The drive to the house was silent, and when we got there, Nate ushered me into our bedroom. He instructed me to sit on the bed, which I happily did. It only led to me sitting there watching as he paced the room.
"Why are you so fidgety? You aren't the one having a mental breakdown," I said as I started to get dizzy from all the back and forth.
"I'm trying to figure out how to start. You know how I've been pushing you for a relationship and always act like you'll just accept all my advances?" he asked. I wasn't sure where things were going, but I didn't expect that segue.
"Yeah, we went over this already earlier today. If you recall, you said you were going to work on it."
"It's a little bit more complicated than that. You see in my mind our relationship, and I'm talking in the romantic sense of things, is a foregone conclusion because it has already been that way for years."
There was a time when I thought I attracted weirdoes. Cleary that time wasn't a thing of the past.
"We've only known each other for three months, how in the world could we have a relationship before that?"
"Technically, the relationship shouldn't even be measured in years, since it has been going on a few millennia. We were together long before all the modern comforts that surround us were made. That's supposed to count for something, right?" There was definitely something left out of his psych eval.
"Um, Nate you're rambling a little and not making a lick of sense." I hoped he'd calm down and start speaking English. If the explanation he had lined up revolved around us being thousands of years old, we had a problem.
"You know how whenever we touch your body comes alive?" he asked, jumping to a different train of thought.
"It's a little hard to forget, since it happens every time. I know you said it doesn't happen with anyone else, but I find that impossible to believe."
"That's because it doesn't happen with anyone else I touch. It happens with you because we are soulmates and have been for eons."
"Nate, last time I checked, I'm only twenty-five. I can't have been anything for eons, let alone your soulmate."
He came to stand right in front of me. He put his hand on my cheek and looked at me sadly. "I really wish I knew what happened during your last cycle." He removed his hand and commenced the pacing again. "The tattoo on my back isn't just some cool design. It's what we are. We're phoenixes. We live about a thousand years and then we combust. Usually a short time later we're resurrected as we were, with all our previous memories intact."
"You're still confusing me. That isn't even possible. I was worried that my mind is going, but I think yours is too. They must be pumping more than just some calming gas in this town."
"I'll prove it to you, but first let me explain." He sat down beside me to start his tale.
"Back when the earth was first forming into what it is today, out of the liquid part of its core creatures were formed born of fire. In the beginning there was just one, but after a few years another was born. It continued that way until there were two hundred. Some of them paired off and began to mate. I can tell you that's not an easy thing for us, but I'm thankful your parents were among the first to be successful. I can't say we were exactly what we look like now back then, but over the years we've evolved to match what was necessary to blend in.
"For phoenixes not born directly from the fire, the first life cycle is started as a baby and then you age until your thirtieth year. Any subsequent cycles, you come back starting at that age. The originals have always had bodies resembling the older version. After a millennium we usually decide to end the current cycle and start anew. It's something we have to do if we want to continue living.
"We tend to resurrect within a couple of months of our igniting. I've never heard of anyone being gone a full year, and believe me, I would have heard about it. Mates don't usually die together. It's set up that way in case they have children at the time and need one to take care of the child. The last time you died was fifty years ago. We didn't have any children, so we could've gone together, but you insisted our next cycle we'd have children, so we needed to have some distance between our deaths."
I thought maybe he'd take a little break at some point, but he kept soldiering on. I thought about interrupting, and probably should have to ask if he wanted adjoining rooms and matching straight jackets.
"When we resurrect, our mates can feel it, so they know to start looking for each other. We also always resurrect to our point of origin. For any of the originals, that means we end up in a desert over in Egypt. The rest of the phoenixes end up wherever their parents are. I counted down the days until you were coming back to me. After six months, I started getting nervous. After a year, I went insane.
"I didn't understand why you never came back. Up until that point, I'd checked in with your parents daily. In fact, I ended up living next door to them for a few months. You can imagine how crazy your mother was. It got to the point where I couldn't take it anymore. I reverted to my phoenix form and took to the skies.
"I remained a phoenix for forty years, mourning your loss every second of those years. By the time I had tracked your parents down after turning back, you were already in New York. I don't understand why they never mentioned you came back. I think they were scared about the fact that you were literally reborn as a baby. That's never happened before and I can understand why they'd worry, but that should've told me." ?
He finally stopped talking long enough for me to get a word in. "So, not only am I a mythical creature, but I'm a freak among my own kind. This is great, and somehow this explains all my visions and the nose bleed today."
In the grand scheme of things, I should've been grateful to hear Nate's words. They meant I wasn't the most senseless person in house at the time. I didn't remember us ever sitting down to a movie featuring phoenixes, but he had to have gotten the ludicrous idea from somewhere.
"You are not a freak. You're my wife and always have been. No one amongst our kind would call you that. You are revered by all of them. The visions are actually memories of your former lives. The little girl is one of our daughters. If you would've been able to play the memory out, you would've found that it was I who'd just came home.
"The rock that little Mirari was bringing to me is actually in the ring you're wearing now. She was our first child and I wanted you to always remember her young, so I made the ring for you. She goes by Sophia now and is currently residing in Italy with her mate."
"I'm starting to think it'd be a good idea for you to lie down for a little bit and get some sleep. It's been a while since you've been on a case and I think it's done something to your brain synapses. If what you're saying was true, why would I just now start to remember?"
I was perplexed why I'd even allow him to try to explain things further. There was a weird, and very twisted, part of me that wanted what he said to be true. My logical brain was doing a pretty good job of shutting that part up, but I was still a little curious about how his delusion would play out.
"I took this mission because I was hoping that something one of the crazy scientists in the think tank was working on would help trigger your memories. I had nothing to base that on, but I read about a couple of their experiments and had my fingers crossed. Evidently it worked, and?for that I will be forever grateful. You're on the road back to me."
He took my hand and placed it under his own on his cheek. I could see tears forming in his eyes. Whether his story was true or false he believed it.
"You said you could prove this all to me. Telling me a story doesn't prove anything really, other than you have a great imagination."
"I can. You sit right here and don't be afraid." He backed up to stand in the middle of the room. He closed his eyes, and without doing anything else visibly, he caught on fire.
"Oh my God," I said, standing up to run over to him. I noticed the carpet underneath him wasn't burning and the fire didn't seem to actually touch his body. After another second, Nate was no longer standing in front of me. There wa
s a replica of his tattoo floating above the carpet.
"You're so beautiful," I told the bird, not at all scared of its presence in my bedroom.
There was still a halo of fire floating around the bird, but I couldn't help myself when I reached out to touch its feathers. My hand went right through the fire and I petted the velvety feathers. I hadn't been in contact with a lot of birds up close and personal, but I doubted a chicken felt as luxurious as what my hand touched.
"Can you change back now?" I asked.
I wanted to continue the conversation we were having. The visualization had caused a lot more questions to pop up in my mind. I could've started having more hallucinations, but a part of me wanted it to be real. To be something that special, would be amazing. Amazing probably wasn't even the right word, but it was as good as any I could come up with at the time.
"Of course I can change back," Nate's voice said in my head. "I have to warn you that I won't be wearing clothes when I do. The fire does actually touch the skin for a second before the change and incinerates any clothing."
"Okay, I'll turn around then." I quickly turned around, letting him change back. "So is that something I can do? Do you have any other super powers?"
He walked over and touched my shoulder, indicating it was okay for me to face him. Only a second had gone by, so I was skeptical, but when I spun in half a circle, he wore a pair of shorts. I held my hand out to touch his skin, expecting it to be hot or boiled, or something, but it was perfectly smooth. We made our way back over to sit on the bed, which was good because I was feeling a little lightheaded.
"You're a phoenix, so of course you can change. I was hoping you'd remember some of this on your own, but I'd be happy to teach you. Maybe not today, but sometime soon. We actually have no super powers. The changing to a phoenix is just what we are.
"We've been around a very long time, so we've learned to use more of our brain than an average human. You might think of those abilities as super powers. For example, we can communicate by thoughts, pick up other peoples thoughts, move objects with our minds and some even claim to be able to see the future. That used to be one of your specialties," he said as a smile grew on his face.
His smile seemed a little different to me. It still held all the devilishly handsomeness it always had, but there was a hint of relief in it that made it even more devastating for me to witness.
"Now that you're here, I can joke and say I've always wondered if the reason you didn't come back was because you wanted to miss the sixties and seventies. Of course, I ended up missing those decades too, but I always hear jokes about them." Coming clean about what he believed we were hadn't made his jokes any better, but I did laugh at the lameness he tried to pull off.
"What about the nose bleed? I don't mind remembering the past so much anymore, but I don't want to come out of the visions bleeding. People may start asking questions."
"I'm hoping now that you know what's happening, your brain won't be as stressed during the visions," he answered. "Just don't fight with them. No matter what happens, follow the memory through and you should be fine."
?"Do you have any idea why I can't remember any of this?" I asked.
If I wasn't certifiable, he'd proven he wasn't human and that made it easier to accept maybe I wasn't either. I still questioned how any of it was possible, but I was willing to collect all the details.
"No. For the past fifty years I have searched every mind I've come across for any answers to your disappearance. There has never been a case such as yours. That was why when you got shot I was so worried for your health.
"Normally a mortal wound can't kill us. We can only die by choosing to go into the fire. Your parents and I weren't sure if the fluke of a twenty-five-year rebirth resurrection made you different in the sense that those bullets could've killed you. It's one of the reasons I'm so protective of you. In our previous lives, nothing would've killed you, in this one I'm not certain that's still true."
"One last question, and then we better head to the store to pick up groceries for the party." The case had to go on, even if my life had just entered the world of the bizarre.
"They're your names," Nate said before I even asked the question, "starting with your original name, Yara, all written in the first language we developed."
I looked at the symbols covering his shoulders, the symbols that represent my former lives.
"Yara is a very pretty name, what does it mean?" I asked as I traced one of the symbols with my fingertip.
I couldn't read what I was tracing, so I had no idea what name it was. Something about the name oddly sounded familiar. There was no reason for it, but he'd once said I was a human lie detector and nothing he'd said rang false.
"Small butterfly. You've always been my little butterfly."
I looked up to meet his fiery eyes. There was even more fire in them than the few times I'd thought I'd seen some hidden flames.
"I wish I remembered," I said as I stood so we could leave. I wanted to sit and talk about things, but I knew I'd get lost in the story and have to scrub the mission.
"It will all come back. You've already started remembering two of your lives. You only have few millennia more to catch up on. From the sounds of things, you haven't got to the good parts yet."
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CHAPTER 13
Unique is an understatement, I'm just messed up