Hector woke to hands shaking him awake. He sat up as the nurse who had performed the checkup on his father earlier leaned over him. She jerked back as he began to move. “You were out cold!”
“Sorry,” Hector said. “I haven’t been sleeping very good lately.”
The nurse nodded. “Easy to understand, with your father’s state. Or is it… dream stuff?”
“Both. Plus a situation with my wife. There’s a lot going on.”
At that moment, Terry revealed that he was awake as well. “Wife? What about her?”
“I’ll leave you two alone now,” the nurse muttered on her way out.
Hector turned his attention to his father. “Jen surprised me and moved back in. I asked her to leave, but she doesn’t want to and I legally can’t make her.”
“So she’s Jen again.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Ever since she left you’ve used Jennifer. Very formal. Three syllables. Now it’s Jen.”
“I am not getting back together with her, dad. She’s dreaming a wolf kin woman and brought three rescue dogs home. I’m not sure how that kin thing works, but it sounds like she might start growing fur at some point.”
Terry nodded. “She might. Fur, claws, snout, any of it is possible. Depends how far they want to push it. Be careful, son. She could turn into a beast.”
“And I could turn into an all-powerful Xian.” Hector didn’t think he’d made any noticeable change to his soul after a single mental cultivation session, but his first effort had caused the same side effect as when Volithur did it. He had cultivated in the real world.
“It’s all possible, Hector. Look.” Terry’s fingers brushed the bouquet of decaying flowers on the hospital table pushed up next to him. They had been freshly cut flowers before Hector went unconscious. “Bring fruits, nuts, and seeds tomorrow. Stuff that can grow.”
Hector quickly agreed to pick some things up while he did some mental calculations. He had only been out for around an hour. Though he felt tired, it wasn’t the overwhelming exhaustion that afflicted Volithur after mental cultivation. Did that mean Hector had better mental recovery speed? Or had he simply not done as much work to exhaust himself as Volithur did in his sessions?
Memories of the conditioning session that had wrecked Volithur surfaced. Hector could not only have kept up with a similar workout, he would have been ready to go again the next morning. His heart fluttered. Was he possibly better suited to train in cultivation than the boy whose life he lived out through his dreams? He might be fifty-two years old, but fitness had been a lifelong passion. And if reading for extended periods of time drained his mental energy as much as it did Volithur’s, he would be completely unable to manage the demands of his job.
“You know,” his dad said, “I’m already deviating from the Alfar ways by taking life energy like this. It’s supposed to be a giving and a taking, an equal exchange where all parties benefit. I’m just taking. That’s the path of the Ogre.”
Hector’s thoughts went to the Shrek movies. “Ogres are a real thing?”
“If we’re believing our dreams are factual, which I guess we are, then Ogres are a very real thing. They run around like brutes, devouring life energy to sate their never-ending hunger. They grow big and strong and heal anything less than a decapitation in a couple of hours. But I can’t exactly spend a couple of years communing with nature, now can I?”
“I wouldn’t stress about killing a few plants, dad. The logging industry has you beat by a long shot. So fruits and seeds for tomorrow?” Hector found a smile on his face as the realization that his father intended to fight the cancer settled in. Maybe it wouldn’t work, but there was at least hope. They weren’t just waiting for him to expire.
“Seeds for planting. Nothing that has been roasted or baked.” Terry turned his eyes to the dead flowers. “And don’t get involved with your wolf kin wife. The kin leave their humanity behind to become animals.”
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“Technically, I think Jen is going to be a dog kin. It doesn’t matter, though. I’m not getting back together with her as a human or as some kind of weird mutant.”
“Just don’t get sucked back in.”
“I won’t,” Hector promised. “Sweet dreams.”
The drive home did not last long enough. With a sense of dread, Hector entered through the front door of his house. The dogs rushed him, demanding pets and scratches. When he had satisfied them enough, he made his way to the kitchen, where Jen stood over the sink scrubbing a skillet caked with burnt food remnants. Plastic containers sat in a row, steam rising from a base of noodles with a pile of meat on top. A room temperature jar of spaghetti sauce sat off to the side, still unopened.
“Couldn’t open the jar?”
“It tastes the same when you add it at the end anyway,” Jennifer said.
“If I were to itemize all the things you did wrong, I would start by noting that you didn’t put the onions I specifically bought for this purpose in with the ground beef. Then I would observe that you let the meat burn. And I would definitely dispute your claim that the order the sauce is added doesn’t matter. Of course, all of this could have been avoided if you hadn’t done what I asked you not to.”
“Well, if you cared that much, you should have hidden the beef better. I just saved you an hour of work. Two hours, counting the laundry.”
Hector popped the lid off of the spaghetti sauce and dumped it into the containers. “The only credit I am willing to give you is for going against my explicitly stated wishes.”
“Technically, that would be a debit.”
“Oh, look at you, finally using your accounting degree,” he sniped.
“Did I tell you that I applied for a receptionist job at a vet’s office?”
“That sounds like a job that doesn’t pay well,” Hector said. “I see why you decided to freeload off of me. Free housing and free food, right?”
Jennifer spun around, flinging water from the sponge in her hand with the motion. “When have I ever cared about money, Hector? Did I ask for handouts even once when we were separated?”
“We’re still separated, Jen.”
“I never asked for money. I didn’t file for divorce to take half. I didn’t want alimony to keep up my lifestyle. I’m comfortable living within my means.”
“Yet you are here instead of your apartment.”
“I was kicked out the first day I had the dogs. There’s a strict no pet policy.”
“Sounds like a great life decision.”
“You’re the one who is all about money. Our marriage fell apart because I wanted your time and you never thought spending time with me was a good investment. Eighty hours a week for your bosses, no problem. An hour a day at the gym, easy. But one evening a week for just the two of us was ‘unrealistic’.”
“If you’re not after my money and you don’t like how I treated you, why are you back?”
Jennifer lifted her chin defiantly. “Because I never fought for our relationship. I made hints and you ignored them. I begged and you waved me off. I tried reasoning with you and you talked circles around me. A dramatic walkout obviously didn’t work either, because you never asked me to come back.”
“I shouldn’t have had to! We swore oaths to each other! Oaths that you broke!”
“You weren’t living up to your oaths for years before I left, Hector. We lived in the same house, saw each other in passing, and had sex on Sundays because that fit your schedule.”
“I’m so terrible, yet you’re still here in my house.”
Jennifer snorted. “I’m the hypocrite here?”
“You most certainly are.”
“If the two of us are so over, why haven’t you moved on, Hector? Where’s my replacement?” Jennifer looked about the room in confusion. “She must be real good at hiding because I have been here a full day already and not seen her once.”
“After the way things went down with us, why would I want to open myself up to anyone?”
“Because that’s what humans do when they’re lonely. Or at least normal humans. Who knows with Jinn types like you.”
Hector slammed his fist down onto the table, causing a plastic bin of spaghetti to topple onto the floor. Dogs swarmed past his legs to get at the mess. “Stop calling me a Jinn,” he grumbled.
“You’re telling me you’re not a –”
“I’m a Xian.” Hector drew himself up to his full height. “I’m not talking about the guy in my dreams, either. Hector Thoreaux is cultivating cosmic energy. I am going to wring every bit of knowledge from my dreams to become a cultivator.”
Jennifer stared at him a moment, frozen in shock. Finally, she turned her attention to the dogs. “I don’t think dogs are supposed to eat spaghetti sauce.”
“Well, it’s too late now. I’ll be cultivating in my room.”