Silent Ground Part 2

by Quil Carter

  The spotted leopard cat looked up at Sasha, his dark brown eyes inquisitive, then continued sniffing Kheva’s face. Sasha thought this was sweet, until Jye began licking Kheva’s lips and he realized the damn cat was most likely looking for stray bits of blood.

  Well, a cat will be a cat, especially a giant cat that probably still had grandparents in Africa.

  Kheva seemed stable, so Sasha decided to distract himself with chores. Since he now had all of their chores to do, it took him hours to finish them off. The cat’s food had to be hidden, all the flowers and the gardens had to be watered, there was a pile of unstacked wood that had to be stacked, the house tidied and many other small projects. Sasha eventually ate lunch by himself, and when evening came and Kheva was still lying on the couch, he decided to heat up some leftover chicken soup to attempt to feed Kheva.

  For the past several hours, Kheva had been sleeping, or at least his eyes had been closed. When the soup was ready and cooled down, he kneeled in front of Kheva and gently shook his shoulder. “Kheva?” Sasha whispered. “You need to eat something. Blood isn’t food, unless you’ve been lying to me and we really are vampires.” He shook Kheva’s shoulder again and this time his glazed over eyes slowly opened.

  “There you go,” he said quietly. “I have soup. You gotta eat something, even scary Master Nightcrawlers need to keep their strength up.”

  Kheva’s eyes didn’t move, not even a twitch, there was nothing.

  Then Sasha got an idea. He put the bowl down on the coffee table and sat down in Kheva’s chair, he leaned back and closed his eyes and ventured to the dark corner of his mind to Silent Ground.

  Sasha drew up the decorated room and watched it contort around him like the air itself was taking on a solid form. The microfiber couches appeared, the marble coffee table, and the warm fireplace, the walls morphed and twisted until framed pictures could be seen, and even the black serval was sitting on the table, squinting his blue eyes.

  Sasha looked around and found Kheva’s faded beacon, one that emanated just how sick his Master really was. It was no longer the bright and intimidating orb of light, one that could lighten even the darkest of minds, it was weak and pathetic, slouched over and miserable.

  “Poor guy,” Sasha mumbled. He drew himself towards it, and almost timidly, he left his own Silent Ground and carefully stepped into Kheva’s.

  Sasha’s warm and comforting room disappeared as quickly as it was drawn up, and immediately Sasha felt the difference in Kheva’s own inner mind. The illness that had taken hold of his master was apparent, just by the intangible sense of the room, but when Kheva’s Silent Ground began to take form, there was no denying that the nightcrawler was incredibly sick.

  The cliff overlooking the rolling hills of black trees with red leaves was now a gnarled forest of towering trees with twisted thorny limbs. The roots of these trees erupted and sunk into the ground like a slithering serpent, the bark itself shining black like it was coated in some sort of slime.

  Sasha jumped when he suddenly heard a dog bark. He turned and recoiled with a shuddered gasp when he saw what was running towards him.

  It was the white dog Sasha had seen inside of Kheva’s mind, but, fuck, the dog’s left eye was popped out of its socket, crusted blood stuck to its nose and there was foam around its mouth. There was mud caked onto its fur, damp mud, and one of its legs was wobbling, making it run wrong, but it showed no pain.

  And… fuck… it was friendly. She was friendly.

  Sasha’s heart clenched and broke. “Hey, Dayna,” he choked. The dog came over, her tail wagging back and forth so hard her entire backside was moving with it. Sasha pet her head, but a happy tongue soon found his hand and began to lap it. Her front left canine was broken, and her tongue looked like it had been bitten. “You should get your master to fix your eye, poor lady.”

  The dog began making some odd happy yelping nose, ecstatic at the attention she was getting. Sasha tried to use his own mental energy to change the dog’s form, make the poor girl healthy-looking again, but this wasn’t his world.

  “Dayna!”

  Sasha’s head rose, and again there was a seize in his chest. He recognized that voice, he could never forget that voice after the things he’d seen.

  The dog looked behind her and ran back into the woods, but she didn’t go far. She stopped in front of a shrouded figure and began to lick a small pale hand.

  “Gabriel?” Sasha said. He looked up and realized he was standing in a patch of light, one of the only breaks in a thick canopy of twisted branches. “Is that you?”

  The silhouette stopped; Sasha could sense hesitation all around him, but then the tension soon vanished. “Sasha?” the boy said back. “I know you. Come on, Dayna.” He ran into the lit-up clearing of the forest, and Sasha saw the little black-haired boy, smiling with the dog trailing behind.

  “Why are you here?” Gabriel asked. He was dressed in dirty blue jeans and a faded red shirt with a white collar, and though he wasn’t in as bad condition as the dog, there were bruises on his face and his lip was cut.

  For a moment, Sasha didn’t know how to answer, until he remembered that he was indeed here for a reason. “Kheva’s sick,” he said. “I don’t really know how to feed him and he’s not responding to me. I don’t really know what to do in general, to be honest, this is all a first for me.”

  Gabriel nodded like he understood. “Bad men are always hurting him,” he said gravely. “He was done with it for a long time, but one man keeps coming back because Kheva just can’t let go of him. He came and made a mess of his head, didn’t he?”

  “Yeah,” Sasha said. “Has this ever happened before? Do you know what to do?” It was then Sasha began to realize that he was most likely talking to Kheva right now, just a different part of him, the only part perhaps that could make itself known.

  Gabriel nodded a second time. “He can look after himself,” he explained. “When this happened and he was all alone, Kheva was able to feed himself and go to the bathroom and sleep and drink. Just leave it out for him, that might make it easier. And he’s not awake, so don’t bug him. But you give him lots of fluid, and don’t let Kel near him!”

  Sasha paused. “And Kel… do you know where he is?”

  The boy nodded again. “He’s just out of Kel’s range. Kheva can go miles and miles but Kel never could. Kheva never taught him how for that reason.” His arm rose and he wagged his finger as near to Sasha’s face as he could get. “Don’t let Kel near him! Don’t let Kel near him, mister.”

  Sasha was going to tell him that he wouldn’t, when he felt himself begin to be pulled backwards, out of Kheva’s mind. “Thank you for – for helping me,” Sasha said, his head turning in all directions as the dark and twisted world began to dissolve right in front of him. “Take care of yourself, Gabriel.”

  “You do too, Sasha,” Gabriel called. “Bye.”

  Sasha’s eyes opened slowly. He saw the living room, and further on, the kitchen come into view. The sunrays on the flat field were now gone, and the sun itself had disappeared behind the trees.

  There was a clinking, Sasha’s head turned. He smiled sadly when he saw Kheva hunched over the bowl of soup, his eyes unfocused, a grey trembling hand spooning it into his mouth.

  CHAPTER 29

  Lex’s house looked like a tornado had come through it. There were empty liquor bottles lined up on the dining room table, take-out styrofoam trays wherever there had been surface area, and garbage and dirty clothing thrown around with no rhyme or reason.

  Not even Jobe had the will to clean up, that will had been sucked out of him the moment he’d seen Lariat get hit in the middle of that highway.

  Where hope had once dwelled, lighting up dark places inside of Jobe’s worried heart, there was now nothing but despair and darkness. Two emotions that life had been force-feeding.

  Jobe looked down at the map of Courtenay’s forested area, but he might as well be looking at hieroglyphs. The surrounding area had
miles upon miles of woods, with logging roads weaved in between.

  None of these roads were on the map, and new ones came every year, and old ones were left to become overgrown. The logging industry on Vancouver Island was strong, and mixed in with the logged areas were Crown land, land belonging to the government, and some privately owned.

  But where were these privately-owned parcels of land? No one knew. Jobe even requested access to property records but none of the names were of any value, and finding their locations seemed like finding a needle in a haystack.

  It was all up to them now, Lariat was dead. The kind, nervous guy who’d extended a friendly hand to Jobe and Lex to try and find Sasha, had been killed by the very man who had kidnapped their most loved.

  First Kheva had taken Rob, and now the monster that Nate called a nightcrawler, had taken Sasha too.

  Jobe glanced over at the television, it was now turned off. He’d grabbed the remote the moment he’d seen it on the news.

  ‘One Dead, Three Injured in Horrific Accident.’

  “Anything, Jobe?”

  Jobe glanced over at Nate, the young man’s eyes swollen and red. Lariat’s funeral had been yesterday, and though Nate had been trying to put on a strong front, Jobe knew when he was alone, he cried.

  Jobe could hear him at night. He was sleeping in the room across the hall now. Jobe and Lex had both asked him if he wanted to stay in their house for the time being. It seemed bordering on cruel to leave him alone with those roommates he disliked, and they were all looking for the same house anyway.

  And the same people.

  Whether they liked it or not, the three of them had started down a road that they had to see the end to, a road that Nate had started years before. What was at the end of this dark path, covered in fog with visibility low, Jobe had no idea, but at least –– at least he wasn’t alone.

  “Nothing yet,” Jobe said quietly. His eyes traced the seemingly nonsensical lines on the map, showing the rises in elevation and the number that meant little to him. What the point of this map was, Jobe no longer knew, perhaps he was hoping to see something that would tell him there was a house hidden in these acres and acres of forest. “I wish…” He let out a dry, languishing laugh. “I wish I was a nightcrawler, you know? They can fucking find each other like that,” Jobe snapped his fingers, “can’t they?”

  I could’ve also stopped Lariat…

  Nate nodded. “Rob said that they could see the world differently if they accessed an area of their mind,” he explained as he approached Jobe. There was a tissue crushed in his left hand, one wet with tears. “And in that world, nightcrawlers glowed amongst us dimmer lights. That’s how Kheva found Rob, and how Kheva found Sasha. Apparently, he has amazing range, Rob told me Kheva said he was the most powerful nightcrawler out there.”

  “And the other nightcrawler you said you knew…” Jobe let that trail. He’d already asked him this morning if that man had contacted him back, and Nate had already said he’d be the first to know.

  And sure enough, Nate shook his head. “Nothing yet, but he doesn’t have a cell phone on him,” he said. He looked down at the map, his dark eyebrows knitting together as he also tried to make sense of the lines and numbers. “I left a message with some guy who claimed he was his boyfriend.”

  “You gave him Lex’s home number, right?”

  Nate nodded and he sniffed. Jobe looked over to see his eyes welling again.

  Jobe rubbed Nate’s shoulder. He barely knew the kid, but he was nice to be around and had a sweet nature. It had been easy to like the guy, but mostly Jobe just felt a great deal of pity for him.

  Pity and guilt. The guilt he’d been drinking away every single night, holding a secret in his head that he could never tell Lex or Nate.

  That punching Kheva had been the reason Lariat had been killed in the first place.

  During the day, he’d been able to stuff those emotions down, convince himself that Kheva would’ve done it anyway, since he’d had Lariat facing the road, but at night, the demons crept from their hidden hiding places and had great fun using Jobe’s imagination as their playground.

  “We’re close at least, right?” Jobe whispered. “We’ll find Rob and Sasha. I know we will.”

  Nate wiped his nose with the crumpled tissue, then took off his glasses to wipe his eyes. “It’s not just them I’m worried about,” he said, his voice showing faint hairline cracks. “I’m… I’m fucking terrified of Kheva.” He distracted his gaze by looking at the tissue but even his stare was a thousand yards. “I don’t know what the hell came over me, why I tried to grab Kel like that… but that’s the only reminder I needed that Kheva… Jobe, he’s a monster. That’s all there is to it. Kheva’s a monster. He just, he has no fucking soul. He kills whoever he wants, he takes whatever he wants; he knows what he is and he knows the world is his fucking bitch.”

  Jobe’s stomach clenched at this information. It wasn’t like it was anything new, Nate had been saying things like this on and off since they’d come back from that doomed trip to Courtenay, but every time he was reminded of just who he was dealing with, it made him want to throw up.

  If he was a braver man, upon thinking about how this monster had Sasha, he’d fill with fortitude and transform into some sort of superhero. He’d declare that even though this man was scary, it would only mean that he had to get Sasha back at all costs.

  But Jobe was no hero like in the comics. He was a normal man who worked with handicapped people and took care of a kid that he sometimes wondered may be handicapped himself. And the thought of facing Kheva again flooded his body with frozen acid that both chilled and burned him at the same time. A face-to-face with Kheva was an experience that he never wanted to repeat––but it looked like he wasn’t going to have a choice.

  So, all he could do was pretend he didn’t have figurative piss running down his leg.

  “Sasha is one too though,” Jobe said, forcing reassuring tones into a voice that seemed to be pushing it away with both hands. “If Kheva tries to hurt us, Sasha will stop him. Then we can get Kel back to being Rob and he can help too, right?”

  Nate looked unconvinced and Jobe knew why. The fear they both had was that Kheva was going to turn Sasha into something like Kel, someone who wouldn’t recognize his own family.

  His own family…

  Jobe looked up at the top floor of Lex’s house, the frame of Lex’s door barely visible past a railing that bordered a partial mezzanine.

  Sasha’s uncle… hadn’t been doing well.

  Not well at all.

  “I’m going to go check on Lex,” Jobe said, patting Nate’s shoulder. “I wanted to talk about taking the truck around some of those logging roads tomorrow.”

  Nate’s eyes widened, hesitation clinging to each feature. “I don’t know if we should do that,” he said. His eyes flickered back to the map, and his top teeth pressed against his lower lip. “What if we actually do find their house? Jobe, Kheva will fucking kill us… you realize that, right?”

  Jobe’s head couldn’t shake fast enough. “Sasha wouldn’t let that––”

  “He might not be Sasha anymore, Jobe,” Nate said desperately.

  “Don’t say shit like that!” Jobe snapped, making Nate flinch over his harsh tone. “You said it’d take a while, right? It hasn’t been long and––” Jobe’s teeth locked, and he made a frustrated noise. “There has to be something we can fucking do!”

  Nate was quiet. “Even when I waited in that damn parking lot every Friday for Kheva and Kel… I still didn’t know what to do when I eventually found them,” he said, his voice wobbling. “Kheva could literally take one look at me and have me forgetting who the fuck I was for a day, and forgetting what I’d seen for weeks.” He looked up at Jobe. “The only reason I remember seeing them is because Kheva was in too much of a rush to do it properly. For all you know, you could’ve seen Sasha fifteen times and he’s made you forget.”

  “Once Sasha sees us… he’ll
do something,” Jobe stressed. “I’m not going to just fucking wait, Nate. I’m not going to let Sasha remain with that asshole. That’s it, the end.”

  “We can wait for that other nightcrawler…”

  “Who hasn’t called us back,” Jobe snapped.

  Then he sighed when he saw Nate’s head lower, then his shoulders tighten. “I’m sorry,” he whispered. Jobe walked to Nate and put his arms around him. “Come here, give me a hug. I was being an asshole, I’m sorry.”

  Nate let Jobe hug him, and Jobe smiled sadly when the kid put his arms around him too. “You’re being all nice warning me and shit and I’m being a dick about it. I know you’re right. I just feel helpless. He has my friend… my best friend.”

  “I’ve been feeling helpless for years,” Nate sniffed, his body still being held tightly in Jobe’s embrace. “I won’t give up on Rob. I fucking won’t. I love him and I know he loves me, deep down, where Rob still lives, I know he’s waiting for me to rescue him.”

  “He is,” Jobe whispered. “If I was a nightcrawler… I’d just put a damn bullet in the back of his head and make everyone who witnessed it forget. Hey…” Jobe pulled back, “did your family mention if they found that other dude… Gavin?”

  Nate’s body language told Jobe the answer before his mouth even opened. “No,” he whispered. It didn’t look like the guy’s face could hold any more worry, but somehow it managed. “My other brothers are pretty worried, but we’re all trying to convince ourselves that Gavin just took off again. He doesn’t really like to be in one place at the same time and his new boyfriend seems to be missing too.”

  The boyfriend was missing too? “Well, that’s a good sign, right? He wouldn’t just leave his boyfriend behind,” Jobe said.

  Nate nodded, but the worry didn’t go away. “We’re hopeful at least, it’s just weird for him to miss family dinner. He really misses us when he’s away, always talking about wanting to come home…”