Chapter Five
Sometimes, he fears her heart as much as he loves it. Fears the way it puts others first and herself second. There is nothing more terrifying than knowing she would put herself at risk to save him.
CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES
Jiro is waiting for them when they get home.
Khiran’s favorite reading chair, a deep leather wingback, has been dragged across the room and placed right in the entry.
When Khiran opens the door, the first thing they see is Jiro’s frame sunk into the leather.
He’s gained weight in the year he’s lived with her, but he still manages to look dwarfed in that oversized chair with its polished brass nailheads and lion heads carved, mid-roar, from the armrest. It’s a physical reminder that, regardless of how mature he feels, he’s still a child.
The second thing she sees is her shotgun—the one she kept in the closet for hunting grouse—across his lap.
He holds it with both hands, ready to snap it up to his shoulder. His finger is painfully close to the trigger as he stares at Khiran. “What are you?”
From his lips, the question feels like a wound. The distrust in his eyes feels like salt. “Jiro—”
“Immortal,” Khiran says, cutting her off before she can string her feelings into words. He gestures to the firearm, voice steady but firm. “If you feel safer holding a gun, so be it. But know that while it hasn’t a chance of killing me, it will hurt, and I will be incredibly displeased.”
Jiro wavers, a moment of hesitation, before the flash of uncertainty is stubbornly snuffed out by resolve. His grip flexes on the stock. “So, what? You’re some kind of god?”
Khiran’s answer is carefully neutral. “Something like that.”
“Anna named the donkey Loki after the god of lies. Is that you?”
The muscle in his jaw jumps, but Khiran doesn’t deny it. “It’s one of the many names I’ve earned over the centuries, yes.”
In her chest, Anna’s heart gives a painful twist. “Those are myths, Jiro. Stories. They aren’t the truth,” she explains gently. “Khiran isn’t your enemy any more than I am.”
For the first time, he looks at her. “He can be anywhere, right?” He spits the question with vehemence, as if the words themselves are coals that have sat in his heart, simmering and waiting to catch.
To burn. “Isn’t that how it works? Why he’s always bringing different food home, and it’s always still warm? ”
Anna doesn’t understand the source of his anger, but she knows a lie now would land like dynamite. Cautiously, she nods, grateful when Khiran seems to accept her leading the conversation. “That’s one of his abilities, yes.”
“Must be great,” he sneers. “Like one big party all the time, right? Eat what you want, be where you want. Watch the stupid little humans kill each other for entertainment.”
“Jiro—”
“Why do you always defend him?!” he shouts, standing. The barrel of the gun hits the wood floors with a dull thud. Anna’s just relieved his finger is no longer near the trigger. “He’s a god! So why the hell isn’t he doing anything?”
“He is—”
“Then it’s not enough!” He looks at Khiran, anger and pain making his eyes glassy. “Why weren’t you there?! Why didn’t you stop it? They put us in horse stalls like we were animals! When they finally let us go, we didn’t have anything to go back to!”
Understanding softens Khiran’s expression into one of pity. “You were forced into one of the internment camps.”
With one sentence, Anna sees where his anger stems and the poison starts. There is a feeling of emptiness in her chest, a hollow echo chamber of regret.
“Yeah, I was!” Jiro snaps. “So where the hell were you?!”
She knows exactly where Khiran was.
He was in Germany inspiring mutinies and deserters.
Gathering secrets to slip to allied code breakers like buried treasure.
Whispering in the ears of journalists and photographers, turning their eyes towards the horrors in hopes that they would tell the world in words and pictures.
In China, Korea, Indonesia—bearing witness to horrors he refuses to share even with her.
She knows, because it was her he came home to. Tired and beaten, he’d fold himself into her arms and tell her all the ways he had failed while he was gone. Anna had held him, listened to all the ways the world tore itself apart from the comfort of the little home she had made herself.
Khiran had been overseas, killing himself trying to make a difference.
Anna had been here, living her life of gardens and honey, painting and reading.
Enjoying a peaceful life in the same state that rounded up anyone of Japanese ancestry and stripped them of everything in the name of national security.
It’s not Khiran who deserves Jiro’s resentment, but her.
She tries to swallow, but her throat is so tight it feels like swallowing sand. There’s an apology on her tongue that she can’t bring herself to speak. It’s too weak. Words are too weak.
“I was in Washington,” Khiran answers. “In London, Paris, Osaka, Hong Kong, Berlin. There is nothing entertaining about witnessing what humans do to each other.” He softens, resigned to a truth Anna has known for decades. “I cannot be everywhere. Not at once.”
Jiro picks up the shotgun, resting the wooden stock against his shoulder and looking down the barrel. Straight at Khiran. “I don’t believe you.”
Anna steps between them, her hands open. Placating. “It’s the truth. We aren’t without limitations, Jiro.”
His face changes. The hot fury that burned so brightly goes out, his face paling in realization. “You’re one of them.”
It isn’t until the words leave him that Anna realizes what she probably should have from the beginning.
He had thought her to be like him—mortal and suffering under the same cruel neglect from gods he didn’t believe existed until today.
How would he have thought her to be anything else?
She has no power, no magic, like the others.
Aside from her immortality, there is nothing that excludes her from being strictly human.
“Yes,” she murmurs. “And no.” She lowers her hands, lets them hang limp at her sides.
“I live a very human life, but I don’t… I don’t die like one.
” Her chest aches around the words, but she can see Jiro struggling to understand the difference.
“I’ve been alive for more than eight centuries.
I’ve helped those I can, how I can, but I only have mortal means in which to do it. ”
She gestures to Khiran behind her, not daring to take her eyes off the boy she’s come to love as family. “Khiran helps how he can, but he does it on a bigger scale. One we can’t see, because if we did, it wouldn’t work.”
She takes a step toward him, but Jiro only raises the barrel higher. He aims it at her chest, tears streaming down his cheeks. Anna softens, fingers gently curling around cold steel. “I’m sorry we weren’t there to help you when you needed it.”
Jiro’s teeth clench so hard, Anna can almost hear them groan. “Didn’t you hear us praying?”
“No.” She hopes he can hear the regret that saturates the word as easily as she can taste it. It sits on her tongue, oily and bitter. “It doesn’t work that way.”
Even if it did, she knows it wouldn’t change the outcome. Their ears would ring with a world’s worth of prayers they couldn’t heed. Couldn’t answer. Anna doesn’t need the whispers of more ghosts to drown in.
“Give me the gun, Jiro.” It’s a request disguised as an order. Anna’s voice is too soft, too gentle, to be a command. “We both know you won’t shoot me.”
“Why not?!” he shouts, voice cracking like glass under pressure.
Splintering into a thousand shards, each as sharp and as dangerous as the other.
“My father stopped fighting. Gave up. But I’m not like him.
I’m not weak.” The tears come faster, breath hitching, face crumpling.
When he repeats the words, they come out as a sob. “I’m not!”
“No, Jiro. You’re not. You’ve been so strong. That’s why you’re here. That’s why you’re still alive.” She offers him a smile, a timid, haunted thing that carries more suffering than it should. “Living takes strength, but that doesn’t mean you have to do it alone.”
A second, then two. The barrel of the shotgun trembles with how violently he’s shaking.
Then it drops away, the steel thudding against the floor.
In the morning, when she looks, Anna knows she will find an imprint of the muzzle on the wood—a scar more visible than the ones on their hearts.
For now, she focuses on the boy leaning into her, his forehead against her collar and his tears soaking into the cotton of her dress.
Her arms wrap around his shoulders, folding him into her embrace until the firearm drops from his grip completely.
His empty hands fist in the cloth at her back as if she’s the only thing mooring him.
As if letting her go would mean being swept off into the sea.
It’s a feeling she knows—understands. She holds him closer, tighter, just so he’ll know he’s not alone in holding on.
Silently, Khiran picks up the abandoned shotgun from the floor. His movements slow and careful as he goes to empty it of ammunition. His brow furrows, eyes meeting hers over Jiro’s dark hair, before he angles his body so she can see the chamber.
It’s empty.
That night, Khiran lays with his back to the mattress and his gaze on the ceiling. “How did you know it wasn’t loaded?”
The question is so soft, it floats. Anna thinks of the hard steel pressed against her chest, of the years of pain that drove it there in the first place.
Thinks of the box of birdshot that sat in the same closet as the shotgun.
“I didn’t,” she admits. The confession sounds louder in the dark.
“I only—” She pauses. Knew isn’t the right word—doesn’t do the feeling in her chest justice.
Knowing implies facts and certainties. Knowing is simple. Easy.
Belief is harder.
“I had faith that he wouldn’t pull the trigger.”
He turns to his side, facing her. She can feel his gaze on her cheek, questioning. Mirroring his position, they lay face to face, with only a sliver of silver moonlight streaming through the window to see by. So close they share the same breath. “It’s not your fault.”
“I know,” she murmurs, but the words are fragile. Weak. Knowing is different from believing. Just because she knows it to be true doesn’t mean she feels it.
Khiran’s fingers thread through her hair, curling at the nape of her neck. “You put yourself between me and the end of a shotgun.”
“I don’t bleed.” The color of his eyes is lost in the dark, but she can see the way they spark. She doesn’t let his displeasure shy her from the truth. “You do.”
“Don’t do it again.”
Anna reaches for the hand tangled in her hair, thumb brushing soothing circles over his pulse. “You know I can’t promise that.”
“Won’t,” he corrects, the word a resigned grumble against her lips.
She considers it, turns the differences around in her mind the way a child holds a crystal to the window just to watch the light bend and refract, showering the room in a galaxy of rainbow colored stars.
“Won’t,” she agrees, because choosing him has only ever felt natural, never forced.
“And can’t.” Because shielding him from hurt, from pain, was as instinctual as breathing.
She could have hung back, could have held her breath, but her heart would have burned and her lungs would have starved. “Would you do any differently?”
“No,” he sighs. “But we’ve already established that I’m a fool when it comes to you.”
Anna’s smile is heavy, weighed down by heartache. “Then let us be fools together.”