by G. P. Ching
And then her arms embraced his neck and she kissed him again, a hard, demanding kiss that set him off balance. Her hips pressed into his, her hand dug into the hair at the back of his neck, and Jacob tried to remember why he should stop this, why the kiss and the heat felt good and wrong at the same time. It was a while before he remembered.
Slowly, he pushed her away. “I can’t do this. I’m with Malini. I shouldn’t have let that happen.”
“But you did. You’re not married to her, Jacob. If you like me, why not give me a chance, too?”
“I do like you, Mara, and you are … unbelievably beautiful. But I love Malini. And that means more to me. It would kill me to know I’d hurt her. I’m sorry.”
“Yeah.”
Jacob nodded a goodbye, straightened the backpack on his shoulder, and walked as quickly as possible to his truck. He was relieved when he climbed behind the wheel and locked himself in. He’d never intended to kiss Mara but he couldn’t deny he’d enjoyed it.
The greatest temptation was that he could get lost in her. Kissing Mara, he hadn’t thought of Watchers or Katrina or Malini’s initiation. He hadn’t thought of anything. She was an escape. Mara didn’t have a dad who hated him and she was a Horseman, just like him. It would be simple with Mara.
But Jacob didn’t love her. He loved Malini.
He started the truck and backed out of Dr. Silva’s driveway, disappointed he’d let it go as far as it did. Malini would be home soon. Would he tell her what happened? Could he? Could he live with himself if he didn’t? Jacob rubbed his chest where his heart began to ache.
Chapter 22
The Last Challenge
Once Malini regained her composure, she released Wisnu’s neck and sat down on a boulder near the path. Raising her right hand, she saw that the glove Death had given her looked exactly like her own flesh and blood. There was a thin pale mark on the crook of her elbow. She dug her finger in and peeled back the glove to reveal the bones.
Wisnu backed away, whimpering.
“Yeah. Imagine being attached to it,” Malini said. She flexed and stretched the bone hand in front of her face. Next to her, a patch of violets bloomed. She reached out. One slight brush and the flowers shriveled to a crispy brown. Near her foot, a spider scampered toward Wisnu. Malini, who had even less love for spiders after the first challenge, touched it with a skeletal finger. It died, the legs curling into the abdomen.
Could she touch herself? She must be able to if she was attached to it. She tested it out by removing her slipper and tapping her little toe. Besides the odd feeling of bone touching skin, nothing happened.
Malini slid the glove back on and frowned. She was exhausted. Gauging the time of day by the sun was impossible; there wasn’t one, just an undefined glow that filled the sky. She wondered how long she’d been there. What day was it? The stone was black around the edges now, with only a soft glow at the center. She had to keep moving.
On her feet again, she continued down the path. “Come on, Wisnu. We have to keep going.” He trotted along next to her, sniffing at her gloved hand.
“Be careful. It’s safe with the glove on but I don’t want to take any chances.”
Wisnu snorted and trotted to her other side. The path changed from dirt, to sand, to pebbles. Malini’s feet and legs ached from walking and her eyes burned, her lids heavy. She should’ve rode Wisnu but by the time she thought of it, they came to a place where he wouldn’t go. The pebble path led to a shiny brass gate. Behind the gate, row after row of headstones stretched as far as she could see, and the path continued right up the middle.
“I’m guessing the best time for guidance is before I walk into the creepy cemetery.”
Wisnu paced nervously a few steps behind her. The sky grayed with no moon or stars to break the dingy night. Malini felt along her sari for another thread and pulled it free of the fabric. She laid it across her palm. The pulses of light wrapped around her, pulling her into the lesson of her past. It was easier this time, now that she knew what to expect.
She was standing on a cricket pitch. An Indian man and his son were hunched over a stitched leather ball. She recognized her grandfather right away, but it took her a while to know that the boy he was teaching to bowl was her father at eight years old. She had to remind herself that it was called bowling and not pitching like in baseball. It had been a long time since she’d watched someone play cricket.
“Place your fingers like this, Jahar,” her grandfather said, positioning her father’s fingers wider on the ball.
“But why, Baba?”
“Because this will cause the ball to spin and make it harder to hit.”
Her father bowled the ball across the cricket pitch. It bounced and veered left out of bounds.
“The other way is easier,” her father said.
Her grandfather growled out a disappointed scoff. “Easy? Nothing worth doing is easy, Jahar. Nothing worth having is easy. You need to learn different ways so you can adapt to the situation.”
“You mean I need to throw what the hitter can’t hit?”
“Yes. Yes. This isn’t just about cricket, Jahar. In life we have to solve the problems we face. We have to think critically about the situations before us. Your education, your experiences, they are all valuable. They create your tools to overcome the difficulties you will face.”
Her dad squatted to pick up another ball near his feet.
“Bowl again, Jahar.”
“Yes, Baba.”
Malini emerged from the vision with a smile on her face. The advice her father always gave her, “solve the problem,” it came from her grandfather. She tucked the thread into her pocket, wondering how this vision would help her. “See you on the other side, Wisnu,” she said. “I hope.” Opening the gate, she followed the path into the cemetery.
Once the gate clanked shut, she was enveloped by silence. The only sound was the shuffle of her slippers on the pebble path. She reached the first row of headstones, but couldn’t make out any of the writing in the stone. The grave markers were ancient and weathered, the inscriptions worn away. She continued, watchful.
About halfway across, she smelled the first Watcher. It was perched atop a mausoleum, cloaked in the illusion of a man but with his wings fully extended. He turned to her, his eyebrows rising before he jumped down from his perch.
“What have we here?” he asked. The phrase hung in the air between them. Malini picked up her pace toward the opposite gate. But there were more. Watchers poured out from every corner of the graveyard, closing in around her. Taunting her.
“Looks like lunch to me,” a redhead in black leather said. She licked her lips.
“I want a leg,” a tall Watcher with a goatee snapped.
“Now, now, Bernard, we all need to share but there will be plenty to go around.”
Malini turned in a circle, trembling as she counted six Watchers closing in around her. She wanted them dead. She wanted out of this place. It seemed the perfect time to use her new gift.
Pulling her glove off, she raised the skeleton hand in front of her. “Stay back or die!” she yelled.
“What’s this?” a blonde male with stocky muscles said. “Less meat for us.” He reached out and snatched the bone fingers, then brought his face dangerously close to hers. “If Watchers were alive, I might consider that a threat.” He moved in, flashing teeth.
Her other hand shot up and pushed the Watcher away as hard as she could. The pain was immediate. Her palm sizzled against his flesh and blisters bubbled on his chin.
It backed off. “It burns!” he hissed. This incited the other Watchers and suddenly they were upon her. She reached out, burning one then another, but it was only flesh on flesh that worked, and soon they had figured out that grabbing her hair or sari was much more effective. Everywhere talons clawed at her, ripping, hurting. And then a belt was around her neck. She hadn’t seen it coming. The Watcher behind her laughed as he tightened it, choking her.
“Perhaps
we can eat it after it’s dead,” the redhead hissed. Malini worked her fingers inside the strap, trying to hold enough space to maintain her windpipe. Instinctively, she’d used her healing hand, her left. She looked at her right hand, the hand of Death, and thought about her vision. How could she use it differently?
She clawed at the strap around her neck with the bony fingers but they were no more useful than her flesh and blood ones. Still, she could feel something in her bones. Death’s hand was buzzing from the inside, as if it knew it had something more to offer.
The belt tightened, cutting off the air to her lungs. Desperate, she reached out to the buzz and asked it with everything she had left to help her. The buzz grew stronger and she bent the bony fingers, pulling against a cord she could not see, beckoning a force that seemed just beyond her reach. She called with her fingers again and again, the buzz growing stronger as she was drawn closer to unconsciousness. The stone around her neck blackened. Was she dying or out of time?
And then the strap around her neck loosened. Air burned down her raw windpipe into her lungs. A spark ignited at her throat, the stone coming back to life. With the newfound oxygen, she was suddenly aware of a commotion going on around her. The Watcher with the goatee struggled against an opponent, someone choking the Watcher from behind, someone tall and strong.
Malini turned in place. An army of people had come to her rescue. Everywhere, the Watchers fought off attackers. She tried to see, to focus on the people who had come to her aid.
One of them was injured. The man’s arm hung useless as he scuffled with the red-headed Watcher. Then she noticed another had a rancid wound in his side. As she turned in place, the buzz in her hand was so strong it felt like a swarm of stinging wasps. But she didn’t care about the pain. She just wanted out of there.
She backed down the path, toward the opposite gate, sliding between the Watchers and their attackers. It was only after she moved outside the ring of violence that she saw where her rescuers had come from. The graves nearest the scuffle were open, fresh piles of dirt on each one. And farther out, hands were breaking the surface of the graves.
The dead were rising.
Their milky eyes sought her out, awaiting her command. They were hers. She had raised the dead. The bones of the older corpses pulled themselves together, gristle and strips of muscle in various stages of decay. The buzz in her bones intensified with each one who rose from the grave.
“Kill them,” she commanded and, with inhuman howls, they did. The zombies ripped the Watchers apart piece by piece. Wings and limbs and heads flew from the fight, and their black blood oiled the path. When all were finished, the dead stood facing her, swaying slightly at attention.
On instinct, she held up the buzzing hand, which had coiled into a fist. “I release you,” she said loudly and relaxed her fingers, letting the invisible cord that she had retracted out inch by inch. The zombies walked backward to their graves, sinking into the dirt one by one. When all were buried again, Malini held the hand up in front of her face. She could still feel them there, under the surface, waiting for her next command.
“Holy shit,” she whispered, turning the bones back and forth in the twilight. Shivering with the remnants of fear and lingering exhaustion, she found her glove and slid it over the bones. Then she finished walking the path and emerged from the cemetery.
She collapsed to the grass on the other side of the gate. With the adrenaline giving out, the pain hit her full force. A ring around her neck throbbed where the strap had dug in, her limbs ached, and her skin burned. Black and red blisters ran from the elbow above her skeletal hand, across her chest, and down her left arm. She couldn’t see, but she suspected by the pain the burns covered her stomach as well.
Every breath was excruciating. She curled on her side and sobbed into the grass. The pain was unbearable. She prayed to die.
When a warm, wet tongue licked her cheek, she knew it was Wisnu. He sniffed her face worriedly. She was too exhausted to respond. Digging his nose under her belly, he rolled her across his neck. A few jarring steps later he dumped her gently into an icy cold stream. The water was only inches deep but it sprayed over her as it jetted across the stones, soaking her to the bone.
“Wisnu!” she yelled, getting a mouthful of water in the process. She planted her hands on the bottom and pushed herself up to a sitting position. When she felt steady, she stood and walked her shivering body to the shore. “Wisnu! Bad boy. No!” She shook her finger in his face and the mongoose lowered his head to the grass.
But, Malini had to admit, the pain was better. The blisters faded to pink tender skin and then completely healed. She rubbed her neck and found it free from pain as well. She remembered the day in the lab, when the water had washed her burn away.
“The water heals me! Wisnu, you’re a genius!” She wrapped her arms around the animal, hugging his neck and burying her face in his fur. He rested his chin on her shoulder.
When she pulled away, she looked up the grassy knoll near the stream and an odd feeling turned her stomach. The water … this meant something. The truth came to her without any effort, a sad revelation she couldn’t deny.
“I always thought … When I was a little girl, a Buddhist monk gave me a note. He said it was my destiny. The note read water. Since last year, I thought the note was about Jacob. I thought that we were meant for each other because his gift was water. But maybe this is all it meant. Water heals me. Maybe the word didn’t mean Jacob at all. Maybe it was just talking about me. About what I needed to be whole.”
Wisnu had nothing to say about the theory but he licked her face in response. She ran her hand over his neck, pondering the idea that maybe her love for Jacob wasn’t destined at all. Maybe it was a relationship just like everyone else’s.
“How about a ride, Wisnu?”
The mongoose lowered his body and Malini climbed on. He jogged down the path while Malini pondered her journey and wondered if she had any energy at all for what was to come. But relief spread across her body when she saw the veranda where she’d begun in the distance. As Wisnu grew closer, she could make out Fatima sitting at a table across from a short, dark woman who looked positively ancient.
The two women stood when they saw Malini, raising their glasses in the air. Fatima spoke in a loud, husky voice. “Hail, Malini, our new Healer, shaman, and medicine woman. You shall give life with your left hand and bring death with your right. Congratulations, Soulkeeper.”
Both women drank the red liquid in their glasses and then bowed their heads in her direction. Malini should have felt proud to have succeeded, or relieved to be alive, but instead, as she watched the women beckon her to their table, all she felt was the weight of the world shifting to her shoulders.
Chapter 23
Return
Her body was too warm. That’s what Jacob thought when he took Malini’s hand in his. She felt feverish. Was this his warning that she wasn’t coming back? Jacob had noticed his temperature drop when he called the water, but he’d always assumed it was because he used ice to fight. But when Mara used her power for too long, her body turned icy cold. Did Soulkeepers grow cold at their most powerful? And what did that mean for Malini who was burning up?
He leaned forward from his perch on the end of her bed and placed his lips on her forehead. Then, even though he had an audience of his mom, Mara, Gideon, and Dane, he lowered his lips to her mouth and gave her a proper kiss.
“Come on, Malini,” he whispered to her. “Wake up.”
He jolted when he felt her hand move. “She squeezed my hand!” he said to the others.
They crowded in around the bed. “Malini? Malini?”
Her eyes fluttered open and Jacob gasped audibly. The normally chocolate-brown color of her eyes was luminescent, a deep golden-brown lit from within. The others in the room leaned in for a better look.
“Oh my God,” Mara whispered.
“Wowza,” Dane said with childlike astonishment.
Malini
swallowed and then her lips began to move. “Water,” she mumbled.
The room became a flurry of activity, everyone tripping over each other to grab the foam cup with the straw off the bedside table. The nurses had been caring for her illusion for days, and Jacob felt the ice shift within the cup as he snatched it out of Dane’s hand and brought the straw to her lips.
She drank greedily, and then sat herself up in bed, motioning for Jacob and Dane to back off. She met the eyes of each of her visitors. “What is everyone staring at?”
“Gideon, pass her the mirror,” Jacob said.
“Of course,” he replied, handing the mirror from the bedside table to Malini.
Malini lifted it in front of her face, turning her head from side to side to check out her new eyes. “Well if that freaks you out, then you should all probably brace yourselves.” She lifted her right hand and scratched at the inside crook of her elbow. Her fingers caught, and then like something out of a horror movie, she peeled back her own flesh from her bones.
“Sweet Jesus!” Lillian yelled from her spot near the windows. She was still technically a patient and hugged the robe she was wearing tighter around her body.
Jacob leapt to his feet, backing toward the windows. Dane vomited into the garbage can near the bed. Mara pressed herself against the closed door of the room, her eyes wide. Gideon completely disappeared.
Malini laughed. “Look at all of you. It’s as if you’ve never seen the hand of Death before.”
In the silence of the room Jacob heard his heart pounding as every cell in his body told him to run. Sure, the sight was horrific, but it was more than that. The thing on the end of Malini’s arm emitted fear and dread. The air was heavy with impending doom.
