CHAPTER 13
“Welcome back.”
The words were barely a whisper. I opened my eyes. Duane’s gray eyes watched me. Me. Eiko. That’s my name.
“Wh—” I gasped a lungful of air. My cheeks felt cold. It wasn’t until Duane brushed the tear away from my face that I realized I had been crying.
“What did you see?” he asked me.
“House. Burned. I ran to the woods. Met you.” I tried to control my breathing. Duane’s fingers stroking my hair helped a little. “When was that?”
“Japan,” he replied. “Nineteen–sixty-one.”
“Fuck.”
He let out a short laugh. “I see that your choice of vocabulary has broadened.”
I looked at him—really looked at him for the first time. There had been an edge in his voice. His gray eyes—there was such a great pain inside them that I felt like my heart had been torn.
I remembered the Duane I’d seen in the vision, in my memory. He had gone through a war and survived, but the Duane inches away from me now was harder than the man in my memory. Like somehow years had aged his soul but not his flesh.
“That’s not all, wasn’t it?” I inquired. “There’s more. More memory that should explain the other things.”
“What other things?”
I laid my hand on his, which was still stroking my hair. “About us.”
I heard him stop breathing. “You didn’t remember about that yet?”
“No.” I shook my head. “And I still don’t understand. Armand mentioned something about reincarnation—are we both reincarnated from the past life? Did you wake up in the woods and have amnesia like me, too?”
“I’m not. I’m able to live for quite a long time without aging like humans. My metabolism works strangely, and according to the newest research, my body cells don’t degenerate.”
“But you said I’m a kitsune. A shifter, like you.” Something gave me a pause. “I had to die in order to be reincarnated, right? How did I die? How did I end up in the woods? Half a world away from Japan?”
The hand on my hair fell away. Those gray eyes slid shut.
I waited.
He exhaled.
“Duane?”
Another exhale. “Ei—Elena. Maybe you should retire for the day. This must be all too overwhelming.”
I was indignant. “You can’t just give me back a piece of myself and leave me to chew everything over by myself!”
“Remembering decades of your lost memory would be very overwhelming, E—lena.”
He was clearly drawing away. “Duane,” I pleaded. “Give me something. Anything. I don’t want to go home and think this all must have been a dream again.”
Duane sighed and sat on the edge of the bed, then patted on the space beside him. I sat down, tentative to the proximity.
“I can tell you some things,” he began. “But nothing past-related. Ask me anything beside that.”
It wasn’t enough, but I’d take any answer for now. I contemplated over where to start.
“I’m a kitsune, right?” I began slowly.
“Nothing past-related,” he warned me.
“And you’re a werewolf.” I offered him a small grin. “What’s Armand? He seems to know what we are. Are there others, too? How many of creatures like us exist in the world? Are you actually related to Officer Sanders? Mr. Harrington just talked about the war, about Japan and all that—does he know, too? Is he a werewolf?”
When I was finished, I was breathing hard, excited to hear the answers to my entire dilemma.
Duane stared at me with a small smile and a rare spark in his gray eyes. “That’s an awful lot of questions.”
“Just answer it already! You promised!”
“Alright. Hmm.” Duane held up a finger. “To question one. I can’t reveal what Armand is to you. It’s his right. What I can tell you, though, is that he’s definitely older than I am. More powerful. He’s a Keeper of the region.”
“Keeper?”
“A protector. A leader. Any supernatural creatures, shifters, especially, are under him as long as we are in his region.”
Huh. Armand Sanders? Would never have imagined. “How old are you, by the way? Did you roam the Dark Ages like a brooding vampire?” I teased.
“Ah, not that old. I was born around the Civil War. And no, I’m not bitten. I’m not a lycan. I’m a rou garou, which basically means I descend from the old French loup-garou line.”
“You mean whatever it was that made you a werewolf passed through the genes?”
“Exactly. Lycans, though, would have to bite someone in order to turn a human into a werewolf. They’re sterile. Now, to your second question. There are a lot of us. Especially in this country. A lot of supernatural creatures originated from Europe. But immigration to the New World was all the rage back then. That’s why every part of the world has its own Keeper. ”
“Okay…Are there others like me?”
“The answer to that would be past-related. So, the next question. Of course I’m not really related to Sanders. Nor is Armand. Erwin Sanders is one of the few humans who have known about our existence for a long time. They build a community called The Vigil. All Vigils are also under the Keeper’s protection.”
“Is Mr. Cadwell a Vigil?”
“He is. But not his family.”
I let that sink in. Oh my.
“And so is Mr. Harrington. There. All answered.”
Oh my.
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