Born of Aether: An Elemental Origins Novel (Elemental Origins Series Book 4)

by A. L. Knorr

  My spine had pushed back against my seat as he had described this. Goosebumps crawled over my flesh. "I'll experience all this when I have my Hanta vision back?"

  He nodded and his theatrical face relaxed into its normal chilled-out expression. "More or less." He scooped up a roll of sushi with his chopsticks and into his mouth it went.

  "Your wingspan," I said, my mind going back to the enormous shadow that had passed over me.

  He swallowed, bumped a fist against his chest and gave a soft burp. "Excuse me." He cringed and looked around, hoping he hadn't offended some innocent passer-by. "That caught your attention, did it?"

  "How could it not?" I said, hiding a smile behind my hand. "How can you possibly be that big?"

  He chuckled.

  "You have some seaweed caught right here," I said, pointing to my teeth to show him where.

  "Thanks," he said, and fished it out with his tongue. "Better?" He fake-grinned at me, showing more teeth than there are keys on a piano.

  "Beautiful," I said, laughing. The more time I spent with Yuudai, the more I liked him.

  "I weigh three hundred pounds," he said. "Birds have hollow bones. Even the largest raptor with a wingspan of ten feet rarely weighs more than two-and-a-half pounds. If I use all my mass…" he shrugged.

  I blinked with understanding. "You're as wide as a soccer field?" Why had I never realized this before? I had never tried to be anything larger than a normal-sized bird. I had never had a reason to be bigger, other than big enough to carry the wakizashi. The night before, when I'd increased my size to make the sword easier to carry, I didn't think about pouring all of my fleshly weight into my bird form. How big would the wingspan of a ninety-pound bird be if a bird had hollow bones?

  Yuudai gave a cough to dislodge something in his chest. "Bigger." He said it without any pride, just matter-of-factly.

  My eyes widened. "Have you ever measured?"

  He laughed. "No, why would I do that?"

  "But if you had to guess?"

  He blew out a breath and closed one eye. "Maybe a thousand meters?"

  My jaw dropped. The waitress walked by and I snapped my mouth shut. "Your wings can span a kilometer?" I said in a hushed whisper.

  "Yes, or I can be a hummingbird. That's the beauty of being a Hanta." He sat back and surveyed the wreckage of our table. Drippings of sauce dotted the place mats, crumpled napkins sat sucking up leftover broth in empty bowls, stray grains of rice stuck to just about everything. The space in front of me was empty and clean.

  "What? You're done?" I said, hardly able to believe it.

  After a longing look at the empty dishes, he glanced up and grinned hopefully. "Dessert?"

  21

  "Where are you staying?" I asked as we stepped out onto the sidewalk. The light was growing dim and the shadows had deepened. I was taken over by a sudden panic that Yuudai was going to leave me alone to wait for Daichi. It knocked the breath from my system just how much I wasn't ready to say goodbye to him. Had I attached to him because he was a Hanta, or because of who he was as a person?

  "I rented an apartment in Tottori. You?" We turned and began to walk toward the train station.

  "I’m in Tottori, too, at the Gato Hotel," I said.

  We walked in silence to the train station, but my mind was anything but quiet. As the trees and mountain-scape slid by through the train windows, I searched for a reason to stay with Yuudai longer. He was the only Hanta I had ever met. He was kind, and fun, and I had nothing to do but wait for Daichi to call and tell me he was here. I dreaded going back to my small hotel room and rotting there while time ticked by.

  We stepped off the train together and began to walk toward the center of Tottori.

  "I have to go this way," Yuudai said, jerking a thumb in the opposite direction of the Gato Hotel.

  I swallowed, brave words dying on my tongue. "Okay," I said.

  "Why don't you come with me?" Yuudai said. "We can get an ice cream on the way."

  My heart leapt. I'd eat cockroaches if it meant I could stay with Yuudai a little longer. "I'd like that."

  "No pressure," Yuudai said, holding up a hand. "Only if you want."

  "I want," I said.

  Yuudai and I ordered ice cream cups from a small shop in the town center, and I followed him to a tall apartment building with trees and vines and flowers spilling from every balcony. I expected to feel some kind of hesitancy or anxiety at going to the apartment of a man I had just met. But I trusted Yuudai completely. He was a Hanta. If I couldn't trust another hunter, then who could I trust?

  With the spoon in his mouth, Yuudai unlocked his door and opened it for me. The place was breezy and light. The balcony door was open and the white curtains blew into the single room, stirring the leaves of a plant on the table. The largest bed I had ever seen, dressed fully in white sheets, sat in the middle of the wall.

  "How did you find a place with a bed that big?" I asked, awed. "All of the beds are always so small."

  "It wasn't easy, trust me. I had help." He closed the door and plopped down on the narrow couch at the foot of the bed. "I don't need much, but I hate when my feet dangle off the end of the bed." His face colored. "Spoiled, I know."

  I laughed and sat in the chair across from him. "How do you fund your Hanta life, anyway?"

  "My wife's business," he said, taking a huge scoop of ice cream.

  My smile melted away and there was nothing I could do to stop it. "You're married?" I was shocked on multiple levels. I'd had the impression that he was too busy as a Hanta to be living a human life on the side. And everything about him so far had oozed bachelor. He wore no wedding ring, or any jewelry of any kind as a matter of fact.

  "I was," he said. "She left me about six years ago. Can't blame her. Human women need husbands who are present, and I was gone a lot. It was inevitable, really."

  "Your ex-wife pays your living expenses?"

  "No, but when we split up, we divided everything equally. It was an amiable split, thankfully. She had recently sold a media company that she'd started decades ago. It was worth a fortune. I was a partner in an engineering firm in Tokyo, so I had done well, too." He peered sadly into his empty ice-cream cup and then set it on the small table beside him. "I invested my share of the money in some stocks and it generates more than enough for me. After the split, I quit my job and went Hanta full-time. I only intended to do it full-time for a couple years, but it’s been six and—" he leaned back and spread his hands wide as if to say 'here I am'.

  "Oh." My ice cream had melted into a puddle and I set it on the coffee table unfinished.

  "So, what are you going to do when you get your tamashī back?" Yuudai asked, lacing his fingers together.

  The question hit me like a mental wrecking ball. "What?" I sat up straighter.

  "When you get your tamashī back, what are you going to do then?" he repeated patiently.

  It was like the breath had been knocked from my body. I hadn't thought that far ahead. What was I going to do? I had been a slave for so long that I didn't know how to be anything else. "I don't know."

  Reality was that Daichi would give it back to me as soon as I gave him the wakizashi, and even that could be a mere handful of days, or even hours away.

  Yuudai's brows knitted together with concern. "You don't know?"

  I shook my head. Toshi's beautiful face flashed in front of my eyes. "For a long time, it was the desire to get back to my fiancé that kept me waking up every morning. But when so many years passed, and I knew he couldn't possibly be alive anymore…" I trailed off.

  Yuudai was watching me intently. "You were engaged?"

  I nodded. "Many years ago. So many years." The weight of all the time I had lost pressed down on my shoulders like a jacket with lead in its pockets. Tears threatened for a second time that day. I hadn't wept for my family or for Toshi in such a long time. It seemed that coming home, no matter how much it had changed, was enough to rip open even the oldest scars.

>   "Don't worry," Yuudai said softly. "When you have your tamashī again, a whole new future full of possibilities will open up to you. Between your human life and your Hanta life, there will be no end of things to do."

  I smiled, grateful for his positivity. "What about you? You'll continue hunting?" I said, brushing my eyes to clear them.

  "For now," he said. "I'll know if it’s ever time to settle in one place again. I always thought it would be nice to have the human experience, kids and everything. I sort of tried that and it didn't work out, but—" He made a face and shrugged. "I think for a Hanta, it is important to know what it’s like to live a mundane human life." He leaned back and put his long arms behind his head, stretching. "But for now, I'm never happier than when I'm flying the Æther. Up there, it’s so—"

  "Pure and perfect," I finished for him. I remembered the feeling of pure love and freedom, of losing the edges of my physical self and feeling like part of the Æther.

  Thirty-thousand feet up in the air, nestled somewhere in the earth’s thin layer of ozone, was a Hanta's heaven. I was reminded of the cold, empty space I had been so acutely aware of up there and wondered what it would feel like when I had my tamashī back.

  "Yeah," he said. "Too bad we can't stay up there forever."

  His face split in an enormous yawn, and I yawned sympathetically. Without any presumption in his face or movements, Yuudai got up and took off his vest. He dropped it over the couch back, crawled onto his enormous bed and flopped out straight on his back.

  "Sake hitting you?" I got up and stretched my legs. I picked up the ice cream cups and found the garbage under the sink.

  Yuudai let out a long sigh with a growl at the end of it. "Just tired. And full."

  "I'll let you rest then," I said. It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him for a phone number or an email or something when he cracked an eye open.

  "Stay, Akiko," he said. "You know you are safe here." He rolled over to his side and lifted a long arm. "Little Hanta."

  Without feeling so much as a twinge of weirdness, I crawled under his arm and lay with my back to his chest. His arm draped over me and out toward the edge of the bed. His body heat melted my bones within minutes and there, under the safety of his wing, I fell asleep.

  22

  I knew Yuudai was gone before I opened my eyes. The bed had the empty feeling that I was used to. I rolled over and looked at the dent in his pillow. A folded note lay on the pillowcase.

  I sat up and opened the note. His handwriting made me smile. Bold strokes with beautiful curves said: Stay as long as you want. My home is your home. Gone to check on my target. He'd scribbled a phone number beneath it and: In case you're gone when I get back.

  I put the number into my phone and sent him a text so he'd have mine. My head jerked up when something buzzed from a drawer—his phone was here. Of course it was. Yuudai was on wings and had left all of his possessions here. In fact, on closer inspection, his clothing was folded and sitting on a chair and his sneakers tucked underneath. I wondered how he got back into the building. He must hide his key somewhere. A breeze lifted the curtain away from the balcony door. It was unlatched. So maybe he didn't hide a key, just left the apartment open the way I'd left my hotel room open.

  Thoughts of doors and windows left open made me think of the wakizashi. I got out of bed and splashed my face with water in the bathroom. I pulled my shoes on and left Yuudai's apartment to go to my own.

  On the way, I bought fresh orange juice with pulp and slurped it as I wandered back to my neighborhood. I scanned through texts and photos that my friends had been sending through and saw a photo of Targa and her mother, Mira, dressed to the nines. Targa explained that they were at a party celebrating the conclusion of the salvage dive. I zoomed in on the beautiful mother-daughter pair and squinted at them. It seemed like there was something different about Targa. I focused in on her face. She did look different, paler, but in a smoother and more iridescent way. And her green-blue eyes were brighter, more vibrant. She must have laid a filter over the image.

  I smiled to myself as I pounded out a return text to the conversation.

  Hi guys. Nice pix, Targa.

  Georjie fired back: SHE LIVES

  Me: Very funny.

  Targa: Everything okay? We’ve been wondering when we’d hear from you.

  I turned the last corner before my hotel, looked up, and almost choked on the juice. I immediately turned around and hid behind the corner. My appetite had gone and my pulse was tripping. The man who had watched me in the tailor's shop was sitting on a bench just a stone's throw from my front door.

  I pounded out a last hasty text to the girls: All okay. Gotta run. Sorry, I only have a few seconds.

  I put my phone away and took another peek around the corner. It couldn't be a coincidence that he was sitting right outside my hotel, three stories below my window. Tottori was way too big for him to just stumble upon this bench and it wasn't a place someone would want to hang out for long, not with all the beautiful parks nearby. He had to be here for me. What other explanation could there be? He had to be connected to Raiden somehow. Paranoia had my mind doing anxiety-ridden gymnastics. Would I even still be alive if I had gone to my hotel last night?

  Not only did I have the problem of this stranger sitting outside my door, I had two other problems served on the side. The only way into my room was through the front door as a human, or through the open window as a bird. Raiden knew I was a Hanta. If I became a sparrow I might fly in unnoticed—if I was lucky—but how would I leave carrying my backpack and the wakizashi?

  The second problem was that I had to go back to the tailor and pick up my silk robe. If this man wanted to catch me and deliver me back to Raiden, all he had to do was be there when I arrived to pay for it.

  I took a walk, pretending to window shop for an hour and hoping the man would be gone by the time I returned. When I got back to the hostel, I peeked around the corner and my stomach dropped. He was still there. Definitely a stake-out.

  I made my way back to Yuudai's apartment, formulating a rough plan while I walked. I would need Yuudai's help with it, though, and I wasn't sure how long he'd be gone. I didn't have any choice. I'd have to wait. Not expecting a response, I knocked on his apartment door and was pleasantly surprised when he flung it wide and bathed me with a grin.

  "You came back," he said. "I was about to answer your text."

  "You're home! How did the job go?"

  He waved a hand. "Easy-peasy. When they're ripe, they unseat like popping a cherry off a tree." He stood aside and let me enter the apartment. "What's wrong? You look worried."

  I shifted from one foot to the other. "I have a little problem."

  He frowned. "What's going on?"

  I explained, and I told him my plan.

  * * *

  The shadows had grown longer by the time I made my way back to the hotel. I peeked around the corner and was surprised to see a different man sitting on the bench. My momentary relief dissolved when he raised a cigarette to his lips and a patch of ink on his wrist peeked out from his cuff. They were stalking me in shifts?

  I closed my eyes and summoned my courage. In the simple plan that Yuudai and I had worked out, my job was to be the bait. I watched the man smoke until his cigarette was finished. He flicked the butt onto the pavement. He checked his watch, and then pulled out his phone and began scrolling. I waved to the small brown sparrow perched in the treetop beside the bench. It flew across the courtyard and disappeared in through the only open window on the third floor. If the man had noticed, I would have stepped out and distracted him, but he kept his eyes on his phone as Yuudai went through the window. I watched and waited until I saw Yuudai's form behind the glass giving me a thumbs up. He had the sword.

  Now for the risky part.

  I stepped out into view and walked toward the hotel entrance. Keeping my eyes on my destination and my stride casual, I passed the man sitting on the bench and pretended not to notice him
. He froze for just a second with a new unlit cigarette half-way to his lips, then set it between his lips, casually. I felt his eyes track me to the door.

  Every hair on my body stood on end as I opened the front door and felt the man behind me get up and follow. I fought down the urge to bolt. There was no one visible behind the front desk, but the office door behind it was open and I heard a shuffling of paper and the sound of a printer.

  As the door shut, I strode quickly past the elevator and darted into the stairwell as quietly as I could manage. I heard the front door open behind me. I held the stairwell door so it closed silently. Instead of going up the stairs to my room, I went down the stairs into the basement level. I heard the door above me open, and quick footsteps go up the stairs. I gulped, thinking that if my heart was pounding any louder, my pursuer would be able to hear it.

  When the footsteps over my head were three stories up, I sprinted up the stairs on tiptoe and slipped back out through the lobby. I darted out into the small courtyard and down the alley alongside the building.

  "Yuudai?" I whispered, feeling moisture gathering in the hollow of my back.

  His face appeared from behind a dumpster and he grinned and stood up. He must have just arrived because all he was wearing were pants. The broad expanse of his bare torso made me blink. I made a valiant effort not to stare. He tossed me my backpack and I caught it. The blue sheath of the wakizashi was poking out the top.

  I let out all my pent-up breath. "We did it!"

  "Easy," he said, yanking his shirt over his head, and slipping his bare feet into his sneakers. "One of the advantages you have from being so petite, and a woman, is that you will constantly be underestimated."

  "I couldn't have done it without you, Yuudai. Thank you."

  "You're welcome. If they knew what you were capable of, they would have put three or four men on you, and not on rotation but all at once. I doubt Raiden told them what you are. He might risk credibility among his men. Keeping humans thinking the spirit world is just myth is one of their most effective deceptions." He jerked a thumb towards the end of the alley. "Let’s jet."