CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
I stood with my mouth open as Ammon waved at me. “Hey. Thought I’d stop by for a bit since I missed both Thanksgiving and Christmas. Kind of funny that I almost beat my postcards here, actually. Seriously, though – I’ve had some serious relationship problems before, and none of them felt as bad as that looked like it did. Are you going to be okay?”
I felt a tear fall down my cheek, which finally triggered the rest of the tears I’d been holding back. I sat on the stairs next to my brother and leaned in to him when he put a comforting arm around me. I silently cried for several minutes, and he was kind enough to not say anything until I was ready to talk.
“I love him, and he loves me, but we just can’t be together, and even though I completely understand why it doesn’t make it hurt any less.”
“I know. It’s one of the downsides of living in our world.”
I snapped almost completely out of my misery when he said that, with the emphasis on our. Did he know?
“Let’s go to your room and talk a bit, shall we?” He said as he stood up. He offered a hand to help me up, and followed me as we tiptoed to my room. He closed the door behind him, and grabbed a couple of small objects from his backpack, which he put on top of the doorframe. He then pulled my desk chair out from its spot, and turned it to face me as I sat on the edge of my bed.
“I got your message,” he said simply, and waited for me to respond.
“Um, yeah. Obviously, since you sent that postcard. Cool about the guru. Sounds like you learned a lot.”
He rolled his eyes, stood up, unpinned said postcard from the cork board, and started drawing on the front with the closest writing tool he could find, which was one of my felt-tipped pens.
“What are you doing? You’re going to ruin your collage!” I said, and started to get up to stop him. Before I could stand up all the way, though, he turned around to face me again and handed the postcard over.
“I got your message,” he repeated, and I looked at what he had drawn. I gasped when I saw that he had outlined and connected the edges of different objects of each picture to form complex, yet vaguely familiar symbols.
“You wrote these wards?” I asked. “You know about mom and dad?”
He nodded. “And about my name, and your name, and Arvin and Terra’s names, and what that means for us, and what it meant for mom and dad to be apart.”
“How long have you known?”
“Not long, actually. I learned by accident, really, and only right before you sent your note. If I hadn’t kept and reread your letter I would have completely missed that you’ve connected with your ‘inner fire’ and that mom and dad were in trouble.
“While passing through India I met another wardcarver – the guru I told you about. He recognized the wards on the keychain mom and dad gave to me which I had attached to my backpack. He invited me to stay with him, of course, and started going on and on about how he was retired but was still so happy to see the work of other wardcarvers and asked how my parents were doing and if I was developing the talent. He’s one of those guys that can see auras or something like that and talked about how he was honored to have a powerful spirit of wind in his house, and of course by then I was so confused but I stuck around anyway because I thought it would made a good piece for a magazine.
“So I stayed with him and acted like I knew what he was talking about. One day he gave me a demonstration of what his wards could do, presumably to compare the effects of his wards versus our parents’ wards, and I realized that what this guy was doing was real. So I studied mom and dad’s wards, and tried it out for my own. At first it was disastrous, since I was just trying to copy what mom and dad had already done, but then the guru taught me how to follow my own instincts and draw my own style of wards. They’re still heavily influenced by mom and dad’s work, I’m afraid, but they do work most of the time, so that’s something. The wards I put above your door are to make the room soundproof, which I realized is what mom and dad did when we were young. It totally makes sense, now, all the times we tried to listen in on their late night conversations and couldn’t. Remember that?
“Then I got curious about his ability to see auras, figuring that if he was right about the wards he was probably also on to something with that, as well. I asked him about it, and he told me all these things about myself that he read in my aura that were just too private and too accurate for him to be making stuff up. He also pointed to the metal piece on my keychain and said that, even though he drew his wards for wind slightly differently, he recognized it as a symbol for wind and could feel the connection I had with it. I asked him to teach me how to feel these bonds, and how I could strengthen my bond with the wind, and he very generously obliged.
“From there figuring out the rest was just process of elimination. I remembered that you and Terra and Arvin also had accessories similar to mine, and when I looked at the other beads on my keychain I realized that three of them look like a tree, waves, and a fire, and I thought, if my personality is like wind, than my siblings must also have personality traits like earth, water, and fire. You are fire, right?” He asked.
I nodded. “Yeah. Mom and dad explained to me that the wards on my necklace were to keep my fiery personality from getting out of hand. I found out that dancing helped naturally balance my personality out–”
“Like traveling does for me?” Ammon finished. I nodded, and he continued, “Yeah, that’s one of the things that the guru told me when he first talked about what he saw in my aura. Anyway, I got your letter shortly after that and realized that you may have been aware of this stuff, too. They were really subtle hints, by the way – I almost didn’t catch them. I would have come home the second I got the letter, but I was really into the training I was getting, and didn’t want to leave quite yet. It wasn’t until the guru told me the repercussions of mom and dad being apart for too long that I realized that you were telling me you needed help, so I left as soon as possible – hence why I got here only shortly after my postcards.
“Hah. Sorry, that was really long-winded. Get it? I can talk and talk and talk without noticing because of my windy personality. It’s funny, I never would have realized it if it hadn’t been pointed out to me. Sorry, I’m getting away again. So, obviously you’ve known for at least a little bit longer. When did you find out?”
“Not too long after we moved here.” I just nodded my head once and left it at that.
When I failed to elaborate, Ammon asked, “How’d you find out? Or was it just something that you realized on your own?”
I sighed and looked at the clock. It was about half past midnight, and while I wasn’t tired since I had slept in so late, I wondered how Ammon was doing. “It’s a long – a very long – story. You gonna be able to stay awake?”
“You really think I’d fall asleep while talking about something like this?”
“Good point. It started when I saw Jack – that’s the guy you saw me with – slay a couple of vampires in the cemetery out back.”
“Whoa, whoa. Hold on a second. Vampires?”
“Yeah. You… didn’t know they exist?”
Ammon just stared at me like I had grown a second head. I rubbed my eyes, seeing that I had my work cut out for me.
“I can’t believe that the guru… he didn’t tell you why wardcarvers exist? What the wards are for?”
“Just that they’re good for encouraging certain behaviors in people or influencing environments. Did you really say vampires?”
“Yes,” I said again, getting annoyed. “Listen, there’s a lot of things that exist. In fact… you know what, lemme just show you. Maybe we’ll get lucky and someone will come out early tonight.” I got up, turned off my bedroom light so we could see out my window better, and motioned for Ammon to stand next to me at the window. He tried asking me what we were looking at, but all I said was, “Just look out into the graveyard. Normally no on
e shows up before one o’clock, but there have been a lot of parties lately.”
He gave me another look, but didn’t say anything else. Sure enough, ten minutes later a couple of ghosts appeared with a long folding table and started setting it up. Ammon looked between them and me several times before exclaiming, “Holy shit! There are ghosts in that graveyard!”
“Yeah, and that’s just the beginning. Listen, there’s a lot of things in this world you’d think only exist in fairy tales, but are, in fact, very real. I myself have only scratched the surface, I’m sure, and I’ve already met a werewolf, an elf, a shape shifter, goblin, naga, wizards and witches, demonlings and a full-fledged demon.”
“So when you said that your story is really long, you didn’t just mean about ten or fifteen minutes, did you?”
I shook my head. “No. You still wanna hear it?” Ammon didn’t say anything in response, just sat back down in the desk chair and looked at me attentively. I sat back down on the edge of my bed and started my story.
“Like I said, it all started when I saw Jack slay a couple of vampires in the backyard. Now you have to understand, real vampires aren’t like the vampires we read about in modern fiction. They’re more like zombies…”