Polishing the final chapter as I send this to the admins. :)
I know there isn't as much nookie in this chapter, but please bear with me. I promise that it is worth the orgasm denial.
Do let me know what you think and I hope you have enjoyed the story so far, because I am preparing the Tikbalang wedding now.
Also, the English usage and spelling errors you will find in this chapter (at the point where Kidlat and Ulap peek into the Makati Police headquarters) are deliberate and are part and parcel of the work. Yes, they are deliberate.
*****
The night gave way to a stunning dawn painted in bright fingers of pastel lightening to cerulean blue as Buhawi and his Baylan slumbered on, their bodies entwined and their breaths mingling in the salt air.
Meanwhile, in the Other Land, a shadow trampled sod and undergrowth, flame shooting from its muzzle and red embers lit his eyes. Frustration was his rice and viand today, it seemed.
The shadow stilled as another passed, a roan Tikbalang in warhorse form running full stretch, his hooves leaving a thundering wake. The shadow melted to smoke and slid silently through the trees, stalking the Tikbalang almost to the clearing where the molave throne sat and stilled under a rubber tree to wait, watch and listen.
Kidlat was sweaty from his race through the triple canopy forest's humid air, but he did not dare delay.
When Haring Ulap summons you, son or not, you get there yesterday,
Kidlat thought wryly. Slowing from gallop to canter to walk, the young Tikbalang approached his father with a bowed head though his eyes were intent and his ears pricked up attentively. Finally, he stood at the foot of the molave throne and transitioned to his Tikbalang form.
"Well, son, it is about time you answered my summons." Ulap addressed his second son with asperity dripping from his deep, haughty 'I am your king' voice. The liege-voice reserved, it seemed, just for Kidlat (for Buhawi surely never heard that, the perfect princely prat that he was, or so Kidlat reckoned). "You have explanations to make and they better be good."
Kidlat held his peace and kept his head down. That worked well in the past, since Ulap would simply scold him and, when he tired of the silence, dismiss him.
Not that Kidlat had any such luck as that today.
"Speak, my son," Ulap said, rising from the throne and stepping to the floor of the forest clearing. "When I said you have much to explain, I meant it."
Ulap waved his right hand in a circle, as one would rub condensation off the glass of a window, his gesture opening a dimesional window on what appeared to be a police station where a middle-aged woman clad in a tie-dyed housedress, every color of which clashed with the cheap neon-green rollers sitting askew in her graying brown hair. She was haranguing a police officer over the investigation into her daughter's murder.
***
"You telled me you will make the case of my daughter a friority!" The woman's screech and heavy Visayan accent complete with p and f interchange rang across the Makati Police headquarters homicide division office as she locked angry eyes on and pointed her right index finger accusingly at Senior Police Officer 3 Conrado Medado.
"It has been more than one month and still nobody is making to pay for da keeling of my Martha! My dafter is deserves so much better than is this! She was da pamily breadweaner. How will we live without her? You answer me! You answer me!"
Medado tried not to flinch at the wild virago screaming at him in mangled English (not that his English was all
that
good, but, well) and spraying him with the saliva flying off her ill-fitting dentures, her thin, silent husband doing his level best (and failing) to calm her down.
"Ma'am, we are doing what we can, but you need to understand, this case is at a dead end. We do not have any witnesses..."
"You don't need a wetness! You think I am
bobo
? I watch CSI: Las Beygas!
Tonto
! I know you need to get good forensicatory tracery ebidens prom de SOCO fifols. But you are so lazy! You just want money prom us poor pamily op da Pilipins! Only the rich get hustisya. But what is dis I cannot even! My precious baby gehl, I taught her da bestest Inggles, so she can spoke like a Kano and work abroad por dolyars. I made insisting a lot that she keep on imfrovement so she would better herself and us, then this bad happen. I telled her not to go der, then she go der. Now look at!"
The woman's tirade ended on a wail and uncontrollable sobbing as she collapsed on her husband, who collapsed under her weight. Medado struggled to get the couple off the floor, only to be kicked against his desk by the murdered Martha's mother, who, apparently, was still angry.
Having rolled out from under his wife, the thin man said in Visayan, "Isay, speak in Tagalog. Your English..."
"There is nothing wrong with my Inggles, Juan! My Inggles is ferpect! My deekshun is dibine!" Isay silenced her husband with a glare and a pout s she rose off the floor and turned to face Medado. "And you, you do everything humanly and inhumanely possible to pind out who keeled my baby or I will make
kulam
you!"
***
Ulap waved his hand to dismiss the dimensional window he'd opened before turning to Kidlat. "Now, my son, tell me honestly: Were you the one who killed that coffeeshop barista and caused that family of
Taga-Lupa
so much grief?"
Silence.
"The poor woman was raped, Kidlat," Ulap said, his voice low and castigating, walking in a maddeningly slow circle around his second son. "She was battered so hard her legs were broken in several places. She was bitten over and over again by a Tikbalang in a feral rage, if the medical examiner's report is accurate. She died in agony. Only you and Buhawi were in that realm, my son and, as much as I don't want to believe you did this, I have to ask you if you did it—because your brother would not and could not do this."
Kidlat's head snapped up and smoke began to stream out of his nostrils, his eyes bright with anger and pain as he looked at his father and held the Tikbalang king's steady, penetrating gaze.
"You've come to the conclusion that I did that,
