The Immortals (10 page)

Chapter 13

Dear God, please. Help him, please. I will give you my servitude for eternity, just please, God, please. Let his suffering end. Or take us both. We’ve tried so hard. We’ve been so grateful and we’ve worked so hard to thank you. It can’t end this way for us. Especially for Colin. Please, God. Can you hear me from here? Can’t you hear him? I wish I couldn’t. God, I wish I couldn’t hear this anymore. Please. Take him away.

“Anna,” Colin was nervous. She was coughing again. It was late springtime and they’d gone to the countryside. The lavender was in bloom and Anna had spent much of the winter indoors, so she’d been anxious to get out of London and into the fresh air.

When she first contracted pneumonia, Anna’s mother wouldn’t let him visit for several weeks. She was far too sick. But as she slowly got better, Colin had come to visit her almost every day, and would sit by her and read to her or tell her about his job or whatever she wanted to hear. Her mother let him stay for one hour. Anna looked forward to that hour everyday. She would watch the clock, willing the minutes to pass faster. There was little she could do to pass the time. She was still on bed rest. 

She reached out to touch some of the lavender now and cast a sly smile at Colin.

“I’m fine, you silly boy,” she teased him. Her mother and father were nearby, picking lavender to take home.

Colin’s emerald eyes watched her carefully anyway. “You always say that, even when it’s not true.”

“You always worry, even when you don’t need to,” Anna retorted.

Colin smiled at her. “Because I love you.”

Anna knew she was blushing. She picked some of the lavender and pretended to concentrate on pulling the stalks. Colin knelt beside her and pretended to help her.

“Your mother didn’t like me reading you the news. She said it would upset you and besides, she said a woman doesn’t need an opinion in politics.”

Anna could hear the derision in his voice even though he’d tried to hide it. He liked her mother, he just often disagreed with her, even though he’d never admit it.

“According to Mother, I’m not to have an opinion about a lot of things I already have strong opinions about,” Anna replied softly, careful so that neither parent would overhear.

Colin glanced at her and smiled. “I know. And I love that about you.”

Anna was pretty sure she was blushing again. She’d known Colin for over a year now, and he could still make her blush so easily.

“Do you think the Scots are acting like traitors?” Colin asked her quietly, also careful to make sure her parents didn’t overhear a couple of teenagers talking about politics.

Anna picked a stalk of lavender and dropped it in her basket. She had to make a show that she was doing
something
over here other than gossiping with Colin. “He isn’t above the law. We’re not the French. He hasn’t been working with Parliament, and now he’s trying to get the Scots to worship like the English. I don’t think that’s fair.”

Colin dropped a few stalks of purple flowers into her basket as well. “I don’t think so, either. But I’m also Irish and Catholic. I’m not as faithful to the English crown.”

“It’s your crown, too, isn’t it?”

Colin shrugged. “Your country seems to think so.”

“Well, Father is no fan of the Stuarts, but he thinks some of the people who are unhappy with King Charles here don’t like him because he’s married to a Catholic. If we ever end up with a new king, I just hope it’s not someone who will try to make us all Puritans.”

Colin snickered. “If so, we can go back to Ireland. Your church is basically Catholicism without the Pope, you know.”

“We?” Anna asked coyly.

And this time, Colin actually blushed. “I’m saving, you know. And I’ve got a second job now. As soon as I have enough money, I’m going to ask your father.”

Anna glanced over her shoulder at her parents who were still examining the rows of tiny purple flowers. “He’ll tell you you’re wasting your time. You’ll be a widower before you’re 25.”

Colin shook his head. “That’s why I need to make sure I have enough money saved, and I can work in a career. I’ll make sure I can pay for your doctors.”

Anna sighed, a sad, heartbreaking sigh and Colin’s face registered recognition of where her pain was coming from. They’d discussed so many things they shouldn’t have. “I can’t have children, Colin. You’ve always known that, too.”

Colin looked back at her parents now to make sure they weren’t watching them then gently took her hand and brought it to his lips. Anna felt that kiss everywhere, and her skin tingled with the excitement of his touch. She loved him so much she often thought he must be some gift from Heaven, because how could anybody make her feel so
alive
when she’d spent the last seventeen years so close to death?

Colin let go of her hand and Anna watched sadly as his hand retreated away from her. She met his eyes and smiled. “I love you, Colin Aedan O’Conner.”

The lavender fields faded and Anna was in a room, a modern room with a cream colored sofa and plush ivory carpet. Colin walked through the front door, greeting her with a sexy smile that made her heart accelerate, her skin tingle with the anticipation of his touch. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed him and his fingers grazed the skin on her back as he lifted his hand toward the clasps on her bra. But the cries of a baby stopped him and his hand dropped, his lips pulled away from hers, and he sighed, “Do you want me to check on her?”

Anna’s eyebrows knitted together in confusion. “Check on who?”

Colin snickered and stepped around her, thinking she was teasing him. “Our daughter, Anna.”

Anna thought
he
was the one who was joking now, and it was a terribly cruel joke. How could Colin ever joke about this? Of all things, he knew this was something they never teased each other about. They rarely even talked about it. She stared at the back of his cherry red t-shirt as he disappeared into a darkened room and the crying stopped. She could hear his voice, his melodic Irish accent soothing this baby, this mysterious infant that had appeared in this equally mystifying home they were living in.

Colin emerged from the room with a baby in his arms. She looked about seven months old, but how could Anna have known? She couldn’t have children. The little girl had dark brown eyes and a scattering of brown hairs on her otherwise bald head and she smiled and cooed happily when she saw Anna.

“Here,” Colin said, “I think she wants you.”

Anna shook her head. “Why?” She didn’t want to hold the baby. She had spent her entire life avoiding them because children were the one thing she wanted most and the one thing she could never have. She backed away from Colin and the little girl in his arms.

Colin looked both confused and angry. “Anna, what has gotten into you? Your daughter is hungry. Would you stop acting so weird and feed her?” He tried to hand her the baby again.

Anna could feel the tears stinging behind her eyes. “She’s not my daughter, Colin. I can’t have children. You know that.” Her voice was so strange. At first, she couldn’t place the reason her voice sounded so unlike her own, so strained and forced. As she watched Colin shake his head at her and walk into the kitchen, she understood this new feeling, this overpowering new emotion. She was engulfed in betrayal.
His
betrayal.

Anna heard him sigh in frustration from the kitchen. “Do you think you could at least hold her while I defrost some of the frozen breastmilk to make her a bottle? Or should I just put her down and let her cry.” His voice dripped with the bitterness and hostility he felt over Anna’s refusal to acknowledge this infant.

But it wasn’t hers. It couldn’t be. And he was tormenting her.
Colin
was tormenting her with the promise of everything she had ever wanted: a life with him and their children. Nothing more.

He’d apparently decided Anna wasn’t going to come for the baby and set her down, and she started crying. Anna inched closer to the doorway of the kitchen so she could see the child, her sweet, angelic face streaked with tears, and her little arms immediately reached up as soon as she saw Anna in the doorway. Colin slammed the freezer door closed and shot her an angry, disgusted look, and Anna’s heart burst open.

Another tormented scream pulled Anna from her nightmare. She could still hear the crying infant and see Colin’s piercing gaze, and she shuddered with shame even though she
knew
it wasn’t real. And then, she caught the briefest hint of lavender, except she wasn’t sure if she’d actually ever been in a lavender field. It had been so beautiful. He had been so beautiful. So young. Real or dream, she wanted to be there again, not in this dungeon, not in this cold room, and certainly not in that nightmare. She never wanted to visit that particular nightmare again. She would face eternal darkness or blistering deserts before the misery of confronting the only life she’d ever wanted but could never have.

He called her name amidst his tortured pleas for the pain to stop.

The door opened and the man entered; Anna closed her eyes so she wouldn’t have to look at him. 

“Anna,” he purred, “I thought you loved him.”

She wanted to tell him he could go fuck himself. He couldn’t possibly understand the depth of her love for Colin. But she lay there quietly instead.

“You can help him, Anna. You can make his pain and suffering go away. You know how.”

He had gotten so close to her this time. She was so dizzy and nauseated and even with her eyes closed, she knew the room was a blurry sea of gray-blue monotony. She shivered against the cold cot, the cold air, the cold radiating off of
him
.

Another scream cut through the small space of that room and tore through her. She couldn’t understand how there was anything left of her. Every cry, every moment of his pain was killing her. How was she still alive? How was he still alive? Where was their mercy? Their promises were broken, and Anna grew angrier as she listened to Colin’s desperate screams. If they couldn’t uphold their end of the bargain, then the least they could do was let them die quickly, yet they’d been abandoned. But she had only one hope for being with Colin now.

“Do you want to help him yet, Anna?” His voice was so silvery.

Anna took a ragged breath. “I want you to go back to Hell.”

Chapter 14

Colin had never used the new blessing The Angel had just given him. Staring at the abandoned camp, the rotten wooden stairs leading up to the porch, wondering how to get inside without alerting this demon, he felt a strange new power surging within him. It tingled in his fingers and caused a warmth to spread throughout his body, and he knew what it would do when he was ready to use it.

If Anna was inside, even if it was just her body, he had to find her first. He couldn’t destroy this place. But he had gotten this far. He had to trust she would help him now and not let this new gift get out of control. That, at least, was something she could do. At least, he was hoping she could.

Colin placed his foot onto the first termite weakened step. It held under his weight. He’d had to turn off his flashlight and was feeling along the rough banister, trying to keep his weight as close to the edge as possible. Dylan was following him, trying to watch where he was stepping. Only the perigee moon above them allowed them to see at all.

The rest of the hunters finally reached the clearing where the camp stood so ominously quiet. They mimicked Colin and Dylan and turned off their flashlights, then trailed carefully up the soggy steps. Colin reached the door first and listened.

He heard nothing from within. No indication that she was struggling, fighting, trying to escape or that she was even alive. He placed his hand on the doorknob and slowly twisted it. The door was unlocked. Dylan grabbed his arm, looking at him as if to ask what the hell they were about to walk into, but Colin wouldn’t have known what to tell him anyway. He opened the door.

The mildewy musky smells of abandonment greeted them, but unfortunately, neither Colin nor Dylan had been blessed with the ability to see in the dark either. Flight and night vision would have come in really handy. And now that they were inside, the moon was doing little to help them. They were standing in a living room with a kitchenette to their right. Colin could barely make out two closed doors to his left, which he thought might be bedrooms, and he was going to check them out when he heard the rest of the hunters on the porch behind him. He turned to get them to stay outside, but something knocked him down.

Colin tried to get up but that same something pinned him to the floor. Dylan slashed at the air above him, but it didn’t seem to do anything. His dagger was just passing through the dark nothingness above Colin, who was still trapped under the pressure of whatever was holding him down. And it was getting harder for him to breathe.

The rest of the hunters tried to enter the camp now, but Colin shouted at them, “No! Stay out!”

Dylan asked him where he thought the demon was, but Colin wasn’t sure. It seemed to be everywhere, so Dylan kept slicing at the air with his knife and his dagger. When those didn’t work, he tried a different dagger made from different metals. Colin still couldn’t move, and the crushing suffocation was getting worse. This demon was strong: it was definitely a different demon than the beetle from the woods that had led them here.

“Back up,” he exhaled, not having the air to warn Dylan any louder. But Dylan heard him and backed away, even though he was clearly reluctant.

Colin closed his eyes and said a quick prayer.

It burst out of him, much like the water had from the bottle in the forest, and like that water, he could sense this energy arcing around him. But this was not harmless like those droplets had been. This was a destructive force, and he heard the shattering glass, the splintering wood, doors being blown inward. Debris from the blast rained down on him, but he wasn’t overly concerned about what might fall on him because he could breathe again. And he could get up.

He had no idea if this demon was dead or gone since he hadn’t been able to feel it or even see it. But it wasn’t on him, and Colin scrambled to his feet, stepping over the rubble as best as he could in the dark to look inside the room closer to him. He turned his flashlight on. He cast the beam into each corner, but the room was empty. He was only vaguely aware that the other hunters had joined him in the camp and were murmuring to each other, something about what he’d just done, but he wasn’t paying attention to them.

The second door was hanging crookedly on its hinges and Colin pushed it open the rest of the way. His flashlight fell from his hand and hit the floor with a hollow metallic clang because, there, against the back wall of this small dank room, Anna lay on a thin blanket. She looked like she was sleeping.

He wanted to run to her. He wanted to go to her and pick her up and get her out of this place, but his legs would not cooperate. The hunters had gathered behind him, excitedly saying her name, but Colin stood in the doorway, frozen, the fear that he had
lost
her finally overwhelming him. He took a few steps closer to her, but he could no longer walk or stand. He fell to his knees in front of her and cried.

The murmuring from the hunters stopped, but Colin didn’t notice that either. One trembling hand reached out to brush her dark hair away from that alabaster complexion, that perfectly smooth and flawless skin. “Anna,” he whispered, “my love, can you hear me?”

She continued to sleep peacefully. Except she wasn’t really sleeping. Colin
knew
she wasn’t sleeping, because he knew all of the noise would have woken her, his
touch
would have woken her, and Anna never slept with half her face buried in her arms like this. The window above her allowed light in from the moon, and he touched her cheek, felt the dampness from her tears. “God, Anna, please, come back to me,” he begged. He realized he was still crying, too.

He wanted to carry her out of here, but didn’t trust his strength right now. He doubted he could even stand yet. So he talked to her instead. “Anna, do you remember the time we went to the Highlands? We’d been invited to stay with an actual
laird
after he met your father in London.” Colin couldn’t imagine Anna had forgotten the only time they’d ever slept in an honest-to-God castle, but he was trying to bring her back to him with a happy memory.

“It was good for you there. You liked the air and the water was so clean it was actually safe to drink. It was almost like being back in Ireland. From our room, we could see the barley fields stretching out to Heaven, you said. During the day, we’d take walks in the heather fields, and he had an enormous library right in his castle. That was your favorite part. There were Shetland ponies in his stables, they used them for plowing and pulling carts, but you’d never seen such a small pony and you were completely enchanted. You teased me and told me they belonged in Ireland for the leprechauns. And in the evenings, he always had guests for dinner, and his cooks prepared the most elaborate dishes. Far more than we could eat. That was before the famine, and long before the bad one. We tried corn for the first time. It was the most exotic thing we’d ever tasted.”

A shuffling sound from the doorway made Colin stop talking. How was he ever going to explain why he and Anna had never tried corn before this trip to Scotland? But Anna had stirred. His attention was still fixed on her.

“Colin,” Dylan’s voice was soft, quiet, compassionate. “How exactly
do
you know Anna?”

Colin kept stroking her forehead, silently praying, pleading. “She’s my wife.”

He heard the quick inhalations, the murmuring starting up again, but he no longer cared what they knew. Anna’s eyelids fluttered, and his heart thumped wildly against his chest. “Anna,” he spoke her name louder. “I’m here. You’re with me now.”

Her dark brown eyes were suddenly on him, damp and red from her crying and Colin felt the agony of losing her, the agony of what she’d suffered, all over again.

“Colin?” she whispered.

“Oh, God, Anna, what’s happened to you?” he cried, burying his face against her thick dark hair.

He felt her hand reach up to his head and rest on the back of his neck, her fingers searching, probing. “It’s
you
, Colin. What have they done to
you
?” She was still running her hand along his skin, along his jaw now, searching for injuries that weren’t there.

Colin sat back from her and grabbed her hand. “Anna, I’m fine. You must have had a nightmare. They only took you.”

Anna blinked then looked around her for the first time. She tried to sit up so Colin put an arm around her and helped her. “No,” she breathed. “Where am I?”

Colin watched her carefully. “An abandoned camp deep in the woods we were in yesterday morning.”

Anna’s eyes settled on Colin’s again. “That was just yesterday?”

Colin nodded.

“This room …” Anna started. Colin looked around him. The ugly brown paneled walls, the cheap print art of ducks flying over a pond hanging crookedly from a nail, the sliding door closet with nothing but wire hangers on its sole bar. “He must have moved me.”

“He?”

Anna told him about the man, who wasn’t really a man, who had kept her prisoner in the gray-blue sterile room, so cold she couldn’t speak without her teeth chattering and her voice shaking, her body so sluggish she couldn’t draw her knees to her chest to try to keep warm. She looked down at the blanket she had been laying on. “And I was on a cot,” she continued. “A vinyl cot. It crinkled every time I moved.”

New tears spilled down her cheeks as she looked in Colin’s eyes again. “And, oh God, Colin, they
had
you, and they were
torturing
you, and you were screaming and calling for me over and over and I couldn’t stop it, I could only pray. I couldn’t help you. He wanted my …”

Colin kissed her. Her lips, so soft and full, those lips he’d kissed countless times before, but for three months, he hadn’t allowed himself to because when you had lived for one person for so long, being separated from that person seemed like a worse torture than whatever Anna had thought they had been putting him through here. And when it came to each other, they both knew how weak they really were.

He pulled away from her and brushed the tears from her cheeks with his thumbs and promised her he hadn’t been here. He hadn’t been hurt. But Colin sensed Anna had felt it, this new gift from The Angel, and she looked at him, puzzled, but she wouldn’t ask in front of the hunters. But Colin realized he had
sensed
what Anna was feeling and thinking again. “
Anna?”
he asked cautiously, not wanting to get his hopes up, but she was there. It was like regaining some part of his own memory or self after an episode of amnesia and Colin never wanted to lose it again.

Anna smiled weakly at him and collapsed into his arms. “
Oh, Colin. Take me home
.”

And he lifted her from the mildewy floor of that camp deep in the woods near the Amite River and carried her carefully down the sodden steps with the six other hunters lighting his way with their flashlights.

That night, for the first time in three months, Colin slept next to his wife. After their ordeal, they were both exhausted, but they lay awake for a long time anyway facing each other, both thinking and talking about what The Angel had told Colin, about the bizarre mind tricks the demon had played on Anna in that camp, and what their experiences in Baton Rouge meant for them. Because they’d been promised two things: Anna could live and they would never be separated. If those promises were in jeopardy now, their contract may expire much sooner than they’d expected.