Erin was waiting—but perhaps not idlily. There she sat at a park bench in the midday summer sun, waiting for a boy who’s a friend. She has a blade in her hand, something like a dagger, and she whispers below her breath: “Oh, I’ve got all my fingers…” as the blade goes stab, stab, between them, in rhythm to, “I’ve got every one.”
With expert dexterity, she chops the space between her delicate hands with that oversized dagger. She’s never missed, because this is what usually happens when she’s bored, and Erin was a young woman who was often bored.
Waiting.
She sighed. She looked up at the position of the sun. It’d been a full hour, she guessed. She took out her flip phone—that didn’t even have a brand on it—and checked the time. It had been an hour. She dialed in the numbers she knew by heart, her friend who should be here.
The phone responded by beeping in her ear. His phone was off or out of service, and neither should be true.
Erin looked around for anyone nearby. The knife in her hand dematerialized with a soft glow because that’s what she wished for it to do. It would appear in her hand the next time she wanted it to, and just as easily.
Erin—a girl with short black hair in a bob, sun kissed skin, and one hundred freckles on her face—got up and started walking to his house. Avery.
Avery was a boy who’s a friend, Erin would say to her peers and adults. Between them, he was a boyfriend.
Of course, they weren’t really fooling anyone. Anyone could connect the dots on their relationship—it wasn’t hard to see that they had a stronger bond than “friends.” They had since they met each other in the third grade, and now they were in the summer of their senior year, both eighteen years old.
They always met at this park to talk and figure out what to do for that day in the summers. Factors like ‘who’s parents are gone for how long,’ and ‘if either of them were hungry,’ or ‘did you have a plan in mind?’ These sorts of things dictated the direction for each day of their summer break together.
Erin noted the unusualness of his absence as she passed the familiar streets of her hometown. Thankfully, she thought, it’s not a far walk. A few blocks away, actually, and she was almost there.
With an empty head thinking of nothing she walked into his house. When you’ve been coming over for as long as she has, you don’t knock, you let yourself in.
All the lights were off, she noted. She called out his name, “Avery!” as she walked down the hallway to his room.
A teenage boys room—Avery’s room—seems clean compared to how it usually was when she snuck in at night. His shoes, a pair of red converse, were missing.
Maybe he had left, Erin thought.
But where’d he go if not to meet her at the park?
The room was clean and his parents were gone. He intended to have her come over today, that’s the only time the room was clean—so Erin deduced.
Erin looked around the room for his phone, even messing up his bed to check under the covers. It wasn’t here.
She went over it in her head: his phone is with him, but it’s off. He put on his shoes, but he’s not here or at the park. He wanted her to come over, because he cleaned his room.
She wandered around the house and took out her phone, flipping it open, calling him again, only to be greeted by the same beeping of a disconnection. She expected as much. Looking around the house, she searched for clues.
If you’d have asked her, she was looking for something out of the usual.
She nearly ran into it.
“Eek!” Erin screamed.
Out of a sense of fear, the blade materialized in her hand.
“A wild warrior girl appears…” A soft, sensuous voice said above a whisper. “Very interesting family…”
“Are you…” The ‘warrior girl’ gulped, saying, “Are you having an affair with my boyfriend?!”
The women who spoke was in the nude, or near enough to not matter. Erin stuck out her silver dagger in front of her, gripped in both of her shaky hands like a kendo practitioner.
“Not quite, little warrior.” The woman sighed. “Wait, cheating? On that shrimp?”
Erin swung her dagger by the flat of the blade at the woman, but was easily thwarted by the woman who caught the tip of the blade in between her middle and index finger like they were a pair of chopsticks.
“Don’t call him a shrimp…”
“When you swing at a God, you get hit back ten fold. Karma.”
Erin went flying backward into the wall of the kitchen, her vision blurring, she spoke the only words she could.
“A… God?”
“The first coming of Yumiko, The Third Enlightened. It’s your pleasure.”
Erin struggled to get back on her feet, tripping over herself on the way up, saying with a snarl, “What did you do to Avery?”
“What you fell into, little girl,” the woman named Yumiko puffed out her chest, accenting her voluptuous body.
“...”
Erin looked at her hands, to see blood all over them and her clothes. She looked down, to see she was standing in a puddle of crimson, oxygenated blood.
“...Ah. You killed him.”
Why are gods so violent? She thought. Always, always with the blood.
Teenagers always did scare the shit out of me, thought God Yumiko, trembling at the defiance she felt from this girl as she raised her weapon again, taking a stance with her fist stuck out in front of her and her weapon above her head, posed to strike…
“Hahaha! I’ll let you go this time, warrior girl. You’ll be happy to know he escaped. But my contemporaries might not be so peaceful as me, I mean, we’re cut from the same cloth… love and lust. But their gods of war.”
Yumiko raised her hands above her head, bent down at the knees, and jumped.
Crashing right through the roof.
Erin, not the kind of person to be phased by such a thing, went into the next room over, the bathroom, and washed the blood off her hands. She took off her clothes and hobbled back to Avery’s room for some of his oversized-for-her clothes.
This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.
That was the beginning of her day.
She went outside and headed on her way home, when a van approached her at a rapid pace. “For the love of God…” Erin said, watching it swerve over the curb and inches away from her. She jumped, throwing her body to the ground.
“Get her!” Some men in masks yelled as they abducted her into the van and loudly slid the door closed to darkness.
“Uh, who are you people?”
“Don’t act like you don’t know who you are, Yumiko! This is the FBI!”
“Yeah!” Another man yelled into her ear.
“I think you got the wrong person,” she said as the van slid around the road at a dangerous pace. “Yumiko just hopped out of the roof. Literally.”
A sack bag was pulled over her head. “Yeah, right,” the driver said. You could practically hear him grin. They cuffed her left hand to something.
“Do I look Asian? Even a little bit Japanese?”
“...”
“Don’t try to get away so easily!” The second man yelled into her ear again.
The first man, the one right in front of her, pulled the mask off of her face and looked her right in the eyes, really contemplating.
“Oh, Shit!” He yelled, looking up to the driver. “We got the wrong person!”
“But what about her shoes tracking blood?!”
“I can explain that, just slow down already!”
The van came to a screeching halt, throwing everybody to the front.
- - - -
They were all standing around in a circle on the side of the street, the three FBI men all in identical poses, wearing identical suits, smoking cigarettes while they listened to Erin’s story.
“...And that’s what happened.”
“Erin, was it? Take my card,” the first man said. Seeming to be the leader of the group, he handed her a business card from his front jacket with a practiced grace. Erin looked at it, it read: Ray Raymond, with an email address and phone number attached. She flipped it over, only to see: Supernatural Sleuth in bold silver letters.
“That’s my personal contact info, please don’t hesitate to use it.”
“Supernatural sleuth?” Erin said, putting the card in her back pocket.
“It’s what I do on the side. Think of me as an unofficial professional of sorts.”
So an amtatur, Erin thought. Great. I just accepted the personal info of dumb, dumber, and dumbest. She chuckled, saying, “Thank you for everything, Ray.”
The sarcasm didn’t reach and FBI agent Ray Raymond replied, “You’re welcome. We’ve got a job to do however, and we’re short on time. Take care of yourself, things are only going to get messier from here.”
All three men simultaneously threw down their cigarettes, stomped them out, then loaded up into the van, leaving only the smell of burnt rubber as they drove off.
Erin shook her head in exasperation. By some coincidence they dropped her off at the corner of the street she lived on, so she started walking, contemplating the events that just unfolded, yet unable to reach a conclusion.
When her phone started vibrating. She took it out of her pocket and read the caller ID: it was Avery.
Erin answered the call but didn’t say anything.
“Are you there? Erin?”
“Are you double timing on me…”
“What? Come on, I just got stabbed!”
“Sounds like a love triangle gone awry…”
“No! And now is not the time—!”
“Where are you? Are you okay?”
“...Somehow, I’m alright for now. I’ll tell you what happened later, what’s important now is that I’m at the park. Bring your doll and come help me back to your house.”
“Are you staying the night?”
“Why not? Aren’t your parents on vacation in Yosemite right now? Or did I misunderstand the timeline…”
“No… The timeline? I just got to my house, so give me ten minutes and I’ll be there.” Erin flipped her phone close and opened the door to her house. It smelt like stir fry inside.
From the kitchen, an indistinct voice that you couldn’t tell was a man or woman said, “Welcome back.” A head poked around the wall that hid the kitchen. “What happened to you?”
“Just got knocked around a bit,” Erin said. “I need your help, your cooking can wait, Nina.”
The figure, Nina, came around the corner with arms akimbo. She went by being a girl, and looked to be about the age of thirteen, but you couldn’t pin her gender just by looking.
“What is it?”
“I’m not really too sure myself. I’ll explain what I know on the way to the park, let’s go already.”
Nina took off the apron she had on, revealing the clothes she had on… brown boots with black levi’s rolled up around them and a loose fitting grey graphic tee of a monster truck. Her face looked somewhat artificial, like she had done her makeup badly, or that there was something inhuman about how smooth and sleek it was.
“Why’s there blood on your shoes? Those aren’t the clothes you put on this morning.” Nina said.
Erin looked down at her own clothes. She was wearing Avery’s white v-neck shirt and light green shorts. The shirt was sheer enough that you could see her pink bra underneath, and sure enough there was blood on her orange Nike’s.
“We’ll walk and talk,” Erin turned 180 and walked back out the front door, with Nina following closely. “You’re a specialist, you were created to be. What do you think about self-proclaimed Gods?”
“Very dangerous, whether they are or aren’t actual ‘Gods,’” Doll Nina said in her ever-so-even, soft voice. “Did you run into one?”
“Yeah, I did. How does one become a God, anyway?”
“There are many different ways, was this a human?”
“Mhm—she looked human enough.”
“It’s nearly impossible for humans to reach godhood, and only one woman ever has in the past. I’d say it was a false prophet, a much more common occurrence.”
“Let’s say she actually was…” She certainly had the skills.
“The path to divinity is a long road for a human, was she three hundred years old? I was created as a sort of god, myself.”
“Why have you never told me that before?”
“You never asked about gods before.”
“...And how are you supposed to be a god?” Wasn’t she created to be my sister and protector?
“It has to do with what I’m made of. Every part of me has been ‘cursed.’ Cursed for certain properties, and when it runs through my core it does the opposite. Think of it as AC and DC power being converted.”
“You’ve told me that before,” and I still don’t understand the analogy. “Shouldn’t you be blessed, not cursed?”
“They’re two sides of the same coin. Like being a god and being mortal.”
They had reached the border of the park, Ume Park as it was officially named. They took their first step onto the manicured grass.
“Anyways, Avery got stabbed. But he says he’s okay, and you know how much of a sissy he is when it comes to getting hurt.”
“You shouldn’t stab your future husband, Erin.”
“It wasn’t me! And don’t call him my future husband…” Even if it’s true. “If I had enough reason to stab him, I wouldn’t stop there.”
“Are we hiding a body, then?”
“Jeez, stop with the teasing. This might be serious business, you hear?”
“I see him,” Nina said, changing direction to the bleachers. They continued their walk in silence.
“Yo,” Avery said, laying down on the top row of the metal bleachers, without looking up at them. “Can your doll heal me?”
“Depends if you start finally calling my sister by her name,” Erin said.
I reserve the right of names to humans and pets, and she’s neither, so thought Avery; but he said, “Nina, take a look at this wound… Please.”
Nina jumped from the grass to the top where Avery was like she weighed nothing at all, probably because she didn’t, sat down on his legs, pulled up his shirt.
She has no boundaries at all… Erin puffed out her cheeks and looked away from them.
Nina pulled off the bandage and saw it was already stitched closed, “This looks to be days old. Good stitch work, as well. What more can I do?”
“Do magic,” Avery moaned.
“It’s already stitched? Avery can’t dress a wound, that’s my job!” Erin yelled.
“Magic doesn’t exist. I could curse it for you with my blood,” Nina said. She put a spread hand over the wound and said a few words under her breath. “There, now you are blessed. Your luck has increased by fifty-one point three four percent.”
“Until when? And how do you define luck?” Avery asked.
“Until the wound is completely closed, and I don’t make the rules,” Nina said. “Try to get lucky tonight and see if it works.”
“Nina! Inappropriate!” Erin yelled.
“Alright, get off me already then.”
So Nina sat up and jumped back down.
“Tell us what happened already….” Erin said
- - - -