Hadrian's Colony: Elanus: Interlude

 Notes: Time for some togetherness, don't you think?

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Elanus: Interlude

***

Interlude: Elanus

 

Photo by Glen Carrie

When Elanus gave himself the time to think about finding Kieron, which wasn’t very often as he committed himself to repairing Catie and fabricating parts and healing his leg with the help of their renewed Regen, he tended to think in very vague terms. He recognized that this was unusual for him—Elanus delighted in specificity, that was part of what made him the genius engineer and businessman he was. He liked to investigate things, he enjoyed breaking them down into their component parts so he could put them back together again, he liked complexity.

He didn’t like any of that when it came to his fiancé.

Anyone born smarter than was good for them knew that creativity was just as much of a curse as it was a blessing. Elanus didn’t have to meditate on the fact that Kieron was missing to come up with a hundred different ways he might be dead right now. This godawful, star-cursed, pestilent place ensured that nothing Elanus thought of was out of the realm of possibility.

Capture and torture? Check.

Being eaten alive by a reptilian? Check.

Becoming injured and dying of a fierce infection? Check.

The list went on and on, and the only way to keep going in the face of it was through rigid mental control. Kieron focused all his creativity toward topping off Catie’s power, recreating her missing parts as best they could, and fixing himself. He also made half a dozen different types of weapons, because why the hell not? When they were both as good as they could be, Elanus told Catie to start with expanding the reach of her communications array—the new one wasn’t as good as the old one, and they were down half their heating coils now, but it was way better than nothing—to see what she detected.

He didn’t honestly expect a lot. Between the storms and the inhospitable landscape, Elanus was pretty sure they were going to come up empty. And yet, his girl managed to surprise him.

“I hearrr…a beat.”

“A beat. What kind of beat?”

“It’s an SOS, Daddeee. It sounnnds like this.” She played the sound over her speaker and Elanus froze as he heard the Morse code as clear as his daughter’s own voice.

“Where is it coming from?”

“Here.” She projected the image onto her viewscreen, including estimated landmarks indicating the creche and basic geological features. The SOS was coming from what looked like some sort of rugged—oh, what were those things called, big and flat-topped and—

“The plateau?” He inspected it, wondering if that was where the people who’d fired on Catie had set up their base. If so, flying there was going to be asking for trouble.

That said, it wasn’t like he had a choice. They were going to get Kieron and Blobby back whether they had to shoot their way in or not.

“Yes, Daddeee.”

“Are you detecting any other electronic signals from there?”

“No…but…” Catie’s pause was worrying. “I am detectinnng some seismic disturbancesss.”

“Like rocks falling?”

“Perhaps.”

Well, that was clear as mud. It wasn’t Catie’s fault, though. “Thanks, honey.” Elanus leaned back in his chair and thought for a minute. The SOS was almost certainly Kieron, or rather Blobby—there was no reason for the local population of assholes to put a message like that out even if they knew it, and Elanus was certain that Kieron was protecting them on his end as much as possible. He wouldn’t have Blobby send up a signal if it meant pulling them into danger along with him, the idiot.

There was only one thing to do. “Let’s take a look, then. Carefully, though,” Elanus emphasized. “I want your skin on the whole time, full shielding from visual and electronic surveillance. We can’t be spotted, Catie.”

“I know, Daddeee.” She was quiet for a moment. “Do you rrreally think it’s Kieeeeron?”

“There’s only one way to find out,” he said, and strapped himself in as Catie began to initialize her engines. This wasn’t quite their first test flight, but the plateau was a good thirty miles away, farther than he’d asked her to go before. If things got hairy, he needed to make sure he didn’t break another stupid bone.

But Catie soothed his fears as she lifted smoothly into the air despite the increasing wind and rain, then set in on a course toward the plateau. Elanus tried to control his reactions, but he couldn’t seem to stop his heart from pounding harder at the thought that they might be heading toward Kieron now. He might be only minutes away from finding the love of his life and the little bot he knew Kieron would never abandon. He might also have a hell of a firefight on his hands soon, but Elanus was confident that Catie’s passive defenses would protect them for now.

It was dark out from the storm, and despite his better judgement Elanus asked for a focused light to illuminate the plateau in the viewscreen as they got closer to the signal. It was risky, but it didn’t take a genius to realize that this plateau was actually a terrible place for a base. The terrain was unstable, the canyons were narrow, and—

“What in the hell is that?” A creature like he’d never seen before was trundling along one of the ridges, its body made from what looked like interconnected, antique shields and its head like a farming combine. It was moving away from them with intent, and Elanus shouted before he consciously registered what he was seeing. “Fire on it, Catie!”

She loosed one of her slender javelin rounds, and it penetrated the creature’s tough hide and sent it careening down the cliff, but Elanus didn’t care. He was already on his feet, ignoring the ache in his leg from the still-healing bone as he moved toward the hatch. “Catie—”

The door opened before he could say anything else, and Catie maneuvered dangerously close to the ledge so that Elanus could reach out and gather the mirage in front of him into his arms.

It was Kieron. Bloody, bruised, looking like he was inches away from death and staggering along the top of a fucking plateau in the middle of nowhere, fuck, what had happened to him? A thousand questions welled up behind Elanus’s teeth, but all he could say was, “Kieron? Blobby? Baby, are you okay?” He pulled back from his hold on his fiancé just far enough to look into his battered face. “Kieron, Kieron, sweetheart, tell me what I can do. Talk to me, tell me anything, please.”

Kieron looked at him, really finally looked, and the fear in his expression melted into the starkest combination of anguish and relief that Elanus had ever seen. He wailed, rough and mindless, wrapped his arms around Elanus’s waist, and dropped like a stone.

Elanus caught him, held him fast, and tucked him gently against his chest. It felt like his heart had come to life again, like he could take a full breath after far too long being squeezed silent. “It’s okay,” he murmured. “It’s going to be okay, I’m here. We’re here, we’ve got you.” Catie was moving, chattering to him and Kieron and Blobby as she found them somewhere more defensible to settle in, but all Elanus could hear was Kieron’s breaths, wet and pained against his chest, and so very, very precious.

He had Kieron and Blobby back again. Everything else could wait.

 

Lord of Unkindness Chapter Thirty-Eight

 Notes: A bit of fallout from our climax, my darlins. Let's get some closure!

Title: Lord of Unkindness Chapter Thirty-Eight

***

Chapter Thirty-Eight

 

 

Someone is touching him. Soft fingertips skate across his chest, lingering on his collarbone and skimming his shoulder before trailing down his arm as slow and sweet as drips of honey. Those fingers interweave with his, and a warm voice close to his ear says, “I can tell you’re waking up. That’s good. Can you feel my hand?”

“Mmhmm,” Ciro hums, lost in the moment.

“That’s so good, baby. I was worried there for a while.”

Worried? Why would Angelo be worried?

Wait. Angelo? What…how were they…

Memories pour back into Ciro’s mind, bursting through his languor like breaking a dam and flooding his brain. He gasps and his eyes fly open as he tries to sit up.

He can’t. He’s got all the muscle tone of a drunken earthworm right now, and the second he even approaches upright his head starts spinning. “Whoa, slow down, slow down,” Angelo says, easing Ciro onto his back again. “You’ve got a hell of a case of magic whiplash, Ciro. It’s going to take a while to get back to normal.”

Normal…Ciro thinks he’s forgotten what normal actually is. Before this, he would have said normal was numb fingertips and loneliness, pushing most of his magic away and wondering how long he’d have before he started to lose his mind. Before that, normal was a healthy body and a broken heart, a mind that was as good as owned and operated by his father. Now he can feel his body, all of it, and his magic…one of his familiars is sitting on Angelo’s shoulder. He can’t see any others, but he can feel his magic brimming inside of him like it never has before, a hurricane of power barely kept at bay. He needs to let more of them out.

Maybe not in kaiju form this time, though.

Angelo grabs a bottle of water off the side table with his free hand and holds it up to Ciro’s lips. “Here,” he says. “You must be parched.”

He is, come to think of it. That informs his first question. “How long have I been under?” he asks hoarsely after his first few sips.

“Two days.”

Two…days? Shit. “Are you okay?”

Angelo smiles. He looks so gorgeous when he smiles, and this is the first time in too long where the expression is completely unburdened by the metric ton of shit Ciro has thrown at him. His chin is stubbly, dark hair roughening his golden brown skin, and his eyes are tired, but he’s happy. He’s so clearly happy that the top layers of worry building up in Ciro slough away in an instant. “I’m fine,” he says. “Although I could do with less sitting by your bedside while you recover from something that could kill you.” Then he leans in and presses a kiss to Ciro’s cheek. Ciro turns his head and makes it a kiss on the lips after a moment, and their conversation is derailed by the sheer joy of pulling Angelo in close, opening his mouth so he can taste him better, the heat he always feels around this gorgeous man building so fast—

“Mm, wait,” Angelo says, pulling away after a few more moments. “Wait, we should talk first.”

“Talk about what?”

Angelo looks a little sheepish. “Well, there’s actually a lot. What, ah, what do you remember?”

Too much. Ciro acknowledges that a little of his eagerness to lose himself in his lover came from not wanting to discuss the fact that his uber-familiar appears to have eaten his father, but there’s really no putting it off at this point. “My dad is dead, isn’t he?”

“As best I can tell,” Angelo agrees. “His body is gone. I have no idea where it went, honestly, and I’m not sure we want to experiment and find out exactly what happens when a familiar eats a person. It’s probably the same as when familiars eat each other, so in all likelihood he’s been broken down into his atomic components and…repurposed.”

Ciro feels vaguely sick. “Is he inside me? Is that what I’m feeling, this…” He points at his chest and the storm he feels brewing in its depths.

Angelo shakes his head. “You got a boost in magic, that’s all. It might dissipate over time, or it might be a permanent increase. There’s no way to know for sure.”

Ciro has his father’s magic now. The sick feeling stays, but it’s joined by a sense of righteousness he can’t quite hide. That fucker, all his threats and bullying, all the shit he did, and all he came to in the end was making his son more powerful than he’d ever been. If Victor had a soul, hopefully it was burning in hell, but Ciro thought he could get used to having his father’s magic on his side. “Okay.”

Angelo looks a bit skeptical. “Okay? Really?”

“Yes.”

“I thought you’d be more upset, honestly.”

Ciro gives him a half-smile. “The best vengeance is living well.” Speaking of that… “Did Nephele survive?”

Angelo sighs. “She’s alive, but she lost a lot of blood. Your family doctors came thanks to a call from one of your cousins, but they’re not sure she’ll ever wake up. She’s in the same suite as your Uncle Magnus at the moment.”

His uncle…who is also in what was likely a permanent coma, thanks to Ciro. He turns his head to stare straight up at the ceiling for a moment. “Does it make me a bad person that I’m not sad? I didn’t want her to be mauled to death, but. I don’t want to have to deal with her, either.”

“That seems totally appropriate to me, considering the fact that she clearly thought you were her property. That’s not love, that’s obsession,” Angelo says, anger curling around the edges of his voice. “Not to mention what she did to Annette, and Maria, and who knows how many more people because she was ordered to or because she got bored. Nephele was a very sick person who was unfortunately also very powerful, and those can be the hardest people to help.”

Ciro tucks his conflicted feelings away and nods. “But Maria is okay?”

“Oh, she’s fine,” Angelo confirms. “She’s got a few questions about the tablet in the hall, though. Apparently her luck drew her to it, and once she got there Richard was unable to touch her no matter how hard he tried.”

Ciro smiles. Magic worked in mysterious ways sometimes. “And Richard?”

“Oh, Chiffon took care of him and his kitty.”

Hang on… “Chiffon? How?”

Angelo grins. “You’re not the only one who ended up having a big meal during that fight. Chiffon will probably be in a torpor for days.”

Ciro stares at him. “What is Chiffon?”

He pats Ciro’s shoulder. “Better you don’t ask, sweetheart. Now, let’s get you cleaned up. Your family—what’s left of it—wants to meet with you, and we need to review the story you’re going to be telling the cops.”

Ciro is starting to feel left behind. “What cops?”

“Baby, you blew the roof off this place both figuratively and literally,” Angelo says. “That requires some answers. Lucky for you, your cousin has a story ready to go.”

It would have to be a good one to get them out of this without being arrested for domestic terrorism, but the way things are going right now, Ciro’s willing to bet on them.

 

Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Seventeen, Part Two

 Notes: Who wants more peril! Peril, get your mortal peril here! But--there's a light at the end of this tunnel, my darlins.

Title: Hadrian's Colony: Chapter Seventeen, Part Two

***

Chapter Seventeen, Part Two

 

Picture by Joe Shields

It took Kieron a moment, in the dimness, to make out the tunneler against the darkness of rock and shadow. It wasn’t as big as the other one, not nearly; this was less than half the size of the first, and that was bad because it was, apparently, much better suited to climbing. At the moment, however, it was on the other side of the slender canyon. That was about ten feet of separation that Kieron was very grateful for right now.

Move on, he murmured silently to himself. Just move on. You sensed the vibration of the rain, you sensed the crack of the thunder. You can’t see us. He watched its massive shovel-like protrusions dig into the rock around it, crunching and cracking it like it was nothing. Please, fucking move on.

Bobby tapped out a message. [Do you want me to stop pinging?]

Oh shit, he’d been sending out a signal all this time? “Yes,” Kieron tapped back. He’d forgotten about that…and that might be the thing that had guided whatever ship this was to them. The General’s people were looking for their rogues—Kieron vaguely hoped that the fact that they were still searching, this far from the closest edge of the plateau to their home base, meant they’d missed Carlisle and the rotten old husk she kept faith with.

Or maybe they were retaken, and she’s being tortured right now while he gets medical care. Or maybe they were eaten by a fucking tunneler, and the ship did pick up on your signal, and it would have left you alone if you hadn’t let Bobby go at it for so long.

It was too late for regrets. Kieron tucked Bobby under his free arm and hunkered down a bit closer to the rock. They just had to wait it out. As long as it didn’t fly right over the top of them, the odds of the ship finding them were low, even with their scanners—it was too wet and cold out for infrared to do much for them. As soon as the ship gave up, they could climb back up to the top of the ridge, away from the tunneler, and move on. Then they could—

Crunch—SMASH! Kieron bolted upright, turning to stare at the tunneler. Or rather, at where the tunneler had been. It wasn’t there anymore, but it took less than a second to realize where it had gone when the rock they were clinging to shuddered.

“Fuck,” Kieron whispered. “It jumped.” Or it might have just fallen from one side of the canyon to the other, if its body was long enough. “Fuck, fuck.” The tunneler wasn’t visible yet, but Kieron knew it was climbing up toward them. They couldn’t stay here.

But they couldn’t get back up on top of the ridge, either. They might be faster than a tunneler—and that was a big if, on the slippery rock—but they couldn’t outrun a ship. If they saw them, if they opened fire…maybe they could slide sideways, or down the other side to get away from the tunneler. But if it came after them, especially once they were downhill from it, there’d be no escape.

[Papa, it’s okay. I can help.]

Kieron blinked, only just realizing he’d been on the verge of hyperventilating. Stars, how could he be so exhausted and so keyed up at the same time? “What do you mean, Bobby?”

[I can move the tunneler.] Bobby pulled out of Kieron’s hold and onto the rock, wiggling nimbly. [I can make it chase me!]

Kieron stared at the little bot, aghast. “Absolutely not!”

[I think it will work.]

“We’re not separating.” After a second, Kieron amended, “Unless I’m stuck and it’s the only way for you to survive.”

[No!]

“Yes.” Fuck it, they were going to have to run for it. Kieron gathered the rope in his fist and began to climb back up to the ridge, moving even faster once he made out the edge of those iron-dark mandibles appear below them. “Shit, let’s go.” He was almost at the top when the brilliant yellow of a search light, bright and ominous, shot overhead. “Shit!”

[Plan B, Papa.] Bobby moved a little farther down the rock wall.

“Bobby, wait—”

But it was too late. Kieron watched as a little piece of the bot rolled downhill, bouncing merrily, until it was at the same level as the tunneler.

Then it exploded.

It wasn’t a big explosion, technically speaking. Kieron only perceived it as big because he’d been in near-silence for so long now, but it seemed like an enormous crack rent the air as the bot-bomb went off. The tunneler, which had made it a few feet closer to them, didn’t like it either—it reeled backward, mouthparts snapping as it tried to figure out why it was under fire. It was, Kieron had to admit, a good distraction.

Now if only they could capitalize on it. “Come on,” he said, reaching a hand up toward the top of the ridge. All he needed to do was unloop the rope, and they could start their scramble. “We’re going sideways, okay? We just need to—”

[It’s coming back!]

Damn it, the tunneler was coming back. Kieron had hoped it might drop off completely, but it had apparently decided to double-down on known prey rather than waste time on an enemy it couldn’t find. Before Kieron could respond, Bobby sent another piece of himself toward the creature. The explosion was percussive, but the tunneler wasn’t as distracted this time.

[I need to make a bigger bomb.]

“You’ll run out of parts,” Kieron argued. The tunneler was moving again. They’d never be able to outpace it going sideways.

Screw it. He picked Bobby up, hauled them up onto the ridge, and swung the rope around his neck. “We’re running.”

Easier said than done. Even with adrenaline rushing through him once more, Kieron was unsteady on his feet. It had been hours since he’d drunk or eaten anything, longer since he’d slept. Every ache and pain, every fracture, every effort he’d laid out over however many hours he’d been held by the General was catching up to him now. He got ten feet, stumbled, and collapsed down onto one knee. He saw the searchlight scanning in the distance and hoped, hoped, hoped it didn’t turn their way.

Scuttle-scuttle-scuttle… The tunneler was coming. Bobby released another microbomb, but it barely made the creature pause.

The searchlight suddenly flooded them. Kieron blinked against tears, the light far too dazzling. He needed to run but it was all he could do not to fall, and the tunneler was coming closer, and if it was a choice between being eaten, being taken captive once more, and falling to his death he genuinely wasn’t sure what he preferred right now, he was so tired and he had done everything so wrong and he was never going to see Elanus or Catie again—

A whip-thrum shot past him, and the tunneler screeched. Whatever had hit it, it did a lot more damage than Bobby; Kieron could hear the creature slide down the slope and over the edge, landing with a distant clatter. Bobby crouched beneath him, clinging to his leg, so no throwing himself off the ridge then.

The light was so close it was blinding now. He could hear the ship’s engine, hear the hum of its hatch door opening, hear the person inside it yell, “Kieron? Blobby?”

…Elanus?

And then the ship was close enough to swallow them up, warm arms reaching out to draw them inside, and Kieron was definitely in a dream, because the person holding them was Elanus, and Catie was shrilling with joy, and Kieron could finally let himself go and just…

Fall.