CHAPTER 10: THE BLOOMING OF HEARTS
The sun shone into Melissa’s dark little crib. The alarm clock went off. Melissa groaned and reached to turn it off. She was about to drop back to sleep when her covers were lifted by our vampire undead hero Raziel.
“Wake up, woman,” Raziel’s cold tone seared into Melissa’s sleepy ears.
“Damn you, vampire, what is it?!” Melissa grumbled as she snatched the blanket away from Raziel and pulled it over her. “Isn’t it enough that you’ve spent a night here and now you want to ruin my beauty sleep?!”
“You promised me, woman. Now get up,” Raziel took her covers up again.
“What in the heck did I promise you? I didn’t promise you anything!” Melissa snatched it back again.
“You promised that you will be opening that box and allow me to consume a soul. I want to heal my leg.” He took it up again. Melissa grumbled loudly and took it back again. This repeated a few times before Melissa sat up in exasperation and yelled at him like a madwoman.
“Alright! Alright! I’ll get you your breakfast already! Sheesh! You just can’t seem to let me enjoy my slumber in peace, can you?”
Melissa crawled out of the bed, falling onto the floor in the process and crawled all the way to the shelf where she puts her weird witch gizmos. She dragged herself up and reached up to the top shelf to get her jewelry box (although it didn’t seem like one—it’s so creepy and downright freaky). She fumbled through her jewel box and took out a key shaped like a skull. She then crawled like someone who was desperate for water towards the safe and turned the combination lock before fitting in the skull-like key into the keyhole.
Raziel could feel the aura of all the dead souls and demons kept in that safe. As Melissa opened the safe, he could hear them moaning and groaning eerily, letting out threats to kill Melissa and have their revenge if they ever get out of their prisons. Raziel could see that they were kept in jars sealed with different coloured incantation scripts stuck on them. Melissa opened her groggy eyes a little wider to see which one she should give away as Raziel’s breakfast.
“Hmm…nope, very important if I have to curse someone…” Melissa muttered as she checked the jars one by one. “Nope, too strong, might burst your guts out…Uh-uh, this one is my favourite…No way, it took me days to exorcise this one…Let’s see, which one is none of my good use…?”
“Hurry up, woman, or I’ll suck your soul instead,” Raziel grumbled a little impatiently.
“Hold your horses, you greedy little vampire! It’s not easy to catch all these critters, you know! How can I just give them away so easily?”
“Just go on. I refuse to walk around with a bandage on my leg like an invalid.”
“Geez! If that’s your problem, then you’re even fussier than I am when I got a zit on my face.”
Finally, after much contemplation, she took out two jars: one with a yellow incantation script and one with a blue incantation script. She yawned and said, “Well, these are the only ones I can spare for the moment. This yellow one is some relentless soul who just won’t stop haunting this nice sweet senior family, so I had to use the hard way. This blue one is a real nasty pain in the neck. He possessed the son of a Mexican family who just migrated here and caused a lot of trouble. Not even the priest or their Mexican holy men could save him, but I did.”
“A restless soul and a demon that has evil at its core,” Raziel took the jars and eyed at them in interest. “This seems promising.”
He lifted the jars high in the air and smashed them onto the ground. The two trapped souls moaned scarily as they floated out of their prisons, screaming bloody murder, as in wanting to murder Melissa who trapped them in there. Melissa sort of stepped away from them before she gets anywhere near death. Raziel immediately removed his scarf and revealed his jawless mouth, sucking the two souls into his gut. She could see them falling down his thorax and into his really skinny body. The bandage on his calf came right off as if it hadn’t been bandaged tight enough. In its place grew his bluish skin over the stitched wound. Even the stitches came off altogether, leaving a small scar that wasn’t too noticeable.
“Impressive! Now that’s what I call extraordinaire!” Melissa said in amazement.
“It feels great to have my wound healed,” Raziel replied as he threw his scarf across his face with flourish. Melissa’s heart suddenly skipped a beat. He actually looked…cool and handsome the way he did that with his scarf. Raziel sighed in relief as he checked his calf. Nothing serious now—just a tiny, scar. That didn’t bother him anymore than it did when he had it bandaged. He ran his fingers through his hair again and that made Melissa’s heart skipped another beat.
‘Damn! What’s going on? Why does my heart race every time he did those things? Can it be…? No! Impossible! It’s not happening!’
“Why are you blushing, woman? Are you running a fever?” Raziel suddenly asked.
“No way hose, partner! I’m just…pissed off because you woke me up from my beauty sleep!” Melissa answered hastily. “Now out of my way! I need to get some shut-eye!”
Raziel moved aside as she jumped onto the bed trying to eliminate the feeling she just felt for the Soul Reaver. ‘No way am I, Melissa Celestial, having a crush with that stupid vampire! No way! It simply isn’t done!’ she thought hotly. She forced herself to sleep and she did within seconds. Only about 15 minutes later, she finally woke up to find Raziel sitting on her large table facing the window. His bluish-black hair actually shone under the sun. Melissa rubbed the sleep off her eyes, trying to hide her blushing face.
“What time is it…?” Melissa groaned as she took a look at her alarm clock. She was horrified that she was 10 minutes late for her class. She skipped out of bed immediately and made a dash to the bathroom. Raziel was surprised at her sudden outburst.
“What is it, woman? Why the rush?”
“I’m late for class! I am SO late for class! Why didn’t you wake me up?!” Melissa hollered from inside her bathroom.
“Because you said you were angry when I woke you up, so I didn’t want to repeat the same mistake again.”
“You don’t know when to obey my orders and not to, do you?!” Melissa yelled as she came out of the bathroom clothed in her usual black. “You are dumber than you look!!”
“I don’t obey orders. I just don’t repeat the same mistakes if I know what’s good for me,” Raziel replied nonchalantly.
“I don’t know why I bother to argue with you! I’m going to be so damn late!” Melissa groaned as she dashed out of her apartment, leaving Raziel alone in the dark, sinister room. A few moments later, after seeing Melissa taking the next bus from her window, he went over to her wardrobe, took out her black leather long jacket, draped it on and walked out of the apartment towards the direction of her school.
Raziel sighed as another day went by sitting up on the tree waiting and watching as Melissa’s class ended. This time he wasn’t caught by any janitor or any other humans for that matter. He noticed a new janitor and a younger one at that—just retired, probably. He got off the tree and waited for Melissa to come out before following behind her as usual.
She stopped in the middle of the big city where there stood a large fountain. It was a beautiful fountain with a statue of a dove in the middle of it acting as the figurine that squirts the water out in a rhythmic motion. She sat at the fountain and waited for customers to come. Slowly, one by one, people young and old approached her timidly to ask for questions. Some were really simple ones (“I wanna know if my business will work out”), some were weird, ridiculous ones (“I wanna know if Britney Speares dig me”) and some were downright freaky (“I wanna know what colour is my secretary’s underwear today”), but it was all for the cause of business and making money.
As the day ended, she picked up her jar of money and kept all her fox elves back to where they belong. She walked slowly towards Raziel who was sitting at the far corner of the fountain and asked with a slight pink running across her face, “So, uh, Raziel…How would you like to hang out with me?”
“Hang on where? Are you expecting me to follow you while you hang yourself?” Raziel asked, confused.
“No, you dork! I don’t mean by that kind of hanging! I meant by a nice quiet meal at my favourite hangout. I know you don’t eat, but you can at least accompany me…right?”
Raziel began to contemplate. ‘This human is actually allowing me to follow her. She actually wants her to come with her. What plan does she have in mind of all this?’
“If you’re thinking of me trying to kill you or something, lay it off. I mean no harm…really!”
Finally, after a momentary silence, Raziel replied, “Alright, woman. It’ll be a convenience for me to discover your weaknesses. Let me remind you, woman, that I still want your soul.”
“Whatever,” Melissa waved away that remark. She seemed really confident that he would never ever find out how to kill her. She herself has not much of a clue on how the beings of the underworld are able to penetrate her force field. She has been repelling spirits and harmful souls all her life that she never stopped to consider what it would take for a spirit to be able to pass through the field. She can touch them but they can’t touch her; that’s how the system has been all about.
Melissa took Raziel’s hand (and blushed in the process) and led him to KFC and had her dinner there. Everyone was looking weirdly at Raziel with that black leather jacket, body of neither skin nor muscles and those eerie eyes and blue skin. Melissa has gotten used to those stares for a while—she had her eyes on Raziel who was looking intently at the fried chicken like it was a piece of rare jewel. Well, it ought to be a normal reaction, judging by the Raziel’s lifestyle have been for the past goodness-knows-how-many years. Melissa grinned and offered him a sip of her coke, which really annoyed him because she knew he had no lower jaw to suck the drink properly. Melissa laughed—she was beginning to love teasing this vampire.
In fact, she was beginning to fall for him altogether.
After dinner, Melissa took Raziel and walked around the busy city. They window-shopped almost all the stores available in this area of the Big Apple. Finally when they reached a disco pub where the loud banging songs of rock blasted out and could be heard even when you a mile away from the place. Melissa hesitated to walk past the pub. Raziel noticed.
“I sense fear. What is it, woman?”
“This is my ‘ex-boyfriend’s’ and his gang’s favourite hangout. His death should be well-known by now,” Melissa replied quite nervously. “One of his gang members who studied in the same school with me gave me the stink-eye this morning.”
“Stink…eye?”
“He glared at me, OK? He glared at me like I was some sort of a criminal! Now let’s get out of here,” Melissa said exasperatedly. Before she was able to turn away from the disco pub, she was surrounded by really mean-looking thugs, both men and women. They were all living in the wild outlaw side, with studs everywhere on their faces, badly dyed hair and terrible punk hairstyles. They even have grubby grunge clothes to match.
“Well, well, well, if it ain’t the ex-chieftess and his new Gothic boyfriend!” one of the punks looked at her and Raziel in distaste, like they were a bunch of punching bags ready to be trashed.
“Look, I don’t want any trouble, OK? Whatever happened to Joe was not any of my business!” Melissa tried to sweet-talk them out of the situation but the thugs didn’t buy it.
“Look here, sweet cake. You were the last person to be with our chief and you disappeared suddenly without a trace. Does that sound like it had nothing to do with you?” His question was answered by a loud cry of objections from the crowd. He grinned, “I don’t think so.”
“So, I can see you trashed our chief—God bless his soul—and hanging out with a new bum,” one of the girls came forward and twirled her finger around Raziel’s loose end of his scarf. “Why, the chief ain’t good enough for a scumbag like you, you little whore?!”
“Bite your tongue, you she-devil,” Raziel growled behind his scarf, his eyes glowing like fire. The girl let his scarf go with horror written in her eyes, as if she saw an unimaginable terror inside his eyes.
“That’s it, lady!” the thugs held out their life-threatening crowbars and were ready to strike. “You and your little weasel boyfriend are going down!”
Melissa had a solemn vow not to use her witch powers on humans, but this was an emergency. She was about to brace herself when Raziel moved forward and, with one swipe, sent all the heavy crowbars flying away. The thugs were dumbstruck for a second there.
“I made your leader a dinner out of him. You got a problem with that?”
No comments:
Post a Comment