by Alma Katsu
“I won’t feel safe if I stay here. You can follow me or not, but I’m leaving,” I replied, and Luke gave in: he could tell I was not going to change my mind. Eventually, we found a cheap hotel on the rail line near Heathrow. For a bribe, the desk clerk kept our names and passport IDs off their books and we paid for a night’s lodging in cash so there’d be no credit card record. The room was cramped, filled with mismatched furniture, the mattress unevenly soft from overuse. I find few things as depressing as a run-down hotel, perhaps because I’d spent more than my share of time in them. But it was just for one night, and in the morning we’d catch a flight to . . . somewhere. I hadn’t made up my mind yet; I needed to find a place where I’d be safe from Adair. I only knew I’d feel better if we kept moving.
Luke and I made love quickly that night, in that tired old bed. I suspected he wanted us to have sex because he thought it might calm my nerves, but he was rather workmanlike about it and not reassuring at all. In any case, he fell asleep soon after we’d finished, but I was too edgy to do anything but try to ignore the painful keening in my head and all that it meant.
The longer I sat in the darkness watching Luke, the more I struggled with the urge to get out of bed and slip away. He’s going to leave you; it’s inevitable, the merciless voice in my head insisted. He doesn’t love you and he’ll wake up to that one day. He’ll want his old life back, the one he threw away to follow you. He’s got children, after all. There is no happily-ever-after for someone like you; you’re one of Adair’s monsters and he picked you for a reason. Luke wouldn’t love you if he really knew you—if he knew of all that you did to stave off loneliness and weaken the sting of Jonathan’s rejection. He’d leave you if he knew half of your adventures and romances, because he thinks of himself as a good person, and good people don’t take up with bad. Did you really think you deserved to be happy?
I hated that voice. I heard it all too often. And behind it lurked the fear that I felt with every man, the same needle-sharp pain I’d felt when Jonathan had left me. That pain had been so bad, I swore I’d never allow myself to be hurt like that again. I resolved that, in all my relationships, if someone was going to leave, it would be me.
The truth was, too, that only one of us was in danger. Luke was only in harm’s way because he was with me. If I left Luke, he would be safe. I was about to do something cruel and unforgivable, but I was doing it for his sake. I would break the promise I’d made to him when he helped me escape: that if he gave up everything to come with me, he’d never be alone again. He’d kept his end of the bargain, and now he would learn that he shouldn’t have trusted me.
Quietly, I searched the writing desk until I found a forgotten sheet of hotel stationery. Luke deserved a note from me, even if I couldn’t think coherently. I don’t know exactly what I wrote that night; I think I thanked him for helping me at my time of greatest need and hoped he would be able to forgive me someday. I left all the money I had on me and suggested that he go back to America and see his daughters. I hoped that he would not be broken by my desertion, as I had been when Jonathan left me. But it was the only way.
I put the note on my empty pillow. I have to go, I have to go, I have to go—the words clamored in my head like the ringing of a bell as I gazed at Luke sleeping peacefully. Adair was coming for me and our time together had run out. I had to take care of myself now and spare Luke and his family. I would be alone again, but in the end, we are all alone. How well I knew that lesson.
I hated to do it, but I slipped out of the room as quiet as a monk at midnight vespers and refused to look back as I closed the door behind me.
FOUR
BOSTON
The next morning, Adair rose early after a restless night. The darkness of evening wasn’t nearly as complete as the darkness and quietude of his sealed tomb, and so he found it impossible not to waken at the minutest lightening of the sky or the slightest street noise. On the other hand, after just one night in a proper bed, he developed an appreciation for the ingenuity of modern mattresses and box springs. The bed in Jude’s guest room might not be as decadent as the bower of pillows and sables on which he’d slept in the old mansion, but it was preferable by far to the hard-packed floor that had been his bed for so long.
Dawn had barely broken and Adair found Jude already up to his elbows in work in the only room in which he seemed to spend any time, the one he called his office. Jude always had been industrious—indeed, he first came to Adair’s attention when he’d nearly brought down the Dutch gold merchants’ guild with an ambitious scheme to break their monopoly—but today Adair was put off by his single-minded devotion to business. After all, his master had returned after an absence of two centuries; Jude should be happy to push aside his ledgers and accounting to celebrate Adair’s return and wait on him as protocol decreed.
“Take me into this new world,” Adair said, standing in front of Jude’s desk, demanding his attention. “I want to see it for myself.”
The Dutchman lifted his head from his work with forced patience. “It’s a little early in the day to see much of anything. How about I set you up on the computer and let you—”
“No,” Adair interrupted. “No more of your precious gadget. I’m tired of it.” He suspected Jude was using it to keep Adair out of his hair. And besides, he didn’t like the feel of it, the way it made his fingertips hum and set his teeth on edge.
Jude leaned back in his chair. “All right. Where do you propose we start?”
“I need clothing. We’ll call on your tailor.”
Jude had the audacity to smirk. “We don’t have tailors make our clothes anymore. You can buy most things in stores. And you’re right: you need clothing. My things don’t really fit you, do they? Okay, once the stores open, we’ll go shopping. In the meantime, you should get a sense of how men dress these days.” He left the room to come back with bound stacks of glossy pages of images. “Magazines. Periodicals, like courants, but the modern equivalent,” Jude said, dropping the pile in Adair’s lap. “They’re mostly advertisements, but that will give you an idea of what to expect.” Thus directed, Adair took his time looking through the pictures, but they seemed like an endless repetition of insouciant and foppish young men, oversize illustrations of timepieces and variations of the mechanized carriages he’d seen on the street yesterday. He found the young men impossible to take seriously, and the other items held no appeal.
Shopping proved to be tedious and fascinating all at once. He’d secretly thought it would be his first pleasurable experience in the new world, since he had been fond of dressing up and, in his day, had indulged in the best cloth and finest tailors money could buy. Presently, however, the experience was much degraded.
First, Adair had to deal with the morbid sensation of making personal choices in front of strangers; he was used to dealing with tailors and clerks, but to make purchases under the curious eyes of other customers seemed too public. Then there were the clothes themselves, so thin and plain, devoid of lace and embroidery, piping, brass buttons, or frogs made of silk braid. Everything was dark and somber and devoid of self-expression, as though Quakers had taken over the clothing industry. And one wore so few layers that even fully dressed he felt scandalously loose and nearly naked. He felt especially unprotected at the throat, with no high collar and winding cravat, and Adair fingered silk neckties, but Jude assured him that he’d never need one. At the heart of his discontent, Adair recognized, was that he felt vulnerable in this clothing. One benefited from constriction in one’s garb: you were sure of the boundary between your body and the rest of the world. You were held in check.
After spending nearly half the day in stores, he’d amassed an entire wardrobe, down to socks (fine as little gloves on the feet, he marveled, magically gripping the calf with no need for garters) and shoes, and a near-weightless wrap of clingy fabric at the groin instead of a saggy linen to hold one’s testicles in place.
Next, Jude took Adair to a salon, which turned out to be a
delightful experience. He sat in a chair while a fetching young woman ran her fingers through his curls, and a half dozen more hairdressers cooed as they passed by, commenting on his handsomeness, coming up with excuses to squeeze his biceps, telling him that he had sexy eyes. A young man trimmed Adair’s facial hair in a style Adair would never have imagined, outlandish to the point of pretension, but it seemed to please the women.
That evening, Jude called for two high-priced escorts to entertain them. Adair sat on the low sofa and watched the two women dance together, studied the brazenness of their clothing, their hair, the precise makeup applied to their faces. Their limbs were sculpted, their eyes bright, their lips sultry, as though every aspect of their appearance had been calculated to make them as desirable as possible. The women he remembered, whether peasants working in the fields or courtesans to a king, would seem overfed and underpainted by comparison. Adair wondered for the hundredth time about the world he was thrown into, the sheer chaos of it, and how nearly unrecognizable it was from the one he’d known.
He and Jude took turns with the women and they seemed to make a game over which could come up with the most imaginatively obscene thing to do to Adair. They made a fuss over the sizable girth of his manhood and vied to make it rise again and again. They stroked and petted him, rubbed their pretty faces against his chest and backside and groin, worked their lips and tongues over his nipples and belly button and stomach, treating every inch of his skin to pleasures he’d not had for two centuries. He came so many times he wouldn’t be surprised if he never climaxed again. One of the women slept in his bed that evening—Jude sent his away in a taxi—and Adair was surprised at how satisfying it was to have this stranger sleep beside him, like a kitten curled under his arm.
After she left in the morning, Adair wandered through the house until he found Jude again in the office. He leaned back in his desk chair upon seeing Adair. “Hope you enjoyed your treat last night.” Jude smiled broadly. “I told the girls you’d just got out of prison for embezzlement: that’s a high-class crime. They wanted to give you a warm welcome back to society.”
Adair ignored him; discussing their activities of the night before seemed juvenile and ungallant. “So, what do you do now, Jude? No longer pretending to be a clergyman?”
Jude gestured at his cluttered desk, the stacks of papers and pieces of electronic gadgetry. “I’m a businessman.”
“A businessman, huh? What line of business are you in, exactly?”
“The business of the day, my friend: making money. I have a partner in Hong Kong—we’ve never met face-to-face—and we speculate on the stock market. Essentially, we make money from nothing but intuition and timing. It’s all very complicated. I’ll explain it to you someday. Right now, though, I doubt it’s the most pressing thing on your mind.”
The condescension in Jude’s tone made Adair seethe. He wanted to take him to task right then and there, but he held his temper, because he knew he needed Jude to find Lanore. Nothing could jeopardize his chances of finding her. “All I need to know is that you’re very good at it and that it provides you with a considerable income, because I will be using your funds while I get back on my feet,” Adair responded.
Jude’s face fell in a way Adair found amusing. However, there was only one man to whom Jude owed everything and could deny nothing, and what would be the use of refusing? Adair would take what he wanted from him anyway. Jude sighed in resignation. “Of course. What’s mine is yours. It’s only money, right?”
“That has always been my belief. Money is only a means to what is truly important.”
Jude hesitated before continuing. “Look, you need to understand, though, that while I have money, most of it is tied up in business ventures. It’s not that I begrudge you any of it, but something tells me my little nest egg is not going to last the two of us very long. And as I explained already, you’ve been wiped out. I have an idea for a way to get you enough cash so that you’ll never have to worry about it again. There are people who would pay a lot to live forever . . . if you would be willing to put this service up for sale.”
Adair’s first reaction was to refuse; indeed, even as the suggestion spilled from Jude’s mouth, Adair felt uneasy. It would be an act of extreme desperation to sell such power. That was how he’d acquired the true elixir of life, the potion that granted immortality, in the first place: he’d found a penniless apprentice reduced to selling his master’s potions to keep from starving while he waited for his master’s return. Even then he’d resisted the temptation to use this power to get rich and sold only enough to meet his meager needs. And that transaction hadn’t ended well for the apprentice: it only takes one wolf to show up at your door.
Still . . . he was no apprentice and this was an extraordinary situation. Adair felt the reasonableness of Jude’s suggestion in his bones. So be it. “I might consider doing this once, and only once, Jude, so the recipient must be able to pay handsomely for the opportunity.”
“Of course. . . . I’ll find someone with the means to afford it.”
“You’re putting the cart before the horse. First, I need to find my books of spells.” Adair had no illusions as to the difficulty of this task, however. Books were fragile things, easily hidden, easily destroyed. If he couldn’t find the books, he’d need to go back to the old country and trace them back to their origins, as he had the first time. He looked down at Jude, who had no idea of the extent of the research it had taken to acquire all these powers in the first place, the years spent tracking down stories of Adepts, practitioners of alchemy who had developed spectacular powers, finding their adherents, convincing them to share the secrets. Convincing them by any means necessary . . .
“These books are quite singular, you see. There were two, a blue book of Venetian origin, and a much cruder one, no more than a collection of written recipes bound between wooden covers. It’s the second, however, that is the more valuable.”
Jude scratched his chin. “The books in the mansion—were those your only copies?”
“Of course not. I took precautions. I wrote out the most important recipes and hid them in a safe place.”
“That’s good. It might be easier to retrieve your copies than to try to find the originals. Where did you hide them?”
“A city in Saxony; a church in the city’s center.” He couldn’t remember the year, but he’d stopped there for one season. He recalled falling in with a widow who owned a nice house in town, and she offered him companionship and a comfortable place in which to spend a wet winter. He used the gray afternoons to copy out his most important spells for safekeeping, wrapped them in a square of boar’s hide, and hid the packet in the church’s catacombs, among the priests’ bones. He could picture the area in his mind very well, but the town’s name eluded him, as did the year. Surely the town was unrecognizable by now, if it still existed at all. But a crypt would go unmolested. No one, not even in the modern age, would desecrate a crypt.
“Could you show me the location on a map?” Jude asked, though clearly reluctant to raise any hope as he spread an atlas in front of Adair. “Here’s the region of Saxony. It’s on the eastern side of a country called Germany now. See, right here where it comes up against the Czech Republic.” When Adair didn’t react beyond peering at the unfamiliar map, Jude flipped to another page, one that showed the area in topographical detail: greens and browns, with rivers in a meandering dark blue line. His finger circled aimlessly on the page. “Any of this look familiar?”
Adair’s eyes picked over the place names . . . Königstein, Freital . . . the Elbe River, yes; he recalled that the town had stood on the south bank of the Elbe. And then his finger passed over the name, Dresden; yes, that had been the name of the town. It had been the seat of the margrave, as he recalled. He looked up at Jude, tapping the spot on the map.
“Are you sure that’s the city?” Jude asked, but by his tone Adair could tell the news would be bad. “If that’s the place, and you left your papers in the
city center, then I’m sorry to tell you that they are probably gone. There’s a chance that it might’ve been spared, if your memory is inaccurate and the place you remember wasn’t exactly in the center but on the outskirts. But the city was destroyed by bombs and gutted by fire in a war.” Adair felt his stomach tighten like a fist. “I’m sorry to have to tell you. We can go over there and search for ourselves, if you’d like. We can try.”
Adair was very tired suddenly. The village he recalled had been a lovely place with verdant fields and forests running with deer and boar. The city had been lively and prosperous, and the young widow had been grateful for his company. Of course, he’d expected that the village as he knew it would be gone, the widow long dead, and yet . . . the news that it had been destroyed struck him like a blow to the head. He was disappointed, too, to hear that the package he’d tried to safeguard was gone. He rose, waving a hand at Jude. “No, let me think about it,” he said as he retired to his room.
A few weeks passed, each filled with new milestones for Adair. A new identity was created for him, complete with documents of identification, credit cards, and passports. Jude bought him a cell phone and showed him how to use it, though he had no one to telephone. He learned to drive, to use an ATM. Jude got a tablet computer for him, and grudgingly Adair spent a few hours a day laboring with it like a schoolboy over a slate in the old days, going through the exercises Jude laid out for him like a lesson plan.
Through all the learning and rehabilitation, the fits and starts, trying and failing and trying again, Adair fought to keep from panicking. Jumping into modernity was daunting, and the temptation to give up very strong. He’d observed over the centuries that what made people old was when they could no longer keep up with change. It’s the beginning of the end, though few recognize it as such at the time. He’d seen it in his own companions, too: there came a time when they could no longer tolerate the press of the new. You might call yourself a traditionalist, pretend to see no value in new ways, or claim that you’ve earned the right to let progress pass you by, but the sad truth of the matter was that you were choosing obsolescence.
