CHAPTER 17
"Eiko," he said. "We have to get you home. It's going to rain."
Home? Was I not already home? I buried my face in his chest, inhaling his scent. This felt so natural. I'd done this a lot of times before. I knew this from my memory.
Had I killed before, too? Was that why the sight of blood on my hand felt so familiar?
A small round bump under his shirt brushed my nose. The magical pendant. Sessho-seki.
"Why did all those people come to hurt me?" I asked him, drawing away a little. "What had I done to wrong them?"
His brows knitted together. "You've done nothing wrong. It's me."
Puzzled, I waited for him to explain.
"Years ago, I challenged the local Pack leader of werewolves here. It was a draw, but their Pack was...provoked by...an incident. It became a war for the community. Things got out of hand, and they formed these underground rebel forces against the law."
I remembered then what Armand had said.
The events of the night came back to me in a wave.
"I killed someone," I told him. The words were barely a whisper.
"He was going to hurt you." Warm fingers stroked my hair. My eyes shuttered.
"But I shouldn't have killed him. I should have just...knocked him out or something." I clenched my hands into fists. "I can't control them, Duane. You should have seen—I didn't have any control over my own hands. They were just suddenly claws and..."
He tipped my face up by the chin and pierced me with his gray eyes. "You've done nothing wrong, Eiko."
"I—" A sob hitched my throat.
"You did what you needed to do in order to stay alive." His fingers brushed the tears away from my face. "Had I arrived earlier, I wouldn't have let them walk out alive either way."
He kissed me. I let myself sink into the warmth, the comfort. Safe. I felt safe when I was with him. I didn't care what we were supposed to be. He's him. Duane. A missing part of the puzzle I'd failed to solve these years. Drops of water fell on my face. I thought they were my tears, at first, but then they also fell on my hair, on our lips. I tasted the rain in our kiss.
I pulled away first. Droplets of rain fell from strands of his hair, shadowing the question in his gray eyes. His arms were still on my waist, as if backing me up so that I wouldn't fall. I let my hand trail to his chest, my other still hung on his neck. I traced the outlines of the Sessho-seki under his shirt.
"Let me do it again," I said. "I've remembered most of it. Let me remember the rest."
Above us, a thunder crackled in the clouds. Duane shook his head. "No."
"Please, Duane."
I didn't let him reply. I pulled him down into another kiss. There was nothing gentle this time about our kiss. It was demanding. Feverish. His hand snaked up on my back to pull me closer. I held unto his shoulders, asking for what he didn't want to give.
And then I slid my hand under his shirt, to his chest. To the Sessho-seki.
Japan, 1966
"Your name for mine. Remember? You said you're going to tell me the meaning of your name. I think you have made me wait long enough."
I rolled in the grass to face him. There was a dried leaf caught in his light hair. I plucked it out and smiled. We both smelled like grass and dew and autumn rain. I kissed his nose, for I have loved it since the first time kissed when it kept bumping into mine. It was the nose of an American man—the people of the village didn't like it.
The villagers did not like me, either.
But that was how I could meet him in the first place.
"Eiko," I told him, "means eternity."
"Eiko-chan," he breathed, and pulled me down into a kiss.
Duane had never sent me off to the other village as he had promised to do. It had been my choice to stay with him. I didn't want another life like the one I'd had for fifteen years—being scorned for being different, struggling to fit into communities I didn't belong in, all alone in a village that must have surely heard of stories from their neighbor village. I wanted to live a life for real.
He had let me stay with him.
For the first few seasons, we had only spent our time as nothing more than two persons coexisting together, sometimes a girl and a wolf. My first winter in the forest had been a hard time for food. Duane had had no trouble hunting for himself, but he always had to hunt for more to feed to mouths. In gratitude I tried to find some herbs and essence to cook a humane meal for us, but sometimes days it had been so cold that the clothes I had brought with me—which weren't a lot at all—couldn't even warm me up. At the freezing nights I would curl up with Duane in his wolf form to share his heat.
I had tried making up for my stay by finding some fishes in the lake. The harsh winter hadn't frozen up the water, but the water had been very cold. When Duane went out hunting in the forest as a wolf, I would spend my time on the lakeside, trying to bait the fishes with some leftover piece of meat. I had never gone further than the lakeside, for I wasn't able to swim.
And then, one afternoon in the second winter, I lost my footing on the slippery ice and fell into the cold lake water.
The lake didn't have a current, and I was still near the side enough to grab it, but the ice slipped from my fingers, and I fell deeper. I had kicked, flailed my arms in desperate attempt to hold onto something. Black spots had covered the edges of my vision, and I had almost let myself surrender.
And then I was carried off to the land.
Everything had been so numb, so cold. My eyelids felt so heavy, as if they had been sewn shut. From my clogged ears, I had heard someone saying my name—it felt like I was still underwater.
Suddenly I could breathe again. I opened my eyes, gasping hard. Duane's face hovered over me. He was soaked with water, and some drops clung to his face like tears.
"You are wet," I had rasped in English. He had taught me some of it, in return of my perfecting his written Japanese.
Duane let out a strangled laugh. "I am wet? If only you can take a look at yourself!" There was an odd look in his face I had never seen before. It made the wolf look almost vulnerable. But before I could comment on it, he had pulled me tight against him, wrapping me in the warmth of his arms. "Don't," he whispered in my ear, "ever do that again."
And then he kissed me on the lips.
That had been almost four years ago now, but we still liked to make jokes about how our noses bumped in that first kiss. Duane and I had been living as husband and wife do for three years now. We never had a ceremony, but just the two of us living in the woods was already the best thing that had ever happened to me.
I told him this, and he said, "And the best thing that happened to me is when you drowned in that lake."
I jerked up from the grass we had been lying on. "What?"
He laughed at my expression and planted a soft kiss at my nose, then at my lips. "Because I never would have realized how much I love you, had it never happened." He buried his face in my hair and inhaled. "I love you. You know that, don't you?"
"Of course I do. You're just baiting me into saying it back to you."
"Damn. I'm caught."
I laughed as he tackled me back to the grass. I let my fingers trail the planes of his face, the hair behind his ears. He leaned into my touch like he always did when he was in his wolf form. A raindrop fell on my hand, trickling down to my elbow. Another drop followed, and then another. The spring dew rain. I closed my eyes, and savored everything in the moment.
"Eiko-chan, when I can go back to States, will you follow me?"
"Of course I will. That's if you still want me around."
"I want you. I'll always want you." Duane kissed my lips, then the tip of my nose. "Marry me, Eiko-chan. Be my wife. Live with me together in a real house, with children, if you want them. Will you, Eiko? Do you love me enough?"
I felt my lips spread into a smile. "I love you more than enough to follow you to the end of the world and back."
His face morphed into a wide smile and we kissed, sealing our promise. We stayed that way for awhile, the rain falling upon us like a curtain of soft touches draped over us. Me, and this wolf I loved.
"We should go back," Duane said. "It's raining. You'll get sick."
"Should we?" I planted a kiss on the bridge of his nose.
"I race you." I opened my eyes to his wolfish grin.
And then we were running in the rain. The droplets had become denser. They poured over us, showering me and Duane until our hair and clothes clung to our skin. I knew Duane was a faster runner which was why I kept cheating by nudging him with my elbow when I ran. He knew my game. His lips split into a grin, but he didn't let his attention waver from reaching the hut.
"Cheat!" he yelled over the sound of rain.
"I love you, too, Duane!"
"Not falling for that!"
By the time we reached the hut, both of us were soaking wet. Duane didn't bother to brush his damp hair back from his forehead. His shirt was plastered to his chest. The raindrops were pouring hard, each splattering to the ground that we could almost hear nothing else.
I reached up on the tips of my toes and kissed him. Our hands roamed on our skins—I didn't know where I ended and where he began, but I knew that our clothes should fall away. I wanted to touch him. His lips moved on my skin, forming soundless words that drove me insane. I opened my eyes to take him in. His gray eyes. His damp hair. That look in his eyes.
A man behind him.
I saw him before he did. The man was holding a rifle, pointed at Duane's back. Duane had told me that water dulled his wolf senses, especially rain water. If Duane picked up the change in my heartbeat, he must have mistaken it for passion, for he continued kissing my skin, almost feverishly.
I pulled his head to face me and kissed him. And then, faster than any of us could have expected, I straddled him down.
The rifle released the bullets.
I saw Duane's face, his gray eyes wide as I fell on top of him.
And then I died.