Chapter 354: Predictable Plants
Zagan called Seth from the phone in his office.
"Zosime has to be in the surrounding area. Why are we even having this discussion? Why has she not yet been found?" he hissed into the receiver.
"The team followed her scent to the river where Kane said she jumped in, and we are canvassing the land on either side of it. There is just no trace of her," Seth replied, his voice muffled by wind.
"What you are saying is impossible. There is a trace of her, your team just has yet to find it. How did she escape from the cell?" he asked, clenching his fists on the desk of his office, wishing there was a throat he could wrap them around at the moment—Alpha Kane would do nicely. The blood in his system was surging with rage, and he could see it pulsing behind his eyes, darkening his vision of the room around him.
"She played at being unconscious when they came to check on her—Kane and some old timer who was the first to discover her. Then she ran free," Seth replied.
"She just ’ran free’ without two grown lycans being able to stop her?" he asked. Surely there had to be more to it than that. It was important to know how Zosime was able to avoid capture so his strays could anticipate what they were up against when they did find her.
"She threw them against the walls of the cell and ran," Seth corrected. "Kane said it was powerful enough to give him one hell of a headache, but they both got up quickly to pursue her. The terrain is steep and rocky...."
"I hope that is not intended as an excuse for the males who have lived their entire lives there," Zagan spit.
"No. It is surprising that she was able to navigate it so well," Seth replied. "Kane said that he had caught up to where the river rapids had carried her, but when he clamped down to retrieve her from the water, she vanished. Do you think it is a portal?"
"Absolutely not. There is only one alyko I have found to be capable of using portals, and as you know she resides here," Zagan answered, referring to Nedra. "Aside from our most recent capture of the Luna, that is. Zosime is in their territory. You just haven’t found her yet."
"Boss..." Seth began and then trailed off, his voice swallowed by the wind.
"What is it?" Zagan prompted.
"The river is freezing. She would not have survived it unless she was able to immediately get out. The river most likely swept her away."
"If that is true, then find her body. I will not believe she is truly gone until the evidence is before me," he replied, hanging up the receiver immediately afterward.
No, Zosime was not dead. He refused to believe it. Things had lined up too perfectly in finding her at the Hallowell’s pack house that night. It was as if he was meant to find her and bring her back, but if she were dead, then it was all for nothing. She had been preserved this long in the vampiric-like state he had created for her for nothing. It was simply not possible.
If Seth and the others on his team were going to continue searching the banks of the river, they were likely to be gone for some time. But with so few alyko now left on the island, it was not much of a concern. He had two of them here in the castle, Nedra in her cottage, and the rest locked up in containment under the facility’s lotus tower.
He turned on the map on his wall and watched the little alyko lights blink on and off in various places around the Earth like twinkling stars in the night sky. This was his night amid the constant day of this island.
It was funny now—the constant daylight that Nedra had created for him in this custom portal world. He had requested the opposite. He did not like the daylight, and he knew that the alyko gained additional power from the moon in its various natural phases. So it only made sense that this world where he kept his precious collection of alyko would be a permanent night.
But Nedra had failed in her attempt to create the night. She said it was beyond her ability to draw the darkness and the perfection of its movements and rhythms into this portal with them. What Zagan was asking was for her to embrace the entirety of the universe with its vast, infinite expanse and distill it into a small, artificial pocket in space. He was asking for the impossible. The most she could do was one star.
That one star held time still and yet allowed a flourishing of life to grow. He learned to appreciate it and the fertility it brought forth. And he created a dense darkness of his own in the midst of that flourishing—the trees that had grown in this time as if they had been growing for centuries. It boggled the mind. In comparison to the real time that had passed on Earth since the alyko were taken into this portal, ages and ages appeared to have passed here and yet at once—no time at all.
It was a contradiction in every sense—the lycans and alyko who did not age living amongst the plants that aged and flourished so quickly. It was really quite a beautiful work of art. Nedra’s interference with the multiple dimensions of the universe by essentially creating one of her own—something he was unaware of having ever been done before as most portals were simply doorways through space rather than creations of it—brought the linear experience of time crashing against its nonlinear truth in a fascinating way.
Why did the rooted plants experience the island differently than those who were non-rooted—who were instead able to move around the island? It was like a riddle that Zagan enjoyed pondering.
He drummed his fingers against the desk, focusing on the predictable plants that he could grow and control—wishing his alyko were just as easily controlled. If he could plant Zosime in a pot and allow her to flourish under the light of the greenhouse, this operation of his would be perfect.
