Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
AKIRA
“You!” it hissed.
“Me.” I leaned on the doorframe, watching it glide back a few feet and quiver around the edges, afraid.
“Out of your prison, eh?” I said.
I called these free ones floaters because, well, they were turds.
The mazoku made no moves to attack me, and I didn’t dash for my katanas stored under my bed.
“What do you want?” I asked, checking my nails, giving the prick the indifference it deserved.
It hissed, its body shrinking. “Better than this.”
The mazoku vanished.
“Oh. No scrap? What a shame.”
I rolled my shoulders, letting out a yawn.
Life wasn’t all about those demonic wankers, guilt, and telling my brain to piss off. I had a wedding coming up.
Hell to the yeah.
The seventh night of Cherry Moon was the prettiest, when the ruby lunar rays were just mind-blowing, even turning the stars into twinkling, cherry-red jewels, the sky itself a gorgeous inky purple hue.
So pretty, so right for our wedding.
On the seventh night this year, we’d be saying our vows under the juiciest of moons right here at the cottage. All the plans were in place, the big day only seven days away.
Yikes. Yay. And more yikes.
I’d been baking my way through some wedding anxieties up until this point. I was super excited, but also nervous as hell now it was closing in.
G had proposed to me almost three years ago, after that Christmas Wanyūdō incident in Cardiff. He made me cry, and made me so happy. I couldn’t believe it. I think I pinched myself about fifty times a day that week.
My poor arm.
We’d discussed a summer wedding but couldn’t quite agree on a month. When the Cherry Moon became a thing for the next couple of years, the decision was made to do the deed this Holy Week. Really get ourselves a mega tenshi blessing, you know?
Let them smile upon our marriage with cherrylicious glee.
Honestly, these things took time to plan. We wanted it to be perfect, and rushing things would have been too much of a ball ache. Declaring our love in front of our nearest and dearest meant a lot to us, so finding the perfect day mattered.
As nervous as I was about everything, I couldn’t wait to exchange rings and sign the marriage register, officially belonging to Gabriel Dawson in every sense. Not that I didn’t already, because he had all of me. I just loved the idea of it being there in ink, the ring shining on my finger.
Didn’t stop my nerves being put through a shredder.
What if we were attacked? Strange things did go down in those seven days.
With the air being rich with magic, there’d been reports of some weird happenings.
Warlocks and witches tripped out on the power, some spells going awry.
Like the witch in Paris who made the umbrellas come to life and sing showtunes all week.
I mean, no thanks. I didn’t want my cushions getting up to wail the songs of Annie at me.
Goodbye to the cushions for sure.
And what if I fucked up the cake—a low possibility, but not out of the realms.
Every time I closed my eyes, I saw the wedding cake I’d be baking. A job I’d almost been banned from undertaking. G didn’t agree at first, thinking about me and the pressure it might put on me. Said I should kick back and let someone else do it.
Bless him. As if I’d let anyone else do it. I’d be their worst nightmare, overseeing everything, a proper backseat driver meddling away. I wouldn’t be able to help myself.
I mean, there’d been a few nights I’d woken up with the cold sweats, all sorts of baking disaster scenarios rolling through my mind.
Dry sponge.
Dodgy icing.
Soggy bottoms.
Lopsided tiers.
Collapse! Collapse! Collapse!
I put my foot down, winning the argument with the deal that G got to choose the type of cake. After lots of negotiation, and me giving him the best head of his life on the bedroom floor, he relented and chose my cherry bakewell cake—a spongy play on the famous tart.
We were defo living in cherrylicious times, eh?
In five days, I’d be making the cake.
Bring it on.
Done with gazing at the sun-drenched hills, I covered the cupcakes and dumped myself on our blue living room sofa to, well, stare at the outside again. Why not? It was such a lovely September morning, so why not admire the shit out of it for a bit?
A gentle breeze blew through the room, keeping the temperature nice and mild. Unlike last week’s mega-hot heatwave, which felt like the country was trapped in a chili pepper’s arsehole—if chili peppers had arseholes. By the tenshi! I’d been sweating in crevices I never knew existed!
Birds sang, some landing in the birdbath up on the elevated grassy section of the back garden.
I smiled, admiring the rainbow spread of flowers in the pots in the lower patioed section directly outside the doors, and the beds along the hedges at the far end of the elevated grassy area, backing onto the hills and meadows beyond.
G worked so hard on all three of our gardens, turning them into floral utopias. Despite the small cottage, the land was pretty vast, making this property the bigger of the two.
Each garden was sectioned off by hedges. What we called the west garden was basically our front garden, the central one was at the back of the house, and the east garden was home to our training area. I kept up with my fitness and combat training in that glass box with tinted windows.
My honey bunny loved to garden, getting seriously passionate about it last year on his thirtieth birthday. I wasn’t quite there with him in the green fingered department yet, but I helped out where I could.
What better place to get married than here?
The central garden was more than big enough to accommodate our wedding gazebo and the aisle and altar section we’d be erecting beside our cherry tree.
It better not rain!
We’d turned this cottage into a paradise, as well as the smaller, second property we owned in North Wales.
Our pockets of joy, havens away from the hustle and bustle of the world.
I couldn’t ever imagine living anywhere else again, especially not London.
Man, those days were done, well in the past. My life as a city boy was left in the dust.
Having been born in Tokyo, raised in London, city-living was in my blood. And I guess a small part of me did miss it. But nope. I wasn’t going back. I just couldn’t live that life again. We got by without ever needing to be in the rat race again.
G sometimes popped into Cardiff to get stock for his online rare book business if he needed to. But not that regularly.
Butterflies fluttered past the open doors as a robin landed on the patio slabs for a quick hop about.
Cute.
I was so proud of G for growing his business like he did. The man knew his books, as well as their value. In fact, he’d become so popular, he had to get himself an office in the closest village where he also kept overspill of his stock.
I’d killed the dream of running a café in that same village. For ages, I wanted to give it a go, expand my business, get myself some regulars. But I preferred being an online bakery. I wasn’t a full recluse, but halfway there. Home was my safe space, anywhere else drained my social battery quickly.
This wedding would be my first time around lots of people in a good while, which was the source of lots of stomach flips in anticipation.
Ugh.
I think the traumatic events of my life might have cut something out of me. Before the Christmas Wanyūdō bullshit, I’d been making the effort to be tight with my family. But here I was, letting my duty slide. Losing myself a little.
It was safer that way.
Right?
You need to sort your shit out.
What I needed was more sweetness. I rolled off the sofa, returned to the kitchen, and grabbed the pot of glacé cherries, the damn things having me in a chokehold.
“You have no power here,” I told the sticky fruit. “But yes, you do.” In my gob it went.
Yum.
With G at his office until two, stage one of my baking plan had been completed with the cupcakes. Next, the oatmeal, peanut, and chocolate raisin cookies. They were an unrelenting itch I’d been ignoring for too long.
“Today is the day.”
I popped another cherry. You know, for morale.
And…one more.
The best part of the Cherry Moon, healing aside, was the cherries. That magical energy brought ripened fruits to every single cherry tree in the world for the whole week, and they never ran out until the end of night seven.
Sometimes, they even helped with physical healing if you were lucky.
Tonight, I’d be milking the shit out of the situation, plucking the glossy orbs from our cherry tree and putting them to good use. Their flavor was dialed up to a bazillion on the yum scale, making them beyond awesome. You didn’t get that level of delicious sweetness outside of the Holy Week.
Cherry shortbread and cherry pie were on the horizon.
Aw, man. Freshly baked and warm cherry pie with ice cream? Get in me quicker than Gabriel’s boner, please.
As I drummed my fingers on the counter, I noticed the sunlight glinting off my white-gold engagement ring.
I really was gonna marry G.
“You lucky fucker,” I told myself.
The King of my Heart.
He’d claimed it, made it his, and orchestrated a life of unadulterated joy for us I never could’ve imagined. I counted my blessings every day, thanked our creators for him, but also feared losing him—the seeds of that fear sown after that damn Wanyūdō attack.
Bloody hell, the dread of loss had grown exponentially recently.
Pure happiness like this must be fleeting, right? Nothing lasts forever. I’d learned that lesson time and time again in my thirty years of life. Seen people come and go, seen my life unravel and come back together again.
But one day it would unravel again, because those were the rules of living. And I couldn’t stand it. Bollocks to actually knowing there was an afterlife and we’d be spending eternity together at some point. Once we both ended up there, of course.
No. I never wanted to spend a day without him, no matter what.