Chapter 20
Gawking at him, my eyes were glued to Van and his unwavering stare.
Out of all the things I thought he might have to tell me, those three words weren’t even in the running.
I thought he was going to tell me something about having known Xoah prior to this flight.
Him claiming he wasn’t human was completely out of the blue.
“What do you mean, you’re not human?”
Van’s eyebrows did a dance, one that told me he didn’t understand my initial confusion. “Is there another way to interrupt those words?” He said, challenging me.
I couldn’t accept the challenge, of course. Because he was right. His statement wasn’t hard to understand. I was just so taken aback that I was pretty speechless.
“I’m looking right at you, Van.” I affirmed, gesturing to his entire body. “You look pretty human to me.”
“That’s because I’m wearing an illusion right now.” He stated very matter of factly. Like wearing an illusion was a normal fucking explanation. “My kind often wears a human illusion most of their existence to avoid being othered.”
My kind. He was really committing to this bit.
If he wanted a challenge, I was going to meet him there and give him one right back. “Prove it.”
“Really?” Van slacked in his seat, his legs spreading wider to exhibit his annoyance moreover.
“If you want me to believe that you’re not human, then I’m going to need to see some semblance of proof.”
After a beat, Van regained his earlier composure and leaned forward in his seat. “Fine. Name an actor.”
“What?”
“You heard me, Alistair. Name. An actor.”
The sternness in Van’s voice went straight to my dick, unnerving me from the situation at hand. I wasn’t supposed to be turned on right now, I was supposed to be getting answers.
Fine, I’d play his little game. As long as it ended in figuring out what was going on with him, I didn’t really care how we got there.
We still had the entire flight to get through anyway.
I mulled his words over, ready to see how he was going to deliver when I said an actor’s name.
My first thought was to go to Reed, being the actor I’d been closest with, but I decided to go a different route.
“Pedro Pascal.”
Rolling his shoulders, Van said, “Watch closely.”
I was about to roll my eyes at the implication, but I watched, transfixed, as a purple light, like the color of his eyes if I didn’t know any better that they were just deep blue, flashed over his frame.
Van started to change shape right before my eyes, like one second he was the Van I’d come to know, and the next he was my favorite actor.
Down to every detail, Van looked exactly like Pedro Pascal. Like magic.
I shuddered in surprise in my seat, shock clearly evident all over my face. One second, Van was the bodyguard I’d been getting to know these past few months, the last man I’d slept with, and then all of the sudden he was the Chilean superstar.
“What the fuck?”
“Alistair, I’m sorry if it feels like I’m springing this on you.” Van / Pedro told me. Hearing Pedro’s voice speak Van’s words made it very real that he’d been telling me the truth.
He really wasn’t human.
“Can you please change back?” I waved my hand out in front of my face, shielding myself from the form of Pedro in front of my vision. “This is too wild of a conversation to be having with Pedro Pascal.”
The purple light lasered over his form until he was back to being the Van that I was used to seeing.
His eyes were the only thing that lingered or seemed out of place, his irises glowing a very neon purple, just like the light that had caressed his body before he’d shapeshifted.
So I guess his eyes really were purple and the deep blue hue was just part of his apparent illusion.
Once they flashed the neon purple, they were back to the Elizabeth Taylor shade I was so accustomed to, calming me in an instant despite the weird situation I found myself in.
“What’s going on, Van?” I said, once he looked like himself again. “How the fuck are you able to do this?”
“I told you, I’m not human.” He leaned forward in his seat, balancing his elbows on his knees as he gave me a solemn stare. “Have you ever heard of the Orb species olatsma?”
Uh-lots-muh. It wasn’t a word I was particularly familiar with.
I’d worked with caeboros, stellymn, petrylle, and sangamar because of my music videos.
And I’d heard about and seen a fair amount of lycanthe and hjarq.
I wasn’t sure about the other Orbs. There was always the chance that I’d seen more but just didn’t know the name.
I shook my head reluctantly after mulling it over. “I don’t think so.”
Van scoffed, smirking lightly. “I’m not surprised.
Most of my kind prefers to use a designated human illusion to go about their every day life, to blend into human society.
” His eyes grew dark, a hidden truth behind them that he wasn’t quite ready to share.
“It’s very unheard of for olatsma to live in their true form anymore. ”
My kind. Those two words kept echoing in the empty space between my ears, trying to take all of this in. Who the hell was Van if he wasn’t my human bodyguard? I’d thought I hadn’t known much about him before, but it was becoming quite clear that I didn’t know shit about him.
“And all olatsma can do this? Turn into any person at will?”
“Yes.” He said, the bouncing of his knee the indication of his discomfort level. “But we can do more than that. We can shift into any living animal or person. We can’t do plants or trees. That’s more of a tythwig thing.”
My head was swimming with this information, completely skipping over the mention of another species of Orb that I wasn’t overtly familiar with. Then, like a sharp jolt to the stomach, I registered what additional information he’d just given me.
“You can turn into animals?”
“Living ones.” He corrected with a slight nod. “We can’t turn into unicorns or dragons, unfortunately.”
“Show me.” I said, gesturing toward Fawcett and Thiessen. “Turn into a cat.”
“Alistair,” He begged, an expression of exhaustion suddenly over his face.
“You want me to believe you, right?” I crossed my arms. “How the hell do I know this isn’t some sort of hallucination at forty-thousand feet?” I tilted my head toward the window, where the sky was passing by all around us. “I haven’t flown in a while.”
He rolled his eyes, and I hated how cute I thought he was.
As much as I wanted to be repulsed by the fact that Van wasn’t exactly human like I’d thought he was, he was still a sweet, charming guy.
One I’d had an incredible night with, one I’d been thinking about over and over the past few days since it’d happened.
I just needed to see Van’s words in action for my brain to thoroughly be able to capture its truth.
Clearing his throat, Van rolled his shoulders again.
Soon enough, that purple light was washing over his body until he inhumanly shrunk into an adorable little Scottish Fold, just like Fawcett and Thiessen.
I gawked at him incredulously. Holy shit, Van had just turned into a fucking cat.
His coat was solid black, his eyes yellow and bold.
He meowed for good measure, in a gesture that seemed to aid in my ability to grasp that this was really happening.
Thiessen and Fawcett stirred in the cat carrier, eyes glued on Van’s cat form, assessing whether or not he was a threat.
They both meowed back at him, a twin pair of cautious sounds as the purple light phased over the black Scottish Fold until he was enlarging into Van’s usual look.
I stared at him with my mouth slack and an empty void in my head.
Van wasn’t a normal security guard. He wasn’t even a normal man.
He was something else, something different and totally unheard of.
It was as exciting as it was astonishing.
I couldn’t believe that I’d just watched him shapeshift twice before my very eyes.
Then I thought back to that night, the one we’d shared together, and my face soured and my thoughts went on autopilot, forming words I wasn’t able to keep at bay any longer.
“So when we had sex,” I began, uncrossing my arms and looking at him with a glare. “You were lying to me then. You knew you were keeping this massive secret from me and you still slept with me like I didn’t deserve to know.”
“That’s exactly why I said I wanted to tell you that morning after.” Van stated. “I didn’t want to keep it from you any longer.”
I scoffed, re-crossing my arms. “Yeah, waiting until after you fucked me.”
“Alistair, I never meant to lie to you. Or to trick you into having sex with me.” He looked frustrated that he couldn’t come over and comfort me, or touch me in general to try and soothe over his words.
“Being olatsma is very difficult, but I never lied to you about anything else about me. My real name is Vanguard, and I was adopted when I was a child.” His face careened, like he hated that there was something else he’d failed to mention.
“Except I wasn’t raised by human parents.
The last name I gave you during my interview, Argent, is just a last name I’ve used to assimilate into human society, to have a job history.
I was raised by two amazing zoudd parents that took me in and they knew I’d need a last name if I was going to wear my human illusion most of my life. ”
That part actually didn’t bother me as much as it looked like Van was expecting it to. If he wasn’t human, it made sense to me that he would be raised by Orb parents. I’d imagine things would get wild if he’d been adopted by humans and shown them his true form.
“What is your true form?” I pondered aloud, my thoughts and my actual spoken words seeming to blend straight together in a line I wasn’t totally in control of. I blamed the overwhelming new information for my lack of control. “Can you show me what that looks like?”