by Wayne Santos
“Just ask about a transfer from Toronto to Santo Tomas.”
He nodded and started asking his question.
Teek nodded as well, his eyes open and focused. “Saddle up,” he said.
Maria walked towards Teek, transitioning to something less tangible, but more spiritually significant—a state she was beginning to realize was more properly natural for her. She almost didn’t feel awkward at climbing on Teek’s back and looping her legs through his arms as she held onto his mane. Teek delicately adjusted his grip on Tate.
“Go, go speed racer,” he said, and actually kicked at the floor a couple of times before breaking into a run, straight for the head of the guy at the counter, who was already looking puzzled, perhaps a little panicked at the fact that the woman he had been talking to had just disappeared. He flinched for a split second, perhaps some vestige of imagination or spiritual connection to home briefly granting him the vision of a demon horse thing barreling towards him, but when Teek made his final charge, the Filipino grocery store, Bloor & Bathurst, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and North America all disappeared.
Chapter Nine
HOME IS WHERE THE HURT IS
THEY WERE IN all-points-in-between, running on a thread of thought, culture, imagination, and wonderment that connected one mind to another. For Maria, it was like becoming a comet or a star, it was freedom, it was distance from everything she’d known. A highway made of pure emotion.
“Hi-ho, Silver, away!” she shouted and laughed.
Her laugh turned into a cry of surprise, and then pain, as Teek neighed, bucked, and tossed her off. She landed on what passed for ground with a hard thud that nearly winded her.
“What the fuck?” She looked up at Teek.
“I don’t have many lines that I don’t like being crossed,” he said, turning around. “Being enslaved is one. That’s another. Don’t cross it again.” He knelt down and looked at her.
Maria got to her feet, brushed herself off, and returned to his back. Perhaps, on thinking about it, what she’d shouted had been offensive. “Sorry,” she said.
“Well, that’s another thing you do a hell of a lot better,” he said, rising back up. “You apologize now. That’s a big deal.”
“That’s also a Canadian thing,” she said.
“I’m clearly not giving this country enough credit.” He snorted. “Apology accepted.”
They carried on. It didn’t take long for Teek to build up his speed.
“How long will this take?” Maria asked.
“Not long at all,” Teek said. “It was a solid connection, the ground is good, this’ll be over before you know it.”
He was true to his word. Maria saw it in the distance: a cloud, that resolved itself into a jumbled patchwork of colors and shapes, like someone had taken a million different photos, turned them into jigsaw puzzles and mixed them all up. It was reality, bearing down on them. Teek bared his teeth, neighed, and pounded on the ground even harder and faster, leaning into it.
“Relax and keep your limbs loose,” he said.
“What?”
Teek hit the collage of reality.
It didn’t feel like any one thing, but like many things at once. Heat. Humidity. The smell of car exhaust. Cocks crowing. An almost shocking pressure in her heart that felt like something inside was drowning for air and struggling to break through her chest.
I’m home…
And then she shouted as she was thrown from Teek. She hit the ground, limp, and went into a roll, groaning with every bump. She turned her head just in time to see Teek killing his own speed with a slightly more controlled skid that kicked up dirt everywhere as he ground to a spinning halt.
She stood up. She had every intention of yelling at him about his lousy fucking landing skills when the words died in her throat. She inhaled, smelled the air, and felt sweat forming on her skin.
It was morning here, the sun still low in the sky, making its rise. She was on some kind of highway, a crowded one, reminding her of the densely-packed buildings between Toronto and the other small cities on the GTA, that made you feel as if you’d never even left the city. Gas stations, hardware stores, fast food joints with a happy, smiling Jollibee in a chef’s hat. Strip malls and more on either side of the roads, as an endless stream of cars, motorcycles with covered side-cars big enough to seat four, and—yes, holy shit—Jeepneys made their way through.
But when she turned and looked to the east, her chest heaved, almost felt like maybe something in there had broken. Or closed. Or maybe even opened. And then the tears came, unasked for, unbidden, and even though she knew it wasn’t there, couldn’t be happening, it felt like the world was singing to her, a song of welcome, of warmth, of familiarity. She couldn’t speak. She knew she couldn’t, because if she did, her voice would betray her.
Mount Makiling.
“Welcome back, kid,” Teek said somewhere behind her, with surprising gentleness.
A row of peaks, covered in emerald green. Warming under the sun. Radiant, monolithic, and dominating the landscape. A sleeping giant, no longer spewing fire and fury and lava on the land. A constant fixture to the people. A source of power and faith. It was here. It was her land. It was her.
Maria wept.
She didn’t even know why. She only knew that seeing it had left her feeling tiny and cradled in the arms of a mother, and yet strong and powerful, with an energy she had never known. There were songs here. Secrets. Whispers and cries. The prayers of the people, the whistles and screeches and endless exchanges of the animals. She knew it all, could feel it all here, and Maria Malihan was almost overwhelmed by how much of it there was, while Maria Makiling realized just how much she had missed all of this.
Teek came up behind her and put his hand gently on her shoulder, squeezing. “You need a minute?”
She probably did. “Tate doesn’t have a minute.” She looked over at him, ran her hand across his arm. Teek had been so careful with him. For a demon horse beast thing, he could be incredibly considerate. “But now that we’re here, I know where we should go.”
“It’ll be easier for you now.”
“Easy to do,” Maria said. “Not so easy to feel.”
“It’s your show, now, this is home ground,” Teek said, staying behind her. She wasn’t sure if he was doing that out of some protocol among the divine and spiritual that she wasn’t aware of, or just because he was afraid of her, now, here, on home ground. And maybe he should be. She felt different here. Powerful. Maybe she couldn’t do anything she wanted, but the number of things she couldn’t do was incredibly small now.
“We’re going to the heart,” she said.
Teek nodded. “Lead the way.”
She closed her eyes and let herself be Maria Makiling. It was like her senses, nerves, blood vessels, muscles, neurons, everything, expanded, connected, bridged themselves to this place.
And when she opened her eyes again, they were already there.
A small pond. A clearing, edged by vegetation. Rock wall around them, but green light above. The heart of the mountain. In some ways, the heart of Maria herself.
She knew what to do now. She knew exactly, it was coming faster and faster now.
“Set him down by the water, we’ll need some of that,” Maria said. She wasn’t sure which emotion she should entertain now. Part of her was afraid at just how alien, how different all of this was, while another wanted to scream for joy at being back here. Still another wanted to stare at Tate more, relieved and happy to be able to help him.
Teek obeyed, laying Tate out. The soil would be soft, accommodating, more comfortable even than the hospital bed he had been recovering on, she knew that.
She reached down, touched the water, and saw the concentric ripples turn into rings of light that grew out from the center, radiating away and continuing even as they reached the soil. The light suffused the plants and the rock wall around them, and the sound of a million plants and animals saying love all at the same time
fluttered in the air around them. The land knew now. It knew its heart and mistress had come home.
Maria cupped some of the water and let just a few drops slip into Tate’s mouth. Then she took her own wet hands and caressed his face, letting the water glow, a gentle green throb, before soaking into his skin.
He sighed, like a man in a good dream, and shifted slightly.
“He’s going to be okay here,” Maria said.
“Are you?” Teek asked.
Maria hugged herself. “I don’t know.” She walked through the vegetation, looked up at the light above. “I’ve never let you in here before, have I?”
“There are rules about that sort of thing.”
“I don’t know them right now. Don’t care, really.”
“Maybe you oughtta. Someone made those rules, you know. And they care when they get broken.”
“Is that right?”
Teek nodded vigorously. “There are consequences for getting caught breaking protocol.”
Maria’s eyes narrowed. “Well, we’ve got two immortal Spaniards harassing a divine being across centuries unless she agrees to date them. Pretty sure that’s not in the HR handbook either, but I don’t see anyone calling that out.”
“That’s…” He stopped and put his chin on his hand. “That’s actually a really good point.”
Tate groaned and moved.
Maria knelt down, looked him over, and touched the side of his face.
Tate opened his eyes slowly, blinked, and focused on her eyes. “Hey,” he said in a near whisper.
“Hey,” she said, and her voice broke. She took his hand in her own and brought it up, laying a single kiss on it before putting it to the side of her own face. “You’re okay now. You’re safe.”
“Was I not before? What happened?” He blinked slowly and looked straight above him as if pieces of memory were sliding into place in front of his eyes. “We’re… we’re not in hospital.”
“No, we’re not.”
He shifted his head, taking in the lush green vegetation, the patina of green light that rustled above them. “Where are we?”
“We made it,” she said. “A lot sooner than you thought, too.”
“What?”
“We’re in the Philippines,” she said. And then, in perfectly-accented Tagalog, she said, “We’re in the heart of Mount Makiling, in Laguna province. On Luzon island. We’re home.”
“What?”
“It’s true,” she said, switching back to English.
“But… how did we…?” He blinked more rapidly now, shifted his head a bit more to look around, and finally saw Teek. “There’s a horse in a loincloth behind you.”
“Don’t act so surprised, sunshine.”
“There’s a horse in a loincloth behind you that talks.”
“That’s Teek,” Maria said. “He’s okay. He’s my friend.”
Teek’s mouth opened. “I am?”
Maria turned back and looked at him, smiled, and nodded once. “Yeah. You are.”
Teek looked at the ground, unable to maintain eye contact with Maria, but his ears twitched, and she pushed down a giggle.
Tate’s own mouth was working, and Maria could almost see the questions filing in front of his eyes, trying to prioritize which one to ask first. She leaned down and silenced his questions with a kiss.
“There’s so much shit to deal with right now, you wouldn’t believe it.” She pulled away from him. “But for now, I need you to trust me. You’ve been hurt, do you remember that? You’re still not well. You need to stay here and get better. You’ll get better a lot faster here. And you’ll be safe.”
“From what?”
She stood up. “Hopefully, I’ll soon be able to answer that, and in the past tense. I’m just going to say that it’s a skeleton in the closet so old it would get a senior’s discount at the movie theater.”
“It would get credited, actually,” Teek threw in. “We’re talking lifetime admission, free tickets, the whole wazoo.”
“Anyway, just stay here. Rest. Be safe. I really need you to do these things. Can you?”
Tate looked around. “It’s a really beautiful place.”
“Thank you,” Maria said.
“I don’t think I could really do much more than roll around,” Tate said. “So you win. Did anyone get the number of the truck that hit me?”
“It was a car,” Maria said.
“I was joking.”
“I know. I wasn’t. But I’m going to fix this.”
He shook his head. “There’s so much about this I don’t understand.”
“It’ll sort itself, I promise,” Maria said, hoping that was true. “Just trust me.”
“I do,” he said. “But there’s just one question. Your Tagalog. You spoke it just now, it was perfect. How did you do that?”
She smiled. “Mahal kita.”
He smiled back, the one that had made her fall in love with him in the first place. “I love you too. But that’s not the right answer.”
“That’s the only answer,” she said. “The only one that matters to me. Rest. Be well, and just be safe. You have no idea how much of a difference it will make if you can do this.”
“That sounds really easy to me, but okay, I’ll do it.”
“It’s more of an accomplishment than you’ll ever realize, but thank you. I have to go.” She waved.
He waved back, feebly, and closed his eyes.
Watch over him. Bring him peace and serenity and let nothing harm him in this place.
The trees, bushes, and grasses all glowed once, briefly, in acknowledgment of her command. Green light ebbed faintly in the pond and faded away.
Maria tilted her head back, staring at the light above, Teek taking a place beside her. She saw the top of Mount Makiling, pictured it with the hyper-reality of her new senses and memories, and that simple act of reminiscence made it real. She stood atop the peak, looking down at the green and verdant land around her.
Beside her, Teek took in a deep breath. “Man. Been a while.”
“Yes.”
“You handled that with some class. Not bad.”
“I meant what I said down there.” She turned slowly, taking in the view of the land all around her. It was still green, brimming with life, but a lot dirtier than her memories indicated. Also, there hadn’t been some kind of college campus down there in any of her memories, but lo and behold, she could see kids walking around. “I do think of you as my friend. But it’s okay. You don’t have to feel the same way. There’s a lot of bad blood between us. Centuries. I’d understand.”
“Well, for now, don’t worry about what I do or don’t think of you. I’m here. And I’m going to see it through to the end with you. Just concentrate on that.”
She wanted to pat Teek, or run her hands through his mane, maybe even give him an apple or sugar cubes. All of these things would probably be offensive. A hug was probably too much. She settled for a gruff shake of his right shoulder. That seemed dudely enough, and not particularly horsey.
He didn’t seem to know how to react to this either, so he snorted and looked around. “Man, this place really let itself go, didn’t it?”
“But there’s still power here. So much of it.”
“And you can feel it?”
She nodded. “And a whole lot of other power. It’s like a web. Everything crossing over everything else in threads, with bigger cores where they converge.”
“Dominions and demesnes,” Teek said. “Serious office politics with some fucked-up stakes. Don’t mess with that unless you have to.”
“I guess we have to,” Maria said.
Teek sighed. “I knew you were going to say that.”
“What do you know about Aurelio and Mateo?”
“I know Aurelio’s got some kind of espada ropera he’s fond of sticking in my thigh. And Mateo’s got a Toledo sword he usually hacks into the back of my neck once I’m on the ground. But I don’t know what they do for fun on
weekends, if that’s what you mean.”
Maria gritted her teeth. “Shit. Have I said I’m sorry, yet?”
“Not in the last five minutes, so I guess that was about due.”
She dipped through her memories. It was tough looking at those ‘final’ memories, the ones that preceded every jump into another lifetime. They were always full of blood, and tears and anger. So much anger. But they confirmed what Teek had said. Whatever else they were, Aurelio and Mateo still retained their martial skills and weren’t afraid to hunt.
“You ever stop to wonder what would happen if you just agreed to marry one of them?”
“No.”
Teek shrugged. “Maybe it would work in your favor. Maybe the loser would get so mad, he’d kill the winner or something. I mean, these guys are pure alpha, right? That’s a pretty alpha thing to do. Just pick one to date, and slip the other a copy of The Fountainhead, wait a few weeks to heat up to a toxic masculine simmer, then let nature take its course.”
“No,” Maria said again.
“Okay. Why?”
“You ever think it was an option to just roll over and let me enslave you? That maybe that was just easier? Give in and let me put you into servitude without a fight? Then hope that maybe, with time, things get better later?”
Teek crossed his arms. “I take your point.”
“The basic problem here is fucked up, psycho, backed-into-a-corner dudeliness,” Maria said. “I remember Aurelio came from an old family, one with titles. So he’s got that rich kid thing going on, of always having the world say ‘yes’ to him, and then I didn’t. Maybe he could have lived with it if that had been the end of it. And Mateo was a turbo-jock, made it all the way up to Sargento Mayor, so he probably had a record for nerds stuffed into lockers, back in the day. He never lost a fight, until he met me, but maybe he could have let go of that, too.”
“And then you hooked up with a local boy.”
“A local boy with no prospects. A farmer.”
“And for two overachievers, you may as well have shit in their cereal and livestreamed them eating it. Okay. Getting the picture now. You mind if I say something?”