Rare (Vampire Knight)

Chapter 68

Life and energy linger, that was how Luz understood it. She knew that no one was ever truly gone. The physical body may cease to exist at some point, but the spirit—the soul—didn't, it continued to live on, it stuck around. People were never truly dead, and she knew that from first-hand experience.

When the first Mother Metal cooled and ceased to exist in the furnace, The Hooded Woman's spirit vanished, but she wasn't gone. For over ten thousand years, her spirit had been active, never resting, and always manifesting as the very thing that could really kill purebloods. Her spirit was tired. Now that she was no longer the Mother Metal, she was resting. As Luz understood it, the metal only cooled down because The Hooded Woman was tired, and she mistook this reason for the cooling as her needing her 'children' back.

Just because The Hooded Woman was no longer the Mother Metal, it didn't mean that her being ceased to exist. Luz didn't know where she had gone, but she knew the woman was now truly at rest. Which begged the question in her: where do the spirits go to rest? How long do they rest? Will they return?

These were questions that she supposed couldn't be answered. She'd grown up in a religious family and had kept ties with her faith, unlike her brothers, but the idea of the spirits going to Heaven didn't really give her satisfaction. Heaven didn't seem very restful in her eyes, but rather just an unseen continuation of life, and there was no rest in that.

Would Charlotte know that answer? She seemed to know almost everything and Luz really looked up to her. Charlotte had answers to many things, and if she didn't have the answers, she'd look for them or help make sense of plausible and possible answers. She was a very intelligent woman and Luz felt really lucky to have such a caring and lovely friend like her.

But despite this, she doubted that Charlotte would be able to find an actual answer to Luz's questions. How could she possibly know if she didn't believe in any religion like Luz did? What could she possibly know without having faith in things like that? Charlotte wasn't a spiritual person, a believer in the divine and unexplainable.

Would she even believe that Luz saw The Hooded Woman the night that she cooled? Luz still didn't know all that entailed about being a vampire and still wasn't sure if seeing what she had seen was normal. She had a feeling that it wasn't normal and Charlotte may not know what to make of it. She also had to ask the question on whether Charlotte might already know that she saw The Hooded Woman that night.

"Luz..."

The girl jumped at the sudden feeling of a hand coming down on her shoulder. She turned quickly to see who it belonged to and she relaxed when she saw that it was just Guillermo. He looked at her with a concerned expression and gave her shoulder a gentle squeeze when he felt her relax under his touch.

"It is just you," she heaved a sigh of relief and leant in to give him a hug that comforted her.

"Who did you think it would be?" He asked her softly, a hint of amusement in his voice.

Luz shook her head, a flash of terror crossing over her face for a brief second before she said, "I don't know. They have been bothering me all evening." She shuddered a bit, pulling herself away from Guillermo reluctantly.

He rose an eyebrow, "They?"

"Sí," she gave a curt nod, "los fantasmas. They have been bothering me all evening." She then shrugged and waved her hand, "and some philosophical questions that cannot be answered." She didn't seem as bothered about her questions than she did about the ghosts that had been visiting her. She thought of them often and their sudden frequency in visitations; she supposed that The Hooded Woman opened up the flood gates.