Spellbound Desires

There were many things Kaito Yoshida didn’t know like the difference between alligators and crocodiles or how to correctly pronounce the word cinnamon but one thing he knew with absolute certainty was that he was going to hell in every religion.

“Kaito? Are you still there? I’m starting to get worried,” Johan’s husky voice asked from Kaito’s ancient smartphone.

In any other situation, Kaito would have laughed or come up with a comeback. Johan was the one who was constantly worrying him by disappearing off the face of the world and not responding to calls and texts for extended amounts of time.

Being a vampire, Johan, along with other supernatural life forms, was constantly being hunted down. So, Kaito was perfectly justified when he began to panic after not hearing from his friend for anything longer than a year—Johan’s standard disappearing time.

“I swear if you don’t answer, I’m calling your parents and telling them the hunters have you,” Johan threatened.

Kaito ignored him and took a deep breath. He pulled himself up from his slumped position and walked towards the body illuminated by his Jeep’s headlights. No. Nobody. He mustn’t think of it as a body.

Thinking of it as a body was highly pessimistic. But then again, thinking of the figure sprawled out in the front of his car as what it was—a pigtailed girl probably just in her teens—was not any less pessimistic. Hence the reason he was going to hell in every religion. Worst case scenario, he had killed a teenager who had the look of a ten-year-old. In the best-case scenario, he had knocked down a girl who looked like a child.

In a moment of what could be best described as pure inhumanity—a rather absurd and inaccurate description as Kaito wasn’t even human—he considered fleeing. Getting into his car and telling Johan that he had driven over something sharp and had needed to change his tire. Then driving home where it was warm and he could watch movies beneath his covers while drinking from his secret stash of chocolate milk.

But Kaito was fundamentally good. And even if he wasn’t, all he needed to do was imagine the same scene but with different actors—a faceless person as the driver and the crumpled body in front of the car, his sister’s. Sure, Akiko was nine and a half and in no way looked like the girl in front of his Jeep, he knew he would be livid if she were ever injured in a hit-and-run.

The sound of whatever Johan said next was drowned out by the beating of his own heart heightened by his supernatural hearing. He took calming breaths and crouched beside the girl. Blood trickled down her temple and there were scrapes all over her body.

He tried to calm his thumping heart to focus on hers but his heart refused to be calm—beating vigorously in his chest like it wanted to get out. Instead, he settled on picking up a dainty wrist and feeling for a pulse. There was a pulse! It was weak but at least it was there.

Slipping one hand underneath her knees and the other underneath her neck, he made to lift her from the ground. It was at that moment that the night got weird. It started with the clasp of her necklace coming undone.

The first signification of the girl’s shape-shifting was when multicolored braids began to replace her puffy pigtails. At that moment, he quickly withdrew his hands and took several steps back. Thankfully, he hadn’t lifted her off the ground so she didn’t fall back to the tarmac. Then, all her limbs grew longer and wounds and scars that were not from the accident appeared on them. Her face became more angular and her nose, slightly crooked.

Kaito stood in front of her stunned. He had seen people’s shapeshifters shifting before. Heck, his entire family were werewolves and he had seen them shift before. He even knew other therianthropes and had seen then shift before. But the thing with therianthropes was that they shifted from human to animal or from animal to human.

Never, in his eighteen years of life, had he ever seen someone shift from one human form to another. He had also never seen someone shift into a different set of clothes: her jean romper had been replaced by a red sweatshirt and biker shorts. It appeared that this person in front of him just basically shifted from a younger version of herself to an older version of herself.

He had been considering taking her to the hospital before. The sad truth was that she was probably better off dead than at a hospital. The world wasn’t a particularly friendly place for non-human entities.

It was hard to lead a comfortable life as an NHE (non-human entity). Sure there were a few NHEs that led successful and seemingly easy lives but he was just a regular werewolf guy, he didn’t have the privileges they had. He had a list of all nearby NHE-friendly enterprises from supermarkets to laundromats but hospitals weren’t on that list. As a werewolf, his healing factor was greatly enhanced so he didn’t have any need for hospitals.

The only time he had required medical care was the one time he had gotten a burn from a silver door knob when he was ten. And even then, his grandma had swooped into action and applied a salve that smelled funny but had soothed the pain. As he got older, he had been able to wait out the pain from any silver burns he acquired.

This girl in front of him, whoever she was, was an NHE (non-human entity). In what seemed less than a flash he remembered when his grandma gave him his first werewolf birthday present alongside a speech preparing him for his transformation and the life of an NHE. He remembered how patiently she explained how different they were from naturally born humans. He had fidgeted, afraid of what to expect. He was forced back to reality by the shaky breath of the girl.

“Gosh,” he muttered under his breath.

The alternative was that the necklace she had been wearing had been magicked. Either way, there was no way for him to tell which hospital would treat her and which hospital would send the hunters the first chance they got.

For the second time that night, he slipped his hands under her frame. The safest place for her to be at the moment was his house. He could only hope that his grandma would know what to do with her.