Daniel Kago lu’Rizek collapsed into a patio chair, his bright, nova-like hazel eyes gazing wearily out past Palma de Mallorca’s sparkling beaches, at the darkening Mediterranean Sea just south of Spain.
Nothing on his homeworld could have prepared him for this place. Not its majesty, nor its complexity, nor the brilliance of the Terran sun reflected on its waters. That little star had been hard on his brass-toned Refvrish skin, rendering it a browner hue than usual. It worked to his benefit, though, since he had needed less makeup than usual to hide his alien skin tone. Nevertheless, he found himself welcoming nightfall more than usual, here on one of his favorite seas.
On a normal day he was a marine biologist, monitoring Earth’s microbial sea life for signs of extraterrestrial interference—Ilaysian or otherwise. He was one of only a few individuals doing the job, and by far the most readily mobile, so he covered the entire planet, and had supply stations on every continent. Some were small, like the apartment in Miami where he kept all his scuba gear. Some were larger, such as a cabin deep in the Yukon Territory. This one was his second in this part of the world, since he’d purchased his old site in Heraklion, Greece for his wife, Samra, after he’d fallen in love with all things Mediterranean.
It was a large, lively, and diverse part of the world, but it had never been the sort of place where bad things happened to his people. Then, three days ago, a pair of Spanish agents for ETHICS had gone missing. The company sent Daniel and Algaeflame, the athletic and multi-talented agents who had handled the Nightmare case: a jack-of-many-trades, and his alien partner, one of only a handful of its kind ever to leave their distant homeworld. It helped that Daniel already had a place to stay here, and was familiar with the area.
Julie, his supervisor, had come to him with the Zirol case a few months ago, but he ended up leaving the bulk of it to his wife and the team, and Julie was more than happy to have Sam on board. Daniel suspected she’d been hoping for it. The work that needed to be done was too dangerous for him to handle without someone like Sam, and too emotionally charged for him to handle in his usual blunt and analytical way. After all, Bernard had hated working with him before—hated it! The boy had found him tiresome and at times appalling, and that was unlikely to have changed. Sam would surely have the softer hand and social aptitude necessary for this situation.
Instead, for the past two days, Daniel had worked with a fellow agent, questioning the locals, human and Ryozae alike, looking for any scrap of information they could dig up on whether Zirol might have been involved in the recent disappearance. So farm they hadn’t caught even a whiff of Zirol, the missing agents, or any sign of anyone else being involved, and they were beginning to suspect that it might indeed have been him.
Most agents were more than capable of working two straight days without sleep, but this . . . this was exhausting. They had to move fast, and Daniel had terrible people skills. He leaned heavily on the other agent to do all the talking. That agent, Rex, was still out there now, conducting a few more interviews. They might already be too late. There was always a chance, though, so they had to try. He hoped Rex would remember to record all the data he’d asked for.
Hunting Nightmare and Dark in the ‘80s had been like hunting a pair of ghosts. Zirol, as Daniel had been warned, was much harder to pin down. A hunter by birth and trade. It was widely assumed he’d be human, but they didn’t have a single lead on his appearance. Some agents believed that he might even have more than one form. If Zirol was an Immortal—Friinirran-Osa, Sam had called him, or “Grand Elder”—then it was reasonable to assume he’d had plenty of time to acquire a stockpile.
Rex was late. Daniel hoped that was a good sign. He stood and walked inside to pour himself a drink, reaching for the first bottle in sight: gin. Some said he had no sense of taste, but he thought of himself as uncomplicated. The drink wasn’t going to do much, but it would take the edge off the anxiety that had built up over the past 48 hours, though the course of so many human interactions.
The flat was as simple as his taste in alcohol: one bedroom, one bath, a few food items he and Rex had purchased, and whatever non-perishable ingredients he had cooked with the last time he’d been here. Al, as he called his unusual partner, had gone to bed an hour ago. As mobile as he was, he’d been busier than either Rex or Daniel, and staying hidden meant expending so much energy, and gaining back very little of it.
Halfway back to the bedroom, Daniel stepped into the kitchen, idly looking for something to eat.
As he reached for the refrigerator, however, a strong hand grabbed him from behind, forcing something into his mouth (a washrag, he realized), while the other arm wrapped around him tightly, pinning him in a vice-like inhuman grip, as he felt a hot breath against his ear. The rag was worked deeper, his jaw cracking, and he thought he was going to choke on it.
A soft, sinister voice cooed sadistically in his ear, in the course, reptilian tones of the most ancient Ryozae tongue, “Ite, ite rrunxagenni’ri, magaahhlo’adi lurrnh-aurna mahha’izi. Rrehnnigehtz-aurna’di uzhhoon, ssazaxxaa-ejjaana, kaii xal magaahlo-ssupurru xaydi-aurna hhaass yaal-zix`hl jjenim-Ilou’ri. Magaahhlin-aurna rruxuniila!” (Poor, poor bastards, think you’re onto something. You scramble about, vermin-like, with the ridiculous idea you can slither right behind Their backs. You know nothing!)
Daniel realized his assailant could only be Zirol, with those words, in that dialect. He tried to cry out to his partner—to make any sound at all—but Zirol’s grip tightened on his jaw, cutting him off and sending waves of agony through his skull.
The old Immortal went on in English. “You do not have the brains, the nrinn-zahhai, to outwit Them.” The term he used was “fire of flesh,” or literally “flesh-fire.”
“And you think that you can find me? Poor, stupid vermin. All these eons, and still such primitive fools. You, your arrogant, lazy, ‘Immortals,’ who are too full of their own eons to offer contributions to any but themselves, and your Shonthera, with all your claimed strength. Someday, perhaps you will finally figure it out, and go home. From the mud-plains of Refvrenzo you came, and in the mud you still crawl. I’m feeling generous, however, so I’ll help you on your way.”
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He felt a heavy boot drive itself into the back of his knee, forcing him to kneel down on the floor. The stranger’s hands slid to his arms as he fell, and the boot connected with the center of his back. It should have pushed him to the floor, but Zirol held him fast, and instead the sheer, unbelievable force created a splitting pain in his back and both his shoulders, followed by a coursing, tingling sensation as he lost feeling and control in both arms.
Zirol lowered him, face-down on the cream-colored tile floor, and kicked aside the already-forgotten gin glass as he walked around him. Any resistance would be utterly pointless, but Daniel drew his legs in anyway, bracing himself against the refrigerator as he tried to right himself into a sitting position.
The tingling was spreading down his legs, and he was having trouble moving them.
The cabinet under the sink was opened, and Zirol rifled around until he found the Bowie hunting knife magnetically suspended above the inside of one of the doors. Although he could see Zirol’s motions, Daniel couldn’t get a good view of the man’s face. Not for the stabbing pains in his neck and spine, nor the blur of the tears in his eyes. Lean, gray hair, in his forties or fifties.
Zirol came back around and grabbed Daniel’s hair, jerking him painfully, then placing him back onto his face. Then the old Immortal hissed in his native tongue,
Slick, sharp, and combat-ready, the knife slid easily down his back, through his shirt. Zirol took a moment to remove it from his body.
At that, Daniel glared back at him, despite the pain.
The moment he did, a liquid substance hit his face. His eyes started to burn.
Zirol made a humored sound, by way of a soft, course, animalistic warble.
He blinked, trying to clear his vision, but he was blinder than ever. His eyes felt as though they’d been lit on fire, and he had a terrible suspicion that Zirol had found the chili oil.
More liquid landed over his body.
Zirol set the knife down on the floor, and whispered in his ear,
Silence followed as his eyes burned. His shoulders and arms ached and stung.
Seconds ticked by.
He couldn’t breathe.
He couldn’t think.
Something exploded, somewhere distant, and he felt the heat of fire lick across the floor and over his skin. Somewhere . . . in the back of his mind . . . he remembered buying a volatile liquor.
A loud, persistent banging sound carried on, and on, and on.
* * * * *
Dawn was creeping into the sky by the time Rex finally brought his heartrate down. He leaned back against the hallway of the company’s European HQ in Berlin, staring through the one-way mirrored windows at the slowly vanishing stars.
Visions of a glistening, blood-soaked platform flitted through his head, far away on his distant homeworld. As fresh as though it were yesterday, he heard the stifled screams; coarse, warbling cries forced through loosely bound jaws, able to part just enough for that awful sound to resonate across the broad social plaza, clawing into the memories of an unwilling audience. Deep reds and exotic indigo violets spilled from bone-deep lacerations, pooling at scaly feet, slickening the reflective pavers. Fragments of flesh scattered through the air at the bidding of Zeronei razorwire.
The mirrorstones of Ryozauggex, and the vistas of his memory were painted in the grisly remains of his fellow Ryozaem.
He was going to need to call his counselor. A flashback like that could jeopardize his reliability as an agent.
He’d arrived just in time to save Daniel’s life, though the real hero of the day had been Daniel’s partner. Al stayed invisible, but Rex felt its wing beats in the air, felt its body expand to block the flames, and expand again to fly them both out. Rex had heard plenty of stories. Creatures like that one were so rare, they were practically the stuff of legends. They’d been lucky to have one around.
Still: Daniel needed immediate medical care. He was Refvrish, and they were a rugged people, but they were by no means invincible.
Thankfully, he was in good hands, now.
Rex had been nearby, and narrowly avoided taking significant injury from the blast.
They’d been lucky, indeed.
A gentle hand on Rex’s shoulder startled him.
The dialect was partially abbreviated—less so than it had been when Rex and Al first arrived with Daniel. War era. The elder Ryozae vastly outranked him. Vowel-heavy syllables denoted a typical herbivore. Although he appeared almost fragile—bony and pale, with thin dark hair—Rex knew better. The man’s eyes bore the sharpness and depth he’d come to expect from his warrior brethren.
Rex shook his head quickly, answering in kind,
The man reached into Rex’s thick, feathery blonde hair, inspecting his scalp where they both knew he’d taken a gash to the head.
The man’s dialect relaxed, his tone softly humored as he warbled,
Smirking, Rex leaned away from the wall. His body protested the movement, but he straightened, and allowed the doctor to guide him down the hall.
Rex leaned away, surprised by the sound of his pack name.
That took him further off guard.
Kadin shrugged—it was no surprise to Rex that he had taken so well to human gestures. Unlike their distant cousins on other worlds, adaptation was an expectation of the Ryozakkan, not an option. While Kadin would operate within limitations, at his age, those limits could prove difficult to detect.
The subtle compliment and humored question brought a smile to his face,
Kadin laughed out loud.
Rex couldn’t help a happy sigh. It was good to speak to one of his own, again.