Chapter 23
TWENTY-THREE
KHARON
I look down at the beautiful woman beneath me on the grass, her hair glistening wet from the river water, eyes glazed over with pleasure as her legs quake with aftershocks.
I lick my lip and groan with the flavor of her still lingering.
All I want to do is stay on this riverbank forever and bring her to pleasure over and over again. But I can’t ignore what she’s just told me. She has finally opened up to me, and she’s in pain. She has such confusion in her heart.
For once, it is something I could actually help with.
I gently caress one of my large hands down the sweet curve of her cheeks, just the brush of my fingertips. “There is a way to know for sure,” I tell her.
She blinks up at me. “What do you mean?”
I sit up and reach a pair of arms down to help support her back and pull her into my arms to cradle her. I gesture around. “Don’t you remember where we are? If your father has passed from the other world into the next, he will be here.”
She stiffens in my arms and, the next moment, springs to her feet. She is beautiful in her nakedness, her eyes huge. “We have to look!”
Immediately she swings around, stumbling back several steps as her head twists one way and then another. Her hands come to her forehead, half covering her eyes. “Why didn’t I think of that? We’ve been here this whole time, and I—”
She looks down at the grass where I’d just been inside her, and her hands slide over her eyes.
I shake my head, though she cannot see me. “You did not know,” I say. “And I did not know what you needed until it was right for you to tell me. Everything happens in its time.”
She nods, her hands falling as she looks towards me. “How do we find him? If. . . if he’s here.”
I understand her urgency. Once, when it was my loved one, I felt the same.
“It may not be easy,” I say, standing and moving to her side. “This is a large realm. Infinite, I sometimes think.”
She turns her face to me, features stricken.
“But,” I say, reaching to steady her back, “Souls do recognize their own. If he is here, you will feel him.”
“What does that mean? I don’t feel him.”
I nod as, again, she looks around, all but spinning in circles. She is overwhelmed, and I am explaining badly.
“We’ll walk around, and you may start to feel a pull of recognition. Then we will follow the pull.”
“A pull?” she cries, almost sounding angry. She is upset, and I understand. Oh, I understand all too well.
“Let’s get clothed, and then we’ll begin. You’ll see.”
She takes off toward where we left her clothing by the bank of the river, only briefly pausing to ask, “How are these already dry?” before yanking her shirt back over her head and shoving her legs one after another into her underthings and pants.
“Time does not work the way you understand in this realm.”
“Hurry,” she says as I shake the river water out of my hair, even though she is still jamming her feet into her boots, not even bothering to tie them before she is standing again.
“What if I don’t feel the tug or whatever?” she asks. “Does that mean he’s not here? That he’s still alive?”
“It is possible,” I say.
She nods rapidly, and I see the hope in her eyes. Then they cloud as she swallows. “And if. . . if he’s here. . . Will I be able to talk to him?”
My stomach clenches with worry for her. Perhaps I have raised false hope.
“If he is here, he will not be as you remember him. He will be only essence. All ego will have been stripped away. Only souls in the sun-drenched fields are capable of speech. But even then, they do not speak much. They seem to just. . .” I cast about for the right word, “. . .commune with nature without many words. Even their songs do not usually have words. You’ll see as we get closer. ”
Her eyebrows narrow. “And if he’s not here, in the, what did you call this—the sunny place—”
I look at the grass. “Then he is in shadow.”
She shivers. “What does that mean?”
“What is your father like in life?” I ask instead. “Is he a man with peace in his heart?”
She pauses, her brow still furrowed. Breathing out a heavy sigh, she shakes her head. “No. No, I wouldn’t describe him that way.”
I nod. “Then we will begin in the land of shadow. Come. I will take you.”
Ksenia stays quiet beside me as we walk across the field and up one of the gently sloping hills. She pauses and reaches out, grasping one of my biceps when she sees a cluster of souls in a bower of fruit trees.
“Do you feel something?” I ask. Perhaps she’s wrong about her father.
She shakes her head. “No,” she whispers, eyes wide as she watches the people move easily with each other, plucking fruit from the tree. One plays a guitar, and the others harmonize a beautiful spontaneous song. In another field further off, others chase each other, laughter ringing out.
“Come then,” I say. As much as possible, I try not to disturb the inhabitants of this realm.
She watches them the entire time we pass by. I understand that, too. It is a hopeful thing to know that peace and joy and rest like this are possible.
After we crest another hill, I lead her to a small, stony outcropping and wave my hand to reveal a vibrating portal.
“How do you do that?” Ksenia blinks, startled, and lets go of my arm to take several steps back.
“Oh.” I pause. I don’t really think about my abilities anymore; they’re such second nature.
“Part of being a plane jumper, I guess. I can move around this realm. When I first came here, I explored and felt drawn to these. . . I don’t know how to describe it.
These energy points. And then when I really focused on them and did the same thing when I plane-jump, these doorways appeared. ”
“So are they different planes on the same plane, or what?”
I pause. “I never thought of that. I always thought of them as just portals to different parts of the same realm, but I guess I don’t really know.”
“You don’t know?”
I shrug. “My father didn’t intend to give me this ability. He was disappointed with how all of his experiments turned out, but me most of all.”
Her mouth drops open. “But you can do this.” She gestures at the pulsing portal of light in front of us. “And you brought us here in the first place. How could he—” Then she shakes her head. “You know what, never mind. He was obviously an asshole. Come on.”
She reaches for my arm, and I extend a middle one to her.
I like that she prefers to be attached to me wherever we go.
But especially if she is right, and stepping through the portal means plane-jumping again.
. . I wrap my arms around her with an extra firm grip as together, we enter the realm of shadow.