Collide, page 30
“What are you doing?!” it demanded, but I ignored it. All that mattered was Maria and the fact that my hand had come into contact with hers. I jerked backwards when my fingers clamped over Maria’s and pulled her towards me. The Gaki screamed and dropped Akira’s katana. Startled, I let Maria go and watched as her fading form began to merge once again with the Gaki who clutched its chest.
“NO!” I screamed, and jumped forward. My hand slammed into its chest and I again felt Maria’s fingers against mine. I squeezed my hand so hard my tendons actually groaned and I pulled backwards for all I was worth. The Gaki screamed and screamed, but I refused to let my best friend go. Little by little she emerged and separated from the Gaki’s body, her eyes desperate on mine as she silently begged for me to not give up.
I dug my heels in and pulled with everything I had as my own strength returned and determination filled my mind. Bit by bit I pulled the soul of my best friend out of the cage that had contained it for the past several months.
A final yank and she was free, but I knew I wasn’t done. I continued to hold tightly to her hand as I carefully guided her to where her body lay, and with my free hand I reached down and placed it directly over her heart. Only then did I release her hand. Maria faded from sight, but I felt her heart lurch underneath my left hand and her chest hitched as she took in a breath. She coughed and sat up, managed to croak out “the others” before she doubled over and vomited.
I leapt to my feet and ran to where the Gaki writhed on the ground. My eyes blurred again as I got closer, and I saw more people standing around staring down at it. They were all faded to the point that they looked like wisps of smoke. One in particular caught my attention, for it was the same man as the body that twisted at my feet, and I realized that it had to be the soul of Akira’s brother. They all looked at me and one by one held out their hands.
“You bitch!” the Gaki screamed, but I closed my ears to its rage, reached out, grabbed a hand, and twisted.
There was the sound of paper ripping, a rush of wind that stirred no leaves in its passing, and I watched as one by one the souls of the Gaki’s victims were released from their prison and vanished. I knew that their bodies no longer existed and I couldn’t return them the way I had Maria, but as they disappeared they smiled at me. Young men and women whispered “thank you” across my heart as they vanished, and I couldn’t stop the tears when Akira’s brother added in watch over him as he left. I drew in a deep breath as that something that had been taken from me returned and my mind fully cleared just as the last person, a young Japanese man who looked like he was wearing some type of priestly robes, bowed deeply to me.
Your gift has saved us, thank you. I knew you were the one we needed, which is why we caused the Gaki to fixate upon you, whispered through my mind, and my jaw dropped when I realized that the priest was speaking to me. I only wish I could guide you through that which I have awoken, but you have friends who will help you.
“Wait, what?!” I cried, but I was too late and the priest’s soul faded from view.
The night was quiet with only the moans of Akira and the Gaki to break the silence. My eyes first went to Maria, who was bending over Dellar and checking on the wound in his chest, and then I hurried over to Akira. I paused to pick up his katana from where the Gaki had dropped it.
“Oh my god, Akira,” I said once I got a real good look at his wounds. I don’t know how he hadn’t completely lost the one wing, and both ends of the puncture were still bleeding steadily. I didn’t know how to help him. I couldn’t call for help because there was no cell phone service, and the whole issue of the fact that he had wings was something you just couldn’t smooth over.
“I’ll be ok,” he rasped. One bloodied hand reached out to cup my cheek as his warm eyes held mine. “I need my katana, it will help me heal.”
I handed it to him, bewildered when he cuddled it to his chest as if he were holding a kitten or even a baby. The katana started to glow softly, and as I watched his bleeding began to slow and stop as his wounds closed over. His wing shifted as muscle and sinew reformed and reattached itself to his shoulder, and he groaned as it moved back into place with a snapping, cracking noise.
“JANE, WATCH OUT!”
Maria’s scream was just a second too late as something grabbed my hair and jerked me backwards, a pained scream escaping my already sore throat. I looked up at the enraged Gaki, the face it wore no longer handsome but twisted and distorted by hatred. As I stared cracks began to form in its skin and pieces started to flake off.
“I will have you!” it hissed as it jerked on my head in an effort to force me to stand.
“Not this time,” Akira said calmly, and stood to his full height. His wings flared out behind him, the only sign of his horrific injuries that was left were the blood stains on his clothes.
The Gaki hissed at him and dragged me backwards. My hands clawed at his wrists and, to my horror, I started to pull away chunks of skin and flesh. I twisted my body and dug in my heels, but it continued to relentlessly move backwards towards the old farmhouse. I gave another wrench, there was a sickening crack, and I squeaked as I dropped onto the ground. I rolled over and got to my knees. The Gaki stared down at the stump that should have been its hand.
The Gaki tore its eyes from the mutilated end of its arm and looked up in time to see Akira pull back and swing. The katana passed through the Gaki’s neck in a motion so smooth that the body simply fell back onto the ground without the typical “head popping off” visual that Hollywood loved to put into their films. As I watched, the body slowly disintegrated until only a little bit of dust was left. I swiped my bloodied cheek with my sleeve and looked over at Akira, who had bowed with his hands pressed together as if in prayer. He straightened and returned my gaze. His face was filled with grief for the brother he had lost, and yet it also contained a quiet inner peace that I had never seen before.
“It’s over?” I asked, my voice shaky.
“It’s over,” he said as he sheathed his katana and folded his wings against his back.
I closed my eyes and allowed my head to drop forward in relief. Something heavy, solid, and rather disturbing thudded against my back. My eyes popped open in horror.
“It’s still there, isn’t it?” I squeaked, and Akira gave a slight cough that could have been a laugh as he looked off to the side. He stepped towards me, but the damage had already been done. I leapt to my feet and started to run around as I screamed “GET IT OFF!” at the top of my lungs. It didn’t help that the Gaki’s hand bounced against my back with every step.
Akira grabbed my arm the third time I ran by him and laughed as I struggled and squeaked. I only stilled when he reached up with his free hand and untangled the rather grotesque souvenir from my hair. Once it was freed the hand disintegrated the same way the rest of the body had and Akira dropped the crumbling remains that vanished on the air.
“Thank you,” I said, or rather, I tried to say, but he plunged his hand into my liberated hair and crushed his mouth to mine. Fireworks went off in my blood and my head went all bubbly, for this was very different from when the Gaki had claimed my mouth. I closed my eyes and clutched his ruined shirt as a gentle wind whispered by my head and the sudden lack of light told me that he had folded his wings around us. His lips moved gently, and when his tongue lightly tickled mine my legs buckled and I sagged against him. He pulled away and opened his wings as he stared down at me for a moment, then he gently released his hold and stepped away, his head tipped to the side in an oh so familiar bird like gesture.
I don’t know how long we would have stared at each other, nor do I know if he would have dragged me to him to begin kissing me again and if I would have let him, because Dellar’s tired voice broke the spell.
“About time,” he said. I looked over, relieved to see him sitting up and leaning against Maria, who was grinning for all she was worth.
“And you say you’re not dating,” she added with a smirk.
Akira had the audacity to chuckle as the skin of my face immediately increased in temperature. It was most likely a release of tension instead of laughter at my expense, but it didn’t matter. I balled up my fist, drew back, and slugged him for all I was worth.
Chapter Eighteen
“How are you going to explain the blood stains with no injuries?” I asked Akira as I turned onto the main road.
I was going to have to request a sick day from school. All I wanted to do was curl up and go to sleep, and one glance in my mirror assured me that I would be granted said sick day. My face was chalky pale and there were large dark circles under my eyes. The only true visible bruise that I had was a light blue across the bridge of my nose, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to discover that I had fractured it when my face had hit the ground. Amazingly enough, the other bruises I had were covered up by my clothing, so there was no way Mom would know that I had been in a major fight for my soul. Maria looked completely unharmed, even the puncture where I had shoved my hair stick into her flesh had closed over, and assured us that she felt better than she ever had before, and was looking forward to returning to school in the next few days.
“I’ll sneak in through the window I left open,” Akira said off handedly. “My raven form comes in handy.”
“Good point. Um, just what was it that I did back there?” I asked, hesitant and not sure I wanted to know the answer.
“You released what was left of the souls that the Gaki had eaten,” Akira said and looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “It was a form of soul retrieval, which is something that Shamans all over the world train to be able to do, but they usually only retrieve a lost piece, not the whole thing. This is the first time I’ve ever seen someone retrieve multiple souls from a single entity before.”
“Just how was I able to do that?” I asked. “I’m not a trained Shaman.”
“You could have a very strong Shaman in your family line somewhere, gifts like that tend to pass down through the blood. Did anything different happen when the Gaki was . . ?”
He paused and turned away. I knew how he felt; I had a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that I had almost lost my body and soul. I thought back, and told him about swallowing a little of the Gaki’s breath and what the priest had said to me before he had vanished.
“A few of the ancient stories talk about collective captured souls banding together to take down their jailor. And the priest said that they influenced the Gaki to be fixated upon you?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s my guess that the priest took control of the body at that moment right before you swallowed, and might have been able to reach through and awaken the soul retrieval ability in you. You said he was the last one to leave, so he must have been the first soul the Gaki absorbed. Sometimes possession can go both ways, the possessor becomes the possessed, though the other soul has to be extremely powerful to be able to take control, and it never lasts for very long.”
“So I’m going to be stuck with this soul stripping ability? How is that supposed to work?”
“I don’t know, but I do know you need to learn how to meditate, and there are going to be tests . . . It’s not safe to have someone running around with the ability to rip souls out on a whim.”
“I would never!”
“I know! I’m kidding! OW! Watch the road!”
“What happened with your katana healing you?” Maria asked from the back in an effort to diffuse the tension.
“My katana is special in that it has a small part of my powers bound within it. Along with banishing or killing rogue Paranormals, it has the ability to heal most minor, and even a few major, wounds,” Akira said as he poked at one of the many holes in his shirt. “But it only does that if the situation is close to hopeless because it drains a lot of the energy out of it.”
“You talk like your katana has a will of its own,” Maria said from the back.
“It’s from the paranormal world,” Dellar said before Akira could answer. “It probably does have a will of its own.”
Akira nodded and I asked, “You mentioned tests?”
“We don’t know if your new abilities are permanent,” he answered, his face slightly troubled. “There’s a strong chance my boss will want to test you himself when he gets here.”
“He’s still coming?”
“I need to be debriefed in person, and also evaluated.”
“Evaluated?” Maria asked.
“I essentially just killed my brother. They need to do a full psychiatric evaluation on me. As of right now, I’m off duty, so to speak.”
“Greeeaaaat. Ok, one more question. When Maria’s soul returned to her body, I felt her heart start to beat, but Dellar was able to feed from her without problems. What does that mean?”
“I have no idea,” he said again, his eyebrows pulled down in a worried frown.
“Ugh,” Maria grumbled from the backseat where she leaned against Dellar. “I’m now an Unknown.”
“Not always a bad thing,” Akira said, but Maria just turned her head and buried her face in Dellar’s shoulder.
The rest of the drive was spent in silence as we were all locked in our own thoughts, and when I got home I fell onto my bed and slept for about sixteen hours straight. Mom had taken one look at the exhaustion on my face and just closed the door and left me in peace.
Considering how intense the last few weeks had been, it shouldn’t have surprised me that the next time I returned to school it felt like some kind of bizarre let down, but it did. The only bright spot was when Maria walked through the cafeteria doors and, laughing, rejoined our table to loud and happy cries of “welcome back!” and “you were so missed!” I gave her a huge hug and turned her over to Kat, who seemed to have forgotten her past hostility regarding Maria’s treatment of her friends and was just as excited to see her as the rest of us.
Needless to say, Maria and I never brought up the old farmhouse as a possible location for our senior prom, and classes and sports continued as usual. Akira helped our team win their second basketball game in three years, a mighty feat that had the entire school spazzing out over him. I still danced around him and the whole “dating” thing because the Gaki had been right when it said I had reservations. The biggest one was that he wasn’t human, and there was no telling what his life span really was or if there was a rule against dating humans in the paranormal world. Then there was the fact that he’d most likely be returning to Japan once the school year was up.
“I don’t know,” he said when I finally got up the nerve and asked him about it. “I guess it all depends on what my next assignment will be, though I know I’m due a little down time since tracking and taking care of the Gaki took so long. Plus I can’t really do anything until my boss debriefs me.”
“I can’t believe there’s going to be more of you,” I groaned and dropped my head onto the table. Thud. “Ow.”
“And the top medical researcher in G.O.O.P.S. is going to be coming, as well,” he added as an after thought.
“What? Why? You could have mentioned this earlier!”
“I only found out myself yesterday,” he said defensively. “She’s coming to check out Maria since, and I quote, ‘it is a paranormal medical mystery about how and why she’s still exhibiting all the signs of being a living being while still retaining enough traits of the dead to be classified as a zombie’. So she’s gotten the research department curious, and they went into hyper drive when she found out there was a newly awakened Shaman here, too. On the plus side, my boss’ll be able to help with your nightmares.”
“They are not going to run experiments on her!” I growled and ignored his comment about the nightmares. I had admitted their existence to him when he had hounded me about the black circles under my eyes, but they had recently changed and their memory made me shudder.
“That’s up to Maria, not you,” Akira said gently. “You don’t have to protect her anymore, you know.”
“Old habit, and there’s nothing wrong with being protective of your friends,” I grumbled.
“I never said there was, but you need to remember that you can’t just go around slugging everyone who pisses you off. I don’t know how you’ve managed to not get into any worse trouble than what you already have. You should have been expelled a long time ago.”
“It’s a gift,” I snarked and rolled my eyes.
“Has to be,” he agreed with a grin. “I suppose I can just add that to the list of ‘Jane’s Superpowers’ that I’m compiling.”
“Oh, that brings to mind another question I wanted to ask,” I said as a memory from what felt like a lifetime ago flittered into my mind.
“Hmm?”
“Why did you switch from calling me ‘Alexander’ to ‘Jane’ a while back? I always wondered.”
“Ah,” he said, and I stared as his cheeks took on a light dusting of pink. “Back home, it’s considered impolite to call someone by their first name if you don’t know them very well, as that implies a much more intimate and close relationship.”
My eyes narrowed. “More intimate relationship?”
“It doesn’t have to mean romantic!” he cried and flapped his hands in front of him. “It could mean family connections or good friends who have known each other for most of their lives, things like that!”
“Riiiiiiight,” I drawled and glared. He grinned at me, and I shook my head and retreated back to my musings.
So while life seemed to have returned to some semblance of normal, I had the impending arrival of Akira’s boss and some paranormal medical researcher to look forward to, SAT’s were soon going to be on everyone’s minds (if they weren’t already), midterms were rapidly creeping up and I had to figure out just what it was I felt for Akira and what, if anything, I was going to do about it. I didn’t have his self-confidence, and every time I relived that kiss out at the farmhouse I had to fight off the desire to hide my face and squeal in a very undignified manner.
