Chapter 12: Afterglow

“Please, Shannon,” someone wept. “You promised. You promised. Please…”

Shannon heard the whimpers through the rush of ecstasy and for a long moment, thought it was a movie playing in the background. Then something clicked in her brain and she once more felt her hands on his body. She looked down, saw the samurai curled naked under her, protecting his vitals, crying, saw her fingers sunk into his leg. Saw her other hand pressed into his chest.

“Oh my God!” Shannon cried, yanking her hands away from him. The glowing fangs jutting from the base of her palms came back bloody.

The man gasped and let out a low, heart-wrenching sob and started crawling away from her.

“Odin’s balls, I’m so sorry!” she cried, reaching for him.

Masaaki screamed and his body flashed in a sudden blast of light, blinding her. Shannon grunted and dropped to the side, catching herself on an elbow, disoriented. When her eyes cleared enough to see again, he was huddled in a pocket of sunlight beside the door, knees brought up to his chest, chin on his knees, arms wrapped around his legs. Rocking. Like someone in a fucking insane asylum.

“I’m sorry!” she cried, moving toward him.

“Stay there!” he shrieked, scrabbling away from her. “Just stay away from me.” His words had a ragged sound, the sound of someone who had just spent several long minutes screaming. He was sucking in huge breaths, over and over, hyperventilating through tears as he watched her with wide, glowing silver-yellow eyes.

I’m a vampire, Shannon thought, horrified. And I was killing him. She tried to think of something that would ease that appalling truth, something that would comfort him, some apology that he would understand.

Very slowly, she got to her knees and dropped low, putting her forehead to the ground, facing him.

The sound of his deep, gasping breaths continued even over the pounding of her heart. For what seemed like an eternity, she heard the wood continue to squeak as he rocked. But then, eventually, they started to subside. For a long time, there was nothing but silence from him, and she wondered if he had slipped from the house. Then she heard him move, the gentlest of whispers against the hardwood floor. She heard him pad slowly across the room, working his way around to her side, keeping his distance.

She heard the rattle of the katana’s wooden scabbard on the hardwood floor. Then she heard him approach from her side, one barefoot step at a time.

Shannon bit her lip and continued staring at the floor.

She heard the metal ringing sound as the blade slid from its sheath. She cringed, but held her ground. Part of her wanted to bolt, to get as far from him as possible, but the other half was so deeply immersed in shame that she simply squeezed her eyes shut and waited.

She could feel the heat of his feet, only a few inches from her right arm. For minutes, he simply stood there. Then, softly, he said, “You promised.”

Shannon ducked her head tighter against the floor. She had no excuse. She remembered feeling the rush of power, dropping her humanity as easily as one would shed a coat. She remembered taking what she wanted, despite his terrified pleas for mercy.

“Get up and face me, vampire.” She could hear the hatred in his voice. The vitriol.

Shannon bit her lip and remained where she was.

“Do it!” he snarled.

She ignored him, keeping her body prostate.

For minutes, there was silence in the room, allowing Shannon to count her heartbeats, unable to even bring herself to look up at the samurai. Time passed, marked by shallow breaths, constrained against her knees and the floor. Then, with a startling thump, the gleaming tip of a katana buried itself in the walnut a few inches from her skull. A second later, Masaaki dropped to his knees beside her head. When she dared to look up, he was drooping against his sword, eyes closed, breathing deeply.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

Masaaki put his forehead to weapon. “I know.”

“I won’t do it again,” she promised.

“Yes you will.” He took several deep breaths, then turned his head slightly to look down at her over his bare forearm. His eyes were brown-and-silver again. “But it is to be expected. Young vampires have no control. I knew this, when we started. I just panicked like a woman.”

“You just got your ass whupped by a woman,” Shannon blurted. She hated his casual depiction of the weaker sex, and, while she wasn’t quite a feminist, she certainly wasn’t going to put up with that kind of idiotic bullshit.

His eyes narrowed down at her. “I just about put my sword through your spine, wan-ko.”

“And I was gonna let you do it,” she blurted back. “Which is why you didn’t.” Thank you, crabby old hardass Japanese teacher and his long, off-topic lectures about honor.

Masaaki grunted and glanced down at his sword. “You surprised me,” he admitted. “How did you know I wasn’t going to strike?”

“I didn’t,” Shannon said.

His eyes flickered to her again, then off toward the sunbeam where he had rocked himself. “Next time,” he said, “we do this in the backyard at noon. At least then, you can’t kill me by accident.”

“I can’t go outside at—” she began, then frowned, remembering his body flashing in unspeakable brilliance. “Uh…can I?”

He lifted a brow and gestured toward the sunbeam. “Go see for yourself.”

Shannon saw the sunbeam and her lip curled. “I think I’ll give it a day or two.”

“Chicken?”

Shannon narrowed her eyes and slowly sat up. “How the hell do you know what ‘chicken’ means?”

He grinned mischievously, easing the lines of pain in his face. Wiping tears away, he said, “One of my fellow captives, many years ago. A young faun. She was constantly daring me to do stuff that would get me in trouble, because it helped us both endure. They forgot they were bleeding her one night, a few years ago, and by the time they came back, she was dead. But up until then, we helped each other do stupid things so we could laugh about it after.”

“Oh,” Shannon whispered. “Sorry.” Now that she was getting a good look at him, she saw a glowing spiderweb of gold laced throughout his body, and that strong golden glow emanating from him she had seen before wasn’t just the sunbeam. His whole body seemed to be radiating an inner light.

He shrugged, the golden spiderwebs in his arms moving with the gesture. “Not your fault. Chicken.”

But Sannon wasn’t paying attention. She could see other, smaller spiderwebs of red, in the walls and floor. Mice, she realized, stunned. As an old house, it had always been plagued with mice.

“Odin’s hairy balls,” Shannon whispered, crawling over to a wall and cocking her head at the moving creature on the other side. “That’s a mouse!” She pointed, shocked, jabbing her finger at the drywall.

Masaaki glanced at the spot on the wall where she was staring, then gave her a flat look. “Don’t change the subject. Chicken.”

“I can see the mice in the walls!” Shannon cried, looking around. No wonder her parents were always complaining about the mice. They were everywhere. Her father’s abrupt, out-of-the-blue assaults on the drywall with a hatchet, sledgehammer, or, one time, a pickaxe, suddenly started to make a bit more sense. “Oh wow.”

Not only that, but she felt great. Like that time she’d gone in to get her wisdom teeth removed and the dental surgeon had given her Vicodin to ease the pain afterwards, but better. Everything just felt…happier. And more alive. The whole world felt alive. It wasn’t just being able to see the worms in the dirt, in the basement below, or hear the mice rustling in the attic ceiling. The world practically vibrated.

“Whoa…” Shannon said, only now feeling the ecstasy really sinking in. She closed her eyes and just felt the singing in her veins, the hum of her muscles over her bones. Enveloped in the pulsation of the world around her, could actually hear Masaaki’s heart beating. A low, easy thrum that sounded like rhythmic liquid thunder in her ears. Shannon felt herself swooning, listening to it. “Dude,” she whispered after a moment, “you’re like some really potent drug or something, aren’t ya?”

She heard him make another manly grunt.

“Is your leg okay?” she asked, realizing she was hearing the hurt in his leg. His thigh sounded anxious, almost sped-up, nervous. Now that was a new experience for her… She frowned, trying to make sense of that.

“It’s almost healed already,” he muttered. “Don’t worry about it. It would heal faster if I went to the sunlight, but with a yatagarasu, we will regenerate just about everything if given light to do so. It’s how they got the shackles on me. They cut off my hands and feet and shoved the rings onto my arms, then let it heal.”

Immediately, Shannon’s eyes snapped open and she glanced at him. “They cut off your head?”

He grinned. “No. They used blood magic for that. Sealed it with their magi talents.”

Shannon frowned, remembering the huge tome entitled, On the Use of Blood. “Magic?”

He grunted again. “I’m not a blood magus, and those who birthed you are dead, so unless you enslave a vampire lord or someone else who brought the techniques across from the Third Lands, you will never learn.”

Shannon got up and started walking over to the coffee table and was halfway to the book before she realized she still hadn’t opened her eyes. She didn’t need to. She could hear the world around her.

“Wow,” she said again. Opening her eyes, she found the huge tome with her fingers, lifted it, and carried it over to the samurai, who was still draped against the non-pointy-end of his sword. “How about this?” she asked, setting the massive leather-bound book on the floor in front of him.

“What is that?”

“It says it’s on the use of blood.”

Masaaki cursed and shuddered, quickly looking aside. “If I were you, Shannon Meeks, I would burn that.”

“Why?” she demanded.

“It’s a slippery slope to walk,” he muttered. “Using another’s power as your own.”

She squinted at him, then at the book, then shrugged and took the book back to the coffee-table and dropped it there with a thud. “Okay. I’ve got this total hankering for coffee, and I’ve got this total death-wish and want to go outside and see just how crispy I get. I’m going upstairs getting a pair of my dad’s jeans and you will put them on. Just for a day. We’ll go to Wal-Mart and get you something else. Maybe drop by a kendo studio and see if we can get you a man-skirt. Okay?”

“I only understood about a quarter of what you just said.”

“Good,” Shannon said. “Then you won’t argue with me.” She went upstairs, hesitated outside her parents’ room, then, taking a deep breath, rushed inside. Keeping her eyes focused directly ahead of her on the wardrobe, she tried not to smell the cinnamon-and-cleaning-solvents as she yanked the closet open and started digging through her father’s clothes. It felt dirty, like she was a sicko just for doing it, and she decided that yes, their first stop in her parents’ fancy new Mercedes that they’d never allowed her to drive would be a Wal-Mart. She would make him change in the bathroom, by God, and they would leave the nasty, cinnamon-smelling black denim jeans and black silk shirt in the trash.

Then she saw some of the other things in her father’s closet, hanging in racks against the back. There was the glint of polished steel and leather…

Blindly grabbing a shirt and pants, feeling the beginnings of panic, Shannon stepped backwards and slammed the closet doors shut as hard as she could. The sound of shattering wood made her freeze, and shards of dark red cherrywood exploded outward, hitting her in the face and chest. Shannon stood there a moment, blinking at the splintered doors, looking approximately like someone had hit them with a battering ram, then turned and bolted from the room.

Masaaki was standing in the hall, just outside her parents’ door, a pale expression on his face as he looked into the room beyond. Stepping out into the hall with him, Shannon quickly pulled the door shut behind her. “Here,” she said, stuffing the clothes into the once-again-naked-man’s arms. “Put them on.”

He took them with one arm, his other hand grasping his three swords. Looking down, he grimaced. “I’d rather wear the towel.”

Shannon laughed. “You can’t wear a towel in public.”

“Why not?” he demanded, dropping the garments at his feet. “I’m not wearing those.” He nudged them away from him with a toe.

“You have to wear those so I can get you something else to wear,” Shannon growled, bending to pick them up.

With the ease of a martial-artist whose limbs seemed to function completely independently of his body, he picked the cloth up with his foot and kicked it down the hall, well out of her reach. “I’m not wearing them. Just seeing them disgusts me.”

And that, she realized, was that. How, exactly, was she supposed to make this sword-wielding samurai do anything? “Uh, please?” she said.

“No.”

“Look,” Shannon gritted, “you can’t go out in public wearing a towel. They’ll crucify you.”

The samurai narrowed his eyes. “Let them try.”

Shannon slapped her face into her palm, then peered up at him through the fingers. He continued to stand there, all brutish muscle and samurai arrogance, daring her to tell him he couldn’t stop the Wal-Mart security team from nailing him to a cross and dropping it in a hole in the ground. She groaned, deeply. “Okay. They wouldn’t really crucify you. That’s a figure of speech. They’d just tell you to leave.”

He frowned. “Are they daimyō?”

“Uh…” Shannon considered. “Yes. Yes, they are. With magic thundersticks. And tasers.”

He grunted, then glanced at the wad of black silk and sniffed. “I don’t want to wear those. Find me something else.”

They decided on a brown polar fleece blanket that had been thrown over the couch, folded over him with a head-hole cut out in the middle, then belted around his waist with a nylon rope from her parents’ copious stash. To which he had attached his swords. All of them. Finishing up the ensemble, she had forced him into a pair of her father’s blazing-white tennis shoes.

“That looks so ghetto,” Shannon said, grimacing. “Like Waldo the Wandering Monk or something.”

He glanced down at himself. “I can still wear the towel.”

“No, ‘Wandering Monk’ is better than ‘Deranged Streaker.’ We’ll just tell them you’re in a play for special people.”

“A what?”

She waved him off. “Let’s go get coffee. I’m dying for coffee.” And, honestly, to test-drive her parents’ Mercedes. Though she loved her eccentric little Dodge Dart, she had always itched to drive the Mercedes. ‘Starving-college-student’ had gotten really old.

At the front door, however, she hesitated, glancing down at the single ray of sunshine coming through the window, bouncing off of her hiking boots. “You sure about this?” she asked softly.

“I’m sure, daimyō.”

Taking a deep breath, Shannon pushed the door open and stepped outside.