Kindred

by J. A. Redmerski

  Our pictures on the shelves are covered in dust. The one with me, my mom and Alex, taken at a portrait studio a year before Mom met Jeff, hangs crookedly.

  But nothing about that is different, either.

  I don’t know what I came here looking for. Yes I do…I wanted to find something else painful, some other harrowing memory to drown out the pain I feel for Isaac.

  But it’s not working and I knew that it wouldn’t.

  I push open the front door and run outside, down the worn steps and away from the house. I run to the edge of the field and don’t stop when the tall grass whips around my lower legs. I rush through it, forcing my trembling body out into the early morning light moving softly over the landscape. I run and run through the tall, wet grass and the tree gets closer. My chest heaves, searching for air not because I’m running so fast and so hard, but because the storm of tears is crushing my chest, suffocating all of my desperate breaths.

  I trip once and almost fall, but catch myself and just keep running until I’m close enough to the tree to see the individual branches spreading out beneath the canopy of leaves.

  And I let myself fall to my knees.

  The legs of my jeans soak up water from the ground leaving my skin underneath to feel cool and grimy. I lean over, arching my back and press my opened hands against the earth, gripping whatever I can inside my crushing fists. My arms are mottled by dirt and brittle slivers of sun-ripened grass and moisture, but the only discomfort I feel is inside my chest, the uncontrollable sobs rattling every inch of my body.

  My weight drops and I lurch forward, lying fully against the soaked ground. I can smell the dank moisture and water-soaked debris and I can feel something small and sharp poking me in the rib, but I don’t care.

  I don’t look up at Genna when I feel her arm slip underneath me. And I don’t care enough about that, either, to refuse or be cautious of why she’s here and what she might want to do to me.

  Genna pulls my trembling body against hers and she holds me there with her legs bent underneath, letting me cry softly into the thin fabric of her shirt. Her dainty fingers comb through my hair as I lay in her lap.

  “It is a beautiful tree, isn’t it?” she says, her words as soft as powder. “Not the way it sits there, but the way you see it sitting there.”

  She goes on:

  “I have lived and witnessed others live a thousand lives, but the ones that I remember the most are the ones who chose to see the world in a different way.” I feel her fingertip brush across my eyebrow and there’s a smile in her voice when she says, “I’m a little disappointed that you aren’t my Charge. I would’ve enjoyed listening to your thoughts every day, seeing the beautiful things that you see.”

  “I don’t see anything beautiful, not in the way you make it sound,” I say to myself, forgetting that she can actually hear my thoughts.

  She brushes the backs of her fingers down the length of my cheekbone. “That’s where you’re wrong,” she says aloud. “You see everything beautifully.”

  I don’t understand her words or the meaning behind them, but I don’t ask. They are completely ridiculous to me and I don’t want to offend her blind philosophies.

  “Come with me,” she says going into a stand and helping me up with her. “I have a little more time to spend with you before I go back to my Charge.” She takes my hand. “And I want to make the most of it.”

  ~~~

  I lay on my side against a comforter atop an incredibly hard hotel mattress, and I stare toward the giant window overlooking Athens. All I can see from the third floor is the gray sky covered by a blanket of thin clouds. The air conditioner hums to life under the window as the set seventy-degree temperature is threatened by the outside heat.

  I don’t care that I’m still in wet, filthy clothes, or that the poor housekeeper who will have to clean this room in the morning will have to lug the heavy less-often-washed comforter out with her this time. It smells like it was washed just yesterday.

  I don’t have the energy to worry about much anymore.

  Genna is sitting at the little round table across from me with her legs pulled up onto the seat. The outside gray light leaves one side of her perfect oval face in a faint shadow, but always, her iridescent green eyes are obvious and brilliant and can never be obscured by anything dark.

  “He has never been in love before,” she says, but I don’t look at her. “And I see that neither have you.”

  “Please,” I say barely above a whisper, “I can’t talk about Isaac.” I shut my eyes softly for a moment because already they’re starting to tingle. I don’t want to cry anymore. I’ve cried so much that my head hurts and my sinuses feel abused.

  “Okay,” she says softly, but I get the feeling that she hasn’t completely given in to my request. “Then let me tell you a little about me.”

  I look at her now, searching her face and I remember the things that Malachi told me. Malachi. The moment his name enters my mind, I see Genna’s face shift from soft to wounded, and she raises her back, letting her shoulders fall slightly.

  Her reaction catches me off-guard.

  “I met him in Portland,” I say, lifting from the bed so that I can see her clearly. “He told me some things about your kind.”

  Genna forces a small smile and I sense she’s only doing it for me.

  “What did he tell you?”

  “Basic things about feeding and Charges,” I say, “but nothing I really understood. He told me that you had stopped feeding from me—that’s how I knew you were telling the truth back at the hospital, when you said you only fed from me once.”

  She nods once slowly.

  I clear a breath. “This would be easier for me if you weren’t reading my mind,” I say. “I-I just feel like there’s no point in having a conversation with you if you already know what I’m going to say.”

  Genna smiles. “You’re right,” she says, “I won’t read it anymore.”

  I actually feel my mind get lighter all of a sudden.

  I nod, thanking her and look toward the window before turning back to see her, quietly eager to hear more of what I have to say about Malachi. She had intended to tell me about her, but Malachi’s name turned everything around, and that’s okay.

  Anything to keep her from talking about Isaac.

  “Malachi thought I might be your Charge, but obviously not.”

  “No,” she says, “you just happen to be someone I got tangled with—I’m still trying to figure it all out myself. We’re a very engaging…collective, if you will. When we come across anything that appears different we have to investigate it.”

  “A collective?” I say. “What, like the Borg or something?”

  She chortles. “Not quite. We can’t read each other’s minds—well, we can, but we can only see the human memories, never those of our true form—or even see each other in someone else’s mind. In fact, we can’t see each other at all, at least not for what we truly are. If I hadn’t of fed from you to know otherwise, you could be one of us, right now, and I wouldn’t know it unless you told me, which we never do.”

  “Yeah…,” I think back to more of Malachi’s words. “Malachi said it was forbidden to say what you are? Why?”

  “Because we hunt each other,” she says and I am totally taken aback by it. “We drink the essence of humans to keep us youthful, but we drink the essence—technically The Soul—from each other to gain power. Some call us Source Stealers; it is an accurate title, I guess.” She looks upward in thought and then turns back to me. “Saying aloud our name, the word you use to label us—”

  “Praverian.”

  She points at me. “Yes, that one—if I were to say it aloud, I would permanently reveal myself to every other one like me and eventually one of them would hunt me, drink my Soul and only then would I be truly dead.”

  “You’re not immortal?”

  “Oh yes,” she says, nodding, “My kind are closer to immortality than any other being that walk
s this Earth. Each of us are A Soul. We’re born into a human life just like you, we grow up and live out human lives the same way you do, not knowing what we are, until one day when we meet our Charge, we go through our Becoming. In a matter of hours, sometimes days, we understand who we are, we relive the hundreds, even thousands of lives that we’ve already lived in just a matter of seconds—it’s very traumatic—and we come out of it knowing the course of our present life and for who we were awakened to protect.”

  “Your Charge?”

  She nods and stands up from the table. She’s wearing a thin, white long-sleeved top and I notice a silver necklace dangling from her neck, the pendant resting just below the second tiny button. I feel the silver chain of Isaac’s necklace pressed against my skin, but I can’t bear to look down at it.

  “Unfortunately, we can die any way that you can, except for old age—as long as we feed, of course—and when one of us do happens to die, our soul is then reborn into another body and the cycle begins all over again.”

  “But…what about my soul? Is it not the same thing?”

  She shakes her head. “No. Completely different. When you die, your soul passes on to wherever it is your souls go. Reincarnation only works with us. We’re where the belief originated. We’re older than religion.”

  I just stare at her blankly for a moment, trying to absorb this, but it’s not something one can so easily do.

  “Just how old are you then?” I’m already looking at her now in a sort of awe because it’s like I know that whatever answer she gives me is going to blow my mind.

  “I was a servant girl to the Roman Emperor you know as Caligula, in 38 AD.”

  A tiny gasp escapes my lips.

  “Oh my God….”

  “Fun times those were,” she says with an air of sarcasm.

  “Wasn’t he like…the worst one?” My expression is misshapen horrifically just thinking about it.

  Genna laughs. “That was one thing they got right in the history books, I’m afraid.” She looks toward the wall now, crossing her arms. “I haven’t been ‘awake’, per se, for very long in this life, but the one before this one…,” she shakes her head solemnly and takes a breath, “Damn, I never thought that one would end—ninety years is too long to be in the body of a sociopath.”

  I don’t know what to say.

  “I actually met Isaac and his family when Isaac was six-years old.” She leaves it at that, maybe hoping I might ask questions, but I don’t.

  The smile gradually fades from her face and she furthers things along. “How are you feeling?”

  I look up from being lost in pictures trying to visualize her past. “I feel okay.”

  “Are you sure?” It seems she doesn’t trust my judgment; maybe she knows something that I don’t.

  I nod. “Yeah…,” Isaac’s face appears in my mind and I want to say that, no I’m not okay, but I think that is precisely what she was referring to and I won’t give in to her.

  I get up from the bed and walk to the window to peer out beyond the gray sky. It looks like it might rain soon due to the early morning haze which still lingers in the atmosphere, but it’ll probably burn off as the morning wears on.

  I cross my arms over my stomach. “How much time do I have, Genna?” I can’t look at her right now; not before she tells me because I’m afraid her face might reveal more of a devastating answer than the words she’ll probably sugarcoat. I stare out at the cars moving back and forth through the four-way stoplight.

  “You want the truth?”

  “Yes,” I lie.

  “Not long,” she says plainly, “two, maybe three months, but the effects of a Blood Bond are unpredictable. It could be tomorrow.”

  I turn around at the waist. “So then it could even be years then?”

  Genna’s eyes stray toward the double beds beside her, but then she looks back up at me. “Not in your case. I’m sorry.”

  I turn the rest of my body around so that my back is facing the window. “W-What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Her eyes lock on mine and I see grief within them, even more than I see the unnatural shining green.

  “There is another reason why a Blood Bond is forbidden by any werewolf other than an Elder,” she says, “one that has nothing to do with rank, laws or power.”

  She pauses as if to let me speak, but I just stare at her, waiting.

  “Performed by a young werewolf,” she goes on, “it wasn’t meant to be done that way. Isaac’s blood is not old enough to sustain you. You need his blood far more often than normal.” She begins to pace the floor back and forth at the foot of the beds. She stops, looking across at me, her arms crossed as mine are. “Aramei, for instance, before she lost her mind, could go months without drinking Trajan’s blood. And then after fifty years and her mind started to crumble, even then she could go without it for weeks at a time…but you…Adria, you need Isaac’s blood every few days and it’s only getting worse.”

  My hands have dropped to my sides. I start to say something, but all that comes out are a series of half-spoken syllables that don’t even make sense to me, much less to Genna. I stare off at the wall, then the table where she sat and then the double beds, but I don’t see anything.

  “He’s been feeding you his blood for seven months.”

  I look straight at Genna. I don’t blink. I feel air drying the inside of my lips as they sit parted, unable to close.

  “What?” I can finally get the words out. “How?”

  My heart is crushing under the weight of this pain. All over again. I try to catch my breath, as if pressing my hands to my chest is going to accomplish that in some way.

  “When you were unconscious,” she says. “In the beginning, Isaac was almost as clueless about what was causing your episodes as you were. Adria, he had no idea. He didn’t know that by him being so young, the Blood Bond would start taking your mind so soon.”

  I can’t look at her still; my mind is trapped. “That must be why he thought I was getting sick because of you.”

  “Yes,” she says softly. “The effects of a Blood Bond and the effects of our feeding are quite similar.”

  “I can’t believe this….” My voice is distant; at first I didn’t even realize I had said it aloud.

  Genna walks over to me and places her hands on my shoulders. “Look at me, Adria,” she says and slowly, painfully, I raise my eyes to her. “Overactive emotions of any kind, especially negative emotions, enhance—irritate—the effects of your bond. It’s like pouring gasoline on a small fire. Emotions like what you’re feeling right now,” she shakes my shoulders gently so that I’ll keep my eyes on her and try to comprehend her words of warning. “If you can’t calm your emotions, you’ll start to lose control. It can happen in many different ways, but the way it seems to always happen to you is everything that eventually leads to you blacking-out.” She holds my chin in one hand and forces me to look at her. I never notice how often my eyes have strayed. “It’s why I’ve been trying to help you. When I realized that you had been bonded and the unnatural severity of it, I only wanted to help, but over time, the worse you got, the more I realized just how bad it was. Not even my ability to control human emotions is strong enough to counter it.”

  I step away from her, causing her hands to fall from my shoulders. I’m not angry at Genna, I’m angry with myself.

  “…He’s been feeding me his blood.” I say, more to myself at first, but then I look at Genna, my eyes filling with tears. “W-Why didn’t he tell me?” My hands ball into fists at my sides and I reach up with both arms and press my fists against my ears. “Why didn’t he tell me…?” I repeat in a devastatingly soft whisper.

  I see each and every instance; every one of my episodes when I would black out and Isaac would be there when I woke up. In the house with Nataša, Isaac was the first set of eyes I saw when I opened mine. And when I woke up in the nurse’s office at school, Isaac was sitting across from me. Earlier today, when I came to at Ath
ens Regional, Isaac was there waiting for me in the room. And I see times even long before all of this, over the past seven months we’ve been together. I see the night he brought me home after rescuing me from Viktor. I replay the scene over in my head of when Isaac and I were in his bathroom, both of us covered in blood, me wanting to tend to his wounds even though they would heal easily on their own. I had passed out then too, and woke up the next morning with Isaac in the room with me.

  Genna places her hands on mine and slowly eases them away from my ears. She interlocks our fingers. “There’s nothing that I can say to you that will make anything better. Nothing. I won’t be a part of what’s left of your mind trying to prolong the inevitable—Look at me.”

  I do look at her with tears streaming down my face.

  “Because it’s wasteful to use what little time you have left on delusions.” She squeezes my hands hard and it’s almost as if I can read her thoughts now. I sense she’s telling me these things with so much severity and devotion that maybe she’s also saying them to herself. Maybe she needs me to right a wrong that in her own past, she could not.

  I sniffle back a few tears. “There’s nothing anyone can do to help me, is there?” I say.

  She shakes her head and lets go of my hands. “No,” she says carefully, “so don’t use this time falsely hating Isaac for loving you so much.”

  Her words rip through me.

  Genna walks away, gazing out the window now with her back to me. She seems lost in painful memories of her own.

  “Malachi…he told me to tell you that he still loves you.”

  I see the faintest flicker of heartache tremble over Genna’s features, but she’s better at hiding heartache than I am.

  “Who is Malachi?” I say softly.

  “Someone I loved once,” she says, still gazing out the window, “but that was a long time ago.”

  “Why can’t you still love him?” I know she still does. She may be able to refrain from breaking down like me, but it’s not so easy to hide love. But I go along, knowing that she doesn’t want to talk about this as much as I didn’t want to talk about Isaac.