“What are you doing?” I asked in my unfamiliar voice.
“Hold still.” He flicked out a knife and slit my wrist crossways, spilling a line of blood into the bowl.
The blood slipped down to the center over the pinhole, bubbling up a little as it drained into the hole. Then he squeezed my blood into a tiny vial from his pocket against my will. When he let me go and gave me the nod that I could decant back to myself, I gripped my wrist to keep it from bleeding.
With an expression of relief, he turned to me. “One thing you might want to know is that the Focus Formula was not just words on a page, Mr. Lyle. As it turns out, Dr. Ubala actually discovered a way to channel energy from human blood.” He gestured to the bowl that was now mostly empty besides the fading color of red.
“What did you do?”
“It is not what I did,” he said, “but what I am planning to do. With the good doctor, she designed a formula that could be injected daily into the body, thus creating powerful industrial energy storages, simply by establishing tiny currents through the body. Over time, the body would adapt to those currents and essentially become an energy source—something like an electric eel—by merely extracting a blood sample and storing the voltages in capacitors. Sure, a sample here and there would not result in much of anything, but what if the entire world were required to donate samples daily? Then we would have a mass of renewable energy that would virtually overwhelm us.”
That was what I kept seeing on the pages that Dr. Ubala hadn’t published. Her philanthropist effort of the world deciding to donate blood for transfusions. If everyone were required to donate, and if those subtle charges could be extracted from the blood and stored, then the amount of energy would be endless.
“But, to accomplish these charges,” Zakhar said, arms still crossed, “it would take years and years of slowly altering the body’s make up before the bodies would generate those charges. Coincidentally, Dr. Ubala had been taking those pills herself to prove her point to the world.”
Maybe that was why I felt unsettled like pins were pricking me underneath my skin when I decanted into her form.
“Due to the world’s unreadiness to accept her claims,” he said, “the doctor was asked to discard those pages that referenced the Focus Formula, and even when she passed away, none of her blood was saved…until now.”
“That’s why you needed me,” I said, coming closer to him. “When I decanted her several years back, I must have decanted her when her blood had been altered.”
“Correct,” he said. “The Focus Formula worked, Mr. Lyle. And it worked inside the doctor.” But like all technology that is meant to advance the world…there are those of us who would use it for our own purposes.” Zakhar faced the machine, placing his hand against the left cone that slanted towards the other. “As it turns out, Dr. Ubala’s blood actually had a subtle side effect—one that she mentions on page 319 of The Elemental Mind, though I am not sure she realized that the side effects were not due to the human side of her.”
I shuffled through my mind to see if I could recall the pages, but none of them stood out to me—merely just words on a page without any real meaning other than that.
“The side effects were due to the fairy side of her,” he said. “She had trouble sleeping. In fact, she suffered from severe, severe insomnia—sometimes so bad that she could only get an hour or so every few days. I find it rather ironic that apparently she died in her sleep.” He laughed at that.
“As it turns out,” he said, hand still pressed against the cone, “her fairy blood sent the currents in a frenzy. The Fairy Godfather learned of this, and so this device was created from that knowledge. The Elemental Enhancer.”
I stared at the machine in awe, not sure if I should back away from it or not. “What does it do?”
“It uses the frenzied blood of Dr. Ubala that had been laced with the Focus Formula, and when electricity is inputted into the system…things become…shocking.”
His eyes lit up with lightning. Blue lines cracked onto the cone. Both cones pulsed with electric energy. A sound like a rushing wind funneled from sky down into the center of the device, followed by a sharp screech. I staggered back away from it, seeing that even though Zakhar’s eyes lost their lightning for a moment, the power of the device did not falter.
With a crack, a streak of lightning burst out from between the cones. Thunder boomed in my chest. The bolt raced up to the clouds in an electric column, snapped at its height, then thousands of lightning lines snapped across the city.
The interstate blinked with daylight at the electricity. Car alarms screamed. Blackouts rolled, bursting out all of the streetlights. Fires burned over the tops of trees, and holes cratered into the concrete where some of the lines of lightning struck.
Zakhar pulled his hand back from the cones. The lightning lapped back into the device like a blue tongue. “Say goodbye to your precious city, Mr. Lyle.”
CHAPTER
TWENTY
“Are you out of your mind!” I shouted at Zakhar who stood by the Elemental Enhancer, his teal button-down shirt opened up to show his white A-shirt beneath. “An entire city! You’re willing to destroy an entire city? For what?”
“For fun,” he said with a smile. “But not just Raleigh. All of the cities around it. Then there’ll be Charlotte and Atlanta and New York. The entire east coast really. The Fairy Godfather is tired of the competition that the ‘Marcuses’ of the world bring to his business. He’s tired of fighting against obstacles that really should never have been in his way to begin with.”
“But the people…” I was practically pleading with him now. “Look at this place.” I fanned a hand out to all of the blazing squad cars and dead police officers in the road. “And who knows what that first lightning strike did to the city.”
Peering down either way of the interstate, all I saw was flames and blackness. No lights shone for miles in either direction, all because this Zakhar Nesterov thought it necessarily to decimate entire cities with this device.
“I’m not going along with this,” I said. “There’s no way I’m going with you. I’m not going to let you slit my wrist in every city that you take this device to.”
Zakhar pulled the vial of my blood out of his pocket, shook it at me. “You do not have to.”
Suddenly, I felt the weight of the world on me. What had I done? Why had I allowed him to take my blood? And what now? Now that he didn’t need me any longer, was he just going to kill me? What about Stephanie and Carter?
He eyed me from the other side of the device. “I am sure you are concerned about your friends?” He patted his pocket. “This ankh has a way of letting me know things. Things specifically about your friends. As it goes with them, they had it in their futures to want to come and save you.”
I stared at him sidelong. “What are you getting at?”
“To keep stupidity to a minimum, I advised my goblins to execute your friends once the device was lit.”
I looked up to the hills to see a tiny line of flames crackling beyond the tree line, a line of flames that no doubt was an indication that the goblin had used the flamethrower on Carter. “You’re lying.”
“Tell me this, Mr. Lyle. When have you known me not to follow through with my words?”
“I’ll kill you where you stand!” In a fury, I dashed at him, decanting into a bear, growling ferociously into the night.
On cue, a strike of lightning zapped from his fingertips, cracking into my chest. My body quivered and crashed to the pavement, two of my four legs kicking on their own. Another bolt fired at me, but when I tried to escape it, I sprang directly into the streak.
“You see, Mr. Lyle.” He strolled over to me. “The benefit of the ankh is that I know where you are, where you have been, and where you are going to go. No place is safe from me.”
He kneeled over me, eyes sparking with electricity as I decanted back to myself. Somewhere in the distance a car screeched, and the spark in his eyes se
emed to skip. Before I could take another note of it, I was off the ground in his grasp, hovering over the street.
“Contrary to what you might believe,” he said, “killing you will give me great, great pleasure.”
His eyes lit up, and with everything I had I kicked forward. He blocked it with his other hand without consequence, laughing at my audacity.
Quickly he glanced up to the hills, and his expression turned sour. Dropping me to the ground, leaving me on my side holding my throat and coughing, he said, “They were supposed to be dead.”
I couldn’t see what he saw, if he saw anything at all. He must have been referring to Carter and Stephanie. But he said they were dead. How could they still be alive and he not have known? Another car screeched off in the distance.
That’s it…I realized. Umara had said that Shamans’ connections—ankh or not—were supremely powerful, unless their connections were interrupted somehow. She’d said that the interruptions differed from Shaman to Shaman and determining that Shaman’s specific interrupter was a shot in the dark, since it could have been anything.
When we’d first met Zakhar in the woods, Umara had fired her AE-17 at him. The blast had hit him shortly afterwards, but even before the blast had hit Zakhar while he was inflamed, his fires had flickered out when the AE-17 had shrilled out a shot. Even as far back as when he’d been at my apartment, he’d said that my television was too loud and that he couldn’t hear himself think, so he’d asked me to turn it down.
Just a moment ago, when the Elemental Enhancer had shrieked into sky, the lightning around him had stuttered out, and even when the tires had screeched nearby, the lightning in his eyes skipped. Maybe that was how Carter and Stephanie had escaped without him knowing. Maybe they’d gotten away once the Enhancer had activated and reset all of Zakhar’s connections.
Even with that thought, Zakhar must have felt my realization. He glared at me, fire in his eyes.
I leapt up, decanting into dark blue falcon, just as a fireball roared towards me. Hovering in midair and digging deep into my raptor lungs, I belted out a cry that made my vocal chords rumble. The ball of fire crashed into me, setting my wings ablaze.
My body slammed against the concrete, and quickly I decanted back to myself, patting out my right arm as flames seared the flesh up to my shoulder. When I saw Zakhar, I realized it had worked. The cry had worked. The flames in his eyes sizzled out for a moment, and it was at that moment, that I decanted back into a falcon, cried out with everything I had, and soared right into his chest, beak first.
Every time he tried to make a spark or an ember or a ball of ice, I screeched at him, smacking him with my wings, tearing at his collar and shoulders with my talons.
He flailed back, swatting at me, until a shoulder crashed to his spine and sent him flying dead into the trailer. Carter charged at Zakhar again, hefted him up in both hands, and slammed him on the ground, fangs flared, eyes red.
All I could do was keep the screeches coming! Cry after cry kept Zakhar rattled, so much so that he trembled in Carter’s grasp, as Carter pounded him against the pavement again and again.
Carter snatched Zakhar up once more, hoisting him high in the air, his voice drenched in fury. “You gone pay for what you done to the fairy!”
I went to cry out again, flapping my wings as I hovered behind them, but I paused. Something had changed. Something was different. Zakhar…had changed. He’d altered. Completely. His black, gelled hair flattened out to bald. His eyes reddened, and his teeth sharpened to fangs. The smooth tan skin, paled to gray, and when he roared, I swear I saw Carter step back.
What in the name… A moment ago, Zakhar had been a Shaman, but now…he was a vampire? I spilled back into my human form, recalling something Zakhar had said to me back at my apartment when we’d shared a drink together: “A business man with a tie, you are. Mr. Straight-forward,” he had chuckled. “I cannot say that I am fond of it, but you and I, we are no different. Isn’t that right, Changer?” It all made sense now. This was what he’d meant. He’d told me who he was the moment we’d met, and I hadn’t even caught onto it!
“Carter, watch out, he’s a Decanter!”
But it was too late. Zakhar was already rushing towards Carter, giving him blow after blow to his belly, and no matter how hard Carter tried to guard himself, he just wasn’t fast enough. His weight slowed him down too much when battling another predator like himself.
Fists rammed against his head, and kicks slammed against his legs. By the time he reacted to one, another was on the way. In an instant, Zakhar was on top of Carter, beating him senseless. Instead of foolishly deciding to jump into a vampiric tussle, I did something else. Something more dangerous.
With flames rumbling beside me from a few of the squad cars, I summoned fire. Flames rushed into me like a scorched river. My insides burned, and my body became a well of flames. Alluring voices from the nether whispered at me, called my name.
“Lucius…”
“Lucius…”
“Come…”
It took everything in me to ignore them. I dashed over to Zakhar, wrapped my scorched hands around his throat and flung him to the side. Fires burned like stripes on either sides of his neck where my fingers had grabbed him. When he tried to smack them out, none of them obeyed, spilling down to his core like inflamed cobras.
“Lyle…”
“Lyle Fin—”
My body hissed as water poured over me like a waterfall, drowning the flames to nothing. Rebekah’s soul swirled out of the dying fires and back into the obelisk around my neck.
“You’re not cutting out on me now,” Stephanie said, shaking the excess water from her hands. “Now let’s finish this!”
Turning to face Zakhar, I realized that he was gone. “Where’d he go?”
I looked around, glancing at the empty squad cars, the open trailer, over by the device, everywhere. Carter made his way to his feet, dusting off his jeans that had frayed at the hems from where he’d been running through the woods and the interstate.
“I don’t see’em,” Carter said. “Don’t smell’em neither. Think maybe he just got away. Probably just—” His body stiffened, hands down by his side, fingers spreads apart, every muscle in his body tightening.
“Carter?” I stepped closer to him. “Carter? You okay?”
Stephanie touched his wrist. “Carter, are you—”
His hand snapped out, grasping her by the throat. “Carter done gone away.” Rearing back with Stephanie’s body, he slung her towards the trailer, her body whirling and twirling in every direction.
Her spine crashed against the corner, bending backwards, and even before she hit the ground, her tattoos began to light up with healing power, repositioning her back to its original state. Before she could fully recover, Carter was ten feet over her head, coming down with a knee that jammed into her ribs, cracking every one of them.
She cried out, smacking the ground with the flat of her hand. This time. The tattoos did not illuminate.
She’s out of energy, I realized. Carter’s out of control. What’s gotten into him? Instantly, I knew. Zakhar’s a Wraith.
Without a second thought, I dashed over to Carter, wrenching him by the arm. Reflexively, he backhanded me sideways, sending me sliding against the concrete. Pain seared through me from the scrapes of the asphalt against my back. I rolled to my side, wiping away a line of blood that streaked down my lip, looking at my thumb and back at Carter.
“Carter…don’t let him…control you,” I said, picking myself up.
“Don’t think that’s an option, Mr. Lyle.” He had Carter’s voice, but Zakhar’s inflections. And when he dashed at me, it felt like I was frozen in front of an oncoming freight train.
Right before he shouldered into me, I took a chance. My body spilled into Wraith form. Blue vapors surrounded me, and the fires and sirens all seemed to fade away. Wit
h ease, I slipped into Carter’s body, immediately crashing into Zakhar who was already inside.
Zakhar’s forces shoved me out of the way, like a hefty man guarding a seat that I couldn’t sit in. When I tried to fight back, I couldn’t. He’d done this before. Plenty of times, from what I could tell, and I was losing footing like slipping off a ledge, slowly sliding out of Carter’s body.
Instead of relinquishing control and letting Carter go on another rampage, I forced my mind to be still. Carter was a vampire. He was immortal. He couldn’t die, not without fire or a stake through the heart or being consumed. But Wraiths, we held onto consciousness. And if there was no consciousness, then Wraiths could not stay.
Just before getting shoved completely out, I decanted into a falcon inside of Carter! I tore through bones and flesh and organs, bursting out of him. Carter collapsed to the ground momentarily incapacitated, though instantly beginning to seal himself up. His loss of consciousness immediately expelled Zakhar. Without hesitation, I summoned fire and inflamed the area around me, then decanted back into myself, before the fire summon could spiral out of control.
My head swirled with Pith from the fire summons and the disorientation from the Wraith form. Nauseous and exhausted, I crumpled to the ground, retching. Before me however, stood an inflamed ghostly Wraith—a vaporous strip of blue with black eye holes—swirling and screaming and shrieking.
Zakhar decanted back to himself, but not before the fire had done its worse, and he lay on his back wheezing. “Mr. Lyle…it seems…I have under…estimated you.”
I peered down at him. “You picked the wrong city to try and take down.” I knew his clothes were nearby from where he’d decanted out of them, so I found his pants, dug in the pockets, pulled out the vial of my blood, and hurled the vial into one of the flames. “As for you and this device, it’s over. Done.” I tossed pants over his bare body.
His head rolled from left to right, a feeble way of saying no. “You cannot stop…” he coughed up blood, “…the Fairy Godfather. No one…can.”
Elemental Damage: Confessions of a Summoner Book 2 Page 19
