CHAPTER THIRTY ONE

Our Kindred Immortal

After acknowledging the bloodbath that had taken place in the hotel room, the first thing I saw was Christian and Brandon’s ashen faces. The second thing I saw was a Tupperware container with the lid on tight.

I pointed to it. “My heart is in there, isn’t it?”

Christian nodded.

“Is there a reason you haven’t started the surgery?”

“Well, with all this twisted metal, there isn’t room for Christian on the bed. We would have gotten another room but we thought it would be best to guard Charles’ body until you returned,” Brandon explained.

I nodded in agreement.

“How’s Trinity?” Christian asked, rushing me like we’d been parted for a year. It probably felt like a year for him, being forced to hang out in a hotel room with Brandon and Charles’ corpse.

“She’s fine,” I assured him. “I delivered her baby and she’s at the hospital getting checked. It was amazing. You were amazing, but we’ll have to talk about it later. How about you two go downstairs to the lounge and leave me alone to handle the cleanup?”

Christian and Brandon both protested that plan.

“It’s bad enough that four of us have come in here and only three will leave,” Christian said.

“The video footage of the hallway will be very damning,” Brandon cut in. “We don’t need to give them extra footage of us.”

“Our faces are ruined after having done this, and might I remind you, we’re also covered in blood.” Christian put up a bloodied cuff and showed me the blood splatter on his shirt.

“Okay,” I said, sticking my hands up. “The only reason I made the suggestion is because this is going to be disgusting and I thought it would be better if neither of you was here for it. No one is even going to connect Charles’ disappearance with this hotel. For starters, he was wearing all that makeup to hide who he was.”

Christian looked at me like I was fourteen again because my naivety hadn’t worn off. “It’s amazing what people can piece together. In this new tech era, we haven’t got a hope that we can erase all the footage, some information will be preserved. We need to finish, abandon our identities, and get back underground.”

“Okay. You two go stand by the door and don’t come near me or him… or the bathroom,” I said breathlessly.

They did as they were told, standing like delinquents in the corner because neither of them could rearrange matter.

I took the lone chair in the room and sat on it. I closed my eyes and started moving matter. If Charles had been a living being, I would have needed Doctor Christian from the third chamber to help me, but now that Charles was dead, what the Other Christian had taught me was enough.

The first task was to take every drop of liquid from Charles’ body and pour it down the drain in the bathtub. I chose the tub because I didn’t want to flush the toilet too many times in case someone in the hotel could hear it. Absolutely no one could investigate. In the end, I turned the shower water to cold and let the majority of his blood, urine, digestive juices, and various fluids go down the drain.

When I opened my eyes, Charles was a husk on the bed, like he’d been mummified on the spot. For convenience, I found a pair of scissors in Brandon’s bag and started cutting his clothes off. Christian and Brandon jumped to life and started untying his shoelaces.

“We could have done this part before you got here,” Brandon complained.

“Yes, because having a naked bleeding corpse is so much better than just a bleeding corpse. Don’t be silly. This job is so much less grotesque this way. He hardly looks like himself, and doesn’t it seem like it all happened so long ago that his death could not have been inflicted by us?”

Christian stopped and stared at me. I noticed him and moved to meet his eyes. “This is part of it,” he said. “I never would have laid a finger on him if he hadn’t stolen my most precious thing.”

“I know. I’m just trying to put this very far behind me.”

“What about the bedding?” Brandon asked, staying on target.

“I’ll be able to clean it very efficiently, but first, we need to get his clothes out of the picture and then his ashes.”

“How are you going to do that?”

“It may not look like it, but there is actually quite a lot of moisture still in his body. I’m going to take it out and then I’m going to carefully turn the rest of his body to ash.”

“Are we going to sweep it up?” Brandon asked.

I shook my head. “No. Just watch.”

As soon as I started involving bones in what I was doing, the world slowed down dramatically. I could have gently run the ashes down the tub drain as I had with the liquid, but I wanted to do something else.

When he was nothing but ash, I crushed small handfuls of him into diamonds the same way I had with the graphite I took from the pencils, except I had so much material that I didn’t bother cutting the stones into diamonds. By five o’clock in the morning, the bed was completely free of even a speck of his DNA and I had a pile of diamonds.

Rhuk sounded in my ear, suspicious of my plans. “What are you going to do with those?”

I picked one up and looked through its brilliance. “Did you used to be a person, Rhuk, with all your calcium in calcium magnesium carbonate? You know, a long time ago?”

“I used to be part of the seafloor. A lot of things live in the mud at the bottom of the sea.”

“Do you remember what it felt like to have tiny living beings make their home inside you or what it was like to be part of them?” I asked, wondering what would happen if I tried to talk to one of the diamonds I had made from Charles’ corpse.

“Are you asking if individual atoms remember what larger beings used to make them up? Maybe you should try asking your own bones. They belonged to other things once.”

My bones didn’t know.

I whispered to the diamond in my hand. “Are you there? Who’s home?”

In reply, I got a cheery little chirrup, almost like the sound of a bird or a bell.

“His spirit is gone,” Christian said. “If that’s what you’re wondering. That was the piece of information that made Charles a human. Now you are talking to the atoms that used to make him up and they do not provide the matter that makes him anymore. He’s gone.”

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

“Gone where? Where do spirits go?” I asked.

Christian shook his head. “That’s not a path we take. Most people want to take it though, so there must be something about it that appeals to them.”

I smiled. “That’s a relief. I don’t want anyone to ever find out where these came from. Ever.” With that, I ordered my lesser diamonds to clean up Brandon and Christian.

When the two men saw the blood fly off them like butterfly wings as thin as the skins of onions and flutter into the bathroom, they were both in awe.

“You didn’t make it look like this when you washed Charles,” Brandon observed, trying his best not to fall on his face in order to worship me properly.

He didn’t know that I wasn’t the one making the artistic display. My little diamonds had so much creative potential that hadn’t been unlocked. I smiled wanly and didn’t answer him. Besides, Rhuk was talking to me.

“Beth,” Rhuk said in my ear. “I don’t mean to be rude. I know you’re feeling tired after all the work you’ve done, but I have to tell you that I found Max.”

I put a finger pad on Rhuk’s largest facet. “Where is he?”

“He’s at The Lazy Hammock Hotel. Three of the hostages there are part of his family. I heard him explain everything to someone on the phone. Dr. Bobby has his wife, sister and brother locked up. He knows that they’re being tortured daily. He’s desperate to save them.”

“Does he know about the explosives?”

“I don’t know. He may only be scouting the place out, but that seems unlikely. He’s holding a crowbar.”

“We have to stop him before he does anything stupid,” I insisted. “If he’s approaching the building now, we won’t make it in time. Can you do something to stop him?”

“Like what?” Rhuk asked, aware that we didn’t want to show off matter manipulation to any bystanders.

“Something quiet. Make a hole in the ground. Pull him into that hole and keep him there until we can get there. Do it subtly. Come on. It’s still dark out. It’s possible no one will see your handiwork.”

“Do you want to go get him before or after Christian’s surgery?”

I thought about it and weighed my options. “We have to go now. If I don’t have the sword in my chest, it will be hard to convince Max of anything, and the surgery will not just give Christian my heart, but it will also free me of the sword. The sword is the best tool we have to convince Max we mean no harm.”

“He’s on the west side of the building. That’s the side with the fewest cameras,” Rhuk said, giving me the play-by-play. “He’s just stepped into a blind spot… and I fused the sole of his shoe to the cement. That should give me some time to make the hole. I pushed up the cement of the sidewalk in chunks, and the dirt is flying everywhere. It’s all he can do to keep it out of his eyes. Okay. The hole is built. I am taking control of his clothes and pulling him down. He’s screaming…”

“Muffle the sound waves,” I instructed.

“Done, and now I’ve replaced the concrete. I don’t know how he’ll manage down there. He does know something about matter manipulation. Maybe he’ll be able to break out if he can shout at the material that makes up the sidewalk louder than I can. You should hurry in case he’s stronger than me.”

I stood up and explained the situation to Christian and Brandon while my little diamonds reconstructed the bed frame. They were fast. All they had to do was tell the frame to go back to being the way it was before I’d started ordering it around.

It took longer to explain to Christian and Brandon what we suddenly had to do at The Lazy Hammock Hotel when they were so set on getting started on the surgery. They listened, but with increasingly unhappy reactions. Christian hated being behind, being incapable. It made him crazy. I knew he wanted to get on the bed and get his chest cut open, but he knew the recovery time might be instantaneous, or it might be days where he lay messed up and shell-shocked like I had been after I delivered the sword.

In the end, he read my look, said nothing as we finished up in the hotel room, and went down to the lobby. He and Brandon went out to the car while I checked out.

It was still dark out as we drove to The Lazy Hammock.

“Is Max putting up much resistance?” I asked Rhuk as we drove.

“He’s shifted the cement blocks a few times. I just keep moving them back, but he’s getting stronger and smarter by the second.”

“Sounds promising,” I said to Rhuk privately.

Out loud, I spoke to Christian and Brandon, “Do you think we’ll be able to take Max directly to the village?”

“No,” Brandon said without hesitation. “Most people want to be with their loved ones. They haven’t let go of their family. Since Rhuk told you that three members of Max’s family are chained up in the hotel, he’s there to save them. Probably, he will eventually give up being immortal to die with them when they die naturally. This happens more often than any of us realize. Lots of people show potential, but they give up. That’s why you’re so special, Beth.”

I remembered Brandon, advising me early in his fake Scottish accent to let go of everything. He really rode the line between friend and foe like a champ.

Outside The Lazy Hammock Hotel, Rhuk whispered which way to go, but I didn’t really need the help. The cement blocks that made up the sidewalk were wiggling.

I bent over the concrete blocks, acting like I was lifting them when I was merely ordering them around with my mind. I was stronger than Max and Rhuk put together when I concentrated. I removed one of the blocks and looked down. “Hey, are you trapped?” I called down in a cheerful tone. “Do you need some help?”

“Yeah,” Max’s voice called from the shadows.

It was dark and neither of us could see each other well, but I dived into the world of matter and saw his face. He was definitely the man I left behind in the prison.

Christian and Brandon crouched down, each taking one of Max’s arms, and pulled him up to the surface. He brushed the dirt off himself. The dirt on his face disguised him as much as the cuts and bruises had before. He was dark-haired, shorter than Christian or Brandon, and meatier with larger muscles.

“Thanks. It’s really lucky you were passing by,” Max said with a smile, flashing white teeth.

“Yeah. Really lucky,” I repeated with a saucy drawl. The predawn street lights illuminated us as I spoke.

Max turned again to thank me but stopped abruptly when he saw the sword that went straight through my chest.

“Are you?” he said, unsure how to finish his question. “Are you?” He turned to Brandon, who he did not recognize, and then to Christian, who he looked at longer.

“You know me?” Christian asked. Ever since we left the hotel, he hadn’t bothered with Tremaine’s face.

“I saw you… being pulled onto the helicopter at the jail,” he said slowly.

“Your name is Max?” Christian asked.

He nodded.

“Great, then you know that we are people who have also been imprisoned by these wackos. Let’s cut to the chase, Max. If you get hurt, can you heal yourself quickly?”

He took a step backward. “Why?”

“I’m not asking because we’re going to hurt you. I’m asking because there is an explosive rigged to every door and window in that building and if you are not excellent at reassembling yourself, you’re gonna have a bad time.”

Max’s round shoulders sagged in defeat.

Christian took over. “And not to be overly rude, but you couldn’t even fight this girl’s earring when it trapped you in a hole. Dr. Bobby and his people are monsters and you’re no match for them all by yourself.”

“An earring?” Max sputtered, confused. “She uses a mineral to control other minerals? What am I supposed to do? These wackos have my family. They’re hurting them.”

“Your wife and your siblings?” I confirmed.

He took another step back. “How do you know that?”

“Let’s not worry about that now. Instead, let’s have a conversation. We are five seconds off of going underground and you need to make a couple of decisions before we go inside the hotel because after we leave, your options are going to shrink,” I said conversationally. “You need you to answer our questions. Do you heal?”

“Only at the same rate as everyone else,” he answered stiffly.

I looked at Brandon, who was already bored with talking to Max. He had seen this play out enough times that he wasn’t as curious as I was.

“Do you have a plan to protect your family should they be kidnapped again?” I asked.

He nodded. “They’re not going to get kidnapped again. We’re going to move.”

“All of you? Are there more? Do you have aunts, uncles, cousins, or friends? Can you make all of them move?” Christian asked. “Have you been chased much?”

“What are you saying?”

“I’m saying that there’s a very real chance that this whole hostage thing will happen over and over again until they’ve killed every last person who’s precious to you. There are people like Bobby in every country of the world. It’s going to be a tough haul, but in the meantime, we’ll help you rescue your family.”

Max looked skeptical. “How will you do that?”

Christian inclined his head toward me in a gesture of confidence. “She’ll do it.”

I spoke to Rhuk silently, “Make breaks in the circuitry, so the bombs won’t go off.”

“Front doors are disabled,” Rhuk said, beginning a narrative to explain which doors and windows were safe.

I turned toward the hotel. “Walk behind me, stay together, and don’t touch anything.” At the front door, I moved like I had a keycard when I was merely snapping circuitry and moving metal.