Immortal (39 page)

She turns to go.

“Wait!” I say. She hesitates. “Okay, say I figure out what the hell you’re talking about. This is the first time I’ve spoken to you after ten millennia of trying. I don’t think I can wait that long again.”

She stares at me gravely. “This world we share is getting much too small. If you want to find me again, it will not be that difficult. Provided I want you to. And you are wrong. This isn’t the first time we’ve spoken.”

I hear the sound of footsteps in sand, up near the head of the car.

“Be well,” Eve says. Then she turns and walks out of view.

“Wait!” I call out uselessly.

“What is it, Adam?” It’s Clara talking, from the driver’s side door. “Is something wrong?”

“Eve. Stop her.”

“What?” She looks around. “There isn’t anybody else here.”

“You don’t . . . no, no of course there isn’t.”

“Must have been a nasty hit you took to the head,” she says.

“Yeah,” I agree. “That must be it.”

With a full tank of gas, a map, compass, and a bag of mushrooms for Iza, we drive out of the compound. Our destination is the nearest town, which according to the map, is a good three hours away.

   
We remain largely silent for the first hour of the trip, all except for Iza, who’s a louder eater than you might expect.

It turns out the reason Iza had been absent for most of the night’s proceedings, was that I had not been quite as clear in my instructions as I’d thought. What I had told her to do after unlocking the doors was to fly off and locate the nearest idle car, then find Clara and bring her to it, and finally to find me and Eve and lead us to Clara. Thus, as soon as I was done I’d head in the proper direction, rather than stumble about a very large area with a killer vampire and possibly a very angry armed security force to worry about. The problem was that Iza didn’t know what a car was, or where to locate one.

You’d think a pixie that lived in Boston at one time would be fully aware of the concept of an automobile. But, after a few days of patient explanation, it became clear that she thought of cars as simply another type of animal, meaning there was a pretty good chance that when the time came she would end up leading me directly to a stray dog instead. So I had to provide her with an extremely detailed description. So detailed, she bypassed a number of perfectly viable vehicular options because a few of the particulars were a little bit off.

But when she finally did spot what she was sent to find, she raced back and arrived just about the same time I tried to fly from a second story window. She explained that she would have told me right then about the car she’d found, but it looked like I was busy.

As to what happened after I passed out, Clara filled in much of the details.

When Bob Grindel fired his gun right next to Clara’s temple, she lost her hearing for a good minute or two, and thus remained on the ground covering her head for a while, hoping things were turning out okay. When she finally peeked out she saw me unconscious on the ground with Eloise kneeling over me. Given what she knew about Eloise, she assumed the worst. But when Eloise said,
“He has fainted,”
Clara understood well enough to not panic completely.

A somewhat awkward conversation followed, during which Clara managed to convey the need to get me to the vehicle Iza had come to tell us about. This must have been a treat to listen to. Clara with her rudimentary boarding school French, translating directions from a pixie who is barely fluent in English, to Eloise and her fourteenth century peasant version of the French language. I wish I’d been awake for it.

But Clara got the point across all right. And, once I was in the car, she went to the infirmary to get what she needed for my wounds, patching me up as well as she knew how.

I spoke with Eloise before we left, giving her a quick review of what country she was in and why she was here. I also asked her if she remembered what she’d done after Iza had opened the door for her. Much like my old friend Bordick, she had only vague memories of what had transpired, but she did recall having an active interest in killing more or less anything she could hear breathing. She was moderately certain she’d succeeded. So, the good news was, we probably weren’t going to run into anybody on our way out. Bad news? As Clara said, there were at least fifty people in the camp at the beginning of the night. I only felt bad about this once I saw the carnage myself as we drove out of camp. It looked like Gettysburg, only with a more thorough appreciation of the art of dismemberment.

Eloise ultimately decided it might be fun to explore America rather than tag along with us, and I was in no position to stop her. Clara looked relieved. Can’t say I blame her.

I did ask how Eloise was going to avoid the sun while in the middle of a desert.

“I will just dig before sunrise.”
I’d never thought of that, proving again that I would make one terrible vampire. I told her to look me up once she got settled—and washed all the blood off and found some clothes and all of that. She said she would.

*
 
*
 
*

Almost two hours into the trip, and my knee is swelling up horribly. I have the pant leg rolled up so I can study it in all its black-and-blue glory. It’s unpleasant, bordering on nauseating. And every bump in the road is a special treat, let me tell you.

I’ve had injuries of this sort before, and usually they heal themselves given enough time, so I’m not too worried. And my shoulder has calmed down a bit. We had to pop it back into place before leaving, which was decidedly unpleasant. But, by comparison, I’m pretty lucky. Not as lucky as Clara, who doesn’t have a scratch, but lucky.

With the sky turning brighter from the impending sunrise, Clara finally breaks the silence.

“She doesn’t hate you, you know.”

I frown. “Eve.”

“Yeah. Her description of you, from the website? It’s actually quite nice. You know, considering.”

“You’re going to have to show me that site when we get the chance,” I say.

“I will.”

I shift in my seat to try to get a little blood flowing, and also so I can look at Clara’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Seems I did something to her once,” I say. “Any idea what?”

“No,” she says, her eyes flicking up at the mirror to catch mine. “She won’t talk about it. I’m guessing it was something pretty bad.”

“You think? She’s been nursing a grudge that’s older than written history. It’s probably something more serious than me pissing in her rose garden.”

“But you don’t know what,” she says flatly. I’m not so sure she believes me.

“Honestly, I don’t. I wish I did.”

The sunrise starts to brighten up the sky to our left. It’s still nice and cool out, but in another hour or two we’ll have the windows up (we raised the top before we started driving) and the air conditioner blasting away. Soon after that, hopefully, we’ll reach something approximating civilization—and a hospital—provided we’re driving in the correct direction.

“You know,” I say, “I’ve been thinking.”

“About?”

“Something Bob said that’s been bothering me. Maybe it’s just the concussion talking but . . .” I trail off. I’m not so sure I want to bring this up right now.

“Go on,” she prompts.

“He said he needed to test his formula on a human subject.”

“Yeah . . .”

“And he implied that he was that subject.”

Clara says, “He was. Told me so himself. If you were him, wouldn’t you want to be the first in line?”

“True, but work through this with me. He nabbed Eve months ago, right? And she’s just as immortal as I am. And really, other than her being able to disappear into thin air, there’s only one difference between her and me.”

“Boy-girl,” she offers.

“Exactly. So, fine, they have her, but there’s something wrong. They can’t get whatever extract or clone sample, or whatever, to work on everybody. So they have to go out and find another immortal, which is when Bob kick-started his search for me. Do you follow?”

“So far.”

“I’m thinking I was critical because Eve’s sample only worked on other women. Bob needed me—specifically me—so he could become immortal.”

“Are you saying that, or asking that?”

“I’m guessing.”

“Not a bad guess.”

“I didn’t think it was.” I lean forward some more. “Clara, when Bob was trying to escape in the end there, he had you and he had his suitcase, and he said he had everything he needed. But what he needed was an immortal man AND an immortal woman—plus one vampire—to deliver the product to his investors. He can pick up a new vampire more or less anywhere, if he knows where to look. But he only had an immortal man.”

“You’re getting to a question in here, right?”

“Yeah, if Bob was the first one in line, who was the second?”

Clara looks up at me in the mirror and gives a sly smile.

“Told you I’d figure out this immortality thing eventually,” she says.

“Tell me about the gods,” she purred. She was curled up next to me, wrapped loosely in a cotton sheet with a pillow under the crook of her arm. The light breeze from my open bay window threatened to lift the sheet off her, because nature abhors a covered succubus.

   
Her name was Rowena, and I’m not calling her names; she actually was a succubus.

I slid out of the bed and padded over to the pitcher of water on a nearby table. After my third or fourth encounter with Rowena, I learned that keeping drinking water available was a good idea. I had tried wine first. That didn’t work out so well.

“Do you want some water?” I offered.

“No,” she said. “I want you to come back to bed.”

I smiled to myself and drank. We were in a private country house in Northern England that I happened to own, in the middle of the day and the middle of the week. I had nowhere to go and nobody to see, and I expected those facts to remain unchanged for quite a long time. So there was no hurry. Despite this, my heart skipped and I fought the urge to race back to the bed, because she asked for me.

This is how things work with succubi. The whole business about them being demons is a bit of nonsense, but it contains a grain of truth. A succubus will enjoy sex a lot—nearly as much as whomever they happen to be with—but what she really appreciates is the obsession. Thus, men (and women, more often than you’d think) might find themselves doing things that turn out to be a touch self-destructive in hindsight. It’s not exactly the same as enslaving a man and sucking his soul out of him and causing premature aging and whatever else people are saying nowadays about her species. But when a man throws away his family, career and inheritance just to spend all the uninterrupted time he can with one, it’s nearly the same thing.

Not that it always ends up that way. I personally love finding a willing and able succubus whenever I can, because aside from their obviously wonderful physical attributes, the average succubus looks roughly twenty-two human years old for approximately fifty actual years, and that is a fantastic thing for a guy who’s been alive as long as I have. Despite that, even if I completely lost control with one, unlike an ordinary human, I could outlive her.

That’s my solution. I don’t know how mortals do it, though.

Rowena was not a long-term companion for me in that sense. She spent most of her time enthralling high-ranking members of the Anglican Church, including at least one Cardinal I knew of. That was no less scandalous then—this was 1862—than it is now.
 

I was her vacation.

“Why do you want to know about the gods?” I asked, returning to the bed. She sat up and let the sheet fall away, revealing a deeply tanned body and two perfect, pert breasts, and for a moment I forgot what we were talking about. I slipped under the sheet beside her. “And which gods do you mean?”

“I’m curious,” she said, curling under my arm. Her hand slid down my chest and to my crotch. “And we have a few minutes, it seems.”

I brushed the red hair from her eyes and lifted her chin so I could see her properly. “This isn’t a casual bedside inquiry, Rowena. Why don’t you ask what you want to ask instead of hoping I stumble upon it?”