42nd Moon: The Woe of Soulmates
Page 11
The younger boy sighs, deciding to tell him the real reason. There is the risk of disappointing them if Irene turns out not to be their soulmate, but Chan can handle that. Besides that, there isn’t actually any point in not telling them; it is just cooler when it feels more like a secret mission. He really takes after his big.
“The barista has a soulmark. She doesn’t know about it yet, but I think it matches with one of our brothers. We already checked with Lee and Matthews, but it’s not either of them.”
Chan’s face turns inhumanly pale at the prospect of meeting his soulmate. “I… I am afraid I cannot grant your request at the moment,” he tries to reply as calmly as possible.
Jaiden furrows his brows and leans a little more forward. “Why not? I thought you were okay with it.” It’s every wolf’s dream to meet their soulmates, isn’t it? Well, almost every wolf’s.
Chan rubs at his wrist where unbearable pain ripped through his body from just a few months ago. He wonders if she has healed from the beating yet. He wonders how she will react once she finds out what he did to her.
“Ask Zeng first,” he diverts.
Jaiden flinches at the mention of the name. “I, uh, I tried. We had a little falling out though.”
It is now the alpha’s turn to furrow his brows and sit up in his chair. This he had not heard of, and it is his job as alpha to make sure the boys are living in harmony. He has already been not doing too well with Jaiden and Darren, and now Xie Ming is in the mix too?
“We found out we have, uh, idea differences,” Jaiden explains.
“Go on,” Chan urges.
“He thinks it’s Ki’s fault Darren… impregnated… his girlfriend,” Jaiden squeezes out. He feels like a kindergartener tattle-telling on his classmate for a problem he can’t fix. The words also feel gross and foreign on his tongue.
“Ah, victim blaming,” Chan sighs. “It’s not unusual, especially since he knows Dust a lot better than Miss Tsujii.”
“Doesn’t make it right,” grumbles Jaiden.
“No, it doesn’t. Mindsets can be difficult to change, though, so what we say to him will just go over his head even if I am his alpha. The only way we can get him to understand that Miss Tsujii did nothing wrong is for him to realize what kind of person she is for himself.”
“How do we do that?” Jaiden asks.
“Just by mere exposure. She’s a good person, and she just needs to let her colors shine around Zeng. Did you invite her to our winter break retreat yet?”
Jaiden nods.
“Good. And Jaiden?”
“Yes, Chan?”
“I know this is hard and unfair, but don’t be too harsh on Zeng. He’s young, and we need to show him what kindness and forgiveness are, alright?”
The boy looks to his feet as he stands. “Yes, Chan.”
Sensing that the conversation is over, Chan reopens his binder.
“And Chan?”
“Hm?”
“Coffee tomorrow?” Jaiden asks with finger guns pointed at the head of bleached haired by the desk.
The alpha rubs his temples with a sigh.
* * *
Freedom is the feeling of finishing your last final of the semester. Even the crisp winter air feels a little fresher when Tsukiko walks out of the examination hall.
“So like, am I going to have to keep judging the way you’re smiling at me, or are we going to get going to my lab?”
Tsukiko’s eyelids flutter open and her smile drops. There in front of her stands Mark with his usual coy smirk plastered on his face.
“You finished your experiment? That was quick!” she comments.
“I hurried just for you, Princess,” he coos, earning him an exasperated sigh.
“What is it about? The experiment, I mean,” Tuskiko asks while following the graduate student closely behind.
“Well, this is only part of the experiment, but it is enough to serve our purposes. See, skin color is controlled by how much pigment called melanin is produced by melanocytes. Usually, everyone has the same number of melanocytes, and it’s their activity levels that control how dark someone’s skin is,” Mark begins explaining, his pace quickening as he does so.
Tsukiko struggles to keep up.
“However, what I’ve discovered is that wolves and soulmates have an extraordinary amount of melanocytes where their soulmarks are. Not only that, but I also found an abundance of luciferase, an enzyme fireflies use to make light, there.” They reach the Chemistry buildings. Mark holds open a door that he unlocks with his ID and they scale the concrete stairs inside. “I have yet to find out how being around each other makes our bodies release luciferin, the chemical that binds to the enzyme, but the soulmate’s body sympathetic system does release it when they are in danger.”
They soon enter a small lab filled with puddles of melted ice, blood samples, and a cage with a rat running on its wheel. Tsukiko doesn’t know whether to be disgusted or fascinated, so she goes with the latter. She quickly pulls her hair into a bun before bending at different angles to look at Mark’s project.
He continues, “I also have figured out how to read the specific light frequencies of an individual’s glow with a chip and send a signal onto a normal radio wave which is received by another chip and can make this glow.” From a clamp, he pulls off a necklace filled halfway with clear, swirling liquid.
“Wow,” she breathes, looking at the pendant with amazement.
“Well,” Mark shrugs, hanging the necklace back on the clamp. “That’s how it’s supposed to work in theory. I have yet to try it out due to an obvious lack of subjects, so that’s where you come in.”
Tsukiko nods. “What do I need to do?”
“I just need some skin samples from you when you’re in danger,” he answers, holding up a probe and a weighing boat.
“Okay. And how are we—”
He cuts her off with an unapologetic howl. Tsukiko tells her feet to hold their ground as a grey-orange wolf appears before her, snarling and pawing at the ground. Her wrist begins to glow, but not quite as vibrantly as they need. Mark leans his front paws on the counter, his hot breath fanning her neck as he hovers his teeth dangerously close to it. Feeling her heart rate increase to an uncomfortable level, Tsukiko scrapes at her soulmark, making the surface skin cells break off. When she feels pain from having scraped too deeply, she sets aside her tools and shoves Mark off.
“Great,” he says, returning to his human form. “I was afraid that wouldn’t work, though I am a bit offended that you were afraid of me.”
“You were a wolf,” Tuskiko points out.
Mark transfers the skin cells into a test tube and mixes it with a solution before the glow wears off. “Still, you would have trusted, say, Han.”
“Yeah, maybe,” she agrees, watching him stick the tube in a spectrophotometer.
“Be careful of whom you trust, little mouse,” he mumbles.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He puts the tube in a spectrometer, and when the machine draws out a graph on his computer screen, Mark drags the picture into a code on another window. He presses a button and two microchips are ejected from a device. One he submerges into the liquid in the pendant which turns it black, and the other he hands to Tsukiko.
“Glue the back side to a bracelet or something when you get back. For now, hold it there and let’s test it.”
This time, Mark whips out a scalpel and charges at her with it. Tsukiko dodges the attack, and the pendant glows from its clamp.
“It works!” she gasps.
Mark’s scalpel drops as he embraces the necklace with both hands. “It works,” he repeats breathlessly. “It works!”
The two jump around in circles excitedly at his achievement.
“Say, if you can do this much, do you think you can make soulmates?” Tsukiko theorizes.
“I don’t know; I haven’t gotten to figuring out how to make two people fall in love yet, but even if I did, how
messed up would it be for me to play matchmaker with someone’s biology?”
“No, but think about it. It might help Jaiden if you can.”
Mark scrunches up his face. “It just seems kind of weird to be playing around with things like this; it might lead to a ‘give a mouse a cookie effect.’ Imagine if all soulmates were made in a chemistry lab?”
He laughs but it has Tsukiko thinking. It isn’t too far fetched of an idea given what she’s seen him do today. Still, she hopes not; the idea makes her sick.
* * *
Before her last delivery for Cain, Tsukiko stops by St. Valentine’s for a checkup. She is lucky the man does not wake up before noon, so she still has the time for a morning appointment.
“Miss Tsukiko Tsujii?” Dr. Lawrence calls as usual.
“Yes.”
“Any memories as of late? How has your recent fainting affected you?”
Tsukiko answers, “I lost some memories of the day I fainted, but nothing before that came back.”
“That does happen if you congregate your blood at your feet by standing like that,” she reads offhandedly from her charts.
That again. Tsukiko could have sworn she was sitting on a lab bench before she lost consciousness.
“And have those memories come back?”
“Yes.”
“Ah,” she says, almost disappointedly. “Can you tell me something from that day?”
Should she mention the numbers? Mark did suggest they might be the reason why someone is after her. “I had breakfast with my friend before going to work,” she decides to reply.
“And what was it that you did at work?”
“That is classified company information.”
Dr. Lawrence closes her file with an unreadable expression. “Alright. We are doing another scan today. Nothing unusual; just follow me.”
Tsukiko does as told, and they enter the blue room on the basement floor.
“Just close your eyes and relax. It will be over before you know it,” the doctor says smoothingly.
Liquid seeps through her hospital gown. Tsukiko wonders why that is necessary for scanning her head. She wonders why Dr. Lawrence said this process is nothing unusual when she does not remember ever doing this before. This capsule-like brain scanner, this liquid, this blueness; she does not remember seeing any of it before, yet they all carry a sense of deja vu.
Out of the corner of her eye, she sees an emergency exit where Dr. Lawrence is standing before her whole world goes black.
* * *
“Coffee and food,” Tsukiko announces, placing the said items on a table beside the self-proclaimed music hacker for the last time. The bright lights of his computer screens contrast the darkness of the rest of the room, making her feel dizzy.
Cain drags his apple turnover out of the bag with his teeth. “Thank you. Matthews should be here soon. We’ll start when he is.”
“I’m here,” his voice sounds from the other side of the door. It opens and Mark steps in. “Let’s see who this killer dentist is.”
“We still haven’t agreed that anyone is trying to kill anyone,” Cain reminds him. “I haven’t had the time to watch the clips myself since Destiny’s firewall was so hard to break into, but here they are.”
Without further ado, he double-clicks on a folder and from it opens a file titled with the date and approximate time Tsukiko was gassed. Sure enough, they see a girl walking into Lab 8 and shuffling through the storage fridges. After a while, she looks up, startled, and runs into a cabinet.
“Is there a camera on the emergency exit?” Mark asks.
Cain sips on his coffee. “This is the only camera they have in the room.”
The three of them watch silently as seemingly nothing happens. Then suddenly, the screen pops, and a sizzle sounds through the speakers. Everything goes black except for a red “REC” in the upper left corner. When the image comes back up, they see Darren picking Tsukiko up and throwing her over his shoulder.
“See? The killer dentist erased the records, therefore proving that he’s trying to kill somebody, AKA, you.”
Tsukiko takes a few steps back with her arms crossed. “Or maybe I did imagine everything. I mean, there were a few moments before the camera went out. We should have seen the person walk into view already.”
“What?” Mark scoffs. “You were so sure there was someone before. Why are you being so wishy-washy now?”
She massages two fingers into the bridge of her nose. “I don’t know. The event seems so fuzzy now, like a dream. How can I forget something that happened in real life?”
“You’re not really one to talk,” Mark points out.
“Wait.” Cain, who has been scrolling through the video while they were talking, suddenly sits up on the edge of his chair. He brings his left hand up to the keyboards and runs it over a couple of keys.
Mark and Tsukiko both lean closer to the monitor where Cain is shifting through a few frames. He finally gets it to pause right before the pop. The image looks like a white screen except for something at the bottom of it. A few more buttons and that something enhances and enlarges.
Mark breathes. “Looks like our killer dentist just became a killer doctor. The white screen is not a glitch, but the inside of a lab coat.”
The image Cain enhanced is a prescription pad watermarked with a snake coiled around a winged staff.
“Maybe a paper flew past. Lab 8 handles a lot of cases for St. Valentine’s, so there’s that possibility,” Tsukiko suggests.
Mark furrows his brows. “Why are you like this all of the sudden?”
“Like what?”
“Like so against the idea that there was someone there even though you were so adamant about it last week.”
An alarm goes off softly in Tsukiko’s jacket. She turns off her phone and pulls out an orange bottle. “The thought of someone trying to kill you just isn’t the first thing people are willing to accept.”
Mark sighs and turns to Cain. “Lee, what are the chances that it is just a flying piece of paper? None, right?”
“I don’t know. It could be. I mean, the video cuts out before we can see if it’s tucked into the pocket of the coat if it even is a coat.”
Tsukiko reaches for her tea to swallow her pills with. “See? It could really have been just a leak in one of the tanks.”
“Even if there is someone, they haven’t tried anything again yet after an entire week. If Tsujii had some information they were trying to hide, they would have silenced her as soon as possible, don’t you think?” Cain adds.
“Exactly. Your necklace hasn’t glowed once since you started wearing it, has it?” Tsukiko questions. “The one connected to my wristwatch, I mean.”
Mark looks down at the said pendant. “That’s true,” he admits. “But! It did go clear again. It does that when it loses signal to your watch.” He points to the accessory on her wrist where she attached the sensor chip.
“When?”
“This morning. When I took it off for a shower.”
“I was getting a check-up this morning. There were a lot of machines around that could have distorted the signals. Regardless, I am still alive,” Tsukiko reasons. She sniffles a yawn behind her hand and wishes she had gotten something a little more caffeinated this morning.
Mark crosses his arms and leans on one leg. “So you’re saying this whole thing was inconclusive.”
Cain shrugs. “Thanks for the coffee anyway.”
“No, it helped me realize that maybe I imagined everything after all, seeing how there was no one in the video and how the memory is starting to fade so much.”
Mark huffs a breath and taps his foot, still convinced of the killer doctor.
“I’ll still wear this,” Tsukiko offers, holding up her wristwatch. “In case something does happen.”
The beta sighs, “Alright, fine. I can settle for that. Lee, can you send me the file though? I’m going to prove it to you guys before it’s too late.”
&nb
sp; T-38 Moons
Jaiden slams down his trunk and climbs into the driver’s seat. At last, their long awaited winter retreat has begun.
“Ready, everyone?”
“Ready!” Finley and Faith cheer from the back.
Tsukiko gives him a thumbs up from the passenger’s side.
“You alright?” he chuckles, looking at her as he buckles in his belt. “You’ve been kind of tired lately.”
“All the stress I’ve built up during the semester is surfacing now that I have a chance to relax,” she says.
“Ugh, I feel that,” Finley agrees from the back.
“What do you mean? You do nothing but game during the semester,” Faith teases.
Jaiden smiles warmly at the giggly couple through his rearview mirror. A sense of longing tugs at his heart, and his eyes shift unconsciously to Tsukiko.
“Want to sleep a little? We have a two hour drive, Ki,” he suggests to the girl beside him.
She shakes her head. “I planned to go through some werewolf cases to see if I can find anything about soulmates there. Maybe some regular human like Terena had to be told about you guys because of impregnation too.”
“Ew,” Jaiden grimaces at the thought of reading case files. “Have fun, I guess.”
“I will,” Tsukiko laughs at his reaction.
“It’s almost noon though. You should take your pill soon.”
“Oh, right. Thanks.” Tsukiko reaches for her orange bottle.
“What are they for again?” Jaiden asks.
“It’s just a little aspirin diluted with some stabilizers. The doctor said she’s afraid of some blood clotting in my brain, so she prescribed these until my next visit.”
“I-is it serious?”
Tsukiko sits back into the seat. “No, don’t worry. It’s just precautions.”
Jaiden nods and focuses back on the road. FANCY starts singing through the car radio not long after, and Tsukiko pulls out a tablet and scrolls through court reports. As the hour mark rolls around, however, her eyes begin to droop until they close altogether. Jaiden’s heart swells a little at the sight of her breath fogging and defogging the passenger window. At the same time, he worries about how much strain the semester put on her. From losing all her memories to finding out about werewolves and that she might lose her life, he is sure none of it is easy to keep up with on top of her pristine grades.