by A. E. Grace
*
The city was ringing. All around her were mopeds nimbly negotiating the narrow weaving roads of Hanoi. A few cars, like islands devoid of heads without helmets, were scattered in amongst the throng, occasionally beeping their horns, but mainly just being ignored. Being a car driver in Vietnam seemed to earn you relatively little prestige on a road full of mopeds.
The sun was beating down, and the air was close, and already, just minutes after leaving her air-conditioned room in the guest house, Terry was sweating. That was the subtropical heat, though, wasn’t it? That was what she had wanted.
But still, even as she gazed around the buzzing city and wiped beaded sweat off her upper lip, she found that she wondered how people lived so willingly in a climate like this. It was probably something people got used to, she conceded.
She shook her head, gazing out at the interlocked mass of flesh and metal breezing by on the road. The river of people never seemed to stop flowing.
But Terry was having trouble really appreciating this new sight and experience, because her own inward eye was turned on Liam. He hadn’t left her thoughts since she’d woken. She felt a familiar rise in temperature that went to her cheeks, converged in her core, as she re-envisioned what she had seen the night before, what she had watched him do.
It had been absurdly sexy. She never really suspected she’d find it so hot to watch a man get himself off. Really, the thought of it would usually make her laugh, or even feel put-off.
But it was different with him. The way his lean and sexy body had leant back, and the way his virility seemed to drip off him… God, it had been intoxicating. It had turned her on, and ultimately, left her with a lingering feeling of frustration.
She felt a little ashamed for having watched him until his completion.
There was more, though, something she couldn’t put a finger on. He seemed like a ball of dark energy just waiting to explode. There was a tension there in his being, something he had seemed poised to tell her the day before, but then he didn’t.
What had gotten him so spooked that moment before they walked across the border?
The mystery of it was appealing to Terry. She… she wanted to know.
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” Terry muttered to herself. It was time to get on with her day. What was with her? Doting on Liam like a schoolgirl! This was her very first day in Vietnam, the place she’d left her life behind to come specifically!
She may as well start enjoying it!
She set off in the direction the traffic was going. That way was the city center, and what better thing to do on her first morning in Vietnam than to have a traditional Vietnamese breakfast, which was basically a bowl of rice noodles and thin slices of raw beef that cooked in a broth.
She found it odd that there was no clear distinction between foods eaten at breakfast and lunch, and thought how polar opposite it was to back home where breakfast was cereal and toast, and lunch was simply not, unless you were a broke university student, or something of an eccentric.
Another breakfast food commonly eaten were the freshly baked baguettes, one of those odd cultural left-overs from the French occupation. She would definitely have to try one of those. It seemed like the day was starting to revolve around food, and coming from the nine-to-five where she ate tuna, ham, or egg salad sandwiches pretty much every day, that didn’t seem like such a bad idea at all!
Terry stopped dead on the street. Before her was a wide road by Hanoi standards, and absolutely teeming with mopeds. God, she thought. She was going to have to cross this. She looked around for someone to cross with, a local who knew how, but there was nobody around her. For a city so jam-packed with people on the roads, it was annoying that there wasn’t one lone pedestrian on this pavement who also wanted to cross.
She could have hid in his or her wake, clinging as close to them without actually touching them. But, instead, she was going to have to quash every one of her survival instincts, and simply step out into a road full of vehicles and walk, without dodging or changing direction, to the other side.
“Shit,” she murmured. Every instinct was telling her not to do it. There, she might get hurt. It was all ‘DANGER! DANGER!’ announcements blaring in her mind, red lights flashing and bomb sirens wailing. It wasn’t like crossing at a red-man, either, where she waited for there to be a gap in the traffic before she darted across the road, hoping there wasn’t an overzealous police officer, new and looking to meet quota, walking that beat. Here, there would be no gap. She would simply step out, and let the traffic funnel around her. She imagined it a little like swimming through a school of fish.
In front of her, on the other side of the road, she could see a lake, and in the middle of a lake was a small island with a building on it, perhaps a temple. On the edge of the lake was a restaurant that overlooked it, with yellow curtains hanging over the terrace handrail, drying in the sun. She saw a few people in the restaurant, sat at small tables, being served by waitresses in long, colorful and traditional dresses: purple, blue, red, yellow, and gold. That was where she was going. She’d made up her mind. It looked lovely. She focused on the restaurant, took a deep breath, and stepped out into the road.
And nothing happened. Standing still like a deer in headlights, she watched as the mopeds funneled around her, leaving her a small enclave of road and air. She stepped forward, and the funnel adjusted with her, and step by step, she walked across.
She had arrived safely at the other side! It really was no big deal in the grand scheme of things, but her heart was racing, and she became aware of the shaky adrenaline that was coursing through her body. That had been… fun. There was something thrilling about stepping into oncoming traffic, and it being the norm.
She took in the sight of the large lake as she slowly rounded it. She took off her day bag, one of her brother’s ratty rucksacks, duck-shit-green. She reached in for her guidebook. The spine was already peeling off its binding glue. If it was any other book, she’d care a little more. It was second-hand, anyway.
“Lake Hoan Kiem,” she read aloud. Translated into Lake of the Returned Sword, it was situated in the historic center of Hanoi. She saw a narrow red bridge that connected to a small island in the lake, and decided that she was going to go there after breakfast. There were already other tourists there taking photographs.
But food came first before sightseeing, and she made her way to the restaurant with colorfully-dressed waitresses. She’d had Vietnamese noodles before in Vietnamese restaurants back home, but she was eager to try the real thing.
“Can I get you anything?” a waitress in a flowing green garb asked, her English perfectly fluent, after Terry had taken a seat. At first it was surprising, until she thought about just how big tourism was in Hanoi.
“Pho Bo?”
“Of course. Any coffee?”
“Yes, drip coffee?”
“Of course,” the waitress replied. She smiled, bowed her head politely, and then walked off.
Terry’s thoughts returned to Liam. There was one question that bounced around the inside of her skull. It was fairly obvious that he was attracted to her. The way he couldn’t take his eyes off her, the way he caressed her curves with his gaze.
So why was he holding her at arm’s length?
*
Liam was his bear, trampling bamboo shrubs, leaving crushed foliage in his wake as he rumbled through the jungle in the deep valleys of northern Vietnam that lay west of Hanoi.
Birds chirped and insects screeched, and he panted, huffing out plumes of hot breath as he ran toward the place where he had once lost everything he held dear.
He tried to distract his heavy heart with thoughts of Terry. She was the one opposite in his present life. She was light where the rest was dark. She made him laugh when he thought he might have forgotten how. She made him forget that trouble loomed, that his past haunted him, and that a hunter stalked him.
Liam’s brown bear roared. That was one thing he could not let hims
elf forget. Though his hunter was elusive, and though he had no certainty past the insane ramblings of a beast that lived in the remote jungles of Borneo, it was still knowledge that he must keep close.
For if he were to forget… if he were to let his attraction toward Terry, his warming heart, dictate his decisions… the stakes were too high!
He’d left early in the morning, but had glanced up and out of his bathroom window to see her room with the curtains drawn, and air-conditioner unit humming. It struck him then that she may have seen him the night before… and if he were not his brown bear, if he were his human, he might have grinned at the thought. He was not one for modesty, and even if he was, it would be a long, long time ago that its edge blunted.
Experience always dulls emotion, he thought to himself. He feared little, found joy in little. Few things made him smile, fewer still pulled laughter from him.
Well, until her. He could not place it, felt as though he were fumbling in the dark. Why had he been drawn to that side of the carriage? Why, when he had seen her, had the near-addictive compulsion to shift simply evaporated? Talking to her had been a thrill that surpassed being his bear in broad daylight. Even now, as he made his way back to a place he hated to return to, being his bear offered him no peace of mind.
Usually it did. Meeting Terry had changed something.
His bear huffed, pushed away those meandering thoughts, for he was getting close.
The jungle was dark. Sunlight could barely penetrate the overhead canopy. Heat steamed up from the wet soil, and all around him were insects and creatures, some of which he realized he had never seen before. The breadth and variety of wildlife might have amazed him, filled him with a sense of awe and wonder, a lifetime ago. Now, it was just another fact that passed through his short-term memory, and vanished into his subconscious.
He saw a trapdoor spider lurch out of its hole to ensnare a dragonfly. He saw a white-throated kingfisher zoom into the water of a nearby stream, plucking out a small fish and flying it away. Before him a python, thick as his human thigh, slithered out of the way of his oncoming bear. Butterflies as large as a human hand flapped about in his way, were left tumbling in the air in his wake. Bees, attracted by the pollen that his big bear paws released with every crunching step, followed him as though they were train carriages, and he was the engine.
He ran. He ran as fast as he could, burned all the energy he could, for he knew that coming upon the camp grounds would be heady and difficult. Since he last left here, he had never returned.
And then he was upon it, the old grounds of the clan to which he belonged. The clan that had been killed in the night by the wolf, the one who hunted him still.
A great sadness came over him. He saw the outlines of where huts had been, now nothing more than tumbled stones overgrown with vines. He saw the stone well, tapping into a vast underground river that raged thunderously. The well was now blocked by earth. An uncharacteristic landslide during an unusually strong summer typhoon, he theorized distantly.
He saw where his family hut had been, where his father, leader of their clan, and his mother, and his sister had lived.
It was in their hut, in the night, in their beds, that they had died.
That they had been murdered.
Liam was not amongst them that night. He hadn’t been there. He could not protect his family, or the other shifters of his clan. He was indulging in an adolescent burst of violent energy. He was hunting in the night as his bear. He had felled a water buffalo that night, pulled black blood from its body. He had hunted prey, and in his absence, his family had become prey to a deranged predator filled with rage.
Marcus!
The name of his father’s murderer, his mother’s murderer, his sister’s murderer, seared his thoughts and charred his mood. His bear roared into the jungle, silencing every other creature, for his wrath was palpable, and their instincts told them to be afraid.
He began the shift, changing into his man. His bones broke and realigned; his flesh melted down into pink goo before the unmistakable shape of a man emerged. His scar tissue healed, and the hair along his body regrew.
Liam walked toward the place where his family hut had been, rubbing his hip where he could feel a pinched nerve. If the shift was too quick, sometimes the body didn’t get it right.
His eyes flashed back into the past. He cradled his sister’s head. She had crawled to their mother, held onto her lifeless body before winking out of this world. Even with the gift of the shift, they could not heal from their wounds quickly enough. The wolf had been too brutal.
She was dead in his arms, and her eyes lay open. They accused him.
No!
Liam awoke, tugged back into the present by the scruff of his neck. He could not indulge in a thought like that. She would never accuse him. She would never blame him. He shamed his sister by thinking such things.
Liam fell to his knees and he wept.
*
After several hours of exploring the city, poking around the shops and stalls, circumnavigating the potato-shaped lake, and looking at tour packages she could take out to various nearby attractions, Terry was pretty much ready to call it a day.
But it wasn’t even dinner time yet, and she wasn’t about to waste what was certain to be a buzzing night life. That was the old her, she figured. After work on a Friday night, she’d often been invited by colleagues to pop out for a drink or a movie, but had almost always elected to go home instead. Ruminating on that fact now, she wondered why, exactly.
She certainly wasn’t going to chicken-out this time.
All day the heat had been baked into her, and so she decided that nothing would be more soothing than a cold gin and tonic, and so she set off back toward the district around Hoan Kiem. There was a small lane where all the hippest bars were supposed to be, and she figured why not? It was a major tourist hotspot, and she was bound to see something interesting there.
Weaving her way through mopeds and alleys alike, she found herself in a narrow street lined with small hole-in-the-walls that sat beneath low-rise blocks of guest houses. Already, though it was just sunset, the place was heaving with what she guessed were tourists. There looked to be a number of local expatriates, too, judging by the number of mopeds that were lined up outside each bar. Most of them didn’t look like the rented sort, which were often branded with bright logos that stood out, so that tourists couldn’t easily steal them, or if there was an accident, they could be easily identified.
She walked up and down the street, and eventually chose a bar without a name, with a big yellow banana as its logo. She sat at one of the tables directly below a ceiling fan, happy for the cooling breeze and shade. She’d chosen the place because it was quite empty, save for some people at the bar and a couple nestled snugly at a back table. She asked the waitress for a gin and tonic, using her finger and thumb, spaced about two inches apart, to signal a half-half mix. The waitress told her that it would cost more, but that was fine with Terry. She’d always liked her g-and-t to have a bite to it.
One drink turned into three, then four, then five, and the music started, the televisions were changed to European football matches, and all the bars started to fill up even more. People wandered down the street, a variety of sorts, some dressed well in suits, others more casually in typical backpacker attire.
She watched from her two-stool table as groups of youngsters, no more than nineteen years old she guessed, flocked from bar to bar, drawing attention to themselves. School wasn’t out yet, and so it couldn’t be a post-graduation trip.
She was content to watch them, examine the crowded night life, and otherwise while away her own evening doing not much of anything at all.
“’Ello, darlin’.”
Terry looked to her side. Three men seated at the bar were looking at her. Bomb sirens were already going off in her mind, only this time, she was fairly certain this wasn’t just her mother’s hyperbolic tutoring that all men were bad. These three looked roug
h, and not in a good way.
“Hi,” she said, before clearing her throat. She offered them a brief smile before returning her gaze to the street scene outside.
“Traveler?”
“Sorry?”
“Are you a traveler?” The man who was talking to her looked to be maybe in his fifties, with gaunt cheeks, and a gold chain dangling from his neck. She glanced at her watch and saw that it was already quarter to midnight. The hours had just evaporated.
“Yes,” she replied without looking at him. “What’s it to you?”
“Well, it’s my bar,” he said, and she turned to him again. He was wearing a slimy smirk, and was rising off his stool. “And mostly, the tourists know to stay outta here.”
“So what, this is a locals-only bar? Or local-expatriates-only bar?”
“Something like that.” He walked over to her, the amble in his step a little wobbly. The man pulled the other stool out from under her table and sat down opposite her, grinning. She saw three gold teeth in between thick rubber-ring lips.
“Is this really your bar?”
“Yes,” he said, touching his chest and laughing. The smell of ethanol emanated from his mouth. “I’m the owner. Name’s Paul. What’s yours, then, darlin’?”
She ignored the question and the name. She had already christened him ‘Gold-Tooth’. “So why don’t the tourists come in here?”
“’Cause we don’t want ’em in here, that’s why.” He looked at his two friends, shared a laugh.
“Why not?” she asked.
The bomb sirens in her head now were wailing louder than ever. She didn’t fancy herself a girl who was easily frightened, but a quick survey of the bar told her it was only them three and her. And that was enough to arouse her sense of caution and danger.
The guy looked like he had a real mean streak to him, someone nasty. She wouldn’t be surprised if he had a sawn-off tucked beneath the counter of the bar. She had skipped the chapters of her guidebook over things to watch out for, and was regretting it now.