The Keepers (The Alchemy Series) (9 page)

“Yes.”

“Why don’t you want to help him?”

“
What I feel about the situation doesn’t matter. It’s not my choice whether or not to allow them to move to Earth. I don’t own this planet. But, I do have to add, regardless of what he says, they’ve already destroyed their world. That doesn’t give me a real warm fuzzy feeling about asking them to move in, even if it were up to me.”

“He said they have technology that could help.”

“He says a lot of things. Do you want to let them all come on over?”

“He said people are gathering to move against you?”

“Yep, that sounds about right.”

“When does this deal end?
I don’t remember reading about war activities in the small print on that contract I signed.” And when can I get the hell away from this mess. I thought my life was messed up before? This put things in perspective.

“
Not sure,” he replied with a shrug of his shoulders.

“Yes, well, that doesn’t really work for me.”

“I’m not trying to play with you. There are a lot of factors at work.”

“Which leads to m
y next question, what are we exactly? This seems a bit beyond making some pocket change and good skin.”

“I’ll tell you whatever y
ou want to know, but you do understand there’s no going back?” He turned toward me to make sure I understood him. “You have a couple of drinks one night and slip, no one is going to let you off the hook.”

“
Didn’t we already establish the whole secrecy thing?
I get it.
Now look at the road if you don’t mind, and start spilling.”

“I’ll do better than tell you.
”

I felt a jolt in the road and realized it was one of the
Lacard driveway speed bumps. We fell quiet as he pulled over to the curb. The moment we came to a full stop the valet took his car.

“Take that to my suite,” he said to the valet, and I turned to see my duffle bag disappear. Oh shit, that didn’t bode well for my evening. He could have had the valet check it for me to pick up later, but he didn’t.

We walked to his elevator in silence, and I noticed more than a few pairs of eyes watch us cross the casino floor, including Vicky’s. I knew what it looked like, but I’d stopped caring about what people thought of me years ago. If they wanted to imagine me sleeping with the boss, let them. That was a lot easier pill to swallow then what I’d grown up with. They meant nothing to me.

When we stepped into his
elevator, I thought we would head up but we dropped instead, and I had to remind myself that I had his word on my safety. Did I believe him? Yes. If he still wanted to kill me, like he said, I’d probably already be dead. Hell, anyone of them could’ve killed me in my trailer. No one would have noticed me for days.

When
the elevator opened, we stepped into a small square hallway. As the doors closed behind us, a panel opened revealing a keyboard. He dialed in a code, then a beam of light scanned his iris and the second set of doors opened. I followed him into a long hallway that had to be at least a mile long.

“I di
dn’t realize the casino was so big.”

“T
his area is larger, but it’s close.”

“W
hen do we get to the whole top secret area?” I tried to sound glib, but I wasn’t sure I’d pulled it off.

He stopped suddenly in front of one of many doors. “Now.” He opened a door and waited for me to enter.

I heard him shut it, as I looked around. The room was the size of my high school gymnasium, but its walls, ceilings, and floors, were the polished dull grey of a pencil tip. A line of computers and equipment lined the back wall and there were two enormous monoliths of polished ebony at the opposite side of the room.

D
rawn to them, I walked over to the closest one and ran my fingers along the veins that ran through the stone. When I touched them, I imagined I could feel a pulse running through them. It felt so real I drew my hand back quickly.

“What are they?” I asked in awe.

“These help us to open a portal. This is where we transport.”

I pulled my eyes from their beauty to see him standing a few feet behind me, admiring t
hem as well. He walked forward and stopped next to me. I watched him graze the ebony surface with his fingers, like I had done, tracing the pattern across its sleek surface. An image of him grazing his fingers across my skin popped into my head. He turned his face to me and I swear he could read my thoughts. His eyes were intense as they stared at my face and lingered a second too long on my lips.

He turned his back
to the monolith and leaned against it with a knowing smirk.

“Don’t look at me like that. There isn’t a chance in hell.
” I took a couple of steps to gain some distance. “Now, explain this to me?” I turned my back to him and looked around the room.

“
Come here.” He pushed off and walked toward a desk where a small dark stone lay. It looked like the same material as the larger monoliths but a fraction of the size. He picked it up and tossed it to me.

I held it warily, not wanting to close my hand around it. I held it far from my body with my palm open.

“Close your hand around it.”

“Why?” I asked,
as I stalled.

“T
he way you are acting, I think you already know.”

“I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Then do it.”

“
No, it’s stupid,” I said, and tried to blow him off. I had the feeling that Cormac wasn’t put off his track that easily.

He walked toward me and went to touch my fingers, but I pulled away before he could.

“Fine.” I closed my hand, and felt the cold stone warm in my hand, then tingle. I prayed for nothing to happen. Sometimes it wouldn’t, but a bad feeling made me think this wasn’t one of those times.

“Open your hand.”

I hesitated, feeling the pressure and afraid to release it, afraid to confirm what he already knew, what I’d spent years of my life hiding. I knew that he expected what was going to happen. He was the same thing, whatever an alchemist actually was, but old habits do really die hard. After hiding something for so long, I couldn’t seem to get my fingers to relax their grip.

“It’s okay,” he said, as he stepped forward and pried my fingers open.

The stone shot through the air like a bullet and buried itself into the lead ceiling above.

“Well, that’s interesting,” Cormac said, as he stared at the ceiling in interest.

“What do you mean? I thought you knew what was going to happen.”

“It’s much stronger than I would have imagined. I should have guessed it would be after how quickly you
r body shot out those bullets, but Buzz isn’t the best shot. I thought he might have grazed you with some of them.”

The mental
calculation he was making showed openly on his face. What I’d done truly surprised him.

“Care to clue me in?”

“You’re a half breed. I don’t understand how it’s this strong. Only full bloods usually have this much strength.” He was still staring at the ceiling. His emotionless mask back in place, so I could no longer read his thoughts. “This is interesting,” he added, but I guessed he was talking more to himself than me.

“Half breed
?”

“A
lchemists, or that’s how we started out thousands of years ago, before we evolved into what we are now. Now we are mostly called Keeprs.” He watched me now and waited for this to sink in.

“You turn metal into gold
and something about the fountain of youth?” That was the beginning and end of what I knew about alchemy and all I remembered from surfing Google.

“That was one of the original goals, but we surpassed that a long, long, time ago. What you just did was change that stone into exotic matter.”

My brain scrambled as I remembered that term from a science class. “Doesn’t that have something to do with wormholes?”

“It has everything to do with wormholes. A wormhole is a shortcut to a di
fferent place in the galaxy, sometimes a different universe. Wormholes normally aren’t traversable for two reasons, they collapse under the gravity generated by the space time fabric, and they emit huge amounts of radiation. If you didn’t get crushed, you die from the nastiest sunburn you’ve ever seen.” He motioned toward the stone still stuck in the ceiling. “Exotic matter counteracts the gravity.”

“And the radiation?”

“It isn’t poisonous to Keepers. We can draw the radiation omitted to us like a vacuum, and we are immune to it. We simply absorb it like a sponge would sop up water. Then our bodies use the energy, similar to someone else digesting a steak dinner.”

“And that’s what I’ve been doing, turning things into exotic matter. How do I hurt people?”

“Yeah, that’s a cute trick you do. I haven’t seen anyone use our ability in that way for a long time. That’s why I didn’t recognize it when you used it on Tracker in the casino. How did you start doing that?”

“I don’t know,” I said vaguely, not wanting to give him the
desperate details of the first time it had happened.

             
He waited for a moment, but then let it go and continued. “You’re exciting their cells.”

“I don’t understand what you mean?”

“You are stimulating them into a frenzy, which applies pressure to the surrounding areas as well. I’d imagine it would be extremely painful. You could burst bones if you did it strongly enough.”

“But I thought alchemists did things with chemicals? They didn’t change things with their bodies and
minds. How can that be done by touch alone?”

“Once our ancestors learned how to d
istort different object’s physical natures, and how to create exotic matter, we were able to create a stable wormhole. Some of the portals that opened led to nothing but barren lands, or just space. But some of the portals led to a planet with humanoid races. Once we learned how to communicate with them, we discovered they had their own unique skill set. Where humans have a conscious brain and a subconscious, their brains are a single united process. Certain functions remain on autopilot, but they can override anything in their systems. They can consciously alter their brain patterns. In exchange for passage through the wormhole, they helped meld our skills into our subconscious.”

“I don’t get it.”

“We consciously control our energy and the energy around us. Matter on a very small scale is vibrations. Different vibrations change what the matter is. We simply change the vibrations.”

“And that is how I healed?”

“No, you healed because of your subconscious skills, although we aren’t as adept as they are at it. Their brains are a single consciousness. Our subconscious has some reasoning abilities, but it can’t communicate freely with our conscious. Your brain knew you were about to be shot, so your cells simply were prepared. They concentrated in the outer parts of your head to limit entrance and then forced the bullets out.”

“But once I was shot, how would my brain keep doing that if I’m passed?”

“Your brain doesn’t stop working, your conscious brain just isn’t aware of it. When your alarm clock goes off, your subconscious wakes you. It’s always aware of what’s around.”

“You know that sounds insane
, right?”

He pointed upward toward the stone still lodged in the ceiling above us.
“But that’s normal? With the bullets, it was simply a matter of changing your body’s density temporarily.”

I wasn’t completely shocked. How could I be? I’d lived my whole life knowing things weren’t the way people believed.
I’d gotten shot in the head and walked away. That didn’t mean I was at ease with this reality, either. I now had confirmed proof, and thinking something and knowing something can be worlds apart. I leaned a hip on the table he had taken the stone from, as I tried to act as if I was taking this in stride, even though my insides felt like a churning mass of mush.

“
I saw that man, Tracker, change. What was he?”

“For lack of a more sophisticated term, you would know him as a werewolf
.”

“And
this alien werewolf person, he is one of the races that helped merge your abilities?”

“No, Tracker is
n’t that skilled. He and his kind are on the lower rungs of their civilization. Vitor’s race, also known as Fae here on earth, are the kind that helped us. In essence, Tracker’s race just came along for the ride.”

“And who are these people gathering against you that Vitor warned of?”

“Vitor himself.”

“Why would he wa
rn me about him?”

“He’s playing you.”

“And how do I know anything you say is true?”

“You don’t.”

“Why did you shoot me that night? Because of this?” I waived my hand to encompass everything in the room.