by H. T. Night
“You don’t have to say anything to Hector. I still have the card. I just used it to get the room, so I can keep my cash in case I need it for a place that doesn’t take plastic. Aren’t you going to ask me where I am?”
“Aren’t you still in London?”
“No, I’m not. I’m calling you from Transylvania, Romania.”
“Oh, wow!” Lena said. “You’re already there?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Did you find the little blue guy you were looking for?”
“Yeah, I did, and our training has already started.”
“Holy shit!”
“Still want to make jokes?” I said, laughing.
“You know I was kidding.”
“Were you jealous?” I asked.
“Who wouldn’t be? The guy you’re crazy about calls you up from Europe, and tells you that he has a date with one of the most notorious bachelorettes in the world!”
“More like one of the most notorious con artists in the world.”
“What did she want from you?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I’m trying to wrap my mind around. All I know is it was an apparent setup where she paid three Mani to fight me.”
“She paid three vampires to fight you?” Lena asked.
“I know the whole thing sounds crazy, but that’s what happened.”
“But you’re the Chosen One.”
“Yeah, some welcome wagon that was.”
“Did you beat up the vampires?”
“Seriously? You need to ask that? When don’t I?”
“That’s true. You are my little blonde warrior,” Lena was distracted. “Hold on, Josiah. Tommy wants to talk to you.”
“Hey, Josiah!” Tommy yelled into the phone.
“What’s up, Broham?” I said to Tommy.
“You were already in a fight?”
“You know me, Tommy. Confrontation tends to find me, no matter where I am.”
“You and I both, brother, you and I both!”
“It’s all we know,” I laughed.
“But still, Josiah, I know you. You need to pace yourself. You can’t waste ass-kickings on every Tom, Dick and Harry vampire and werewolf you meet. One of these days, you’re going to get caught off guard.”
“I’m always caught off guard. That’s when I’m the most dangerous!”
Tommy paused. “That’s true.” Now Tommy seemed distracted.
“What’s wrong, Tommy?”
“Be safe. It’s driving me crazy that I’m not there with you.”
“You know I had to do this by myself, but that means a lot to me.”
“It better. Well, I don’t want to take all your time. This poor little lady has been waiting around for your call for the last twenty-four hours like a puppy dog.”
I heard a smack!
“Ouch!” Tommy said, in response to the smack I heard. “What, Lena? You’re trying to tell me you weren’t gazing lovingly at your cell waiting all day for your knight in shining armor’s call?”
I heard a bigger smack!
“Hey, Josiah, you better put your woman on lockdown. She is out of control right now! Later, buddy!”
“Bye, Tommy.”
“Hello, Josiah.” Lena had apparently grabbed the phone from Tommy. It sounded like they were having a lot of fun. I missed that. I was in Europe flying around castles and into open windows. For what? To save the world? Who was I kidding? I wanted to go home really bad. I had never felt more homesick than I did at this moment.
“Josiah, don’t listen to him,” Lena said.
“So, you weren’t hoping I’d call?” I said, pretending to be hurt.
“No, sweetie. Of course, I was. I just wasn’t so Air Supply about it.”
I laughed. “I miss American pop culture and McDonald’s burgers. And I miss you, Lena.”
“I miss you, too.”
I was quiet. “Lena,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“I won’t be able to talk to you for a while. The little blue guy wants me to be focused.”
“Really? How long will that be?”
“However long it takes to be trained, I guess.”
“That sucks. What is this guy? Some kind of communist?”
“I don’t think he’s too political,” I said, laughing. “Lena, I love you.”
She was quiet, and then after a few seconds I heard a loving exhale. “Forever and always, Josiah.”
I smiled. My lungs filled up with her love, with her promise. God, she was something. No fear to tell me. Just like that. Forever and always.
“Josiah, do you have any idea when you’ll be done?”
“I don’t know. Hopefully, it will only be a week or two. He’s doing this Yoda meets Mr. Myagi thing with me. Everything he says is some grand life lesson.”
“That’s cute.”
“Oh, if you could only see this creature, Lena, he’s anything but cute. It’s like Yoda and a Smurf were thrown in a blender together.”
She chuckled. “Be safe, baby.”
“I will.”
“And no more fighting! Tommy is about to take a plane down there to be with you.”
“Tell him I’ll be okay. How’s everyone else?”
“They’re good. We aren’t exactly the Brady Bunch here. You’re kind of the nucleus, and when you’re not around, everyone seems like they are just trying to play nice.”
“Are you talking about Yari?”
“Her, me, everyone.”
“How is Yari?” I asked.
“I told you already, she’s good.” Lena didn’t sound too happy about answering that question. Yari was still a touchy subject. She didn’t have anything to worry about when it came to her. Don’t get me wrong, Yari was hot as hell, but Lena was my world. I decided not to press the issue and say goodbye. “I’m going to go,” I said. “I’m going to rest.”
“Goodbye, Josiah.”
I put the phone down in the cradle and laid on my back on the lumpy, uncomfortable bed. Whenever I stay at a hotel, I never get under the covers. It grosses me out. I knew it was the nicest and cleanest place in the city but it was just... well, travelers had been in and out of that bed for years. It gave me the heebie jeebies. I can kick a seven-foot-tall werewolf’s ass. but dirty sheets are my kryptonite.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know... another superhero reference.
Chapter Eight
I used the bedspread in my hotel room as an extra covering over the drapes in the room. No sun was getting in and that was the way I liked it.
I laid down and tried to get some sleep. My mind was racing as I tried to drift off. A lot had happened to me and I think most people would have cracked by now. But, I’m not most people. As a matter of fact, there is no one in this world like me. That thought alone is what gave me peace, even when my mind was going a hundred miles an hour. I know that under any circumstance, I can come out ahead. I meditated on that concept for a while. All these different things that have been thrown at me, I’m still here. I haven’t faltered; as a matter of fact, it’s only made me stronger. I took some solace in that fact, and I finally I fell asleep. And it was the best damn sleep I ever had. I slept like a dead man for at least fourteen hours.
When I woke up, it was nighttime. In a way that sounds depressing, but these days, it is all I know. I flipped on the TV and watched some CNN. I was having a hard time figuring out how the remote control and TV worked together. I was itching to watch a good reality show. Survivor and Hell’s Kitchen weren’t exactly in the Romanian TV guide. I would just have to wait till I get back to the States to watch my favorite programs.
I watched the news till about midnight. Then I decided it was a good time to head over to the courtyard. I transitioned into the eagle and made my way over to the castle. It took only a couple of minutes to get to the castle from my hotel room. When I approached the compound, I circled around the castle and looked down into the courtyard. I saw Goshi, and it appeared that he was doing P
ilates. This creature definitely perplexed me.
I flew down to the courtyard beside where Goshi was warming up and this time I did a better job on my landing.
“Josiah, I almost didn’t recognize you without the crash landing.”
“Funny, blue man. Funny.”
“Have you stretched?”
I looked at Goshi and he was going all out in his stretch. I sure as hell never stretched like that, even when I was in MMA.
“No,” I said.
“Well, you might want to transition to your Mani form and stretch.”
Huh? I forgot to switch?
I quickly transitioned into my vampire form. “How was I able to speak to you as the eagle?” I asked.
“Josiah, powerful Mani will be able to understand you even when you are the eagle. It isn’t the audible sound that we hear come out of your mouth. It is the voice inside you that gets translated.”
“Was I speaking eagle?”
“If that is what you would like to call it. It will benefit you to speak eagle at certain times so that you can only be understood by the most powerful Mani.”
I shook my head and looked at Goshi. “I have no idea what I am actually capable of doing.”
“That’s why I’m here. I’m your guide to yourself, Josiah.” Goshi’s eyes shifted in a way I didn’t quite trust. It was the first time he had rubbed me the wrong way. He noticed me studying him. “You’re curious about me, aren’t you?”
“Well, yeah. I sort of had to wonder, when you had me put my girlfriend on the back burner if you... if there are others like you, of your, um, species.”
He didn’t answer and then I was quiet. I tried to imagine how it would be if there were none of my kind. No Lena. No Yari. What a terrible thing it would be. To be alone. To become a teacher and a philosopher in that aloneness took great inner strength.
“Ask me a question from your inner self,” he asked, as if he could read my mind. “Not from the surface. From deep inside of you.”
I was quiet. I didn’t know how to answer. For the first time, this situation gave me an adrenaline rush of fear. I hated fear. But there was something not right about the way Goshi shifted his eyes. There wasn’t much I could do about it if something was off. I knew one thing for sure, I was gonna guard my balls from that guy. He had no mercy.
“Well?” he said.
I should have died at least five separate times by now, and somehow, I was still going strong. I needed to trust my surroundings.
“No,” I said. “I’m not curious. What’s there to be curious about? You’re a little blue man that appeared to me in a dream. You had me travel halfway across the world to learn from you. That’s what I’m here to do, learn.”
Goshi seemed disappointed that I didn’t seem to care who he was or where he might have come from, only that I wanted to know if there were others like him. One of the reasons I asked is because I sort of feared a whole ball-kicking drill team of little blue men descending on me, as well as feeling sorry for him about him possibly being the only one of his kind, or maybe the last of his kind, like Highlander. What he didn’t realize was that I did care; that was not a hand I was prepared to show at this moment in time.
“Let’s review some of the punches from yesterday,” Goshi said, and then proceeded to run through all the hand and arm drills we had done the previous night. We reviewed for about an hour then switched over to kicks. Goshi showed me how to kick from all angles. He gave me an insane workout. I think I pissed him off. My hands, arms, legs, and feet were extremely tired. It was about three in the morning when we finally stopped.
“Let’s take a break, Josiah.”
“What’s the matter, Papa Smurf? You tired?” I said, gasping for air. “I’m the one doing all the work.”
“Papa who?” Goshi asked.
“You never heard of The Smurfs? It used to be a Saturday morning cartoon back in the day.”
Goshi sat on a rock near the courtyard. His legs were small and pointy; his body and demeanor appeared to be beaten down from life. I wondered how old a creature like him could possibly be.
I sat on the grass and stretched my back in a sitting lotus position. “Why are you doing this, Goshi? What are you getting out of it?”
“I thought you didn’t want to know about me,” he said, in a way that told me my assumptions that I had hurt his feelings were correct.
“It’s not like that at all,” I said, honestly. “I’m very curious about you. I just don’t need to know all the behind-the-scenes crap. I don’t think that would benefit my attitude.”
“Behind-the-scenes crap? Are you really that selfish?” Goshi was really turned off by what I said.
I needed to save this. “Okay,” I asked. “What’s there to know?”
“Josiah, I have seen things and experienced heartache that you will never understand. You could walk the earth for a thousand years and never see the things I have seen with my own two eyes. You think the world revolves around you, because you were given this gift. A gift you didn’t even deserve. But the Triat shined their goodwill on you. All I can tell you is you need to show some appreciation for those who came before you.”
“It’s hard to appreciate a culture that every time I turn around one of them is trying to kill me.”
“That doesn’t change the fact that a trail was blazed before you and now you have a task ahead of you. You can’t protect a future of a people if you don’t know anything about their past. You need to hear their stories. You need to feel the pain of their persecution. Someone like you doesn’t understand heartache, and until you do, you won’t be a good leader.”
“I don’t understand heartache?” I yelled at Goshi. “Are you fucking kidding me? My entire family was taken away from me two years ago. I have had the life I once knew stripped away from me! Do you think for one second that if I didn’t know about heartache, I would even be here? Don’t you know that it’s my pain that drives me?”
Goshi stared at me for the longest time without saying a word. Then he mumbled, “You shouldn’t have called my life crap.”
“I didn’t mean it like that.”
Goshi stood up and walked out of the courtyard. I watched him as he went inside the actual castle from a side entrance.
Great, I hurt this guy’s feelings. I wasn’t trying to do that. I liked the little guy. He was a kick-ass teacher. I knew there was a depth to him beyond his blue surface. I sat on the ground and waited for him to return. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do. Was I supposed to go after him? That castle was huge, I could get lost in there.
I waited for him to return for about twenty minutes. I finally came to the conclusion that he wasn’t returning to the courtyard tonight. I suppose the little guy needed a proper apology from me. But the nerve of him to tell me that I don’t know about heartache. I am heartache.
So, I jumped up off the ground and headed toward the side entrance of the castle where I’d seen Goshi go through. I walked into the castle and it felt like I had just gone into a time machine. The place must have looked exactly the same as it did hundreds of years ago. It was sensational how my dream was spot on with the details of the castle. The walls were gray with a coarse finish. The floors were made of brick. Even the odor in my dream was accurate.
I couldn’t help but get a sense of history that was in this place. I walked around taking in the ambiance. It was quite intoxicating. Eventually, as I made my way to the back of the dimly lit castle, I heard the sound of classical music playing on a piano. I walked through the final part of the hallway and made toward the music. I stood in front of the room where the music was coming from. The door was slightly ajar and I poked my head in and saw Goshi sitting at the piano, playing. I walked into the room and sat on a wooden chair in the corner of the room and observed this creature play some of the most beautiful music I had ever heard. None of the tunes were ones that I even recognized. They could have been Romanian, or maybe of his own little blue guy culture.
The room was empty except for the piano and a couple of chairs. There was a bookshelf filled with music books. “Wow,” I said, from the chair in the corner of the room.
Goshi stopped playing and looked over in my direction. “Josiah, are you ready for your next lesson?”
“Are you going to teach me how to play the piano?” I said, amused.
“I don’t need to teach you,” he said.
He didn’t need to teach me? “Is one of my gifts that I can play like Mozart?” I asked.
“Maybe not Mozart, but you could give John Tesh a run for his money!”
“You know who John Tesh is?” I laughed.
“Yes, Josiah, even a creature of the night knows icons of such.”
“An icon?” I guess he was to someone. To each their own, I suppose. “So,” I said. “You’re telling me I can play the piano. How so?”
“Everything in nature has a melodic scale. Every note, every experience, every memory is played out on the grand piano of life. This piano is only an instrument. It is up to you to find your own song, your own voice.”
“How will this make me a better fighter?”
“It doesn’t. It will make you a better leader. Being able to express yourself in other ways besides your fists is a good thing.”
I walked over to the piano and Goshi stood up. “Goshi, before I do this, you need to know I do care about what has led you to me. It is just as important to me as why I have been led to you.”
Goshi smiled.
“Goshi, I do have a question for you.”
“Oh, this should be good. Go ahead, ask.”
“Are you a Mani?”
It was the first time I had seen him smile. “Yes,” he said, “I am.”
“Wow, I thought you were a—”
“—a little blue troll that happened to get the Josiah Reign assignment?”
“It’s a good assignment,” I said.
“I know it is. You and I are making history and you don’t even know it.”
“Trust me, I know it.” I stared at Goshi and realized that in many ways, we were in this together. I was glad to not be alone. I was happy that I had a mentor.