Fallocaust (The Fallocaust Series Book 1)

by Quil Carter

  “Reaver, go.”

  “Tomorrow at noon, bona mea, do not keep your master waiting.”

  “Asher! No! You… Silas you can’t!” Killian screamed.

  Jade heard the callous, undaunted cackle of Silas beside him. “I can, cicaro. I can. You will soon see just what I can do.”

  Reaver’s seemed to be fighting to restrain himself. He held Killian firmly and turned his back on the terrible scene before him.

  “Put him into the Falconer,” Silas said. There was a crunching of dirt against pavement as he walked close to Jade. “Dead is he? Pity, he was starting to grow on me. And after all that trouble you caused to keep him.”

  “The bullet hit his upper arm, he’s just stunned,” Elish said. There was just a hint of something caustic on his tongue. Jade felt himself get carried back to the plane.

  On the ride home even Tim was quiet, or perhaps the cotton stuffed in Jade’s brain had succeeded in blocking out even the most annoying of voices. Even when Siris dug the bullet out with his fingers he barely even flinched.

  The next thing he knew, Luca was helping him sit on the bed. He quickly stitched 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. He always wore a headband adorned with cat ears and had been born and raised into servitude. Luca didn’t often speak, but not by choice. It was the nature of a sengil.

  Sengils were pretty, obedient, and loyal. Luca was Jade’s maidservant, though that term 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 appeared on his face. He reminded Jade of Elish in that way, though Elish’s unmoving face radiated ice and authority, while Luca’s showed only 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 by having a servant around. Now they had become friends and Jade didn’t mind Luca doing his duty and serving him. It hadn’t taken that long to become used to someone waiting on him hand and foot.

  Jade winced as Luca pulled the silver thread; in response the next jab was more gentle. 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 Elish picked up the towel and wiped the edge of Jade’s lips. He usually only received such gentle caresses in their bedroom. Jade didn’t complain or raise issue. Any touch by Elish, especially in private, was welcomed with a shiver of anticipation. Elish had been so cold and closed off since Silas had 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, running his hands along Jade’s neck. Jade flinched as a raw pain boiled under Elish’s 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.

  “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 the silvery strands in his aura again.”

  Elish thought about this for a moment and Jade saw the smirk turn into a smile. “It has turned out rather well.”

  Jade winced as Elish 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, 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, 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 Jade’s chest as Elish left their bedroom, tugging at his heart as if 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 lying 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. Jade 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, trying to muffle his own crying. I could see Perish looking at us from the couch, the cat jumping off 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 bloodstained 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. It was underneath my fingernails and had 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 beforehand, 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 as they gripped it. I still hadn’t moved. Killian’s wails and Perish’s rapid consoling buzzed the corners of my mind, 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 anything 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 me to such a primal expression of anger. But what else could I do to release the boiling frustration inside? How else could I mourn the life I once knew? Dr
ipping 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 in the end, my tempered mind 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 conversations 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 subjected to different levels of interference, depending on what they were being created for. Some were destined to be scientists, others military geniuses, some even slaves to serve their masters.

  I hadn’t asked what I had been born to be. Though from what 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 laid his hand on top of my own. “I have some drugs waiting.”

  Killian’s hand was so soft, his fingers delicate, so different to my gnarled blood-soaked talons.

  “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 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 months, hun.”

  The buzzing in my mind stopped, like a beehive had been submerged in water. I stared at him, wondering how many more secrets he had.

  Killian’s 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 soothe.

  “Please believe that I would have told you right away,” he pleaded. He must have heard my thoughts. “But Leo found out that I knew about him being Lycos. He said that if I told you, 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 gazes 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 walked 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 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 escaped from his mouth.

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

  “Did you recognize 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, an unoiled 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 it for testing in case you had hereditary diseases or impurities. I only wanted to use your make-up 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. I reached my hand down, in a forgiving gesture. Perish 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 Garrett 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.

  “We might have sent you to Moros perhaps,” Perish said slowly. “Or Eros, but never the greywastes. We never had the chance to plan since we all thought… we would never successfully create someone like you.”

  “And now that I see you were raised in this place, I wonder what your environment has made you become, and what is… and what is your engineering.”

  That was the million dollar question Greyson and Leo had been asking themselves since they brought me here. The realization shook me, but I didn’t let my gaze waver from him.

  Perish held out his palm too and put it beside me. I realized then… we had identical hands, right down to the lines on our palms.

  “You love though, you love Killian. What a curious development. I can see why my master would be fascinated with your emergence.”

  This conversation and on a greater level, his touch, was making me uncomfortable. Killian must have sensed it.

  “Lycos just disappeared?” Killian asked. Perish shook his head. He withdrew his hands and clasped them behind his back. “Silas incinerated the lab with Lycos inside, without warning. Lycos knew things none of us did. Because of his research trying to create a perfect… you. Silas decided he had to die.”

  “Why?”

  “Punishment for failing, discretion for knowing Silas’s secrets.”

  “Wh
at secrets?” I said warily.

  “They died with Lycos… or I thought they had. I only helped sometimes, once the embryos were planted.”

  I saw Killian’s hands hold both of ours in place so he could examine them. He let out a breath of disbelief.

  “How did Leo and Greyson escape with Reaver?”

  Perish sat down beside Killian and I sat on his other side. Immediately I felt a tautness around my upper arm as he prepared me for my newest drug addiction.

  “I am not sure. Silas summoned me to Skyfall while Reaver and the other babies were just small like baby kittens and next I heard Silas had incinerated the lab. We were not allowed to talk about it after. Master Silas was so mad, very mad, especially at me.”

  “Why you?” I felt the needle move inside my arm; I was starting to like that feeling. I looked down and frowned. “That’s not heroin.”

  “It’s your oxy prepared a different way. It won’t zone us out like the heroin does.”

  I shrugged and tipped my head back as I felt the bitter sensation sweep through me; it wasn’t the sting of tar but it was a sensation I was familiar with. I got comfortable on the couch and started cleaning my guns. I would need them soon.

  “Because I…” Perish’s mouth was wide open ready to say the next thing, but I suppose the light bulb gave a flicker because he clamped it shut. “I’m sorry, I can’t say.”

  I didn’t mind that. I was tired of him talking. My mind was racing, but the oxy was slowly catching up, creeping its essence into the coils constricted around my brain, slowly unwrapping them tentacle by tentacle. Perhaps soon I would be able to think clearly and put some sense to this.

  It was a few hours of cleaning and packing everything we needed for a quick escape before I started hitching my M16. With the silence and calm of everyone being stoned, I was able to form in my head a few safety nets for tomorrow’s exchange. I knew Asher was a game master and I knew he was a taunter as well. Either way I wouldn’t underestimate him. I wanted some backup in case the exchange went awry.