Splitting a Soul~Chapter 4

“Hey everyone, look who finally decided to show up,” my mom said as she almost flung me into the room full of my relatives before heading into the kitchen. As my eyes looked around the room, I saw a lot of my family sitting around the room. Most of them were laughing as they carried on conversations of their own while my younger cousins seemed to be running around the house playing tag or maybe even hide-and-seek. Some of my older relatives were here as well. I saw my grandparents sitting over on a small love seat joking with two of my aunts. My Uncle Mark was over by the appetizer table snacking on carrots, which were his favorite food. When he saw me he kind of gave me a wave before turning around and grabbing another carrot, snapping it loudly as he took a bite. When my Grandpa Don saw me, he stopped talking to my Aunt Susan and Aunt Missy and almost sprinted across the room. Despite being in his mid-sixties, he was still as strong as an ox and stood at a little over fix feet tall.

“How’s my favorite chess partner?” he said as he gave me a big hug.

“I’m your only chess partner,” I replied in a deadpan tone. “Every other member of the family is smart enough not to play you anymore.”

“You know some time over the break, we’ll have to play a few games,” Grandpa said to me with a smile.

“I already owe Jack about a hundred games already,” I said with a sigh, but my Grandpa Don gave me a stern look. “But I’m sure I will have plenty of time for a few games.”

He gave me a big smile and messed up my hand with his hand. Grandpa Don then looked over my shoulder and saw Jackson and Kimi standing behind me.

“And who is this lovely lady?” Grandpa Don asked.

“Don’t you know?” Jack asked, looking a bit confused. “Isn’t she Ash’s cous…” I elbowed him in the gut. I knew it was a low blow, but I didn’t want my cover to be blown so easily. I only told him she was my cousin to try and avoid suspicion, but if he wasn’t suspicious then, he was now. Thankfully my Grandpa Don was a quick thinker and saw everything at once.

“Of course, I can’t remember the last time I saw you! You were only this big last time I saw you,” Grandpa said, lowering his hand to about his knee. “How is your mother doing? I heard she got sick so you came here for Thanksgiving in her place.” “Thank you,” I mouthed silently and he gave me a quick wink in return. However always one to cause trouble, my grandpa wasn’t going to let this slide.

“So, do you want to hear some embarrassing stories about your cousin?” he asked and Kimi’s face lit up as she shot me a smile. My face on the other hand seemed to go completely pale. My mom and I had lived with my grandparents for a number of years and stories tended to add up, especially when you’re a young kid.

“Sounds like fun,” Kimi said and followed him over to the love seat. I on the other hand was left standing there and was forced to watch as my Grandpa Don entered his Story-Teller mode. If there was one thing Grandpa Don was better at then chess, it was telling a story.

“Ok, so this happened right after Ash moved in with us,” Grandpa Don started, which drew the attention of most of my other relatives in the area.

“Oh I have to hear this,” Jack said and found a nice spot on the wall to lean against. I on the other hand knew what story he was about to tell and wanted to just hide in a corner.

“So his mother was always telling me to watch my mouth because Ash over there was at a very impressionable age, or some mumbo-jumbo like that. I tended to ignore her however. I mean I cursed all the time in front of my own children and they turned out ok; right Susan?” he said, turning to his one daughter in the chair next to him.

“Dam straight,” she replied back. I would have thought it was a joke if I didn’t know her as well as I did.

“Exactly, so as I was saying. Ash had gone upstairs about fifteen minutes earlier to get ready for bed. The water must have been on for most of that time and after I was done talking to his mother I yelled up the stairs,” he said, making an exaggerated gesture to make it seem like he was yelling up some stairs. “Ash, what the hell are you doing?! He then yelled back ‘Brushing the hell out of my teeth Papa.’ A moment later his mom started yelling at me with so many ‘I told you so’s’ that I couldn’t help but laugh.”

Grandpa Don kept going from there. Kimi was laughing almost nonstop as he went from one story to another. He told her about the time that I accidently took the parking brake off my grandma’s car and it roll down the hill and broke the fence at the local park. He talked about how there was an indent in the upstairs hallway, caused by me putting my head right up against the wall whenever I was sent to get a time out.

“This is one of my favorites,” he began as he started another story. “So I was visiting my daughter for the weekend and Donna and I were sleeping in the couch bed in the living room. Ash was probably only about two years old at the time. So it is the middle of the night and I think I hear a pitter patter of feet, but I quickly go back to sleep. A minute later I hear the fridge open and a loud thud. Now I have no idea what is happening, but I keep quiet to see what is going on. As I’m lying down I hear the sound of something heavy being dragged across the floor and quiet footsteps. Now this goes on, I hear it getting closer and closer until it is right next to the bed. All of a sudden I hear ‘Papa, milk Papa.’ Ash had gone to the kitchen and pulled an entire gallon of milk out of the fridge and carried it all the way to my bed!”

At this everyone started laughing and I turned a deep shade of red. Thankfully, he had eventually moved on from me and started telling stories of his own childhood and his time at school. He even told one of my favorite stories and I took it as an apology for all the teasing.

“Ok, last one before dinner. So this took place back in my first year if high school, or maybe my second. I had gotten detention from my science teacher, Mr. Tong, and had to stay after school. Now you have to understand, Mr. Tong would run his own experiments after school and the kids in detention would have to help. Well about ten minutes into detention, another teacher walks in and they start talking. Meanwhile, I grabbed two electrical clamps and asked Mr. Tong to hold them. The sucker was so distracted that he grabbed them and continued his conversation while I walked over to the far wall and grabbed the large toggle. It took Mr. Tong almost a full minute before he stopped, looked down at what he was holding, and then looked over to see me with my hand on the on switch. He was so stunned that he didn’t know what to do. All of a sudden he dropped the clamps to the floor and charged right at me. He was pretty fast too, as he chased me around the school three times before finally getting his hands on me. I would have had detention for a year, but he didn’t want to ever see me again outside of class,” Grandpa Don joked and everyone laughed with him. Even I let out a small chuckle.

“Dinner time everyone,” my mom called from the kitchen. “Ash, can you set the table?”

“Sure thing,” I said and headed into the kitchen. There was something alienating about it however. I found myself having to check three or four cabinets before I found the one I wanted. I had been gone so long, that I couldn’t even remember where the forks were. I eventually got everything together and pulled the napkins down from on top of the refrigerator.

The actual dinner was pretty chaotic. There were about three different tables as not everyone could fit at one. The younger kids were sitting at a small fold up table with a tablecloth on it in the living room. There were about six of them and I tried to remember their names. The two oldest were Sammy and Molly, Aunt Susan’s kids. The others were Jordan, Sully, Alex, and Katie, but I could never remember which one went with which aunt, as they were always together whenever we had big parties. The second table was bigger and was in a different part of the kitchen, but it held about five people who were all smashed together. This was where Jack, Kimi, and I sat, as well as my older cousin Tommy and his dad, Uncle Mark. The big table in the dining room was where everyone else was. My grandparents, my mom, two of my aunts and uncles, and my Great-Uncle Drew, who flew in from out of town.

Each table got to get up once and get their food before the next table good get up. I grabbed a little of everything when it was our table’s turn, but Jack seemed to just pile stuff on his plate. Kimi didn’t even know where to start, as there was everything from turkey, to lamb, to sweet and mashed potatoes. She eventually decided to stick with my plan of attack and grab small bits of everything. Dinner went by really fast and afterward, there was plenty of cleanup to do and leftovers to pass out. Jack was about to go into a food-coma and Kimi was enjoying a slice of apple pie while I put the last bowl away. After that, everything became a blur.

A few of my aunts and uncles left, heading back to the hotel before it got too late. My older cousin ended up falling asleep on the love seat, which was kind of funny because his legs were hanging over the side. A few other relatives headed for the guest rooms or set up sleeping bags on the floor for the night. I lead Kimi upstairs to my room. We didn’t have a lot of extra space in the house so the plan was to let her sleep in my room and I would roll out a sleeping bag or something on the floor somewhere.

“This is a nice room,” Kimi said as she looked around. This was actually the first time I had seen it in awhile. I could tell my mom had cleaned it while I was gone because I couldn’t find anything. My room was actually kind of plain as I didn’t really have much. My bookshelf was filled with multiple copies of Ripley’s Believe It or Not, which were gifts from my dad. There was some kind of joke there, but I could never figure it out. I also had a few small Lego sets around the room from when I was younger. Besides that, all I really had was a small dresser and about three different clocks around the room. The bed was also pretty simple, being a single bed with a black comforter on top.

“Ya, it does what I need it to,” I joked.

“So what is it with you and your family?” she asked me.

“What?” I asked back, as I didn’t really understand what she meant.

“Look at you and now look at everyone else,” she commented, but saw I still didn’t get it. “You have a family of Aisling’s pretty much. They are loud, hyper, your Grandpa Don is pretty much the ring leader. Now look at you; you’re quiet, reserved, and are usually very restrained. What happened?”

“Someone needs to balance them out,” I told her, which was pretty much true. This wasn’t the first time someone had mentioned this to me. Jack and I used to joke that we were born into the wrong family and were switched at birth or something, as his family was normally very serious. “I mean when you grow up around craziness, you don’t see it as crazy so everything is normal. And when surrounded by crazy, you either turn crazy yourself or just learn to deal with it.”

“So I guess you learned to deal with it?” she asked rhetorically, already knowing the answer already. We joked around for awhile before it got late and Kimi started falling asleep in mid-sentences. Eventually she completely passed out and I was careful to cover her in a few blankets. I grabbed a sleeping bad out of my closet and headed downstairs. Everyone appeared to be asleep except for Jack, who was sitting at the kitchen table listening to his ipod.

“What are you still doing up?” I asked, but he just ssshhh’ed me.

“Dude, listen to this,” he said, holding out an earphone to me. I put it in my ear and I heard a news anchor talking about some kind of explosion in the Albany area.

“That’s right John, there appears to be lava filling the streets outside Albany. It is somehow flowing uphill toward the northern part of the suburbs. No word yet on what caused this, but more details will be revealed soon. As of right now it seems to be staying on the streets, but people are being told to stay in their homes…” the anchor said, but Jack pulled the earphone away.

“It is heading this way,” Jack said. “Should we tell everyone?”

“No, they’ll just start to panic and the news guy said to stay inside,” I said. I knew this couldn’t be a natural occurrence, as Albany wasn’t known for their active volcanoes, but I needed to think of a way to not worry Jackson.

“That isn’t stopping her,” Jack said, pointing behind me.

“Kimi?” I said out loud, but she appeared to be in a trance and just walked right out the door. Jack and I both looked at each other for a minute before jumping up from the table and rushing after her.

I took a good look at her and small sparks seemed to be flowing from her hair. It was like it was alive as every move of her hair kicked up more sparks. I wondered what Jack was seeing as the Mist would normally hide these things in a way that humans could understand.

“What is that?!” Jack said as he looked past Kimi and down the street. What I saw scared me almost to death. Walking down the street was a giant that appeared to be completely made of lava. Every step he took caused the road to melt and plants to go up in flames. Maybe the fire and heat it generated was what brought Kimi outside. It was a minor Elemental, most likely a mix of Earth and Fire to make magma. As soon as it saw us, a ball of magma formed in his hand and he threw it at us. Without thinking I pulled out Alter, my sword, and stabbed it into the ground. A wall of earth rose up and shielded all of us. At the same time, a cold beam of snow and ice hit the ball of lava and cooled it down until it was just rock. The rock hit the wall of earth and simply bounced off.

I looked over and saw Jack holding a long wooden staff that curved into a hook at the end. It also looked like Celestial Bronze was threaded into the wood, as if the wood had grown around the bronze. Frost had formed on Jackson’s hoodie and I could see his breath coming from his mouth. His hair also seemed to turn slightly white as he looked back at me. We looked at each other for a few moments, trying to think of the right words.

“You’re a demigod?!” we both said at the same time.

Author's Note
I'd like to dedicate this chapter to my Grandpa Don. He died about three years back on the 23rd of December. However, he will always be the most important person in my life and was even more amazing then I could ever write down on paper or type in words. Also, most of the stories above are actually true stories from our lives together or his life alone.