Locking the door behind him, sitting back down and laying the shotgun across her lap, Hannah thought about what he had said. It was dire, and it was frightening, but it made sense. She’d wondered why he was still here, what possible interest a being that has been around as long as Asher could have in her welfare. This at least she could understand.
Because she thought she understood his regret. The heaviness she’d been bent under all those months when she thought she’d killed him had been crippling. Imagine carrying that for a hundred lifetimes, putting more and more on top of it year after year. What would it take to keep going under something like that? She wouldn’t want to add to that burden either.
Hannah gathered up what was left on the table and set it in the sink, pouring the remainder of her wine down the drain, watching it swirl away in a twist of red.
The sun had begun to redden, and she got up to turn on the kitchen light. Before she sat back down, she heard a rattle at the door. Hannah grabbed the shotgun and took it with her the few steps to peek around the towel while Asher came back in.
“The storm is growing worse. The snow is coming down more quickly. ” Asher stomped it from his boots and relocked the door behind him. “You have been productive.” He nodded toward the neat stack of envelopes, stamped and ready to go in the mailbox. It seemed silly that she’d bothered to do it at all, knowing there was a chance someone dangerous was lurking outside. It could end up being utterly pointless, opening bills, writing checks, and sealing envelopes.
She frowned. She’d done it because the monotony and normalcy of it had been relaxing, but it had ended up being a painful experience as well. A notice from the bank Hannah had expected to be an overdraft was confirmation that her uncle’s affairs had been settled and the contents of his accounts had been transferred into hers. She’d propped the notice up against his urn where it now sat on the windowsill. Hannah missed him so much, and it appeared he was still caring for her. Without the funds she would never have been able to settle the pile of bills in front of her.
“Have you given any thought to my suggestion, that we go somewhere more secure for a time?”
Looking away from the container of ashes, Hannah considered Asher. She hadn’t really thought about it; there were a couple more pressing things on her mind. She couldn’t deny she was considering it now. The prickle of discomfort in the back of her mind that something was dangerously off here had grown.
The thick woods behind the house, with their girdle of shadows, used to be welcome, a natural fence around her little house. With the thought of the shadowy figure prowling behind the house and the possibility of being penned in by the weather, it now made her uneasy, like she was trapped inside a snow globe.
“Seems reasonable enough, I guess. Where were you thinking?”
He dropped his voice, speaking so quietly she struggled to hear. “I have a place in mind. It is not too far from here.” She nodded but didn’t ask more. The feeling of being watched made her wonder if there was any chance they were being listened to as well, and she shivered.
“When do you want to leave?”
16
Night had fully fallen, and she could hear Asher prowling around downstairs. Hannah had left the shotgun with him and gone up to her room to pack a few things. Even though they weren’t planning on leaving until daylight when it felt safer and the snow had slowed, she wanted to be ready.
The house that had always seemed safe to her felt like a rickety prison now. The woods she’d hiked and camped in, never fearing anyone worse than Mother Nature, had turned menacing, and it felt as though the trees were tightening around the borders of the yard, creeping closer when no one was looking. Hannah was afraid if she pulled aside the curtain she would see branches pressed against the window glass.
Leaving the bedroom light off, she stuffed a few things into an old backpack by the light from the hallway, shying away from making a lingering silhouette through the curtain. She leaned the bag at the ready outside the bedroom door then grabbed a change of clothes and locked herself in the bathroom.
She looked longingly at the jar of pale pink bath salts and thought about how good a long soak in the tub would feel, but she turned on the more expedient shower instead.
Not that it was much more expedient. Hannah lingered under the spray until the knot between her shoulder blades loosened a bit and the hot water started to run tepid. The worst of the pain from her fall off the bridge was mostly gone, an allover dead-tired stiffness all that remained. She was a little less beat up–looking too, the swelling around her eye subsiding, the bruises faded to patches of lilac and yellow around the thin line on her cheek where the skin had split. Hannah had always healed quickly; it was a bonus when you were prone to clumsiness. She had shins that seemed magnetically attracted to sharp corners.
Water dripped from the bottom of her braid as she looped an elastic band around it. She took a quick last look at herself, at the drawn cheeks, the sunken eyes, the batch of leftover bruises, and sighed.
Hannah followed her nose downstairs, backpack slung over her shoulder.
“Those look amazing,” she said.
Asher was hunched over the stove, head crammed under the vent hood, meticulously turning over a perfectly browned pancake. She was beginning to notice he tended toward the robotic, his movements spare and efficient. Maybe when you lived long enough you boiled everything down to its more precise parts. There was coffee in the pot, and she poured herself a cup. It was too late for caffeine, but it was a long time until dawn, and she had a sneaking suspicious that she wasn’t going to be able to sleep anyway.
Hannah would have complimented the chef, but her mouth stayed way too full for anything so unimportant as talking. She was halfway through her third enormous pancake when she stopped for a breath and some coffee. Asher was watching her with amusement—he was one to talk, having already demolished a mountain of pancakes nearly a foot high—and she stuffed another giant forkful into her mouth.
The sleeve of her sweater was dangerously near the maple syrup, and she shoved it up to her elbow.
The fire in the wood stove had burned to ashes and they hadn’t built it back up, intent on leaving. With its old single-paned windows and lathe and plaster walls, the house was drafty. Without the heat to beat it back, the cold was quickly stealing in. Even though she was dressed in a long sweater, jeans, and thick socks, Hannah was just tolerably warm enough.
“Aren’t you cold?” she said.
Asher was in a t-shirt, having left off the ever-present flannel shirt for once. It emphasized just how big his chest and arms were. Hannah dove back into her coffee.
“Cold? No, I rarely am cold. Benefit of my condition, I believe,” he said, a wry smile on his face.
“Are there other benefits, besides being warm and not worrying about death being a permanent condition?” She tried to sound flippant, but Hannah was by nature annoyingly curious; there were a thousand questions she wanted to ask.
Asher let out a big breath and got up to refill his coffee.
“There are a few. But unlike many of the others like myself, I do not really accept that this is a permanent condition. All things eventually come to an end.” He sat back down with his mug, frowning. “And while I return to life, I still have to die each time. Having your life come to a close is a terrible thing each and every time, no matter how it happens. And one of these times, I believe it will be the last time. I will have to meet my maker and account for what I have or have not accomplished with the many lives I have been given.”
“I’m glad to see there’s something you have to share with us boring old one-and-done humans. Seems reasonable.” She joked, but having had a brush with death of her own so recently, she could understand how having to repeat it constantly could be less than fun.
“Very true. Why should I be excluded from the fear of death.” His eyes crinkled at the edges, his lips turned up at the corners. He started laughing to himself.
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��What?” she asked around a mouthful of pancake. “That wasn’t really that funny.”
“It was not that. You just made me think of something. There was actually one time that it was not so bad.” He added cream to his coffee and stirred it, still grinning in a way that told her he was stalling for effect. “This was actually not that long ago, maybe a hundred and fifty years past.”
She rolled her eyes at him.
“I was in Italy with an acquaintance of mine, another who is like me. We were staying in a small town known for its grappa, and there were several local gentleman who believed there was no way an outsider could handle the local distillation like the men who made it. My friend begged to differ.”
The grin on Asher’s face was mischievous, a smile that reached his eyes. “We drank and we drank, and they drank, and they drank more, and we drank more. Just by size I have a greater than average tolerance, and as time goes by I think it has only improved. But even that has its limitations, it seems. Things grew hazy as the night progressed, and the last thing I recall was my friend marrying a local woman. She was twice his age and already married, but it seemed like a good idea at the time, and we toasted their union with yet more of the grappa, of course.”
“What happened after that?”
“That I daresay no one will ever know. Certainly not me. To my confusion, I woke up naked in the middle of a field miles and miles away, on an entirely different island. The truth is, to this day I have no idea whether I died and came back there or if I was still alive and somehow ended there in that state as a result of my inebriation.”
Hannah snorted as she mopped up as much syrup as possible with her remaining bite of pancake.
“And the other benefits, besides not being cold and super-human tolerance?” This was the weirdest conversation ever. “Flight? X-ray vision, telepathy? Please tell me you don’t have to drink blood or anything like that.”
This time it was his turn to roll his eyes. “No, no, no, and heavens no, that is disgusting. There are no extraordinary powers, no rules or requirements,” he answered. “As far as I know none of those things exist, but given my personal experience, I guess nothing is out of the question. But really, I was born just like anyone else, and when I died for the first time, I was the same as any other man. I am still very much as I was, except for subtle changes over time.”
“Like what? You’re getting better with age?”
He frowned. “I do not know that I believe I am growing any better. I am just slowly becoming something different. I feel as though now I am only an echo of the person I was, beginning in that very first life. I am growing less distinct by degree, I think, smoothing out and losing the original edges as I travel farther and father from the point of origin.”
She looked at his unnaturally smooth skin, the exceptional beauty of his face, the sheer size of him and wondered if that was true. What had the very first Asher been like?
“Were you always enormous?” Hannah blurted out rudely before she could catch herself.
He laughed out loud, and she couldn’t help but smile.
“Enormous? By the standards of the day I was certainly larger than average, but yes, that has followed the same pattern as every other trait or ability I was born with. Each time I have come back, I have come back just a tiny bit larger. A little faster as well. Not inhumanly—not faster than the fastest man—but fast. I am stronger and I have more endurance. My hearing is better than the average man’s. So is my vision.”
That explained why he could pick out the figure in the woods before she could, even though her own eyesight had always been perfect. She wondered if he would continue growing more attractive, because she wasn’t sure that was entirely possible. Hannah blushed, then mentally smacked herself in the back of the head. Thank goodness she didn’t share his perfect pale-gold skin, which would have made it immediately obvious.
“How old are you? Not how many years, but . . .” She wasn’t sure how to phrase it, so she wasted time taking down a nice glass from the cupboard above the refrigerator, or rather trying to. “Biologically, I guess, how old would you say you are?”
She was about to pull over a chair to stand on when he reached over her and took a glass down from where her fingertips couldn’t quite reach.
“My god you’re hot,” she said.
She smacked the heel of her hand against her forehead because it was too late to bite her tongue completely off. “I mean temperature wise. You are unusually warm.”
He was laughing at her, in a good-natured way. “I think that is why I so rarely feel the cold, because I am unusually hot, as you put it.” She was certainly warm enough now, burning with embarrassment. He opened the refrigerator door and poured them each a glass of wine.
“Interesting temperature for red wine.” He handed one glass to her and motioned her back to her chair.
She took a sip and winced. “The flavor of this particular vintage isn’t improved by being served at room temperature. It would probably not be improved by much other than a trip down the drain, but waste not, want not.” She raised her glass in a mock toast.
“You want to know my age?” he asked.
Hannah nodded.
“The first time I died I was nearly twenty-three years old.”
“How did you die?” It was a macabre question and it had just flown out of her mouth. Things generally did.
“I do not recall. It was a very long time ago.” Hannah watched his face, and she knew he wasn’t telling the truth, but she let it go.
“I’m so sorry. You were only twenty-three?”
He nodded. “It sounds a young age to you, I imagine, but it was not terribly far below the life expectancy at the time, especially then, when things were in a state of unrest. I think if I had to hazard a guess, I would say I appear to be somewhere around thirty now, give or take. There really is no way to know for certain, I suppose.”
She bought that. He didn’t look older than that certainly.
“Why is that?”
He laughed out loud again, mouth open, perfect teeth bared.
“Why? I do not know why. Why are your eyes brown and your hair so dark?” He squinted at her a little, a thought forming in his head that showed in his brow. “I do have a theory though. You know I am not the only person that is like me?”
She nodded.
“One of us, he lived to be an old man, a respectable, mature age even by today’s standards. For his time, though, it was an advanced span of years. Keep in mind, this is according to him, but my acquaintance was by his guess sixty-five years old when he died for the very first time. He has never managed to string together as many years in one go since then, but by the time I met him I would have put him at thirty-five years old at the very most. He swears every time he comes back he is a little younger and more physically perfect.”
He looked at her, waiting for her response.
“Doesn’t seem any more unbelievable than any of the rest of this, so why not. But why is he getting younger if you look older than you did when you died the first time? Will he keep going? Do you think he’s eventually going to end up in diapers?”
He rolled his eyes at her.
“I think it is more a matter of everything growing toward the center. I think it may be that my kind all move slowly toward the same age because it is a sort of prime, an ideal point for life. Or maybe it is a reflection of mental maturity. I find that most adults, no matter how old, still feel as though they are of the same age on the inside.”
She leaned back. “Well that’s something to look forward to. Knowing I’ve got a couple of years before I hit my prime and start going downhill.” So this is as good as it’s going to get, she thought, getting up with her plate.
Washing it and standing it up in the rack, she resisted the urge to pull aside the towel over the window and look out, sobered by the thought that someone, maybe even his sister, might be out there.
“You have a sister. Are you all related?”
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br /> He shook his head.
“I do not believe any of us are linked to one another in any way, save for my sister and I. We are the only two of our kind to share blood that I know of. It may be because we are twins. We had siblings, but none of them were as we are. Other than we two, it seems we have been scattered through time and across the world.”
“So what do you call yourselves? Immortals?”
He shook his head in amusement.
“Call ourselves? I do not think we call ourselves anything. Certainly I do not. It is not a club, Hannah.” He shrugged. “And I would surely not use that word. I am just a person who after my life expired was for some reason gifted with another. Thus far. Any time could be the last.”
Hannah dried the dishes and put them away quietly, gently closing the cupboard. When he went silent, she asked a question, hoping he would answer.
“If there’s more of you, and all this is true, then how are you a secret? Why isn’t it common knowledge? I mean, some people know, you said, but how come they haven’t told everyone? It seems a little unbelievable that I’ve never seen a news story leading with ‘man has been alive for three hundred years,’ especially if there isn’t a super secret club full of repeat offenders like yourself out there protecting your identity.”
“Repeat offender.” He chuckled. “I like that. It is strangely appropriate. The truth is we have been hiding in plain sight all along. Consider that before modern transportation and communication, before photography or even comprehensive record keeping, if one of us died in battle, out hunting, anywhere out of sight and was never found, it would not be extraordinary. Life was dangerous, and on any given day one might walk from their door and never return.”
Echoes (Book 1): Echoes Page 13
