Evanescence-15

Chapter 15

*Alecia…

I leave the hospital a bit reluctantly at first heading out into the morning sunshine and not bursting into flames was…its bad fiction really, it is the re-souled vampire or Vampyre I guess according to THE GODDESS seeing the sun for the first time in so long.

I really don’t want to burst people’s bubbles but tons of vamps have seen the sunshine, most of us have and do all the time it’s just that we can’t have the sunshine actually touch us.

There are things that I do notice or know. It’s brighter than I remember or because of my senses. There’s way more people out and about than I’m used to unless it’s in a crowded place like a mall or a theater ect. I’m weaker, way weaker than I was and I’m not sure if that because I’m in daylight or because I’m sort of alive now.

I’ve got a pulse so that means alive right?

I dial up Onstar and find out where my car is and take a cab to the impound yard. It’s pretty dinged up from Shay and it’ll need a bunch of body work but it’ll drive. Shaun’s car on the other hand…it’s there with a whole bunch of other vehicles and it’s a total right off. I pay the impound fees and drive it under its protests off the lot. I take it right to my mechanics place actually and leave it with him and he rents me one of his spares that he has there.

I drive around town for a little bit getting gas, and a coffee and a box of doughnuts at Dunkin doughnuts…it’s so nice, more than you know nice not to have to have blood in or with everything I eat. I eat four jelly filled and have a large coffee and other than the enjoyment of it I’m still not human. No lift from the coffee and no sugar rush from the doughnuts.

I’m used to that so it’s not too big a let down but I’m finding that I need my sunglasses and end up buying a pair with mine being in the car back at the garage. The sunlight’s starting to give me a headache or rather that there’s so much glare off of everything during the day.

I stop off at my house take a shower and get changed and catch myself falling into my pattern of dodging around the light through the windows in the house. My cats want seen to as soon as I’m through the door and regardless of being a vampire or whatever I am now they ran right up to me yowling at me and demanding their food. I love my furkids for that. I treat them to some tuna and the water off the tuna mixed into their dry food and I ate half the can myself not having to eat it with blood on it. It tasted totally different than anything that I’ve had. Not great actually but so not like what I’ve had, There used to be this place in Osaka that served Hamachi in it’s own blood with a touch of sweet Meyer lemon juice hinted into it and a touch of mirin and Saki…that was the best Tuna that I had ever had and that was back in 1922…unfortunately that was in my darker days and I ate the chef and his family too after that.

I head out after taking out the garbage and changing the litter boxes and a few other sundry things and head over to Donna’s house. I’m leery about the whole invited in thing but as Donna gave me her house keys.

Raine…wow girl. I can feel her wards around her place and the neighborhood a mortal wouldn’t recognize them and there’s so many that the place shines a bit and will definitely be felt by something of the paranatural sort or…I see a car with government plates driving around and one fellow in looking at some kind of I-pad or something. I start for her trailer and as soon as I get there I’m out of her place and taking out the ward symbols with a bleeding finger, no power in the blood but just to wreck the sigil. I take down the spell-bags and fetishes and stuff and break them and tear them apart and toss them into the trash…I’m at the curb and yeah they’re at the end of the street checking out one of her charms that’s there in the tree.

I know she did a lot of this to protect herself and her mom and Shaun from me but an active charm or ward like these are able to be felt pretty easily. These Men in Black guys seem to be able to track majik or at least active majik and from watching him typing things into the I-pad like device he might be cataloging it or try to see what it is or what it does.

They pull up this street and I moved back inside the trailer and they slow but don’t really look here still focused on the thingy. I breathe a sigh of relief and wait, I wait and watch and don’t really do much until they’re out of the neighborhood. I’m not used to that, but the whole thing’s set me on edge. I leave my car there and take Donna’s truck and clothes for her and for Raine and drive back to the hospital. I’m being paranoid now and it’s a good thing too. I’m no expert but with the life I’ve lead I’ve picked up a tail in an unmarked car but they look like official looking guys trying to look un-official. I don’t actually do anything but actually let them follow me all the way to the hospital and I head inside to go find Donna and Raine.

I get in the elevator and pull on my mana…oh…bonus. And I move vampyre fast up through the top hatch and jump over to the elevator going down and feel just one person in there. I drop down and startle the nurse and I lock eyes with her. “I was always here, that was just a bump that startled you, you should call maintenance…” she gets that hypnosis daze when she’s been tranced and then say’s cloudy like. “Yes…I should call them…” then she clears up and frowns. “Did you hear that? I really didn’t like the sound of that. I’m going to give the repairs guys a call. Someone might get hurt.” I mirror her as she walks out keeping myself between me and them and seeing them talking to that sister of Shaun’s before they see me I make a quick slip into the stairwell and head up to find my friends….Holy…when did I start having friends?

*Raine….

As tired and sore and drained as I am it’s so nice to just lay there in the hospital bed with Shaun. As beat up as he is and hurt as he is he still wraps those strong arms around me and holds me and we take a few minutes to just lie there together and just Be, just Breathe.

We fell asleep for awhile together and my dreams are chaotic, mixtures of the other versions of myself and they’re all stirred up. I dream of Spain and the deep south and Vietnam but of ancient Norse villages and Viking boats and Greco-roman styled homes but up in a mountain valley mostly made of stacked stone and grasses and mosses in between covered in stucco like plaster and made to look rustic but still cultured and fancy. I remember being scared from spears and swords but also at the same time being Nordic blonde and stacked and having a wife…being a lesbian but one in a community of them…I remember ambushing and killing men, not soldiers of the Roman Empire but merchants and robbing them and taking their young men and boys. Using them for sex until those that wanted children had gotten with child and either killing them after that or gelding them and keeping them as slaves or selling them as such. I remember bearing a baby boy and having him taken and drowned and I/Me then was good with that.

That wakes me up. I get off of Shaun and into the bathroom and I’m violently sick over that, those feeling of the Nordic me. That last community of what was supposed to be the great Amazon nation. Artemis’s priestesses ruled there for the most part and there were a lot of us there who didn’t just love women and were part of that but we…we were not good people. We were with OUR people but we…I…we did horrible things.

I feel the images so strongly and for as few long minutes I’m fighting through the hate and revulsion that she, us, I feel at being with Shaun and being a girl that has the parts of a man.

SHE’S there with me and rubbing my back and holding my hair out of the toilet bowl as I ride through the memories and thoughts and feelings of that Nordic witch that I once was. She had power, and she/Me is so strong as she surfaces inside of me with a vengeance trying to be the one in control, trying to do things right or right according to her and I’m assaulted with the memories and the horrible things that she’s gone through. Raped at the age of nine by her kinsmen, beaten and tortured and left for dead for being a witch and cast out from her village and all those nearby. Taken in by raiders and used as their whore until she was with them when they went to a witch in the Black Forest for healing. Getting taken in there as an apprentice…air sympathy, storm majiks, strict lessons and punishments because it was a hard land. She’s so strong, but she had turned into a killer, a die-hard man hater and she still is.

The other versions of myself tow the line though. Me, us, them none of us are good with her being a murderer of people, a rapist of young boys and a baby killer. Joanna and heaven have suffered as a slave and a hooker under a lot of men and they help me/us face her and Joanna me, pull her into her and us and we three but me as the Nordic her relives Jo’s life as a black slave and being raped and being a slave and the pain and the depths of the degradation that you really go through that most people could never fathom.

It almost literally drives me/her insane and we’re pulling together into her and me and she/me gets to feel the horrors and hardships that are all of my lives. Including the current me and the pain that most genetic women will just never get at not being the woman that we transgendered people really are. ..It‘s the last push in all of it really and she loses it as we shatter under the strain of it all.

So how would a man hating, raping, male child killing feminazi take being trapped as a male when you/she/I know that I’m a woman, that I’ve always meant to be a woman and then seeing her and what she and the others in her village had been, and looked like in HER eyes. Feeling the sadness and the raw pain of HER as a MOTHER seeing HER daughters killing Their babies because they’re boys. How SHE as the GODDESS was also a Mother and that Mothers love their sons….she/we/I feel the depths of HER loss and HER shame of what we/they had become then.

And seeing because of them and their militant hateful leadership the Utopian Amazon society died within a single generation. They were like the hippies compared to the greedy consumer paranoid culture of today. Men should have been just as respected; it wasn’t about any femdom bullshit but about equal rights for one of the first times and a chance at something better. And it wasn’t war that killed them off, not really. It was the extremists that came after the founders. They drew the eyes of the world on them and the powers that be in those days, The Roman Empire, the Fledgling start of the church and all that followed just finished the blow generations later because of what they did and what they challenged the amazons died and they did their damndest to erase any trace of them and all of their blood from the world.

I cry, I cry so hard at the sheer waste of it all and all of the pain that I lived through and had inflicted was for what!? I cry but I laugh too as I realize that I’m the legend, the Evanescence the holiest concept of the Amazon nation and that in each of those lives I was that as well only I…Me…Raine’s the first one in so long so many ages even before she was born to achieve it, or to touch it…I was it all the time and I was just too full of my own hate and bullshit that I never seen it…There’s this grim Nordic Viking irony that has me laughing until it all starts to fade and I’m soaked in the shower stall of Shaun’s room and SHE’s with me.

SHE’s wet but clothed and looks like a goth chick if you could have a goth dressed RN. SHE looks at me and is kneeling looking worried a bit. “Rough one this time wasn’t it?”

I laugh but it’s sort of that strangled crazy Mel Gibson if he was a girl looney kind of laugh, Kramer from Seinfeld with boob’s crazy laugh as I nod. “Whoo, yeah this wasn’t a fun ride at all this time.”

“Sorry…”

“No you’re not.”

“Well kind of, but not a whole lot.”

“Oh, well fuck you very much then. You’re forgiven.” I grin at her; we’re developing this weird banter. Technically I’m only kinda sorta Wiccan, so SHE and I aren’t like boss and employee kind of thing but SHE’s part of what they did to make the thing back then that became me so…we’re close.

SHE smiles at me and dimples and sticks HER pierced tongue out at me and gives me the finger.

I laugh at HER. “Hey stop coming onto me, keep your tongue and finger to yourself I’ve got a Boyfriend.”

“Yeah he’s kinda worried about you right now and the only thing keeping his hurt ass in bed right now is Alecia.”

“You didn’t do something like stop time for this or anything?”

“Nope, the stuff in the ether is way too disturbed for me to be doing something like that.”

“Yeah I guess there’s been just a bit of power thrown around her the last forty-eight hours or so.”

“Exactly and it’s still pretty choppy.”

“Jill?”

“Another good reason but there’s stuff going on that I can’t see.”

“Not good?”

“Dunno, it could be the fae. We’re going to hear something over the kelpie and what you did to him.”

“Great, Jill said that there might be trouble from this Morrigan and the Ash?”

“Fortunately there might be a bit of wiggle room there.”

“Howso?”

“Wicca is one of the old faiths, the older majiks and I’m from the same era of creation as they are and so I’m seen as a cousin in sort of like the royal way to them. I might be able to claim you as kin and extend you some of that protection. The light fae should respect it, the dark fae say that they might respect it.”
“Oh? So they really don’t like humans then?”

“You ruined the world as they see it, created and brought for the gods, brought earth to the attention of heaven and Hell and got them involved in a war with the demons. Oh and the one religion of God pretty much killed the belief in majik so when the majik in this world weakened it closed off all those doors and gates that they used to use to travel back and forth through.”

“We did all of that?”

“Yes but not all intentionally, the demon thing was an accident but not depending on who you ask.’

“Okay, That’s when we tried to imitate the fae and in doing so we evolved into modern humans and Lucy took a shit fit.”

“Yes, Heaven claims that God, the one true creator created Man in his image because both the Angels and the Fae didn’t possess the perfect quality that he wanted, needed in his children. They say it was the divine plan for mankind to evolve the way that it had. In either case Lucipher hates humanity for being put above him and he hates the fae because they helped put you there.”

“So what was that one perfect thing?”

“The Human soul? No other being has a soul like a human soul has. Other beings have souls but they seem to be a certain way, to have certain rules and no other species has the capacity for good or evil or damnation or redemption that a human soul has.”

“That’s why you were able to do that thing that you did with Alecia isn’t it?”

“Yes, redemption and absolution are some of the most powerful forces in existence against evil.”

I pass HER my hands and SHE pulls me up to my feet. I feel wonky and really off kilter. I lean my butt on the sink and throw some mana into the air and wrapping myself up in a vortex of air and sort of blow myself dry.

“What now?”

SHE’s gone.

I shake my head and take my time walking out and Alecia’s right there to help me over to Shaun’s bed. He pulls me into his arms and I enjoy the squeeze he gives me so much. I can’t help but to look on him with new eyes and in wonder actually at the light and the love and the caring that’s there in them for me.

There’s a lot of bullshit with being the evanescence but to be able to look at someone that you love and see all the reasons that you love them all over again and still see new things, amazing new things about them.

Right here and right now it’s worth it.

“I heard you in there Raine are you okay?”

“Yeah, I was just re…” I look at him, Shaun doesn’t know yet. “I was reliving as past life and it got kind of rough on me, like PTSD trip rough.”

“I sounded like you were going through hell in there.”

“Yeah, I was actually.”

“So that’s got to suck right?”

“Yeah, it does but its part of who I am.”

“So like a Druid thing, or a Buddhist thing?”

“No it’s more than that Shaun.” Should I tell him? What’ll he do? What’ll he say? Will he be in more danger because of it or less, will he tell Jill what I am? He already told her about me…I close my eyes and bite my lip and keep it to myself. “It’s sort of like I channel my ancestors. I see and feel stuff and learn things. It’s kind of like me leveling up in D&D.”

“Oh, cool”

Alecia’s looking at me with this not quite approving but she’s not going to bust me until after we talk look. Yeah all of that, hey she’s old she’s had the practice.

She does break the mood by handing me a bag of my clothes and a box with a few doughnuts in it. My stomach makes a fine impression of a horny mountain lion about that time and was actually that strange a sound we do get a laugh out of it. I eat three and Shaun eats two and that kills the box and Alecia’s muttering about... “Bloody Magicians, you work a bit of power and they’ll eat you out of house and home.”

“Hey, sorry Alecia. But we’re starving.”

“Yeah, yeah okay. Listen Raine we’ve got to talk.”

“Okay, bathroom?” She nods. Shaun rolls his eyes. “Women, jeesh Raine you just got out of there.”

“Yes honey and I’m going to go and change and stuff, it’s a girl thing okay?” I smile and dimple at him. He just gives me that look that guys give women just for being women and stares the TV into turning on. “Fine, I’m just going to watch TV.”

“You do that pumpkin.” And he winces at the pet name and gives me an annoyed look and I give him a kiss on the forehead like he’s being a good boy. I take my things and head into the bathroom again.

Once inside I turn the shower on and take out my clothes and stuff and set my things on the sink. Alecia sits on the toilet with the seat and lid down using it as a chair and her eyes wander over me as I shimmy out of the hospital robe and then my underwear. She stares at my crotch a little. I turn red. “Hey, eyes up please.”

She nods and looks up and I run my hands through the towels there restructuring them into plush and soft terry cloth ones. “Right there that’s the number one thing that we need to talk about.”

I step into the shower and start using the homemade soft soap that I made and use at home of my shower poof and start lathering up. I use a bit of power to sort of make a fine shield to keep the spray in while I keep the shower curtain open.

“You Raine. You’re extremely powerful even now. But you’re barely trained. You’re leaking power all over the place and you are leaving mage trails all over the place. I saw some very officially under cover looking guys checking all the protections that you’ve left all over town and if I hadn’t taken them down then they would have used their mage-machine to pick your place out magically like a hose decorated for Christmas in the West-bank. I caught them reporting to Shaun’s sister.”

“Yeah Okay I can see them doing that. Jill’s a MIB agent.”

“MIB?”

“Men in Black…like the movie.”

“Never seen it, I’m not one for movies.”

“Oh, okay Jill’s a government agent and works for an agency that’s tasked with keeping the supernatural forces in the world from tearing us and each other a new one.”

“Oh, well she’s looking at stuff in town.”

“She told me all of that in fact she’s kind of wet for you right now.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, you. I think that she recognizes you a bit but the you she's seen being around in the daylight's scrambling her up and she’s not quite getting who you are sorted in her head. Its okay I told her to back off that you’re under my protection.”

Alecia rolls her eyes at me. “Dammit, Raine you should have told me first!”

“Hey! Why’re you yelling at me? I stood up for you.”

“Look you said that she’s government and you warned her off by they never work like that. I’m likely being investigated right now and all my stuff’s getting hacked and they’re going to find out eventually that my current ID isn’t really me.”

“Look, I don’t really trust Jill or this SDA she works for either but right now there’s nothing that either of us can do about what she’s going to investigate. Like I said she’s got her nose into your sent and she’d have looked into it anyway. Jill’s like that.”

“You sound like you know her.”

“I do and more importantly I did. One of my essences hasn’t been dead that long. Jill and I used to be lovers.”

“And I take it she doesn’t know that?”

“No and I’m not going to reveal things to her at all if I can help it. They get read telepathically when they report into wherever they’re headquartered at.”

“Lovely, so who keeps them honest?”

“Hmm, that’s what I asked. She told me it was need to know and since I wasn’t in her club I didn’t need to know. But I get your point about learning to get a grip on things. I haven’t really been doing any of this that long for me to get a grip on any of it.”

“Yes and that could be a problem.”

“So, what about you? You’ve gotta know some things?”

“Some but most of my powers were of the vampire majik variety.”

“But you know some stuff. I know some stuff from being a slave and from my storm-witch days and a little Wicca from my hooker days. I’ve got a tutor in the Wicca stuff out in the trailer park so that’s a start right?”

“I guess but we’ll have to find you better, you need some serious teaching young Skywalker.”

I step out of the shower and start to pat myself dry. “Star Wars, you know about Star Wars?”

“Hello, I was undead not dead Raine. Everyone on the planet knows what Star Wars is. Besides to a vampire the idea of a lightsaber is kind of scary stuff.” She smiles this nice little kinda shy girl next door smile. It feels rare and genuine.

“Was that a joke?”

“A bit of one but you got to be careful making Star Wars jokes in the paranormal community.”

“Huh?”

“Ooooh, Never make a Wookie crack to a Were-Bear.” She said it with such a straight face that it takes me a few seconds and a close look at her before I start to laugh, actually I laugh until I snort. Oh my geeky funny bone is enjoying that way too much considering the life I live I sort of get this funny vivid image in my head.

It feels good to laugh like this and Alecia…there’s something there that’s shining and sparkling under those eyes of hers. There’s this girl next door there but the geeky shy kind, maybe who she was before she got vamp-amped.

“You and I are going to really get along I think Alecia.”

“That’d be nice; I don’t have a whole lot of friends. I never did.”

“You do sort of seem like the wallflower type.”

“More like you’re type.”

“Huh?”

“Before I was turned, I used to be a boy. Michel turned me into a vampire and by using his powers over blood magic he flipped a chromosomal switch turning me into the girl I always wanted to be and knew I was all I had to do was to give up my soul to him in the process.”

I go over and give her a big hug. She cries a bit and I cry a bit too just because she’s crying and we just have this moment. We get each other, there’s parts of her and me that click. Suddenly we’ve got someone now who gets it.

“’Leasha, we are so going to have to really sit down and talk about stuff. There’s so much.”

She nods and sniffles into my towel. “Yeah, s’not fair y’know.” Her voice has this light southern lilt of her deep southern background.

“Hey, what’s not fair?”
“You got hit with The Evanescence thing and I get turned into a vampire and you get to have bigger boobs than me.” She sniffles and looks at me. Eyes dancing again despite being red and a little puffy.

“Fangy bitch.” I shove her and then tickle her, she tickles me back and suddenly I’m not twenty three with several lifetimes making me way too damned old and she’s not a world weary vampire who’s been around since the civil war, we’re just too girls too friends and we’re just being.

Normal.