A Spirit's Kindred

by Katherine Kim

  “Jennifer’s boys were extremely helpful destroying the wights. They’re more than capable of fending off one human in a Halloween costume,” Kai said. “And I sure wouldn’t want to mess with any of the Sanderlings.” There was another round of chuckles from the crowd and Mrs. Sanderling winked at Kai.

  “If you’re sure, Kai,” Eric said. “You’d know best, I guess.”

  There was another hour of discussion after that before people started wandering off to their apartments again, to spread the news and let everything sink in. Before they’d all left, Kai had asked them to keep careful watch over the Village and their neighbors, and to report anything they felt was off as soon as they could.

  “Well that could have been more fun.” Sebastian sighed. Kai watched him slump onto a bench and scrub a hand over his face, then back over his head. It made his sandy blonde hair stand up in odd clumps which Sarah immediately started smoothing down.

  “Yeah, well. With everything that’s been happening lately, I can’t blame anyone.” Kai said. “I mean first wights and now kidnappers and reporters, and the pool is off limits for another two weeks, not that it’s super hot yet, but still.”

  “Is it always like that? Residents being all whiney and demanding?” Eric asked.

  “I don’t think they were whiney or demanding,” Kai said. He stood to gather up a few chairs to store away again. “They have reasonable concerns. One good, clear photo of someone in here and it’s pretty much the end of everything.”

  “Yeah. Besides, not even normal humans like being harassed by reporters,” Sebastian said. He handed some chairs to Eric and gathered up the rest, following behind. They’d leave the pavilion tent up until the clubhouse was finished in about three months. It was a terrible solution, but it was what they had for the moment.

  14

  Just give up, Kai,” Eric’s voice echoed down the hallway. “It’s not like you can do anything anyway.”

  Kai looked around, the strange, funhouse hallway that destroyed any sense of direction he may have had at the start. He felt as if he’d been trying to get out of this place for hours, but he was pretty sure he hadn’t gotten anywhere. He really couldn’t remember.

  The light was sterile, almost clinical, and didn’t seem to come from anywhere, it just was. The walls dipped and swam at impossible angles that made him feel like he was in a Dali painting. Eric was nowhere that he could see, but Kai had the impression that seeing was not very helpful here, wherever here was.

  When had he gotten here? Where was here in the first place, anyway?

  He turned back towards the direction he had been heading— he thought— when Eric’s voice had drifted over him. He was sure that if he could just find the end of this awful hallway he could get out, get free of this place. The question really was how to do that.

  “Eric?” Kai called. Maybe if he could find his brother that would help. Just having company here would make it less awful.

  “I mean what are you going to do? Reporters are pretty persistent, they’ll find out eventually. You’re never going to be able to keep your people safe.” Eric’s voice floated to him, reasonable and calm. There was something odd about it, though, and Kai couldn’t quite figure out what.

  “I will! I’ll keep everyone safe, it’s going to be fine. Where are you Eric?” Kai spun around again, searching. There must be a door somewhere. Or a window. Or, shit. A two-way mirror or something, not just melting white walls.

  “Leave it to me, Kai. You’ve already made a mess here once, so leave it to us. Sarah and I will take care of everything, like we did last time.” Sebastian’s voice now. Where were they?

  “Seb? Seb how do I get out of here?”

  “Sebastian can’t do any better, Kai. You’re more powerful than he is, and not even you can stop it. The whole Village will be exposed. Then the hunters will come and take care of everyone, if you know what I mean. Those hunters will protect us humans.” Eric’s voice faded as he spoke until the last word seemed to come from miles away.

  “What? Eric!” Kai yelled. He shivered, the ice seeping through his veins and pulled him down like weights were hooked into his flesh. The hallway floor under his feet seemed to buck, causing him to stumble. He landed hard on his knees and pitched forward, barely catching himself before his face smashed into the generic white tiles. Cold and glazed they would have been appropriate in a dive bar bathroom in the winter, but against his hands they felt almost cozy and alive. Fear, nausea, defeat, panic. Kai wondered if he would ever even remember what warmth was?

  Kai groped his hand out, searching for the wall to help steady him as he stood, but instead of the smooth drywall he expected, he felt his fingers brush wood. He swallowed, trying to ease the tightness that squeezed his throat and threatened to choke him, and looked up at a door. It was heavy, made of solid unpainted oak with a minimum of decoration— just enough to make it look like a door rather than a mere slab of wood— and a plain, brass doorknob. Kai stared up at it, despair like he had never known clawed through his chest. It hurt. God it hurt like knives stabbing through him from the inside trying to carve an exit where his lungs should be. He knew what was behind this door. Knew beyond any doubt, past any sort of reason, what was on the other side of this strange, unfamiliar, plain wooden portal. It was his fate. If he stepped through that door, he would be stepping into the darkness forever. He opened his mouth to try to scream, but no sound made its way out into the nightmare hallway.

  Kai squeezed his eyes shut and scrabbled backwards until his shoulders hit the wall opposite. The hallway bucked again, making him slide back towards the simple, horrifying exit.

  “No” Kai denied the door, denied what it stood for, denied the brutal inevitability of his own hand turning that knob. “No!”

  “Kai!” A hand landed on his shoulder and Kai leaped away from it, his breath coming fast and hard.

  The panic closed his throat and he couldn’t even scream, not that he thought it would help. He scrabbled across the grass for a few feet before his brain registered what his senses were telling it. He was on a lawn, the green scent of recently mown grass and the night-damp dirt mixed with the usual suburban scents of warm asphalt and the last ghostly smells of last evening’s meals wafting through open windows. It was night— or maybe early morning given the quiet stillness of the world, Kai wasn’t sure— and he was on the Village Green.

  “Kai? You okay?”

  He rolled onto his hip, keeping one hand dug into the turf to prop him up and to reassure himself that he wasn’t trapped in that mad hallway anymore, and turned to see Marcus hovering a few feet back. Kai tried to speak but the panic was still gripping his throat, making voluntary sound impossible.

  “Here, man. Let me help you up. Come on.”

  Marcus stepped over and very carefully pulled Kai’s arm over his own shoulders and stood smoothly, pulling Kai’s weak body with him. Kai was grateful for the man’s help, as unsteady as he felt right now he wasn’t sure he could manage to walk very well. Together they staggered off the lawn. Kai wasn’t too proud to admit that Marcus was basically carrying him inside now, because there was no way he had the strength to get himself anywhere. His legs were numb with cold and weak with fear. Marcus took him to his own apartment, it being much closer than Kai’s own, and gently lowered him onto the sofa.

  “Thanks,” Kai managed to say finally, once Marcus pressed a cup of coffee heavily laced with whiskey into his hands.

  “No problem. Bad night?” Marcus took a chair and sipped his own coffee.

  Kai shivered, the memory of the nightmare pressing down on his mind again. He nodded and sipped his coffee. The warm liquid hit his stomach like lava, but he welcomed the burn and almost sighed in pleasure when the whiskey’s warmth started seeping through his veins to thaw him out. This is what warmth feels like.

  “After the shooting, and Sam’s murder, I had the worst nightmares.” Marcus said.

  “Shooting?” Kai asked. His throat felt like he h
ad been screaming for hours, and his voice reflected that. He took another slow sip of his coffee.

  “Yeah. I told you that the hunters figured out that I’m nocturnal. They found out where I worked and followed me there. I worked on the security team for Beyond the Veil,” Marcus said quietly.

  “Oh jeez.” Kai remembered that story on the news. It had been another horrifying mass shooting at a club near Miami. It was one of those tragedies that got lost in the seemingly endless parade of tragedies on the news, but this one hit close to home for many here in the Village.

  Beyond the Veil was a club that was known to be accepting of spirits, even though it wasn’t set up as a sanctuary. It had been owned by a pair of yakshas and they had made it known that they were friendly to other spirits that just wanted to get out and dance. No violence or rivalries were tolerated inside the club, just spirits having a good time together and not worrying about the rest of the world outside. Many of the Villagers had voiced the theory that the shooting had targeted their kind somehow, and now it seems that they were right.

  “Yeah. It was–” Marcus swallowed and poured some more Bushmills into his own mug. “It was bad. I lost friends that day. The hunters didn’t care who they shot, either. Eight paranormals and three humans died. I don’t even know how many were injured but lived. Dinesh and Raj, the owners, were devastated. They’d worked so hard to make the club a safe place for anyone who walked in. I ended up being interviewed by the police until well into the next day and I had to stay at the club till sundown. When I finally did get home…”

  “Oh shit, Marcus,” Kai said. A blade of cold stabbed down his spine, and he shivered again.

  “The man followed me. He’d been waiting for me to leave the club, it seems. Cassie was still inside the house, thank God, but Sam was watching for me and ran out of the house when I pulled up. As soon as she reached me, she started to lean in for a hug. She’d been crying, watching the news. Then the guy was there. When I got out of my car, he revealed himself. He shouted something about me being an abomination and how Sam and Cass were tainted and needed to be ‘put down.’ Those exact words, ‘put down’ like some sort of animal. He’d followed me home and—” Marcus dragged in a shaky breath. “She saw him over my shoulder and yanked me down behind the car while he was shouting and firing. She was hit in the head. The paramedics that showed up later promised me that she didn’t feel anything, that she died instantly. Our neighbors were up, mostly, getting ready for dinner or bed so they called the cops as soon as the shooting started. The two shootings were connected almost immediately and I’d been hit in the shoulder at the club so at least I wasn’t a suspect.”

  “Jesus.” Kai shivered. They sat in silence for a long while, slowly edging the coffee out as they added more whiskey to their mugs.

  “I can’t imagine what it was like to walk into a whole cave full of wights, Kai. Or to struggle with a wound like that, but I know what it’s like to stare into hell. It’s not something you ever get over. It’s part of you forever once you’ve seen it, I’m not in the slightest surprised you’re having stress dreams about it.” Marcus broke the silence. Kai shivered, knowing that the man was right.

  “But here’s the thing,” he continued. “You can choose to let yourself get pulled into it, or you can fight back, try to keep anyone else from having to face that kind of darkness. For me, I have Cassie. I will do anything it takes to keep her from knowing more grief like that. You have everyone here. Your brothers, your friends. They stared into hell with you, many of them. You’re not alone.”

  Kai looked up at Marcus. The lidérc was staring at him, sympathy and understanding written on his face. He did carry a burden as heavy as Kai’s. Different, but no less difficult. Kai had an apartment complex full of spirits. Marcus had a daughter he had to try to raise in the light while he himself was trapped in the dark.

  “Thanks.” Kai raised his mug of Bushmills in a salute, and Marcus raised his in return.

  “Anytime, Kai,” Marcus said.

  “Hey, what were you doing out there, anyway?” Kai asked. Hell, what had he been doing out there himself? Last thing he remembered was having a beer with Eric and Sebastian, and they and been very much inside their apartment.

  “I have taken some overnight patrol shifts.” Marcus sighed and stared into his mug. “I talked to Sebastian about it and since I can’t seem to find any work right now, I felt I should contribute to the safety of the Village. I’m doing okay financially from my freelance design work anyway.”

  “Why are you looking for work then?” Kai felt that one job was more than enough for him. Taking care of the Village was the most stressful job he could imagine.

  “Company, mostly. I get lonely, you know?” Marcus shrugged. “The patrols aren’t much better but at least I feel like I’m doing something to contribute to the community. And I do have to eat. The wild energy floating around in a club is more than enough to keep me going.”

  Kai nodded. He hadn’t thought much of it, but there weren’t many folks available to hang out with when one can’t go out in the daytime.

  “Well I’m glad to have you on the team,” Kai said. “Not least because you hauled my ass in from the cold.”

  “What are friends for?”

  15

  Kai opened his eyes, squinting into the glare from his window. The blinds were open and the sun had finally crept down the wall to hit his pillow, the most natural wakeup call on the planet. He stretched and yawned so widely that his jaw popped and sat up with a word of thanks for whoever had been watching over his dreams since he’d crawled into bed.

  He had left Marcus’ sometime after four once they’d run out of Bushmills. Marcus had offered his company on any night patrols in the future, and Kai had to appreciate the look of concern in the man’s eye. It figured that the first vampire he ever met would be a hardworking, civic-minded single father and homebody.

  Most people would probably consider that the weirdest thing that had ever happened to them.

  He ran a gentle finger over one of the feathers dripping off his dreamcatcher in silent gratitude and shuffled through his morning routine, late though it clearly was.

  Nobody else was home, but he had a text from Sebastian suggesting they meet up for lunch at Seb’s favorite pho place. Kai sent a quick text back in agreement that it sounded like a perfect breakfast to him and sat down with his coffee and his never-ending email. Most of the really urgent things were from the architect and the contractors who were slated to come in and start the biggest part of the upgrades. They had started fixing the place up years ago, before they had actually inherited the complex. Safety concerns and basic maintenance that had built up over the years had been their transition into management. Kai sometimes wondered if Obaachan had just waited until she knew they were comfortable in their new responsibilities before following her beloved husband into the next life.

  Now, however, they had reached the point of genuine updates. Everyone was having their kitchen gutted and renovated. Everyone was getting new bathroom fixtures and windows. Everyone even got new carpet, if they wanted it. They were getting new roofs on all the buildings, updating a lot of the plumbing, installing solar panels everywhere they could, and of course, now they were working on the clubhouse as well, since it was already closed and half demoed already. What the heck?

  Still, it all came with a ton of paperwork and thousands of decisions, all of which he had to go through. By himself, apparently.

  His new message alert bonged softly and when he glanced at his inbox he blinked in surprise. That reporter managed to get his email address. Kai grunted in irritation as he answered it, declining both an interview and permission for her to come on the property to harass the Villagers, and giving her the local police non-emergency number for her further enjoyment and use. She should take a hint already. If she wants to know about an ongoing investigation, that’s where she needs to go. If she wants to study local folklore and mythology, she could go to the li
brary. So long as she stays the hell away from here, Kai didn’t care.

  He was still grumbling to himself about nosy reporters when he got to the restaurant. Sebastian was already there, chatting with the ancient Vietnamese woman who ruled the restaurant in a ruthlessly maternal way. When Kai was being entirely honest, she kind of intimidated him, but he’d never said so out loud. Sebastian, however, seemed right at home, grinning and yes-ma’aming as she made sure that he was eating enough and was his pretty girlfriend coming today?

  “Actually, my brother is. And here he is now! Kai!” Sebastian waved him over.

  “You don’t look like you are getting enough sleep,” the old woman said, narrowing her eyes and studying him. Kai ducked his head sheepishly. “You are sick?”

  “No ma’am. I’ve been working a lot lately. Lots of long nights,” he said. She clucked at him and shook her head. She bustled off without another word, still shaking her head.

  “Uh oh.” Sebastian grinned across the table at Kai. “You’re about to get the get-well-soon soup. I have no idea what’s in it, but you’d better eat the whole thing if you know what’s good for you.”

  “Oh man. Grandmothers are terrifying,” Kai said, wincing as he heard her voice shouting rapid-fire instructions in the kitchen.

  “So, what happened last night, man? I went in this morning to ask you something before I headed out and you gave me your hangover snarl for an answer. Eric got a dose of pissy Kai this morning, too, and left in a huff about how he’s here just to help you out and this is how you treat him? I told him to go play in the city and enjoy his vacation instead of being a dick.” Sebastian took a long pull on his glass of water.

  “Shit. I should go find him and apologize. I don’t remember either of you coming to talk to me this morning, sorry. Marcus caught up with me while I was doing the rounds. We ended up killing a bottle of whiskey at his place.” Kai shrugged.