CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
“So does that arm have superhuman strength?” Yamamoto asked, fascinated.
“Not so far,” she said, smiling. “But I’m still very clumsy with it. They tell me it will eventually operate like a normal arm, but in stressful situations the adrenaline pumping through it could make it potentially much stronger than usual. I’m sure I’ll discover unexpected tweaks as we go along, though – it’s new technology, so I’m a kind of experiment.”
“Doesn’t that bother you?” he asked.
“In some ways, not at all; being half-Fae means I remember a lot about most of my past lives. That gives me a pretty long-view perspective, so I’m not overly attached to the particular collection of cells I’m currently inhabiting.”
She paused, losing most of her smile. “But in other ways, yes, it bothers me a lot. Being mixed human and Fae was difficult enough in its own way, but I could at least feel whole in being a native of Gaia.” She flexed her new arm. “Now there’s part of me that’s alien; I’m not sure how to reconcile that, as someone who has always been so much a part of nature. And I have no idea how it will impact my lifestyle in the long run, either. How will this affect my shapeshifting? Will my owl be able to fly straight? Will I even be able to shift the artificial parts at all, or will they hold me back from being able to take my animal forms? Things like that.”
Yamamoto did not know what to say; he squeezed her hand a little. “I know you need the wild; I hope your shapes can adapt, or the new arm can adapt somehow.”
“Me too,” she said quietly.
Someone from the physical therapy department came the next moment to get Yamamoto for his daily torture session, so Thalia kissed his cheek and departed, leaving the afterimage of her smile to get him through the next hour.
***
The next afternoon, Thalia was discharged by the hospital, although she made it clear that she was of course not going anywhere until Tetsuya was also discharged.
“You’re restless,” he argued once they’d been left momentarily alone. He knew she needed to go outside and feel the wind in her hair, stand among the trees, and soar under the moon with Alecto again, hunting in the wild. He was very irritable, also, from his own enforced inactivity and the slowness of the healing process. “I spend most of my time half-conscious anyway, and I don’t intend to start a life together having you play martyr by my hospital bed. Go outside, at least find a tree, for fuck’s sake, and don’t come back until it’s dark.”
Thalia had been prepared to do battle, standing her ground, but it occurred to her that he was right. Her shoulders sagged, her arguments deflated.
“You’re right,” she admitted, then bent down and kissed him. “Thank you. I’ll still have my phone with me if you need me,” she said. “Otherwise, I will be back by dark.”
“After dark,” he said firmly. “If I let you say ‘by’ dark, you’ll be back in here somewhere around sunset in an hour and a half. You need more time than that.”
“Now you’re just trying to get rid of me,” she said. “You should wait for that shit until you’ve taken out a nice fat life insurance policy on me.”
“Tch, what a mouth you have, woman,” he complained, smiling up at her despite his tetchiness.
“Yes, indeed,” she agreed, then looked at him lasciviously. “And it still has many surprises in store for you, trust me.”
Kirito and Kato came into the room a moment later, catching them in a rather impassioned kiss.
“This is just – can’t you get a room?” Kirito demanded, then looked around. “Oh. Never mind.” He shrugged and sat down, ignoring the blushes.
“Tetsu just kicked me out, actually,” Thalia said, clearing her throat and gathering her things. “So it’s up to you guys to keep him company.” They might have been concerned had the affection not been so obviously undamaged between them, despite Tetsuya’s snarling mood.
“I’m not handicapped, damn it, I can be left alone for two minutes occasionally,” he said irritably.
“Technically, you are handicapped, since you don’t have full use of all your faculties at the moment,” Kato pointed out. “But we can come back later, of course.” He grabbed Kirito and pulled him half-protesting out of the chair he had just commandeered.
Out in the hall, Kato asked Thalia, “You’ve been discharged?”
“Yes, just a little while ago, actually.”
“Where are you going, if you don’t mind me asking?” he asked.
“I would really like to go and stretch my wings,” Thalia said. Kirito did not yet know about her shapeshifting, but this was a common enough euphemism that it would pass unnoticed.
“Uh – you sure you’re up to it?” Kato said, obviously uncomfortable.
“Tetsu was right, I’m getting stir-crazy. I need to get outside,” she said, nodding her head emphatically.
“Wait a minute – there’s something you should know first, now that you’re well enough and going out there alone,” Kato said.
She looked up at him, concerned. “What is it?” she asked. “Is Yamamoto all right?”
“Yes, he’s well on the road to recovery, they tell us,” Kato confirmed. “It’s just this: Kirito and company have been helping us keep an eye on you all because we think there’s still potential danger to your lives. Sekiguchi and Wataru escaped, and might be anywhere by now. Seizo is worried about them wanting revenge, and that would be consistent with Hellfire Rising’s track record.”
Thalia nodded, not seeming surprised in the least. “I understand. Please don’t leave Tetsu alone, no matter how awful he gets,” she asked. “As for me, I can take care of myself now that I’ve recovered – and getting out at this point is probably a necessity for survival anyway. Kato-san, you understand.”
Kirito snorted. “Oh, and I wouldn’t understand, I suppose.”
Thalia gave him an unexpectedly thoughtful look. “Actually, I know you would.” But she didn’t stay for further conversation. She was out the door with a backward wave and smile in record time.
Kirito was staring after her thoughtfully. “Is it just me, or did she seem like she already knew about Sekiguchi?”
“I think she already knew,” Kato agreed. “There’s not much that gets past her; I expect she saw them getting away.”
“And here you are, uncharacteristically letting her go out alone despite a likely threat to her life, and further not like you, not worrying obsessively about it,” Kirito said, eyeing Kato speculatively. “What am I missing, I wonder?”
Kato looked uncomfortably at the ceiling and did not reply.
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“You’ve got someone following her, don’t you?” Kirito said triumphantly.
“It’s only Seizo, it’s not like she should mind,” Kato said guiltily.
“Why not just tell her, then?”
“For the same reason we came out here into the hall instead of sitting in there letting the Vice-Chief get more and more pissed off until he breaks something – most likely hurting himself again in the process.”
“Ah,” Kirito said, and nodded. The need for space and privacy was something easily understood. It was not always as easily respected.
Harada’s door opened from inside and he peeked out, wary of nurses. When he saw Kato, he hissed and glared balefully at him across the hallway. Kato ran over, protesting in a whisper.
“What are you doing, Hara-chan?" he hissed, using the nickname he rarely said in front of anyone in his agitation. "Get back to bed, you idiot! Do you know what your woman will do to me if you fall and break your dumb ass while she’s gone?”
“Probably about the same as what I’ll do to all of you if anything happens to her while she’s out alone,” he retorted. “What are you doing?” This to Kirito, who had slung Tetsuya’s arm across his shoulders and was maneuvering him back toward the bed.
“Trying to make sure you get back into some kind of condition to make good on your threats,” Kirito retorted.
“She’s not alone, Tetsuya, what do you take me for?” Kato said, irritated. “Seizo’s following her.”
Harada was visibly relieved by this. “Seizo. Perfect,” he said, closing his eyes and leaning back into his pillows. “Thanks, Kato-san,” he added, opening his eyes again and smiling a little sheepishly.
“Go to sleep, dumbass,” Kato said gruffly.
***
Thalia bolted for the nearest outdoor reasonably private space she could think of as soon as she got out of the hospital. She was not only eager to be outdoors, but she was almost as eager to prove her own fears groundless about her enhanced limb’s effect on her shapeshifting capabilities.
She knew no fact that would indicate the limb would interfere, but she also knew no fact that would indicate otherwise; there was simply no information. The only thing she had to go on was intuition, and hers had been telling her that something was fundamentally different in her since the operation.
Seizo found it ridiculous that he had to follow her rather than simply accompany her, but he knew it was important to let her have at least the illusion of some privacy.
She ended up going back to Headquarters, where she took one of the carriages. Seizo, cursing, took another and followed her into the mountains; he dropped further and further behind in the effort not to be obvious, until finally he was afraid she had lost him. As it turned out, however, it was just that she had turned off the road unexpectedly and parked in deep shadow under a low-hanging willow.
Seizo parked somewhere nearby, trying to be discreet without taking too long to catch up. It was not so hard to pick up her trail once she had left the carriage; Seizo’s tracking skills were not as good as Yamamoto’s, but they were more than adequate.
Perhaps thirty feet into the forest, her tracks changed; he had to look closely to be sure, but it was a horse he was following now. He was not experienced enough to be certain, but he was afraid it was a lame horse – something was wrong with one of the forelegs. After a few minutes of this, the tracks got messy, then became human again; she was running now.
Seizo had an increasingly ominous foreboding about all this, and went as fast as he could track her.
Several minutes later, he reached a clearing in the woods that became a wide meadow of sweet grass and wildflowers blanketing gentle hills. Not far from where he came out, there was an enormous red-brown owl on the ground; it was recognizable to him from the photos in her file as Thalia, even from the edge of the woods. She was flapping frantically with her right wing, but her left seemed broken, or weighed down. The owl hopped and strained, trying to get any kind of lift at all, but that wing seemed nailed to the ground.
Seizo had never witnessed her other forms up close before, and something in him was awed by the beauty and mystery of it even as another part of him was filled with pity for the grounded wild creature. He remained at the edge of the woods, observing, unsure of his welcome though he would have liked to try to help her, or at least comfort her.
After a few minutes of wrenching struggle, she gave up. She transformed back to her humanoid form, but left several long red feathers in her hair, too distraught to be tidy about the details. She sat naked in the meadow and wept as if her heart would break.
She did not know how she was going to retain her sanity without being able to hunt in the moonlight, soaring and swooping for the sheer joy of the wind and the night sky; without being free to hunt the depths of the ocean for fish, circling with the currents, then against them, startling a school of silver sparkling mackerel, then reaching the surface and sunning herself on a reef; without the option to gallop over hills, across meadows, feeling the thrumming beat of the earth’s pulse echoed in her hooves, its strength coursing through her blood, the smells of every herb and tree and flower in the wild coming distinct and sharply beautiful to her distended, sensitive nostrils.
Thalia was now trapped inside this one constrictive form, and she mourned it bitterly.
Yet all this emotion was not just because she had lost her ability to shapeshift effectively, as she had feared. A lot of suppressed feelings remained from the recent trauma they had all been through; even though the outcome had made her happier than she'd been in several lifetimes, and Tetsuya too was joyful for the first time in centuries, the results did not fully erase the effect of all the anxiety and pain they’d been through to get there. The hospital was itself a form of trauma for her, an alien environment with almost nothing natural in it to soothe her Faerie soul.
In addition to all that, which her friends would have understood readily enough, there was a terrible secret.
Since her confrontation with Sekiguchi Teiji, Thalia had become aware that Tetsuya and Seizo were not the only ones in Edo, in this dimension, with whom she shared a significant past. She knew Teiji also, had known him very well indeed during more than one of her lifetimes; but never had she imagined, even in nightmares, that he could become the villain he was here and now.
Tetsuya and Seizo were both deeply wounded souls, it was true; but they were healing. They were better now than when she had seen them last. It was the opposite with Sekiguchi; he had somehow become a monster almost past recognizing.
She sat there in the meadow remembering one of the lifetimes she had shared with Teiji, during the decline of the Roman Empire. He had been a high-ranking member of a tribe in Germania; she was dragged to the region by the Roman legions as part of the Diaspora of Gaul, following the massacre of her tribe and the burning of her village.
Sekiguchi’s tribe had sent him to engage the Romans in diplomatic talks, though most of Germania had no interest in compromise with Rome. While he was there, he had seen her bitterness and misery, her rage toward the Romans, and took pity on her. He began to talk with her, asking why she was so angry, what had happened to her; when she finally trusted him enough to tell him, he had listened quietly and then reacted with deadly, silent retribution that same night against the Romans.
He killed those enslaving her and brought her to his home instead – and when his tribe disowned him for his actions, he simply took her with him and adopted a nomadic lifestyle, always keeping a few steps ahead of Rome. He was a natural leader, and gradually attracted other outcasts from nearby tribes whom he trained to become skilled vigilantes.
Despite the fact that he made an instant, furious enemy of Rome, and then lost his home and family, he’d had no qualms about creating a diplomatic disaster to rescue her from her oppressors and bring her with him to freedom.
He taught her skill with a few kinds of blade, she remembered; he gave her ways to fight back as brutally as she had only dreamed of doing before. His training sessions were harsh, and she often sustained injuries that made it difficult to walk or function for a day or so afterward, but she improved quickly.
Once she was ready, he brought her with his group of raiders when they went out to pillage from the Roman outliers. She had zeal for blood, and enough hatred of Rome to fuel her for many years.
Thalia would always be grateful to him, although she had not done well in her soul’s journey that lifetime, regressing in many ways to her take-no-prisoners Fury behavior from her first lifetime. Yet she was also a loyal friend, then a loving wife, mother, daughter, and sister to the family she eventually shared with the one who was here and now called Sekiguchi Teiji, head of Hellfire Rising.
It was the last time she had shared a harmonious life with him; since then, they had been at odds whenever their paths crossed, and the bitterest estrangements occurred when she was with Tetsuya.
Tetsuya had not shared the Germania lifetime with her, and she had been fully human, therefore not retaining any clear memories of him. Yet even when she did not consciously remember her twin flame, she invariably spent that lifetime aching and searching for him on some level. Despite this, she occasionally managed to achieve a kind of contentment in a marriage with someone else.
That had been Sekiguchi at least once. She had known him as a lover many times, once as his aunt, a few times a sister. It seemed significant, however, that she knew she hadn’t progressed well in her soul’s journey during any of the lifetimes she remembered sharing happily with him.
He had never been good for her, in other words; nor was she good for him. This was even truer when they were in harmony than when they were enemies, as they were here and now.
She wondered if he remembered her, and was certain that some visceral, unarticulated instinct in him did know her. He had tried to kill her onboard his ship that day because he recognized her, not only because her words struck him too close to home. She had always aroused passion in him, though she did not intend it. It seemed this lifetime would be no different in that respect.