José Ortiz's Arc

Chapter 3 of 6

Zack slowed to a walk. The rain had thinned to a mist and the woods held that dead quiet that came after hard weather. He was still a mile from Alana's door. His boots pushed through wet leaves and the memory pushed back up before he could stop it. 1826. A road outside a small town whose name he had made himself forget. Lavitz on his back in the dirt with a bandit's knife in his gut. Blood coming faster than Zack could press it back. Lavitz had made him promise once, plain and calm, in a room with the curtains open. Never turn me. Zack had said the word yes and meant it for five years. He had broken it in under a minute. He remembered lifting Lavitz's head. He remembered biting his own wrist. He remembered the taste of his own blood in Lavitz's mouth and Lavitz too weak to turn his face away. Then the long dark hours in a rented room while the body cooled and warmed and cooled again. Lavitz woke at dawn. Zack said, You're alive. Lavitz said, You promised. Zack said, I couldn't. Lavitz sat up and ripped off a shirt stiff with old blood and looked at Zack the way a man looks at an enemy. Then Lavitz said, “I did not want this”. He walked out the door and Zack let him go because there was nothing left to say that Lavitz would hear. Two weeks later they got back together and Zack taught Lavitz how to survive on animal blood. Lavitz however felt zack was trying too hard to keep him under control. So Zack left on his own. Only to be hunted and burned to ashes by villagers. Zack had swore to never to turn another person without their consent. He had kept that one. In present day, Zack stopped on the path. The mist ran off his hair and down his neck. If the innkeeper wore Lavitz's face, then one of two things was true. Either the man at the Sea Spell Inn was some stranger cursed with a dead man's shape, and Zack owed him an apology and a wide berth. Or Lavitz had never been killed by an angry mob. If Lavitz was alive, then two hundred years of penance had been paid to a ghost that had made itself. Zack started walking again, faster now. He would reach Alana's door before full dark. He would ask her one question. Is José Lavitz reborn?