Severing Sanguine: A Companion Book to The Fallocaust Series Book 2 (37 page)

Silas was right… I did hate math. I actually hated everything there was to do with math. I didn’t understand anything more complex than what the X symbol did, the one I had learned on the calculator as a kid, and even then I didn’t understand why carrying numbers made everything suddenly work. It was stupid.

“Why don’t you just outlaw this?” I said bitterly as I dropped the lead pencil onto my work book. “You hate it; you say all of my brothers except for the science chimeras and intelligence ones can’t do it. So just make it illegal already.”

Silas laughed, his face beaming with a smile that seemed to come from Puck himself. He picked up the pencil and started filling out the question I had been stuck on, upside-down. I knew he wasn’t purposely being smug but it still made me give him a flat look.

“It wouldn’t be the first time I made something I hated illegal,” Silas replied. Then he pointed to a nine he had written down. “See… twenty-three times fifteen… you put the one over the three…”

“Long division is stupid… when do I need to long divide in life?” I muttered, but I tried to follow the steps.

Silas ignored me. “So then we now turn the two into a three… times that by five and we have fifteen.”

I grunted. Silas carried on, still holding his stupid smile. “On the second row we times the one by twenty-three and with our two rows what do we do?”

I sighed and rested my cheek onto my hand. “We plus it.”

“We add it together, that’s right… now I know you can add so what is one hundred and fifteen times two hundred and thirty?”

My eyes looked at the numbers and I took the pencil from him. This wasn’t as hard as the other problems in the workbook so I took a moment to do the math on my fingers and started writing down numbers.

“Three hundred and forty-five,” I said out loud, then looked at King Silas to see if I was right or not.

I disliked admitting it but there was a flicker of pride welled inside of my chest when Silas nodded his approval. “Correct! See? Long division isn’t hard. The other stuff is complicated but we don’t really teach trigonometry or any of that unless you’re taking the course at the college. So in a way you are lucky. I haven’t made math illegal but the complicated stuff isn’t in the school system. There
is
really no need for it.”

I guess that was better than nothing. “So you say that you made illegal certain things you didn’t like…” I glanced up and visibly flinched when Kinny appeared beside me. I was in the living room with Silas and though it was only the three of us Kinny was extremely quiet. He appeared beside you at random moments seemingly out of nowhere. It still gave me a start though he always looked apologetic when he did.

Kinny put a bowl of chips down beside my workbook which I immediately dug into. Silas grabbed one and ate it politely but I still couldn’t help cramming them into my mouth.

The king chuckled, as if the answer amused him and, sure enough, it was a rather amusing answer. “Before the Fallocaust… Disney started churning out horrible sequel after horrible sequel of some of the world’s most beloved movies. A selfish cash grab. The Little Mermaid, Tarzan, The Hunchback of Notre Dame… almost everything. Horrible low budget movies with barely any thought put into it. The Lion King was even worse… oh don’t get me started on that horrible sequel.” Silas took another chip and nibbled off a bite. “But since they made so many I have never found all of them of course, and I don’t… per se,
punish
my people for watching them. I just have a huge bounty of forty dollars per movie to encourage people to hand them over to the authorities. I wish to not taint a nice Disney legacy so… we burn them after we get them. I have some elites who’ve gotten rich finding boxes and boxes of these movies in the greywastes. I enjoyed the smell of boiling plastic when I light them on fire.”

“That’s a lot of money,” I said trying to finish the last problem in my work sheet. It was long division again but I think I could do it since I had an example of one right there. “All of you have so much money.”

“You do too,” Silas responded. I gave him a skeptical look and at that he reached into his pocket and handed me a card. “We just put the system in about ten years ago. Our first digital way of paying for items, just like they had before the Fallocaust. If you give this card to anyone in Skyfall they’ll charge it to us at a discount and give you the item.”

My mouth twitched as I took the strange, shiny black piece of plastic. I glanced at it and saw raised numbers and letters in gold writing.

Sanguine Sasha Dekker. Over the last week I had learned my middle name was Sasha like most of the second generation. King Silas says we were named after a friend of his before he ended the world. I wondered if he had killed him but I hadn’t asked.

“I don’t go out though…” I said in a subdued voice. I looked back down and wrote a number I thought was right.

Silas waited until I was done my math problem before he spoke. “Would you like to go outside?”

I shook my head no. Even the light that sometimes streamed into the dark apartment, mostly when the kitten was playing with the curtains or he found a fly trying to get outside, made me uncomfortable.

“You know you’ll have to go out sometime, lovely boy,” Silas said but still I shook my head. I was just starting to get used to being in the living room without my mind constantly having me on guard. Outside there were… too many people, too much light, and too much noise.

I tried to explain this to him, and though I was mumbling and tripping over my words he seemed to understand what I was saying. He could hear really well. He had the enhancements I had learned were unique solely to chimeras. My sharp eyesight plus night bright… well, night vision as they called it, plus my hearing. All of these had come from my genetic engineering.

“Well, you’ll have to go outside to receive a gift I was able to get for you,” Silas said and at this I looked up at him.

I gave him a curious look. By now I was used to his bribes, usually said in a singy voice, with every word coming out of his mouth like it was coated in glitter.

I wrote down the last number in my math work and handed him the paper. “You can’t bribe me to do everything…” I said with a frown. “I’m not a cat where you can shake a treat bag and I come running.”

“And how else do I get you to do things?” Silas smirked, his eyes scanning my work before he took a red pen that he had tucked behind his ear. “Asking doesn’t wield any results. How am I supposed to coax you into your family?”

I thought for a second as he graded my paper. I grabbed another chip and was proud of myself that I had left some in the bowl while I had this conversation. I hadn’t eaten and eaten until it was all gone.

“Let me do it on my own?”

Silas snorted and I gave him an angry glare. He caught it and smiled at me. Then with a wave of his hand he said, “If I let you do it at your pace you would still be hiding under that bed and I fully believe we would be celebrating your seventieth birthday under there too. Why can’t we just make it a mutual thing? If you promise not to shoot me down every time I ask you to make a step, we can meet in the middle.”

“I don’t like outside,” I said flatly. “There is nothing for me out there but people who can hurt me, and activity, noise, and busy things that I dislike. Tell me what awaits me outside that is so important I see? I’ve seen the sun; I’ve seen what arians look like. No thanks.”

“You can see Stadium!” Kinny suddenly said. He was behind Silas with a statue of an Eskimo man on his lap. He was polishing it with a rag. “That would be exciting!”

“Stadium?” I asked and looked to gauge Silas’s reaction. He made no facial expression though he just continued grading my paper. “What’s Stadium?”

Silas was using the red marker a lot but I ignored that. “Stadium is a way that the royal family makes money, plus gets rid of condemned criminals,” he explained. “Every Saturday we bring out that week’s convicts who have been convicted and sentenced to death. Rapists, murderers, terrorists, you know, bad people. We put them in front of Nero and give them a knife or some small weapon and Nero with nothing. If the convict kills Nero we set him free, though odds are the crowd is treated to a gladiator-type fight to the death which is amusing. We also have entertainment usually from your brothers. We bring out the lions and cougars, wolves and other pre-Fallocaust animals to do tricks, and we have contests between the chimeras to show off their strength or intelligence. We will also show off any new babies. It’s a wonderful show and promotes community and culture. It also helps remind the Skyfallers that the Dekker family is in charge and just as powerful as they think.”

Condemned criminals? Though this Stadium thing piqued my interest the part about bringing out the convicts churned my gut. I had a question on my lips, one I wanted to ask so badly it seemed to coat my mouth in embers… but I couldn’t form the words. I couldn’t ask…

So I looked down at the work book, and stared at it. Pursing my lips and forcing down the question that was searing my insides.

My saviour came in the form of a knock on the door. A light knock so I knew it must either be Garrett or Elish. With a jump in my heart I got up to run to my bedroom but paused when Silas cleared his throat.

To my surprise he pointed to a corner of the living room with no lamps or any light near it. I looked over and realized it was a large structure covered in blankets, with a small dark hole leading inside.

“Garrett and I made that for you last night, love. It’s safe and protected. Hide in there not under that bed. You’ll destroy your back, and this way you can watch who comes and goes,” Silas said rising to his feet. He gave Kinny a nod to answer the door.

I gave Silas a suspicious look, but I had been here for almost two weeks now and not once did he make a move to harm me. So I quickly walked to the little homemade cave and ducked inside.

I was content to see that inside was a foamy mattress and lots of pillows and blankets. I crouched down at the back of the den (an old cage it looked like but I wasn’t offended by that) making myself as out-of-sight as I could and watched the sengil answer the door.

It was Elish. I disliked Elish because of his cold, patronizing voice but he was predictable when it came to his movements, voice, and personality. He might be a jerk but he was the same jerk every time he came so I was okay with that.

I didn’t move though, but I managed to swallow down the growl that was vibrating in my throat.

Then a little boy appeared in the door way too. He looked to be about seven or eight with thick curly blond hair and as he looked around I noticed he had orange eyes as well. I had been told about the youngest chimera in the family. His name was Drakonius, or Drake for short.

As Elish and Silas started making conversation I saw Drake’s eyes sweep the room. Though as soon as they fixed on my new den he paused and suddenly grinned.

“Play fort!” Drake suddenly exclaimed, and at full speed he started running at me.

I bristled and immediately tensed as the boy started speeding towards me like a little blond freight train, and I wasn’t the only one. Elish and Silas both turned around at the same time, yelling an enthusiastic NO! in unison.

But as the little boy with a huge smile peeled towards me, I mentally berated myself and forced down the growl. In a split second I reversed my thinking and destroyed the part of my mind that felt threatened. Instead I shifted away from the entrance of the cave to give him room.

Drake stopped, Silas and Elish still running towards him, and when he saw me… to my surprise, he grinned and poked his head in.

“HI!” he said in a cheerful voice.

“Hello,” I said back. The boy squealed, though as he lifted a little boot to come into my cave two sets of hands grabbed him and pulled him back. The shock of the suddenness of the grab making Drake scream in fright.

Elish yanked Drake back, and to my anger he gave the crying child a hard smack upside the head. Drake started wailing.

And I started to growl.

“Stop your pathetic whining. I told you beforehand to stay with me while we see the king!” Elish snapped. “You can wait outside the door now and think about why you decided to disobey a direct order.”

“Fuckface!” Drake suddenly screamed and at that Elish dealt him a harder smack.

As Drake’s face crumpled and went red, I felt a blackness decent on my vision. A dark curtain that disrupted the normal impulses of my brain like I had been cloaked in a veil. In my radiating anger at Elish hitting Drake I heard Crow in my mind.

‘Attack. Attack. Attack.’

“I can’t! I can’t attack him!”

“ATTACK!”
Crow demanded. He started saying it again and again in my head and when I shook my head his voice only got louder and more painful.

I clenched my teeth and closed my eyes, Crow still screaming inside of my head.

Screaming and demanding. I had to do it. I had to go it.

‘Attack. Attack. Attack! Protect Drake! You didn’t protect the little boys. FUCKING COWARD!’

‘ATTACK! ATTACK! ATTACK!’

I jumped out of the den and lunged at Elish, tumbling with him to the floor. Elish swore as he landed hard, and made the motion to throw me off of him but I was too quick. Without hesitation the man who ruled the darkness in my mind opened my mouth and sunk my teeth into Elish’s throat, feeling the taste of chimera blood mixed in with my own saliva.