Keepers & Killers (The Alchemy Series) (21 page)

"I
'd rather have her about one hundred feet behind us, waiting," he replied.

"Good idea. Once we get there, we
've got to act quickly or I'm afraid the radiation will take us down before we can close anything."

We lined up in an arc, with me at dead center. Fitting place name
, I thought. I hoped it wasn't foretelling.

"Okay everyone, once we hit ten feet, I
'm going to channel all the energy through me and direct it towards the space hole. Let me lead, but everyone concentrate on forcing the edges of the hole closed. And don't hesitate. We get there and start right away. If I give the hand signal, we break and retreat back here." I looked around at the faces that alternated between staring at me and then at the ominous space hole. Signs of nerves abounded as I saw one of the greener girls having trouble standing still. A guy I knew as Mathew was twitching his jaw like he'd done a line of cocaine and I wondered to myself how the hell we'd be able to shut the larger ones if we couldn't get this one done. "This is not that big. It's not going to be difficult with the amount of Keepers we've got here," I added, trying to boost the morale a bit.

"It will be fine," Cormac said to me, but I knew the game. He was lying to me just as I had lied to them. We didn
't know any such thing.

I hope so,
I thought, but didn't say aloud.

He squeezed my hand, "Just don
't get distracted. Keep focused."

"I think I could figure that out." I
snapped, and knew I was on edge; perhaps overreacting due to stress.

"There
's a lot of things I thought you'd figure out that you haven't."

I should
've left it at that. I'd gotten nasty, he'd gotten nasty back.  But I couldn't.

"You mean like figuring out that you used my friend to screw with me? Stuff like that?"

"Using her would have been sleeping with her. If I'd actually wanted her, I would have had her, and that's just stating the facts." He broke into a falsetto then "'I don't want you, no wait, I do want you' and then you hang all over Vitor. Maybe you had it coming?"

"So you used my friend? You thought that was the smart thing to do? No wonder we
've got holes rotting away our universe, this whole operation is being run by an idiot!" It took me only a fraction of a second to regret what I'd just screamed in front of everyone.

Dodd cleared his throat and I realized we were already ringside
to the massive space hole that was spilling radiation out and that we had raised our voices to the point that all the Keepers were avidly listening to our spat. "Not that this isn't entertaining," quite a few heads nodded as he said this, "But not enough to die from radiation poisoning for." They nodded for that too.

Maybe this was where I was meant to die, surrounded by a bunch of sarcastic assholes like myself, being killed by their leader because he looked like he was about to explode. Logic now entered my brain as my temper exited, screaming that he was an idiot in front of everyone was probably not on the top ten ways to handle things. Not that he wasn
't and didn't deserve it, I just could've been slightly more tactful. I realized exactly how pissed he was when he switched places with Buzz so that he didn't even have to touch me as we began.

I took a deep breath
, trying to shake it off. Time to get to work. A fight with Cormac wouldn't mean shit if I couldn't fix this.

I felt the tingle in my hands as the energy of all the Keepers started to flow through me and I concentrated every cell in my body to feeling the edges of where our existence ended and the strange universe started. Jagged and angry, it resisted the pressure. This felt so strange compared to a normal wormhole that just stretched open. Unlike a slit in a seam of clothing that can
lie closed, this was a rip right in the center.

"I need more," I yelled down the line. I gripped Dodd and Buzz tighter as I felt more power flow from them. I closed my eyes, my sight was useless anyway. It wasn
't working and it had to.

"More," I screamed. I could feel it in the way the energy coursed threw me, almost as jagged and unruly as the hole
's edges; they were giving me every last ounce they had.

But it started to budge. Slowly, the edges started to creep closer together. I opened my eyes
, wanting visual proof. It was slow, but it was working. Before our very eyes, we were altering the fabric of our very existence. It was awe inspiring. What else might we, as a group. be capable of?

It was half-closed now, and I noticed for the first time that the ground beneath my feet was spongy. I should
've realized this earlier, we couldn't just stretch our world without something happening. The sand and earth that covered over the hole didn't just appear out of nowhere. We were stretching it and that would have repercussions. The electromagnetic force that keeps gravity from pulling us to the center of the Earth lost a little of its strength tonight. It was a small price to pay.

I measured the distance from where I stood now, to where the I had
been before we started. I was closer to the center and farther from the cars. If the hole had still been the same size, I would've been standing a third of the way in it.

Almost finished, just a small gap was left when I felt a tingling near my ankle. Silver tendrils snacked around my leg. I looked over at everyone else but their concentration was firmly on the hole as it slowly closed.

I shook my leg and tried to knock it free but it clung with determination. It wrapped its way up my leg, like a boa constrictor, as I tried to not lose my concentration on the space hole. Only a few feet left and it would be closed.

As the edges finally touched, blocking out any sight of a foreign galaxy, I could feel the sides mesh together like there
'd never been an opening. Laughter rose around me as we all shared in the same relief. We'd been fighting an uphill battle and this was the first time in a while I felt hope. We could fix this. We could fix all of this. We just needed to take out the senator before he could help anybody else get more wormholes up and running.

The silver coiled mist moved around my leg and reminded me of its presence.
“Get off
,”
I whispered to it. I didn't think it was going to do anything but then I felt a pinch. “
Get off,”
I whispered again, in a harsher tone. This time it dissipated into thin air.

It wasn
't that I was ungrateful to it, whatever it was, but I had a group of Keepers here that I didn't want to freak out. I didn't think it would hurt me, but the fact it showed up out of nowhere was a bit unnerving. I thought it was tied to spells, like Vitor had explained. But there was no spell here, which meant there was something else at work that I didn't know about or understand.

I needed to stay calm and in control, and I needed to keep all the confidence of the Keepers
, because I knew that the other space holes would be much harder. This one had already pushed them further than they'd ever gone already. I could sense it when we had all joined. There'd been a hesitancy at first.

Everyone was smiling and patting each other on the back. But when I looked at Cormac, I knew he was pissed. He was smiling at his people, but when his eyes landed on me they weren
't smiling anymore. I got it. I didn't want to, but I undermined him in front of his people at a time we couldn't afford it. Considering all the shit he's done to me, I'd say we still weren't even.

"So where do we go now?" a couple of them asked, still riding high.

"New York?" another Keeper offered up.

"No," I said. "Now we kill a
senator."

Chapter Sixteen

"I didn
't expect a normal cemetery," I said to Vitor as we watched Hammond's body get lowered into the ground.

"We
've got burial grounds on my planet that are similar to this."

As I looked around at the large crowd that had shown, I noticed the people certainly weren
't of the normal variety as I spotted Fae and werewolves. It wasn't the largest turn out I'd ever seen but it was a healthy amount of a few hundred.

Cormac stood about fifty feet from me as he spoke to Burrom. I
'd felt his eyes on me several times but every time I tried to catch him, he wasn't looking any longer. We hadn't spoken since we closed the hole the night before. When we'd returned to The Lacard, I had gone to my room and he'd gone to his.

"What
's up with you two?" Vitor asked, noticing where my attention had been directed.

"It
's nothing. He's just pissed off at me," I answered as I smoothed down my black dress.

"I wouldn
't worry about it, considering."

"Considering what?"

"You know, the contract."

"The loyalty contract?"

"Strange name for it, but yes, that."

"What would you call it?"

"In your language? I'm not sure that it exists exactly. Maybe a prenup?"

If Vitor hadn
't been so transfixed on all the different people coming and going, he might have noticed that I was about to lose my shit right then and there. It bought me time to calm myself down. I had to, and in a hurry. Vitor might have not noticed but Cormac had. He knew something was up and I didn't want this conversation interrupted.

I unclenched my fists and tossed my hair around as if I wasn
't about to march over and kick the shit out of him. It worked; he went back to his conversation with Burrom and I was free to delve for more information.

"How do you guys use it? Is it the same as us?"

"We don't commonly use them anymore. Traditionally, they were used when we wanted to join two houses together but the children were too young to form an actual marriage. It was a place holder, of sorts."

"Did you ever break one?"

"I'm not sure about yours, but ours have varying time periods where if the relationship isn't consummated, the contract dissolves on its own."

I will not
freak out and cause a scene at the funeral
. But oh, would he pay afterward. I didn't want to hear a thing about the idiot comment.

"Keepers can live forever so what
's a few years if you change your mind?" Vitor continued.

"I still don
't get how our brains stop us from aging."

"Yours do, ours don
't."

"Why is that?"

"It's a Keeper thing. Even though Fae have a single consciousness, we don't know which genes are responsible for aging so we can't turn them off."

"Why didn
't you guys work that into the deal with the original Keepers?"

"I wasn
't around back then but everyone knows it was a non-negotiable. They were greedy buggers, your other half, that is. They were willing to let people in, but nothing else."

"You still have long lives."

"About three hundred years, which is a drop in the ocean compared to Keepers. On the other hand, you guys are dropping like flies so maybe you need them." We both looked at the casket after he said it. "You're down to less than a hundred now."

"And the information that was merged with our DNA is gone," I said sadly. If they could
've just written something down, maybe we wouldn't be in this mess. "We're taking out the senator next…or trying to."

"I don
't know if you can take the senator out."

"Maybe not, but we
've got to try. Are you in?"

Complete silence.

"I'll take that as a no."

"I can
't jeopardize my people."

"And what about the Earth?"

"We still have our planet."

I shook my head and walked away from him in disgust. As I stepped up to the casket and looked down at Hammond, I didn
't feel mournful at all. If he had all of a sudden woken from a deep sleep, I might have tried to kill him myself. He was the major reason I was in this mess. He was around with the original Keepers when it was started and I found it hard to believe he hadn't had a hand in it. He brought this down upon all of us.

A group of twenty-two men and women, all arriving together, instantly drew my attention. They were led by a dark haired
, lanky man, whose eyes darted from person to person, his body stiff.

"They
're the defectors. The one in the lead is Linus," Cormac said as he came to stand next to me. He wore nothing but black from head to toe, except a glimmer of a gold watch at his wrist.

"We need to talk."

"I'm not ready to talk," he said mockingly.