Please C&C to Gerald Tarrant at lordofmerentha@yahoo.com

候鳥
Hou Niao [Migrating Birds]

Sho had changed.

He'd grown a little more muscular in the chest and biceps, for sure, and his hair was long now. Behind the sunglasses that he hadn't taken off, there were most likely wrinkles forming at the bridge of his nose, crow's feet making their tracks around the corners of those hard almond eyes.

His friend was growing old.

It was an oddly disquieting fact, and just thinking about it made him flinch a bit, almost dropping the box of glassware he was in the process of replacing on the storeroom shelf. The glasses shivered inside with the sudden movement, tapping against each other like windchimes. He held the box still. Waiting.

"Shinji! You done in there?"

He jumped, and the glasses hummed again. Thrusting the box up on the shelf, he bent to the lone crate on the pushcart to his right, blocky metal, rusting wheels casting weird shadows on his scuffed white sneakers. "One more box and I'll be out," he called back.

"I don't have all day," the voice retorted, and he heard footsteps passing, headed toward the kitchen entrance.

The crate was heavier than he expected, and as he gave it a final push up onto the shelf, he felt something pop in his right shoulder, felt the twinge of pain that meant he had pulled something. Wincing, he rolled the joint a bit, massaging with the fingers of his left hand as he kicked the cart around.

The club was almost empty now, the stage dim and the last of the crowd paying their tabs and shrugging into fur coats. He stared straight ahead through the trickle of human beings headed for the door, brushing past giggling girls on the arms of their tipsy partners, silent, grim men in dark suits who most likely were carrying a gun in a pants pocket or strapped under a silk sleeve. They did not even glance at him, but their eyes unnerved him nevertheless, and he was glad when he and the cart had wheeled past them, to the back tables where the guest of honor had sat this evening.

He hadn't seen Sho come in, had almost been discovered by those sharp eyes behind the sunglasses, and only Sho's voice had given him away. The man had fortunately been detained at the entrance by the manager on duty, and as they had conversed in soft tones, he had, standing in the doorway of the broom closet slightly down the hallway and to the left, had caught the familiar timbre of Sho's voice.

He had thought his ears were lying. He had thought Sho dead, the destructive destiny of their old lifestyle caught up to him at last, and he had even thought that one of these days, he would track down his friend's grave and go pay him a visit, to reminisce on old times in the shade of whatever trees and mountains shadowed the tomb as the sun set.

But instead, Sho had caught up to him.

He'd never doubted the past would come back to haunt him. It was not something that he could run from, he had been told. The memory was still hazy in his mind, hazy above the throbbing of pain and the awakened sense of unfulfilled hunger that he had become accustomed to now, but which at that time had been a sensation wholly new, wholly consuming, wholly frightening.

VAMPIRE ON THE LOOSE IN MALLEPA, the headlines had read, and he knew that sooner or later until he would be caught, but still he had not been able to make himself care enough to stop. He stalked the streets at night, and any human or animal careless enough to show its form under the dead white light of the moon had been his prey. There was one night where the memories had overwhelmed him, and he had torn his way through an entire city block before the dawn's light had forced him away at last, exhausted and bloated, blood caked around his lips and staining the front of his shirt. As the sun had risen above the lip of the earth, he crawled back to the ruins he called home now and hid in the crumbling shadows of the existence he had been reduced to, and he wanted to die but had not the courage.

Kei had found him, as he knew he would. Perhaps all of the wanton destruction he had committed upon himself and hundreds of innocent and not-so-innocent victims was all for that purpose. Kei had shook him awake, and when he opened his eyes, he hadn't been surprised to see that too-familiar face, caked with dirt and grime but no blood, bent above his own. He had been prepared for this, had even rehearsed the speech several times of what he would say when he met Kei again.

But strangely, as the last rays of the sun touched Kei's face, caressing with reddened fingertips the scarred flesh and stringy blond hair falling in uneven lengths about his cheekbones, he felt the words escape him.

The pain in Kei's eyes needed no words.

They sat instead in silence till the sun had gone down and the stars had come up, and the streetlights came on, and there was no moon because it was a new moon that night. It was cool, dark, time suspended, a night for the creatures of the undead.

"Stop this, Toshi," Kei said.

"You should have let me die," he said in return, and Kei's shoulders slumped a little.

"I know."

There was nothing else to be said, and something rustled in the shadows - something small, a rabbit perhaps, or maybe it was just the wind.

"I should have," Kei said at last, and stood up, the movement a quick stroke of black paint on a black canvas spattered with bits of fluorescent light. "But I didn't. Just like the one who made me should have let me die, but he didn't. This is our fate - his, and mine, and now yours too."

He tried to open his mouth, to deny it, to deny everything, but how could he deny the truth?

"You can't escape it," Kei said. "Our circle of destruction...it can't be broken."

"I hate you," he whispered.

Kei bowed his head. "I hope someday you will understand." A pause, and the lithe body tensed like a wound coil, a black and silver spring. "Goodbye, Toshi."

After Kei left, he washed himself and his clothing in the pool of collected rainwater under the stone eaves of that abandoned building, and then he sat down in the corner and cried until he had no tears left.

He slept all day, and then when evening came, he began to walk.

There was no escaping the past in Mallepa, and so he decided to leave altogether, made the journey to a city one prefecture over, and there he set out to pretend to be human again.

There was always the thought in his mind still to find his mother, who he had never seen but yet thought of every day, a false memory of himself watching her wait in that park, sitting on the bench and looking at her watch, wondering why her son was late, why he had not come. He could get Kei to send the message, he thought sometimes. Kei would not be fooled by the fact that he was no longer in Mallepa; Kei always found what Kei was looking for. He remembered that much from the fragments of his childhood memories.

But even that was a fantasy after all. Kei was too street-smart, too wary to initiate something of that nature. Toshi was dead. Toshi, the pizza delivery boy, Sho's friend, the carefree orphan - he would let it all go. Toshi had to be dead, because if Toshi was not dead, then Sho would be in danger.

It would be many years until he understood why Kei had not been able to let him die. It was not about saving a life, because being trapped in this body, eternally hungry, was not a life anyone in their right mind would choose. It was instead, because Kei had been hungry and yet not hungry enough to suck the essence out of the body of a man he had called friend for all these long years.

The first night after he'd awakened, Kei had sat with him in the old abandoned building they'd called him as children, and soothed him as he shook, held him as he screamed and ranted and raved and then broken down and cried, told him that the others thought him dead. What of Yi-che, then? he'd asked incredulously. What of Son? Kei's face had hardened and they had changed the subject, but he had realized then that in those long moments when he had lain in the twilight between life and death, Kei had finally been unmasked, and friendship had not been enough to save him.

Away from Mallepa, away from the memories. Avoiding the daylight was something that he learned to do with little trouble, haunting the shadows of alleyways and emerging at dusk. When he finally scraped together enough money to purchase a small apartment, he had not seen the sun for so long that he did not think he remembered what she looked like. Instead, he sat on the side of the bed that first night and stared at his reflection in the mirror, at the face which had already lost the tan he had grown up with, which seemed like the blood was draining from it drop by drop, day by day, stared at the black eyes looking back at him, and shivered. Toshi was someone that he had known years ago, it seemed, a casual friend who one day had simply stopped coming by to see him and whose death he had heard of by some indirect source, the memory of someone so faint that it had almost been forgotten. The face in the mirror was familiar, but it was a familiarity that had nothing to do with the man he had once been.

The face in the mirror was Kei's.

He'd managed to get a job at the local bar and had impressed the manager with something resembling a responsible work ethic, so he'd been promoted. Then there was a newer, larger club, and he had been promoted again, and then one day he found he was waiting on the same gang bosses and cleaning up after the same corrupt politicians against who he had spent the better part of his life fighting.

There had been no moral resistance or inner battle at that revelation, and he felt faintly guilty for accepting it so readily, but a vampire could not afford a conscience. Kei had been that way, and as he continued waiting tables and sweeping floors, as the months and years passed, he understood why. He tried not to think about a time soon where he would have leave this place, leave before they realized that they were growing old and the building was slowly crumbling, but he remained unchanged.

Toshi was dead, so he called himself Shinji.

There was no word from Kei, and he heard nothing of his old friends, but word had come one day that there had been a huge gang brawl in Mallepa and there had been many people killed. No one needed to tell him that Sho had been involved. There was the cold prickle down his spine, and he knew Sho was dead. He had thought that Kei would show up to pay him a visit and to confirm the fact, but night after night he waited, and Kei never showed. Kei was not dead, but perhaps his silence was all the confirmation that he needed to believe he would never see Sho again.

Until tonight, when he had been proved wrong by the man in the sunglasses and long hair tied neatly at the nape of his neck, in the dark suit and silk tie and silver cufflinks and brace of pistols hanging very obviously at his belt. The Sho he knew had been a boy, but this Sho was a man, a man who walked with the air of one who had seen the world and knew it was his for the taking.

If he had not been a vampire, he would not have been able to smell the sharp, cold smell of grief that echoed in Sho's footsteps, grief so strong that it stung his nostrils and made him want to weep.

He'd stood in the shadows, making quick trips to the wine cellar for the patrons at the edge of the ballroom, never venturing out into the center where crystal chandeliers cast jeweled lights across the dancers on the floor, to the other side where Sho sat alone at his luxury table with a glass in his hand and the scent of grief hovering around him like a fog.

It would have been so easy to go up to him, said his mind to him more than once tonight. It would have been so easy to take his place again at Sho's side like he had always done in the past. It would be like nothing had happened and that he had never been dead. He had been tempted. All it would take was a few steps in that direction, a quick tap on the shoulder, saying, do you remember me?

But in the end, Sho's world now was not his world, and it could never be his world. His world - Kei's world - was something that Sho could never enter, so how could he possibly begin to understand the world which Sho lived in now?

He paused before picking up the wineglass, remembering Sho's face as he had seen it tonight in the ephemeral lights of the smoky bar, and felt again the shadow of Sho's grief. It was there in the glass too, the cup from which Sho had drank, and the thrumming in his fingers as he touched it was disquieting.

"Shinji! Hurry up out there!"

There was no point in dwelling on the memories after all. He dropped the glass into the plastic bin and turned the cart around once more, grimacing at the pain in his shoulder. It was a quick trip back to the kitchen, two sharp movements to unload the last plastic bucket of dishes next to the dishwasher, and a wave to the manager on his way out.

"I'm done for the day, sir."

"Paycheck's at the front," the man said absently, and he nodded, dropping the cart off at the storage room, making a short detour to the back closet to drag his coat off the hangar, taking the envelope bulging with cash from the short, fat man at the front table, who bowed to him and wished him a good night.

He stepped out the entrance, and then stopped. Even without the flicker of movement at the corner of his eye, he would have known that someone was there all the same. The past reached out cold hands to him, and he tried to flinch away, but it held him fast and he could not even struggle.

"Kei," he said.

He wouldn't have recognized the man if it had not been that moment, if it had been any other time, if in any other place. But the moon was just right and the wind had shifted, and for a moment he smelled Kei's scent mixed with fear and anger and loathing and hunger, like a wolf's. He was hunched slightly like a hunted man, swathed in an oversized cloak, and as he stared at those haunted eyes in that hollow, waif-like face, he had the terrible sensation he was looking at a skeleton.

"Kei, where have you been?"

The voice was a barely audible rasp. "Where's Sho?"

"I-" he began, and then stopped. "I don't know what you're talking about."

Kei seemed to withdraw into himself, and then as he stood there uncertainly, the paycheck envelope still clutched in his shaking hands like an offering, Kei reached out one hand, the fingers snaking around his wrist like a handcuff. He shivered.

When Kei started walking, he did not try to struggle but simply felt his legs begin to move as his arm hung limp in the hypnotic grasp of Kei's cold hand. The avenue was dark and the streetlights on their side of the walk had gone out. Somewhere nearby, a dog barked twice, two quick, short barks like gunfire. He saw Kei flinch.

"Where are you taking me?" he wondered softly, knowing that in the vampire's hearing, that whisper would be as loud as a shout. There was no use in arguing with Kei. He had learned that growing up. Kei simply was or he wasn't, but the only one who could change Kei's mind was Sho.

He was not Sho.

The next intersection was a four-way, the stoplight a bright, glaring green and the don't walk sign fiercely fluorescent red through the shower of leaves fluttering past like living skeletons of birds. Kei's feet took him to the very edge of the sidewalk, and then he simply stopped.

"I made a mistake with you," Kei said. "I won't make that mistake again."

"Kei, I-"

The wind gusted at that moment, and Kei's cloak billowed out about him, snapping in the chill breeze like strips of coarse, torn linen hanging from the dead branches of cemetery trees. "I am going to save Sho," he said. Hollow eyes met his again, desperate like a dying man's. "Toshi, come with me."

He flinched involuntarily at that name. The stoplight changed, the walk light flashing to green, but he did not move. "Where have you been?" he said again, and Kei smiled fiendishly. In the light of the moon, he saw something gleaming from those white teeth, and he knew without asking that it was blood. "Where did you go?"

"Hell."

The memories surged up again at that word and he saw the images play out in his mind, saw Sho come straggling into the hideout with a bedraggled man in tow. Saw the man with the briefcase draw the gun, saw the bedraggled blond man charge at him, felt Sho's arms around him and heard his voice murmuring that it was all right, that there was someone who would protect them now and that they didn't need to be afraid anymore.

"We've already been to hell," he said.

Kei bared those bloody teeth again, then turned abruptly to face into the wind. He wanted to reach out a hand, to touch him and to make sure he was really there, that it was not a figment of his imagination because he wanted so badly to see him again, just like he had wanted so badly to see Sho again that he still was not sure that what had happened tonight had been real.

One more chance at redemption.

"Come with me," Kei said again.

"You should have let me die," he said harshly, but Kei turned his head sharply to look at him, and something in his scent changed.

"I couldn't save you," Kei said at last. "I'm going to save Sho. Sho's going to be different. Sho's going to live."

He almost opened his mouth then to tell Kei the truth then. Yes, he wanted to say, I saw Sho tonight. He came in and sat there and drank and then he left. He was alone. I don't understand how Sho could be alone. There is something following him, something like death, and I want to believe you can save him, Kei, but I don't know if you can, and I don't want you to fail again.

"Kei," he said.

The vampire looked at him expectantly in the moonlight with an expression something akin to hope, and he suddenly felt the words die unspoken on his tongue, because there was something in Kei's eyes he had never seen there before, something that reminded him of how Sho used to look, and it frightened him and filled him with unbearable hope at the same time.

"Nothing," he rasped. "Never mind."

Kei's grip tightened on his arm again and then the iron hand let go, leaving him standing there swaying in the wind like a rootless tree. His arm felt numb where Kei had touched it.

"Come with me."

"You don't need a dead man going with you, someone reminding you of your failure everywhere you go. I'm not Toshi anymore, Kei. Toshi's dead."

"So am I."

He did reach out his hand then, and Kei flinched from it, and he saw from the look in Kei's eyes then that he did understand, that he understood though he did not want to. "No," he said. "You're wrong."

"Sho needs you!" Kei cried, and he closed his eyes.

"He needs you, Kei. He doesn't need me. He doesn't need a ghost."

He expected Kei to protest that, to offer some kind of retort, but instead Kei stood there as the stoplight changed and the yellow light cast a brief halo around his hunched form in the cloak, and he felt without needing words that this was the last time he would see Kei again.

"I'm sorry," Kei said finally. "That I couldn't...save you."

He almost smiled. "I couldn't save Sho," he said. "I wasn't strong enough. But you are."

Later, as he unlocked the door of his apartment and stepped in, throwing the paycheck on the counter and flicking on the dim lights, he wondered if there had been anything else he could have said. The leather of his couch was cold to his touch as he sank down on it, staring at the ceiling and feeling the hunger pangs stretch out wavering fingers, but he ignored them. Not tonight, he told them. Not tonight.

He thought about the Sho he had seen tonight, and then about Kei. Sho had changed, but that was the changing of human nature and of time. But Kei had changed also, and Kei, he was quite sure, was not alive. If, then, Sho had changed and Kei had changed, was it possible that he himself had changed without knowing?

A cloud passed over the moon and he got up, turning off the light and lying there on the couch staring out the window. No, he decided. He had not changed, not since the day Kei had taken him away and Toshi had ceased to be. And that was what Kei did not understand, because Kei was not yet a ghost. That was the change he had seen tonight in Kei's face - cold, haunted, but alive.

Perhaps that alone would be enough to save Sho.

From a near distance, he heard gunshots, a faint cry. Then everything was still and silent again, the silence of the world whirring beneath his feet and spinning by him, people and cities and technology and Mallepa and all their childhood memories, and Kei and Sho, crossing through the light into a living time forever beyond his reach.

8 Jan 2005