by S. E. Babin
Over the next couple of hours, my rocky road lay forgotten in my freezer and the Doritos remained untouched on the counter. I sat with my mother, listening with rapt attention as she spun a tale of love without parallel, breathtaking adventure, and sights and sounds I never imagined existed. Sherlock had been her one true love until he betrayed her and Watson, a loyal and true companion.
She left when she became immortal because she knew she could no longer trust her lover. He’d betrayed her in his quest to become the best, go the furthest. He’d betrayed Watson and everyone who’d ever been close to him. She left, devastated and pregnant, my father unaware of who she carried inside.
I rarely interrupted her tale, but this time, I was curious. “Did Watson know?”
She gave me a soft smile. “He would have taken the secret to his grave.”
I blew out a breath. Watson might be a bit of a jerk, but he had been a loyal, steadfast confidante and friend to my mother. Another thought occurred to me—a major ick out factor. “Mom, did you and Watson ever…?” I trailed off, praying she would say no.
“Penelope Wilde!” my mother admonished. “I am a pure woman and Sherlock was my husband. John Watson is an honorable man and never glanced at me twice.” She frowned at me, as if she was disappointed the thought even occurred to me.
“Sorry,” I mumbled, but inside, I was screaming with relief. Thank God. I couldn’t handle it if she and Watson had done the horizontal mambo, especially since I couldn’t seem to get him out of my thoughts.
She patted my hand. “It’s eleven-thirty. Do you want to stay up?”
I thought about it. What would happen? Would lightning suddenly flame down from the sky and strike all the age out of my body? Would I feel any different? Would it hurt?
I glanced at my mother, suddenly feeling like a kid again. “Is it going to hurt?” I asked softly.
Her eyes filled with tears. “Every single day, darling daughter.”
I wasn’t sure what she meant by that, but I didn’t think she was talking about physical pain. She stood and pulled me into an embrace. My arms went around her waist and my head rested on her slim shoulder. I was scared, terrified, curious, hungry, thirsty, freaking out...everything. I was all the things. And I had no answers.
After a few moments, I pulled away. “I think I’ll go to bed,” I said.
“Good choice, darling. I drugged your second cup of tea to help you sleep, so make sure you pee before you go to bed. I’d hate for you to wake up immortal after peeing the bed.”
“Mom!”
She laughed. “Don’t get a bee in your bonnet. I used to do it all the time when you were in high school and nervous about exams.”
I stared at her with a mix of horror and amusement. No wonder I’d slept so good right before a test. “You little Japanese minx!”
My mother laughed and shooed me out. “Go. Things always look better in the morning.”
I stood, feeling a little wobbly after sitting for so long, and gave my mother a hug, even though she duped me. She was still my mom. My immortal, international spy mom. I sighed, shook my head, and made my way to the bathroom.
Sleep pulled my eyes down as I struggled to focus in the mirror. I wanted to remember myself right here, right now. Heart-shaped, olive-toned face. Wide, slightly slanted green eyes. Nice lips. Dark, annoyingly wavy hair. I pulled my mouth open in a grimace. White, strong teeth. There was little trace of my mother and too many of my father. I took my cell phone out of my pocket and snapped a selfie.
Twenty minutes prior to immortality, I would write in my scrapbook: High on drugged tea and currently feeling sorry for myself. I was still young enough not to have any fine lines or wrinkles, but old enough to have some life experience written on my face. One small chicken pox scar no one could see unless I pulled my bangs up, one scar over the right side of my lip where one of our many pets scratched me while playing, and one small brown spot on the side of my left nostril after a Goth phase left me with a nose-piercing scar.
I took one last long look at myself and stripped off my clothes. I put my favorite sleep pants covered with sweet looking lambs on and a jersey cotton tank top.
A quick glance at the clock told me T-minus eighteen minutes to immortality. I slid bonelessly into my bed while cursing my mother and tried to hold my eyes open so I could stay awake for I-Day. Immortality Day.
When I awoke, it was eight forty-five in the morning and my bed was on fire.
Chapter 8
“Holy shit!” I screeched as I bolted upright and saw the flames licking around the edges of my teal comforter. I scrambled out of bed and screamed for my mother, just like all twenty-five year olds do when shit gets real.
Instead, John Watson walked in with a fire extinguisher and a quick smirk at my pajamas. He strode over to the bed and calmly put out the fire with the ease of a professional.
My heart was still pounding a hundred miles per hour as I stared at him in disbelief. “Are you psychic or something?” I blurted when I realized I’d been staring at him for too long.
He set the fire extinguisher down and rubbed his hands together to get the white powder off.
“Potassium bicarbonate,” he said in distaste.
“What?” I asked dumbly.
He pointed to the extinguisher and the white remains scattered around my bedroom. “Potassium bicarbonate,” he said, as if he was speaking to an idiot.
I rolled my eyes. “What the hell just happened and why are you here, in my bedroom, prepared like a boy scout?”
“Be prepared,” he said with a grin, holding three fingers up in the Boy Scout salute.
I huffed out a breath and immediately regretted it. Smoke and dust filled the room.
He walked behind my bed and opened the window. Even the fact that I couldn’t breathe well didn’t stop me from watching his lean backside as he leaned forward and down. When he turned around, my eyes quickly flew up to a particularly interesting spot on the wall. He chuckled, took me by the elbow, and led me out of the room.
“It happens to some of us,” he said once we were safely in the kitchen and I’d started preparing the coffee.
“Catching on fire?” I said, cringing as I heard the snark in my voice.
Fortunately, Watson chose to ignore it. “Technically, you catch other things on fire when you first change. Your body chemistry is adjusting to the serum. It spikes your body temperature for the first twenty-four to forty-eight hours, but eventually, it returns to normal.” He stopped. “Well,” he said sheepishly, “almost normal.”
I pursed my lips. “Almost normal?” I echoed.
He shrugged and snagged two mugs down from a spot in my cabinet I would have had to get a chair to reach. “Once it normalizes, you will run about two to three degrees above the normal, average body temperature.”
“So I have a permanent fever?” My voice rose a few octaves. Out of all the weird shit going on, I wasn’t quite sure why that one bothered me so much.
“It’s the price we all pay for our gift,” he sneered. There was no mistaking John Watson’s opinion about Holmes’ gift.
No wonder he was so warm when he lifted me against the wall in that alley. I’d thought it was the outside temperature. Turns out, it was just Watson.
“Weird,” I said after a moment.
“You get used to it.” He made himself at home in my kitchen and poured himself and me a mug of coffee. When he finished and handed me mine, he gave me a shrewd look. “So, do you feel any different?”
I hated that question. Undoubtedly, some genius would ask me on my birthday if I felt any older and I would always give them a withering stare and say something witty like, “Ages.”
But this morning was different. This was the start of my brand new life. I hadn’t even had the chance to think about it because oh...there was a freaking fire in my bed! So I sat for a moment in silence, examining myself mentally from head to toe. I was a little bit warmer, as Watson had mentioned, but other t
han that, there wasn’t much difference except for...my eyes flew up to Watson.
He gave me a knowing smile. “Around the center of your brain?”
I nodded in disbelief. It was warm and...pulsey. It was sort of creepy, sort of not.
“You’re feeling the hypothalamus. Holmes has narrowed it down to the portion of the brain that controls how we age.”
“Freaky,” I murmured.
“You’ll get used to that, too,” Watson said as he sipped his coffee. “His serum was targeted to activate the hypothalamus. He believed if he stimulated it just a touch, it would send anti-aging chemicals throughout the body, possibly giving people a few extra years of quality of life.”
I studied him as he recited this tonelessly. “Except,” I said softly, “it worked better than he’d ever dreamed possible.”
He tipped his mug to me in a salute. “The understatement of the year.”
A thought occurred to me. “This is why he’s so eager for me to work for him, isn’t it?”
Watson’s expression immediately closed off and I knew I hit the nail on the head.
“It has something to do with this serum, doesn’t it?” My brain was working to put the pieces together. A brilliant man found the literal fountain of youth. Who wouldn’t want that?
He nodded and set his mug down with a clack. “It’s best you get ready to go, Penelope. Sherlock doesn’t like to wait.”
But I wasn’t finished. “Someone’s trying to steal the serum, aren’t they?”
His lips thinned. “Go shower before I drag you out of here in your pretty little pink pajamas.”
I held my hands up in surrender, but a wide grin spread over my face. “He’s terrified someone is going to get the serum, isn’t he?”
“Shower!” Watson boomed.
“Fine, fine,” I grumbled. “But I know I’m right.” I took my mug into the bathroom with me and pretended not to hear Watson as he mumbled to himself.
“Damned Holmes’ IQ. Why couldn’t they send me a dumb one?”
Chapter 9
The first shower of my new immortal life was surprising in how mundane it was. Pity I still had to shampoo and dry off. It would have been cool if my immortality made me perma-clean. I sighed as I toweled off and threw on the jeans and soft cotton shirt I’d dug out of my dresser.
I studied my face in the mirror, expecting to see nothing different, only...there was.
The childhood scars on my face were gone. I moved closer to the mirror, frowning, certain I was just fooling myself, but as I peered closer, I saw absolutely nothing.
“Huh,” I said, and whipped off my jeans to see if I still had the bicycle accident scar on my left thigh. I’d gotten it in fifth grade after I rode straight into a tree. It wasn’t my finest moment, but in my defense, my mother was yelling something at me and I’d turned back to see what she wanted, only to run straight into an oak tree mere seconds later. I’d crashed hard and fell onto my left side. The pedal of the bike scored a deep line across the side of my thigh, so deep I had to go to the emergency room to get stitches.
My mother had been a wreck. Looking back, so had I, but it was pretty cool when I got to go back to school and lift up my dress to show everyone the badass scar I’d gotten. I embellished the story to make it sound like I’d been flying down a hill while being chased by an armed robber (which I’m pretty sure everyone was too polite to roll their eyes at my blatant lie), instead of telling them the story of my epic klutziness.
Now, standing pant less in my bathroom, I searched for the scar that defined my childhood, only to see nothing. A sad sense of loss stole over me. That scar was always a conversation starter when new boyfriends were about to get me naked. It saddened me to think that even though it was a memory, it was no longer a story that could be told. One memory wiped away.
How many more would disappear?
I pulled my jeans up slowly, fastened the button, and towel dried my hair as much as I could. After slapping on some mascara and giving my hair a quick blow dry, I pulled it up into a messy top bun and stepped out of the bathroom.
My room still smelled like burned sheets. Watson stood in the middle of the room, his expression melancholy. I watched him, his back toward me, as he stared out through the small window. It felt like I was intruding on a private moment, so I softly cleared my throat and padded over to my closet to get my flip flops.
“Something interesting out there?” I kept my tone nonchalant.
His eyes crinkled as he offered me a small smile. “There’s always something interesting out there, Penelope Wilde. And that, my dear, is the problem.”
I studied him for a moment, the meaning of his words sinking in. He could have been speaking about my father or something completely different. Even though I didn’t understand completely, I agreed with him. It was too easy to focus on things beyond your control than to control things within your own reach.
This was probably why two immortals were standing in my room. Sometimes people played with things they should never be allowed to. Sometimes people played God and ruined lives in the process.
I dropped my eyes so he wouldn’t see my sympathy and rummaged through my closet for my black Teva flops. I knew my life wasn’t ruined—yet, that is—but I wasn’t sure about Watson. What had happened over two hundred years? And, maybe most importantly of all, why was he still tied to my father?
I swallowed down my questions and slid my feet into my shoes. After I plastered a polite, disinterested smile on my face, I stood and grabbed the duffle bag off the top of my shelf.
“I’m assuming I need a bag?” I turned back to see him studying me, an intent expression on his handsome face.
“Yes, it would be prudent.”
I nodded, unfolded the duffle, and set it in front of me. I rummaged through my closet for a moment, pulling blouses and t-shirts off their hangers when a thought occurred to me. “Clothes for a week?”
Silence met my question. I turned, only to see Watson wearing a quizzical expression on his face.
“Watson?”
He continued to stare at me. After a moment, he rubbed his hand down his face and scratched the stubble. “Have you spoken to your father in detail about what he expects from you?”
The first doubts crept in. I hadn’t really given myself time to worry about what he wanted. I figured I’d have some training, fix his problem, then I’d come back here and worry about what the hell I was going to do when twenty years passed and I still looked exactly the same. I shrugged. “Not really. I figure I’d have some training or school stuff, but I didn’t think it would take over a week or two.”
He dropped his hand and a look of disbelief stole over his face. “And then what?” Amusement and surprise colored his voice.
I narrowed my eyes. “What do you mean, and then what?” I mimicked his accent in a pissy tone.
Instead of growing angry, he looked sympathetic. “I know this is difficult. I know your head must be full of a million different thoughts right now, but I know you’re smarter than this.”
There was a suspicious lump in my throat. I swallowed hard. “Are you calling me stupid?” I blinked back tears. Watson was damned perceptive. My nonchalant front was just that. A front. I had about eighty bazillion questions and only one or two answers. None of them from my father.
He stepped closer to me and gripped me by the upper arms. “Look at me.” His voice was gentle, his touch warm.
I swallowed again and lifted my gaze to his. Understanding swam in his amber eyes.
“You won’t be coming home.”
Way to rip the Band-Aid off there, dude. I nodded and swallowed hard. “I know,” I whispered after a moment.
He pulled me into his chest. My head rested at his heart, thumping slow and steady. I wrapped my arms around his waist and leaned into him, taking the comfort he didn’t have to offer me. “This sucks,” I mumbled into his flannel shirt.
A chuckle rumbled from his chest and he kissed the to
p of my head. “It will get much worse before it gets any better. Be prepared.”
“You’re like an episode of Dr. Phil,” I grumbled sarcastically. “All my problems are solved.”
We stood there a moment, in the smelly room I’d probably never see again. And while at first, I thought it was only me taking comfort from the warmth of John Watson’s arms, when he didn’t let me go, I suspected he was taking comfort from me as well. I held him a little bit closer and snuggled a little bit deeper for a moment before I reluctantly let go.
I stepped away, avoiding his gaze. “I should finish packing.” I studied the rest of my room, the bed sheets still smoking a little bit. “What about the rest of this stuff?”
He stood there for a moment, his height impressive, tension thick in the air. “Leave it,” he said brusquely. “Someone will retrieve most of it.” He turned around and left me standing there, confused and upset.
I packed quickly, making short work of my closet and dresser. I wasn’t the type of person who collected a lot of expensive pieces. I was the kind of dresser who could roll everything into a suitcase and call it good. Summery dresses, leggings, yoga pants, t-shirts, a couple of pair of jeans, and long tunics were the only things my wardrobe consisted of. I rarely wore proper shoes, resorting to flip flops or sandals instead—except in the winter. High boots were super sexy when worn properly, so I included a pair of black and brown boots. I picked out some of my most important jewelry pieces and secured those in the top pocket of my bag. I included a couple of pretty, gauzy scarves my mother had given me over the years and a whole bunch of hair ties. My hair was a pain in the ass on the best of days, so ponytail holders and bobby pins were my best friends. After a quick sweep of my bathroom for appropriate toiletries, I was ready to go. I picked up my duffle, swept my gaze over the room one more time and with a deep sigh, stepped out and shut the door softly behind me.
Watson waited at the kitchen bar, another mug of coffee steaming in his hands. His hair was mussed and dark shadows crept under his eyes. Even though I knew he wasn’t exactly human, he’d never looked it more.
