“Why, how did you come to world?” she teased me right back. “Mother not make Jack baby?”
“No. Well, not in this world, anyway.”
Lelia frowned. She got the implication right away.
“There is another world?”
“Yes. In my world, there are no beautiful women with blue skin,” I said with a grin, kissing her arm. “And there is only one moon, not two.”
Lelia frowned harder. “How did you get to this world?”
“I don’t know, exactly… but I think I died.”
Her eyes bugged out, and she scrambled away from me across the cave floor.
I bolted upright. “Lelia?! What – ”
“Rakala,” she whispered, real fear in her voice.
“What? What’s a rakala?”
She pointed at me. “You. You died. Then you came here.”
If people had a word for something in their language, there was either a fair chance that it existed, or that they thought it did.
“You’ve seen other rakalas?” I asked, intensely interested.
If there were others like me – people who had died and come back – maybe I could finally get some answers about what had happened.
Lelia hesitated. “…no.”
“Do you know anyone who’s seen a rakala?”
“…no.”
Great.
So we were talking ghosts and vampires ‘n shit.
“But mother of my mother said someone saw one when she was little girl,” Lelia insisted.
I could just imagine a withered old blue woman telling five-year-old Lelia stories around a campfire.
“So your grandmother told you about them.”
“Grandmother?”
“Mother of your mother.”
“Oh… yes. Grandmother told me.”
“So they’re just stories,” I said gently.
Lelia frowned. “‘Just’ stories?”
“Yeah – they’re not real.”
She frowned furiously and pointed at me. “YOU are real!”
Okay – she had me there.
I thought for a second. Just because I didn’t believe in ghosts didn’t mean that I was automatically 100% right. I knew a cameraman on my film crew who had worked on a previous show where they investigated supposedly haunted sights. He swore he’d heard voices and felt creepy presences in some of those places, and he was otherwise an entirely rational, logical guy.
And the entire vampire myth was thought to have started from people in the Dark Ages who had porphyria, a disease that makes sunlight intolerable. Not to mention that as corpses decompose, they release gas, which can make them sound like they’re sighing or gurgling – which would be terrifying to a European gravedigger circa 1100 AD.
So maybe there was something to this rakala thing.
“Do all rakala have white skin?”
She thought for a second. “No.”
Actually, that was kind of stupid of me to limit it just to my own skin color.
“Brown or black skin, maybe?”
She thought for a second, then nodded. “Yes. Not blue. Not people.”
‘People’ was how Lelia referred to her own kind: blue skin and pointy ears. No matter how much I protested, she informed me – quite cheerfully, I might add – that I was a vaklik. I had no idea what the translation was, but I assumed ‘outsider’ or ‘foreigner.’
She liked to call me her ‘little vaklik.’ I got the idea it wasn’t necessarily a pejorative… or that maybe it was, but she liked using it to tease me.
“So what do rakala do?” I asked.
She stared at me. “They kill people.”
Translation: they kill my kind.
Oh shit.
“No – babe – I would never hurt you,” I said, shaking my head and holding out one hand to her. “You know that – you know I would never hurt you.”
She stared into my eyes, and I could tell from her expression that she wanted to believe me, though she was afraid to.
“Lelia, I love you,” I said – and then immediately stopped.
Holy shit, had I just said that?
It had come out of nowhere –
But it felt right.
It felt true.
She didn’t know what it meant, though.
But she could tell it was special just from the sound of my voice.
“…love?” she whispered.
“I care about you deeply,” I said.
She frowned. “Friend?”
Crap.
“No – more than a friend.”
“Good friend?” she asked.
Damn it –
How the hell do you explain what love is?
I tried again. “When a man and a woman want to be together forever.”
That was a bit limited, too – but I wasn’t going to get into gay marriage when it was just me and a blue elf.
“Friends forever?”
“Yes, but – friends who have sex.”
She frowned some more, then pointed at my crotch, then hers. “Sex friends?”
This was not going the direction I’d intended.
“More than that. I – ”
I hesitated to say it, but it was the truth.
“I would die for you,” I finished.
She frowned again. “You already died.”
Oh…
I guess that was true…
“You stay with Lelia forever?” she asked, and leaned forward.
“Yes,” I said, and meant it.
“You have baby with Lelia?”
Oh shit…
THIS conversation had escalated quickly.
I’d gone from knowing her for a week, to saying I would die for her, to talking about having children with her.
Of course, if I absolutely didn’t want that, I probably should have been practicing the withdrawal method.
I’d just assumed that since we were obviously different species, we couldn’t have offspring.
…or could we?
And what if we did?
Would I make sure that child came into the world and was safe?
God damn right I would.
I stared right into her eyes and smiled. “Yes.”
That got her.
Her eyes teared up, and she smiled back at me.
Then she moved back over to the fur cape I was sitting on and straddled me.
Looking down at me, she whispered, “I love you, too.”
I kissed her deeply…
…and then we set about making a baby.
Potentially, anyway.
14
But the conversation wasn’t over.
As we lay in post-coital bliss after our second time making love, I asked teasingly, “So you don’t mind that I’m a rakala?”
She looked at me askance, and for a second I was worried I might have brought back up a topic best left buried.
Finally, though, she shrugged. “You are rakala, so all rakala not bad.”
I laughed. I guess that was as good as I could ask for under the current circumstances.
She leaned up on one elbow and stroked my chest hair, one of her favorite things to do. “In your old world, did you love woman?”
My throat hitched.
Shit.
Lelia saw my reaction and
