Keeper of the Lost Cities: War

Chapter 4

Fitz Vacker couldn't move.

He almost couldn't breathe.
But given his death wasn't Keefe Sencen's command- he had to watch in anguish as the blonde haired boy he used to call his best friend- the same boy he needed desperately to get ahold of- vanish from his sight once again.

The last time being from right underneath his hand.
Keefe had been calmly asleep- but that same boy who was with him today turned out to be more than an average human.

In fact- he wasn't even human- but actually an elf- though Fitz had no idea who he really was.

And Fitz knew this for a fact that the boy was an elf- even though he had brown eyes- because he at least had telekinesis, that had been able to toss Fitz across a floor into a wall.

There was something else that he used against Fitz, but he had been knocked unconscious by the mysterious ability and then he had woken up miles away from where he had been.
The boy had been in Fitz's way time and time again, appearing where the Neverseen seemed to always be striking in the forbidden cities.

It had started with Vespera's kidnapping of Sophie's parents- that's when this boy showed up the first time. They had been trying to keep grabbing human experiments when this boy had wiped out the extraction crew.

This boy had somehow managed to become sort of a guardian angel over the humans he was nearby— thwarting the Neverseen in the small ways. And somehow— not one elf has managed to stay awake long enough to be able to find out the boy's actual ability— and given the current state of the Lost Cities' registry feed system- there was absolutely no way they could do any digging related to his identity prior to existing in the Forbidden Cities.

There had however— been exactly one time where Ruy trapped himself into a force field to escape the boy's ethereal wrath. But either he actually didn't know and was telling the truth that his force field blinded him from seeing anything— or Ruy was hiding something.

While Fitz found Ruy to be among some of the more trustworthy members of the Neverseen— he never trusted anyone one hundred percent of the time unless it was himself.
That was a lie— himself and his informant.
The person he still had inside the Lost Cities feeding him information whenever they could.

But even his informant hadn't been able to scrounge up a detail about the boy who had helped Keefe Sencen escape yet again— so Fitz had come to the conclusion that the protector boy had either been born similar to Sophie Foster— an elf among humans— possibly an illegitimate councilor child— or an unregistered elf due to hiding a multiple birth.

Even now— the boy's piercing brown, almost black, eyes, stared at Fitz for a second after he and Keefe had made it safely out of the green doors.

There was a flash of light outside the door and Fitz figured they light leaped somewhere because the affects of Keefe's ability snapped like someone hit the resume button on a remote.

The absolute fury Fitz felt rip though his chest was worse than that of the day he found out Alvar was going to be at Everglen again after his tribunal.
While Fitz knew it was going to happen, a part of him had been convinced that the council would surprise him and kill off his brother before he had too.

After all— he would have had to prove at some point that he was against the Neverseen— and killing his brother who was openly with the Neverseen, seemed like a pretty good way to have an alibi of sorts.
Though that didn't matter now because of Dex and Linh's stupid security system that got him caught a couple months ago— the system where Dex would produce a schedule of everyone going in and out of Eternalia and Linh would be able to locate anyone not on that list if they were intruders.