Page 12 of All That Has Flown Beyond
“And Thea.”
“Deal.”
They looked at each other in the silence of the night. What they didn’t tell you about loss was that it was a presence instead of an absence. You could feel it, constantly. It was active with memory. A stain, a smell, a word. Anything could take you back to a place which was painful to remember now. Suddenly, the dead would be everywhere.
But amidst that presence, Kaiyo could feel Ahmik too.
Kaiyo found Ahmik’s hand between them. His skin was soft from werewolf healing. No callouses would mar those fingers, even if they belonged there. Ahmik turned his hand and laced their fingers together.
“It’s you and me. And Thea.”
“Against the world.”
**********
The lack of pack bonds was like another death. A death inside Kaiyo, in a place he never thought would ever waver.
He went to class. He socialized. He met people and did his projects and felt nothing.
Everything was an endless routine. He was stuck on a roundabout, the world blurring around him until he couldn’t get off.
There was something creeping up inside him. He couldn’t bear to look.
He called his mom and asked about the pack.
“Everything seems fine. I’ve been keeping an ear out, but there haven’t been any threats.”
Maybe Ahmik had been right. Maybe they didn’t need Kaiyo at all.
Kaiyo would stay up every full-moon night. He would sit outside even in the freezing cold and look at the sky. He felt like howling at the night. Like ripping his skin off and transforming into something else. Maybe if he were a shifter, they wouldn’t have kicked him out. But shifters weren’t made through Hollywood magic. Shifters were those with Ousía which held qualities of both human and an animal. Werewolves shared their human Ousía with that of the wolf. Kitsune, of the fox. Selkie, of the seal. You were either born that way or rare enough to have the type of Ousía that could meld with an animal after birth through a ritual only a trained shaman could perform. Kaiyo was neither of those things.
His body stayed stagnant in the moonlight, but a part of him was wild. It would leave him to run through the woods.
Sometimes, it wouldn’t come back.
**********
The exams leading up to the holidays washed over him, leaving an indifferent crust on his tired eyes. The mask he wore to cover the malformations pretended to remember which exams he had done well at and which he had failed, but it was hard to distinguish the things he should be caring about.
He returned home with a suitcase full of dirty laundry and a head that was beating like a heart.
“Honey…” his mother said, looking at him. He tried to keep the mask from slipping at the concern in her eyes, pulling at its corners to imitate a smile.
“Exams. I think I did all right though,” Kaiyo said. Adeline put a hand on the sunken concave of his cheek, the razor blade of his high cheekbone.
“You need to take care of yourself, Kaiyo. Exams or not. You’re way too skinny and it’s flu season. You need to—”
“Mom. Don’t worry. I’ll eat plenty when I’m here, and I’ll buy a whole set of instant ramen when I go back.”
“You needvegetables.”
“I was kidding.”
“And liquids.”
“Ramen has plenty of liquid.”
“Kaiyo…” Her tone indicated her lack of amusement.
