“Jae-Hyun!” I scream, running over to him.
What. The. Santa???
What the heck is happening?
Why is Hayato here?
And what will he say…and reveal?
Find out in the next episode of
TWELVE MONTHS OF KRISTAL!
GOD ONLY KNOWS
Episode 11
41
Here Today
KRISTAL
“Jae-Hyun!” I rush to my fallen mentor’s side after he collapses.
No, he’s more than a mentor. A father. He’s been like a father to me. But now he lies on the ground, his breathing heavy and labored in the same rattling way I remembered from the Christmas Eve before my mother passed.
I don’t want him to die. Not right now. Not this way. A sob rises in my chest as I try to figure out what’s wrong.
I was orphaned when I was ten, but I curse my easy life now. There’s no need for medicine in the workshop. Spells have been cast so that elves never get sick or suffer so much as a sneeze from allergies. I have no idea what to do with an old cancer-ridden human.
Luckily, Norio drops down on the other side of Jae-Hyun and puts two fingers to the side of his wrinkled neck. “He has a pulse, but it’s weak.”
I nod. I sense that he doesn’t have much time left now that the conditions of my contract with Santa have been met.
I try shaking him. “Jae-Hyun? Jae-Hyun? Your loved ones are here. Please wake up!”
But he doesn’t wake up. In fact, the rattling only gets worse with every breath.
Norio frowns, his expression confused. But titan of industry must be his baseline setting. The confusion clears off his face, and he goes into command mode. “Hayato, call 911.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
Norio and I both look up from Jae-Hyun’s fallen body to see Hayato, standing exactly where he was when Jae-Hyun fell. He looks totally unbothered. Like Jae-Hyun’s merely taking a little nap.
Rage shoots through my body. “We have to do something. He’s totally passed out!”
“He’s not passed out—at least not in the sense that you fear,” Hayato answers, his voice verging on bored. He then shifts his gaze to a point above our heads and says, “It would seem a ghost cannot hold on to its human form when it is highly emotional.”
Norio and I stare at him for a long, bewildered moment. Then we both ask, “What?”
42
I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times
HAYATO
Kristal and Norio stare at me as if I’ve lost my mind.
Actually, Norio has been staring at me in that manner ever since I returned to his doorstep and insisted he travel to San Francisco with me. The old Hayato from ten days ago wouldn’t have risked involving him.
But Kristal has truly changed me. I can now see that he deserves to know the truth about both Jae-Hyun and his younger brother. And bringing Norio along for this reckoning was the only way to ensure any chance of him actually believing me when all was revealed.
I crook my head at the ghost, standing just a few feet away from the old man’s fallen body. He is younger than I expected him to be. Also older. Much, much older. If not for the many drawn depictions of samurais that graced both my paternal and maternal ancestral homes, I might not have recognized him for what he was.
A samurai. I’m looking at a samurai.
He must’ve died in battle. He wears an intricate coat of armor crafted from iron, red leather, and fur. I cannot see his hair, hidden as it is underneath an iron flame helmet laced with gold and bronze. But I could easily imagine him sporting a chonmage, the classic shaved-on-the-top, knot-at-the-back hairstyle long favored by many historical Japanese warriors and current-day sumo wrestlers.
And as for his face, it is well sculpted with the sharp planes both Norio and I inherited from our family's Nakamura side.
I can see now why my mother might have fallen for him. On the outside, he had been a rough and uneducated servant. But his spirit was that of a classically handsome warrior.
My mother had most likely been impressed by his spirit. But I feel nothing but disdain for the ghost after all the trouble he is caused.
“Calm yourself and return to your body,” I command. “I will need your assistance to convince my brother I have not gone insane.”
As if to prove my point, Norio asks, “Who are you talking to?”
His voice is careful and highly modulated. As if he’s no longer talking to the brother he trusted implicitly just a few days ago, but to a crazy person, he doesn’t know it all.
“Now,” I command the ghost.
The ghost wavers, both figuratively and literally. As he hesitates, his image flickers in a way that I’ve only ever seen with spirits from long-ago eras.
Norio stands up from the body of the man Kristal calls Jae-Hyun. “I will call 9-1-1. This situation has obviously gone beyond anything we can handle.”