Sorry, I sort of did chapter four twice, but I promise you'll like this one better!
Suddenly, the phone rang. I flopped over, got one of my rear tentacles caught under a radiator and fell on my face. From behind me, the guys laughed and amongst them, the girl. Her voice was strangely like Blacky's but lighter; a giggling bark of a laugh. I rolled my eyes and got back on my 'feet', laughing with the rest of them. I picked up the phone that Damon installed in the front of the bus and said "Hello?"
Heavy breathing. Then a man, with a heavy British accent, said "Hello? To whom am I speaking?" I rolled my eyes.
"Listen buddy, y'got the wrong number-"
" The girl is in my custody."
I shut up a moment. How did this Limey (no offense to any Brits reading this) know we had Ran? Was he watching us? If so, I'd be talking to my agent.
"Listen dude, this is a private restricted line and I don't know how you know-"
"Pardon me. My name is Caleb Buschemi, I got this number from a very good friend of mine named Dkylar. He's one of the other gods."
I paused.
"Who is it?" asked Freddy. I waved a hand at him and hissed.
"You have my attention now, Buschemi." From behind me, Ran cried "Caleb!"
I heard her scramble up and run up behind me, so I coiled a tentacle around what I thought felt like her waist and held her at bay.
"Keep her with you, but keep her safe. She can take care of herself, but that girl has the fighting spirit of a Scotsman and the temper of an Irish. She's only sixteen, and I'm sure if you ask her, she'll tell you the circumstances surrounding that, but I tell you to keep her safe. Understand? I hear from my son Corey that you'll be flying out to the U.K. next month. I'll see you at the concert."
"How'll we know it's you?" I asked.
"Easy." He had a small smile in his voice and I got the feeling he wasn't very young.
"I'll be accompanied by a wild-haired lizard punk and I'm the orange one with brown hair. I have a long scar running down the side of my face."
A scar, huh? Sounds like his name should be Slade or Captain Bluebeard I thought randomly, smiling to myself.
"Can I talk, can I talk?" asked Ran from behind me. She struggled against my tightening appendage and I let her go.
"Hey…Caleb, was it? Ran wants to talk to you." I said. I handed to phone to her and she said "Hi, Dad!" with a big grin on her face. She was breathtakingly beautiful and her white seal-like skin was seamless and seemed to glow with the light of the moon. In that moment, I believed her.
"Okay. I will….no. Why?"
"Hey, Guppie, y'think it's really her dad?" asked Freddy. I shook my head.
"He says he's orange and from the sound of his son, he's a lizard. Should be interesting, he says he'll see us at the show next month." It was September now and we were planning to fly out after Blacky's birthday party, of which he conveniently knew nothing.
"She's gorgeous." breathed Kou, goggling at her. Adrian elbowed his conjoined twin in the ribs (what ribs he has) and he snapped out of it. Their sixteen (together) tentacles twitched and thumped occasionally, like a content cat's. In the sunlight, their skin was like living flames and it was hard to look at them for too long, they were so brightly colored. I guessed that Ran would be the same way, with her glowing white skin.
"Okay. Love you….bye." She hung up, still smiling.
"He's not really my dad. He was the one who took me in when I was human and fed me monster food, thus mutating me. I love his family like the one I never had growing up." She explained. She had a peculiarly cryptic way of talking.
"So, Ran. You'll be traveling with us for the next month and a half, so let me set down some rules for you." said Freddy.
"First; if the sound crew needs help, they'll ask Blacky. If he needs help, and only then, will you be allowed to handle our equipment. Second; we'll be featuring a few roadies this tour, so stay out of their way, too. Third and this is very important; No doing anything someone under eighteen is allowed to do." He stated. Ran rolled her eyes.
"No drinking, smoking, fooling with the roadies, trying to get into you guy's beds or getting in the way, got it. Anything else?" she summed up.
"She's good." said Adrian, laughing. I chuckled and put an arm around her shoulder, pulling her close. She tensed and I felt bad for the memory it must have induced in her mind.
"I like you, kid. We're heading from here to South Dakota for now. Our jet's being repaired so we're driving. In the meantime, it's gonna be a very boring ride. Wanna swap stories, eat junk food and drink 'till we drop?" I invited. I love beer, but unfortunately, after two or three, I'm usually drunk off my ass. My brother Sunny can down a six pack and get a buzz.
"Guppie, she's just a kid." said Freddy warningly. I laughed.
"Freddy, you're the second biggest alcoholic I know, give the kid a break, let'er have some fun." I taunted. Ran rolled her eyes and pulled away from me.
"How 'bout we skip beer, give me a few sodas, swap stories and eat junk food 'till we puke? Sound better? I'm missing a few organs, including half my liver, so I wouldn't drink if I could." she rephrased it. Kou and Adrian narrowed their eyes in suspicion.
"Why're you missing a few organs?" asked Kou.
She turned to face us from the left side and showed us a long, dark white scar, running just from the top of her pelvic bone to the middle of her rib cage. It wasn't a very long scar, because she was short and there wasn't much room between her ribs and her hips, but she was curvy enough so that I felt myself get a little loose in front. I snapped myself out of those thoughts and focused again on the scar. It really disfigured her, but then, so did the half dozen or so smaller scars that I began to notice.
"I was born with the same birth defect you guys were. My brother and I were separated shortly before the fire and I was still really clumsy without him. I'm still dead clumsy." she said.
"Ah." said Kou.
"Oh. That makes sense." said Adrian.
"Don't you have to be same sex?" I asked curiously.
She shrugged. "That's what I've read on the subject but I guess not. I know what I was like and I guess that's proof enough." She said dismissively, as if she wanted to go onto a different topic.
"Good enough for me." agreed Kou.
The bus was stopped at a rather deserted intersection and the stoplights were busted, flashing their silent, uninterested lights over the darkening landscape and bathing the grass nearby in an eerie light. It was almost nine.
"You still hungry?" asked Freddy. Ran shook her head but I distinctly heard her stomach growl. Blacky did too, because he rolled his eyes and reached into the porta-cooler. He tossed her a monster lunchable and said "bullshit. Eat."
"Okay. Thanks." She shrugged, and she promptly tore open the cardboard and began fixing herself a cold deep dish pizza. We lived on that stuff when we were on the road.
"Caleb said that you were sixteen but if I asked that you'd 'tell me the situation regarding that'. What'd he mean?" I asked.
"At any given fertile age, the deity will stop aging in order to preserve their fertility until they are ready to have children. Call it nature's way of making it so that you won't get old and die before you get the chance." She explained.
"So you're sixteen FOREVER!" cried Freddy, looking quite alarmed.
"I guess so. At least until I have children. And the first time, it will be children. Fraternal twins are strongly hereditary in my family." She said.
"Why?" I asked.
She looked at me sort of odd, like I should know this already, and said "Because it takes more than one person to supervise all the water in both worlds. Actually, the human world and the monster world are the same thing on the same planet; they're just reversals of each other. The monster world is simply a reflection of the human world." She explained. It took a while for all she'd told us to sink in.
"There is a way I can begin aging again." She said suddenly.
"How?" asked Freddy. He still looked quite appalled that she'd be stuck sixteen forever.
"If I have children, they grow up and have children, and so on and so forth until the next eighth generation, the new deities are born and I can begin safely aging again. Even then I'll still live for a very long time. I'll share deity duties with the newborn deities until they are old enough to control it on their own, then I'll simply assist them when needed. I'll never lose the power of the sea." She told us, spreading tomato sauce on her crust.
Freddy sighed and shook his head.
"Kid, this is sumthin' else." He said, shaking his head again. He was right. But it was about to be something else entirely. Little did he know that within the next forty eight hours, she would save our lives.
FORESHADOWING!