Memory of an Immortal Heart (Immortal Hearts)

by Kita Bell

  Memory of an Immortal Heart

  Book One of the Immortal Hearts Series

  by Kita Bell

  IAL Publishing

  www.KitaBell.com

  Text Copyright © 2013 Kita Bell

  All Rights Reserved

  Table of Contents

  Epigraph: the Kaspians

  Prologue – Brand

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Epilogue

  Sneak Peek: Shadow of an Immortal Heart

  The Kaspians…

  Kaspian children are given lives with no time limit. But they are all born carrying inside the expectation of dying in blood, and someday soon. So often that expectation proves true. So tell me, Nikandros, which is the greater tragedy:

  Is it that our remaining children might realize what it means to live forever? Or does their tragedy stem from the fact they all possess your fatally mortal turn of mind?

  But you, Nikandros, would call these tragedies “gifts.” You chose to walk that path.

  Know this, my love: whether gift or tragedy, they are all my children in the first.

  I’m afraid they will remain your children to the last.

  -- as spoken by Ashtoreth

  Prologue – Brand

  The worst memory of his life wasn’t his own.

  It belonged to his brother Khael.

  It was worse than the memory of his father dying, worse than dealing with his mother’s madness. It was worse than losing a sibling he had known since birth. In fact, that memory – the memory – occurred near the start of his life in the year 1315 AD. It occurred at night, in Spain, during that first long miserable year of the cold and rains.

  It wasn’t a memory he had wanted to steal. No, he had been given no choice but to steal it. On more than one occasion he tried to give it back, but couldn’t. It wasn’t possible.

  Yet, he tried.

  Because the memory he stole wasn’t just a memory. It was a person. It was a heart, and a smile, and a wistful, teasing, laughing loving voice.

  The memory was of a woman. Brand loved her. He had always loved her – like a sister. Yet, after taking those memories he found himself carrying a nameless longing. A shapeless wish – an unformed desire. Not for Khael’s amati…but for his own amati.

  He wanted the woman who was his future. He knew she would be a strong woman, a beautiful woman – a loving woman.

  Even as the once self-assured Khael stumbled around, furious and dead-eyed, miserable and unknowing with loss, Brand scrubbed his hands through his dark hair and remembered.

  He always remembered.

  Those stolen memories could make him smile, but they also hurt like too-sharp claws slicing into the deep muscle of his heart. He felt like a voyeur peering into them, for they did not belong to him. Those scenes, those emotions, that pain – thank the gods, that pain did not belong to him.

  He didn’t ever want that pain to belong to him. He didn’t ever want that to be him. He vowed it never would.

  And yet, Brand still found himself longing for his amati.

  He longed for a nameless woman.

  He longed for her.

  The first time he saw her, she was lying naked in the snow off an abandoned road.

  Chapter 1

  Present day

  The Warnings – those rare, tangled premonitions of death that encompassed Eva’s small, singular ability – did not come very often, but when they did, they terrified her. Over the past twenty-six years of her existence, Eva had learned to leap when they called, to run where they whispered. Most importantly, Eva had learned to change them.

  Eva never, ever, ignored a Warning. Not anymore.

  When she did, people died.

  People she loved.

  Which was why, when the blizzard cut the power to the Asylum’s electromagnetic locks, Eva escaped.

  Because this time the Warning had been for her.

  The instant the Asylum’s power flickered out, Eva held her breath. She began a slow count to one hundred in the darkness, unclenching her near-frozen fingers as she cautiously rose to pace toward the door of the tiny cement room that served as her prison cell. The paper-thin hospital slippers Rohe’s henchmen had thrown at her whispered on the ice-cold floor, the baggy institutional sweatpants and thin gray sweatshirt she wore doing little to stave off the chill.

  When Eva finished her count, she raised her hand to the smooth door. There were no latches, no handles – no way to work the power lock from the inside. The fluorescent bulb dangling in her cell had dimmed to a pale afterimage, barely enough for her tiger eyes to see, but Eva reasoned, If the electric lighting doesn’t work, then neither should the electric locks.

  She placed an ear to the lock: no hum.

  Eva jerked back, then sharply drove her palm against the steel door. It hurt; there was a clicking, grinding sound – the noise of the lock working against the mechanism, but failing to hold. It had weakened. But was it enough?

  “Please be enough,” Eva whispered, envisioning Rainey’s gentle face. She had to get out of here – she had to see her sister again. Rainey was all she had left.

  Hope cut through the cold, dull daze in Eva’s mind, and she threw herself against the steel door. The reverberation was loud and flat, and the impact bruised her shoulder, jolting her unexercised body. She hated the weakness. The places Rohe had bled pulled and began to bleed again, but she ignored them. There would be no second chances, not here.

  She couldn’t last much longer in this cage. Escape was burning a hole inside her.

  Eva slammed into the door again. And again.

  Finally, it gave.

  The hall outside was dark, black, like the stomach of a monster. Faint residual energy glowed weakly in the fluorescent bulbs, fading now that the power had cut. There were no guards outside, there never were. But that was part of the fear Eva lived with – of being locked away, forgotten forever. She rubbed her arms, fighting goose bumps as she moved forward, unsure whether to turn right or left – then shook her head. Much as she needed to escape, she also needed to make sure someone else got out. She owed it to him.

  They had put Eva in cell 114. He was in 113. Eva didn’t know his name, or how Rohe had captured him, but she knew he must be a blood tiger. He had a blood tiger’s hearing, anyway.

  Eva gave a mirthless smile as she turned to the right. Her sister Rainey had been obsessed with codes when they were kids. For a few years, Morse code had been their “secret code.”

  Now that code belonged between her and the man in cell 113. In this place of madness, that code – and that stranger – were the only things that had kept Eva sane.

  She owed him.

  And she needed to know if he was real.

  Eva quelled the urge to go running down the hall and stepped toward the large steel door. She brushed her fingers against the number plate, then reached to grip the handle. She gave a careful tug, testing it. Easy.

  Her stomach lurched as the door swung outward, leaving a tingling static charge on her palm.

  Eva shivered. She slapped her thigh, neck prickling from the electricity that filled cell 113. The stale air smelled like copper and blood, and her stomach tightened. Eva forced one foot inside.

  It felt like a trap. Another trap. It was clo
sing in on her.

  Only this time the trap was inside her own mind, caught somewhere between hope and fear and the prayer that she wasn’t delusional.

  “Hello?” Her voice was raspy from disuse. “I don’t…know your name. Perhaps I should have asked…”

  Eva’s words dwindled as she forced her other foot forward, gripping the doorframe as she squinted into the pitch-black. The walls tightened. Eva’s heart began hammering. The shards from a light bulb glinted dully on the floor, and Eva took a wary step around them while the darkness gathered like a physical force. She was shaking. Okay, I’m done here. I need to leave, go home to Rainey, and forced herself to speak anyway, “It’s Eva. From 114. I can’t see anything. Where are you?”

  Please be real.

  Ice-cold fingers gripped her ankle like a manacle; it was as if all the electricity in that room broke towards her. Eva stifled a scream, and the hand relaxed.

  “Don’t come closer,” a hoarse male voice said from the floor. “Glass shards. Camera wires.”

  The terror in Eva’s chest loosened: the man was real. He wasn’t some delusion or coping mechanism. Her brief exchanges with him – tapping through the walls where cameras couldn’t see – had happened.

  “You’re real,” she breathed in utter relief. “Alive.”

  A moment of silence. Then: “I suppose.”

  “What’s wrong? We have to get out of here. Now.” Eva crouched, pulling his bulk up and toward the outline of the door. They had to get as far as possible from Rohe. Soon. Immediately.

  She was weak, but it would take more than three weeks of Rohe before Eva lost her Kaspian strength. On the other hand, the man leaned heavily on Eva’s shoulder – and seemed shaky.

  “Did she bleed you today? I thought today was my turn.” Eva tried to understand his unsteadiness as they moved into the eerie hall. She couldn’t make out his personal scent; he smelled too strongly of burned electrical wiring. Eva quelled a sneeze and hesitated as they reached a second corridor.

  “Left. Go left,” he rasped and shifted to take more of his own weight. “And no. I think…I was attempting to break the camera in my cell when the power surged. I got caught in…that.”

  Eva shuddered. “She is a monster.”

  They turned. “You were in 114. Eva, you said?” He asked it like she had surprised him. He sniffed her shorn hair.

  “It’s me,” Eva promised, his uncertainty oddly reassuring. She didn’t know him. But he understood how it felt to be trapped in a cell, what Rohe was like. “Don’t worry. We’ll get out.”

  “Yes…” the man shook his head, a bare movement in the darkness. “I know.” They stumbled to a dark intersection. There were no sounds, no signs of life. Everything was silent and cold. “Left,” he said again, with a stark knowledge. “Take the stairs. Up one flight.”

  “Rohe never took me through here before.”

  “Be glad.”

  Eva shuddered, listening for the guards until they reached the steps. Her companion’s body shifted away. “Railing,” he said. “I should be fine from here. As long as we pause at the top. I’m not…at my best.” Then, stiffly, as if it hurt to admit it, “I won’t be much good in a fight.”

  “We’re running, not fighting. Besides, you need to lead. I don’t know the way out,” Eva replied, her heart starting to pound with a painful anticipation.

  Three weeks.

  Three weeks of caging herself, of pacing, of sitting, of being strapped down by Rohe and her henchmen and being bled and questioned about magic of all ridiculous things, as if she were nothing more than some human’s high school lab experiment.

  Three weeks without running or playing, without sky or wind or the sensation of dirt beneath her feet. Three weeks without speaking to her sister or feeling the Change or simply just breathing in freedom.

  “Don’t get excited,” the man said obscurely.

  Eva ignored him.

  Light glimmered beneath the double-doors at the top of the steps. Anticipation stretched through Eva, straining her control. She took a quick step forward. Her companion gripped her arm and she jumped.

  “There are humans in there. Listen.”

  “Guards?” Eva hissed, squinting at him; she just was able to make out pale skin and shaggy hair.

  His voice was dry. “Human guards? Those are patients, Eva. Real patients. Certifiable ones.”

  “I don’t know how you can tell the difference,” Eva muttered, rubbing the row of scabs on her right arm. All of Rohe’s toadies were stronger than she was. Which was just wrong.

  Eva shivered and told herself it was from the cold radiating up through the paper soles of her shoes. “What are they? Rohe’s guards…whatever they are, they aren’t right.”

  Her companion tugged the latch of the door so she could slip through; she heard a faint hum as the Asylum’s generators kicked in and Eva froze, momentarily blinded by the bright institutional lighting. The man from 113 cursed. “I’ll tell you when we get out of here.”

  No arguing there. Now wasn’t the time for conversation.

  The atrium was large with stark white walls and a dark growth of plants fringing the edges. One of the human patients stared vacantly at Eva. He was dressed in gray sweats identical to hers, drool trickling down his jaw; Eva sprinted toward the lobby’s outer doors, trying to ignore him.

  So close. Her heart beat a tandem to her thoughts as she moved forward. She forced herself to walk, not run, reciting the first principle her Gens had drummed into her over the years: move slowly, do not attract attention. Pretend you belong. Eva reached the outer door and tested it: the locks held.

  “No.” Fear bit Eva, panic bleeding into her veins. Her muscles tensed. Eva gripped the steel handle of the right door, leveled her foot against the left door and pulled.

  “Wait!” A low, harsh order. Her companion ripped her wrist away.

  “Wait? What is wrong with you?!” Eva hissed, fighting to hold on and felt her wrist pop as it gave beneath his grip; dull pain flared up her arm to lodge a molten point in her elbow. “What do you think you are doing?”

  He dropped her wrist as if she had burned him. As if he realized what he had done.

  Eva cradled her arm as she whirled on the stranger she had shared a wall with for the past three weeks, fear and panic combining into raw fury. “How dare you? I was trying to get us out of here!”

  His body was tense. “Apologies,” he said stiffly. “I can hear them. Don’t you ever listen?”

  Eva snarled. “What are you – ”

  He clamped a hand over her mouth as the sharp tread of a guard boot sounded in the hall. Eva swallowed her anger, buried her pain, and clutched her wrist to her chest. She twisted away and sandwiched herself between the wall and a large plant. She didn’t see where the man from 113 hid.

  A guard opened the door and glanced around the lobby. His dark eyes seemed to latch on Eva, and a frown crossed his face…but then the drooling patient shuffled into the guard’s line of vision. Eva’s nose filled with the sour stench of urine as the patient wet himself. The guard scowled and turned away, moving – Eva realized with dismay – down the black stairwell they had just escaped from.

  This time her companion beat her to the outer door. He wrenched against the lock, and she heard metal stress and groan. The cold steel buckled outward, stretching slowly, unwillingly, until Eva finally heard a grinding click as the lock broke.

  The man from 113 stepped back then slammed the base of his palm against the door. It crashed outwards with a muted, distant boom.

  Eva’s sucked in her first breath of freedom in three months as she stepped outside into the waning blizzard. Thick snow swirled around the Asylum like silver dust. Frozen air and ice-chips bit her cheeks, making her feel more alive. “Beautiful,” Eva whispered, because it was. “It’s like a postcard.”

  Her companion made a low sound of disbelief.

  “Okay,” Eva agreed, fixing her gaze on the shadowed tree line as she wonder
ed how many bodies were buried beneath those drifts, “A dark and ominous postcard.” She shivered. Scratch that. Not a postcard: a newspaper clipping. One where the headline read, “Unsuspected Psycho Killer.”

  It didn’t matter. Eva would survive worse to escape. She wouldn’t be one of those bodies.

  Eva turned. She couldn’t see her fellow prisoner very well, but his shaggy head was tilted back as he gazed up at the dark snow-torn sky. His throat was pale, corded and marked with fading scars. Eva looked away, rubbing her own wounds. “Do you know where we are?”

  “The nearest town is in that direction.” He pointed unerringly through the thick trees without looking at her. “West. Approximately eight and a half miles along I-91.”

  I-91. So we’re in New England. Thank god. Not too far from her Gens in North Carolina. “Okay.” Eva edged toward the trees, fighting the urge to Change and run. She didn’t know the man’s name. But neither did she need to know. Their path ended here, so Eva sank all the gratitude she could into two words: “Thank you.”

  The man from 113 spared Eva the briefest glance from gray eyes that chilled her far more than the blizzard ever would. “Goodbye, Eva,” he said, turning to face the darkness. “And Godspeed. Rohe’s come hunting. Run fast.”

  “Tell Seth I’m shipping back to Europe. I’d rather be fodder for the Sakai than go through that again.”

  Brand Kade snorted tiredly. “Don’t tempt him. He’ll tie you up and dump you on the next boat out.” He switched lanes, taking the interstate north into Vermont and squinted at the road through the snow. “Come to think of it, I might too.” The blacktop hummed beneath the car’s tires. He could feel his cousin weighing his words. Though old snow in the ditches reflected their headlights back at him, the night mirrored the leaden fog of Brand’s mood. Boston had been a bust and all he wanted was to get home to Stronghold.

  Joshua growled. “I doubt it. You need me too much. My point being that those kids didn’t have a hell of an idea what they were doing. They don’t even know to use their claws. Cubs these days are fucking blood fodder.” Joshua kneaded the thick scar tissue on his right hand. His sandy brows were pulled low over steely eyes.