I really love reading all your reviews. So much fun.

Chapter 16

If you had expected me to feel relieved or happy to see my long lost father, you'd be wrong. I had grown up without this man and I had forgotten his features enough that his face looked almost like a stranger's. It didn't help that he was taking me away from my sick husband while there was a monster on the loose.

"Put me back!" I cried. My voice came out clear and strong, and no sign of coughing threatened it.

Now that I was noticing, my head had cleared considerably too. Not encouraged by this, I craned my head over his shoulder too look back at the car just in time to see Lin open the door my father had just taken me out of. I could see my blanket clad back, the rest of me still curled in Naru's arms.

That's when I really started to panic.

"Let me go this instant!" squirming out of a man's arms should not be this difficult. It was almost as if I had shrunk, or I was the corporeal ghost and he was the solid body.

"No," he said. "Not while that thing is loose."

"Naru can take care of me just fine-he has all this time without you-"

The man holding me made an ugly sound in his throat. "He's the reason you are in this mess in the first place. Like hell am I going to leave you with him."

I hadn't been expecting that. "Excuse me? If I recall correctly, you're the reason I'm in this mess."

I got the satisfaction of making him flinch, but he kept walking. I thought I could see something similar in the way he pressed his lips and narrowed his eyes-my eyes.

Tree branches passed over me. They stretched over us, as though living things, and the bushes and trunks seemed to thicken, as though the forest reached out to embrace us. Before the trees blocked my view, I caught site of stone steps leading up to a Tora gate, which marked entrance to sacred ground. Lin had driven us to a shrine.

"If it weren't for that boy," said my father distastefully, "you would have never awakened to your powers and never have awoken the attention of Nisabe, along with several other unfriendly spirits. Him, and his blasted doppleganger."

Gene? "It isn't like ghosts existed before Naru. I would have met them eventually."

"It wasn't spirits," he said. "The doppleganger was a medium. He broke my barrier reaching out to you. How he even saw you is beyond me. But has that self-proclaimed proffesional done anything to repair the damage he has done? Has he done anything to stop the torn and wretched refuse of mankind from reaching you? No." His voice tightened with a bite. "He used you instead."

"That was my choice! I wanted to help people!" I kicked, pushing on his shoulders, but my arms could have been paper for all the good it did. "I'm not four anymore, I have my own free will!"

"A man should be able to protect what he loves no matter their choices."

I snorted. "Oh, that's rich, coming from you."

He raised smooth, dark eyebrows, and I realized they were like mine before I shaped and plucked them. "I protected you up until he came. And I was dead."

"Then why haven't you contacted me before then, hmm?"

"I was preoccupied keeping the cannibal from finding you." He sniffed. "Again, it would have worked if it wasn't for that boy, tearing away the last protection with his..." His face twisted into an ugly, pale snarl.

Branches didn't pass through us or hit us. Rather, they bent out of our way, like mirages. Rain pattered through in streaks of gray. I found it strange I could feel it at all, but I did, pattering through me like the cold fingertips of children drawing on a foggy window.

"He thinks to steal my place," my father continued, voice low as the thunder above us. "And then fail? No. You will not return. You will stay with me until your life's energy fades, then we will return to your mother."

Cold horror flooded to the tips of my fingers. My yelled protest came out as a whisper, as though I were in a bad dream.

"First, to get out of this blasted water," he finished.

"You can't do this. You can't steal my life away."

"This life is meant to learn through suffering. You have suffered more than your fair share. I think it's time to move on."

"Says who!" I cried, finally finding the volume I wanted. "Who died and made you god?"

Just then, a rippling crackle broke across the spiritual plane, like lightning without the flash. I caught glimpses of the headless spirit with its burnt, gaping body, flickering after us in twitching, glitchy strides without having to turn my head. I suppose eyes were an organ stuck to the physical plain. They were just for show in the spiritual.

My father stopped, twisted, and suddenly there was fire licking up the trees behind us. The thing made a gurgling, popping noise as it's organs-made-tongue rose. I thought they might spill out, but they hovered on the bottom lip of the maw, held back by some unseen force.

The fire struggled, though, hissing against the rain and fighting to keep hold of the damp leaves.

He made a low hiss and turned back to where he was going, except this time he ran. My spiritual legs clenched to keep from flopping with each landing of his foot.

"Please!" I screamed. "Take me back! Don't do this!"

"You're sick and spiritually weakened," he said curtly, not in the least winded by his sprint.

"Fine, forget Naru, Takigawa can protect me! He has been this whole time!"

"That's not how it works, Mai."

"Then tell me how it works so I can convince you to put me back, you chauvinistic pig!"

That made him pause. "Excuse me?"

"You heard me! All this crap about protecting me because your my dad and he's my husband-what the hell! Who's protecting you and him? Why the hell can't you just let me protect myself? Screw that, what the hell kind of parent kidnaps their full grown child from their own choices? Bad ones, that's who!"

The darkness that slipped over his eyes almost scared me into thinking I had gone too far. But he just gave a dismissive grunt.

"I showed you part of my soul, hoping you'd understand." He turned his eyes back to where he was going. "But apparently that wasn't enough."

"Then how would you feel if your dad kidnapped you from protecting mom?"

But he wasn't listening to me anymore. The forest had closed in about us tighter than before until it wasn't a forest at all, just walls of darkness, green, and flickering foxfires. I began to recognize the spiritual plain as it was whenever I first stepped into it. It made me long for Gene more than ever.

I tried a different direction, resorting to tears, which wasn't hard as they were near the surface anyways.

"Please! Daddy!"

"You'll thank me," he said.

"Tell yourself that! Like hell I will! You're doing this all for yourself!"

The green vanished completely. He was once more walking, and I couldn't remember when he had stopped running. The passing foxfires gave me the vague impression that a lot more time than I knew of was passing, and panicked alarm rose up even stronger than before, driving me wild.

I imagined Naru waiting by my beside for me to wake from a coma that I never would-

Suddenly, my flailing hands hit my dad's chest with superhuman strength. I shot from his grasp and he fell back onto his rump. I flopped across the spiritual plain, rolling to a stop some distance away from him. I blinked and I was standing. Position here was all about thought. Your surroundings were based off of perceptions, and so was yourself.

I bared my teeth at him. "You will not!"

"Mai-" he started, dark eyes shimmering with fear, pleading.

"No!" I steadied my feet, limbs quivering as though they had been swallowed by heat waves. "Get the hell away from me or I swear I'll kill you!"

For the first time, something I said stunned him speechless.

And in that same moment, the blue-lit dim of the spiritual plain tore open, and a long, boneless, charred arm reached through. The rib-cackling, organs-licking torso followed. It's sightless collarbones didn't even glance towards my father. It just went for me, knobbly black legs almost seeming to dance with each step.

But I was done. The image of Naru's face besides my bed burned in me like a super nova and I stared down that horrid thing with pure, righteous fury.

"You're nothing by a pathetic, sick in the head man!" I cried, almost sung, as the burning within me reached my voice and powered it to an ear-splitting volume. "I'm sick and tired of you causing problems for me! You're not even alive! I AM!"

And without thinking, I crossed the distance between us with one step, swung my arm back, and punched right toward its bared spinal cord, still and white between the flopping purple-red sacks of its lungs.

The bone snapped. It folded in half over my fist, ooze and blood spilling out into nothing.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw my father still kneeling on the ground, frozen in shock.

My arm that had sunken into its flesh glowed with blue light as I yanked it out.

"Get over yourself and die already!" I shouted, bringing my leg up between those pathetic, burnt excuses for limbs. It tore up the things torso like it was jelly. The torn bits of its corps froze in mid air for a moment, as though not realizing what had happened. Then, with something like a relieved sigh, it burst into blue flame and faded away, as every afterimage eventually does.

I started stomping towards the hole it had created, which shone with all the senses I had left behind. I could see the back of my eyelids, feel myself lying in something warm and soft.

"Mai..."

I almost just kept walking. I didn't see why that pathetic man deserved even a bit of my time after nearly swiping me away from my life.

But, since he was my father, and since he had essentially confessed to dedicating his afterlife to protecting me from his mistakes...

I spared a moment to look back.

He was standing right behind me. Distance, after all, was all relative.

He looked at a loss for words. He didn't glow, like I did, and thus looked pale and transparent next to me. He almost looked apologetic, but not quite.

I knew I should say 'thanks' or 'it's okay' or something forgiving. I knew I should be kind. But you couldn't lie on the spiritual plane. There was no ability for numbing white lies or cushioning words. That's partially why they say that, if you've chosen to live a horrible life, dying will send you to hell: because all the justifications and lies you use to protect yourself will be torn away.

And I could see that hell in my father's eyes. I knew that hell. It was the same place he had shown me in my visions, where he replayed over and over the death of that girl, and then the inevitable replacement of the girl with me before the house that was to burn down.

And it was that which made me finally really feel true compassion.

"It sucks when you die and can't be there as your kid grows up," I said softly. "You desperately wanted to be a part of my life...didn't you?"

He didn't need to say it. The answer was there.

"I did my best," he said. His hands grasped at his face.

"And that's all you can do, even if you hadn't died." I hesitated. "Dad...I'll be okay. Na...Oliver is a good man. I chose him. And I really can take care of myself."

But he just shook his head. I got the impression he didn't care. Made me wonder if being alone and dead for so many years made it difficult to comprehend someone else's feelings.

With nothing else to say, and since I couldn't say 'I love you' as I barely knew him, though I wished I could say the words just to put his soul at ease, I turned and stepped into the light.