Immortal (22 page)

“You see, Evie, I still dreamed about gaining perfect immortality. Living for two hundred years, or even five hundred years, wouldn’t be enough for me. I begged Agnes once again for her help. But she told me she had given up her powers and hidden them away in a secret Talisman that I would never find. My temper flared up, and I shook her roughly, demanding to know where this hiding place was. She tried to break free, but a blind, furious madness came over me. I wouldn’t let her go. I wanted to hurt her for the pain she was causing me. I threw her down angrily, and she…she…”

He stopped.

“What happened? Tell me!”

“She hit her head against the wall as she fell. It happened so quickly, just one tiny moment. Her body lay on the ground, as still as a flower in the moonlight. I started to weep, asking her forgiveness, begging her to speak to me. There was nothing she could say.” He looked at me with shame and misery burning in his face. “Agnes was dead. I had destroyed her.”

Forty-one

A

bird had begun to sing, far off over the moor. The sky was starting to get light. The night would soon be over, but the dawn would bring no hope or comfort. Sebastian had killed Agnes, and we were left to carry on with the weary confusion of life.

“I hate and despise myself.”

“Don’t,” I said. “You mustn’t say that.”

“Why not, when it’s true?”

I didn’t reply. I was incredibly tired. Nothing seemed quite real.

“So, what’s going to happen now?” I asked, forcing myself to speak.

“I want you to leave Wyldcliffe as soon as you can,” Sebastian said. “It’s your only hope of getting safely out of all this.”

“I’ve nowhere to go. And I want to be near you.”

“Evie, that’s the last thing you should want! I’m a freak and a murderer.”

“You’re not! It was an accident. You never meant to hurt Agnes; I know you didn’t.”

“Dear Evie. You’re always so good, so trusting.” He sighed. “But there’s more. You haven’t heard the whole story yet. I have to tell you now, while I have the courage. But let’s get out of here.”

We began to walk slowly in the direction of the distant Abbey, leading the horse over the rough grass. I was glad to leave the dark monument under the thorn trees. I glanced at Sebastian’s tormented face. At that moment I couldn’t tell whether I loved him or pitied him, but I knew that my heart was breaking.

“So what do you want to tell me? Is it something to do with Agnes?”

He nodded. “When I realized that Agnes was…that it was over…I couldn’t leave her lying there. I lifted her up and carried her through a little gate in the Abbey walls, into the gardens. No one was around. I walked to the old chapel ruins and laid her on the green bed of grass where the holy altar had once stood. Even then I was more concerned about myself than her, worrying about my grief and my shame and my fears. It occurred to me that this Talisman she had talked about might be around her neck, and that I might be able to use the powers she had sealed within it to revive her. At least, that was what I told myself. She wasn’t wearing it, though, so I searched her pockets. There was nothing in them except a scrap of ribbon. A memento of her baby, I guessed.

“Then I heard a noise in the trees. The night watchman had roused himself from his stove in the gatehouse to make an inspection of the grounds. He must have seen Agnes’s dress fluttering on the grass, and me crouching next to her. He came rushing at me with a pair of silver pistols, calling for help. I knocked him down and grabbed one of the pistols, held it against his head, and threatened to shoot him. But I was sickened by the thought of taking another life. I let him go and turned and ran. By now the alarm had been raised. Servants were running out in their nightshirts. I dodged to avoid them, but the watchman aimed his pistol and shot. The bullet went straight through my heart.”

He laughed suddenly, an odd, discordant sound.

“It was so strange, Evie. I was glad to die. After everything I had done to avoid death, I would have finally welcomed it. But it didn’t work out that like that. I felt the blood spurting down my chest. I collapsed on the ground and then…I can’t describe it…I was still conscious, but transformed. I had passed into a world of shadows. The pain left me and I stood up. The servants were running past me, shouting out, ‘Where is he? Has he gotten away?”

“‘I’m here, you fools!’ I screamed. ‘Come and get me.’ But they didn’t seem to hear or see me. I wasn’t dead, but I wasn’t alive. I felt no hunger or thirst or pain. The secret potions I had taken, the evil rites I had endured in pursuit of immortality had left me with this: I no longer lived, but I couldn’t truly die.”

He looked down over the valley.

“I would have accepted that, Evie, as a just punishment for what I had done. Endless existence without meaning or joy. Later, when I had fled the Abbey, it soon became clear to me that what I faced was even worse than that.” A tremor ran through his body like a spasm of pain. “The dark masters I had served in my search for forbidden knowledge told me that a choice lay before me in the Shadow world that I now inhabited. I had one last chance to become one of the Unconquered like them, existing forever out of the reach of time and space and the rules of God and man. For that, I needed the Talisman.”

“Why? What was so special about it?”

“Agnes had sealed not only her powers, but her love for me inside the sacred object. Nothing else could help me.”

“But what if you couldn’t find it?”

Sebastian grimaced, as though flinching from some dreadful memory. “Without the Talisman, I would not be permitted to stay as I was. I could no longer be killed by a pistol shot or the thrust of a knife, but without the Talisman I would eventually fade.”

“Fade? I don’t understand.” I didn’t think I would ever understand.

“To fade is to wither and decay, hour by hour and minute by minute, until one becomes an evil spirit of darkness, a slave, a torment to oneself and others. In other words,” he said, “a demon. To fade is to lose any last spark of humanity, yet to be eternally aware of one’s own degradation. And that is what would happen to me. Oh, it might take many years, more than a hundred, but it would happen in the end.”

He shuddered. I felt sick at the idea of Sebastian—so beautiful, so full of life—turning into some hideous specter. I kept thinking, This can’t be true; it can’t be happening. But it was. The earth was under my feet, and the sky was above me. I was awake. And Sebastian’s voice went on remorselessly, spilling out his dreadful secrets.

“I was afraid of such a fate. I had desired life, not a living death. I swore I would do everything I could to find the Talisman and unlock its powers. I gathered my coven of followers around me and commanded them to help me keep my tormented hopes alive. I tried to convince myself that if only I could find the Talisman, I would live not as one of the dread Unconquered, but as a man again; I would become the person Agnes would have wanted me to be; I would have hundreds of lifetimes to make up for the mistakes I had made. And so I searched for it for many empty, dreary years. And then something happened…something so awful…”

“What?” I asked, horrified. “What happened?”

“I…I can’t bear to tell you. But I swear that it made me face my crimes at last. I gave up the fight for the Talisman. I turned my back on what had been…feeding me. I accepted my final destiny. To become a foul demon was no more than I deserved. And at that precise point, when I was weak and beginning to fade, that was when I met you.”

Sebastian turned my hand over in his. He traced the faint scar where I had cut myself on the glass the night we had met. Now I knew how he had been able to mend it, and why he had looked so ill and pale when we had first met. Sebastian wasn’t sick; he was fading out of existence, leaving me behind, leaving this world and heading for the dark….

“That first night I was astonished that you could see me,” he said. “I usually conceal myself from the innocent.”

“How? And where did you live all that time? Where do you go when I’m not with you? How do you live?” There were a thousand things I wanted to ask.

“I walk in the Shadows—caught between life and death. I still have powers enough. I have learned how to show myself to the living, or I can choose to be hidden. At times I have entered life again to try to forget everything. I have been a laborer, a shepherd, a traveler. For a while I lived with some Romany wanderers. They were good to me, like brothers. But I could never stay too long in one place or with one set of people. A nineteen-year-old who never got any older, who didn’t seem to eat, or sleep, or have any family connections? It was impossible to belong anywhere. So I always came back to Wyldcliffe.

“The night we met I knew there was something special about you, Evie. I had concealed myself and my horse through some simple charms, as usual. And yet you saw me. I no longer knew how to be kind, or even scarcely human, when I first spoke to you, but something in you made me feel alive, and it wasn’t just because you reminded me of Agnes. I was desperate, so wretched and lonely that I couldn’t resist the temptation of seeing you again. After all, I was doomed, so what difference did one last piece of self-indulgence matter? But you were young and trusting and good—everything that I had lost—so after a while I told myself I had to stop seeing you, for your sake. For the first time in my whole existence I truly knew what it was to care for someone. I had been obsessed with Agnes, bound to her in ways I barely understood, but with you it was different.” His blue eyes met mine. “For me, there is only you. You taught me how to love.”

“I’m glad,” I said fiercely.

“So am I.” A faint smile softened his face; then he sighed. “But I was too weak to carry out my resolution. I let myself keep seeing you. And the supreme irony was that it was you who led me to the Talisman.”

“How?”

“It was so simple, but so like Agnes. There had been all sorts of rumors about both of us after Agnes’s death and my disappearance, which her parents tried to crush. They said she had died in an accident. They wanted to believe it, and they wanted everyone else to believe it too. The stories persisted, though. The local people gossiped that Agnes had brought a great treasure with her from London before she died. Oh, they said all sorts of crazy things: that secret papers had been buried next to her tomb, that her ghost had been seen down by the old chapel, and that she would return one day as an angel of light to save Wyldcliffe from some dreadful doom. They even claimed that touching her grave could heal sick people.”

Sebastian reached out to touch my hair. “When I met you, I thought you could heal me, girl from the sea.” He smiled sadly. “Sane, sensible Evie, you wouldn’t have listened to all that nonsense, would you? But I latched on to the story about the treasure. I was sure it meant the Talisman, and like an arrogant fool I gave no thought to her real treasure—her child. A little girl growing up unnoticed on a local farm with a pretty trinket around her neck was enough to trick the deep and cunning magician that I imagined myself to be. But last night I touched your necklace, and I realized how I had been deceived. In desperation I went over all the old stories again, scratching in the dirt for more clues. I forced myself to do the one thing I had been decent enough to resist: I recovered those secret papers from where her friends had hidden them on hallowed ground. And her journal told me everything.”

Now I understood. It was hanging around my neck, this precious Talisman, passed down from each mother to her daughter, the descendants of Evelyn Frances Smith, the secret heirloom:
May it never fall into darkness
. All I had to do was to give it to Sebastian, to give him what he had always wanted, and save him from his terrible fate. Perhaps these “Unconquered” would let him be, I thought desperately, perhaps it really would be possible for Sebastian to be restored to human life with my immortal gift; we could be together….

“Here,” I said. “Take it. You can have it.”

He looked at me with infinite tenderness. “Darling Evie, if only it were that simple. Just being near it has given me some strength and energy in these last weeks. But don’t you remember what happened the other night when I tried to touch it? Agnes was no fool. She has bound her powers to you and you alone. And she knew that if I tried to lay a finger on it, its powers would work against me.”

“Why wouldn’t she want to help you?”

“She didn’t know that I was already ensnared by my own folly. She thought she was protecting me from a terrible mistake by sealing the Talisman. But it was too late. I had already put myself into the hands of my masters, like a blind fool. And so she also sealed the only thing that might have helped me: the memory of her love.”

“Can’t you get these…masters of yours to unseal it for you?”

“No! They are pitiless. They do not help the weak.” A flicker of pain passed over his face. “The Unconquered have achieved immortality with their poisoned arts, and can no longer be touched by death, or truth, or love. They rule the Shadows, and they are terrible.” He shuddered and clasped his hands together.

For an instant I seemed to see with Sebastian’s eyes: ghastly figures of men robed in black and red, with iron crowns on their heads. One turned his face toward me, and I saw his ravaged, inhuman beauty, and I felt that I would turn to dust under his withering gaze. I dragged myself away from the awful vision and tried to understand what Sebastian was saying.

“My masters have made it clear to me that there is now only one way that I can use the Talisman to halt the process of fading.”

“How? Tell me!”

Sebastian looked paler than ever, and his breath came in a quick, stabbing sob. “By conquering the Talisman, taking it from you by force and claiming my immortal crown. And to do that I would have to kill you.”

I knew by his face that he was telling the truth.

“I cannot be near you anymore, Evie. I know that as I fade further into darkness and become less than I am now, I will be tempted to come after the Talisman. To become one of the Unconquered, or their eternal slave—how can I be sure what I will choose when the moment finally arrives? I’m so afraid that in the end I will destroy you, as I destroyed Agnes. Now do you see why I cannot love you? My love is worthless.”