The Ghost and the Darkness Volume 1 (The Fallocaust Series Book 2) (54 page)

The bullets burst through the soft area of Kessler’s combat armor, making large bloodied holes appear where his arm would meet his shoulder; each one hitting their mark and sending its own firework of blood onto Kessler’s neck.

The Legion General, the man whose army had been fucking with my people, bullying us and murdering us for years bellowed with rage, and like his son he started scanning the buildings.

“Willis!? The Imperial General demands you fucking show yourself!” he roared, holding his arm as the blood gushed under his fingers.

But even if I decided to yell back just for the sheer joy, there was no time for it. Caligula gave a hollar as he jammed another clip into his gun and started shooting several kreigers trying to pull him into the black buildings around us. They worked together like a team, three kreigers, two on his left leg and one on his right, pulling him along like he was already dead.

Kessler shot all three of them but no sooner had he done that did Tim’s screaming sound behind him. The general, now using his left hand, pulled out a handgun and tried to shoot the kreiger dragging Tim towards the mob but he missed half of them, sparks flying as the bullets bounced off of the pavement.

I saw the sweat beading down his forehead; I saw the fear start to come to eyes I knew had only held brutality and power. I wondered when I’d see the realization of what I was making him have to do.

Your master told me I could only save one of my fathers, now Kessler… which son will you choose?

“If you come down here and help me… I’ll… I’ll – Fuck, I’ll promote you. You’ll be in debt to the Dekker family; I command you to come down here!” Kessler ran and pulled Tim back. He dragged the boy towards Caligula before grabbing him too. Though his arm was useless, I could see his fingers not even tighten around Caligula’s combat armor before they loosely let go and fell back against his side.

“Dad!” Tim screamed. He pulled the trigger of the carbine Kessler had given him but only a clicking sound filled the air. All the gunfire had stopped and now only the sandpapery shifting skin and the hissing of the creatures echoed off of the looming black buildings, mixing in with the chilly electric air. “They’re getting closer!”

Inside my body the inferno grew, to the point where I thought I was going to have a full bodied orgasm. But instead of giving into my own physical pleasures I watched Kessler turn around and freeze.

Then… then the climax.

Like his chimera mind had eliminated all other options I saw the pain sweep Kessler’s face. He bounded over to Caligula and picked him up with his still functioning arm, by now the boy was only half-conscious, blood pooling around him and splitting into several channels as it ran towards a gutter.

“Dad?” Tim’s cries were full of agony. I turned from the delectable scene and saw Tim frantically hitting a kreiger who had latched onto his arm. Not a moment later another one sprung out of the mob and snapped its jaws against Tim’s side and thrashed the boy’s body with its teeth, creating a squealing screaming noise from the boy I had heard many times before.

Kessler didn’t turn around.

He threw Caligula over his good shoulder, his face holding anguish beyond tears. He secured his son with his arm wrapped around Caligula’s legs and shut his eyes tight as Tim’s screams switched to a higher tone.

The tone of someone being eaten alive.

Kessler mouthed something… whether it was an apology or a curse word Tim’s loud screams drowned it out. He took Caligula. And as the kreigers ran past him, no longer caring at all that he was there, he sprinted past his son, now being devoured by five kreigers and counting, then disappeared into the alleyway.

As soon as he was out of sight I swung over the railing I had been sniping behind and landed on the pavement below me.

One of the kreigers looked up at me and hissed, without pausing I walked over to it and bashed its skull in with the butt of my M16, it screamed almost as loud as Timmy was screaming as the side of its face got ripped off of its skull. As soon as it was down I started hitting the other ones, the remaining lizard men scrambling away from the boy’s bitten and bloody body as I beat on them.

They lowered their heads at me and I felt teeth clamp against my leg. I raised my gun and shot it in the head.

“Help… help me…” Tim’s weak voice cried, as Jade behind me kept the lizards away I leaned over Tim and smiled at him.

The boy looked at me back before his eyes widened.

“You know who I am, Timmy?” I whispered.

As the kid, sweaty and covered in shining blood, stared at me, his calico eyes shot to where Jade was picking off the kreigers with his silenced assault rifle. “Help me… my family will –” He coughed a spray of blood and whimpered. “Help… help me… please?”

I chuckled and petted his dark hair back with my hands. Such a sweet little thing, my little brother, Tim Dekker. Only a year younger than the first time I had seen Killian.

Sweet, sweet little brother.

I leaned down and licked the blood that had just erupted from his lips. To my inner, transgressive joy his blood held on it the unique cinnamon-like flavour. I liked the taste of chimera.

I wanted more.

I licked it again and found myself almost moving to his lips but instead they shifted lower… and lower, until I found his neck.

Jade gasped and swore behind me as I cut the straps of the kid’s combat armor off, then the shirt he had on underneath. Ignoring the chunks of flesh the kreigers had ripped out of him I traced a finger down his bare chest and smiled at him.

Tim stared at me, his brown and black eyes bulging out of their sockets as I reached to my belt and pulled out my combat knife. His body was shaking, his pale chest with only small traces of chest hair, rising and falling under his own oppressing anxiety.

I held my combat knife in my hands – and stabbed it between his rib cage.

The boy screamed and with that beautiful moonlit music gracing my ears like the quickened moans pre-orgasm, I dug the knife in and began to saw, splitting his rib cage apart. It was easier than I had expected, a quick saw, but not too deep, only to sever the fused together bones.

I tried to ignore the fragrant hot blood spilling out of his chest and on to my hands and knife. Warm and wet, steaming in the cold… what I would give to bottle it and drink it every night before I fucked Killian.

Once I was confident I had weakened the flesh-covered bones seemingly clasped together like weaved fingers, I wedged my hand into the bottom of the rib cage and pulled it back with a sickening wet sound of tearing flesh and the snapping vibrations of breaking bones. Sound that I was no stranger to.

With a good pull and the high pitch shrieking of Timothy Dekker, still alive, I revealed his still beating heart.

Yes, I had never forgotten that I had wanted to do this.

My hand held back the hot slab of flesh and bone that had been his chest cavity, my other one dropped the knife and reached in to grab his heart. The last image Tim’s hazy eyes saw was me picking up the twitching, thrashing organ into my hands, connected with thick hose-like veins before bringing it to my mouth.

I bit down and found heaven in the greywastes.

Blood squirted into my mouth, down my chin and all over my face; the convulsing organ spraying pulse after pulse of warm blood with every desperate thrash. I swallowed the first piece whole, before closing my lips over the next bite as the heart inside my jaws slowly died.

I held it there and drank each pressured pump of blood until the once powerful spray of blood became a trickle… before it finally became still.

All of this only took half a minute, yet to me I was kneeling over the boy for several lifetimes.

I closed my eyes, his heart still warm and in my jaws. In that moment I was confused as to how I felt, until I realized I was tasting pure bliss for the first time in months. A chimera in his element, a bloodthirsty monster tasting the flesh he craved so much, and not just legionary this time, or the former councilor or officer in Aras… a chimera.

My little brother Timmy.

I breathed in the thick heavy scent of blood and though I wish I could say I didn’t recognise myself… the truth was I had just found myself again.

I shifted and realized my dick was rock hard.

I bit the thick blood vessels away from Tim’s heart and took what remained with me as I stood. When I turned around I saw Jade, staring at me with his eyes wide, a dozen kreigers dead around him but several more quickly closing in.

“Keep them far away; they’re not eating his body,” I growled to Jade and picked up the kid. I was going to make a fucking statement to the Legion and to King Silas. I didn’t care what it would mean for our mission for it to be known it wasn’t this ‘Willis’ person to shoot Caligula and Tim. I feared no one, especially not King Silas.

I would store him somewhere safe, and tomorrow… yes, tomorrow I would have my fun.

After stashing the body of Tim Dekker into a closet of an old apartment building, Jade and I started walking back to the library, running along ridges and taking alleyways until we managed to lose the kreigers that were trailing us.

I was on top of the world. The intoxicating feeling was making me feel like I was floating, lifting me above my troubles and the worries that had been claiming me, and carrying me into the sky in a warm embrace. Oh, did I love the heavy smell of blood. I loved the taste of human flesh.

Perhaps it was because I felt like myself, the person I feared I would lose, though the only thing that had really been lost was my adolescent attitude. That had died with Leo and Greyson, and had been buried when I became the guardians of Killian and Jade. This new life hadn’t killed the sociopathical desire to see people suffer, if anything it had only strengthened it.

What a thrill. I wish I could show Kessler and Caligula what I had done to their little Timmy… but no, no, do not rush it, Reaper. They will see, eventually they will see.

All of them will pay for what they had done to me, what they had done to my family.

“They can’t see us anymore, if we make a break for it we can get back to the library without them following us.” Jade’s voice was low but I couldn’t read his tone. I didn’t know if he was nervous with me now, apprehensive, or if this was just a normal day since he was used to chimeras. What it boiled down to though was that he was still here and he hadn’t stopped me from eating Timmy’s heart, and that alone gave him points with me.

Yes, he was the serial killer in Moros… we were alike in more ways than either of us cared to admit.

He had never wanted this either, he had been a Morosian with a boyfriend and I had been a greywaster with a suitable life. Nowhere in our past or our future did we wish to have become chimeras.

But we were chimeras, the torn apart mess on the pavement and the blood on our hands said that as clear as day. Whether I wanted to deny the realities that came with this knowledge or not, it didn’t change the facts.

This was my family; I was but a resistant black sheep.

I offered Jade Timmy’s half-devoured heart like I was passing him a post-sex cigarette.

The boy looked at me for a moment, before his eyes trailed to the heart of his brother. Then, like he had never had hesitation, he took it and tore off a good size chunk of it. I watched him eat it and as he swallowed I myself took another bite.

“I love our taste,” he said lowly.

The blood ran down his chin, purple and shining under what moonlight the grey sky allowed us. And though I could never admit it, in that second the throbbing in my pants only amplified at how the cicaro looked right now. A slender thing with pale skin, brilliant yellow eyes and a face streaked with blood. I could see why Elish fucked him into madness every night; at this point if I was single I may have done the same.

I could… if… I wanted to.

Before my mind could tell me how wrong it was, I reached over and wiped the blood from his face before bringing it up to my lips and tasting it. My groin gave another throb, making me immediately retract and tear myself away from a very dangerous feeling. A new one that I knew came with my blood makeup, one I would have to watch from now on. It was common knowledge inside of me that I was not a sexual person but when there was blood, murder, and agony in the air… that was the recipe to get to the inner lust of a chimera.

And if there was one thing I knew chimeras liked doing – it was fucking each other. Who else could bear our stamina? That had been proven with Killian time and time again.

Shit, Killian.
I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth. With my boyfriend’s trusting face in my mind I shook my head free of those thoughts.

I took control of myself and pushed the feelings away and like an orgasm it faded back into the depths of my mind and reality quickly replaced it. I grabbed onto it and thrusted myself back into the moment, feeling my ears go hot at the mere suggestion of putting a move on the cicaro chimera, makeup or not.

I quickly walked home, the taste of blood in my mouth.

Chapter 19