Chapter 11: Chapter Eleven – Third Quarter

Chapter 11

 

North! Swim north! 

A dark, cold ocean. Fierce waves batter me. I sink, and sink, and sink.

I must swim north. I must swim nor-

"Lua!" 

I open my eyes to Lina's furious face above me. 

"Who did this to you?! What happened?" She shouts.

"Ugghh…what? I feel terrible." I groan as I pull myself up to a seated position. I take in our surroundings. We are on a rocky beach, the sun just poking over the horizon to the east. Lina kneels next to me, leaning over me. Her black turtleneck is soaked and covered in sand. 

"Who did this to you Lua?" She asks again, in a lower, but still loud voice. 

"Uggh, please stop yelling." I say, rubbing my forehead. I painfully unzip my sand caked wetsuit, and slip my injured shoulder out with a small cry. It's black and purple from my neck to my upper arm. 

"I feel terrible." I moan. I look up at my vampire. Her face is calm, but underneath I feel an inferno of emotion. Concern, fear, and most of all, vengeance. 

"I should have been there to protect you! Who found you? What did they do to you Lua? Where else are you hurt?" Lina fires a rapid barrage of questions at me.

"What? Nobody hurt me Lina, please, calm down. I crashed into the sea floor when I dived, then I hit my knee against it again when I was swimming away." I cry out as I gently try to touch my knee. "Shouldn't I be asking what happened to you? I felt so much through the connection. I thought you were fighting someone. Did you kill someone, Lina? Did you kill whoever was flying that helicopter? Pl-please tell me you didn't kill anyone Lina." I stammer. 

Lina's emotions are quickly replaced with confusion. "Wait, that's not right. I was sure someone was hurting you. I felt someone hurting you Lua, it couldn't have been anything else." 

"Nobody hurt me, Lina. Well, nobody but myself at least." I weakly smile. "But what happened to the helicopter? Did you fight them? It felt like you were killing them."

"Uhh…no, no I didn't fight or kill anyone Lua." Lina rubs her eyes. "I flew out to the sound of the rotors. I found a Federation Navy FH-90 Sea Tiger, with the external aether sensor pods. I concealed my aether signature, then flew northeast along the Spanish coast, dropping aether decoys with a release signature similar to an average water channeller."

Lina holds up her hands to me, showing her missing all but 3 fingernails, with the raw pink nail bed exposed. 

"I wanted them to assume we were a group of migrant water channelers making a run for France. They took the bait. They followed my decoys, dropped all their depth charges and then turned home. That's when I felt you through the connection. I felt so much violence, and pain. I turned back and got to you as fast as I could." 

I shake my head. "Ok, something’s very wrong here, but first, what the hell happened to your fingernails?! Are you ok?" I gently grab Lina's hands, turning them to inspect the freshly exposed, raw pink nail beds on seven of her fingers. 

"Yea, I'm fine Lua. These are just black onyx stones chiseled into the shape of a nail. Just a few of my channeling artifacts. These dampen sound from my movements, increase my strength, and increase my reflexes, in that order." Lina explains, touching each of her three remaining nails individually, before continuing. 

"The other seven were empty, so I could push aether into them on the fly for whatever needs may come up. Like tricking a helicopter with aether decoys. A fake nail setup like this is discrete, but maintaining it is pretty inconvenient. Vampire biology heals injuries much faster than humans, so about once a month I have to pry off fresh grown fingernails and cauterize the nail bed with silver nitrate." She says.

"Lina! What the hell?! Doesn't that hurt?" I gasp.

"Yes."

"..."

"..."

"..."

Seeing my horrified expression, Lina goes to her pack and pulls out a perfectly spherical dark cherry red stone, just big enough to fill her large hand. 

"This is a red amber gemstone, it was gifted to me by Juliane Ursula Frederick, an earth channeller, and the former Margrave of Baden-Durlach. I was living as a Swiss mercenary in the first half of the 17th century, and I saved her life at the battle of Wimpfen in 1622. It's charged with a spell that acts as a mild topical anesthetic. It's so aether efficient that it still has a little juice left in it today. I just press my fingers onto it for about 15 minutes and it numbs them right up! It was priceless when she gave it to me, but these days lidocaine does the job just as well." Lina giggles as she tosses the red amber orb into the air and catches it as it falls back down. 

"Uhh ok look, that's great Lina, but we really don't have time for a history lesson. Shouldn't we be figuring out what the hell happened out there?!" I shout, throwing my arm up towards the ocean. 

"Hey, you’re the one who asked me! But yes, let’s get back to the issue at hand." Lina catches her orb one more time then sits down next to me. "Start from the beginning, tell me everything you did, and most importantly, everything you felt." 

"Ok." I take a deep breath, and launch into my story. 

I'm barely halfway into my recount when I'm interrupted by a thunderous slap. I look up to see Lina with her eyes closed, and her palm enveloping her face. 

"Oh my goddess!" She shouts. "I'm such an idiot!"

You are reading story Lunar Bite at novel35.com

I painfully reach over with my good arm, and touch Lina's shoulder. "Hey, you're not an idiot. Look at me, what's wrong?"

Lina sheepishly removes her hand from her face, exposing a red handprint spanning chin to hairline. "It's a feedback loop. We fell for a classic feedback loop! I should know better." Lina groans.

I feel her embarrassment through the connection, I fight it by sending back what I hope will be felt as a wave of kindness and compassion. "Look, it's ok. What do you mean though? What loop?"

Lina sighs. "When the helicopter dropped its depth charges, I got angry. My decoys weren't migrant water channelers rushing for Europe, but the EF Navy didn't know that. They were just going to kill them, and fly home like nothing happened!" 

"What, they can't do that! Isn't the federation bound by treaties to give humanitarian aid to migrants in its territorial waters?" 

"They're required to aid boats of migrants in their waters. The treaties don't say anything about channelers swimming across. Ever since the Hamburg attack, foreign channelers have been seen as a national security threat. That means lethal force is authorized."

"What?! That's crazy! The Black Sun is a domestic terrorist organization. African migrants had nothing to do with Hamburg!"

Now I'm angry too. 

Lina nods. "Exactly. It's not about security, it's just about killing channelers. That's why I got so angry, why I wanted to take out the FH-90, but I didn't. That would have only brought more military units to the Mediterranean, and put more pressure on African channellers. It's not my place to escalate the political situation like that. If actual people were in danger I would, but not like this…" Lina trails off and hangs her head.

I feel Lina's guilt and uncertainty. "Hey, you did the right thing. If an EFN helicopter was destroyed by what Europe thinks are African migrants, it would have provoked retaliation. I know it was hard for you to hold back, I felt exactly how badly you wanted that pilot's blood, but you did the right thing." I squeeze my vampire's hand to reassure her. 

Lina smiles weakly at me. "Yea, I know. I just… I just don't like having the power for so much violence, you know? My whole life I've been fighting. I've been forced into situations where I've had to, over and over, and I just don't know if I've always made the right decisions. I don't want to make decisions about who lives and who dies, but I keep having to." 

I reach over and take Lina's head into my lap. She sighs, and I feel some of her tension leave her body. After a moment of silence Lina speaks up again. "What if that helicopter crew goes on to kill the next group of channelers that try to cross?" 

"I don't know, and neither do you." I say, stroking Lina's hair. "You made the best decision with the information you had at the time. That's all you can do. You're not responsible for the Federation's actions. They are, and nobody else. That pilot chose to take off from Gibraltar. She chose to press that button, to drop those depth charges. If she kills someone innocent tomorrow, that's her responsibility, her choice that she made. Not yours." 

Lina turns to look at me with tear filled eyes. "Thanks Lua. I needed to hear that. I think I needed to hear that a few thousand years ago." 

I painfully pat Lina's back as she sits up and pulls away from me. 

"That's what happened though." She says. "When I felt that anger, you did too, and I think it may have triggered a trauma response in you." Lina gently touches my hand. 

I think for a moment, then hesitantly nod. "Yea, I guess it did." 

"Do you want to talk about it?" 

My mind immediately goes back to the night I died. I quickly push those feelings down, and shake my head. "No, not yet." 

Lina sighs, and gives me a kind smile. "Ok, well I'll be here for you if you ever want to talk." 

"Thanks." I choke out around my own suppressed tears. 

"When you had that trauma response, I felt it too. I thought someone was attacking you. I immediately flew towards you. Then I thought you were running away from someone, with how fast you were swimming. When you hit your knee you stopped, and I felt your pain. I thought whoever was chasing you had caught you, and was hurting you. That caused a new wave of my emotions to be sent to you , and then you thought that I was fighting someone. So you swam towards me! Then we met in the middle. It was just a feedback loop. Neither one of us was fighting anyone." Lina sighs, and shakes her head. 

"Wow, we hurt ourselves in our confusion." I joke. 

"Yea, we did. Let's just get what we need in Libya and get to my friend in the Azores as fast as we can. The sooner we learn to control the connection, the sooner it stops controlling us." 

I don't think she got the reference. 

"Ok, but I probably can't swim anytime soon." I say, holding my injured shoulder. 

I feel Lina's sincere sympathy and care for me at the same time as I see it appear on her face. "I know. Oran is just a bit further down the coast. We can probably find you an earth channeler there. I'll carry you. Can you move now, or do you need the day to sleep?" She asks me. 

I collapse back onto the sand as the full weight of my exhaustion hits me. "Sleep." I say. 

"Ok, here, let me dry you off, and get your blanket, then I'll start a fire. Tonight I'm cooking for you little lady! Here, take this-"

Lina hands me her red amber orb, before getting to work. "Just hold it against whatever hurts, until it no longer hurts!" She shouts as she digs in my bag. 

I press the orb into my shoulder, and sigh as the spell brings me a small bit of relief. "How am I getting hurt like this? I thought you said I’m immortal now?" I ask.

Lina chuckles. "You're immortal, not invincible, silly. You've just stopped aging, that's all. You can still get hurt." She says as she wraps me in a towel, and then my blanket, tucking Tiamat in on top.

"Uggh, what a scam!" I grumble.

You can find story with these keywords: Lunar Bite, Read Lunar Bite, Lunar Bite novel, Lunar Bite book, Lunar Bite story, Lunar Bite full, Lunar Bite Latest Chapter