Immortal Beloved

  Do we get married, have kids? Sometimes. I’ve been married. It’s a conundrum—if you marry a regular person, no matter how much you love him, he gets old and dies and you don’t. So at some point, you either have to tell him about yourself, or you let him stew and wonder. Either one of you has a secret, or both of you do. And if you marry another immortal, well, you’re going to be married a looong time. Worse, if you’re married to a non-aefrelyffen and you have kids, seeing those kids age and die is even worse than seeing your spouse age and die. But more on all that later.

  Four hours, three espressos, and a bag of Chips Ahoy! later, I hit West Lowing. I drove straight through the town in less than ten minutes. Not a major metropolis. I turned around and drove back into it, cruising the neighborhoods, following the winding roads around the town’s outskirts. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. A sign? Either a literal sign, like RIVER’S EDGE, TURN LEFT, or a metaphorical sign, like a burning bush or something, a bolt of lightning pointing me in the right direction.

  Two minutes later I was out of the town again. I pulled over, leaned my head on the steering wheel, and slammed my palms against the dashboard.

  “Nastasya, you are an idiot. You are a stupid effing idiot, and you deserve this.” Actually, I deserved so much worse, but then, I’m pretty easy on myself.

  After several minutes of thought and consideration, I got out of the car and walked into the woods by the side of the road. No cars had passed me in a while. About twenty feet in, hidden from the road, I knelt on the ground, putting my hands flat. I said a bunch of words, words so old that they sounded like a string of unrelated syllables. Words that had already been ancient by the time I was born.

  Words that reveal hidden things.

  One of the few spells I knew. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d used it. Maybe to find my keys, back in the nineties?

  I closed my eyes, and after a minute, images floated into focus. I saw a road, a turn, the shape of a maple tree, its leaves sprayed with autumn’s colors. I saw where I needed to go.

  Taking a deep breath, I stood up. Where my hands had been, the leaves and twigs were powdered, dry, disintegrating. Bits of late clover were withered and dying, their cells sucked dry of life so I could work my baby spell. Two handprints of destruction marked where I’d gotten my power. Because that’s how immortals do it—to make magick, we rip the power away from something else. Most of us do it that way, at least.

  I got back in the car and drove again down winding roads that led through and around the small town. I started looking carefully, trying to feel where I was. I knew I had been down this road just ten minutes before, but this time I examined every tree, every unpaved turnoff.

  There it was: an unmarked road, a maple tree aflame with color, its wide branches forked into a V, as if hit by lightning years ago. I turned. My tiny rental bumped over the unpaved drive—I bet it would be almost impassable in a heavy snowfall. I was starting to feel chilled, so I cranked the car’s heater. I felt hyped up on caffeine and sugar and was suddenly overcome by the supreme ridiculousness of what I was doing.

  I was insane. This was the stupidest thing I’d ever thought up. Part and parcel of my panic, my nervous breakdown, I supposed.

  Abruptly, I stopped the rental and rested my head on my hands on the steering wheel. I’d come all this way to look for a woman named River. This was so incredibly asinine. What had I been thinking? I needed to turn around, return the car, and go home. Wherever I decided home was going to be, this time.

  When had I met her, River? Like, 1920? 1930? All I remembered was her face, smooth and tan, and her hands, strong and slender. Her hair had been gray, very unusual for an immortal. Innocencio had wrecked his first car—and I do mean first. As in just invented.

  Had it been… 1929? That sounded right. Innocencio had bought himself a truly beautiful Model A, sort of a dusty blue. It was one of the first Model A’s that Ford shipped to France. Incy had it a couple weeks, and then he crashed it into a ditch on a road near Reims. Another car stopped to help us. It was night. I’d been thrown through the glass windshield and had landed in the ditch. My face was shredded—this was before safety glass, before seat belts. It was freezing.

  Innocencio and Rebecca had been thrown out of the car. Rebecca had a bunch of broken bones. She was a regular human and probably ended up in the hospital. Imogen was dead—her neck had broken when she hit a tree. Innocencio and I were messed up but could walk away. We’d met Imogen and Rebecca only the day before, at a party. They were both pretty, rich, and ready for fun. Unfortunately, they’d met us.

  A car had stopped. A woman and two men ran over to help us. The men carefully loaded Rebecca into the backseat of their car, and they discovered that Imogen was dead. The woman checked Innocencio, who was already starting to shake it off, mourning the loss of his beautiful car. Leaving him, she came and knelt by me, where I was climbing out of the icy ditch water. In French, she told me that everything would be fine, that I should lie still, and she tried to check my pulse. I brushed my sodden hair out of my eyes, pulled my fox-fur collar closer around my neck, and asked her what time it was—we were on our way to a New Year’s Eve party. Imogen was dead, and it was too bad, a shame, really, but it hardly registered on me. Depraved indifference. Incy hadn’t killed her on purpose, after all. Humans seemed so… fragile sometimes.

  That was when the woman looked at me. She held my chin in her hands and really looked into my eyes. I looked back into hers, and we recognized each other as immortal. There isn’t a distinguishing characteristic. It’s not like we have a big I painted on the backs of our retinas. But we can recognize each other.

  She sat back, looking at the scene: the ruined car, the dead girl, Innocencio and I already starting to pull ourselves together.

  “It doesn’t have to be like this,” she said in French.

  “What?” I asked.

  She shook her head, her warm brown eyes sad. “You can have so much more, be so much more.”

  That was when I started to get belligerent, wiping blood out of my eyes and standing up.

  “My name is River,” she said, getting up also. “I have a place, in America. In Massachusetts, up north. A town called West Lowing. You should come there.” She gestured at the ruined and smoking car, at the men gently carrying Imogen’s body to their own car. She gave Incy a glance that seemed to sum him up in an instant as a wastrel, a good-time guy, the proverbial rock that seeds of wisdom would die upon.

  “I’ve been to Massachusetts,” I said. “It was straitlaced. Snooty. And cold.”

  She gave a brief, sad smile. “Not West Lowing,” she said. “You should come, when you get tired of this.” Again she looked at the car, at Incy. “What’s your name?” Her eyes were sharp, intelligent—they seemed to memorize the planes of my face, the curve of my ear. I drew my fur closer around me.

  “Christiane.”

  “Christiane.” She nodded. “When you get tired, when you want to be more, come to West Lowing. Massachusetts. My house is called River’s Edge. You’ll be able to find it.”

  The woman named River got into the car with the two men, with Rebecca and Imogen’s body, and they drove off, leaving me and Incy and his ruined, beautiful blue car. Eventually someone came along and we hitched a ride, then took the train to Paris, and then down to Marseilles, where it was warmer. It was a beautiful spring in Marseilles, and I put River—and Imogen—completely out of my mind.

  Until two days ago. Now, eighty years later, I was deciding to take her up on her offer. Eighty freaking years later, as if she would still be here, her invitation still good. As you might imagine, immortals move around a lot. To live in the same village for fifty years, your looks not changing—well, it would arouse suspicion. So we rarely stay in one place too long. Why would I assume that River would still be here? It was just… she had seemed so timeless. A pointless cliché for an immortal, I know. But she had seemed—unusually rock solid. Like if she said she’d be t
here, that I could come anytime, well then, by God, she would be there, and I could come any freaking time.

  The espresso and sugar made my hands shake, my insides churn. What to do, what to do?

  There was a tap on the window of my car, and I jumped, barely able to stifle a scream.

  My frantic eyes focused, and the man leaned down to look at me.

  Almost-hysterical laughter tickled my throat, and I had to swallow it. A Viking god had tapped on my window, was looking at me with concern—or suspicion. His golden handsomeness was breathtaking, as if a mythical figure had come to life, had warm blood flowing through his veins.

  In the next moment, I squinted at him—his face was familiar. Was he a male model? Had I seen him in an underwear ad, forty feet across, in Times Square? Was he an actor? On a daytime soap? I couldn’t quite place him as I rolled down my window. Please, please be some sex-starved nutcase who wants to kidnap me and make me your love slave, I begged silently.

  “Yes?” My voice sounded dry, cracked.

  “This is a private road,” the god said, looking at me disapprovingly. He was, maybe, twenty-two? Younger? Did he like teenage girls? I blinked at him, feeling again, at the edge of my consciousness, as if I’d seen him somewhere before.

  “Ah… um, I was looking for River? River’s Edge?”

  His topaz-colored eyes flared in surprise. It occurred to me she might have cloaked her place from neighbors. If she was still there at all.

  “Do you know anyone like that?” I pressed.

  “You know River?” he asked slowly. “Where did you meet her?”

  Who was he, her personal guard? “I met her a long time ago. She said I could come visit her,” I said firmly. “Do you know if her place, River’s Edge, is around here?”

  Too fast for me to react, one strong hand reached through the car window and touched my cheek. His hand was warm, hard and gentle at the same time, and I knew that my skin felt icy under his touch.

  He was immortal, and he now recognized that I was, too.

  I tilted my head to one side. “Do I know you? Have I met you somewhere?” If I’d met him, surely I would remember him with much more clarity, much more intensity. No one would forget that face, that voice. Still, I’d pretty much crisscrossed every continent too many times to count. Maybe he wasn’t that old. Or—

  He was one of them, the other kind of immortals. The kind I had nothing to do with, nothing in common with, avoided like the plague, mocked with my friends. The kind I disdained almost as much as they disdained me.

  The kind I was hoping would… save me. Protect me. The Tähti.

  “No,” he said, drawing his hand away. I shivered, feeling colder than ever.

  “It’s down this road here,” he said, sounding reluctant. “Down this road. It curves to the left. Take the first left fork. You’ll come to the house.”

  “So River is still here, then?”

  I couldn’t read anything in his expression. His face was closed.

  “Yes.”

  CHAPTER 3

  I watched him in the rearview mirror as he walked down the road. He was tall and broad-shouldered, and the way his jeans hugged his butt was a rare treat. As I looked at his back, that feeling of recognition lingered, and I frowned, racking my memory. Then I caught a glimpse of myself and groaned out loud—my skin had an unhealthy nightclub pallor, my lips were practically as pale as my skin, my eyes looked weird because of my blue contacts, my spiky black hair was lopsided and stiff. I was his antithesis: He was the perfect man, while I was the least perfect of women. Strung out, unhealthy. Well, what did I care? I didn’t care.

  Four minutes of rutted road later, I finally pulled up in front of a long two-story building that looked more like a school or a dormitory than someone’s home. It was large and rectangular, painted a severe, pristine white, with dark green shutters on each precise window. There were at least three more outbuildings off to the sides, and a stone fence that might enclose a large garden.

  I parked my car on autumn-dry grass next to a beat-up red truck. It felt like the next few minutes were monumental, as if they would decide my whole future. Getting out of this car would be admitting that my life was a waste. That I was a waste. It would be admitting that I was scared of my friends, scared of myself, my own darkness, my history. Everything in me wanted to stay in this car with the windows rolled up and the doors locked, forever. If I’d been a human, and forever meant only another sixty years, I might have actually done it. However, in my case, forever truly would have been unbearably long. There was no way.

  I’d come here for a reason. I’d left my friends and disappeared to a different continent. On the plane coming over, I’d realized that besides Incy crippling the cabbie, despite my disgust at my lack of action, despite my paranoia about Incy’s seeing my scar, it had been a hundred, a thousand other things leading up to that, chipping away at my insides until I felt like a shell with nothing alive left in me. I hadn’t been going around killing people and setting villages on fire, but I’d been cutting a destructive path through my existence, and I’d realized, with nauseating honesty, that everything I touched was harmed. People were hurt, homes broken, cars wrecked, careers destroyed—the memories just kept trickling in like rivulets of fresh acid dripping into my brain until I wanted to scream.

  It was in my blood, I knew. A darkness. The darkness. I had inherited it, along with my immortality and my black eyes. I had resisted it when I was younger. Had pretended it wasn’t there. But somewhere along the way, I’d stopped fighting, given in to it. For a long time, I’d run with it. But that last night, the darkness that had been following me for more than four hundred years had come crashing down on me with a suffocating weight, and now I hated the horrible thing I’d become.

  If I were a regular person, I’d be tempted to kill myself. Being me, I had almost collapsed with hysterical laughter when I realized that even if I managed to cut off my own head, I wouldn’t be able to make sure it was far enough away from my body for long enough to actually kill me. And what was my other option? Throwing myself headfirst into a wood chipper? What if it jammed when only half my head was through? Can you imagine the regrowth process of that stunt? Jesus.

  My life suddenly felt like I’d fallen off a cliff and would fall forever toward ever-increasing despair, never to be happy again. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d felt truly happy. Amused? Yes. Diverted? Yes. Happy? Not so much. Couldn’t even remember what it felt like.

  The only person who had ever offered to help me, who had ever seemed to understand, was River. She had invited me here so many decades ago. And here I was.

  I glanced around again, and this time I saw her, standing on the wide wooden steps of the house. She looked just the same as I remembered, which was unusual. We tend to alter our appearances frequently, drastically. I certainly had, probably twenty times since I’d met her. I didn’t see how she could possibly recognize me. But she was watching me, and it was clear that she intended for me to make the first move.

  I let out a deep breath, hoping the house was toasty warm inside, that I could get some hot tea or a drink or take a hot bath. Would she even remember me? Was her offer still good? I knew how ridiculous it was to hold her to something she’d said more than eighty years ago. But what else could I do?

  Well, I’d done more pathetic things. I got out of the car and hunched into my leather jacket—my old one, not the one I’d lost two nights ago. I scuffled across the fallen leaves on the ground, already making plans for what to do when she turned me away. Go hide someplace warm, definitely. Fiji or something. Stay there till I felt better, felt like less of a waste. It was bound to happen sometime. Eventually Incy would probably seem less scary. Eventually I would forget all about the cabbie, as I’d forgotten about Imogen until yesterday.

  “Hello,” she said when I was close enough. She wore a long paisley skirt and a woolen shawl around her shoulders. Her gray hair was straight, the sides pulled back by a clip. ?
??Welcome.”

  “Hi,” I said. “River?”

  “Yes.” She searched my face for remembrance. “What’s your name, child?”

  I gave a short laugh at being called a child, at my age. “Nastasya. Currently.”

  “We’ve met.” It was a statement, not a question.

  I nodded, crunching leaves under my boots. “A long time ago. You said—if I ever wanted to do something more, to come to West Lowing.” I looked casually off into the distance, saw clouds rolling in from the southwest.

  “Nastasya,” she repeated. She looked at my straggly black hair, the contacts that made my eyes match the description on my American passport. I tried to remember what I had looked like when we met, but I couldn’t.

  “Christiane,” I said, recalling. One of a very long line of names. Not the one I was born with. “My name was Christiane then. We met in France, after a car wreck. Like, in the late 1920s?”

  “Ah, yes,” she said after a moment, nodding. “That was a bad night. But I’m glad I met you. And I’m glad you’re here.”

  “Well,” I said awkwardly, looking anywhere but her face. “I know that was a long time ago, but I thought, you know, if—”

  “I’m glad you’re here, Chr—Nastasya,” she repeated. “You’re welcome. Do you have anything with you?”

  I nodded, thinking of my huge suitcase. And, of course, all my emotional baggage.

  “Good. Let me show you to your room, and then you can get settled in.”

  I got a room? “Is this like a hotel or something?” I asked, following her through the door into a foyer. A round table held a vase full of dried maple branches. A beautiful, wide curving staircase led to the second floor. Everything was white, simple, elegant. It was weird, but as soon as I stepped across her threshold, I felt—less scared? Less, I don’t know—vulnerable? Maybe I was imagining it.