“He got away,” the Immortal says.
Shane presses his lips together in a thin line. “Fantastic.”
“We must fight this transmutation, Shane. Rafael is being hailed as an incarnate god by his people, and he promised to give them the world, to make them all evolve the way he has. The fire eaters are a minimal threat compared to this .”
“How can he make them evolve?” Shane says, echoing the same question I have in my mind.
There is silence on the other line. “We don’t know.” She finally says, but I get the feeling she’s hiding something.
Shane rolls his eyes, confirming my suspicions. “Got it.”
“Rafael may be the one responsible for what just happened in Billings, or it might be another Sun-Child. Kill the fire eaters and track whoever is responsible for this down.”
“Sounds like a walk in the park, Evelyn,” Shane says. His eyes flicker to mine for a moment before looking away.
“Whoever is out there is a major threat to humans.” Evelyn snaps. “You will do as I say. Don’t fuck it up.” Without further word, she hangs up. Shane puts his phone in his pocket and looks at me grimly. We stare at each other for a moment, and then I break eye contact.
He won’t take me with him.
I won’t allow it.
Shane stands in the middle of the room, torn.
“You heard her; we all did,” Brandon says, stalking up to me. “Let’s take this bastard in.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” Piper says, standing between us.
“I’ll go,” I say.
“What?” Piper shrieks. “You’re insane; they’ll kill you!”
“And he should be killed! He’s a murderer!” Brandon kicks a dilapidated old chair into the wall. It crashes with a bang and breaks apart. From the corner of my eye I can see Kyle burying his face in his hands.
“Settle down!” Shane yells at him. Brandon obeys, sitting down on the floor and fuming. Shane runs both his hands over his head and starts pacing again.
“Daniel, please don’t go with him.” Piper faces me with tears in her eyes. “You can’t die,” she says softly.
“They won’t kill me.” I smile ruefully. “I’m Daniel Maze.” Whatever the fuck that means. I put a hand on her cheek and kiss her forehead, inhaling the sweet smell of strawberries from her hair.
“Okay, this is what we’re going to do.” Shane stops pacing and exhales deeply.
“We’re going to track and kill the existing fire eaters, then we’re going to track and kill the pregnant Sun-child and all her spawn, and then we leave for the Headquarters.” He stares at me, right in the eyes. “I won’t force you to come with us.”
“That’s bullshit!” Brandon yells. “If you don’t, then I will!”
“So help me God, I will rip your throat out if you do,” Shane snarls at him. “I am your superior and you will obey me.”
“There’s a pregnant woman we have to kill?” Kyle practically wails from across the room, his voice strained beyond measure.
“Shut up, Kyle,” Alesha scoffs. “She’s one of them.” She looks at me with the same hatred in her eyes as Brandon.
“I’ll take care of her,” I say, and they grow silent.
“What?” Piper whispers, confused.
“I’ll kill her. None of you have to do it.”
“Yes, you will kill her,” Brandon says, his lip curling up. “And then we’ll kill you.”
Shane socks him, hard. He stumbles to the floor and looks up at him, surprised. “One more disruption and I’ll knock you out cold.”
Of course I’m lying to them when I say I’ll follow them to the Headquarters. There’s no way in hell I’m turning myself in. I just don’t have the time for a more elaborate lie. I look at Shane and at Piper, the faces of people who have grown to be real friends. I’m lying to them, and I don’t care.
Be strong for her.
“I want to do this, Shane.” I say. “After what just happened, I deserve it.” The lie rolls off my tongue naturally. I don’t even have to try. Piper turns away from me.
“I trust you,” Shane says easily, almost too casually. We stare at each other, and for a second I get the sense we’re both playing a bigger game here. He turns around to face the rest of the group. “As for the rest of you, just try not to get yourselves killed.”
The Mission
We wait until it is completely dark before we set out to hunt the fire eaters. As the time passes, I begin to feel more like myself, or as much as myself as I can feel in the middle of these fucked-up situations. Last time the stakes were this high, I was running for my life. Now it’s Kismet’s life I have to save, as well as my own, and I remind myself this every passing moment.
I don’t focus on the fact that I just killed God knows how many innocent humans. If I’m going to focus on the task at hand, I can’t be held up by guilt. There’ll be enough time for that later. There always is.
Shane goes over strategy and fighting techniques, pairing up Kyle with Brandon and Alesha with Piper, purposely putting a strong fighter with a weak one in order to protect them. He will search the city alone, and so will I.
We leave the house, tension giving way to a mixture between excitement and fear. Kyle is biting his nails, and Brandon jumps up and down, just like an athlete warming up for a big game. Alesha, out of all of them, seems the calmest. Her face is grim, like she has nothing to lose.
I take this opportunity to pull Piper aside. Her eyes are bloodshot, and I notice for the very first time that she has been crying. “What do you want?” she says, her lips quivering.
“Don’t cry for me, Piper.” I say, and the corners of her lips pull down. “I don’t deserve it.”
She opens her mouth to say something, but I hold up a hand. “We don’t have much time. I need you to listen to me.” She shuts her mouth instantly and very discreetly leans into me.
I whisper my plan into her ear.
“You have a death wish,” she says when I finish, taking a deep breath. “But I’m in.”
I smile at her. “That’s the Piper I know.”
-*-
The city is silent. Only a few unsuspecting people are out and about, apparently ignorant or defiant of the fact that some terrible ailment had struck the city just hours ago and killed many innocent victims.
“All right, we’ve reached the peripheral area of the city. Let’s go!” Shane whispers to all of us, and we do our best to blend in with the shadows in the night and run off as fast as we can.
The plan is to run through the whole city once as a group. If we don’t spot anything, we’ll separate into our already chosen teams and look through all the alleyways and dark corners where any lurking demon might be hiding. Of course, I am hoping we don’t find any fire eaters on our first run, so we can separate and I can look for Kismet alone.
I am too distracted to look into the faces of the group to notice whether they are nervous or have gained control of their emotions, but I’m hoping the natural order of things will take over and they’ll be nervous as fuck during their first mission. Nervous Immortals mean poor focus, and less of a chance of them seeing anything unusual in the shadows.
We run through the whole city and see nothing, or at least I assume we haven’t, based on the fact that no one has said anything, because I’m not paying much attention. I’m trying to not find Kismet, not yet, because it’s crucial that I find her alone. Exposing her to a tribe of Immortals would mean her certain death.
“Nobody saw anything?” Shane asks. There are a few shaking heads. We are back at our starting point, in the yard of the abandoned house we had taken refuge in. I can see their faces clearly now, and their nervousness has all but vanished. They look keen and focused. Even Kyle looks unnaturally sharp.
This is going to be harder than I thought.
“Good, then, pair up and get going!”
Alesha and Piper go south, running so fast they are barely a blur. Brandon and Kyle go southwest, jumping over trashcans
and swerving around poles. Shane is supposed to go east, and I’m assigned to go west.
But he doesn’t move. Instead, he sighs, and then faces me. “I had hoped for us to have had many more missions together,” he says simply. The pale moon reflects in his eyes. “I want to let you know that no matter what the future might hold for us, I truly considered you a friend.”
I suspected he knew I was lying when I said I would come with him, but his words confirm it. He knows this is the end.
“In a less complicated world, we could have stayed friends,” I say.
He smiles at me, and then stares up at the sky. It is dark and starless. “I don’t know what you and Piper are planning, and I don’t want to know,” he says without looking at me. My heart starts beating faster at his words.
“Shane, I need your word,” I say urgently. “A promise that you won’t come after me.”
“A day,” he says, turning to face me. “I’ll give you a day to leave with impunity. After that, you’re my enemy.” His blue eyes are dark tonight, almost as dark as the sky, and his mouth is set in a fine line. He looks older, or maybe it’s just the first time I’ve seen him like this.
“Thanks,” I whisper, but his face doesn’t change. Then I run as fast as I can towards the heart of the city. I look back once, and see him standing still in the overgrown grass, his hands in his pockets, still looking up at the clouded night sky.
-*-
I look for her everywhere. I have to hide several times from Brandon and Kyle, who aren’t having any luck either. Not only do I not find Kismet, but there is also no sign of the fire eaters.
I begin to despair. What if I don’t find her? What if she dies, and it’s all my fault? What if Virginia was wrong?
If she’s here, and something in my heart tells me she is, I must find her. I run as quietly as I can through the city, sweat soaking my shirt and my heart beating wildly.
By now, I have successfully run into all of the tribe members except Shane. I’ve hidden from all of them, including Piper. All of them are impatient, nobody has found anything yet.
An hour passes before I run into Shane. He’s with Alesha and Piper, and they’re walking now instead of running. The kids look strained, but Shane is as focused as ever. He stares into the shadow I’m hiding in, and then slowly looks away, never making eye contact. I know he saw me.
If Shane had not given me a day, I would’ve been fighting for my life right now.
I hear some people laughing, and walk out of the alleyway to peer around. The laughs are coming from a group of young adults, probably my age, sitting in chairs around a table outside a bar. They're having a few drinks and a good time. Just normal and human, without a care in the world. I wonder what they would think of me if I asked them if I could join their table. How strange it would seem, a sweaty man coming out of a dark alleyway, wanting to make friends.
They continue laughing, taking no notice of me whatsoever. I turn around and start to walk away, but suddenly, a piercing screech coming from a place not too far away reaches my ears in a dreadful, horrifying way. It sounds like some kind of wild animal in pain.
“Holy crap! What the hell was that?” one of the girls from the bar says. I’m out of there in a less than a second, running past all the closed shops and empty buildings, the cold night air pressing against my lungs, not caring if anybody sees.
I’m coming; I’m coming; I’m coming…
“Kismet!” I whisper loudly when I arrive at the opening of the alleyway where the sound had come from. It’s a very narrow opening between the wall of one building and another, but wide enough for me to walk in comfortably. I force my eyes to look into the darkness.
“Kismet!” I whisper again, this time a notch more desperately than before, and then I hear some low, quick breaths coming from the darkness in front of me.
“Who’s there?” she says. It’s her voice; it’s her, the same old Kismet, my Kismet. I peer harder into the darkness and walk forward.
“Who’s… there?” she repeats. She has trouble speaking, the words coming out in fragments. And then I see her. She’s naked from the waist down, and her enormous belly is crushing her down to the floor. Her legs are facing away from me, and her head, with the same red, fiery hair, if perhaps dirtier than I remember, is only about three feet away from my feet.
I get down on my hands and knees, grab her head and place it in my lap, feeling waves of tender emotion I had not felt in months wash over me when I touch her head.
“Kismet, it’s me, it’s… I’ve come to help you.”
“Daniel!” she whispers, smiling. But my heart breaks when I see her face. A huge scar runs from the top of her head down to her chin, and one of her cheeks is swollen. She has more scars all over her arms, and seems skinnier, except for her large, protruding mass of a stomach. Her amber eyes are dull, almost dead.
My heart stops. “What happened to you?” I ask, voice cracking. I bite down on the side of my hand to stop myself from crying.
She just shakes her head. “It doesn’t… matter… I knew… you’d come.” She tries to sit up, but then a spasm comes over her, and she slumps down to the floor in pain, hissing through her teeth.
“Don’t move,” I say, feeling the weight of her unhappiness and unexplained trials heavy on my heart. I never should have left her; she never should have stayed. I should have forced her to come. I should have died before running away. She looks up at me again, and I take one of her hands in mine. Her breath comes in short, quick gasps.
“I’m going to help you,” I whisper, forcing the pain away. “I will be strong for you.” My eyes flicker quickly to the looming, spherical mass of flesh that is burrowing her into the ground.
“My god, Kismet, how did you manage to walk with a massive tumor attached to your uterus?”
Her face darkens. “I tried…to kill them,” she says between breaths. “Didn’t work.” Then she’s gone, eyes shut closed, too immersed in her pain to pay any attention to the outside world. Her stomach has lumps in it now, and they’re moving.
“Don’t worry, Kis,” I say, the swell of a resolute kind of ferocity filling me up inside. “I’ll take care of these fuckers for you.” I set her head down on the dirty, wet floor and crawl to her feet. I position myself between her legs and wait for the beasts to come out, feeling around the floor for her pants at the same time. I find them behind me, lift Kismet’s body up as much as I can and then put the pants underneath her.
“Hygiene is going to be a difficult thing to attain in a situation like this, but it mustn’t be ignored,” I try to joke with her again, trying to make this as easy as possible for her, but she doesn’t respond.
I don’t blame her.
“All right, I’m going to be honest, I really don’t know how to proceed here, and I don’t think you’re in a situation to tell me what to do, so I’m just going to be really careful.”
“Get them out,” she says, opening her reeling eyes. “Just get them out—”
I don’t think my heart can break any more than it already has, but it does. It does. Hot tears run down my face before I know it, but I wipe them away furiously before they cloud my vision.
“It’s coming!” She grits her teeth and glues her eyes shut. Her stomach moves in wave-like motions, and I tell her to push as hard as she can. She purses her lips in concentration, and pushes without a sound. The deformed creatures squeeze out of her, covered in mucus and blood. One, two, three come out, and then her stomach goes flat. Her skin is stretched and bruised after her gargantuan delivery.
The beasts are larger than a human baby, their limbs big and ugly and disproportionate to each other. They wriggle and move unnaturally fast. One by one, they open their eyes and look at me. Their eyes are slit in the middle like a snake’s, pupils jet-black like the full mat of hair on their head.
There’s a sort of animalistic, carnivorous intelligence in them, and it is hard to look at these creatures and not think of demons. All they
need is dark, bat-like wings for them to be the vivid personification of the evil, infant angels of hell.
They don’t cry, but hiss, like snakes or the reptilian monsters of the underworld. Kismet sighs, and her whole body relaxes. Before she opens her eyes and sits up, before she lays eyes on her first and only offspring, I hammer down my fist like lightning upon the three beastly skulls.
I hear a crunching noise when my fists hit their ossified heads. A low-pitched gurgle comes out of their lips, and then they stop moving, their short life extinguished in a flash. Kismet sits up at once and looks at the crushed skulls of her babies. Her eyes go over them once, and then she sighs. “Thank you.”
“Who did this to you?” I say, not missing a beat.
“I haven’t seen you in six months and that’s the first thing you want to know?” But she’s smiling. I lean in and kiss her, kiss her with the passion I could only have for her, kiss her like it’s the first and last kiss we’ve ever had, and it feels like I’ll explode with relief when she kisses me back.
When we finish, she opens her mouth to tell me something, but at that moment, four completely naked human-sized disproportionate dwarfs with Tanzanian-like jet-black hair and eyes like jaguars leap from the building above us and land in the alleyways, their dark eyes staring into mine, their sharp, blood-stained teeth gnashing furiously.
I scatter back, holding Kismet close to my chest, disoriented for a moment. Kismet clings to me in a way she’s never done before. “Fire eaters,” she whispers desperately.
Yes, of course. The black hair, the rabid eyes, the massive limbs. These are the monsters we have come here to kill.
They must have heard Kismet scream and were attracted to the noise. I lean Kismet against the wall. “Stay here, okay?” She nods, pulling up her pants and hugging her knees to her chest, fear running rampant in her eyes as she stares at the four squatting, lumberjack-like beasts.
I crack my knuckles and stand, ready to fight them, when I suddenly hear Shane yelling from the opening between the buildings. “Attack!”
Then I see the members of my second ex tribe running into the full-fledged fight that is about to unravel.
The Sun Child (The Sun Child Saga Book 1) Page 23
