Year of the Boar- Tica

by Heather Heffner

  “What did you say?” I grew aware of my ragged breathing and the stabbing pain in my shoulder creeping down through my chest. The rain had been protecting us. It had confused our scent. Now I could see them in the night: the long-limbed cadaverous Dark Spirits, nostril slits flaring, eerie green eyes floating. They were coming for us.

  My mother’s sad smile turned to me. “You fought their servants off before, Tica. So brave. But the Plague Lords want you for themselves. Jinho tried to help. His touch is death, so he was able to kill off their presence inside of you for a while. But his venom bears too great a cost. That is why we must try another way.”

  She squared her shoulders and clenched her hands into fists. “He must drain their poison from you and give you my blood in return.”

  I stared. The sheer shock of her pronouncement cut through the haze. “Some type of magical blood transfusion? How is that even possible?”

  “It will be.” Her voice trembled. “In Eve. There, our spirits shall commune together to decide our bodies’ fates. Sometimes what happens in Eve is more real than what happens in our waking one.”

  “You’ve known all along about the spirit world.”

  Her smile grew wistful. “Oh, Tica. How do you think I met your father?”

  The sky’s darkness thickened outside like a badly burnt stew bursting with pustules. My mother gathered me into her arms to protect me from it: me, her full-grown sickly daughter. “I knew the first time you came running up to me on the beach that day, babbling about the man beneath the sea, that you had the spirit sight like me. And I knew then that there were forces bigger than either of us listening who would see you as a threat. And so I was grateful for every moment that we spent together. Sometimes it was at a cost to your half-brother.” She blinked, suddenly looking as scared and young as I felt. “Tell him, Tica. Tell him I loved him and should have loved him better.”

  “Mom.” I shook my head fiercely. “You’re not sacrificing yourself for me.”

  “I’ll live on in you.” She touched my face, smiling. “You’re a part of me living and breathing in this world. And I choose you to keep breathing, both of us living.”

  My eyes blurred as I stubbornly repeated, “No,” but she cupped my chin.

  “Look.” She shrugged off her shawl. The faded purple bite marks on her dark skin matched my own. “I knew a long time ago that a powerful blood-feeder like Jinho could give you my strength. It is already done. He almost has all of my health now, built up inside. And he will give it to you in one final blow to shove the Plague Lords out. All of this”—she gestured to the candles, the offerings—“is in preparation for this final moment.”

  Something smacked into the window. We whirled about, eyes narrowed, and saw a fly fighting to get inside. Another joined it. A low buzzing started up, as if the TV had been left on in the other room…but we knew that they were here. It wasn’t only the dark mo’o, like Poli’ahu had foretold: it was their masters.

  My mother gestured to me. “Draw the curtains.”

  I couldn’t let her do this. Only weeks earlier, I had succumbed to the fever haze. I had believed my own mother was betraying me with Jinho. I had fought with Rafael and told lies about Aolani. I had tried to destroy my family’s shop, heedless of others.

  There had to be another way. If Jinho was so powerful, then he could perform the blood transfusion so both my mom and I lived. He could control himself, I knew. He would stop before he took too much from my mother.

  I dashed from window to window, yanking down shades and pulling curtains shut. I reached the final window across from the front door, and the cord turned to ice beneath my hand. I flung about, heart hammering, to see the jaundice-shot eyes of Ahalgana pressed against the rose-colored glass. Her long yellow arm ended in lethal black claws that extended all the way to the top of the door frame. She opened her mouth wide to smile at me, and her needle-thin teeth clicked against the glass.

  I spun around, and there was Ahalpuh. He lunged at the window, and I flipped him off before dropping the blinds.

  Ahalgana began to scratch the glass with fervor, pupils rolling back into her head so her empty irises leaked milky-yellow puss. I heard the click of a gun behind me. My mom appeared in the stairwell, wielding Raf’s boar-hunting rifle. The candlelight painted her little statue of the Virgin Mary blood-red for war behind. She nodded grimly and tossed me a speargun. Ahalgana grinned and began to scratch with greater fury. Suddenly, black wings descended upon her.

  Ahalgana wailed and disappeared. There was silence for an instant, and then something thudded high above, sending a shock reverberating through the entire building.

  “They’re on the roof.” We locked eyes. Our apartment had four floors.

  I gestured to my mother. “Straps.”

  She nodded, grabbing the bands. I pressed the speargun to my shoulder socket, and she bound it tight with the straps until it felt anchored and part of me, its metal burrowing into my flesh. I swung it around, the razor-sharp point of my spear piercing the darkness while my finger rested on the trigger. Ahalgana was occupied, but Fly Butt was still out there.

  Someone knocked on the door. We both froze, but then tiptoed to either side. I readied my speargun and nodded to my mother. She flung open the door, and both of us surged forward with weapons at the ready.

  Jinho looked amusedly at the speargun and rifle cocked at his chest. “I feel sorry for your door-to-door missionaries.”

  Relief welled up in my chest before I could stop it, along with something else—nostalgic longing. I forced myself to remain scowling. This vampyre I’d stupidly cared for might be able to help us, but that didn’t mean I had to like it.

  Then a large shadow lizard with glowing green eyes dropped from the trees, mouth open.

  “Jinho, look out!” I cried, and shoved him inside. The dark mo’o roared, and I told the palm tree that guarded our door to crush it.

  “Come in quickly.” My mother locked the door securely behind and ushered us into the living room.

  “Where are the Plague Lords?” I demanded of Jinho.

  “I left Ahalgana stuffed in a vent,” he said, gunmetal-sharp eyes darting around the room. “Ahalpuh turned into a cloud of flies to escape from me. It won’t be long before they trick someone into letting them inside.”

  “Like you did?” I asked sarcastically.

  “Tica!” my mother admonished. “Jinho is going to save your life!”

  I placed a hand on my hip. “Why?”

  He didn’t miss a beat. “So you can help me. We must defeat Nanaue tonight, Tica. The Plague Lords aren’t here for you. They want him.”

  I stared at him, realization dawning. “The hole into Kuaihelani isn’t big enough yet, is it?”

  “No,” Jinho said quietly. “Don’t you see, Tica? Both of us will get what we want. A massive ingestion of your poisoned blood now will kill Nanaue…and me. Your cancer will be defeated. However, your mother will be in poor health, and you must take her to a hospital straightaway.”

  I swallowed, allowing hope to leak in once more. “You’ll stop before she dies?”

  His eyes locked with mine. “Understand this: I’ll only stop once I’m dead.”

  Across the room, my mother nodded at me. It wasn’t reassuring. It was desperate. This was the last card she had to play in order to save her daughter’s life.

  “Okay,” I heard myself agree. We took our places at his side and then entered the spirit world.

  The extraction process began. The familiar intoxicating haze settled over my senses as his fangs sank into my skin, but I had developed a hardy shell of stamina. Precariously, I balanced on the waves of bliss, careful not to let even one toe get swept under. Whenever I grew too weak, Jinho gave me some of my mother’s blood. Mine he ingested, the shadows of gray streaking his blue eyes deepening. One moment I caught him looking at me, a look of torrential heat and intensity, and my mouth parted involuntarily. His lips brushed mine roughly before he returned to my
neck again. I gasped, sinking against him.

  To my surprise, he buckled. Ingesting my poisoned blood was working. His hands twitched unsteadily, and his skin shrank to cling to his bones. His face grew gaunt and cadaverous beneath his black hair, until I had the impression of a fanged skull leaning in to take yet more poison.

  As he bent down, I saw two sets of eyes, one eerie green, and the other jaundice yellow, leering at us from the kitchen doorway. They were inside.

  “Jin—” I didn’t have time to warn him before the Dark Spirits hurtled toward us.

  The vampyre prince backed away from me, jaw frantically trying to close. He just managed to whip out a hand and imprison Ahalpuh within an iron grip. To my astonishment, blackness began to bleed forth from Jinho’s knuckles and into the Lord of Tumors, sickening him. Ahalpuh thrashed and wailed, but he couldn’t dissolve into a cloud of disease-ridden flies to get away.

  “Hello there,” I heard a soft singsong voice say behind. I whirled around and shot Ahalgana through the chest with a spear. Then I ordered a nearby vase to smash her over the head. Across the room, my mother also advanced, pumping the demon full of rounds from the boar hunting rifle.

  Yellow puss poured out of the Jaundice Lord’s wounds like miniature waterfalls, and Ahalgana collapsed completely into a pile of mucus. Then she propelled herself up into a new form, the bullets and spear popping out of her skin. She laughed and ran at me with black claws outstretched.

  Ahalpuh had coiled his rotting body around Jinho’s like a serpent, shredding the vampyre prince’s shirt as he fought to get out of the death grip. Jinho teetered but remained standing, shooting more rot into Ahalpuh until the Dark Spirit’s neck curled back in pain. Then Jinho spun him around and threw him into a lamp. My mother was waiting with a candle to set him on fire.

  The demon’s anguished cries filled the room, but I couldn’t see what was happening with Ahalgana in my face. She laughed and struck me again and again. Each time I fended her off with the speargun. Finally she tore it free from my stump.

  “Poor Ahalpuh. He’s always such a baby,” she sneered at her burning brother, and then streaked forward to gash my cheek. I gasped, falling back, but she made no move to attack. She stared at my blood staining her claws, her yellow eyes glowing with wonder.

  Too late, I realized what she was about to do.

  “Couch, crush her,” I whispered, but strength left my knees and my head suddenly felt very light.

  Our old sturdy sofa flew forth to do my bidding, but Ahalgana contorted her spine backwards up and over it.

  “Is that Tica girl’s only trick?” she cried. “How about you see one of mine?” And then she whipped about to leap upon Jinho.

  “Jinho, guard your back!” I shrieked, dragging myself forward despite waves of head-pounding pain. How come my body wasn’t cooperating?

  Jinho snarled at her, fangs bared, and tore for her jugular. For a moment, all I could see was Ahalgana’s legs wrapped around Jinho’s torso like a malignant spider, while her bone-white hair shrouded them both. Then Jinho snapped her leg in half and hurled her off of him. She joined a scorched Ahalpuh in the corner.

  I took a tentative step closer. “Jinho.”

  He stood very still, shirt ripped and black wings fully extended. They beat once, twice—enough for me to see Nanaue’s slumbering mouth on his back, now open with my blood spotting his serrated teeth.

  “Jinho—?”

  “Get your mother out of here now!” he thundered, and then something quivered through his entire being, bringing him to his knees. His back began to bulge, and then abruptly his spine split along the seams, flinging both of his wings to either side of the room. The shadow of an enormous tiger shark grew on the living room wall, enveloping the desk and overtaking our family photos. Nanaue’s fins bumped me aside as the shark godling departed from Jinho, and I painfully crawled away from that deadly thrashing tail. Still Nanaue grew larger, a gigantic brown beast with black stripes and eerie green eyes overtaken by the Plague Lords’ madness. His teeth jutted out at all angles, full of bits of flesh from his last meal. I watched those jaws leer toward my mother.

  “No!” I threw myself in the way and felt his teeth sink into the scarred sinews of my stump, flooding me with shock. Several white-hot bolts of pain stabbed me in the brain. Once, twice, and then I couldn’t feel anything. My tether to my body was gone.

  The candlelit doorway quivered behind the shark god’s son. My eyes hardened. Then I shoved back.

  Chapter 21: Daughter of the Gods

  ~Khyber~

  I gritted my teeth as I came to, my body painfully sewing itself back together. The Plague Lords and Nanaue were nowhere to be seen, and the mother was crying at her dead daughter’s side. I stared out the window into the night, hollow and defeated inside.

  And there was the mother’s other child: Rafael. He stared at me in horror from the other side of the window. With the amount of spirit activity the tiny apartment had just experienced, I knew the veil between the waking world and Eve was very thin right now. He could see me.

  I clenched my teeth together, struggling to pull back my fangs. Now that Nanaue had departed, I was ravenously hungry. The room was heavy with blood and damp with tears.

  “Come back to me.” Ana Dominguez shook the motionless girl’s shoulders again. Her fingers frantically pawed at her glossy brown hair. “Please, Tica! Why won’t you come back?”

  Your daughter is dead, woman. The guilt that seized me was the only thing strong enough to hold me back from plunging my fangs into her exposed neck.

  I touched her shoulder instead. “Listen to me,” I said quietly. “Your son is coming to help. He will take you to a hospital. There, you must fight the vampyre venom in your system for all that you’re worth. Fight it for him. Fight it for…her.”

  By the time Rafael burst through the door, I was gone.

  ~Tica~

  I wrestled Nanaue into the spirit world. We rolled over and over on white sands and then into the surf. If Nanaue thought the sudden shock of spray would scare me, then he clearly hadn’t grown up with a brother who’d gleefully dunked me every chance he got. On and on we fought, my stump inextricable from his mouth.

  We dove deep. As the pressure tightened around my head, I saw one of the shark-man deity’s lidless green eyes watching me. Despite the depth, I smiled back and reshaped my lungs to be like a fish’s. Gills sprouted along my neck. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that the moment Nanaue had sunk his teeth into me without Jinho’s soft finesse had been it. I wasn’t waking up ever again.

  So I left behind my mortal body and fear, and I saw Eve more clearly than ever before. A thick film developed over my eyes and my skin hardened into scales. My free hand grabbed Nanaue’s fin, and I bent it in half.

  That frightened him. Nanaue abruptly shot up and hurtled through the spirit sea at unbridled speed. We shot under arches of blue coral and past waving sea fans. I knew where we were heading. Nanaue’s instincts told him to return home. To Kuaihelani.

  I caught a flash of eerie green eyes on my left, and then red-veined yellow ones on my right. I blew out a spout of bubbles in shock. Ahalgana and Ahalpuh had followed us into Eve. Nanaue was free of Jinho. Now the Dark Spirits wanted him to finish the way into Kuaihelani.

  Nanaue vaulted up out of the sea. My eyebrows rose in shock. A towering wall of water stood before us, a frozen sapphire tsunami poised to fall. Up we soared, and I could see the shadows of tropical fish flitting about inside.

  The colossal wave trembled at the Dark Spirits’ approach and began to fall. Tons of whitewash broke over Nanaue’s head like a crumbling skyscraper, and the wave’s awful roar drowned out all other sound. However, Nanaue had jumped high enough, and we just barely made it over. We streaked down the back of the wave and plunged into the calm aquamarine waters of a black sand islet, which glittered as if it held a million tiny diamonds. There, hissing like a slowly deflating balloon, was a hole in the air wreathed with
silvery mist—the hole torn in Kuaihelani after Nanaue’s unholy summoning.

  Nanaue finally released me. I hesitated, but then let him go as well. Slowly, the black-striped shark clambered up onto land, bulging eyes fixed on the hole. His teeth and snout retracted, and his fins changed into hands. Then the young shark-man pulled himself, panting, toward home.

  However, he couldn’t lift his tail from the water, and let out a bellow of pain. My eyes narrowed as the leering faces of Ahalgana and Ahalpuh rose above the tide, their claws sunk deep into Nanaue’s flesh. They had hitched a ride over.

  “Kuaihelani!” Ahalgana stepped onto the black sand beach first and licked her lips. “I can smell the soft bodies of the divine from here, Brother. They do not know pain or illness.”

  “Feasting here will make us strong enough to free our brethren,” Ahalpuh agreed. “Screw that fat vampyre toddler’s demands. Nanaue, finish what you started and open the way.”

  I stepped forward. “Nanaue, don’t move.”

  The great shark-man wheeled around, froth dripping from his mouth. Certain evil blocked the way behind, and if he entered Kuaihelani, then it would surely follow him there.

  Ahalpuh stalked toward me, seaweed dripping from his wild black hair. “Shut up, girl. Don’t you understand? You, the daughter of a mere mortal woman, are dead. You have lost the game. You are ours, the same as this shark godling is.”

  “I am my father’s, who is a god.” I matched him step for step and didn’t back down. “I am my mother’s, a mere mortal woman whom a god fell for. I am my brother’s, who taught me how to throw a punch. And I am my own, who is the best at everything, including beating you, what, is it two times now? No, let’s make it three.”

  They shrieked and flew at me. I placed my stump on Nanaue’s bent dorsal fin, where they blended seamlessly together. And I became the shark.