Ogbanje – Kingsley Okpii

The bus stop was cold and the wind whistled that eerie tune that only it knows how to. Something evil was shadowing me, I could hear its breath, rapid like an infant’s, but deeper. I smelled it, metallic like stale blood. I could feel it, and it made the hair on my nape stand on end. Then I heard a voice in my head. “Bitch! Whore,” it said. Goose bumps marched on my skin like a million ants – was it the cold or the fear? I wasn’t sure, but I knew that voice, it was Anayo’s. Out of reflex, I fingered my bronze ring necklace, rubbing its smooth surface with my thumb to calm myself.  

I killed Anayo two years ago after I’d seen his stigma, four black dots over his left Achilles tendon. It still surprises me how he kept it hidden from me for so long, but I try not to think about it. His was a rare stigma and was located in a rather peculiar spot. This, added to the fact that I never once saw him lose his temper was enough to have fooled even the most experienced guardian detective.

The case was an open-and-shut one, a citizen taking the life of her Ogbanje partner. I was acquitted in seconds, and within an hour his body was mummified and sent off to one of the numerous Ogbanje research facilities. I sometimes catch myself wondering what would’ve become of me if I’d never found out. I’d probably be dead, beaten to death, body rotting in a ditch somewhere, after all, three quarters of all cases of domestic violence features an Ogbanje as the inciting spouse. It’s who they are, what they are.

After twenty minutes of waiting at the bus stop, a yellow BRT bus pulled up. It was empty – which was no surprise as it was about four o’clock in the morning. The buses were automated, their tracks running alongside the tarred roads on which other vehicles ran, and with their programmed brains they circled the same route over and over again, even in the wee hours of the morning when no sane resident of Aro would be found outside of their home.

I stepped onto the bus’s carriage and walked down the aisle to the seat furthest from the entrance, and looked through its faintly tinted window. I saw where I had sat for the last twenty minutes waiting for the bus, and wondered how I’d survived every minute of the wait in the dark. I hated the dark; it was like poison to my spirit. I remembered as a child how I’d plead with my mother to not turn off the lights after she’d tucked me in, and on the nights when she didn’t oblige me, I would scurry off my bed and flick the light switch on as soon as she had left.

I leaned my forehead on the window and I felt my spirit coil away, distancing itself from the darkness that lay on the other side of the glass. I wondered, again, how I survived twenty minutes of being completely immersed in it.

The bus’s engine revved, letting lose a mechanical sound that pierced my ears, and I quickly put my hands over them. It wasn’t the loudness or shrillness of the sound that caused my reaction; it’s what the sound seemed to say. “You murderous whore, I will get you,” it said. I felt a stream of sweat run down my side. “Fuck you!” I cursed under my breath.

“I will kill you,” a raspy voice, carried on the breeze that entered the bus through its open windows as it accelerated. A chill coursed through me and my skin was, again, awash with goose bumps. In that moment I wished I could teleport to Ike’s front yard.

Ike was a professor at Primeford University, and a leading expert in spirit science, and also my childhood friend. It was to his house, at the University, that I was headed so early in the morning.

The bus took forever to reach the next stop and I reckoned it was just five minutes away on any other day. It seemed time had slowed, such that seconds became minutes. I wondered if this was also Anayo’s doing, or maybe my mind was just playing tricks. I pinched my palm in exasperation, something I’d learnt from my mother. She always pinched the centre of her palm as if trying to pull the skin off any time she was frustrated, vexed, or sad. I still recall how red her palms were after I’d told her that Anayo was an Ogbanje. She knew what I had to do.

The bus halted at the next stop even though there was no one waiting, and in the 2 minutes I had to wait at the empty stop I mulled over the redundancy of the BRT technology. If the bus had a human driver, he wouldn’t have stopped at an empty bus stop, let alone wait at one, but then again, he wouldn’t have been on the road working so early in the morning either.

Finally, the wait was over and the engine revved again, but this time I steeled myself to the sound, shielding my mind from its piercing invasion, and then I realised that I would have to do this anytime the bus had to leave a stop, and there were quite a number of those to come. The thought was exhausting.

At the sixth stop there was a man standing, waiting. He got onto the bus and on seeing only me, sitting so far back in the bus, he called out a greeting. “Good morning this morning.” He sounded old-school for a man who looked to be in his thirties. I remembered my dad used to greet like that. But who was I to judge, I was the one wearing the boot-cut denim trousers that went out of style at least ten years ago.

I managed a smile and waved at him. I wasn’t going to call out my greeting from across the distance in the public like an untrained child – even though I had no audience except the man whom I addressed.

The first rays of sunlight were beginning to peep from over the eastern horizon and I was glad for this. The darkness outside, together with the voices I had been shutting out of my mind, had sapped my energy, and so when sunlight found its way into the bus I scuttled to the seat on which it shone and drank from its warmth. I closed my eyes and took deep breaths, focusing my attention on the spot, on my arm, where the ray now shone, and somehow the warmth, faint as it was, seemed to diffuse to every part of me. The passengers, who now consisted the man who got on at the sixth stop and a woman with her child, observed me with something close to confusion on their faces. The woman, a fat lady with more jaws than one person needed, whispered something to her child and they both laughed. In their laughter I heard Anayo cackling derisively at me. I turned to face them, and the child, a young boy no more than ten but almost as big as his mother, quivered when my eyes caught his. His laughter seemed to dry in his throat and choke him. He began to cough wildly. His mother went berserk with worry and began thumping his back repeatedly, with hopes that whatever was caught in his throat would be expelled. Then she turned and caught me still peering intently at her son. “Witch!” She screamed. “Stop it. You are hurting him.” But it was as if I’d been possessed.

All I saw was Anayo laughing at me and I wanted to show him that I wasn’t afraid, so I continued to peer at the boy even as he threw his bouts of cough, each stronger and deeper than the preceding one. Fortunately for the lady and her son, the bus was pulling up at another stop, and when it did, she carried – no, dragged – him off the bus.

My gaze trailed the child as his mother pulled him along the aisle until they were off the bus, then it found the gentleman whose mouth was agape, bewilderment plastered all over his face. On catching my stare, he too scurried off the bus, missing a step as he got off and landing face first on the sidewalk. I had the bus all to myself again.

At the next stop there were six people waiting. They all wore deep red jump suits, and drawn on their breast pockets was the crest of the Primeford University. I’d seen enough of those maroon jump suits during my time at Primeford to know that they were constructional magic students. Amongst them were three boys all towering above six feet, and three girls who were also tall. They took their seats in pairs. They all had their noses in a book or portable device and took no notice of me. I suspected they had a test explaining why they were en route school so early in the morning.

Half the circumference of the sun was now above the horizon and the bus was bathed in its golden rays. Primeford University was the next stop.

As we approached the school, the twin towers of the University gate came into view. The chancellor several years ago had erected the massive gate made from an alloy of gold, silver, and bronze, supported by two massive towers on both ends. When asked why he’d chosen such a bizarre alloy for the gate he’d said it represented the equalisation of man by knowledge. I never really understood his response, but I always assumed he meant that the school welcomed people from every station in life. Still, I felt it a waste of precious metal. The BRT stopped in front of the gate and its doors slid open. We proceeded to file out of the bus, and just as I was about to step off something caught my eyes. A word scratched onto one of the bus’s glass windows. Bitch, it read with a strange symbol underneath it. A feeling of dread grew in me as I considered the students who had gone before me. Had one of them written it? Was my stalker among them? Perhaps one of them had been possessed by Anayo. But they kept on walking, paying me no mind.

I shook the feeling off and walked towards the gate. Once past the gate I was greeted by the familiar scent of knowledge heavy on the air. Its fragrance filled me as I took in the bronze road leading from the gate deep into the university. The road went on for about a kilometre before one noticed the first building, the library. A few paces from the gate I boarded an Intra-University shuttle. The driver was a greying man who had a slur to his speech, and spoke mostly in the native dialect of the Nsukka people, in whose community the Primeford University was built several hundred years ago.

“Nde ebee ị nei jei?” he asked, saliva collecting at the sides of his mouth.

It took me some time to understand what he’d asked, as my Igbo was never good and the Nsukka dialect was renowned for its unintelligibility even to speakers of other Igbo dialects. Where are you going?  I finally translated. “Number 4b Tiger street, staff quarters,” I replied in the general tongue. The man made a clicking sound deep in his throat at my response, and I registered disappointment flash across his features for a second before he collected himself. I never cared for the many languages that afflicted Aro, and I spoke only the common tongue, even though my parents would commonly speak Igbo to my siblings and me as children.

He turned on the engine and we joined other commuters on the bronze road. Soon we came up on the library and took the first exit at the round-about, headed for the staff quarters. We drove between houses that constituted the staff quarters and soon we were on Tiger street. Ike’s house was at the end of the street. When we pulled up at his gate, I reached into my pocket and gave the shuttle driver, who hadn’t spoken a word to me after our earlier exchange, a currency note. On seeing the money, he contorted his face in disgust. “No change,” he hissed.

“You can have it all,” I said, unwilling to search my purse for a smaller denomination. He took the money without as much as a thank you and was on his way.

I dialled Ike’s number on my communication device and after the third ring he picked up. “I am at your gate.” Seconds later, I heard the gate clank, the sound of metal moving on metal, and Ike’s face appeared from the gate.

“Welcome, welcome,” he hugged me tightly, and showed me through the gate. His house stood just as I remembered it. A 2-bedroom bungalow whose singular striking feature was the strange symbol that adorned its walls internally and externally. Ike, on the other hand looked different, he was sporting a full beard. Together with his afro and sideburns his face seemed to be wrapped in a thick layer of hair. I thought he looked funny.

“Trying to look hip, are you?” I teased him.

He chuckled. “I try my best,” he said, running his hand through the thicket of black hair on his face.

The air inside his house seemed different, peaceful in a way I couldn’t quite place. All of a sudden, the feeling of dread I’d had for the last few days was gone and I could feel my muscles relaxing. I filled my lungs with this pleasant air and sprawled myself on the settee in his living room. Ike disappeared and reappeared with a glass of a black fizzy drink.

“Coke this early in the morning?” I asked, shooting him a look. “It’s no wonder you’ve put on so much weight.” I eyed his protruding abdomen.

He set the drink on the table at the centre of the room and touched his abdomen, moving his palms in circles over it. “This is the prime evidence of good living, or would you rather I be skinny like these undergrads, ehn?” he laughed as he took a seat across from me. “And that’s not just coke, I added a herbal potion my students and I developed. It’ll relax you. You look worn out.”

I hesitatingly took a sip of the drink, and true to Ike’s words the drink had a strange flavour I hadn’t tasted before, then I took a large gulp. I felt the coolness of the drink trickle down my ribs and spread to my extremities until it got to my fingertips. In that moment I felt like a new born, without a care in the world, no worries, no aches.

Seeing the relaxation spread through my body Ike began to explain that the potion was a mixture of the extracts from the nchanwu plant and the echicha fruit. “When we patent it, it will replace that poisonous liquid these kids are smoking. It has the advantage of not being addictive and actually being nutritious. It’s also rich in quite a number of vitamins and anti-oxidants.”

“That’s wonderful,” I placed the glass on the centre table, “but I didn’t come here to drown myself in your magic drink. What have you found?”

Few days ago, I’d called Ike and he’d promised to look into the voices that I’d been hearing, and the nightmares that kept me from sleeping.

“What do you remember of the creation story?” He asked, with a smile growing on his face.

“Just what everyone knows, I replied, “Chukwu, the prime spirit created Ekwensu a greater spirit and Amadi a greater man, and then the greater beings gave rise to the lesser beings of which man is one. That’s what we were all taught in elementary school. That’s all I know.”

Ike let out a condescending laugh. The kind a professor makes at a first-year student’s feeble attempt at explaining one of the more complex concepts.

“Your knowledge of the subject is rudimentary at best and fraught with falsities. For starters, there is no prime spirit called Chukwu. Chukwu is a construct made up by philosophers to give coherence to the creation story.” He considered his wall clock, squinting his eyes to see the time on the wall, and then he continued, “Well, it can’t be helped, I’ll have to be a little late for my meeting. Listen closely, let me tell you of our origin.” He had an air of wisdom about him, and for a second he could’ve passed for one of the wise wizards, the rulers of Aro.

“No one knows the beginning, not us humans, or the spirits that live in and between us. All we know is this; there are spirits and there are humans, some humans are spirits and some spirits are humans. Let me explain.

The earliest records we have tell the story of the time when Ekwensu, a greater spirit met Amadi, the Father of men. Ekwensu was on a journey when he came across Amadi’s hut. Amadi welcomed Ekwensu into his home. Amadi treated Ekwensu to a feast as was the custom of men. After the feast Amadi provided Ekwensu with a bed to lay his head for the night, but by morning when Amadi awoke Ekwensu was gone, and several moons later Amadi’s wives bore him five sons. The first wife, Oriaku, bore two children, Obi and Ike both of whom were mages – powerful wizards whose obara is said to run alongside their blood in special vessels akin to the arteries and veins that conduct blood. The second wife, Adala, birthed Ikuku, a lesser spirit, who had control over the winds, and tides of the sea. The last wife, Nneoha, birthed Dim, whom it is said was the first ogbanje – a spirit who has a human body and is born only to die and be reborn again, and Iche who had control over the mind of men. It is said that Ekwensu had inseminated Amadi’s wives with his rotten seed while they already carried Amadi’s offsprings, and thus, the brothers, Obi, Ike, Ikuku, Dim and Iche were all born man-spirits. The story of the brothers weaves a complex plot with many skirmishes between them and their descendants over the years, leading up to the great spirit wars which resulted in the abolishing of lineages and the founding of Aro by the nine wizards.”

I’d surely heard of the great spirit wars just as everyone in Aro, but like most I never cared for the details. “What do you mean by the abolishing of lineages?” I asked, cutting him short.

“Before the wars the lines of the five brothers never intermarried and so you couldn’t happen upon a mixed spirit. But after the war, this law was abolished as an era of peace was ushered in when spirits and men were allowed to marry anyone of their choosing. This gave rise to the appearance of the mixed spirits, creatures who combined the abilities of the 5 great brothers to varying degrees.” He paused, considering something I couldn’t see in his palms.

“I,” he continued as if being snapped back into reality, “suspect that your ex-husband, Anayo was a mixed spirit, and from all you’ve told me I think he is a descendant of Dim and Iche, a psychic ogbanje. He walked to the shelf close to the door and withdrew a large book. The book had a grey hard cover with weird symbols drawn on it, similar to the ones that adorned Ike’s house.

“This is a grimoire,” he explained, “and it includes a chapter for all the documented clans of mixed spirits.”

He hurriedly flipped through the pages until he came to a section where one page had been folded. “Aha! There it is, I’d marked the section with this folded page.” He looked positively thrilled as he scanned the section for the clan of the psychic ogbanje, descendants of Dim and Iche.

“There it is,” he said, pointing at a symbol, a hexagon with a curled snake within it. “That’s the symbol assigned to the psychic ogbanje clan.

I felt my hands shake as I traced a finger over the symbol. I recognized it. It was the same one inscribed on the glass of the bus, right under the word bitch. Ike was right, Anayo had been a psychic ogbanje.

“Look,” Ike said, excitement heavy on his voice as he scrolled his index finger down a column of text, “It also contains research on the abilities of a psychic ogbanje. From the few that have been studied, they are known to possess the ability of telepathy among other traits. One of such traits allows for their powers to manifest at a really young age. As a matter of fact, it says here that there was a case of a psychic ogbanje foetus manifesting its powers before it was delivered from its mother. It’s thought to have haunted its mother’s mind late in the third trimester and she came down with something called peripartum psychosis. When it was born, she tried to kill it but was stopped by her husband who had her committed to the psychatorium. As a teenager the child murdered his father for unknown reasons, and was subsequently apprehended by detective guardians upon which his stigma was revealed.”

“Wow! You mean to tell me I am being haunted by a two-year-old kid? Because that’s how old Anayo’s reincarnation should be”

“Look, it also says the psychic gene seems to amplify that of the Ogbanje enabling them regain memories from their past life earlier than the pure breed Ogbanjes. This may explain why he is after you. He remembers you killed him.”

“No shit! It does. What do I do?” I fingered my necklace. The once calming atmosphere inside of Ike’s apartment had been replaced by air that scalded my lungs as I breathed it in. I was having a panic attack. I could feel my skin prickle with a thousand goose bumps. I was hyperventilating, trying to catch my breath. I felt light headed. The room was spinning. I reached for Ike’s hands to support myself, and then darkness.

When I awoke, I was in a healing room, an IV attached to my right arm. I noticed my clothes had been changed.

“Ah, she’s awake,” came a female voice. A woman dressed in a white coat appeared through the door, following her closely was Ike. He looked worn.

“Where am I? What happened? What’s this in my arm?”

“Relax my child,” the lady in the white coat said, her voice calming. The wrinkles around her eyes and grey hair told me she was at least in her sixties. She smelled of nchanwu, the scented herb Ike had used to prepare his drink. I took deep breaths, filling my lungs with her scent. “I am Fidelia, a healer mage and one of the nine ruling wizards.” I almost jumped out of my bed on hearing that I occupied the same room as one of Aro’s rulers. Nobody really knew who they were. They were such powerful mages that they could take on the form of any creature, any person. But each had their bias. I’d heard of Fidelia, the great healer, one of the ruling wizards with a bias for medicine.

“You were attacked by a PO,” she continued to say but on seeing the quizzical look on my face Ike cut in, “PO stands for psychic Ogbanje. Sorry to interrupt, Wise one, please continue.”

“As I was saying, you suffered a psychic attack and had you not been putting on that talisman,” she said, pointing at my necklace, “you most likely would still be in a coma. Of course, you also have the protective force of the edemede script on Ike’s walls and divine providence that willed it that I would visit Primeford on the same day as your attack to thank for your life. Rest, when you regain your strength we’ll talk more.”

She snapped her fingers twice and turned into a hawk. The hawk hopped on the window pane beside my bed and then turned to look at Ike, who hurriedly rushed to open the windows and then it flew away.

“Ike, what happened? How long was I out?” I could feel a dull ache in my temples. It throbbed in unison with my pulse.

“Four days.” He responded, tears brimming in his eyes. “I thought I’d lost you. You came to me for help and got attacked right in front of me and I couldn’t protect you. So much for being a professor of spirit science.”

“Hey, don’t beat yourself up. You saved me, you brought me here didn’t you. I got the best care. I mean Fidelia herself tended to me.”

He drew a long sigh and I could see that he was doing it again, cursing his ancestry, his ordinary human parents who had no gifts of their own and so couldn’t pass any on to him.

“The wizard, Fidelia, had been scheduled to visit the department of spirit science earlier that day but when you lost consciousness, I rushed you to the healer and she was already there. She said she’d felt the psychic ogbanje’s presence and knew she had to be at the healer’s.

She set up an IV of her obara and let it flow directly from her into you, then she started a healing chant. She sang for the better part of two days without sleep, water or rest – until she’d reinforced your mind’s defences, then, she stopped. The rest was up to you, your will to live.

We waited, one day passed and you still didn’t come to, that was yesterday. I thought I’d lost you forever.” A tear escaped his left eye as he spoke. I’d never seen him so broken.

In the evening when I’d regained most of my strength Ike arranged for us to meet with Fidelia in my room. A few minutes to eight o’clock he opened the windows and, as if on cue, a sparrow flew in and morphed into a young lady. She looked to be in her mid-twenties and wore a white coat. It was Fidelia.

“Greetings, Wise one. I am most grateful for…” she cut me short mid speech with a wave of her hand.

“It is our duty to protect our citizens. Say no more.”

Ike motioned for her to sit at the table he’d prepared, and then helped me off the bed to join her at the table, before taking his own seat.

“It is known that an Ogbanje child can be born into a family even without any of its ancestors having ever been one,” Fidelia began to say immediately I took my seat, “but our researchers have found the frequency of Ogbanje births to be more among certain groups of families. We’ll begin our search from there.”

“Search?” I asked.

“Search for Anayo’s incarnation.” Ike volunteered. “We’ve located his mummified remains at the Ozalla Research Facility. There’s a team of tracking mages working to locate the child incarnation using extracts from the remains, and I think that’s our best bet, because let’s face it, we don’t know a lot about the psychic ogbanje sort, but we do know that Ogbanjes get their stigma some time in their teenage years. And searching for a child whom we have no way to identify and who could be anywhere in Aro is fucking insane.”

Fidelia shot him a look at the swear, but she was in agreement. It was going to be almost impossible to find Anayo’s incarnation without a means to identify the child.

“You have a point Ike, and that’s why we’ve dedicated all our resources to developing the tracking juju, and as a matter of fact the research has been underway for the last decade, but it’s still several years away from completion. It will revolutionize the identification and prosecution of the Ogbanje kind. It’s our hope to one day prenatally identify Ogbanje foetuses and cut them out from their mothers.

“In the meantime, we have guardians scouring every household in every city in search of any two-year-old who may have shown some kind of abnormal behaviour over the past few days beginning around the time when you started having the nightmares.”

“What if it tries again? I fear I may not survive another attack. How do I protect myself?”

“You didn’t tell her,” Fidelia said, addressing Ike.

“Tell me what?”

“Remember how I said Fidelia saved your life. She bled her obara directly into you. You see, obara flows in specialised vessels separate from the veins and arteries that conduct blood. It carries the magical essence of a mage and other spiritually gifted life forms. Obara is never to be mixed with blood for in doing so one dabbles into forbidden sorcery, the likes of necromancy and blood magic.”

“I don’t understand. If obara is never to be mixed with blood, how then did she bleed hers into me?”

Fidelia and Ike considered me for an unsettling amount of time, and when they determined that I wasn’t going to figure out what they were trying to say, the wizard volunteered.

“It’s almost impossible to find a pure human these days, not since the abolishing of the lineages. Everyone is some sort of hybrid. We may all even carry Ogbanje blood as we sit here discussing, albeit in trace amounts, not enough to manifest. I bled my obara into your own obara vessels. They were a bit atrophic seeing as you have very little obara flowing in you.

“We also made a discovery. Ike determined that from the anatomy of your obara vessels you likely are a lesser witch, which would explain how you came to wield such a powerful talisman. Your ancestry must have consisted other lesser witches who passed it down from one generation to the next,” she concluded, reaching across the table to finger my ring necklace.

“With Fidelia’s obara coursing through you, you are safe from further psychic attacks. And we’ve come up with a twice weekly top up regimen to ensure that you are never too low to be susceptible to further psychic intrusions.

I stared at both of them in disbelief as they talked on. I was a witch? Well, a lesser witch but still, a witch no less. And my necklace. My mother had given it to me for protection, but I never for one day believed it really protected me from anything. I had obara flowing in me. It all seemed too surreal.

I remembered the boy and his mother on the bus. Being a witch, a lesser witch, perhaps I was really hurting him at the time, even though it hadn’t felt like I was actively doing anything.

“Are you with us?” Ike snapped me from my thoughts

“Yes, yes. Please forgive me, Wise one. I couldn’t possibly impose on you. I can’t subject you to such torture all for my benefit.

“Do you not want to live?” She asked with a quizzical look on her face

“Believe me I do, more than you know. Maybe perhaps we could take 2 months’ worth of obara at a time. It’ll greatly reduce the inconvenience.”

“That won’t work,” Ike contributed as our topic of discourse was right up his alley. It was refreshing seeing a small smile break across his face as he spoke. “Obara deteriorates within an hour of leaving its hosts body if it isn’t transfused to a recipient,” he said. Then turning to the wizard he continued, “forgive me, Wise one, but there is another way.”

Fidelia considered Ike suspiciously. What other way could there be? A way that even she was unaware of.

“Speak,” she said.

“There have been publications from Bazing of trans…”

“Bazing! You would speak to me of Bazing. That lawless territory made a wasteland by their own hubris and stupidity,” As she spoke, I saw her features grow dim and fearful, and even though she wore a young face I could see the elderly woman I’d met earlier in the day.

I’d heard of Bazing, a country that once rivalled Aro’s might until it fell to dark mages who dabbled in forbidden magic.

“I am sorry, Wise one. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“You should know better. There is a reason we do not speak of Bazing, but continue, I want to hear this solution that Bazing presents us with.”

I could see the conflict on Ike’s face. He did not want to continue with his earlier thought but he had been commanded to do so, and he had no choice but to speak.

“There are reports of a phenomenon they’re calling transcendence. And if the reports are anything to go by, we could transcend her from a lesser witch to a full mage and then with proper guidance she could protect herself.”

“What does this transcendence entail?” Fidelia asked.

“It…it involves. The publications describe a procedure that fuses the obara vessels with the blood vessels at specific nodal points.”

“Blood magic! First you speak to me of Bazing and then you suggest I soil myself with blood magic. Is there no end to your insolence young man? I will hear of no such thing ever again.” Her outrage had somehow caused her to age and she was now the old woman I’d seen when I awoke from my coma.

“Leave your windows open every third and fifth day of the week. Make sure to have the necessary equipment for the transfusion. Ike will fill you in on those. I will fly to you on those days.

 “You should be well enough to be on your way home. Hopefully this arrangement won’t last too long.” With that she morphed into a sparrow, landing on the table. Unlike when she’d arrived, this sparrow had pitch black velvety feathers and bloodshot eyes punctuated in the middle by two black dots. Ike rushed to the window and let the bird fly away.

When he joined me at the table, I could see the frustration and disappointment on his face. He sat and slouched. There were no words of comfort I could conjure. However, I managed to pat his shoulder and he smiled weakly at me.

“Does it have to be her obara? I mean can’t I get obara from any of my mage friends?”

“You know any powerful mage who also happens to have terminally differentiated into a healer?”

I didn’t understand, and he saw this on my face.

“Fidelia’s obara is unique in that it has brewed in her vessels for a very long time, and given her bias for medicine it’s very potent in healing and protecting its recipient from biological and, as in your case, psychic illnesses. There aren’t a lot of mages with obara that potent, and I don’t think you know any one of them. Count yourself lucky your path crossed Fidelia’s.”

I was grateful for my life having being saved, but I didn’t feel lucky. The weight of having to bleed Fidelia twice every week was heavy on my conscience.

I left Ike at the table and made for the bed. It made no sense going back home as it was already dark outside.

Just as I tucked myself in there was a knock on the door.

“Who’s that?” Ike enquired.

“Sorry to disturb. Just checking in to see that everything is okay before the shift change.” I recognized the voice. It was the healer nurse in charge of the wards. I saw Ike relax as he too recognized the voice. He opened the door and there she was, in her white nursing uniform, a young woman no more than 30 years old. Holding her right hand was a child, a boy, or a girl, it was hard to tell. Then I noticed her eyes. They were glassy. The black of her eyes were a very faint grey that they blended with the whites.

Before I could draw Ike’s attention to the nurse’s eyes, the child attached to her hand transformed into a hulking man and bashed her head against the door frame rupturing her forehead. Ike made for the door as quickly as his feet would let him, but the child who was now a man stood in the way, overpowering him and pushing the door wide open. He flung Ike into the seats and table as if he weighed nothing. He then stretched his right hand towards Ike and recited some inaudible incantation under his breath. Ike’s eyes went white like the nurse’s had been, and he stopped moving. The huge man then turned his attention on me.

It had all happened in an instant, the child turning into a man and then squashing the nurse’s head, Ike being thrown across the room and then hypnotized. I had opened my mouth to scream but the sound died in my throat and I just sat on the bed, petrified by fear as he walked towards me.

Up close I could see him clearly. He was bald with a tattoo of a hexagon with a snake within it on his forehead, skin as black as night, and ripped clothes hanging off his back and thighs. He inched towards me slowly as if taking his time, savouring every step.

.

“You think that filthy thing can save you?” The man said, voice jagged as the edge of a saw, as he traced a finger on his forearm signifying the borrowed obara I had coursing through me.

When he was centimetres away, I felt strength flow through my legs like electricity, and I lunged to the side of the bed away from him. I hurriedly opened the windows ready to jump to my certain death, for we were on the twentieth floor, and then I saw it in the distance, moving terribly fast towards me, a pair of oval orbs the colour of the sun.

The man jumped over the bed to grab me and as he did, the object I’d seen flew in, an eagle with gold and violet wings. It transformed mid-air into the young Fidelia wielding a sword with which she struck the man on his back. He fell to the ground, blood spurting from the large gash Fidelia had put in him.

She pinned him down with her right foot, squashing his head, and soon he lay in a pool of his own blood.

“Quickly, get some ropes lets…” Fidelia was saying when he broke free and pushed her into the wall before jumping out the window. Seconds later we heard his body collide with the ground.

“Shit! I didn’t want him to die.” Fidelia said as she sheathed her sword. Ike was rousing in the corner. The nurse’s dead body with its brain leaking out the forehead still lay at the doorway.

“What do you mean you didn’t want him to die?” I asked, and then I felt it, no, I heard it.

“Bitch! Whore! I will be back for you.”

It was Anayo, he’d been reborn; again.