soothing noise. “I’m sorry. I understand… Crow was your only friend when you were locked away. It’s insulting for me to insinuate that you could so easily toss him aside when he has been the only constant thing in your life. I understand, Sanguine. I apologize. Okay?”

I tried to hide the surprise on my face. I fully expected an argument to start, or for him to transform into this cruel king I had thought he was deep down. There was nothing inside of my mind that had expected him to not only understand but to apologize. He wasn’t what I was expecting… almost the opposite.

“I… accept your apology,” I said, pulling up the old manners I had learned long ago in Sunshine House. I hadn’t had to use manners in longer than I could remember.

Silas seemed happy with this. He grabbed another cookie from the bag and took a bite out of it. “You’ll be living with me and my sengil Kinny. I do have our family coming by to visit, plus we get together at least once a week for dinner, and once a month for a party; birthday parties or some excuse for a celebration,” Silas explained. “During this time, I am to assume you have no problem being in your bedroom or the entertainment room?”

I nodded. “I like that.”

“You’ll also, I hope, be open to doctor’s visits. You’re extremely malnourished and your body requires more than an average arian since you have genetic enhancements. Other than that, I just want you to… figure out what it is you want,” Silas said.

Figure out what I want? I swallowed this down and answered dryly, “Figure out what I want is in the same league as asking me what my future plans are. Why can’t you understand… I never thought I had a future. There was no… dreams, no desires… I’m a walking corpse. I have nothing, I am a shell. He stole…”

I paused.

He stole all of that from me.

“He?” Silas dropped his tone. “Jasper?”

I visibly recoiled and felt the veins nestled under my skin contract. My muscles froze and I the breath got sucked from my throat making me visibly gag.

“He’s going to ask you about Jasper,” Crow said behind me. I heard the clicking of his high heel boots as he walked over from the paintings he was examining. “He’ll force you to tell him that Jasper was fucking you down there the entire time. You realize that don’t you? They all are so eager to know just who Jasper was.”

I glanced over my shoulder before tucking my knees up tighter to my chest. “I mentioned it first. He’s only… wondering what I was speaking of.”

Crow walked in front of the couch and leaned against the back of it. He had the flower in his hand which he brought up to his nose.

Then he gave me a closed mouth smile, one that made his eyes squint. “And if you tell him you don’t want to speak about Jasper. What then? Do you believe he will stop?”

“Yes,” I replied. I looked over at Silas who was watching me with a confused look on his face. Jasper looked at me the same way when I talked to Crow in front of him, though I knew it was because only I could see my friend.

When Silas saw me looking back at him he smiled, though there was no lightness in his eyes. “We don’t need to speak about him. Why don’t we continue to make plans? Give you a reason to be excited about your future.”

Crow made a disgruntled noise. He walked behind me, the flower still in his hand, looking cross. Silas had just proven Crow wrong and I knew my friend didn’t like this. I wasn’t sure if he disliked Silas or not. Sometimes Crow liked people – sometimes he didn’t.

I took another drink of tea and wondered what I could say to Silas so he would leave me alone with his penchant for wanting me to have a future. Right now the thought of doing things filled me with apprehension. I wanted to go back to my bedroom or even the basement. If Jasper wasn’t there anymore I could stay there alone with my crows.

My crows.
I frowned as I thought about them. I would miss them but at least they didn’t have Jasper to yell at them anymore.

“We found a lot of books in your old house and in that basement,” Silas said. “So you know how to read and your vocabulary is impeccable. Would you like to attend school?”

I shook my head vigorously, so vigorously Silas chuckled.

“How about school at home? Elish is the Dean of the college, Garrett and your brother Perish also teach. Why don’t we get them to make you some work books? You can learn about Science, English, Math from your bedroom, and I can grade them or one of the others. Just warning you though, love, you’re going to be awful at math but no worries. Unless I specifically engineer them to be able to do it, all of us are horrid at it.”

“School?” I said slowly and nodded. “I would like that.”

This thrilled him. “I’ll make the calls tonight then.”

I stared down at my tea and took another drink of it. I liked mint. I had once been scavenging in an old gas station and I had come across mint gum. It was dry and it sucked all of the saliva out of my mouth but I remember loving the minty flavour.

“If there is anything I can do to make you more comfortable,” Silas said. “We will make your recovery–”

Terror ripped through me as there was a sudden loud noise coming from the double doors that led to the hallway. I looked over in fear at the loud knocking and in an instant my brain clicked back to survival-mode.

With Silas rapidly trying to calm me I jumped to my feet, my tea spilling onto the floor. Another loud bang soon sounded, followed by a man’s happy voice. I jumped over the couch and ran as quickly as I could back to my bedroom. Without stopping I slid under my bed, a deep growl vibrating against my adam’s apple.

“Garrett!” I heard Silas roar. He sounded angry at the man but my mind was too high-strung and in a panic to think much of it. I backed to the far end of the bed and watched the bedroom door with fixed eyes.

The growl only intensified when the door opened and I saw a pair of polished leather shoes step into the bedroom.

“Oh, I just want to see what he looks like!” the man I knew was Garrett said. “I won’t be long.”

Then there was a pause and everything went quiet around me.

“Oh my god… Silas you’re right… he growls – oh my god, that is fucking precious!” The noisy man got down on his knees and poked his head underneath the bed.

He was a man with spiky black hair, three earrings in each ear and a trimmed goatee. This one had normal green eyes, not some of the odd colours I had seen and been told about.

“Wow… okay, I can see what you mean. I won’t fuck with that. He looks like he’s going to rip my bloody face off. Hello, Sanguine! I got you a present, would you like to see?”