The Immortals (6 page)

Colin didn’t answer her. He was still scowling at Jeremy.

“I can’t control what Adrián says,” Jeremy shot back. He was getting angry now, too, and Anna wanted everyone to just shut up and get out of here.

“You’re
supposedly the leader here,” Colin had stepped closer to Jeremy, who instinctively backed away from him. “You’ll figure out how to control him or I’ll make sure it’s never a problem again.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Jeremy asked, but Colin was already walking out of the break room. Anna stared after his back then looked at Jeremy. She felt like she should be the one to apologize now, but for what? Colin would never stop protecting her, and he felt like Adrián had threatened her. She couldn’t blame him for reacting the way he had.

“We should just go,” Anna suggested. “This will blow over. Just make sure Colin and Adrián aren’t working together.”

Jeremy nodded in agreement and looked at her sheepishly. “I really am sorry about what he said to you. He can be kind of a disgusting asshole at times.” Anna smiled and didn’t even have to fake a smile this time. When Jeremy wasn’t trying to flirt with her, he was actually friendly and likeable.

Colin and the other hunters regrouped at the same rural area outside of Baton Rouge the email had originally told them to go to. Camps and deer stands dotted the woods around here, but it wasn’t deer hunting season. Colin wasn’t
too
worried about getting shot.

Colin waited impatiently for Anna’s car to arrive, his rage from earlier still lingering and he just needed to see her and know she was safe. He saw her car pull up behind Jeremy’s and he exhaled slowly as she climbed out, her long dark hair pulled back into a sleek ponytail, and even in her dark blue pants and red shirt, she still looked every bit the angel he’d always suspected she was.

Jeremy stood next to Colin and looked at the assembled hunters around them. Colin figured Jeremy had no clue what to do now.

“Want us to split into two teams?” Colin asked, but really, he was giving Jeremy directions.

Jeremy nodded and split them up, and when he separated him from Anna, he felt the heat rising in him, the hatred and anger resurfacing, but Anna felt it, too. “
It’s ok, Colin, we won’t be far.
”

He took a deep breath and tried to calm down. “
Of course he kept you on his team. And with Adrián
.”

He could almost hear her sighing in his head. “
It’s better this way, Colin. We’re the two best hunters out here, and one of us will be with each group. Now stop pouting and focus on finding these archdemons so we can get out of this city.”

He turned his attention back to Jeremy just in time, because Jeremy was asking him what kind of weapons he thought they’d need to kill these archdemons. Normally, Colin would have immediately known, but after the past couple of days, he felt like an amateur again.

“They’re changing all sorts of stuff. I don’t know how they’re doing it, but what’s worked in the past may not work now. I’d still try the dagger with the combination metals first, but someone in the group should be prepared to strike at it with a fixed blade in case the dagger doesn’t work.”

Demons were old.
Really
old. Newer alloys didn’t work as well on them because they didn’t exist when these demons were created. Stainless steel may be the symbol of the modern age, but it usually didn’t do a damn thing to hurt a demon. Colin’s dagger and knife were also extremely old.

But Jeremy nodded along like he’d anticipated Colin’s response and sent the groups into the woods. Colin resisted the overwhelming urge to roll his eyes behind Jeremy’s back. It would have been kind of immature, but it also would have been a lot less obvious than flipping him off.

“
He may be at the bottom, but he’s still on my growing list of people you need to let me hit before we leave this place
,” Colin told Anna.

Anna bit her lip as she walked away from him, trying not to laugh at him. “
I’ll help you with
Adrián. He’d better hope he doesn’t get lost in these woods with me.”

Colin almost stumbled over a thick branch on the ground at Anna’s comment. “
Go for whatever body part is most accessible. I’ll be there as quickly as I can.”
He was pretty sure Anna rolled her eyes at him.

Colin led his group of hunters into the woods, the thick trees soon obscuring much of the morning sunlight. It smelled strongly of pine and mosquito repellant, but Colin wasn’t complaining. He thought mosquito repellant was one of the best inventions man had ever made.

As he searched around him for any sign of a demonic presence, he also kept checking on Anna. She had quickly dropped back, trailing the group to keep away from Jeremy who was walking up front. “
Did he hit on you?
Now?”

Anna sighed again. “
He asked me what I thought of your recommendations, and I told him I agreed with you. Then he told me after a day like today, he was going to need a drink and asked me if I wanted to go with him.”

Asshole.

Right now, Anna agreed with him about that, too.

“
I had a strange dream last night. I was in Berlin when the Russians arrived.
”

Anna registered revulsion but it wasn’t at his dream. She’d just crossed paths with a copperhead. “
I had another weird dream the other night. This time, I was in Paris during the Revolution. What do you think it means
?”

Colin had no idea. “
I doubt it has anything to do with us needing history lessons.”

He could sense her amused frustration with him, and he imagined the way she’d shake her head, put that porcelain hand on her hip with the faintest smile pulling at those full pink lips. And then Anna chastised him for thinking about her like that.

Colin tried to clear his mind, but it was difficult. He missed her so much. As they walked farther into the woods, the only other creatures they encountered were supposed to be here: squirrels running up the trunks of the towering pine trees to hide from the invading humans, snakes and lizards burying themselves under the dense bedding of the forest floor, birds fluttering from branch to branch, watching these odd new trespassers warily.

It was unbelievably quiet. Colin took a few more steps into the woods then abruptly stopped. He’d suddenly realized it was
too
quiet. The birds still chirped and the rustling footsteps of his fellow hunters still sounded behind him, but he couldn’t feel her. The panic welled within him. Surely she hadn’t walked so far away from him that he could no longer
feel
her?

“
Anna
?”

He tried searching for her, desperately reaching out but he was reaching for emptiness, just heavy dense Louisiana air. He turned slowly in a circle, wondering how he could have suddenly lost his connection with her. “
Anna!?
” he tried again. The panic was suffocating him. He couldn’t breathe. Silence.

He ran in the direction he had last felt her and he could hear Dylan calling for him, asking him what had happened, trailing behind him. The others had followed, but Colin ran faster, the branches beneath his boots snapping under his footsteps. Ahead of him, he could hear voices now. Jeremy and Max. He barreled into the clearing where they stood, staring dumbfounded at him, and Colin grabbed Jeremy’s shirt and pulled him close to his face.

“Where the hell is she?” he yelled.

Jeremy’s eyes mixed with confusion and fear. “Who?”

“Anna!” Colin pushed him away and Jeremy stumbled, falling onto the ground. Jeremy stared up at him, still scared and bewildered.

“She’s in the back, Colin. What the hell’s your problem?”

There was nothing out here. Colin couldn’t feel anything. No demons. No Anna. Nothing. But he ran to the rear of the column anyway, already knowing the terrifying truth. She wasn’t here.

“Anna!” he started yelling for her aloud now. The others realized he was right and started calling her name, but they were met with the same insufferable silence.

“Spread out!” Colin ordered, and the others obeyed, fanning away from him to look for her. The air kept getting thicker and heavier and he was sure he would pass out soon, but he kept searching.

Time must have been passing, but he was no longer aware of it. He didn’t know how long they looked for her. At some point, Dylan approached him and told him they needed to call the police, but Colin ignored him and kept calling for her, both aloud and in that secret way of theirs. Because he
knew
wherever she was, whatever had happened to her, she could never be found by something human.

Chapter 7

Anna blinked slowly, trying to will the world into focus around her but it was blurry, fuzzy, like she was drunk only she knew she wasn’t. She lay in a room, cold and empty, gray-blue walls confining her. The cot she was on was thin, covered in a vinyl that made a crinkling noise underneath her. She shivered and tried to pull her knees to her chest, but her limbs were sluggish and uncooperative.

A single steel gray door stood opposite the cot she was stuck on, firmly closed, flushed against the monochromatic walls. No handle. No way to open it. She watched it for a while then closed her eyes again. The swirling motion of the room made her feel like she had to throw up.

It was so cold. She shivered again and wrapped her arms tighter around her body, the cot crinkling as the movement shuffled the plastic underneath her. She tried to find him, but her mind was as quiet as the room she was trapped in. How had she even gotten here? She couldn’t remember anything between chastising Colin in the forest then waking up in this room.

She strained to hear any sounds from outside of the room, but the entire building was eerily quiet, like a mausoleum. The thought made her even more nauseated. She opened her eyes and looked up at the ceiling, a dull grayish white, smooth rather than tiled. At least she thought it was smooth. It was swiveling just as much as the walls were. There were no windows. There was no way out. She closed her eyes again, not wanting to see the walls swirl in colorless patterns in front of her.

She thought of him. Maybe a dream or a memory or a combination of the two, but even in her imagination, his presence comforted her. It was a Christmas, she couldn’t even tell which one, and she’d just finished wrapping a present for him when he walked in. She quickly hid it because this one was meant to be a surprise. It hadn’t been easy to find any vestiges of Catholicism in London, but she’d finally found what she’d been looking for: a small silver medallion with St. Augustine’s image on one side and the phrase
Roma locuta; causa finita est
on the other.

It was misquoting Augustine, but some Catholics had secretly taken it up as a slogan against the usurpation of the Pope’s power by the English monarchy. Anna slipped the small package beneath the pile of sewing she still meant to get to. One of these days. Anna hated sewing. Colin called to her from the parlor and she came out of the bedroom, throwing her arms around him and kissing him, brushing the snow off his coat and hat. He smiled guiltily down at her because he knew the snow would leave puddles on the floor, but Anna didn’t care about the small wet pools he would leave behind. He was home.

“Your father came by at work. Wants to know if we can come for Christmas dinner earlier,” Colin turned around as Anna took his coat from him and hung it in the mudroom.

Anna sighed and was about to lament their unfortunate fates of having to listen to her father bemoan the future of the country as it wrestled with its own civil war, and of course it was all the fault of those damn Stuarts, except he probably wouldn’t actually curse unless he
really
got too far into the bourbon, when she smelled her bread in the oven and remembered it was time to take it out. Colin knew what was in store for them anyway; her father had been not-so-secretly cursing the Stuarts for years, long before parliament decided to fight back.

Colin followed her into the kitchen and watched her as she set the bread on the counter to cool. She gave him a funny look, wondering what was so interesting about the same bread she made almost every single day.

“How are you feeling?” he asked her.

Oh. That.

“Colin, I’m fine. It was nothing. You were sick, too.”

Colin’s brilliant green eyes studied her. “I got over it in three days. You were sick for almost three weeks.”

Anna shrugged it off. He always worried about her. “I’m better now. And tomorrow is Christmas Eve, so I don’t want to hear you nagging me about my health. That can be your gift to me.”

Colin smiled at her and pulled her into his arms. “How can I stop? I love you. You are everything to me.”

He kissed her and the kitchen darkened, disappeared, and then he vanished, too, and Anna was alone, standing in a dark room by herself, cold and afraid. She put her hands out to try to find a wall, but no matter how far she walked, she never ran into anything. She was in a black void, empty and soundless. Even her footsteps made no noise as she kept searching for something to hold onto.

Anna didn’t know if she was still dreaming. This room, this empty space, felt too real, unlike the dream with Colin, where it had held that ethereal quality and she’d known he wasn’t with her, it wasn’t Christmas, England was not at war with itself. Was she trapped in a dark tunnel now? So Anna kept walking, reaching for something that wasn’t there, hoping to find an escape from the endless nothingness. She dragged her feet along the floors, but they were smooth, and when walking in a straight line brought her nowhere, she turned to her right and walked farther. Not even the sounds of her footsteps could find her in this place.

Maybe she eventually fell asleep again or maybe no time had passed at all when the door opened and someone stepped inside, breaking her out of that infinite emptiness. She was back in the cold gray room. Two legs swirled in front of her, walking closer to her. She saw only black pants. They stopped a few feet before her and the knees bent, bringing a man’s face in front of her bleary eyes.

“Anna, is it?” he asked.

She blinked again, but his face wouldn’t clear. He was just a splattering of color. “How do you know my name?” Even her speech slurred. She felt drunk, as if she’d been the one to hit the bourbon too hard at some fantasy Christmas dinner.

“We’ve been looking for you for a long time, Anna.”

Anna closed her eyes. None of this made any sense. She must be dreaming still. She preferred dreams about Colin and her father and the English Civil War or even the French Revolution.

“Your partner is Colin?”

Her eyes shot open. Oh, God. Colin. Her heart beat against her ribs, but she could do nothing but pray.

“Who are you?” she asked weakly. He had none of the distinctive marks of a demon and no odor. He must be human.

“Doesn’t matter. Sleep now, Anna. Your job on Earth is done.”

And Anna fell back to sleep.