There were two other solid colored orbs to guide down after that, and then it was just a matter of tracing the paths of the multi-colored orbs to see which ones would cut each other off, so they could decide what order to drag them down in, until there were two rows of glass orbs.
Distantly, there was a clanking noise, like a locking mechanism that hadn’t been unlocked in an age. The wall broke apart, dividing into two uneven halves along the slots, until Jack could push one side inward. Siobhan followed him through, into a spacious but not altogether large room beyond.
There wasn’t a single piece of furniture, and dust had collected to such an extent that just stepping inside sent both of them into a coughing fit. Even then, most of the dust had caked together so much that it made a solid mass across the ground. Considering how long Osamu had been sleeping, though, an overabundance of dust seemed like a fairly benign problem to have.
In the center of the room, arranged neatly on the floor, was a man who looked to be in his mid-forties, with skin the color of milk and hair the color of asphalt.
Cautiously, Siobhan approached, peering down at the dust-covered, sleeping figure before she lifted her arm to her mouth, glancing to Jack as she did. He nodded once, granting her leave to carry on, and she bit down on her arm, drawing blood to the surface. Once it was flowing, she dusted Osamu’s face off and held her arm over it.
Osamu woke up much less explosively than Dask’iya. He twitched and flexed for a few moments, until his eyes opened and he simply sat up, a curtain of dirt and dust falling off of him yet still leaving more crusted to his clothing. He blinked at Siobhan in quiet bemusement before he asked simply, “Is it my turn?”
“Not…quite,” Siobhan returned carefully. She let Jack explain the majority of the goings on.
*
Osamu deigned to have tea with them upstairs, after changing his clothing, while Jack explained the situation. He spoke little, but it felt like he watched everything, like he could see things they were only contemplating doing but had not actually done and perhaps would not do at all.
He was polite. He seemed interested in the changes the world had undergone since the last time he was awake. He was going to need to familiarize himself with it eventually, after all. Eventually, it would be his turn to wake, and he knew he wouldn’t be able to simply carry on as if he was waking up in the world he had gone to sleep in.
He seemed concerned over the plight with the angels, but he remained calm as everything was explained. It was refreshing, as far as Siobhan was concerned, and at the back of her mind, Jack’s own relief over a calm reaction was like a balm after all of the day’s events.
He left peacefully once the situation was explained, simply setting his cup down and strolling out the door before he vanished.
The main room was silent for a moment before Noriko sighed, “A bit anticlimactic, I think.”
Siobhan coughed into her hand to cover a laugh. “You wouldn’t think so if you’d been there for the last one.”
She and Jack spent the rest of the night in the inn (and the hot spring, of course), and stayed until the sun set once again before they were once more on their way, readying themselves to get onto yet another ship. They were only halfway there, after all. They couldn’t take a break for too long.
CHAPTER SIX
Alas, the stay at the hot spring came to an end far sooner than Siobhan would have liked. They wound up on another ship, drifting south to Australia. They couldn’t do any sparring or mental bond practice while they were on the ship—the sparring was rather conspicuous and dangerous, and even practicing with the mental bond posed its own dangers, as a vampire losing her temper would never be safe—so most of the trip was spent simply blending in with the other passengers.
It was a peaceful cruise, all things considered. The weather acted up only briefly. The sky clouded over, and Siobhan and Jack stood safely on the deck and laughed as people vomited over the sides of the ship in the rain. No one ever said they were claiming to be paragons of virtue, after all.
Riding on ships was not especially entertaining, Siobhan was finding. Much like flying on an airplane, it was a lot more exciting in concept than in practice. In practice, it was just a method of getting from Point A to Point B without getting above sea level. But she supposed that was preferable to an exciting trip. She was pretty sure she could only take so much excitement in a short amount of time, and she didn’t want to fill up her quota before they found all of the Vampire Lords.
It was pleasant, though. The way the ship bobbed, barely perceptible because of its size, and watching the way the waves crashed against the sides of it and the way the moon turned the ocean spray into drops of molten silver. It was a good way to clear her head and absorb everything that her life had become.
She had surprisingly few objections, though. Her life had been completely upended, and she could hardly even bring herself to care. She had Barton still, and she had the night sky. As long as she didn’t lose those, she was content.
*
It was, thankfully, already dark by the time they disembarked from the ship and made it through the red tape at the end.
“Before we do anything,” Jack informed her as they made their way toward the nearest hotel, “we need to get something to eat.”
As if on cue, Siobhan’s stomach growled. The ship hadn’t exactly offered many chances for either of them to eat anything.
“Are we going to a hospital again?” Siobhan asked, adjusting her bag on her shoulder. “Does that work in other countries?”
“In theory,” he replied slowly, “but I’m not sure what the password is outside of a few countries. Instead, we’re going hunting.”
Siobhan hesitated. “…For, like, people?”
Jack shook his head quickly. “Animals. We’re in Australia; we should be able to find a few rabbits without any trouble.”
Slowly, Siobhan looked down at Barton. He blinked up at her, his head cocked to one side as his tail gave a slow wag. “I think I can handle rabbits,” she decided after a moment, patting Barton on the head.
*
Finding rabbits was, indeed, not especially challenging. When they disembarked from the ship, they weren’t in a particularly urban port. It didn’t take long to find their intended prey.
Rather a lot of them, actually. Nearly two dozen rabbits, casually grazing their way along.
“There isn’t much I can really teach in advance,” Jack cautioned, his voice low. “You basically rush in and hope you grab one before they all get away. Ready?”
Siobhan nodded once, her hand on Barton’s head to keep him steady. He squirmed back and forth beside her, his hindquarters leaving the ground in increments until he remembered he was supposed to be sitting and he planted it back down, only to jig right off the ground again a moment later. He whined, low and needy.
“Let’s go,” Jack decided. Siobhan pulled her hand from Barton’s head, and he prowled forward, stalking low to the ground until he was close enough to put on a burst of speed and lunge for the nearest rabbit, just as Jack and Siobhan burst into a sprint.
Barton’s jaws closed around one rabbit, and he gave it a shake until it went slack. Jack seized one by its back legs and hauled it off the ground. Siobhan leaped for one, but her fingers just grazed through its fur as it hopped away, right out of her grasp.
As quickly as it started, it was done, and Jack, Siobhan, and Barton were standing in a patch of paw prints, the rabbits scampering farther into the distance. Barton looked up, a rabbit dangling from his jaws, and then he simply dropped it on Siobhan’s boots. It was bleeding sluggishly and twitching, and the rabbit in Jack’s grip was kicking fitfully until he gave the side of its head a purposeful flick and it went slack.
“The fur can be a bit gross,” he acknowledged as Siobhan picked up the rabbit twitching on her boots. “But it’s better than trying to kidnap someone or convince someone that you need to bite them as a medical emergency.”
He wa
sn’t wrong. The fur was a bit gross. Siobhan spent the next twenty minutes after feeding trying to get every strand of it out of her teeth. Maybe she should start keeping dental floss in her pocket.
*
They had enough time after hunting to get some shopping done, though they didn’t need much. What they got, however, was a bit surprising, at least to Siobhan.
As they left the store, she dangled the package by a corner, peering at it curiously. Inside, there was a black, plastic tarp, still neatly folded. “Are we going to be doing some yard work I wasn’t aware of?” she asked, lowering the tarp and tucking it under her arm.
Jack shrugged casually. “I’ve got a vague idea of where the next Lord is hidden, but it’s going to involve a lot of trial and error and covering a lot of ground. It’s entirely possible it could take more than a night.” He gestured upward, toward the sky. “Do you want to get stuck in the outback in broad daylight?”
“No,” Siobhan acknowledged, glancing down at the tarp again.
“Then you’re going to love that tarp if the sun comes up while we’re still out there,” Jack returned, reaching over to flick her ear good-naturedly. She snapped her teeth playfully at his finger in return.
They continued on their way after that. It hadn’t been a particularly long shopping list.
*
The sun was beginning to peek over the horizon by the time they made it back to the hotel. They dozed for a couple hours on the bed, and once they were awake, it seemed like the perfect time to get their practice with the mental bond out of the way.
They got comfortable, with all the oddities that could entail. Siobhan sprawled back on the floor, Barton propping her torso up. Jack flopped back on the bed, his hands under his head and his legs hanging off the end of the mattress. The room was silent, save for the humming of the air conditioning unit.
“Try to…visualize it,” he began eventually, his voice low. “Like a hallway, with your feelings closed behind different doors. If I just walk down your hallway without touching anything, then I won’t get anything. I’ll just get to the end of the hallway and that will be it. From my perspective, that’s the default; your doors are closed, but if I felt like it, I could open them.”
It was a simplistic metaphor, maybe, but it was easy to put it together in her mind, so Siobhan had no complaints.
“From your perspective, though, since you have less experience with it, the doors in my hallway are open by default,” he carried on. “Even if you just walk down the hall, you’re going to get bits of whatever’s behind the doors unless you actively close them yourself or if I lock them in advance.”
“And as I get more experience?” she wondered slowly, her eyes closed as she imagined herself in an endless hallway of doors. Behind each door, she could hear…not words, exactly, but each door called to her in a different way. Cautiously, she reached for the knob of the first door and drew it shut, muting the noise.
“Then closing the doors will be second nature,” he answered, and he sounded like he was shrugging, even if she couldn’t see him.
“Can we open closed doors?” she asked, proceeding down the hallway and pulling doors closed as she went.
“As long as it isn’t locked,” he replied simply. “It’s easier with practice, though. So I could open your doors more easily than you could open mine after you close them, at this point.”
“Okay, putting the metaphor aside for a sec, what does a locked door mean?” she sighed, letting the hallway dissolve around her for a moment in exasperation.
Jack huffed out a quiet laugh. “It means whoever locked the door is consciously trying to keep you out.”
“Couldn’t the lock be picked?” she asked, since it seemed like the logical extension of the metaphor.
Jack was silent for a moment. “Technically,” he answered slowly. “Though it’s…less like picking the lock and more like breaking out a battering ram. It’s invasive and unpleasant and very hard to do, and your average vampire won’t have the skills to do so. It takes practice, and…well, it takes a certain sort of person willing to get that practice.”
They lapsed into silence after that, as Siobhan focused her attention on closing doors once again. Some of the doors closed easily, the noise that trailed through them barely distinguishable to begin with. Some, however, were louder, and closing them was more like a game of tug-of-war.
“What happens if I walk through one of the doors?” she asked slowly, standing outside one of the doors that hummed the loudest. It was an anxious door, seeming to vibrate in its frame. It matched many of her own feelings, when she thought about it.
“Then you get deeper into where the feeling comes from,” he returned simply. “You aren’t going to see…thoughts or anything like that, but you can sort of trace it back to see how it bloomed.”
“Ah.” Well, that was interesting. With a moment more of thought, Siobhan stepped through the door, sparing hardly even a moment to contemplate that it might be a breach of privacy.
The anxiety was a tangled knot, and she followed it further, as it morphed from simply anxiety, to a desire to impress like an intern meeting their future boss, to a steady numbness and lack of…anything. Defeat, like someone being told they would never succeed and accepting that lot in life. It was like wary self-isolation -- an adolescent sullenly deciding to go it on their own, to abandonment like a child being herded out the door to have it slammed in his face. She prodded at it curiously.
She backed out and closed the door, the anxiety behind it muting into silence as she did.
Siobhan opened her eyes and blinked at the hotel room’s ceiling. She shifted, Barton’s fur warm against the back of her neck. He grumbled lowly beneath her, and his tail swayed once across the floor.
“Hey, Jack?” she began, trying to sound casual but not quite hitting the mark. “Why did Regina change you?” she wondered, idly twirling her finger around the tip of one of Barton’s ears. “What drew her to you? Or were you just some random pick?”
The bed squeaked as Jack sat up on one elbow, looking down at her, his expression warring between offense and amusement. “You went poking through my doors,” he stated, his tone landing somewhere in the realm of puzzled.
“Sorry.” She shrugged as best she could without disrupting Barton. “I guess you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”
He was silent for long enough that Siobhan thought he might simply decide to ignore the question entirely, until finally he sighed. “I’ll explain it tonight,” he decided. “When we aren’t cooped up in here.”
Siobhan nodded slowly in agreement. “Yeah, alright.” If he was actually agreeing to humor her curiosity, then it sounded like a fair compromise to her.
They found a deck of cards in the drawer of the side table, and they whiled away the rest of the day playing poker and blackjack.
*
When at last, the sun sank far enough below the horizon for them to safely go outside, what happened next was…procrastination, as far as Siobhan could guess. First, they found a shop to buy food for Barton. Not actually dog food, but the sandwich consisted of about eight kinds of meat, and he seemed to enjoy it immensely. After that, they found more rabbits lurking in the distance, and they caught a couple more (“We get hungry faster with animal blood than human blood, so we may as well,” Jack had reasoned.) Siobhan supposed she had no complaints on that, since she actually managed to grab one that time, even if she did feel a bit guilty about picking it up by one of its ears. It did feel nice to have a full stomach, at any rate.
Jack spent some time checking things over on his phone, only sighing and dragging himself back to the present when Siobhan reminded him, “I did say you didn’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“No, no, it’s fine,” he sighed, shoving his phone back into his pocket. “It’s just not the most pleasant topic.”
They had wandered off the beaten path by then, though they could still hear cars in the town a
nd the distant crash of waves. Jack slowed to a halt where he could sit down on a rock, and Siobhan made space for herself beside him while Barton curled up on the ground, on top of their feet.
“I was born in 1917,” Jack began. “I had the good fortune of sleeping and wetting my diapers through the end of World War I, but that was about as far as my good luck went.”
*
He was an infant, still chewing on anything he could put in his mouth and nowhere near verbal, when his parents had died in a carriage accident. He would have died as well, had his mother not shielded him with her body. She’d loved him until the very end, and occasionally he wondered what his life might have been like if he had been able to stay with his original family.
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