Chapter 7 Unexpected Connection #2
The shock was instantaneous, a jolt of pure energy that arced up her arm and straight into her heart.
His skin was not cold. It was intensely, impossibly hot, a living forge beneath her touch.
It was the heat of a sun, of a star’s core, a fundamental power that hummed against her palm.
Where her fingers made contact, the luminous bronze of his skin flared, the sigils beneath the surface glowing with a sudden, fierce intensity.
She felt his power, raw and untamed, and it did not frighten her.
It thrilled her. It was a connection, freely chosen.
This was her decision, her touch, her claim.
For the first time, an act of intimacy was an expression of her own power, not a surrender to someone else’s.
The thing Ramon had always feared, his deepest, most paranoid delusion, was beginning to take shape not as a betrayal, but as her salvation.
And she savored the sweet, forbidden rightness of it.
Hours bled into one another, measured only by the slow march of the candle’s flame toward its base.
The killing cold had long since receded, leaving a strange, placid calm in its wake.
They sat on the low taupe sofa, the space between them charged but no longer fraught with terror.
Lina had talked until her voice was raw, unspooling the tangled, ugly story of her marriage.
And he had listened, his magnificent, monstrous presence a constant, validating force in the encroaching dark.
He spoke of his own long existence, of the covenants he’d kept and the judgments he’d delivered, his voice a river of time that carried her far away from the shores of her own small life.
The first hint of dawn began to stain the edges of the drawn curtains, a pale, sickly gray against the black.
Exhaustion was a physical weight on Lina, pressing down on her eyelids, making her bones ache.
She fought it, unwilling to cede a single moment of this new reality to the oblivion of sleep.
To sleep felt like a return to the world where she was alone.
Maruz, who sat with an inhuman stillness that was absolute, turned his head. The faint light caught the sharp, perfect planes of his face. “You are fading, Linang,” he said, his voice a soft rumble.
“I don’t want to sleep,” she confessed, the admission childish but true.
“Your body is mortal. It requires rest,” he stated, his tone gentle but firm.
His voice deepened. “The judgment comes with darkness. Face it rested, not hollowed.” A shiver traced her spine.
In mere hours, Ramon’s key would turn in that lock, and nothing would ever be the same.
Whatever strength she’d gathered in this strange night with Maruz, she would need it all.
She finally surrendered, her head drooping, the last of her adrenaline draining away.
The sofa, a piece of furniture she associated with lonely nights and tense silences, felt different now, a sanctuary.
As her consciousness frayed at the edges, she slipped into a dream that was not a dream at all, but a memory carried in her blood.
The cliff’s edge crumbled beneath her feet, black volcanic sand cascading down to where waves devoured the shore with angry hisses.
Above, stars she’d never seen pierced a sky bruised purple like her own skin after Ramon’s rage.
Salt mingled with loamy earth and night-blooming flowers in the primal air.
At the precipice knelt a woman - the same one from her earlier vision, first of their shared blood.
Ritualistic scars mapped constellations across skin stretched over arms that, though thin, rippled with hard-won strength.
When the woman turned seaward, Lina gasped at her own face staring back - aged by suffering, hollowed by fury, every softness carved away by the knife of survival.
Arms thrust skyward, the woman’s throat tore open with ancient syllables that rode the salt wind.
The sea answered. From its churning depths rose something neither water nor air - a pillar of mist shot through with cold blue light, save for twin points of ember-red that fixed upon her like a predator’s gaze.
This was Maruz before he wore the mask of humanity: pure appetite clothed in the archipelago’s oldest magic.
The obsidian blade flashed once across her palm.
Dark droplets spattered the talisman clutched in her other hand, and as they struck, the column of vapor gathered substance, coalescing into something that could leave the water and walk upon the shore.
With that first step onto land, the pact was sealed.
Then, the dream shifted. The ancient shore faded, and the first mangkukulam was standing before Lina in the void, her eyes burning with a desperate urgency.
She reached out, her fingers feeling as real as Maruz’s touch had been.
“He is a tool, but a tool has its own desires,” the woman whispered across the chasm of centuries, her voice a dry rustle of leaves.
“The power you have claimed is a fire. It will warm you, but it will also consume what you feed it. Be careful, daughter.” Her grip tightened on Lina’s arm.
“The price is always higher than you think.”
Lina woke with a gasp, her body jerking on the sofa.
The ancestor’s warning echoed in the sudden, jarring silence of her own apartment.
The room was bathed in the thin, watery light of a Manila dawn.
For a disoriented second, she felt a spike of pure panic, convinced she was alone, that the night had been a fever dream.
Then she saw him. He was still there, sitting in the same spot, watching her.
His form seemed less solid in the daylight, the edges of his bronze skin blurring slightly into the shadows, but his presence was undiminished.
His fiery eyes held a profound, thoughtful expression as he gazed at her, and she had the unsettling feeling that he had watched her dream.
“Rest, Linang,” he murmured, his voice a low, soothing current that washed over her panic.
He raised his hand, the one that had touched her bruise, and it hovered in the air just above her forehead, not making contact but projecting a palpable sense of sanctuary.
A shield against nightmares and the coming storm.
The ancestor’s warning still troubled her, a seed of doubt planted in the fertile ground of her fear.
But under his watchful gaze, beneath the shelter of his un-given touch, a deeper feeling took root: a sense of safety so absolute it was a revelation.
She was not alone. For the first time since she was a girl, she was not alone.
She let her eyes drift shut, her body sinking back into the cushions.
She fell back into a deep, dreamless sleep, her hand resting on her chest, where the blood-dark talisman lay against her skin, a warm, solid promise.