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Authors: Chrystalla Thoma

Elei's Chronicles (Books 1-3) (9 page)

BOOK: Elei's Chronicles (Books 1-3)
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Kalaes’ eyes were laughing. “Thinking again, fe? It’s frying your brain, I can hear it sizzle.” He squeezed Elei’s shoulder, pinned him with his dark gaze. “What’s on your mind?”

A thousand thoughts, whirring like revolving blades. Elei leaned back and rested his shoulders and head on the wall. “Thinking about tomorrow.”

“You think too much.” Kalaes chuckled. Elei wondered what in the hells he found so funny. “Maera told me she half-scared you to death this morning.”

Elei ducked his head, heat licking his neck.

“Listen to me, Elei.” Kalaes’ voice dropped, all laughter gone from his face. “Dakru isn’t a good place to stay. Not safe.”

The threat of Gultur. Elei shrugged. “Neither is Ost.” He had no preference between a bullet from the Gultur and a knifing from the streetgangs.

“All right.” Kalaes shook his head. “I’ll ask around, help you as much as I can to find a job and a room.” He squeezed Elei’s shoulder one last time and released him. “Will you just relax now and take that look off your face? It’s making me nervous and, anyway, it’s too old for you, fe.”

Again something bright and altogether sad passed through Kalaes’ eyes. It was gone in a flash and left Elei wondering if he was imagining things.

“Say, I’d have taken you out for a drink tonight, gods know I need one, but the Gultur bolted down all bars on Dakru.”

Elei frowned. “But tonight—”

“Tonight you’re crashing with me, or else Maera’ll have my head. Tomorrow is another day.”

Hells, Kalaes was probably doing this against his will and would kick Elei out as soon as morning dawned. Elei slumped back. “Thanks.” He struggled to say something more, something nice. “Maera’s great.”

“Yes, she is.” Kalaes leaned back, too, resting his head on his interlaced hands. He smirked. “I told her you’re not a puppy to be taken in like that, without asking, though.”

“Huh.” Elei tensed more, the tendons in his neck aching. “And what did she say?”

“She laughed. Told me nothing was stopping me from asking you.”

Elei’s pulse doubled, beating in his temples.

“So I’m asking you, would you crash in my home again tonight?”

The muscles in Elei’s face relaxed and cronion kind of sighed inside him. The grip in his middle and the incessant throbbing in his head went down a notch and left him blinking.
One more night of safety
. “Okay.”

Kalaes grinned widely.

Elei supposed things couldn’t be all that bad if Kalaes was grinning.

So he smiled.

 

 

Chapter
Ten

 


K
alaes
!” a woman’s high-pitched voice called. “Hey! Wait up!”

Elei started, his breath cut short. Kalaes stopped a few steps up, duffle bag slung over one shoulder, head cocked to the side. In the faint radiance spiraling down from the windows of the second floor stood a middle-aged woman, dressed in a filthy pink robe and scuffed slippers. She leaned on the wall and puffed a cloud of sweet
ama
smoke in their direction.

Kalaes sighed, shoved the duffel with their dry laundry into Elei’s hands and climbed the rest of the steps. He strode up to her. “Hey, Zea. Everything all right?”

She nodded. “Someone came looking for you. A young woman.”

“For me?” Kalaes folded his arms across his chest and gave her a sideways look.

Her face wrinkled more and she pursed her painted lips. “Not you, sweetheart, for the boy here.”

Elei looked at her pointing finger and realized she was talking about him. “Me?” He climbed to the landing and stood next to Kalaes.

“Kalaes is nineteen, and although he’s pretty as a picture,” she winked at Kalaes who rolled his eyes, “I can’t really call him a boy, now, can I?”

Elei shrugged. He was just an inch or two shorter than Kalaes, but he was thinner and narrower of shoulders. His age was a mystery to him, but he’d signed without hesitation the legal documents produced by the monks which stated his maturity, when Pelia had said she needed an adult to drive her aircar.

“A boy with different colored eyes, she said. Not many of them around, I said.” She raised a too-thin, plucked eyebrow. “She told me she’s a friend of yours. I told her you were out, didn’t know when you’d be back.”

Friend?
Elei realized he’d dropped the duffel bag and was backing away, inching toward the stairs. His right eye throbbed and faint flashes of colors jumped on each surface — on Zea’s chest, on Kalaes’ broad back. With his foot, Elei found the first step and climbed down.

“Any idea who the woman might be?” Kalaes scratched the back of his head. “Hey, Elei…” He turned.  “Elei? Where’re you going, fe? Apartment’s up, not down!”

Elei’s ears roared. He missed a step, but Kalaes’ hand closed around his arm and yanked him back up. “Elei, can you hear me?” Now he sounded concerned. “Come on, fe, don’t freak out on me again.”

But he was. Time splintered into uneven slabs. At some point, he realized he’d been walking with Kalaes’ voice droning in his ears like a damn mosquito, yet he couldn’t tell how or when he found himself back in Kalaes’ apartment. One moment he was outside, the next he leaned on the wall, beside Kalaes’ bed.

Kalaes locked the door and dropped the duffle on the bed. “Listen to me. I take it that you weren’t expecting any woman to drop by, right?” He lifted a dark brow. “Only guessing here, since you aren’t one for much talking. Any clue who she is?”

Elei shook his head. He didn’t know many women. Apart from Pelia, he only knew his concierge, Pelia’s concierge, and an
ama
cigarette vendor on Ost. Oh, and the aircar driver. What was her name? Fia. That pretty much covered his female acquaintances. Besides, nobody should know where he was staying now.

 “Are we thinking the same thing, fe?” Kalaes raked his fingers through his wild hair and tugged on the two braids. “They came after you; they still think you got what they’re after. How in the hells did they find you?”

“I don’t know.”
The boatman. The woman at the diner. Timmy. Fia
. He rubbed his neck. He’d left a trail. Of course he had. Only he hadn’t thought anyone wanted him so desperately to come looking. “I wasn’t careful.”

“You made it out alive,” Kalaes said grimly, “and I’m getting a feeling it wasn’t that easy.”

Elei looked away, uncomfortable.

“They won’t kill you,” Kalaes said, “they won’t risk damaging what they think you have.”

Right
. And he knew that, how? “Maybe they just want to destroy it.” After all, they’d shot Pelia, hadn’t they? They hadn’t politely asked her to give them whatever in the hells it was they wanted.

“Why?”

Elei sighed, frustrated. “I don’t know. It’s a feeling, that’s all.”
A very bad feeling
.

“I thought it was a guy after you, this Falx and his gang, not a woman.”

“Yeah, me too.”

“Look.” Kalaes rubbed his face. “I’m beat, I need to sleep. I can’t think straight like this. Whoever that woman was, she was alone, she asked for you very decently, and she isn’t here now.”

Might be nice to have Kalaes’ positive outlook on life. Elei could see a thousand paths, a thousand possibilities, and none of them pleasant.

Kalaes rummaged in a trunk and threw Elei a striped blue and green blanket.  “Get some sleep, fe.” Kalaes fell on the bed and pulled the covers up to his waist. He yawned so hard his jaw cracked. “G’dnight.”

Kalaes was right. The woman who’d asked about him wasn’t there. Then why was cronion on the fore, tightening his insides?

Or maybe he’d felt safe, protected, for so long with Pelia, he’d forgotten what it was like to fend for himself. Maybe cronion was just reminding him that there was no rest, no relaxation in the real world.

When Elei looked up, Kalaes was already fast asleep. He watched the black-clad chest rise and fall for a while and tried to relax. He wrapped himself in the blanket and sank against the wall, letting himself slide down.

He kept the Rasmus out, in the general direction of the door, though he left the safety on. Accidentally shooting himself in the foot was the last thing he needed. He shifted, seeking a more comfortable position, his gut tight, his head throbbing, the world flashing in colors, every detail painfully sharp. He pulled his hood forward, half-hiding his face, and closed his eyes, but images kept playing behind his lids — Pelia, the girl in the alley, the Gultur shooting the men. The boatman, Timmy, Fia, his endless wandering in the streets, all that had happened ran in an endless loop, providing no new clues, just more headache.

Who was that woman who asked for him? Was it someone he knew? Hells, Falx had tried to kill him and Elei had always thought him his friend. What if the
ama
vendor from Ost turned out to be after his head too?

He was being paranoid. But who could blame him, under the circumstances? The world made no sense.

Dawn was seeping through the windows, red as blood, when he finally slept and dreamed that a little girl stood before him, her small naked feet in the clear water of a huge fountain. The fountain was in the shape of a seashell carved of white marble. Soft waves of blond hair fell around her cat-like face, framing her large, dark eyes. She wore a long yellow dress with dark stains like blood down the front.

“Elei.” She bent over and placed a small hand on his cheek. “I am Poena.”

The name sounded familiar, but he couldn’t place it. He reached out to touch her and her arm was solid, warm, and her scent powdery, milky. “Do I know you?”

She slipped from his fingers like an eel. “I bring a message from the king in you.”

He drew his hand back. “The king?” Something was off. No child talked like that. “What king, what are you on about?”

She smiled, showing black gaps in her teeth. “Find the silvery lake at the temple, spill blood into the water, turn the water red.” Tears formed in her gray eyes, rolled down her cheeks, framing her smile with shiny tracks. “Do you hear me? Spill blood. Spill it all. You must.”

 

 

***

 

 

Coordinates found, Hera hurried out of Iliathan’s tiny basement, letting the door slam behind her, and climbed the iron ladder onto his small aircar. With one step she reached the cabin and wrenched the door open.  The cockpit was cramped and smelled of engine oil. Bent, she scooted over to the driver’s seat. One more person could fit next to her, and two more people behind. A good, practical size. She hummed her approval.

The longgun secured under one foot, she took stock of the driving panel. Standard. Using Iliathan’s code, she started the engine and flipped on the equilibrators and emergency lights.

She had the name of a town, even a street and a number. Someone was very serious about their work. They’d interrogated anyone who might have seen Eles on his flight. Grudgingly, Hera had to admit they’d done a much better job than her.

Then again, she had not tortured anyone to get the information. She shuddered as the details and photos from the reports flashed before her eyes.

“Hey, what do you think you’re doing?” Iliathan raced out onto the street yelling, waving his arms in the air. His hair stuck out like the spines of a sea urchin. “You can’t take that aircar! It belongs to the company. They’ll fire me!”

“I’ll bring it back,” she shouted and smirked.
One day
. “It’s an emergency.”

“Yeah.” His hands curled into fists. She could barely hear his voice now. “I like you Hera, I really do, but that boy’s probably already roast meat or charcoal by now and I need that aircar. Are you even listening to me?” He pulled out his gun and trained it on her. “Hera, damn you!”

Eles had better not be dead
. Hera accelerated, passed by Iliathan, knowing he would not shoot her, and set the course for Aerica and the apartment of Kalaes Ster.
He had damn well better not be.

 

 

Chapter
Eleven

 

E
lei
paced the room, his stomach cramped like a stone lodged under his ribs. A bleep had woken him at the crack of dawn and Kalaes had staggered past him with his beeper in hand. He’d gone to work and Elei had dozed off for a while longer. Dawn had turned to late morning by the time he stood up, golden light spilling through the window, and a check of the apartment had shown him he was indeed alone.

He reached the wall and turned back. And again. It was too quiet. No sound from outside. No aircars passing. No voices. He stopped, his heart beating too fast, then backtracked until his back was pressed to the wall. He curled his fingers around the handle of his gun. Inside the building, he heard a woman’s cry. A whiff of
dakron
teased his nostrils.

His right eye twitched and throbbed. Everything inside the room began to glow, their outlines impossibly bright, as if burning with white fire. His legs tensed, quivering with the need to run.

Danger.

Yet no colors flashed in his eyes. He hesitated, caught between relief and fear.  Cronion hadn’t activated his heat sensitive vision, which could mean that he was wrong. That he was safe.

Though his insides wouldn’t knot like that if he was, would they? Sweat rolled down his temples, down his back and his heart pumped furiously.

A crash sounded from above.

Before he realized what he was doing, he wrenched the door open and ran out. He glanced right and left. The corridor was empty. Voices rang from above. Then the hum of aircars came from outside, so deep it sent an ache into his teeth.

See?
he told himself.
There’re sounds.
Nothing’s out of the ordinary. Stand down
.

But the corridor swam in an eerie glow and his heart hammered against his ribs. He started down the stairs — just to check, just to set his heart and damned cronion at ease.

Whispers.

He paused, his back plastered to the wall, and listened. Male voices conversed below. A faint scent of smoke tickled his nose. Elei stepped back toward the apartment and the corridor flashed with pale, washed out colors, blue, green, faint yellow, watery pink. He jerked around in a circle.

Nobody and nothing was there. No assailants, no fire, no danger. Was cronion running mad? He strode back to Kalaes’ apartment and gripped the door handle. A thundering sound filled his ears, like the whiz of helicopters and planes, gathering in a great swarm, descending on him. The stench of burnt
dakron
filled his nostrils.

A sharp ache rushed from his right eye to encompass the right side of his head. He clutched it, reeling against the wall. What in the hells was wrong?

Danger. Flee. Leave the building.

There had to be an emergency exit. He forced himself not to run and instead walked to the other end of the corridor. When he reached the emergency door, he took a deep breath and tried the handle.

Locked
. A howl was building in his chest. Swallowing it, he kicked the door, pummeled it with his fists. His head buzzed unpleasantly. He rattled the handle, desperation heavy in his stomach, then he forced himself to look at the lock more closely. The design was unfamiliar, a plain metal sheet with strange symbols engraved on its surface.

The thundering sound intensified, drilling inside his skull. The colors around him flared, blinding neon green and yellow, and he groaned, dizzy. Frantically, he ran his fingers over the lock, searching for any clue to its function.

Something clicked under his forefinger and the door opened. He stumbled out on a creaking fire escape, but the blinking colors threw off his balance. He grabbed the rusty ladder and inched down. Below him, the narrow alley stretched into emptiness. As he crawled down, snatches of sounds bored into his ears like insects. The metal ladder glowed a faint silver.

Elei dropped into the alley, landing on his feet, but his knees gave way and he fell to all fours. He laid his head on his folded arms for a moment, willing the nausea to subside, then crawled away until he could find his feet.

A glance up showed him a clear, empty sky. No planes, no helicopter. Heartbeat in his mouth, he stood and ran. The world pulsed, unbearably bright, as he raced among crumbling buildings, in claustrophobic, winding streets. Getting away. Only that mattered.

Hiding in shadows, he ran and threaded through back alleys. And the worst was that he didn’t know what exactly he was running away from, only that he was getting as far from it as possible. Golden outlines of people showed behind fences and hedges, and he hid from everyone, even from children playing on the sidewalk. Finally he fell behind a dumpster and huddled there, too winded to move.

What in the deepest hell are you doing?
He curled into a ball.
You’ve slept too little, you’re tired and you let a parasite control you like a puppet. You had it under control until the shooting. You can’t run from everything. You can’t run away from quiet. Since when is quiet suspect?

He unfolded his legs, leaned back and breathed deeply, starting to wonder where he was. The light was high, the shadows short. He just sat there, feeling like he’d felt all those years ago, when Albi had died and he’d wandered the streets of Alecto for the first time.

Lost.

He remembered the monks of the factory convent who had taken him in. Faceless, nameless, a mass of masks and hooded heads. Isolation. Quiet. But no complaints, even though after Albi’s warmth and affection it had felt at first like living encased in a block of ice. He’d had food and work and learning, and although talking and laughing had been discouraged, the monks had been the reason he’d survived. No orphanages on Ost. No charity for the ones marked with telmion and other diseases. He’d been lucky.

And then Pelia had come along, looking for a driver, and he’d looked up and right into her smiling face. She’d taken him with her.
A stray
. He hadn’t known she’d done it before. That it had been her habit.
Her hobby
.

He sighed, not sure why he was angry. She’d taken him in and it had been an act of kindness. Nothing wrong with kindness. But now he thought he might have preferred to find out it had been something different. He struggled to pinpoint the concept he was looking for. Affection, perhaps. Connection. What kept families together. What gave birth to smiles.

His eyes burned. Affection or kindness, she’d been his family. Now she was dead, like Albi before, and he was again alone.

The light changed and the shadows lengthened. What time was it? Elei’s leg muscles protested when he pushed himself to his feet. Kalaes would think him mad for bolting like that, without a reason.
And he’s probably right.

Maera would be worried, too. A sudden flash of fear went through him. What if something had happened to them?

Yeah, add paranoia on top of ordinary madness
. Yet, he couldn’t shake off the sting of fear the thought carried. He started to run. When he received curious stares, he pulled on his hood and slowed down. He jogged in the general direction he remembered coming from. He passed decaying buildings crowded with squatters, kids huddling under low walls to roll
ama
cigarettes, and cats prowling street corners. After a while, he realized he was lost, unable to even remember Kalaes’ street name, until he finally came into the main avenue.

While waiting to catch his breath, he checked the avenue for anything suspicious but nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary. He finally spotted Kalaes’ building and strolled toward it as casually as he could, hands in his pockets, his hood drawn down over his face. There was no sign of anything unusual, no crowds gawking, no police helicopters. How was he going to explain why he’d run away like that? Kalaes might not even let him inside again. It wasn’t as if he owed Elei anything.

Closer up, he stiffened. Thin smoke drifted from an open second floor window. Had the façade been streaked with black the previous day? He frowned but figured that it was, after all, an old building, full of stains and mold. When he reached the entrance, he saw no movement inside and nobody stood at the door or the stairs.

The street was busy, though; people moved around him, vehicles passed, a dog barked on a corner. His flight already felt like a bad dream. He pushed the door open and entered.

Burnt
dakron
, burnt flesh. His nostrils twitched and his stomach tried to climb up his throat. He ran up the stairs. At the first landing, he stopped in his tracks, breath knocked out of his lungs, not understanding what he was seeing.

Blackened walls and floor, chipped ceiling. All windows were broken, pools of glass shards before each one. A body sprawled in the corridor, near an open apartment door. His gut clenched and he doubled over.
Kalaes? Maera?

Oh, gods no, please don’t do this.

He wiped at his eyes and forced himself to straighten, to walk on, to check the corpse. The smell of cooked flesh turned his stomach. The corridor tilted and he steadied himself with a hand on the wall. The body was charred. The face was unrecognizable. His eyes finally registered pieces of a pink robe.

The neighbor. What was her name? Zela. Zea. Whatever. Something had exploded close to her, probably an incendiary grenade falling through the window.

Not Kalaes. Not Maera.

Elei stood there, breathing heavily, his relief so profound his knees threatened to give out. He left the corpse and climbed the second flight of stairs, his Rasmus gripped in both hands. The door to Kalaes’ apartment stood ajar. If Elei hadn’t seen the body downstairs, he might have thought he’d just left it that way on his way out. Heat emanated from inside. He raised the Rasmus and flipped the safety off.

Gods, please don’t let either of them be dead.

No sound, no movement. No flare of colors. Cronion remained still inside him.
Odd
. Elei looked in.
Burnt. All burnt
. Warmth pulsed off the walls and floor. The furniture had fallen in charred heaps, the walls were black and the floor was covered in soot.
Hells
. Rocket-propelled fire grenades, highly explosive. He’d seen them used before, in houses razed by the police on Ost.  

Whoever they were, they’d made sure nobody inside would survive. If he hadn’t left, he’d have stood no chance of making it out alive.

He steeled himself and entered, his boots crunching on pieces of furniture. He had to make sure Kalaes and Maera hadn’t been there. Had to look. Silent as a ghost, he moved from room to room, scanning every surface.

No other body. It didn’t mean much, but it meant something. It meant there was a chance Kalaes and Maera hadn’t been there when this had happened. That they’d survived.

Unless they had known this would happen. What if they’d been the ones behind this? He hardly knew them. What if they’d sold him out?

Exhausted, he stumbled into the bedroom and slid down the wall, curled into a tight ball and tried not to think.

Yet the thought couldn’t be chased away, or the fact that someone was after him, and they weren’t the question-asking kind. 

BOOK: Elei's Chronicles (Books 1-3)
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