by T. E. Joshua
“I would rather not go down that path again,” I muttered.
My suggestion came into reality as I glanced out of the restaurant window. Through the smudged glass, we saw Natalie Schultz walked along a university sidewalk with another girl.
“Look, there she is,” Liyah said.
“Who’s the other girl?” James asked Liyah.
“That’s Nicchole Schultz, Natalie’s older sister. She isn’t Awakened, just a normal Reborn. Nothing you should be concerned about.”
For the past few days, Liyah and Alope had been stalking Natalie—keeping up with her local hangouts, favorite places to dine, and preferred coffee shops. So far they hadn’t made contact with her.
I looked at them both and said, “I am going. This is my problem. My father ordered me to execute her, and I will do whatever is necessary.”
“Necessary? What’s necessary?” James questioned.
“I am going to talk to her—you know, befriend her, and get to know her.”
“Seriously? She might recognize you, probably not as the stranger who broke into her home, but as the boy who stood up for her in the Castleton Park mall,” James said gruesomely.
“Maybe you’re right. Maybe this hunt is impossible. Maybe the Awakened Reborn can’t be killed. But if we don’t something out of the ordinary and clever, then time will slip by before we realize it.”
Liyah nodded. “Tristan’s right. We can’t simply attack the girl. According to legend, their powers rise when a paranormal threat endangers them. We have to be sly, strike her when she least expects.”
“Are you sure you want to do this, Tristan?” James asked. He was only looking out for me, thinking I would fail at the challenge ahead.
“Yeah, I won’t fail this time.”
“At least you’ll be the first Naiche warrior to deceive and kill an Awakened Reborn,” Liyah said.
That was right. No one had killed one. I intended to be the first. I, the Promised Child and the element of fire would bring the head of Natalie Schultz to my father as instructed. I am the number nine warrior.
I took one more bite of my hamburger and a sip of my soda, wiped my mouth, and stood up from my seat. Liyah handed me a breath mint. James picked up the check with the money given to us by Uncle Eis.
“Wish me luck—I’m going to need it,” I said to them.
Before I left, James grabbed my hand and warned, “Be careful, Tristan. Don’t let that Awakened Reborn influence you. Remember the Covenant.”
“Of course,” I agreed. I walked out of the exit, glancing back inside the restaurant. Liyah smiled, which gave me the confidence to befriend the Reborn. James looked away, not having much hope in my abilities. I couldn’t blame him—befriending a faith monster wasn’t exactly what we had had in mind when we first came to Blackfalls.
Natalie and Nicchole walked toward the Manchester Library, located in the center of the campus between the west and east ends. I crossed the street and quickly followed. I had no weapons on me, nothing but the energy from the dark spirits and the lighter in my right pocket.
As seconds passed, words of conversation were going through my mind. We could talk about the weather, the most common topic. Or maybe—well, I hoped not—church and God. I didn’t have much knowledge about the Reborn religion, but I believed I could hold a decent conversation. I didn’t want to go with whatever came to mind. I needed the words to speak.
Soon, Nicchole Schultz, the brunette of the three sisters, departed from Natalie. I watched them hug and heard Nicchole mention something about dinner plans later on that day. I zeroed in on the Reborn as Nicchole vanished behind another building. Natalie began to search through some of her notes while standing alone in front of the Manchester Library.
“I have you now,” I muttered, igniting the lighter with my thumb.
Then the strangest thing happened: Natalie looked my direction, as if she had heard my words of deception. I veered back and looked the opposite direction, hoping she had just happened to look my way. Certainly she hadn’t heard me. I had only whispered those words. Maybe her Awakened abilities allowed her to have sensitive hearing. The dark spirits allowed us to increase our volume intake if we willed. I hoped Reborns didn’t have this ability.
As I looked back, Natalie Schultz marched toward me. That was it. She knew it was me. I stopped and then I walked away, entering one of the buildings nearby in hopes that I would lose her. The word coward streamed from my mind in the voice of Aaron. Oh how he annoyed me!
“Please don’t be following me,” I repeated softly again and again.
I walked into the university café, the Falls Coffee. I guessed it was short for Blackfalls. The entire staff of five workers glared at me when I stormed through the double doors. I walked over to the menu sign and appeared to be looking over the choices of coffee when the doors swung open behind me.
I could smell the scent—the aroma of sweets and spices. I breathed it in and felt my blood boil. It was so … ravishing.
“You can do this, Tristan,” I muttered.
Then I felt a tap on my left shoulder. I figured it was her, but I refused to turn around.
“Excuse me, sir, do I know you?” a woman’s voice asked.
“No, I’m not from around here,” I blurted out. I remained claim, looking at the different coffee choices between pumpkin pie, strawberry ice, and hazelnut cream.
“Oh, I could’ve sworn I have seen you before. You look awfully familiar.”
“Sorry, I haven’t seen you before. You must be mistaken, ma’am.”
I began to run my fingers down the menu, flustered. Sweat rose out of my pores and I didn’t know what to do. I debated if I should I run again or just tough it out?
“I see you like coffee, but how do you know you haven’t seen me around? You haven’t even looked at me yet,” she pointed out. I lowered my head. I peeked over my shoulder, and the first thing I noticed was her eyes—one green and one blue, both as heavenly as the morning sun. She was very pretty. I hadn’t noticed before. No! I told myself. Don’t think like that, Tristan. You’re a warrior, a killing machine. Not a lover boy.
“Oh, so now you notice me. Well, do I look familiar to you or what?”
“No,” I uttered calmly.
“No? Are you sure? I know I have seen you before.”
“Maybe you’re confusing me with someone who looks like me.” I sniffed about the odor on her. The demon within wanted to rise to the surface and spill blood. Keep calm, I repeated in my head.
I began to breathe very hard.
“Are you okay? You seem nervous.”
“I—I—I have to go, sorry,” I stumbled past her and out the double doors. I didn’t look back. I ran out the university union and vanished behind another building. There I vomited up the hamburger meat I had eaten just minutes before my encounter with the Awakened Reborn.
I rested for the moment and looked around. There was no sound but a bird chirping and a squirrel climbing the base of a tree.
“That was a close one,” I said.
That night, I returned to the house of Eis Lakota and locked myself in the boys’ room. James and Aaron were in the living room watching television. Liyah and Alope were upstairs. I didn’t come out. Once again, they knew I had failed at the plan—this time, the plan of friendship and deception. No one wanted to talk to me.
I peeked out the door and could hear James complaining about my lack of leadership and my disappointments. My best friend, the one I depended upon for moral support, had given up on me.
I overheard him mention to Aaron, “Brother, we might have to take control. Bodaway might be over his head with this one. Let’s start planning on a surprise attack against Natalie. We have less than two weeks.”
“Yeah, you’re probably right. After the incident in Woodland, Bodaway has been slipping. Hopefully he’ll snap out of it soon,” Aaron said.
I closed the door, hoping they didn’t hear the sound of wood rubbing against the meta
l. I lay down and soaked in what had happened today. She had pursued me. It should have been the other way around. I had to change this. I had to make my clan proud. I couldn’t let the Awakened Reborn get the best of me. They were all counting on me.
It was a near sleepless night, filled with gruesome dreams of the face of Natalie—the repeated scene of me being thrown facedown onto the wooden floor of her bedroom. It angered me. When I opened my eyes, I saw nothing but darkness. I sweat. The room was hot. James and Aaron were sound asleep. I didn’t wake them as I quietly opened the bedroom door and walked into the kitchen.
As minutes passed, my eyes wouldn’t shut. I needed to get some fresh air and come up with a plan to draw Natalie into my arms, to create discord among her close friends as willed by our lord god, Lucian. I was the element of fire and would be the darkness at the end of her life. My face would be the last thing she saw on this earth. Of course, these words of innate hatred flowed from my mind.
I grabbed my car keys and took my car into the town. The sun was barely peeking over the horizon, giving the skies a faint dark blue tint. The birds chirped. The woods were silent. The sound from my exhaust echoed around me.
As I drove into town, I noticed my fuel gage was near empty. I pulled into a neighborhood gas station near the edge of town and parked at pump two. The sign read Mill’s Gas and Snacks. I assume it was family owned.
There was one person working the counter. He seemed to be keeping an eye on me. I seemed to startle him a bit as I walked inside. I could sense the fear oozing from his demeanor. My very presence sent fear into Anglos; it was the powers of the Covenant.
I walked into Mill’s Gas and Snacks and paid twenty dollars; Uncle Eis had given each of us money to live on until we finished the hunt.
As the gas pumped, I leaned back onto my driver side door and shut my eyes. It was then that the scent of Natalie trailed into my nostrils and my blood boiled once more. I reopened my eyes and there she was two pumps over and using a credit card to pay for her gas.
What was she doing here at this hour of the morning?
Wait—this was my chance. She hadn’t noticed me yet. I could easily sneak up and attack her from behind. Or I could use Liyah’s plan of deception. All I had to do was approach her like anybody else—be nice, be considerate, be someone else. I couldn’t be me. I couldn’t be Bodaway, the Reborn killer. I had to be Tristan, the innocent boy in Blackfalls.
As I finished filling up the gas tank, I puffed out my chest and walked over to her. Natalie’s scent increased to such a high level that my eyes wanted to shape-shift. I could feel the intense burning going on inside, and yet I ignored what I was thinking—the pain, the suffering, the lust to kill, the dema. I had a means to an end. The moment would soon come, and her head would be my trophy.
Suddenly, I stepped onto a soda can. The noise from my foot crushing the aluminum caught Natalie’s attention as I stood there. Once again, I froze. She turned to look at me as her eyes widened in shock.
“What are you doing here?” she asked.
“Do you remember me?” To be honest, I hoped she would say something along the lines of, “Yeah, you were the stranger who snuck into my room.” She might recognize me as the boy who saved her in the mall—or maybe she didn’t recognize me at all.
“Yeah, you’re the boy from the mall. Are you stalking me?”
“No.”
“Then what are you doing here at this hour of daylight?”
Without a response, I looked the other way and saw the clerk watching the two of us from his window.
“Getting gas, like you.”
Then Natalie’s gas pump finished fueling her car. The pump made a clicking sound. She rushed over to close her gas cap and put the gas hose back onto the pump. Then she hurried to her driver side door, fumbling through her keys. She was frightened of me. I didn’t think I seemed to be a threat—after all; I wanted to be her friend.
She reached inside her purse to grab what appeared to be pepper spray—a small metal black can with a white tip.
“Whoa!” I exclaimed, flinging my hands up. “You must not fear me.”
“What are you?”
“What? I’m not here to hurt you. I just wanted to talk. That’s why I walked over here.” I began to slowly take baby steps back. She lowered her pepper spray and started to relax.
“Just talk?”
“Yeah,” I answered.
“Then what happened at the Castleton Park Mall? I knew you looked familiar. You were the boy—the boy with fire.”
I took a deep breath and kept my mind clear as I chose my next words very carefully. “I took care of it.”
“Took care of it? You don’t even know me. That boy you nearly killed is in the Blackfalls Metropolitan Hospital. His arm is broken, and he has first degree burns all over his body.”
“So I must have pushed him harder than I thought. No big deal.” My lack of likeability was really hurting me at this point.
“You expect me to believe you?”
Natalie Schultz was within arm’s reach. I could have quickly grabbed her throat and squeezed as tight as possible, causing the blood vessels in her neck to burst, ripping her bones from her muscles and tissue. After only a few seconds the hunt would have been finished. But that would have been a fool’s mistake. Aaron would have taken the risk. Her Awakened powers could be unleashed within an instant, and there I would be, dead, obliterated from the powers of the Spirit of the Reborns. I withheld my dark nature and continued to look into her eyes. I was lost and trying to be someone she could see as a potential friend.
“I don’t expect you to believe anything. All that matters is that you’re fine. I want …” I froze. She had a puzzled expression. For a moment, I lost my confidence and uttered, “… to be your friend.”
“A friend?”
“Yeah, a friend.”
“You don’t even know me.”
She was right. As far as I was concerned, she was nothing more than a duty by the Covenant. But, again, she was my territory to defend and soon destroy.
“Yeah, you’re right. I don’t know you,” I muttered. “Well, I would like to get to know you.”
The Awakened Reborn took a step forward and seemed to be looking deep into my eyes. Maybe she was accessing some of her unknown abilities. Perhaps she knew I was lying. I hoped not. Oh no! She might have known what I was thinking right now. She might have been able to read minds. Anything was possible with their powers, or so the legend has it. I cleared my mind and prepared to defend myself verbally.
Then she asked, “How did you move so fast—almost like a ghost disappearing from one place and reappearing in another?”
I tried to hide my tracks with sophisticated talk. “I didn’t move that fast. I just know how to fight.”
“No, I have never seen anybody move like you before or vanish so quickly.”
“You’re probably still shocked about the whole thing. You might of hit your head against something hard. Who knows what you really saw?”
“I know what I saw,” Natalie said. “Whenever you hit those guys, it was like you forced them to fly back or—”
I cut in. “Are you suggesting that I have some type of superpower?”
“Listen, I know what you’re trying to do,” she argued.
“What is that?”
“I just need to know the truth,” Natalie said. She wants the truth? The reason why I was here talking to her? She could never know. She wouldn’t. Her head would be detached from her neck before she found out.
“Just forget it, and thank god I was there to save you. Fortunately for you, I am never that kind to someone like you.”
She put away her pepper spray and glared at me. “Please,” Natalie begged. “You can trust me. I need to know what really happened.”
“You’re not going to drop this, are you?”
“No.”
I paused, trying to think of false ideas and words to make her believe that what she had see
n was due to nothing other than the heat of the moment.
“Okay, I helped you because no one else would have. You’re my territory.”
“Territory, what do you mean? I saw a wave of fire burst from your hands as you … controlled it.”
“You wouldn’t understand. Can we drop the subject? Let’s start over,” I said, attempting to shake her hand. “Hi, my name is Tristan.”
“I know who you are. You’re the boy who ran away yesterday in Falls Coffee. Tristan, please, I need to know the truth.”
This girl was impossible. Maybe I should have quickly cut her throat, spilling her blood onto the concrete while I watched in satisfaction. That was an option; however, judging from my previous two attempts, failure was a surety. I could probably cause her Awakened powers to erupt. No! I had to wait till she was most vulnerable. Now wasn’t the time.
“Listen, cut me some slack here. I want to get to know you. Maybe we can be good friends—you never know. I mean, I did save you from those jerks,” I said, hoping she would drop the demanding questions.
“You want to be friends and you don’t even know my name?”
“I know its Natalie,” I said too quickly. Stupid, I thought, she doesn’t know that I know her name. Now she might be suspicious.
“How did you know my name?”
I had to think quickly. “I asked around on campus and someone told me.”
“Who was it?”
“I don’t know … one of your sorority friends.”
“How do you know that I am in a sorority?” Are you kidding me? This conversation was not going well. I was losing her interest and raising more suspicion by the second.
“I know because of the Greek symbols on your shirt.” There, I was safe. The letters of KW were printed on her yellow shirt.
“Well, it doesn’t matter, Tristan. You seem like a nice boy, but I don’t have any room for more friends in my life.” Then she got into the driver seat of her car and started up the engine. Her face had an aggressive expression. She was angry with me for not telling her the truth of that day.
“Wait, Natalie.”
