Immortal at the Edge of the World (42 page)

“Look harder, then. Or stop running away from it so much.”

She sighed. “Maybe you’re right. Goodbye, Urr. I will find you again sometime. Unless, I suppose, you figure out how to find me.”

“I might, if I can do it without upsetting the faeries.”

She smiled, brushed Paul’s hair, and then turned and walked off into nothing.

Paul was wriggling in my arms, so I put him down, making sure he could stand first. I could already hear his mother running for us from what sounded like clear on the other side of the camp.

I took a good look at him, as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked around. He was confused, clearly, and scared, but otherwise was a lot like a tiny version of me, or maybe a version of me after I woke up not knowing where I was. This was something that actually happened to me a lot.

“Hello, Paul,” I said. I knelt down to his eye level because something in my past reminded me kids were less threatened if you did this. Although I may have been thinking of bobcats.

“H’lo,” he said. “Who are you?”

“My name’s Adam.” I extended my hand and we shook. He had a firm grip for a seven-year-old. “I’m a friend of your mommy.”

“Okay.”

“She’s coming right now for you.”

“Okay. I made her a picture.” He looked around again, and I realized we were still standing among corpses. “I don’t know where it is.”

“Look at me, Paul,” I said, which I thought was important because I was not a dismembered body. “What was it a picture of?”

He looked at me. He had Clara’s eyes. “It was a horse. Mommy likes horses. The man said if I drew a good one he’d let me see Mommy, so I need to find my picture. Do you know where it is?”

At that moment I kind of wished I remembered what it was like to be seven, just to know how to stand on a street surrounded by death and worry about a crayon drawing of a horse. “I think it must have been a very good drawing.”

“It was. It was my best one.”

“Well, the man must have thought so, too, because here comes your mother.”

Epilogue

As soon as Clara was reunited with Paul we set about destroying all the video footage we could find in the compound, and then we exited as quickly and calmly as possible. It was a little bit of a challenge given everything we’d seen—the satyrs, being disposed to believe in gods walking the Earth already, were particularly shaken by the faeries—but we had to look like everything was perfectly okay for as long as it took to reach our boat and get off the island.

I don’t know who ended up finding the mess we’d left behind. Smith had evacuated all the scientists prior to our arrival, so it was probably one of them. Whoever it was, they didn’t keep the information to themselves, because before long the secret CIA black site where “at least twenty” people died was international news. That it was not a CIA-sanctioned site nor was it only twenty-odd people was a detail best taken up with the newspapers, which I wasn’t about to do. Although I may have been responsible for a certain exclusive that showed up a few weeks later in the London papers connecting the Scotland massacre with a similar incident a decade earlier in the southwestern United States.

I’m not sure what happened to the consortium of rich people that had invested so much time and money in finding me and farming my biology, if anything happened at all. Francis Justinian pulled all his funds from the investment shortly after the Isle of Mull base became public, and it was probably safe to say he wasn’t the only one.

That was actually the last official financial act of Mr. Justinian before he died tragically in a skiing accident in Vail. The accident didn’t make much of a splash at all, newswise, because nobody had actually ever heard of Mr. Justinian, despite his being one of the richest men in the world. Entirely unreported was the recent discovery of one Paul Justinian, a fake name for a real heir.

Per the decedent’s last will and testament, the entire estate was liquidated, with half the money going to charity and the other half in a trust in his son’s name, to be received once the boy turned twenty-one. Mr. Heintz, while sad about having to bury me, was actually excited by the estate sale and the prospect of getting to advise Paul and his mother in the years to come. It was the sort of thing that excited Mr. Heintz, just in general. He was probably also happy to work with someone whose requests were slightly more sane, and who grasped finance as well as Clara did.

A few months after that, the Harvard University Science Museum received a piece of mail anonymously. To the amazement and confusion of the curator, the package contained a rare astrolabe that had disappeared from the collection several months earlier. “It’s a really extraordinary piece,” the curator was reported as saying. “The only one of its kind.”

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After I got Clara and Paul to safety, she made it clear that she didn’t want me to be involved in their lives. I would be upset about this if it was the least bit surprising, but considering knowing me had put them both in a huge amount of danger it made sense. It was probably better that way. I could never find and destroy the consortium that had come after us, but as long as Clara and I were not together we were probably both safer, since they needed each of us to work out the science. Well, or Eve, but she had a get-out-of-this-reality-free card. Paul, being mortal, would not be of use to anyone.

I don’t know what happened to Eve. It was safe to assume she went back to lurking in the faery realm, but there was a chance that she took my advice and decided to become a waitress in Hoboken or something. Anything would have to be better than just watching the world go by.

Hsu couldn’t answer regarding her whereabouts. He was still in awe for having seen her, as were his faery friends, but they had no way to locate her even in their own realm. What he could do was try and convince me to go there with him, and I actually thought about it if only because it was something new and it had been a really long time since I’d had something new. But ultimately I decided to pass. Their world went by too quickly, and I have enough trouble with people growing old and dying before my eyes when time is going by at the usual pace. And one day maybe I’d get to meet my son as an adult, even if it was only for a little while. I didn’t want to miss that.

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*

The last thing Francis Justinian officially did before he ceased to exist was fire his only employee. Mirella took this pretty well, considering she expected to not survive protecting me. We parted ways at the Seattle airport, which was the nearest international hub to my former residence.

I had a new fake identity in my pocket and a credit card with enough of a credit line to get me a flight just about anywhere in the world and about a week or two of food and drink, after which I was going to be left to my own devices.

This was how I expected things to turn out eventually, not because I’m a poor manager of money—although I am—but because it was the only way to break from my old identity completely. If anyone thought I was still alive and wanted to find me they wouldn’t be able to do it by following a money trail.

I was eyeing a flight to India. It was as good a place as any to disappear for a while, I knew the place, and if I thought I could get away with it maybe I’d find some time to get into China and look around, since that was one of the only places on my mental map that was mostly blank.

“Excuse me.” I turned around to find Mirella standing there, looking exactly as I’d left her an hour earlier, which is to say looking fantastic. “I’m looking to hire a bodyguard. I wonder if you know someone?”

“A bodyguard? What do you need a bodyguard for?”

“Well.” She pirouetted slowly. She had on three-inch-heeled leather boots with jeans and a tight white blouse with a great deal of cleavage showing. And given she was about to get on a flight I was nearly positive she had no knives hidden on her this time, which I found inexplicably arousing. “Don’t you think this body needs some guarding?”

“I do, yes. I think it could use a lot of guarding, actually. I’d like to guard it myself.”

“Would you? That’s good. You look like a capable guard. And as it turns out, I am a very rich woman.”

“Is that so?”

“My last employer was unusually generous. I think he was sweet on me.”

“I don’t blame him.”

“Yes, he was very nice. Unfortunately, he died. No fault of mine, of course.”

“No, of course not.”

She stepped up to me. With the heels on she was nearly eye level, which made it easier to tilt her chin and give her one of my better kisses. Not my absolute best, since we were still in public and we had on clothes, but a pretty good one.

“You know this is a terrible idea,” I said. “Someone may find me by connecting you to your former employer.”

“They might. But you see, on the one hand we have the millions of dollars sitting in my private bank account, the bungalow and beach I just purchased with a tiny percentage of that money, and the great likelihood that I will find the string bikini in my luggage unnecessary when sunbathing on my private beach. On the other hand, we have the possibility that someone will connect me, a rich heiress, with a bodyguard who let her last client die on a mountain, and this someone will in some way present to us a risk that neither I nor my new bodyguard can handle. It seems to me this is a fair exchange of risks.”

“You’ve thought this through.”

“I am very thorough.”

“Then I agree with your reasoning.”

“I’m glad. I will hire you conditionally, and once we are alone, you can show me your résumé and I’ll consider your application at length. I hope you aren’t the sort of bodyguard who is uncomfortable with sleeping with your boss.”

“Oh no, that’s exactly the kind of bodyguard I am. Now where is this island? Is it a place that gets hurricanes? I’m not very fond of hurricanes.”

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About the Author

Gene Doucette is the acclaimed author of
Immortal
and
Hellenic Immortal
, the sci-fi thriller
Fixer
, and (as G Doucette) the erotic horror thriller
Sapphire Blue
. He is also the author of multiple short stories—including
The Immortal Chronicles
series—is a prize-winning playwright and screenwriter, and a published humorist and essayist. He lives in Cambridge, MA with his wife and two children.