Kabal - 14. Chapter 14

“Trusting someone is always a calculated risk.” Nico was explaining why trusting friends wasn’t stupid when a wave of raw hate hit him so hard, he stumbled backward and bumped into Diarmad. Involuntarily, he lifted his hands to shield himself and his mate from a possible attack.

Ronan jumped in front of them, sword in hand to protect his king. “What is it?”

“Check him!” Nico pointed at the person in the recliner on the right.

After switching positions with Simon, Ronan cautiously approached the suspicious Elder.

“Careful!”Nico warned.

Everyone watched as Ronan lifted the man’s robe with the tip of his sword. “He seems to be younger than the others. His skin isn’t as mottled. No oozing sores too.” When Ronan reached out, a jarring growl froze him mid-motion, and lightning-fast, a claw-like hand shot forward and clutched his wrist. The robe slipped from the man’s bony shoulder as he sat upright and flashed yellow, crooked teeth at them.

“Leave me! Filth! Don’t touch me again!” Spittle flew from his mouth.

Wanting to know what was going on, Nico tried to shove his overprotective friend aside. “I need to see him.” Simon reluctantly acquiesced.

Instantly, Nico locked his gaze on the seething Elder, searching his mind for an entry point.

The man fought hard against the intrusion, even managed to repeatedly reinforce his shield, but Nico was determined. After a while, a small smile appeared on Nico’s face. “Gotcha!”

Diarmad whispered, “What do you see?”

“Imagine a huge knot of interwoven arm-thick cords, moving and twitching to evade my probing.” Nico picked out a particular vibrating knot and mentally pulled it apart. When it looked as if it was loosening, the strands seemed to become slimy and threatened to slip his grip. He tightened his focus. His hands burned as if he were actually using them to detangle acid-laced cords. Nico ignored the pain, knowing there was no real damage to his hands. It was only the man’s mind fighting him. He pushed as hard as he could—and the knot unraveled. His stomach heaved as pictures flooded his mind.

Sensing Nico’s struggle, Diarmad tightened his arms around his mate’s waist. “Do you need a break?”

Nico shook his head no. “This is Ito Aki. He leads the Secret Council together with the Secretary of Elders. The Secretary is their outside face; Aki controls from the inside.”

While combing through the dark chasms of Aki’s psyche, Nico suddenly doubled over, uttering only one word, “Evil.”

Ronan glared at Aki.

“It’s in his very essence. He ordered the abduction of Ciaran’s mate, Aaron, to force him to help them by shielding the Order members during the negotiations. Afterward, he made Ciaran watch as they pumped the blood out Aaron’s body.”

“But he did what they wanted!” Carl cried out.

“Yes. But he thrives on other beings’ suffering. Feeling Ciaran’s pain was pure joy to him. As if it were his drug.” Nico turned his face into Diarmad’s shoulder when the next gruesome scene played out. “Sho and I found Ciaran’s mangled body, still connected to tubes, in one of the side rooms. He was bled to death the same as his mate. He’d become worthless to them.”

“We found him. There was another man with him in that room, dying from exsanguination,” one of the men said from the background.

“Oh, God!” Nico turned to the man. “I forgot about him! Could you save him?”

“We tried to give him back his blood, but I think we were too late. He’s in the hospital now.”

Inwardly recoiling from the depravity he was finding, Nico threw caution to the side and rifled through Aki’s mind without any care. When he met yet another level of resistance, he hesitated only briefly, before he shattered this last barrier regardless of the consequences to himself. Shaking violently, he exclaimed, “Boudreaux! It’s him!” Enraged, Nico turned to Watson. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

“What? Where?” When Watson saw Nico’s thunderous expression, he understood. “I didn’t know that! I never saw the man.”

“You said you knew Boudreaux, even asked if we talked to him when we searched the lab!”

“I only assumed he was there. He has an office there, and the others always talked about him as if he were present. He gave orders. How could I know he was one of the test subjects?” Watson gestured at Aki. “If you don’t believe me, read me, scan me!”

After a long moment, Nico closed his eyes, then nodded. “He’s telling the truth. He didn’t know Boudreaux is one of the Elders.”

Ronan scoffed. “I can’t decide if you’re an idiot, Watson, or a very, very clever man.”

“I scanned him, Ro.”

“Still,” Ronan grumbled. “I don’t trust him.”

“I told you everything I know. Nico scanned me! I’m telling the truth! I swear!”

Diarmad could barely hold Nico upright, and they sunk down on the floor. “He needs to leave. Instantly! He’s depleted his power beyond what is safe for him. He needs to recover first before we can continue.”

“No, no... I can— There’s more. Feed me.”

“No! It won’t be enough.”

“Feed me! Or he slips away from me again.”

“I can’t.” Diarmad looked at Ronan and Simon, pleading with them to side with him.

“He knows what he’s doing, D. Do it, trust him,” Simon said.

“Feed me!”

Reluctantly, Diarmad gave in. Pulling his shirt from his neck, he turned Nico in his arms and pressed his mouth to the crook of his neck. After a short moment, he felt the sharp bite, and Nico pulled blood from his vein.

After he finished, he didn’t want to waste his newly-gained strength, so Nico immediately focused back on Aki. He hissed, “This isn’t possible.”

“What isn’t possible?”

“Boudreaux is a— Mate?”

Simon eyed Aki incredulously. “A Seraei mate?”

“Yes and no,” Nico said reluctantly. “Something’s not right. Human mates become entirely Seraei. He feels like both, human and Seraei. I must be too tired.”

“An Eraj!” Diarmad exclaimed.

“An Eraj?”

“Sometimes, when a mating is not fully concluded, the transition to Seraei stops somewhere between human and Seraei. Then an Eraj comes into being. Most of the time they die, as their human body and mind aren’t able to handle the Seraei part.”

Clasping Diarmad’s hand, Nico turned back to Aki and was confronted with renewed resistance. And the Elder murmured, “I will destroy you.”

Pale, with huge shadows under his eyes that betrayed his utter exhaustion, Nico replied tersely, “I think not.” With newfound resolve, he calmly dissected the Eraj’s mind. Seconds later, Nico’s body went rigid, his face a mask of fury. “Impossible!”

“I assure you, Eraj are—”

“Not that! Remember the sick bastard Andra McGill and I killed after he had me abducted and tortured? He was his mate!”

“The mad doctor was Boudreaux’s mate?” Simon exclaimed.

“Yes! I can see him clearly in his mind. They knew about the Order’s plans to replace Diarmad with McGill!”

“How?” Diarmad demanded.

“Remember when the McGills suspected Diarmad illegally mated with me before I turned eighteen, because Diarmad recovered so quickly from the effects of his soul’s imbalance? They convinced the Council to call a doctor to examine me for bite marks, which would prove Diarmad drank my blood against their law.”

“He wanted to touch you indecently,” Diarmad spat.

“He was provoking you and tried to distract us, so we wouldn’t note the exchange of my blood with a false sample.”

Pushing deeper, Nico came upon the scene where the doc gleefully told Boudreaux what he found out about the Order. “At first, I thought it was a simple job for the council and the McGills, but then I became suspicious when every time I met with the McGill’s, an Order member was present. Today, I scanned one of them unnoticed. You won’t believe what I learned. The Order plans to replace the king with the head of the McGill clan.”

Simon turned around. “He knew about that?”

“Yes. The initial plan was to kill the mate—me, thereby sending Diarmad back to his earlier imbalanced status. After that, they would declare Diarmad unfit to be king and replace him with the only logical choice, McGill, as he had been chosen by the king of Tracct himself before the Serai contingent traveled to Earth, who then voted for Diarmad’s uncle to become their king.”

“With the added bonus that killing the king’s mate would have meant Diarmad wouldn’t have been able to be reborn and eventually reclaim the throne,” Ronan interjected.

Next, Nico saw the doc and his future mate discussing how to make the most of this information.

“They quickly discarded the idea of revealing the Order’s plans to Diarmad as not profitable enough. Instead, they decided to blackmail the Order and use them and their new puppet king to gain coin, influence, and power. With enough power, they even considered overthrowing humankind and becoming Earth’s ruler.”

“What held them back?” Watson asked.

“The law and the king back on Tracct, I suppose. They probably knew he would never support these plans, and he has ways and means to punish them should they violate the law,” Simon said.

“You’re not here to take over Earth?“ Watson looked at Diarmad incredulously.

“Of course not! Seraei law says we have to live among the inhabitants of the planets we settle. We mingle, find mates eventually, and make a life for ourselves but never interfere with the planet’s governmental structure. Tracct would have come for them and crushed them.”

Ignoring the others, Nico searched other areas of Aki’s mind, then he found Misa. “The doc met Misa when he visited a get-together of former Tracct citizens. When she tried to sound him out about Earth’s standing with her father, he sensed there was more behind her question. In a spur of the moment decision, he told her about the Order’s plans to replace King Diarmad with McGill. He had a back-up plan in mind of killing her should his hunch turn out to be wrong.“

“Apparently, he was good at sniffing out potential allies.”

“Misa easily fell for his seeming ‘leap of faith’, and after some hesitating, she revealed her own regicide plans to him. In the end, she promised not to interfere in ‘Earth business‘, and even support them after the doc and his people had been able to seize power. In return, he assured her they would support her as queen.”

“Probably because of the strategic position of Earth, and the high compatibility of its inhabitants with the Seraei. Its king has a great influence on Tracct policy. Securing his support would mean fewer people would argue against her, and fight the way she came into power,” Simon speculated.

“To set their plan in motion, they had me abducted with the objective to kill me. Only, doc felt he still had a score to settle with Diarmad for exposing and embarrassing him and the McGills after he failed to exchange my blood with a false sample. He decided to get even and enjoy the king’s anguish and helplessness by forcing him to witness him torturing me before he killed me.”

“Then you and Andra killed him,” Carl said triumphantly.

When Nico encountered the memory of when Aki got the message of his mate’s death, he was hit by crippling pain. He cried out loudly and convulsed.

“Nico!” Diarmad shouted. “Stop! Now!”

“There’s more....”

Nico felt Aki’s rage as if it were his own when he found out he was stuck between human and Serai. He suddenly understood the Order’s attempts to find a way to expand their human lifespan. From then on Aki had but two goals in life: revenge and finding a means to make uisce beatha from Serai blood. As a biochemist, he immediately began to think of ways to perfect their experiments.

Now that the Order’s plans with McGill had failed, Aki could reveal he and his mate had known about their schemes. At first, they tried to deny everything. Then he brought Misa up as a contingency plan.

In the meantime, Misa had become impatient and murdered her father without having a decent plan ready. In consequence, she had been banned to Verdonia by her brother, the new king.

Now that Aki had unrestricted access to data the Order had collected, he could conduct experiments and recruit a team.

Sweat ran down Nico’s temples and neck as the scene shifted to Aki talking to Misa. She told him of the drugs she discovered. One dissolved the mate bond, and Aki immediately recognized its potential. The other made a person receptive to mental influence without them being a strong telepath. He suggested to the Order using her as an alternative to McGill after they’d gotten rid of Diarmad. Then the scene switched, and they were somewhere underground. Aki talked to the Secretary of Elders. He agreed the drugs would be an elegant way to get rid of the king and his mate. After losing his mate, Diarmad would become mentally unstable again, and they could discredit him as unfit for office. The Sarei would easily accept Misa as their new queen. What was left was to find a person in the king’s vicinity who could administer the bond-dissolving drug to the king’s food.

Nico felt exhausted and dizzy. He tried to commit everything he saw in Aki’s mind to his memory when he thought he used up his strength. “Aki was behind everything,” he murmured.

“And in the end, he will die a wretched death. I would call that poetic justice,” Ronan said.

All Nico saw was dense fog, but there was something else, a last barrier. Push....

In the distance he could feel Diarmad shaking him, begging him to stop, but there was... something major... He summoned his last reserve and the barrier disintegrated. Gun!

A moment later, Aki screeched, “I will kill you! I will kill you all as you killed him! Murderers!”

As though out of nowhere, he held a gun in his hand, aiming it at Nico. Then Nico felt a hard push, heard several shots, and crashed down hard on the floor.

Diarmad held Nico in his arms, frantically looking for bullet wounds. When he didn’t find any, he glared at Ronan and roared, “You failed to protect my mate! Lionel did your job! He gave his life to save Nico! You’re a failure. If someone should be dead, it is you! I don’t want to see you again! Get out!”

The chief of security wordlessly put down his bloody sword, bowed, and left the room, hanging his head.

Carl checked Aki’s lifeless body. Ronan had cut off the hand holding the gun first and then slashed his throat. “He is dead.”

Nico cupped Diarmad’s face with a trembling hand. “I’m okay. How’s Lionel?”

Diarmad looked around the room.He saw Simon kneeling beside his former servant, desperately pressing his hands on the man’s stomach, where blood was quickly welling up between his fingers. When Simon felt they were watching him, he lifted his eyes and shook his head.

Nico put his trembling palm over Diarmad’s heart. “Let’s say goodbye.” His voice broke.

Diarmad tightened his arms around his mate protectively, then inquired, “Are you sure?”

“Of course. He is our friend, is he not? He protected me at the expense of his life.”

“You are right.”

Diarmad stood and carried his mate over to their fallen friend. Letting Nico slip from his arms so he could sit beside him, Diarmad dropped to his knees, bowing low in front of Lionel. He heard several gasps from his men. “You saved my mate where I and others failed. I will be forever thankful.”

Lionel opened his eyes and smiled weakly.“My king, please don’t bow before me. I did it gladly. You need not thank me. I only paid our debt.”

“There never existed a debt, Lionel.”

“Keith... couldn’t live with the guilt.”

Ignoring the blood on the floor, Nico took Lionel’s hand in between his own. “It was never Keith’s fault. He was a good man tricked by evil minds.”

“Thank you for saying this. He sent me here, forbid me to follow him and ask for the rite. He knew...I could...Now our sins are paid, and we might be forgiven....” Trembling, he lifted his bloody hand. “Please....my king,” he pleaded.

After a long moment, Diarmad understood. “I forgive you, although there is nothing to forgive.” When Lionel’s gaze didn’t leave him, he finally said, “I forgive Keith.” Immediately, Lionel’s tense expression relaxed. His head fell to the side. “Thank you,” he whispered, and a smile ghosted over his face.

Lifting his hands from the bleeding wound, Simon felt for Lionel’s pulse, inhaled, and confirmed, “He passed.”

Still kneeling, Diarmad carefully closed Lionel’s eyes. “Be at peace, my friend. Go on and find your mate.”

With tears running down his face, Nico sobbed. “And find us when you’re ready to meet again.”

Diarmad looked at the ghostly pale face and slightly trembling form of his mate. “I will bring you to our hospital now.”

“No, I don’t need--”

“To see Ivan.”

After getting up, he wrapped his arm around Nico’s waist, then looked around the room until he found Carl. ”You clean up the trash. Burn the bodies after you retrieve every piece of evidence, then torch this place, barricade and hide the entrance so no one can ever use it again.”

Outside, Diarmad walked his mate over to the open door of the waiting helicopter. “To the hospital!”

After landing on the hospital roof, he put his unconscious mate on a stretcher. The waiting nurse immediately asked, “Where are his injuries?”

“It’s not his blood. He isn’t injured, but utterly exhausted. He’s so weak because he depleted his power.”

“Understood.” She instantly connected Nico to a saline drip. “At first fluids, then a doctor will look at him.”

After a thorough examination, the doctor confirmed Nico wasn’t injured. However, he recommended he stay at least overnight so he could rest and regain his strength. “Two days would be better.”

Nico opened his eyes, searching for Diarmad. “Ivan.”

“He’s in another part of the hospital.” Diarmad took his hand.

“I want to see him.”

“You’re too exhausted. Let’s wait until tomorrow.”

Having none of that, Nico tried sitting up. “Now. Sho needs us. It’s bad.”

The doctor tried to push Nico down on the bed.

“Leave me alone! Diarmad! We have to be with Ivan and Sho.” Nico’s eyes blazed silver.

Seeing his mate’s agitation, Diarmad nodded to the waiting nurse. “Get a wheelchair for us, please.”

“But your highness, he should rest. A visit is way too strenuous for him. I can sedate him.”

“Don’t you dare!”

Diarmad scooped Nico into his arms and sat him carefully into the chair the nurse brought. “Thank you, nurse Aaron.” They mounted the bottles with the fluid to a drip stand and made their way to the elevator. After reaching the floor where the ophthalmology department was, they looked for the waiting room, where they found Sho and Landyn, Simon’s mate.

Sho jumped out of his seat. “They can’t do anything for him. The lens is entirely opaque. They could remove it and implant an artificial lens, but the drops completely destroyed the optic nerve. Nico, he is blind.”

“You are his mate. Can’t you help him?”

Sho buried his face in his hands.“If we were rightfully mated and had gone through the ritual, there would have been been a slight chance for the nerve to regenerate after feeding on me. If we had known each other longer, the bond might have had more time to establish itself. If, we had done more than just stare at each other...the theoretical possibility would have existed. As it is now...there is no chance.”

“If you mated right now—”

“The chance for even a slight improvement would still be extremely low.“

“But there would be a chance! You should try....”

“Ivan doesn’t want to mate with me.”

“What?” Nico exclaimed.

“Ivan doesn’t want to be a burden. He doesn’t want me to be bound to a blind cripple”

“He wouldn’t be a—”

“Of course not, only he doesn’t believe me. He already made up his mind. An hour ago, he sent me home to Japan.”

“But you won’t go, right? You have to give him time to think things over, Sho. He is just shocked. He needs to calm down first.”

“I don’t know, Nico. He doesn’t want to see me. I’m forbidden to enter his room. I can’t force him to mate with me.”

Diarmad sat on the chair beside Sho. “We will talk to him. Right now we have to leave him be for a while.”

Landyn bent forward, so he could rest his elbows on his knees. “Ivan has to stay here at the hospital for at least two or three weeks. After that, he’ll need therapy and rehab. But he’s already talking of leaving and going home to his clan’s land.”

“Did he talk to his brother? He is the clan leader now. Ivan has to listen to him.”

“He’s with him right now, trying to stall him, telling him they have to make preparations before he can come home.”

The door opened and Nico’s doctor came in. “Here you are. I insist you stay overnight, so we can monitor you better.

Nico immediately began to shake his head. “I want to go home. I—”

Diarmad’s phone rang. After a short look at the screen, he said, “I have to take this, it’s Simon.”

After listening to Simon, he closed his eyes. “They are all dead? How did they die? It looks like suicide? How many? Three hundred… four?” After a pause, he said, “This is too big to hide. You have to call the human police. After you and the men remove everything that points to us. Make it look like mass suicide by a cult or something.”

Landyn looked up, alarmed. “What happened?”

“They found the soldiers that attacked us. They are all dead. Simon said it looks like a mass suicide, but he thinks the Order murdered them.”

“Damn!” When his phone buzzed he looked at the screen. “Finally some good news. The doctor’s wife made it and just gave birth to a healthy daughter.” He held his phone up and showed the picture of a tiny newborn wearing a pink hat.