CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Thinking about his mother and reincarnations and the world took its toll on him. I watched as, with each class, he deteriorated under the pressure. The doubt lingered in his eyes. He would never truly come to terms with what he was, not until circumstances gave him no choice.
Gym consisted of basketball practice first, and then the division and naming of teams. I was elected team captain, which backed me into the most uncomfortable political position I'd ever been in. My fellow team captains picked the best of the best girls—or their friends. I had no friends, and I could make up physically for not having the best of the best. So I ended up picking the girls who looked at me with marked defeat. I couldn't help but to think of yesterday, when I wandered the halls without a clan, when I felt the most vulnerable.
Afterward, as we packed into the hall after changing, Toivo pulled me aside by the crook of my arm, away from the crowd and away from wherever The Blonde might have been hiding.
He sucked in a deep breath of air, eclipsing me with the expansion of his chest. "I'm sorry. For yesterday. I shouldn't have said what I did, and you're right. I shouldn't be getting myself distracted either."
I rolled from my heels to my toes and back again. "I wish I could say I'm sorry for punching you, but I'm not."
"I might have deserved it. Could you at least be sorry for disappearing for several hours and giving Carmi and I a heart attack?"
"I didn't give Carmi a heart attack."
"Fine. Me a heart attack?"
"Fine. I'm sorry for giving you a heart attack."
"Good." His arms swooped around me and crushed me to his chest. My feet kicked and I made noises.
Yuuhi saluted us as we parted ways. We dropped Jason off back at his house and we went home. I accomplished my homework before bed for once, managed some combat practice with Toivo and Carmi, and we had dinner at the table, and all was as normal as it could be.
But I still had trouble looking Toivo in the eye. I still saw Rajy in him, and now I couldn't break the connection. It was engraved into my brain. I'd look up at him and see Rajy staring back.
And it didn't go without Toivo's notice either. I was glad he didn't decide to confront me about it, because there was nothing that could be said without me breaking promises. I was a terrible liar, and I was an even worse secret keeper.
Friday morning was a 'late start' morning, or something rather. It didn't mean that Toivo and I were allowed a break. Rajy saw the ample time as a perfect opportunity for us to start out our day with some physical training. That was my least favorite. Weight sets and repetitious movements were tedious enough to bore me to tears.
When we greeted Yuuhi at the truck, however, he extended his arms as if to embrace me. "Kali! You're glowing!"
I mmphed at him and climbed into the truck. At school, I located Jason with his clan before class began and inserted myself as if I belonged. Some of his nest members greeted me like a new recruit. One even high-fived me and then said, "Please, please, please rip off his pants and fuck him soon. It'll make him into a completely new man."
Both Jason and I turned scarlet. I had to pull him aside so we could chat alone, where it was safe. When he was away from his clan, he felt much freer to talk about the things that interested him, like proxy wars and military operations in the Middle East and market globalization. Stuff that made even me dizzy.
Classes proceeded with the occasional banter, lighthearted with the guys still trying to out-guy each other. Toivo demanded a rematch of dodgeball and Jason said, "You can't have a rematch in war. Did the Persians go up to the Greeks and Spartans and ask for a rematch?"
Toivo said, "Well, yes, they did."
Jason shrugged. "And then they lost again."
Toivo's fur puffed up. He promised instead certain doom come the basketball games. Jason accepted the challenge. Yuuhi made it all so much worse by antagonizing them both.
When lunch came around, I usurped Jason from his table and dragged him to ours. He pretended to be put-out and displeased by it, but I knew it was all a farce.
Lunch was also the period when The Blonde smiled at me, tucked her hair behind her ear, and tentatively said, "Your lunches are always so colorful and healthy-looking, Kali. Do you make them yourself?"
I glanced down at my grilled tofu salad wrap and forgot English. "Um. Yeah. Well. Sometimes I do. Sometimes my dad makes it for me. It depends if he gets up early enough, because he's an artist, and you know those artist types, right? Their bedtime is when they pass out, if they do, but." I stopped myself before I could tell her my whole life story.
Yet I was tempted to go on when she lit up with more sunshine than gloomy Pittsburgh could handle. "That's nice! That he tries, I mean. My parents, well, you know, typical working parents, they just shove money into my hand and tell me not to spend it on drugs." She laughed, and I laughed with her because of reasons.
Rosie. That's what Toivo called her. Rosie.
A pet name.
I swallowed ten kinds of bad tastes. Jason watched the entire exchange with eyebrows raised high and eyes narrowed. At the end of lunch, he said to me, "I'm starting to think your negative feelings toward Toivo's flirting are because you're actually attracted to Rosette too."
My face caught fire.
"It's okay, Kali," he said. "Jealousy is natural."
I pinched him in the side. He nearly keeled over.
Classes came and went. Our most accurate professor, of Inter-People Studies, chipped away at vampire lore and sentenced us to an over-the-weekend expository writing assignment on the Vampire Alliance Court. Everyone groaned. Yuuhi only snorted as he jotted down notes, and under his breath he murmured, "I wonder how much I can actually write without it being treasonous."
Jason overheard. "Where you're supposed to put your name, just put gang signs. Then they can't trace it back to you."
Yuuhi pointed at him with his pen. "You are a brilliant kid."
I had no idea what gang signs were. Like graffiti? Or the stickers that teens lobbed onto public signs?
The professor continued, drawing the rebellious attention of the class back to him.
My ear ticked at the sound of a gadget vibrating. Yuuhi leaned to the side to pull his phone from his back pocket. Beneath the desk, his screen lit up. I couldn't see much from this angle, but the change in Yuuhi's face spoke paragraphs. His eyebrows pressed a dagger down his forehead. His eyes pierced through the gadget in his hand. The tendons in his neck swelled with tension.
The professor turned his back to us so he could doodle another awful diagram on the whiteboard. I seized the opportunity to lean toward Yuuhi and whisper, "What's wrong?"
He dismissed me with a shake of his head and swiftly returned the phone to his back pocket. He wouldn't look at me.
Something was wrong.
I watched him for the remainder of his class, but the familiarity and geniality had turned cold. Miles and miles of distance separated us. I sensed it was very deliberate.
On the way to our next class, if 'art' could really be called a class, I snagged a handful of his shirt and pressed him against the wall in a quiet alcove. "What's going on?"
He rolled his eyes and made sure to be dramatic about it. "Must I read to you my text messages as well, Kali? I at least prefer a date or two before we reach that level—"
"Oh, shut up." I released him, and as he smoothed the new crinkles from his shirt, I said, "Do you remember the other night when I asked you if I could trust you?"
"Yes, and I told you that you couldn't. The answer hasn't changed."
"Well, the question has. Do you think you can trust me?"
The other teens laughed and chattered in the hall beside us, glancing us but never prying. They filtered into classrooms, becoming fewer and fewer. The bell was about to ring, my nerves tensing up in anticipation, but if Yuuhi had any such similar sense, he ignored it in exchange for analyzing me.
No, it didn't feel like analyzing. It felt as if he collected up my features with his eyes, one by one, storing them all away for safe keeping. Sometimes he did this. Sometimes he looked at me and I felt as if he was looking at someone else.
It must have been that woman, the one he claimed he didn't love. But if he saw her everywhere, especially in me, how could he not love her?
His hand rested on my shoulder, his fingers squeezed, and then he pushed me away from him. The bell exploded and I tried as best as I could to control my flinch. He waited until the searing of my eardrums ceased before he said, "I know what you're trying to do, Kali, and I've already told you—" he moved in close, his face a hairline from mine so that his hollow breath struck my cheeks with each word, "you can't trust me."
My conversation with him from that night flickered across my mind, taking no more than half a second for me to relive it all, but it was long enough for him to pull away and round the corner for class. I remained there, but I didn't know what I was waiting for.
He scared me.
I wasn't sure what about him exactly that scared me, because it wasn't the type of fear it should have been.
"Why can't you be afraid of us like you should be?"
"Why can't you make me be afraid of you?"
The memory of him checking the screen of his phone, the quiet illness that overtook him, his attempt to push me away, it scared me.
During class, I could barely focus on the shading techniques the professor attempted to teach us. Toivo sensed my discomfort and he noticed the inadvertent sips of Yuuhi I stole with my eyes. He pushed a snack bag into my lap, but I couldn't pretend to have an appetite for anything.
My teammates were glad to have me during gym. We started off our first game terribly, but whenever a chance opened up, I identified one of my teammate's weaknesses and offered her a tip to correct it. Mostly the problem rested with dribbling and passing, messy attempts with awkward posture and weak throws. By the end, we beat our opponents by a single point. I wanted to celebrate in their victory, but when we returned to the locker room, I noticed a few girls had already taken off—including Yuuhi's girlfriends and Rosette.
I stuffed my clothes into my bag for a weekend wash. When I emerged, Toivo and Jason stood together, discussing their basketball games and the much anticipated rematch of egos.
Yuuhi was nowhere to be seen.
I came up to them. "Where's my third henchman?"
Toivo's face soured. Jason shrugged and said, "I didn't see him back in the locker room."
Toivo gestured vaguely to the doors of freedom. "I noticed some of the guys sneak out of the hall still dressed in their gym attire when the proctors turned their backs."
"It's not weird," Jason said. "Some of us just wear our clothes home instead of changing if gym's the last period of the day." He paused. His ever alert eyes cut across the heads of the crowd of teens meandering around for the final bell. "And if Yuuhi's not here with us like he usually is..."
The fear lodged the pit into my gut again. Toivo produced his phone and maneuvered it with a single hand. "I'll send him a text. Leaving with human minors on demon property violates the treaty. He's an idiot, but he's not stupid enough to make war over a couple of tasty teenagers."
Jason scowled at him. "Can you not refer to us as tasty?"
My gaze turned to the window. Sunlight crested the clouds and turned them silver. After the final bell of Friday, we climbed into the truck and headed to Jason's. I didn't like the idea of leaving him alone for the entire weekend. He would have to learn how to deal with me stealing into his house to whisk him away, or something like that.
When we pulled up to his driveway, however, he didn't budge from his seat. I leaned forward. A sleek and sporty Mercedes was parked beside his mother's SUV. Jason stared at it, his jaw set and his fingers digging into his thighs. The vaguely sweet scent of his dread filled my nose.
I exchanged a quick glance with Toivo before I asked Jason, "Do you need a place to stay for a while?"
His eyes shifted sideways. We might have been on better terms, but he still wasn't comfortable enough with me to enter my house and play Yahtzee and Monopoly. I was still a stranger to him.
At least, that was what I thought. Then he looked at me, brow furrowed, mouth taut. "If it's okay."
Toivo removed his foot from the brake pedal and we rolled on. When we arrived at the house, there was no Prius to be seen. Jason looked on, forgetting the Mercedes in exchange for studying the foreign realm of a demon's natural habitat. I shuffled him out of the cabin.
We followed Toivo up the steps as he pried the ring from his finger and revealed his maidenly silver locks. It was the first time Jason got to see them, and he made that apparent by how he gawked.
"I know demons are supposed to have 'one or two weird traits' or whatever," Jason said, "but I thought those traits weren't really supposed to be odd enough to be distinguishable. Like your eyes."
My eyes might have been a strange shade of gray for my skin tone, but he was right. Most of us blended in, or— "You've probably passed dozens of demons in your life without realizing it," Toivo said as we climbed the squeaky steps. "The difference is that a lot of us will color our hair or wear contact lenses if it means we can blend in. I don't."
Inside, Lio wasn't in his usual drawing position, but we found Carmi sitting at the dining room table with his homework spread around him and a tin of cooked and salted acorns in his small hand.
His nose detected our third party. He lifted his chin to see Jason busy looking around and analyzing every thread in the couch and fiber in the carpet.
Carmi's eyes stayed on Jason even as he said, "Lio got a call from Rajy. Said something might be on our property. He didn't tell me how Rajy knew, just left me here and told me to 'sit tight'. I don't even know what that means. How does one sit tightly? And is he allowed to be here? I thought this was all supposed to be a secret."
Toivo pulled out the chair next to Carmi and plopped down. I coaxed Jason into sitting across from them. His feet glided like lead.
Instead of addressing Carmi's question, Toivo hovered over the spread of papers and books. "You're attacking your homework so early. How uncharacteristic of you."
"Yeah, I know." Carmi narrowed his eyes onto Jason, and Jason took the opportunity to observe him in return. "I've got a big project in bio, though, and I wanted to get the rest of this shit out of the way before I get the glue and safety scissors out. Would you stop staring at me? Mother of Kirin."
I leaned into Jason. "Carmi's a very sensitive boy."
Carmi sharpened his glare onto me. "Shut the fuck up, Kali." Toivo thwacked him upside the head.
Unfazed, Jason asked him, "How old are you really?"
"Older than your mom."
"Eighty-nine," I said. "He was born in '23."
Jason took on that mock haughtiness. "So you missed the first World War. You're just a baby."
Lio had said that Carmi had a particular cackle that could be referred to as an 'evil laugh', and that was the type of proud laugh he had for Jason. Then his palms slapped down on the tabletop and the humor vanished from his face. "You're only saying that because you think you have a leg up on me, huh? Because you're supposed to be Ares, you think you've got an extra couple thousand years on me, fool?"
Toivo gauged Jason's reaction, from the tension in his brow to the way he slouched in his seat. Honest surprise took over Toivo's face as he reclined in his chair. "Well. I'm shocked. Kali hasn't been able to convince you yet?"
He wasn't shocked that I had already cracked and told Jason everything. He was shocked because I hadn't been able to convince a boy that he was actually the reincarnated form of an old fart with mystical powers. Toivo had called it a clichéd plot in a bad thousand-page epic fantasy novel, and I assumed that was at least fractionally accurate, since I'd never read any myself, so—
Buzzing.
As Toivo pulled out his phone, Carmi danced in his seat and announced, "Booty call! Did you know people still do that? When a phone rings, there will be at least one person who shouts it out, like it's still cool or something."
Jason sharpened the knife of his sarcasm. "It's so turn of the twenty-first century." But then he noticed Toivo's cheeks turn pink and he sat forward with new interest. "You gave Rosette your cell number."
His wide eyes ticked to him and all the defense mechanisms set in. "She asked!" He got a good look of my disapproving frown before he added, "I didn't think she'd call yet."
Carmi lifted a hand. "Well? Ain't you gonna answer that, homewrecker?"
"Why am I a homewrecker?" Toivo didn't wait for an answer. His chair squeaked against the tile as he pushed himself up. He tapped the screen and pressed the phone to his ear as he aimed to take refuge in the kitchen. "Hey, Rosie."
The strange amount of crackly background noise was not what we expected. Carmi and I leaned in to drop some shameless eaves as Toivo's feet slowed. "Rose?"
Her voice resounded in a hushed, alarmed whisper. "Toivo, I'm so sorry, I don't mean to cause you trouble, but—you're the only one I knew to call."
He stopped. "What's going on?"
The crackles returned with a vengeance, but once the sound receded, urgency flooded the breathy whisper of her voice. "We were going to have our annual end-of-the-first-week celebration party, and Janelle invited Yuuhi, but when we got here to the house, there were other vampires around, and it looks like they all have guns."
I jumped to my feet, adrenaline spiking my heart. Toivo faced us, shifting to his controlled exterior as he said, "Slow down, Rosie. How many? What happened?"
She continued. "Six or seven, plus Yuuhi. No one seemed to see them except me, so I think they're under mind control, like compulsion, like the vampires blocked everyone from seeing them, but Yuuhi could see them and he messed with Janelle's brain to invite them in, and I pretended to ignore them too so that I could listen to their plans. They're going to hurt us, Toivo. It sounds like it's part of something bigger, but I don't understand what, so I'm in the bathroom right now, and—"
She stopped with a hiss of air. I could picture her listening, gripping the phone with shaking fingers. When she returned, she nearly slurred her words together. "I'm okay. But we need help." She blurted out the address in Allegheny. Toivo and I locked eyes.
Neutral territory.
The place in question wasn't within our turf boundaries, or anyone's, and thus it was considered no man's land. Rules could be broken there.
Her voice dropped to the barest whisper. "I think someone's coming."
Toivo snapped back to reality and eclipsed the phone with both of his big hands. "Hold on, Rosette. We're on our way, just hold on as long as you can."
A man's voice resounded in the background, too distant for distinct words.
And then the line died.
Carmi jumped to his feet as well. "Then let's get our shit going."
Jason stood beside me and I sensed a trickle of his own adrenaline. Toivo gestured to him. "Stay here. You're safer here than you are with us, and Lio shouldn't be out too much longer—"
"No," I interrupted. "No, he's not safe here."
"Sanctuary, Kali." Toivo produced his keys, and with Carmi at his side, made for the door. "No vampire can get him in here."
"One can."
I stopped them both, and the wheel spun in Toivo's brain before the realization finally settled in. His head bowed. "Solara."
It was my fault. I knew it. I was the one who had invited her in, and we couldn't rescind her invitation unless she was here to receive it. Jason couldn't deny her, either, since this wasn't his sanctuary.
I couldn't believe how this had all come around.
I didn't want to believe it.
Toivo reassembled his leader mode. "I'll pull the truck around. Carmi, collect some tools from the closet. Kali, grab the Beretta. Jason will have to come with us, and you're going to teach him how to fire."
(Copyright © 2013 Sarah Godfrey. Please alert the author at keyboardsmashwriters@gmail.com if you are seeing this work posted in full outside of SarahandVictoria on Wattpad.)
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