Elei's Chronicles (Books 1-3) (34 page)

Chapter
Six

“E
lei.
Can you hear me?”

He blinked, still caught in the dark vortex, and tried to reach for his gun, but his arm wouldn’t move. Colors flashed in his eyes. Forcing down panic, he blinked again and wiggled his fingers. Those seemed to still be there.

“Elei.”

Hera’s voice
. A sigh rose in his throat and the colors paled, then faded. As feeling returned to his limbs and his senses sharpened, he realized he knelt in a closed space, inside a building, Hera’s arms around his shoulders all that kept him from crashing to the yellow linoleum floor.

Damn, he couldn’t remember getting inside. He remembered walking through the town, Hera’s hand on his arm guiding him, her soft voice brushing his ear from time to time, a faint, distant sound, like the wind. There had been a cat, hadn’t there? And a kid crossing the street. He remembered walking alongside pools of blood. Had that been real?

“Elei, can you hear me?” Hera’s voice rose in pitch and he looked up at her. Her face was pinched, furrows between her fine brows.

“Yeah, I hear you,” he mumbled, not really feeling much of his body except for various areas of pain, mainly — he grunted as he tried to move — his left arm and leg. He was so cold his teeth chattered. “Kalaes?”

“I checked him for biotransmitters,” Hera said. “He’s clean.”

Trust Hera to keep a cool head when all Elei could think was whether Kalaes was still alive. “How is he?”

“He’s still out.” Hera sighed. “He’s drugged.”

He didn’t ask how she knew. It was, after all, her kind, her race who’d done this to Kalaes. “Will he be okay?”

Hera pulled Elei to sit up on the cold floor, then she drew back and squatted before him. She nodded to her left.

Kalaes lay on top of a black jacket, face white, eyes closed, mouth slack. Without that bright energy that dictated his every move, he looked young and ill.

A whimper left Elei’s throat and he tried to get up, but Hera caught his arms and easily kept him down.

“I think he’ll be all right,” she said in an even voice. “They probably gave him the usual cocktail of hallucinogens, pain enhancers and truth serum. He should sleep off the worst of it, and when he wakes, we shall have to... evaluate his state.”

The dark mirror of her gaze flickered at the last words and he knew that wasn’t what she’d been about to say.
See if he’s gone mad? If he recognizes us? If he can still make it?

“But all the blood...” Dripping from Kalaes’ face, from his braids, pooling on the floor as he hung from the Gultur guards’ hold.

“Head wounds bleed a lot.”

“What else?” he asked, needing to understand what had happened and what was to come.

“He may have hallucinations and nightmares until the drugs leave his system.” She glanced to the side, long lashes casting a black lace of shadow over her cheekbones.

“Wounds?” He struggled with the blankness of the words, their empty sounds. “How bad did they hurt him?”

“Not too bad. You got him out in time.” She raised a hand to stop him just as he opened his mouth to demand more information. “I do not think anything is broken inside. It looks like they’d only started working on him when you stopped them.”

Despite her assurances, he needed to check, make sure Kalaes was okay.
All my fault
. He gritted his teeth and used his hands to drag himself closer to Kalaes.

“Elei...”

Ignoring her, he sat next to Kalaes and, with trembling hands, he lifted the blood-soaked shirt to check the wounds underneath. Knife-slashes and black-and-blue bruises spread over ribs and narrow hips.

Elei pulled down the shirt, watching Kalaes’ chest rise and fall.
He’s alive. Still alive
.

“Look, I’ll take care of him. You should rest.” Hera moved to Elei’s side. “Your leg is bleeding. I think you pulled the stitches.”

Right, stitches
. He’d practically tried to blow his leg to pieces by shooting it twice, and the doctors had stitched it back together. Odd how he couldn’t recall what the wounds looked like. He tried to imagine them and saw cobwebs covering his leg, a pattern of black thread, curling into flowers and starbursts. The black patterns spread up his leg to his hip and side, moving, reaching for his arm.

“Elei?”

“Hm?” Hera’s hand moved before his face, breaking the images. “What?”

“You keep spacing out. I need to check your leg, and your chest. You have so much blood on your shirt that I cannot tell if you’re bleeding in other places or if it’s all Kalaes’. You need to—” Her voice cracked, a tiny break that puzzled Elei, and she cleared her throat. “You have to sleep, let your body recuperate. You both need to rest. Listen.” She touched his arm, lightly, as if not to scare him. “You did it, Elei. You broke him out of the hospital. You saved his life. You can relax now.”

He glanced again down at the older boy, but he couldn’t relax. There was a tight knot of tension in his chest, and all his muscles were still strung tight. “What about the Gultur?”

“The others are keeping watch until we find a way out of the town,” Hera said, gesturing with her hand at the closed door. “This is a safe place. Rest.”

Safe
. It was safe.

As if that was a password he’d been waiting to hear, a key to unlock his tense body and mind, he slumped forward, his eyes closing so fast he wasn’t able to even give a warning as he fell into a dark and deep well of sleep.

***

Hera caught Elei as he toppled sideways, limbs going slack, and laid him down on the floor. Her heart was beating a war song against her ribs, and her pulse choked her, kicking at the base of her throat.

She’d almost failed them. If she had not shown up when she did, if she’d been but a minute later...

But you were not late. You were there in time
. She clenched her fist and breathed out.
Just get to work
.

She nudged Elei until he rolled onto his back, an arm draped over his middle. The way he’d passed out, the suddenness of it had been frightening, as if he’d been holding onto consciousness with teeth and nails.

Damn the boy, he’d surprised her yet again. She’d gone in to save him, thinking Kalaes might mount a rescue, and Elei had been the one trying to break Kalaes out. She brushed a strand of dark hair from Elei’s temple, fingers trailing on soft skin just above the tel-marks, the rough snakeskin caused by telmion.

She was definitely getting too involved with these two mortals, and then her own past had come calling.

Sacmis
.

Those gray eyes, so soft when teasing. So hard when angry. So full of hatred in the end, and then indifference. That had hurt the most.

What in the hells was Sacmis doing in Teos? Of all Gultur, of course Sacmis had to be the one assigned to this unit. Sacmis, her childhood friend. They’d fallen out over an incident during their first coast patrol, when Hera had experienced her first doubts about the system. 

But why had Sacmis let them live and go free? And what of the things she’d said? About Rex, about danger, about trying to find her.

Hera could not trust her. She just could not, not after all this time, not that easily.

Wishing she knew what to believe, Hera undid Elei’s blood-stained shirt and peeled it back to check his torso. Her fingers brushed over a few spiral scars of
urion
and circular ones of the
trieter
parasite on his stomach, old marks, white and fading between swaths of bandages. She stripped off the stained gauze and gave the gunshot wounds a critical look. They’d bled and seeped, but looked otherwise healthy and on their way to healing, the scarring a light pink. His left arm had two new grazes from bullets, or maybe shrapnel, that still bled sluggishly. The skin was scorched and tender in the front, but the snakeskin covering the back of the arm had taken the brunt of what had to have been an explosion.

She shook her head. How had the boy gotten hold of grenades and weapons without leaving the hospital? How had he convinced street kids to provide him with a distraction? How had he broken out of his room, which had to have been heavily guarded?

Her stomach knotted. She should have been the one — the one to save them, break them out of the hospital, make sure they did not suffer again.

She fished butterfly bandages out of the first aid kit and applied them to the bullet graze on his arm. If her guess was correct, Rex would heal those so fast stitches would not be needed.

What concerned her mostly was the leg. Blood drenched the black material of the pants, and she was not sure she had the medical knowledge needed to patch such an injury up. With a sigh, she undid the fly of Elei’s pants — oversized, most probably not his, who knew where he’d found them. He was skinnier than when she’d first met him, bare muscle and bone, and looking way too young, passed out there on the floor. It made her want to hold him tight, to protect him.

Gods
. She gritted her teeth. What was this feeling? A faint memory of a hand caressing her hair struggled to the surface and she reached up again to brush her fingers through Elei’s soft hair.

A sharp pain went through her middle and she rubbed her chest. Why was Regina reacting? Nunet, she needed to focus. After all, Elei was not a little child. He was almost her height and was probably still growing. Almost a man.

Hera clenched her jaw.
He does not need your pity, only your help
.
Get to work,
hatha.

She pulled down the pants, averting her eyes from the boy’s genitals — they looked so different from educational illustrations — and hissed.

He’d pulled the stitches all right. When he shot his leg at the Sacred Fountain, the bullet had ricocheted off the femur and fragmented. Pieces of it had blasted out, opening deep wounds, and others remained lodged inside. The surgeon had removed them at the hospital. These wounds had opened again, showing the torn muscle inside. She bent closer for a better look.

His thigh was so soaked in blood she could not tell for sure, but it seemed like he had acquired two new bullet wounds on the way —scarlet furrows just below the hip that looked like they would need sutures.
Frigid Hells
. Although her training covered such operations, she did not particularly cherish the experience. Good thing the boy was passed out.

Grabbing a sponge and a bottle of water, she washed off the blood as best she could.  Rex would not let infection set in, she guessed, but she sprayed antiseptic over the open wounds to be on the safe side before taking the needle and thread. Pinching the lips of the new wounds together, she began stitching, her fingers slipping on the blood-sleek skin. Sweat dripped into her eyes and she wiped it with the back of her bloody hand. Her hand shook and she pinched the needle so hard between her fingers the metal bit into her skin.

Seven stitches to one graze, six to the other, black stripes across scarlet flesh. She judged that the older bullet wounds only needed steri-strips and butterfly bandages. They’d bled, but the inner sutures held and the flesh was knitting fine. Rex had accelerated the process by at least a week.

She straightened with a deep sigh, sitting back on her heels. She picked up the bloody needle to clean it, but her hand twitched and the needle fell to the floor with a tiny clatter. She bent over it, tears pricking her eyes.

Gods, what sort of a world is this?
She was sick of the violence and blood and gore and death and sorrow. Taking deep breaths, she forced herself to calm and bandage Elei’s thigh. She finished cleaning him up, washing a layer of soot from his face and neck, trickling water between his slack lips, and making a note to check if they had any serum to replace the lost blood. She pulled up his pants and settled him on the floor, wishing she had another blanket to cover him.

Then she moved over to Kalaes, to check him more carefully, make sure she had not missed any important injuries. Her hands hovered over his bruises and cuts, and she clenched her jaw. She’d change this, fix this. She’d make sure peace would come to the Seven Islands. Although she did not know yet how, she would find a way.