Chapter 6

                                                            

THE FOLLOWING WEEKS WERE my hardest and also my happiest. I was free, more at peace, and relaxed. Every other night found me at Olofi on the ancient training grounds, pushed hard by my taskmaster, Oniko, in weapons and magic training, while the days at school became more fun with Kudaisi to spice things up.

The watcher who made my nights sleepless had turned out to be a witch sentry posted to keep watch and protect me at nights, since the cursed ones could only move at night. And with the help of Lara, I finally dealt with Ebiye and her group, giving them the scare of their lives when they learnt I was a witchlord—a position far above even the matrons they feared—while Stephen and his group did their best to avoid Kudaisi and I after the incident which put all of them in casts—an incident that proved to be a mystery to the whole school as they would not say how it happened.

The major highlights of the weeks were the Saturdays I went out with Kudaisi and Lara tagging alongside her new nerdy boyfriend, Adeola—who would equally pass for an athlete since he frequented the gym and was built, but was much more interested in quantum physics and had a really sour fashion sense.

I would never forget the shock on Felicia’s face the first Saturday I went to her for permission to go hang out with friends rather than following to her supermarket where my siblings and I worked part-time on the weekends. Since I had never once asked to go out with friends in all my sixteen years, I understood her shock.

“Who are these friends you want to hang out with?” Felicia asked, concentrating on the sandwich she was making for breakfast. “I only know Lara.”

“It’s the Ferrari boy.” Taiwo who was eavesdropping on our conversation from the kitchen door blurted. I groaned inwardly.

“Taiwo get away from there this moment.” Felicia barked. She waited until she heard Taiwo walk away before turning back to me. My heart pounded as I knew what was coming. “So you now have a boyfriend and I don’t know about it?” Felicia sounded hurt, since I used to tell her almost anything.

True, the emotions between Kudaisi and I was thick, but we have still not taken any further step. “Kudaisi is not my boyfriend, we are just friends.”

Felicia perked her eyebrows. “I should have known. Your face is glowing more recently, you seem more happy, relaxed, and you are always on your phone chatting.”

“Seriously we are only just friends,” I insisted.

Felicia scoffed. “Follow me.” She abandoned her work and led me to her room where she took me through ‘the talk’—a very awkward twenty minutes of sexual education.

It was another of those Saturdays two weeks later, and today, Kudaisi had to come to pick me up from Felicia’s supermarket since father was home and I had to pretend I was going to my part-time work as usual. Lara came in to call me out as I was not ready for Felicia to meet Kudaisi just yet, and for all her thoughts, I was going out with Lara.

“So where are we going today?” I asked Kudaisi as I entered the car.

He smiled, his twinkling eyes making my heart race. “Cinema first, then maybe some other place to cool off after.”

“Cool.”

Kudaisi picked a movie for us when we arrived at the cinema, I was not sure the title, while Adeola chose to watch an animation movie with Lara, making us split to different halls. The movie Kudaisi picked was ways apart from what we read in the synopsis, a bad excuse of a thriller movie and I quickly lost interest a few minutes in. Soft smacking sounds of kissing soon reached our ears from the couple seated below us, making me blush at their actions.

“You don’t like the movie?” Kudaisi asked.

“Do you?” I retorted’                                                    

“Of course I don’t. They succeeded in deceiving us by overhyping the movie. I was really expecting something mind blowing from the trailer I watched a little while back.” Kudaisi chuckled bitterly. “Should we leave? We can go to the gaming center down below or look for another attraction.”

I felt reluctant to leave, the ambience of the theater hall was cool despite everything, and sitting beside Kudaisi in the near darkness gave me a kind of adrenalin rush. “Let’s just wait a little more.”

“Okay.”

I really tried to watch the movie, holding my eyes on the screen, but I soon lost interest as the couple below got to me again with the sounds they made from their kissing.

Kudaisi reached over and held my hand over the arm rest, making my heart skip a beat. He then began to stroke it softly, stoking an inferno from where his hands touched through my whole body. A moment later he sighed and removed his hand, and I felt like he was retracting back to a wall he built around himself, a place where he was all alone.

“Tell me about yourself,” I asked softly, willing him to come out from behind the wall he hid himself.

He went silent for a minute or two, and just when I wanted to repeat myself thinking he did not hear me, he replied. “You have read all there is to me online I’m sure.”

“I want to hear it from your mouth.”

He sighed. “Okay. What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

“Everything enh?” he burst into a short chuckle. “There is nothing much to me except that I’m a young boy with more money than I can ever finish, and my parents and siblings died in a car accident when I was only a baby, leaving me with my grandmother who brought me up till she passed on last year.”

Something must have happened with his grandmother’s death. I sensed his anger and vexation as he spoke about her passing.

“How did she die? Your grandmother.”

“Heart failure.” There was an unmistakable hitch in his voice.

“Can you tell me a little about your Grandmother?” I asked hesitantly, scared I might be touching a sore topic.

Kudaisi stared fixedly at the screen for a long moment, silent. He was like a statue, unmoving, and his amber eyes seemingly gave of a little glow as the air of loneliness he effused increased. It made me wonder if it was because I had magic that I was sensitive to his emotions, since that was not the case with any other person but him.

“Iya Agba was everything to me, she was my world. It took me losing her to know how much I would have been nothing without her, and she left just when I needed her the most,” Kudaisi said in a low voice.

Iya Agba… A feeling of déjà vu hit me as the image of the old woman I saw in my mind’s eye the day I challenged Kudaisi cropped up again alongside the feeling of sadness and loss.

“It’s okay.” I reached over and took his hand in mine.

Kudaisi turned to me, smiling bitterly. “You remind me of her a little you know? Iya agba always looked withdrawn and calm like a dove, but she was in fact a crouching tiger that could strike at a moment’s notice. Everyone knew her to be kind, the kindest person I ever know, but she was also a strict disciplinarian.” He zoned out, still smiling as he was lost in thought.

I smiled back wryly, lost in the emotions on his face. He must have loved her a lot, and losing her must have nearly killed him with the depression it brought. The movie forgotten, the theatre forgotten, I stared into Kudaisi’s face losing track of time. He was all I could see.

“Am I that handsome?”

“Yes…” I nodded slowly. “What? No…” I shook my head hard, coming out of the haze. Kudaisi giggled, a sharp twinkle in his eyes. I had not noticed when he moved, and then suddenly his face was mere inches away from mine.

“Toke.”

“Yes?” I held his gaze as the haze descended again, sinking me fast.

“You’re the best thing that has happened to me in a very long time.”

My heart began to race and I began to breathe heavily.

“I-” Kudaisi continued.

I didn’t know where the confidence came from, but I moved forward and closed the tiny distance between us, silencing his words with my lips.

Few minutes later as we left the cinema for a private resort, Lara already knew that I and Kudaisi were officially a thing just by looking at my face. I looked like someone that was ‘high on drugs’ in her words, and that was a dead giveaway.

 We spent the rest of the day lounging by the poolside of the resort and I did not return to the supermarket until late in the evening, meeting up with Felicia and the others to follow them home and keep up pretences for father who was home.

“I can’t go out on Saturdays anymore till the exams are over.” I informed Lara the following Monday. It was a free period and we sat at the back of the class, away from the others who surrounded Kudaisi as he held them spellbound in another of his stories.

“Why?” Lara asked.

“My father said I should stop work at Felicia’s supermart so I can take the time to read since school leaving exams are starting in less than three weeks, and Felicia also said she won’t be giving me permission to hang out anymore until after the exams.”

Lara nodded. “I see reason in what they both said. We still need to focus on our future despite everything.”

My mind wandered to our hidden night lives as she spoke of focusing on the future. The trainings at Olofi were all tailored towards making me stronger to be able to defend against the vampires—cursed ones, but I have not even seen them or confirmed if they were truly real.

I looked around carefully, and noticing nobody near us, I turned back to Lara “Err… Lara.”

“Yes?” she held my gaze.

“I have some questions I want to ask about this witch thing.”

Lara’s drew a sharp breath, eyes widening. She waved her hand in the air, saying something under her breath, and a soundproof barrier surrounded us. “This is not the best place to talk about it,” she hissed.

“Then where is the best place?” I snapped. “I don’t even know much about who I am and what I’m supposed to do besides fighting some cursed ones I’ve never seen. And no one is telling me anything.” There was just so much I didn’t know and no time to bring them up. Most nights once I got to Olofi it was always straight to trainings till it was time to return home.

Lara sighed, letting the silence draw for a moment. “What do you want to know?”

“Have you seen the vampires before?”

She nodded. “Twice. I and some other nighthawks-in-training followed the teams who fought with them to watch.”

“So what do they look like?”

Lara took a moment to think before replying. “They look like normal humans, but they are faster, stronger and very evil. The two times I witnessed them in action, it was a scene of utter carnage. They had nearly killed all the witches of the small coven who had first sensed them and came to save their human preys of which there was no survivor, before we arrived.”

My eyes widened at the picture her words created in my mind.

“Only the nighthawks and witchlords can really fight them, and even then it’s never easy,” Lara added.

“Wow!” I hissed, fear written plainly on my face.

Lara smiled wryly. “There’s nothing to worry about, really. The cursed ones only began to appear recently when the magic barrier protecting Africa began to weaken, and the supreme mothers are doing everything to get it back up. Once that is done they will all meet their end.”

“So you mean these cursed ones from outside?”

“No.” Lara shook their head grimly. “This is something we don’t still understand. The barrier has not totally fallen so they cannot still come from outside Africa in here. These cursed ones we are currently fighting are all from around here and are all strangely youths. We don’t know who is turning and recruiting them and we don’t know what they are after, seemingly attacking people randomly.”

The silence drew for a moment before she added, “You know, all of Africa currently face the threat of the cursed ones, but ours here in Nigeria is unique because of the one we call ‘the Shadow’.”

“The Shadow?” I raised my brows, intrigued, leaning forward.

“Yes. He is a cursed one too, but he is always showing up to foil the plans of the others right before we get there. He seems faster and stronger than an average cursed one.” She explained. “I saw him once, the second time I went to watch their battle, and he saved two humans that night, fighting hard against the cursed ones. But once we arrived and he saw that they were safe, he fled.”

So there was one good one trying to rescue humans? I didn’t know why, but the thought of that was a little refreshing. “Why did he run?” I asked.

“Because there is priority on his capture. Since he is different from the others the council hopes maybe if we can capture him then we can get him to tell us the cursed ones nests. The others that had been captured all vomit blood and die before they can say anything, making us come to the conclusion that they are under oath.”

I drew a sharp breath. Such an oath only pointed to one thing, powerful magic! And if the witches could not find a roundabout way to make their captives speak then it means the level of magic in play was even frightenly powerful. “That means magic is involved?” I still asked.

Lara sighed. “Unfortunately, yes.”

My mind wandered as I ruminated on all Lara just told me. This was even more real than I thought it to be, more serious.

“Is that all?” Lara asked. “I want to remove the barrier so we can get to other things.”

“No,” I replied as I remembered another issue on my mind. “Is it possible Kudaisi has magic?”

Lara stared straight into my eyes. “What?”

“I mean maybe he hasn’t discovered it yet like me at that time.”

“Why do you think Kudaisi has magic?”

I pursed my lips, thinking how to explain myself. “I don’t know, I just feel so.” I paused for a moment. “I feel something between us whenever we are together, something very tangible but I can’t lay my hands on it. Like I’m in his head sometimes and he’s in mine. It is even there when we are apart, and then there is—”

Lara burst out laughing, cutting me short.

“What?” I glared at her.

She continued laughing for a long while, amusement masking her face, before she finally stopped. “Well, it is a kind of magic in its own. It is called love.” She burst into laughter over again, seeing my look of displeasure. I allowed her have her fun, scowling silently by her side.

“We will continue another time,” Lara said when she finally stopped laughing, removing the barrier as her boyfriend, Adeola, came towards us.