by J. Armand
“Help me with what?” He laughed sarcastically.
“Freedom. You’re willing to kill yourself for it, but not accept help.”
“I don’t need your help. Anything worth doing is meant to be accomplished alone.”
“That isn’t true, Noah. Vivi may be gone, but you still have a friend that cares about you as much as you try to push him away.”
“Maybe he should take the hint.”
“Why keep me around, then? Why take the time to teach me and jump in when you think I’m in trouble?”
“So you don’t end up like me.”
The lights in the rotunda dimmed even further until we sat in total darkness. Something grabbed me by the leg and dragged me across the floor. Please let this be Gianluca, and let him be all right.
Chapter Twenty-One
My sight returned along with the noise of battle and the fire spirit’s song. I was on my back outside the temple, where Gianluca was fighting off all four spirits and the stone samurai army with army of his own shadow knights. I couldn’t see his face behind his armor, but I knew he was running on fumes. His movements were sluggish and his shoulders slumped between swings of his obsidian greatsword.
This was it, the final push. Stopping them here would put an end to our spirit troubles if the seal worked as planned. I rushed in, only to be tackled back to the ground. A wave of fire passed overhead narrowly missing me.
“Th-thanks?” Noah was on top of me, blocking the flames. He turned to mist and dissipated without saying anything. I flew more cautiously this time to Gianluca and cleared away the statues. By compressing them into stone spheres I was able to prevent them from reforming for a while. I smashed the fire spirit between the spheres to defeat her the same way I had earlier and quiet her singing. With the loss of their fourth, the spirits returned to their more human form. Noah didn’t waste time ambushing the gale-force monk with the Muramasa across his throat.
My eyes were glued to the golden door as the Nether knights surrounded the water spirit and ended her with a trip to the shadow realm. Gianluca’s blade was parried by the lightning spirit’s katana. Gianluca overpowered him, cleaving down through the katana and then the spirit himself.
“Come on,” Noah mumbled under his breath, watching the door with me. The wait was agonizing.
“I hear them. I can feel them in the shadow.” Gianluca broke the uneasy silence. “They cannot pass the door.”
“It works!” Noah cried in elation. “It fucking works! I’m so happy I could stab Vance for making me doubt him.”
“That’s it? It’s over?” I tried holding back my screams of joy until I was absolutely sure, but for Noah to be celebrating was a good sign.
“Yes, I will make sure,” Gianluca said. He removed his helmet. Chains of darkness sprang up from the shadows and covered the temple from every angle. “It is inside too. They cannot take the paper away.”
I couldn’t describe my happiness. A single piece of paper had just ended a war that had claimed so many lives. Maybe this was what Noah had planned from the start, maybe it wasn’t. But now he had the key to his freedom in his hands. Even when the spirits were presented with the peaceful option of taking back the sword, the anger that carried over from their past lives drove them mad with violence.
“Come, little one.” Gianluca called up to me, smiling the warm smile I had missed seeing behind the armor. “We go now.”
I flew down, still exhilarated from our victory, right into Gianluca’s arms. I hovered at eye level, smiling back at him. Before I could let myself hesitate any more I grabbed his armor and pulled him toward me until our lips met. Our embrace gave me a feeling of pure bliss like nothing I had ever felt before. I closed my eyes and held his face in my hands, feeling along the coarse stubble as his soft lips locked with mine. We ran our fingers through each other’s hair and continued kissing for countless minutes. It was sweet, tender, and most of all passionate.
I had been afraid of nothing this whole time. There wasn’t any awkwardness between us; it was fluid and natural. Every subtle move we made anticipated the other’s. We flowed together like we had done this a million times and it only got better with practice. Nothing else was important, not where we were or who we were. My senses were all on him and I didn’t care otherwise. I felt accepted and safe in his arms, and I never wanted to go back to living in fear of something so good. I would remember this moment forever. It was transcendent.
“This is the best prize,” Gianluca whispered to me in his deep sexy accent. He pressed his nose to my cheek before kissing it and squeezing me closer to him. The steel-hard armor softened back into regular clothing so I could feel his skin. I kissed his palm and then his lips before realizing we had forgotten someone.
“Where’s Noah?” I asked. Gianluca located him atop the pagoda where he was looking out over the village and brought us to him.
“Sorry,” I apologized.
“I ain’t even mad, kid.” He turned to us, ready to leave, and clutched the Muramasa tightly. “I’ve got everything I could ever want.”
He wasn’t smiling, but there was an expression of hope in his eyes I had never seen before.
“Then, to home!” Gianluca announced.
---
“Gianluca, where are my clothes?” I shouted from the hotel bathroom. I had just finished taking a shower and my clothes had gone missing. “I know you can hear me in there if you can hear me from two worlds away.”
I wrapped a towel around my waist and went to see what he was up to in the room. I wasn’t really prepared for what I saw. Gianluca was lying on the bed in black underwear he must have seen modeled in a store. The sight of his chiseled body was enough to make anyone lightheaded; every muscle was sculpted with perfect symmetry and definition. It was the first time I had seen him like this and the sight was certainly a welcome surprise. I had guessed he was fit and had the body of a very well-built Roman soldier, but he was more like a Roman god carved from olive-skinned marble.
He looked up from a book he was reading, his grin turning from sheep’s to wolf’s.
“Very nice, but I think it is too much?”
“Funny, but it’s not gonna be that easy!” I noticed my clothes sitting on a chair that I hadn’t left them on. “What are you eating? Is that ice cream?”
“Gelato?” He looked down at the big tub next to him on the bed. It was big enough to be behind an ice-cream counter.
“Where did you get that?” I couldn’t hold back from laughing at him as he ate from a giant ice cream tub in his underwear while reading a stolen history book.
“Eh… I do not understand.”
“You stole that, didn’t you?”
“Sorry, my English…” He shrugged and went back to his ice cream. “Maybe in Italiano?”
“At least share it with me.” I got on the bed and lay next to him.
“Hm, if you say it in Italiano, then maybe. Okay? ‘Gelato.’”
“Gelato,” I repeated with a frown.
“No, sorry. This is not very good. Maybe you practice sometime and we try again.” He was trying to be very serious and took another spoonful.
“Gianni!”
“Oh, Gianni? I like this name.” He put down his ice cream and book and curled up with me.
“You have enough nicknames for me. I figured you needed one.”
“I like-” Gianni didn’t finish before his lips found their way to mine again. He climbed on top of me and, feeling a little adventurous, I let my hands travel his tanned bare flesh and explore the smooth curves of his rock-hard abdominals. “I have something you will like more than a gelato.”
“Gianni, we only had our first kiss yesterday. One step at a time.”
He reached into the shadows of the wall behind the bed and pulled out a stack of three white boxes.
“For you.” He presented them to me. As if things couldn’t get any better between us.
“I can’t accept that.” I was smiling ear-to-ear and
dying of curiosity to see what was in the boxes, but too humble to take them from him.
“Yes, you must,” he insisted and opened the first box for me. A very expensive-looking white sweater was wrapped in tissue paper, looking like something the Blackbournes would have had.
“Gianni-” I couldn’t say more than his name without sounding giddy, so I let my kiss do the thanking instead. It was taking some getting used to expressing and accepting my own emotions, but I was loving the journey. “This was really nice of you, but you can’t steal for me.”
I checked the price tag and was shocked to see the sweater alone was worth more than my first car.
“Stop, you are so stubborn. It is not stealing. I pay with the money.” He opened another box for me with an even more expensive white jacket. “You will not let me make you the clothes, so I must buy them.”
“I won’t let you make them like yours because I know you can see and feel through them. I don’t think I like the idea of you looking under my clothes and touching everything like that just yet.”
“Even the normal clothes have the shadow under them for me.” He grinned roguishly.
“Gianni!” My protest turned into a fit of laughter as the shadows under the towel I was wearing tickled my leg.
“Okay, I will be good. I will promise to you.”
I rubbed the faux-fur hood of the jacket against my face in admiration. “Where do you get the money from? Stealing the money doesn’t count.”
“Always the stealing. I am not the thief. Gianni is not the bad man.” The third box contained a pair of designer jeans and underwear. I imagined him selecting this stuff in the store and had to wonder how he knew my size so well already. “I read this is worth very much money, so I find the place to trade.”
He pulled out Ancient Roman coins from the shadows to show me. They were in near-pristine condition, something that no human collector or museum on Earth would have ever seen. A handful of these could be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Gianni was as ingenious as he was attractive. It also made me feel a lot better about accepting his gifts.
“Put on the clothes.” He kissed my hand. “I want to take you to a place.”
“You have good taste for someone who slept through centuries of fashion,” I said after changing in the bathroom. “I’m noticing a pattern with all the white. I’m surprised you didn’t pick black.”
“It is to match your skin. In my Roma the very white skin like you is the most beautiful. Only the very rich person can stay this white because he does not work in the sun like the farmer or soldier. They make the statue in the white stone like a marble, in Latin it is said ‘alabaster.’”
“I always just called it pale. Alabaster sounds so much better. Everything sounds better when you say it.”
“Come, little chick. We will go to see our Roma now.” He created his usual clothes and took us through the shadows to the Colosseum. I hadn’t thought about going back, but this time would be different. I hoped.
It was a bright sunny day. The air was crisp and clean, and I felt cozy in my new clothes. It wasn’t as crowded here as it had been on our previous visit.
Gianluca hooked his pinky around mine playfully and looked away, pretending he wasn’t doing anything. I made my move and took his hand. Like all the other couples around us, we were holding hands.
“This is okay?” he asked, a little surprised and cautious for my sake.
“Absolutely.”
Thoughts of Gianluca trumped even the Colosseum, which was little more than a backdrop for me. A few curious or unkind looks made my anxiety flare up again, but the strangers’ expressions faded from view as quickly as they did. We were all that mattered.
We sat together in the stands, looking out at the ancient amphitheater. Gianluca put his arm around me and nuzzled his face past the fur of my jacket hood to sneak in a kiss on my neck. My stomach still filled with butterflies any time we touched. It was magical. I surprised him again by kissing him back and pulling his arm around me.
Two skinny teenage boys kept looking over their shoulder at us and whispering to each other. I didn’t let it get to me. I thought of getting up and moving, but I had every right to be here and express myself the same way as all the couples did.
“I think they are jealous.” Gianluca spoke into my ear.
“You always say that.” I squirmed, not from embarrassment, but from the feel of his facial hair tickling my earlobe. “It doesn’t bother me. Not this time.”
I stopped paying attention to the boys until a few minutes later I noticed the two of them fidgeting. Then something amazing happened. One of them finally grabbed the other’s hand and held it. They were trying to be discreet by hiding the coupling under their coats, but I watched the whole thing happen. The boys moved closer to each other as inconspicuously as possible until one kissed the other on the cheek with lightning speed that would make Noah envious. They looked around to check if anyone noticed, then smiled back at us with beet-red faces.
Gianluca and I smiled back at them. They talked among themselves nervously, and then came over to us. The one who had initiated holding hands spoke in Italian to us, which Gianni translated for me. The only thing I caught was a “thank you” at the end.
“He say they are being in love two years, but do not show anyone because they never see it until us today. They are very thankful.”
I was touched and suddenly felt more powerful than I ever had. And that was saying something coming from someone who could lift a car over his head with his mind. I had judged them as incorrectly as others did me at first. It was the best feeling being proven wrong.
“Be proud of who you are,” I told them through Gianni’s translation. “Nothing can stop you when you love yourself.”
They shook our hands and walked off together with big smiles.
“This is a very strange world,” Gianni said after they left. “Why love is a bad thing to some people? I do not understand, but I am happy to help the change.”
“Me too.” I rested my head on his shoulder as the sun moved across the sky over the Colosseum. A group of Chinese tourists passing by pulled out their phones in unison to listen to a ringtone. At least, I thought it was a ringtone. The tune was eerily familiar and kept going.
I got up to look over their shoulders at their phones. They were all watching a video of someone named Kamiko Yamamoto, “Japan’s Hottest Songbird.”
The tourists started to sing along. I had no doubt the tune was the fire spirit’s song, and she was the one singing on the video. But the song was different, and so was she. The song had been remixed into a techno rave trance beat and her hair was dyed yellow-blond, with the rest of her done up like a modern-day pop star.
Her song pumped throughout the Colosseum, but it wasn’t coming from just the cellphones.
“Hey, a live concert!” someone shouted from a lower tier of the stands.
“Gianni!” My heart pounded as I looked down at the roped-off staging area. The fire spirit, Kamiko, was belting out the new version of her hit soul-stealing song with a tremendous captive audience. Everyone, including security staff, had the faraway dreamy stare as they listened to her sing. Hundreds of cellphones played the background music.
Gianluca wasted no time and jumped over the railing to confront her. He donned his full suit of armor on the way down, throwing away the slim possibility of keeping this under wraps. The tourists thought it was all part of the show as she nimbly dodged and danced between Gianni’s sword strikes. He tried swallowing her into the dark abyss, but she just reappeared to even louder cheers from the crowd, who thought it was some preplanned illusion act. It wasn’t until the sky started to rain fire at her command that they realized this was more than pyrotechnics.
I saw the teenage boys separated in the crowd as people trampled their way to the exits in sheer terror. The oval tiers of the Colosseum were turning into rings of fire, trapping the tourists. I couldn’t use my powers here and let people see
. I shouted for Gianni to stop so we could flee and take the battle somewhere else, but he was either too focused or too angry to listen.
The intense heat melted the supports of scaffolding fastened above an exit. One of the two boys we met earlier was directly underneath, but no one was paying attention in their rampage. I yelled for people to look out, then tried to get Gianluca’s attention again.
“Fuck it,” I shouted to myself. I was going to wind up being outed someday anyway and I’d rather it be on my own terms. It wasn’t as though I had led a peaceful life up until that moment, anyway. I froze the scaffolding and tons of falling rock in the air before they could crush anyone. For a brief moment I thought maybe no one would notice I had done it, but the guy with the creepy black and grey eyes kind of stood out even in this chaos. I moved the debris to the center where Kamiko was performing, hoping to hit her, but no such luck.
Now people really noticed me. In typical human fashion, the word spread like the plague throughout the Colosseum to people who hadn’t even seen me themselves. Some screamed, others ran. I wanted to think their fear was because of the fire, but to be honest it didn’t make any difference.
I looked back as I flew down to Gianni. The teenage couple was reunited, openly holding each other in the mosh pit. One stared in horror at the demonic visage floating in the sky, the other in wonderment at the idyllic saint that had rescued them. I wasn’t going to win everyone over, but they were safe and I had opened at least one mind.
Kamiko danced about singing to the entrancing beat. Her evasive footwork antagonized Gianluca and I until she decided her show was over and left the scene in a burst of flame. Her taking us both on without her friends and in our world was cause for serious alarm. This siren spirit had been posing as human to use her song on unsuspecting fans. The Muramasa stole blood and she stole souls. It was the perfect combination for evil as their group exacted their vengeance on the world that had wronged them.
“We have to get to Noah,” I told Gianni. “They’re going to go for the sword.”