#kai mason

[stilljustvasha]

clockworkcrow replied to your post“I really want people to ask me questions about my characters, but I’m...”

what does kai think of dogs

Something tells me he doesn't like them very much because they remind him of wolves/lycanthropy, but he's too nice to ever be mean to one.

[100dow2013]

054. History

A boy, barely sixteen, shivers against the cold night. The jacket he's got on is hole-ridden and barely holds any warmth, but he wouldn't dare part with it. So once more, it will have to do. He looks up at the large metal gate and sighs. Another night sneaking into a graveyard and pretending he doesn't know that this is wrong. His conscience is always screaming at him, but he's gotten better at ignoring it now. Sure, these people were supposed to have gone to their final rests, but the ones who have aren't the ones he's after. He's only after the ones who aren't resting anymore.

My favorite stories were always the earliest. The Wolf with Two Names. The one that began it all. The first warrior against the darkness. Ever since that day when he fought against the wolf pack that took his family from him, he fought to make sure no one else had to go through what he had. He took what most people called a curse and put it to good use. He did more with his life than any so-called “normal” human being. He was always a great inspiration for me.

The boy grips the shovel tighter and looks at the grave in front of him. It's fresh. He didn't know this person when they were alive, but he had heard the name before. And now he was dead, and his body was about to be dug up. It sends a chill down the boy's spine.

But even the greatest warriors come to an end eventually. In the end, he was betrayed by one of the people he trusted the most. After all the demons and vampire he had fought, he was killed by the person who had taken him in and cared for him in the years after his parents' death. It just echoed the message I had learned all throughout my entire life: once a person dies, they're gone. Even if it looks like they've come back to life, it's never really them. When a person rises from the dead, their souls is still gone, and all that's left of them is a demon wearing their face. You can never trust a vampire.

“Hurry up, Kai,” the voice booms from above him. Kai doesn't bother to look up; he merely digs the shovel once more into the mound of dirt at his feet. The crunch is more familiar a sound to him than he'd like to admit. He doesn't want to remember that he now spends his nights digging up graves with a priest who takes them to study them. He doesn't want to remember that he never got to see his parents once they died or that he spent weeks with a vampire he didn't know instead of looking for their bodies. He didn't want to remember what he was now, but that didn't matter. No matter what he wanted, this was his life now. Everything else was history.

[100dow2013]

051. Definition of Death

The door of the church moans shut and slams firmly in place. There's some mumbling before Kai's head pokes around around the corner.

He almost makes it to the stairs before the man inside the office calls him back. He ignores the shifting lump in the child's stomach; there's no question what that could be.

“Kai. What is death?”

The question takes him by surprise, and he almost drops the creature concealed within his shirt.

“Wh- what?”

“Death,” Judas spits, annoyed he has to repeat himself. “Define it.”

“Um. Death is... when a person dies?” he says dumbly and shifts his feet. “I guess it's when they stop to exist? One moment they're here, then the next they're not?”

Judas slams his fist on the table, causing the child to jump, and yells, “That's just it. That's what you would expect the answer to be. That's what most people would say, but you and I both know it's not that simple. You spent weeks with a man when the only thing you knew about him was that he was dead. And my wife...”

He cuts himself off, but Kai's curiosity is piqued. Cautiously, he enters the tiny, cluttered office far enough to see the empty bottle of alcohol on the desk next to the priest.

“Judas, are you... drunk?” he asks, reaching out to him like he's some dangerous animal. He's seen Judas temperamental before, but he was always sober when angry.

“So what if I am?” Judas coughs, poking the bulge in Kai's jacket and causing the cat inside to fall to the desk and meow sharply. Despite the fact that this is the third cat Kai has tried to smuggle in this month, Judas still appears shocked. “Get that mangy, flea-ridden thing out of here.”

The boy frantically grabs the feline and flees the office before Judas has a chance to snatch it.

“You never answered my question,” Judas yells after him, but there's no response. He sighs angrily and buries his head in his hands, staring at the bottle in front of him like he's expecting it to move. “Define death,” he repeats to himself.

After a minute of trying to find the answers in the empty glass, he suddenly rises from his chair and makes his way to a small cabinet hidden away in the corner of the room. In the second shelf down, far to the right, there's a small compartment that blends into the back. From this he draws a small vial of thick, red liquid, which he proceeds to pour into the glass that until recently held the remains of his drink. He then takes to staring at this new fluid.

“Blood is life,” he muses to himself, repeating words that his wife had spoken to him after he had raised her from the dead. “The connection between life and death is the blood.”

He holds the glass up and watches it, smells it. The smell turns his stomach almost as much as the idea creeping in his mind. He closes his eye, brings the glass up to his lips, and pauses, reflecting on what he's learned one last time in the hopes that he can talk himself out of it.

Everyone knows the mythos surrounding vampires: to be turned, one must be fed upon. But in reality, it's much more complicated than that. In fact, it's not even the being fed upon that is the key. Someone can be turned simply by living far enough off the narrow road, or by never finding rest in sacred ground. The true key, though, is the blood of the vampyre. When a vampyre turns its prey, it doesn't just feed, it gives of itself. And the longer the blood of the vampyre stays in it's victim's body, the easier it is for a portion of that person's soul to linger after their death.

At least, that's what he's been able to surmise. Strangely enough, he hasn't been able to find an expert on these things yet.

Judas sighs and opens his eyes, but the glass is still there, and still full. Slowly, he lowers it and places it back on the desk. What was he thinking? There was no way to be sure that the information he had was correct; Father Hadon had so much nonsense mixed in with his research that there was no way anything was reliable. And what was he even trying to do? Try to curse himself so that a demon could ride his corpse for the rest of eternity once he died? He was being ridiculous.

He's almost ready to forget this whole mess when he remembers the whole reason he started this. His wife. He has to know what happened to her. What went wrong. He did everything perfectly, yet she had still come back different. Even after all of these years, the guilt is unbearable.

Before he can back down again, he grasps the glass and forces it up to his lips. The contents inside pours into his mouth and coats his throat as it seeps down. He chokes on it and coughs. The glass slips from his hand and shatters on the floor. He can hardly breathe. It tastes nauseous, even worse than it smells.

He collapses into his chair and lets his head fall against the desk, trying not to gag. Hopefully this will all be worth it in the end.

[100dow2013]

037. Foreigner

A man steps off of the train and looks around the station solemnly. In the large bustling crowd he's all alone, with nothing to his name but the back slung on his back. Still, there's no going back anymore. There's nothing left for him anymore where he came from. That life is dead to him.

A few months back, he had been staying at a hotel for longer than he had liked. The one day, a letter came for him. He didn't look at it; he just moved on to the next hotel. No one was supposed to know where he was. But then soon after, another letter arrived for him. This time he read it. The letter, addressed from some priest in England, listed details about himself that no stranger should have known, and the promise of steady food and shelter in exchange for “observation.” He figured it couldn't hurt to investigate, and was now miles away from what used to be home, alone in a foreign country.

As the train churns off to its next destination, the mass of people begins to thin. The man looks around and growls faintly. He had been told that somebody would meet him at the train station, but not what his envoy would look like.

He marches forward. Someone on the outskirts of the crowd catches his eye; they're staring at him.

The man walks towards the stranger.

“Are you Judas?” he asks.

The man nods. “And you must be Ludolf.”

Ludolf nods.

The stranger is a good deal shorter than Ludolf, but that's true of most people. His short blond hair looks like it was washed especially for this occasion, but that at normal times hygiene is not of the utmost importance. The man is skinny, almost unhealthily so. He's wearing black pants and a long black shirt despite the heat.

Ludolf looked down at the boy beside the priest. “You brought another wolf along with you.”

The boy flinches at the world wolf, but the priest doesn't seem to notice. “Yes. Is that a problem?”

“No, of course not.”

He takes a moment to study the other wolf. He's even shorter than Judas, and he's about as skinny. He's wearing a jacket that looks like it belongs in the trash. He's filthy.

“Is he your son?” Ludolf scoffs, only partially joking. He looks like he could be young enough, and they both have the same unclean feel to them.

The boy's eyes finally flick upward. “No.”

“It speaks,” Ludolf laughs, already strolling past the pair. “I'm sure you two have all sorts of war stories to regale me with. You mustn't keep me waiting.”

He waits for the pair to catch up so he knows where he's going, but somehow Ludolf always seems to be in front, in command. An arrogant air emanates from him. He could slaughter these two in an instant, and he knows it. No matter what sort of games this priest thinks he can play, Ludolf will always be the one in control.

[100dow2013]

036. Cornered Animal

Or maybe it was the fact that he had just come from a conversation with Judas. Those conversations always made anything else seem negligible in comparison. Judas' moods seemed to change with the seasons, from horrible in Summer to even more horrible in the winter. It had been awhile since he had actually seen Judas outside of his office. Most times of the year he could be found searching after some supernatural creature or another, but now he just seemed bitter and solitary. Kai supposed the endless years of failures were finally catching up.

And then again, perhaps the cold didn't bother Kai because the beast clawing around just under his skin. Ever since the incident, Kai felt like he had more energy, that he could go for longer without eating, and that his metabolism had quickened to an almost worrying place. Perhaps these were not the only changes? Perhaps his wolf had granted him some sort of resistance to the cold.

Kai greeted a passerby with a smile. The man nodded to him, but then lowered his head and pressed on faster to find warmth.

He had almost made it to his small apartment when he heard a noise from an alleyway next to him. Kai stopped and peered into the darkness, trying to make out any sort of shape that might be hiding there. The noise came in—some sort of scratching noise—and Kai took a step forward.

“Hello?” he called.

No one answered, and so he continued further. When he got to the end of the inlet, he found not another person, but a small cat that was clawing at the side of a building.

Kai smiled. “You're not a fan of the cold, either?”

The cat's head turned sharply so that it was looking at the newcomer. It hissed at him and backed towards the wall.

“It's okay, I'm not gong to hurt you,” Kai soothed and took another cautious step forward.

The cat kept its gaze fixed on the boy, but made no other signs of protest. Kai took another step forward, and then another, until he was right in front of the cat. He bent down and, when it made no effort to escape, pet it.

“Poor thing, out here all by yourself,” he comforted. “No one deserves to live like that. I think you need to come home with me.”

He picked the cat up and it meowed loudly, though it was more from surprise than from distaste. The cat wriggled a moment, but then found a comfortably warm place to curl up in Kai's arms.

Kai smiled quietly at it and continued back home. Another stray taken in. At this rate, he was going to save the world one cat at a time.

[100dow2010]

056. Danger Ahead

            It took only a few minutes of walking through the empty city streets before I found the building. It was just like all the stories had said: a church that was hardly a church, run by a priest that was hardly a priest. Out front, dead trees and graves guarded the path, making it look more like something I would frequent rather than any normal human I had ever met. I think I saw a few cracked windows, some rotting boards on the wall, the remains of a long-deteriorated cross, and a big set of doors whose hinges almost looked too rusty to work.

             I walked up to study the cross, but, as I did, I heard the priest walking up the stairs behind me.

             “Nice place you’ve got here, Judas,” I told him, turning around and watching him approach. “It’s no wonder so many of my kind feel at home here with you.”

            His eyes narrowed on me, and I could tell he had already recognized me. “How did you find me?”

             “News travels fast in the underworld,” I responded, turning back to the cross. I reach a hand out to grab it and it burns; I revel in the pain.

             “Faster than here. The simpletons of this town have no idea what I do in here; no one even cares anymore that I haven’t had a parishioner in years.”

             “Yes, quite suspicious, isn’t it?” I took my hand off the cross and held it in front of my face. It only took an instant to see how red it has gotten, then I looked past my hand to the priest glowering at me.

             “What do you want?”

             “Honestly, Judas, is that how you treat an old friend?” I laughed, and he visibly cringed.

             “You’re not a friend,” he spat at me. “I used you to get what I wanted, and that was it.”

             “Fine,” I sighed, frowning. “Maybe I’m a vampyre who needs help, then. You do that sort of thing, don’t you?” I marched up to him and noticed how small he was. He didn’t show it in his face, but I could see him shaking.

             “What’s it to you?” he asked, still glaring.

             I began to circle him. “You’re playing with dangerous forces, you know. Vampyres aren’t stable like you humans. We aren’t bound by emotions; you can’t predict us. Our only thought is to kill and survive.”

             His eyes followed me, but he didn’t turn around. “What I do is my business alone.”

             “Yes,” I agreed, “but remember what I told you last time we met? I told you not to thank me, because I’d be back for you. Well… I’m back.”

             He spun around, then, a stake in his hand, and thrashed out at me. I easily dodged and grabbed his arm. Snapping it backwards into a disgustingly unnatural position, I swatted his weapon away. The pain on his face is delicious.

             “You’re not a kid anymore, Judas. You may still be feisty, but let’s face it: you couldn’t hurt me if I let you. I think it’s time for you to retire.”

             His good hand was suddenly at my stomach, and I could see the handle of what looks like some sort of a knife in his grip.

             I smiled. “I’m sure you know it would take more than that to kill me.” I put both of my hands on his head, and his eyes grow wide as they stare up at me. “Relax: this will only hurt for a moment.” With that, I wrenched his head around, and was answered with a satisfying snapping sound coming from his neck. His body fell limp to the ground, dead in an instant.

             “See?” I laughed and kicked his body. “Dying isn’t that bad.”

             Moving past him, I ventured down a hallway that appeared to be the most used part of the church. At the end was a horribly hidden door, but it was locked and I didn’t care enough to see what he could be hiding, so I opened up the door to his office instead. Clippings from newspapers about vampire sightings and the like lined all of his walls, his desk, and most of his floor, too.

             “Geeze, Judas, get a life,” I said in disgust.

             On top of all the clutter on his desk was the start to a hand-written letter. It was addressed to some person named Kai, and was full of intriguing content. Content such as a lycan that was able to control when he shifts, and had spent most of his life surrounded by vampyres, other lycans, general paranormal activity, and worst of all, the dead louse outside. I rummaged through some more of his stuff until I found an envelope that seemed to belong with the letter, plainly displaying this lycan’s address.

             Stuffing the envelope in my pocket, I smiled and made my way out of the church and back into the night.

             “This should be interesting,” I laughed to myself, turning down a street and reveling in the exhilarating feel of tonight’s kill.

[100dow2010]

049. Stripes

            I wake up early, just like always, and Jane is still asleep, just like always. I smile, wipe a stray lock of hair behind her ear, and kiss her cheek before pulling myself up out of bed. My pants still seem clean enough, but, looking down at my shirt, I see it’s covered with stains. Sighing, I pull it off and rummage through my drawer for my other shirt.

            “Kai?” she asks, seeing me awake and wrapped up in a blanket. “What’s wrong?”

            “I was cold. Everything’s fine, just go back to bed.”

            “Then come back to bed, silly,” she laughs, still half asleep.

            “I will. Just… go back to sleep.”

            Eying me mistrustfully, she finally gets out of bed and wraps her arm around me. I flinch as she puts her hand on the blanket and it slides a few inches off my back. “Kai, what’s wrong?” she repeats.

            “It’s… it’s nothing,” I plead with her, hunching over and wrapping the blanket tighter around me.

            She doesn’t fall for it. “Are you hiding something?” she asks and pulls the blanket slowly away from me. My teeth clench at the thought of what she’d see if I drop my shield.

            “Let me see it,” she whispers to me, still pulling. I don’t respond, and, before I can stop her, she’s pulled the blanket off my back. She falls silent, and I know what she’s seeing: all across my back are long, red stripes—scars from that night that will never heal, eternal memories permanently etched into my skin.

            I quickly grab for my shirt and crawl back into bed, turning to make sure my back is facing away from her.

            She sighs and sits on the bed next to me. “Kai… are those…?”

            I nod.

            She sighs again. “Kai, you know I love you. I love you no matter what. I knew you were a lycan, and I loved you. You scratched me, and I still loved you. There’s no way that something as petty as that would ever make me stop loving you.” She laughs, “Besides, I have the same scars. Just not as many. We totally match.”

             “It’s not that,” I tell her, positioning myself now to look straight up at her. “It’s not that I thought you’d stop loving me, it’s just… embarrassing.”

            She smiles and lies down next to me, wrapping me in her arms. “You’re too sensitive about this. You’re different than most people; so what? You’re not weird or strange, you’re unique.”

            “What?”

            She sighs and kisses my forehead. “You don’t have to be embarrassed about some silly scars. Thousands of people have some sort of scar on them; it’s nothing to be ashamed of. And I will love you just the way you are, scars or not.”

            “Thanks, you’re sweet,” I say with a smile

            “I know.”

[100dow2010]

028. Sorrow

            Dropping to my knees, I stared at the empty field in front of me. Nothing reminiscent from that night was there anymore. All the lights were gone, the stage had disappeared, and, most importantly, all of the bodies were gone.

            Tears rolled down my cheeks as I searched for any remnant from the last time I was here. But there was nothing. Nothing at all.

            I turned around to see who it was talking, but I could hardly see through my tear-filled eyes. I could vaguely make out a form, clad all in so much black that he seemed to fade into the night around him. The voice seemed familiar, though, and, as I continued to dry my eyes, I slowly recognized who it was.

            Still I didn’t answer.

            “Did you expect the town to just leave a pile of bodies lying in a field for everyone to see? These people are superstitious, and they can put clues together. Mysteriously, and without warning, a large group of people are lured away and killed on a full moon. Of course they’re going to take precautions against what they think has just happened.”

            I stared at him for a while longer, not understanding what he was trying to say. A few stammers managed to escape my mouth, but no full or sensible words.

            “It’s strange how much caution they took in dealing with the bodies, and now the monster they missed is standing right in front of me.”

            “I- I’m not a monster!” I squeaked.

            “No, you’re just pathetic.”

            I didn’t notice he was next to me until his hand pulled me up off the ground and pushed me forward. I stumbled for a few seconds before falling back down, my knees too tired to keep me standing for too long.

            “I didn’t help you so you could squander your power and wallow in sorrow. I helped you so you could use it.”

            I cower as my mind shows me pictures of the one and only time I did use it. Pictures of her lying there—dead, covered in blood, all because of me.

            “I’m never going to use that stupid power! I- I just want my mom and dad back!”

            “They’re never going to come back. They’re dead, Kai. And the sooner you get over that, the sooner you’ll be able to live your life.”

            “But- I never got to say goodbye!”

            “That’s what happens when someone is murdered!” he growled, and behind his voice there was a surprising deepness. “They’re here one moment and they’re gone the next, and there’s nothing you can do about it!”

            I could feel tears welling up in my eyes again. “But… can’t I even see them anymore?”

            There was silence for a moment, and then the man said, softer this time, “No, Kai, I’m sorry. I truly am. After the bodies were found, they were all burned. The town wasn’t sure what happened, and they didn’t want to take any chances.”

            “I… I miss them.”

            “I know,” I heard him say, and a few seconds later I felt his hand on my shoulder. There was a smile on his face, and somehow it seemed out of place. “But that can’t stop you from moving forward.”

            We stayed there, silently, for what seemed like forever, before finally I picked myself up off the ground. He gave me one last, soft smile and I followed him back to the church.