“She has the ability to hide herself and her home objects at whim. The only way you can find it is if you knew where exactly it was located.”
Yarra understood. If she could see into the future - a future where Avice and she are in this friend’s house - she would be able to retrospectively trace their way to their destination from her ‘memories’.
“How does your friend look like?” Yarra asked.
And Avice told her. “Old…, just imagine an old lady. Someone who is kind looking like that lady in our campus cafeteria!”
“Mrs. Thatchdale?” Yarra asked, amused. She would have never imagined that belligerent old hag to be described as ‘kind looking.’
“That’s the one!”
Yarra took a deep breath and closed her eyes. She imagined an ancient old lady, almost in her eighties – her experience evident in the heavy lines on her face.
Nothing appeared in her vision.
“I’m going to need more, Avice. Anything particularly different about her?”
“She also has wings on her head.”
“Say what?” Yarra opened her eyes in disbelief at that next part of the description, and the mental image that she had constructed vanished for a moment, such was her surprise. “Wings?”
“Yes, bat-like wings at the side of her head. They are quite small.”
Yarra did not know whether he was joking at first, but she was then starkly reminded of the fact that a year ago, she had not known that vampires and werewolves existed too. Sighing, she then imagined in her mind’s eye, an old lady with black bat wings.
Precognition was a funny thing. Sometimes it gave her what she wanted. Sometimes, it didn’t, particularly when she tried to force it. But tonight, it did.
Her mind’s eye saw Avice and her sitting in the warm living room of a small home. A small fire was crackling in the mantled fireplace, and an old lady sat on a plush armchair across them. Yarra saw herself and Avice talking to the lady in hushed voices. She was a mere observer of this future, unable to gain their attention. The old lady had a kind face that seemed very weathered, and a small scar that was too hard to ignore. Though minute in actual size, it had a grotesque keloid forming at the side of her neck. But aside from the scar, the other thing about this woman which caught Yarra’s attention was her head. There were batwings at each side of her head. Avice had not been lying. This woman, this friend of his was real. The vision would not have been so clear had he mistaken the details, and it would have jarred and flickered within her mind.
‘I see the home’, she thought. ‘But how do we get here?’
As if answering her own question, her vision began to peel away from the hall. It was as if she was being pulled by an unseen force, tugging at her navel. Thankfully, she had long since got used to the sensation to the point of no longer feeling sick. It took her out of the living room, then into the small hallway, and out of the house. She was then stood outside the house, next to the perimeter fencing consisting of a blue-painted wooden fence and a yellow mailbox. The force pulled her until she was being taken down the street like the rewinding of a tape recording, walking backwards and able to take in the passing details as the result. She moved away from the house, passing a lane decorated with a line of pine trees. All of the houses in the neighborhood were similar except for the colors of their walls and cars. The road continued to unfurl retrospectively, to a point, and then ceased as the vision sharply ended.
Yarra was back in the empty, dark field with Avice looking directly into her eyes with an expression of nervous expectation.
When she had fully returned to reality, she looked at him with a smile. “I know where to go.”
Chapter-3
Providence and Reunion
Just as her vision had played it on rewind, Yarra retraced the steps she had seen through her mind’s eye. They ran in the rain, with Avice’s eyes all the while darting in every direction to make sure that they were not being followed.
She took them down the lane with pine trees. “Almost there. It is a house with a blue fence and a yellow mail box.”
“That one?” he pointed out.
They stood a few yards away from the exact house. There was nothing particularly interesting about the house itself; old-style colonial house, and distinctly middle-class. Neither run down, nor lavishly luxurious.
“Odd. You said that your friend was good at hiding things. But we can see it…,” she said, as they crossed the road. Her feet crashed into a stagnant puddle on the ground, wetting her shoes and jeans.
“Well, she hides it, just not in the way that it turns invisible,” he explained. “She can render anything to become uninteresting. Imagine for a second that there is a pink elephant in the room with green polka dots.”
Yarra laughed at the request. “Okay.”
“Nainoru has the ability to make all eyes not fall on the very interesting object. It isn’t that they fail to see it. They just choose to not pay it any heed. It is the same with her and the house. The biggest form of invisibility is being ignored by the world. That is exactly Nainoru’s power,” he explained, as they pushed open the wooden gates.
The rain had reduced considerably, though it still showered upon them enough to keep them soaked to the skin – as if they were not already. She swore that they had not fully dried from the downpour that had occurred since getting off the bus.
Avice took a step forward, and knocked on the door. They both looked around the otherwise deserted street while waiting, half expecting for more members of the Keepers of the Blade to pop up. But no-one did. The distant sound of a wailing siren could be heard, possibly the local police heading to the convenience store after being alerted about a gunman. She wondered if the man would have possibly escaped. But he had seemed pretty injured from what her mate had done to him, in addition to having a bookcase land on him. Would he put up a fight if the police tried to subdue him? Or would he be smart and cooperate with the authorities so as to not reveal what he really was?
A click came from the door, and it creaked open slightly. They saw the orange light and warmth from inside leak out in indiscernible fragments. Only when her face felt the warm air did Yarra realize how soaked they both were outside the house. And cold, tired and hungry.
A face peered through the slight gap, and the eyes of their host widened at the sight of the two young adults.
“Nainoru…,” Avice said with a sigh of relief. “It’s me…, Avice.”
The woman’s eyes registered recognition at the sight of the young man in front of her. But still, she refused to part the door wider to let them in. “I know no such person.”
She was about to close the door when Avice placed a gentle hand on the door. “Please, Nainoru. I know it is you. I recognize your smell, even if it has been ten decades since we parted.”
“I don’t owe your clan anything, after what they tried to do to me! Have you come here to kill a poor, defenseless woman?” Nainoru asked. Her voice sharp with hurt and defiance. “Or has your mother asked you to drag me back by the poorly rooted hairs on my head?”
“I am no longer with the Keepers of the Blades,” Avice said. When he said it, Yarra heard the tinge of sadness and disbelief in his voice. He too, was still in shock with his own decision from twenty four hours ago.
“How do I know you are telling the truth?” Nainoru asked.
He had been waiting for her to ask that question. With a sigh, he removed the backpack and placed it on the wet concrete floor in front of them with a low thump. He proceeded to unzip his jacket, revealing his white shirt. Hoisting his shirt up, he revealed his toned abdomen, where his tattoo laid. Yarra was the first to notice that something was different, even if she could not immediately distinguish what. She, just like Nainoru, stared at the ink on his stomach. Nounari gasped.
“The hilt!” she said.
And then Yarra saw it too. When she had first seen it, it was whole, fluid, and even beautiful to look at. The shading was austere, a
lmost as if he had grown with it on his skin since birth, growing with him instead of distorting as he had bulked out. Now though, the weapon had lost its allure, and the hilt of the blade had a patina of subtle rust – ugly, mismatched and broken.
“A mark of my shame.”
She had to concede that the handle now looked mismatched to the still grey blade. Fine lines cracked between the tattoo, signifying that the handle was now fragmented into four pieces.
She remembered when he had first explained about the tattoo on his body. It was not made out of mundane ink, but from crushed and melted grey Gem of Malia. The properties of the gem allowed it to be shaped even after it had been etched onto a person’s body. The leader of the clan had such power and remotely, she could had broken the handle off of Avice’s tattoo; a sign that she had excommunicated him from the Keepers of the Blade.
That seemed to assure Nainoru, and she sighed heavily. When she spoke, her voice had lost its pitch of anger, and was replaced with something more sympathetic. “When did you leave?”
“Yesterday.”
“And how did you find me? This place is hidden from roving eyes.”
Avice tucked his shirt in and looked at Yarra. “My girlfriend found you through precognition.”
They both saw Nainoru’s eyes widened again, now in amazement rather than surprise. “So the rumors were true. I did not want to believe it when I heard that Alicia Selleck had gotten herself another Oracle. But I guess that history has an odd way of repeating itself.”
Nainoru then laughed bitterly. Neither Yarra nor Avice understood what she meant by that, and so, remained patiently quiet.
“Come on in then,” Nainoru said, with a tone of decisive finality. The door closed and they heard the sliding of the chain lock. Only, it was not just one but hundreds, reverberating and echoing through the door.
Yarra looked at Avice questioningly, and he answered without even having to ask what her confusion was over. “Magic. It looks as if the door is barricaded by only one simple lock, but seeing that Nainoru is also running from the vampires as we now are, she has placed an array of spells and incantations on the house to make it impenetrable from the outside.”
When the door finally slid open fully, they were granted with the sight of a petite woman who barely reached up to Yarra’s chest. She was ancient, shrewd, and looked quite silly in her blue muumuu. Just as Yarra had seen in her vision, two small leathery batwings were neatly folded to either side of her head.
Nainoru peered out beyond the doorway, and gestured for them to enter immediately. She walked ahead of them into the living room with a slight limp, muttering in a way that was both at them and to herself all in one. “Danger, danger everywhere. Don’t even know why I am helping you…, silly boy.”
She gestured for them to sit in the living room, throwing two warm bathrobes at them which they accepted graciously.
Yarra peeled off the first layer of her clothing and donned the bathrobe. She heard Avice sniffing behind her. When she turned around, she was surprised to see tears rolling down his eyes. He stood there, bathrobe in hand, still sopping wet from head to toe, and too overcome by Nainoru’s presence to even move.
“You left without a word, a hundred years ago…,” he finally said.
Without waiting for Nainoru to respond, he hugged her. She laughed weakly, patting him on the back.
“Little Avice is all grown up. You were my height the last time I saw you.” She turned to Yarra and smiled. “Such a gem of a kid. You are a lucky girl…, err?”
Yarra grinned then, at the realization that introductions had not yet been made. “Yarra. Yarra Davis.”
“Quite a human-like name for an Oracle. Who were your parents?” Nainoru asked, parting away from Avice who was still slightly tearing up but in the process of controlling himself.
“I don’t know. I was brought up by my adoptive parents,” Yarra said. “It was Alicia who told me about the Oracles when I first met her.”
“Hah! That woman,” Nainoru gave an angry smile. “Of course, she would have told you what she wanted you to hear. Told you all about the war between the Bloodlust Clan and the Keepers of the Blade, did she? And how the Bloodlust vampires eradicated the Oracles?”
Avice, who was midway through removing his shirt, stopped and looked at Nainoru when she said that, his face showing a puzzled expression. “Isn’t that what happened? The Bloodlust vampires killed the Oracle clan because they helped us?”
“That’s Alicia’s side to the story,” Nainoru sighed wearily. “Sit. There is plenty to be said about the matter.”
Yarra and Avice acquiesced, sitting across from the wizened old woman. Her wings fluttered slightly as she poured them each a generous helping of brandy. Thrusting the glasses into their chests, she ordered them to drink it up. “Good stuff and I won’t have you wasting it,” she said, though with a smile that indicted that perhaps the last part of what she had just said was not so serious as her tone had implied. Then, as though debating with herself, she walked to the free armchair and sat down with a sigh.
Turning to Yarra, Nainoru began to speak.
“Avice may not have told you who I am. As you can see, I am actually a vampire too, just like him. I was from the Bloodlust Clan,” she said. To demonstrate this, she looked to her side, causing the corresponding wing to unfurl and spread open.
A partial transformation made her kind brown eyes turn into reddish slants. The fangs were just like Avice’s when he transformed, although Nainoru looked far more dangerous despite her apparent age. Yarra could not help but recoil a little.
“Don’t worry. I am not like the other Bloodlusts. In fact, when I was young, I fought against our kind drawing blood from humans. As such, I was banished. It was Schaila Selleck, the original leader of the Keepers of the Blades, who took me in.”
“Nainoru was one of the first few founding members of the Keepers of the Blades,” Avice chimed in, having evidently recovered from his tearful episode earlier, even if there was still a suggestion of redness to his eyes.
Nainoru nodded. “We were just a bunch of misfit vampires then, who believed in the sanctity and preciousness of human lives.” Then, her face darkened. “Of course, Schaila Selleck, bless his soul wherever it may be, maintained that the war between magical creatures should remain within this realm, and not poured out into the human world. But that was not meant to be.”
She stared into the fire, reliving a memory too bitter to taste.
“Schaila had one protégé, then a young female vampire eager to make her mark known to the world,” she said, turning to Avice. “Your mother.”
Avice sipped on his drink and said nothing. Yarra was curious to hear what Nainoru had to say.
“Alicia, when I first met her, was an able warrior. Shrewd, dangerous and cunning. And those who underestimated her on the grounds of being pretty and naïve-looking paid dearly with their lives. It was she who suggested to Schaila that we consult the Oracles when battling with the Bloodlust clan and against the werewolves as well.”
Yarra nodded. “I know this much at least. That was when the then Oracle predicted the war, and helped them to win the battle in exchange for the protection of his family.”
Nainoru shifted to get more comfortable, her back touching the curve of the chair. She bit her lip slightly, reverting to her human form. As her skin filled up with the more familiar tanned color, so too did her hair. The unfolded wing returned to the side of the head, nestling itself against her wispy white hair.
“That isn’t exactly what happened,” Nainoru admitted.
“What do you mean?”
“Right after the first victory against the various clans of demi-humans, there was internal strife within our clan. Schaila Selleck had fallen ill after the war, and he had one foot in the grave. The time came for him to choose a successor. And no-one was surprised that he chose Alicia Selleck, in lieu of better candidates.”
“But mom is a suitable leader,” Avice
protested. “She brought the clan up to what it is today.”
“You may argue that, Avice, but at the price of many lives. I acted as her advisor…, so I know. And it was after knowing Alicia’s true nature that I decided to run away.”
“Why?” Avice retorted, leaning forward. “Why did you leave the Keepers of the Blades?”
“Just after Schaila Selleck died, and your mother was made the leader of the clan, she ordered the complete annihilation of the Oracle and his family.”
Yarra and Avice were thunderstruck by the revelation. She looked at Avice and wondered how he would take the news. By the look on his face, it was obvious that he did not want to listen. His hands were firmly gripped against the glass, with his gaze downwards at a particular – yet unparticular - spot on the carpeted floor.
“You… that can’t be true, Nainoru,” he said weakly.
In Love with the Enemy (A Rizer Wolfpack Series Book 4) Page 38
