by CJ Anaya
I decided to leave it for now and investigate it later. Tie would live, and that was what mattered.
I reluctantly disconnected, wishing I could stay wrapped within the confines of Tie’s spirit forever.
Beautiful, ice blue eyes were there to greet me.
I couldn’t contain my relief. I pulled him into a sitting position where I promptly wrapped my arms around his bloody body and crushed him to my chest. His warm arms enfolded me, holding me just as tightly to him. I pulled back to examine him; to reassure myself he was okay. He moved some hair away from my face and softly caressed my cheek.
If I’d thought a brush with death would’ve been enough to forever wipe that smug, almost challenging grin off his handsome face, I would’ve been dead wrong. There it was, shining at me like it’d never be darkened again. Even his face had completely healed. He looked amazing.
“You know, for someone who has no idea how to heal people, you sure are a quick study,” Tie said as he playfully tugged on my hair. “Don’t you think she catches on awfully quick, Vicky?”
“Don’t call me Vicky,” Victor said, but the look of relief on his face softened the delivery of his words.
As Tie’s remarks sank in, I felt my heart speed up a little. I stared at him, knowing full well my little masquerade was truly over. There was no talking myself out of that big reveal. I slowly disengaged myself from Tie’s arms and put a little distance between us. Tie sat there looking healthy, whole, and annoyingly triumphant.
My father was going to kill me.
Victor’s reaction came out of left field. His eyes were big and bright with unshed tears, and the smile on his lips lit up his entire face. I’d heard of people glowing before, but Victor’s smile illuminated the entire room.
“It’s you, Hope. It really is you.” He reached forward and pulled me up into a standing position.
I thought I heard an angry grunt from Tie.
Victor’s eyes hungrily took me in. I should’ve seen what was coming, but his kiss took me by surprise. He wasn’t timid at all, and there was nothing soft about the way he caught my lips with his own. He kissed me as if he’d been waiting hundreds of years to do so, crushing me to him, no longer polite and reserved as he had been earlier. This was a completely different Victor.
I always thought my first kiss would be kind of anticlimactic. Everyone in school talked about it like it was just a practice run, a way to get your feet wet. With Victor’s arms holding me close and his lips pulling me in I felt completely submerged.
It wasn’t a bad feeling or a bad first kiss, but I couldn’t help it when Tie’s face flashed through my mind. I couldn’t help, but compare it to the memory of Tie and I kissing—whenever that may have been.
Someone in the room cleared their throat, interrupting the exchange. Victor backed up and gave me a sheepish grin.
“I’m…uh…sorry about that.” He cleared his throat. “I don’t know what came over me. I don’t usually…um…”
I tried to nod like I understood, even though I didn’t.
Awkward.
I turned to our audience.
Tie and Angie were sitting side by side on the floor. Tie surprised me by looking extremely annoyed, angry even. The look Angie gave me could have melted iron.
“Normally, I’d be performing a highly entertaining victory dance to Will Smith’s “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It” in honor of this very momentous occasion, you receiving your first kiss and all, but I’m a little preoccupied with exploding cars, Dr. Fairmont’s head getting chopped off, and my best friend sealing up a gaping, bloody wound on a guy that may or may not be on a date with me tonight. Your thoughts?” she asked politely, turning to Tie and holding an invisible microphone up toward his mouth.
Tie obligingly spoke into it.
“I don’t care who claims me as their date so long as they buy me dinner and feed me chocolate cherry bon bons while giving me a much needed neck massage. Getting stabbed in the chest has left me feeling slightly famished and incredibly sore. Although, I am very interested in watching you get jiggy with it.”
He quirked a naughty eyebrow in her direction. Then he wrapped an arm around her shoulder and gave me a defiant look. It was like he was flirting with Angie to get under my skin. It was definitely working. I tried not to let it bother me. After all, I’d just kissed Victor. Maybe that had bothered Tie a little. I secretly hoped so.
I sighed heavily and tried to put even more distance between Victor and myself.
“I guess we have a few things to talk about, huh?” I gave Angie a fat grin, testing the waters.
“Ya think?”
“You’re not supposed to be able to do that,” Tie said.
He and Angie were still sitting side by side on the floor. I felt an unreasonable twinge of jealousy and tried to shake it off. I knew it was silly, but I had this crazy urge to plant myself in between them.
“Do what?” I sank to the floor in front of them, completely exhausted.
“Heal me like that. Nobody has ever survived a wound from a sword forged in the land of the dead.”
“That’s because the residue the sword leaves behind is able to turn your life force off. All communication between your brain, your life force, and the rest of your body is broken. After that, it’s simply a matter of time.”
Tie studied me, looking more than a little intrigued.
“I don’t understand any of this. What is a life force?” Angie asked.
“It’s like a person’s spirit or soul. It exists throughout the body giving every organ, every cell, every molecule a chance to live and function properly. It’s also the essence of that person. Like a personality, only more than that. It’s absolutely aware of everything that’s happening within the body because it controls everything that’s happening within the body,” Victor tried to explain.
Angie held up her hand in protest.
“Okay, pretending I even understood any of that, what do you mean it controls everything? How?”
“Let me ask you this first,” I interjected. “Do you have any idea what makes your heart beat? Has science figured out exactly why a heart starts beating and doesn’t stop? In our physical world where anything that functions does so because of some man-made invention, how do we explain a heart that beats without the help of batteries, or solar power?”
Angie shook her head, looking a little overwhelmed. It was a lot to take in, and there were already so many other things for her to process right now, but I tried to explain it anyway.
“It has intelligence. Your heart, and all the cells and molecules that make that particular organ what it is have intelligence. These intelligences dictate how that organ functions, and that intelligence comes from a person’s life force. Once a life force enters a physical body those intelligences come to life. They’re given instructions and they listen and obey.” I paused for a second trying to gauge Angie’s reaction.
“Is that it, or is there more to this stimulating conversation?”
Sarcasm, for Angie, was a defense mechanism. I was so not her favorite person right now.
“Once I connect with a person’s life force, I know what it knows, and I take on its role by treating it like my own command center in order to heal the body properly. I can show the life force how to heal injuries by giving it access to my computer.” I tapped my temple lightly. “Does that make any sense at all?”
“Oh, sure. Intelligences, life forces, strange healing powers, the fact that you’ve kept this from me for who knows how long. It’s all makin’ sense to me now.” She shook her head like the whole world had gone crazy.
Yep. She was totally mad at me.
“So where’s the land of the dead? Is that in Arizona or something?” she asked, shifting gears.
“That’s very funny,” said Tie. “No. The land of the dead is the underworld. It’s where all men go to pay for the crimes they committed in this life. Highly unsavory sort of place if you ask me.”
I felt like
my reality and my imagination had suddenly nose-dived into one another. “This all sounds a little far-fetched,” I said.
“Says the girl who talks to life forces.” Victor sat down next to me and gave my shoulder a squeeze.
Tie rolled his eyes and continued talking, obviously bothered by any kind of interaction between Victor and me.
“While this is all very touching, it still doesn’t address how you managed to break through the barrier between life and death and act as my life force,” Tie said in an attempt to bring us back to the situation at hand.
“She couldn’t have broken the barrier,” Victor argued. “It would’ve killed her. At the very least her brain would have hemorrhaged and…” Victor trailed off looking completely horrified.
“No, Hope. Tell me you didn’t break through the veil when you were at the hospital tonight.”
“One again, some things never change,” Tie muttered.
I chose to ignore him. “I was healing a friend. I had to break through something in order to get his cells to listen to me. His life force wasn’t willing to do it.”
“That’s because it wasn’t meant to.” He shook his head in amazement. “You really haven’t changed much, despite all the time that’s past. Always healing people who were meant to pass on.”
“Why do you and Tie keep behaving as if you know me?”
“We’ll get into that in a minute. You need to understand something first. You can’t mess with the line between life and death. You can’t heal people that are supposed to pass on. Playing that kind of role is not only dangerous for everyone involved, but it hurts you. Forcing a healing prevents you from healing yourself, and it weakens that part of the veil you’re pushing through.”
“I don’t need to heal myself. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with me.”
“Well,” Tie began.
“Watch it,” I warned.
“If you divert all of your healing power toward something that isn’t meant to be then you’ll never become immortal, and you’ll never fulfill your destiny. When we found you screaming in that elevator you were already starting to die. The forces of life and death are not meant for us to control, and trying to control them could get you killed,” Victor lectured.
“Immortal? What are you talking about?” I felt ready to explode. “Kirby has leukemia. He’s dying. I had to do something. I couldn’t sit there and allow him to waste away.”
“I don’t know who Kirby is, but if his life force isn’t willing to heal his body then it isn’t supposed to. I think you already know that.”
“But I’m not willing to accept it. Was Tie supposed to die?”
“That was different,” he said. “Tie isn’t meant to die. Not ever. I’m not certain, but I think the only reason you were able to bypass his life force without damaging yourself is because there was no barrier for you to break.”
“What are you saying? No one lives forever. It’s ridiculous!” Angie said.
Victor held up a hand before she could say anything else.
“There’s no line between life and death for people like Tie and myself because our purpose is continuous and eternal.”
Angie’s eyes lit up with understanding. “Well, that certainly explains a few things.”
Seriously? Angie had found some clarity here?
Unbelievable!
“Hope merely fixed what was never meant to be broken.” He turned and addressed me. “Which, by the way, was also incredibly risky. Your spirit could have shut down just as easily as Tie’s.” Victor gave his cousin a hard look. “It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve placed her life in jeopardy.”
“I didn’t ask for her to heal me,” Tie shrugged. “I was a little preoccupied with bleeding to death.”
His words stung me more than I wanted to admit.
“Wow. Ungrateful much? Next time you’re bleeding out, I’ll just let you die.” I quickly stood, disgusting myself with an embarrassing need to cry.
Tie jumped up and walked over to me. He placed his hands on my shoulders and forced me to look him in the eye.
“Tie,” Victor warned.
“Keep your shirt on, Vicky. I’m only going to apologize.” He turned back to me, looking a bit uncomfortable. Actually, there were all sorts of emotions flashing across his features, but the one that stood out was this look of wonder, like he couldn’t possibly comprehend why I’d even bothered to save his life. “I’m sorry. What you did was brave, albeit incredibly foolish, and I’m grateful to you for saving my life. Thank you.”
His backhanded apology sounded a little forced, but his eyes actually held a small hint of warmth in them.
“I owed you one.” I gave him a tentative smile. “After all, you did kind of throw yourself between me and a lethal looking sword. You saved my life too you know.”
He shrugged off the compliment.
“Oh, I know. I’m a regular hero these days. My bad boy image is really starting to crumble.”
“If it makes you feel any better, I think you’re a creep, and you can buy your own dinner,” Angie threw in.
His lips quirked in amusement, and then his face took on a serious cast. “To be honest, Hope, I owed you one first. Whether you remember it or not, you once sacrificed yourself for me, and I never had the opportunity to thank you.”
“You have exactly two seconds to explain yourself,” I said. I was done with being left in the dark.
“That’s enough, Tie.” Victor’s growl of anger was uncalled for, but I didn’t understand the dynamics of what I’d been thrown into so maybe it was perfectly called for. Anxious for me to recollect something important, Tie kept dropping hints to jar my memory, and Victor appeared ready to throttle him for it.
Tie rolled his eyes. “Anyway, I wasn’t about to stand on the sidelines and allow a nekomata to take your life.” He released my shoulders from his warm grip and walked over to the recliner in the corner.
“As much as I’m enjoying this heartwarming moment,” Angie said, “I’m afraid it’s absolutely necessary that I address the elephant in the room. Or should I say the great, monstrous cat lying dead in the corner.” She pointed to where my headless father used to be. She was fighting hard to keep her voice steady, but Angie was on the verge of a very noisy breakdown.
And who could blame her?
I looked to where she pointed and caught my breath. Instead of a headless Dr. Fairmont lying motionless on the living room floor, there was a gigantic, headless, black cat with two very long tails.
“What is that thing?” I asked.
“That is a nekomata,” Victor said. He sounded like he was hosting an episode of Animal Planet. “They’re servants of the underworld and extremely dangerous assassins.”
“I gathered that thing was dangerous. How many more are out there?” Angie wondered.
“This is the only one we’ve traced to this location. Though I doubt it was sent by the demon god.”
“You’re right. Amatsu wants her alive,” Tie said. “This thing definitely wanted her dead, but who knows how long it will be before he sends his own lackeys. I hope he’s still only able to send them one at a time.”
“I thought you said it wouldn’t be able to track us for a while. It certainly found us a lot faster than you anticipated,” I said.
“I can’t account for that. With the amount of voltage it received, it shouldn’t have recovered so quickly, and it must have assumed we’d go here first. I didn’t think that far ahead.”
Tie made a snorting noise and said, “Coming here first would have been obvious to a fifth grader let alone a demon cat from the underworld.”
“I thought we would have more time!”
“Demon cats and gods, huh?” Angie asked, letting out a little giggle. “Since I can’t claim to know the difference between reality and fiction anymore, I’m gonna go with the flow here and pretend this conversation is the most normal thing that’s happened all day.”
I took in Angie’s mask of cal
m and knew it was only a matter of time before it cracked wide open.
“Let’s pretend for one second I believe you. Why does this demon god only send one assassin at a time?” I asked, watching Angie from the corner of my eye.
“One assassin is all it takes,” he said. “Nekomata are dangerous because they can take the form of any human they wish. This is how they gain your trust, and then they strike.”
“And the fireballs?”
“Nekomata breathe fire,” Tie said.
“Of course they do,” Angie replied. “Cats the size of my refrigerator, are always pretending to be human while coughing up deadly hair balls of fire.”
“Angie?” I asked.
“I’ll be over here having a psychotic episode if anybody needs me.” She stood and made her way to the couch on the opposite side of the room, picking up her phone in the process. She quickly curled herself into a ball and remained motionless.
I walked over to her. Besides needing some space from Tie and Victor, I was seriously worried about my best friend. I sat down next to her and began rubbing her back, hoping to comfort her and avoid another one of her dark periods. She’d been focusing in and out quite a bit lately. It was always the prelude to a melt down. For the millionth time I wished I knew why.
“Don’t think a back rub is getting you off the hook. My level of displeasure with you has skyrocketed to the point where I’m not sure I actually know who you are. Not only has this double date turned into a complete and total disaster, but I think my hair got singed when that first fireball hit my car. I’m not going to be happy until we get a chance to talk this out.”
“We’ve got to get out of here, first,” said Victor, getting serious again. “They know who Hope is now, and the demon god is not going to stop until she’s dead.”
“I’ve got about a million questions on that subject as well, but before we go anywhere we have to call my father. I’m not doing anything until he knows what I know.” I wasn’t about to budge on that one.