The Everborn - Nicholas Grabowsky [51]
She was doing what she wanted.
She was doing the right thing.
And if Andrew found out who she was....by the time he found out, she was sure she could make him understand.
“Call me, I’d like to hear from you,” she said to him. “Soon. Like maybe tomorrow. You got my number. Let’s get together this weekend.”
“Or you call me, you now have my number, too,” said Andrew. “Or how about this, the first person to call the other wins.”
“Wins what?”
“Wins a full course Chinese dinner for two, courtesy of yours truly, on the house. Or should I say, at my place. It’s a cozy little apartment and I make great Chinese. We could do something afterwards, maybe, like go catch a movie....”
“Sounds nice,” Melony replied, and smiled.
As Andrew watched Melony pull into the street and speed into the distant lamp-lit black, his thoughts sped also, thoughts about the weekend, thoughts about dinner and beyond.
...and thoughts about what Bari would think of all of this.
He was left in wonder and wondering these things when he proceeded back to the opposite side of the street to make his way to the apartment, casually observing the flow of nightclubbers exiting The Crow Job and swarming between the parking lot’s vehicles and it crossed his mind that Melony had never quite answered his question about why a magazine concerned with the unknown would concern itself with a horror writer’s rock n’ roll gig.
Then again, it didn’t matter.
He went home with these thoughts and with them he went home to Bari.
13.
A Few Fringe Benefits of the Gods
When Andrew returned to his third floor apartment, he expected Bari to be somewhere about and waiting for him to come home.
Bari herself was more than amused at this. She’d given up reminding her dear one years ago that she was always with him, always and in many ways. What was he thinking, that Bari slummed around the place like a bored housewife, that protecting him with her very soul meant macrame and Days Of Our Lives and hoping he’d return to her safely for chicken and dumplings and a piping pot pie?
Andrew knew better than that; he simply wasn’t as conscious of things as he could be. And whenever Bari would appear to him, she would appear mostly at home and very rarely elsewhere, almost never in the presence of others or under the potential of being seen by others, except in a few past cases of protecting Andrew from harm. Aside from any exceptions when Andrew was out and about, Bari remained undetectable and observant and totally nonexistent to the physical realm of Andrew’s world.
Oftentimes to Andrew, Bari’s absence grew so convincing and certain, stretching over the course of hours or even days or weeks that it became all but impossible to accept her claim of always being there.
But hell...people generally take God that way.
Whatever sort of creature or being Bari was or used to be, she was actively a Watchmaid, like it or not and she had been for quite a while now. Oftentimes, she dared to confront what few vague glimpses of memory she carried of her human self, of the mortal woman she once was, but in many ways it became a natural instinct not to dwell on these memories too much. Her duties were embedded within her from the single burst of moment it took for her to be transformed and the sudden enlightenment, which accompanied this transformation left her with no choice but to accept it and to remain true. It was like dying and embracing the inevitable afterlife, and then assuming the role of guardian angel to the very one responsible for her death.
The only thing was, Bari never truly died. She was too physical and material to be a literal angel; she was also too spiritual and intangible to be limited to the physical world. Bari possessed the power to materialize into the physical world, to touch and to feel and to be touched, but she could also upon her own will manipulate her state of mind and body to disappear and reappear, to see the unseen spectacles