Anna switched off the lamp and lay beside her husband. “So do you think Lacey has forgiven him for being ancient after saving her life and everything?”
Luca had been the one to perform CPR on her after she went into shock and her heart stopped beating.
“I think she would have forgiven him anyway. Luca can be really persuasive when he wants to be.”
Anna couldn’t stop yawning either. She wanted to talk to Colin about this Immortal Luca’s angel had told them about, one they’d only met a couple of times, and the possibility of learning to control this gift, about the knowledge that someone else in the world had this particular blessing. But she closed her eyes and she must have fallen asleep because she was no longer in a hotel room in Boulder, Colorado but in Leipzig. French troops had just moved past the house where she and Colin were staying.
Napoleon’s forces had surrounded the city and everyone expected the coalition that had amassed against him to pursue him here. Colin and Anna had been following the French army for a few years now, and were hoping his crusade to conquer the rest of Europe was almost over. They were tired of the constant warfare.
“They’ll probably billet,” Colin told her, looking away from the window where he’d been watching the passing columns.
“They always do,” Anna replied.
They were renting a room here. If soldiers came to this house and demanded a place to stay, they would be forced out.
Colin was about to curse the French – again – when he backed away from the window and grabbed his coat.
“There are three demons following this column,” he told her.
Anna looked up from her book in surprise. Finding two together was somewhat common. But three? Demons were far too greedy and territorial to cooperate long enough to work together in one area, unless one of them was a superior and commanding the others. With three of them, it made it more likely there was a superior here.
Anna tossed her book aside and hurried into her coat. Now that they were closer, she could feel them, and they were all lesser demons, but they were together and that suddenly made their job in Leipzig a hell of a lot more interesting.
She and Colin snuck out the back of the house to avoid detection by the passing French troops. The three demons, none of which were bothering with an Earthly form but drifted behind the soldiers in clouds of smoky amber, didn’t notice the hunters at first. Colin and Anna followed them and as they crept closer to the rear of the formation, the demons sensed the hunters’ presence and turned on them, morphing into perverted versions of rams and goats. Anna and Colin gripped their daggers tightly and prepared to fight one of the few uneven battles they’d ever encountered.
A strange whirring sound pulled Anna out of that narrow street in Leipzig, and in her dream, she looked around her, trying to place the source of this noise that was so out of place in 1813. This was not a sound that belonged here. But there was no here, now; she was surrounded by stark whiteness and nothing else.
She felt Colin’s hand brush against the side of her face and she slowly opened her eyes, returning to the hotel room in Boulder and smiled at her husband, although the dream still bothered her, and the sound was gone.
“What was that?” Colin asked her.
Anna closed her eyes again. “Just a dream.”
“The Leipzig thing was a dream. I mean after that.”
The only way Colin would have known what she was dreaming about was if he’d been awake. Anna opened her eyes again to look at him. “You weren’t sleeping, my love?”
“I was, but something woke me up. Guess I was having a bad dream of my own. I woke up at the part where we started chasing those demons and they turned into animals. But then it was like… you were yanked out of the dream.”
Anna’s heart accelerated and she felt nauseated. “What did you see after that?”
“Nothing. I couldn’t even sense what you were dreaming about.”
Anna’s arm wrapped around Colin’s waist and she pulled herself closer to him.
“Oh, God, Colin,” she whispered. “What if he’s here? What if he’s still messing with my mind and can separate us again?”
Colin’s grip tightened around her. “It will never take you away from me again. Maybe it was just a…”
But Anna knew he couldn’t think of a reason he wouldn’t have been able to get sucked into that whirring white world without her. There was only one reason. One explanation. Her abductor had found her and was still preying on her mind.
Chapter 8
Colin didn’t sleep well the rest of the night. He kept waking to make sure Anna was still lying next to him, still sleeping and dreaming and that her dreams were only hers. And they must have been, because he couldn’t imagine any archdemon invading her thoughts and forcing her to dream about a carnival with a Ferris wheel whose cars were made from giant shoes.
Colin was a little freaked out when she made him get in one anyway, and she didn’t even pick the sturdy looking work boot: they had to sit in the espradille. He was also certain the only reason he knew it was an espradille is that he was checking on Anna in her dreams and she knew what an espradille was.
In the morning, he called Dylan and Max and asked them if they wanted to look at apartments with them. Really, Colin and Anna just needed a ride. They’d lost their car in the attack outside of the Italian restaurant. Immortals needed a different kind of help from the angels who had made deals with them: because they didn’t age, they couldn’t hold a job for a long period of time, and once the modern era hit and employers insisted on all sorts of paperwork, they often didn’t work at all. So Anna and Colin had a bank account that mysteriously never emptied, but they’d never questioned it either. But they still didn’t have a car.
Max and Dylan agreed to pick them up and look at a few places, and it was Max’s idea to check the classified ads for someone selling a car who would be willing to take cash. Getting the title transferred would be easy. Money wasn’t the only thing that mysteriously appeared in their lives when they needed it, like social security numbers and passports.
Dylan wanted to check out The Hill first, a trendy and beautiful area of the city next to the university. Colin and Max thought there were too many college kids there and didn’t want to be bothered by loud parties all the time. Colin may only look twenty-six, but he felt like he hadn’t acted his age in… well, almost four hundred years.
They ended up finding a complex they could all agree on for no other reason than the name: that day, they signed two leases on apartments in the Devil’s Thumb subdivision of Boulder, Colorado.
Colin put a down payment on a third for Luca and called him to tell him to come sign his lease before leaving for Caracas, because there was no way they were not going to living in a place called Devil’s Thumb.
Luca joined them at Old Chicago’s for lunch and it was only then Colin brought up Anna’s dream and how something had awakened him just in time to feel her slip away again. Anna explained the part of her dream Colin hadn’t been able to sense for himself, the odd whirring noise, the complete blinding whiteness around her. Luca drummed his fingers nervously on the table, watching Anna uneasily.
“I know what my angel said, but maybe I shouldn’t go to Caracas right now. I shouldn’t leave with something like this going on.”
Anna protested before he could even finish speaking. “No! You have to go. We need Andrew so he can help us learn how to use this gift or it’s useless to us. And I’m positive it’s the only way to destroy these archdemons or The Angel wouldn’t have chosen this gift. Please, Luca, just go and don’t worry about me.”
The look on Luca’s face told everyone at the table that was going to be impossible. He stopped drumming his fingers and sighed, “My sweet Anna, I’ll go, but… don’t go anywhere on your own. Not even with another hunter. Stay with Colin. If you can stay with Colin and several other hunters, even better.”
“I was with a bunch of hunters when I was abducted the last time, remember? An
d I still have no clue how that happened. I can’t remember any of it.”
“Well, that probably wasn’t the best thing to say when you’re trying to convince Luca to leave town,” Colin told her.
“But I wasn’t with her,” Colin quickly added. “I was half a mile away.”
“Nice save, my love,” Anna responded.
Luca remained unconvinced.
“Besides,” Colin continued, “be quick about finding Andrew and get your ass back over here. Then we’ll have four Immortals in one city. That’s got to be some sort of record.”
Luca just shook his head. “Before this is over, we may end up with every Immortal in the world with us.”
Dylan and Max got fidgety with that pronouncement, but it’s not like Colin was terribly happy about the idea either. Congregating all of the Immortals in one place, wherever that place might be, would be one step short of Armageddon and who wouldn’t be nervous about that?
After lunch, Luca returned to the hospital and Dylan and Max took the O’Conners car shopping. Anna tried not to look incredibly bored as they threw around words like horsepower and torque.
They were at their fourth stop when Anna decided she’d had enough. “I liked the white one.”
Colin and Dylan stopped talking and gaped at her as if simultaneously asking her if she was really choosing a car based on its color and not performance capabilities.
“The white one, Colin. We’ve had good luck with Toyotas, it has low miles, and no one ever smoked in it. Get that one and let’s do anything else.”
Dylan snickered, but Colin shot him a shut-the-hell-up look. “When you’ve been married as long as I have, feel free to laugh when your wife tells you she wants something done and she wants it done now.”
Max nodded wisely, but it was a combination of I-totally-get-that and I’m-just-being-a-smartass. “Try being married for only ten years and not doing what your wife tells you to when she tells you to.”
Anna crossed her arms and scowled at them, but she was just teasing them. “We are not your masters. Sometimes, you’re just helpless without us and you know that.”
Max smiled. “More like all the time. My wife saved me from a life of eating corn from the can for dinner.”
Dylan shrugged. “What’s wrong with that?”
“Oh, Dylan,” Anna sighed in the most patronizingly maternal voice she could manage, “so much potential. You’ll be just fine in the right hands.”
Max patted him on the shoulder. “Enjoy the corn while it lasts, buddy.”
Dylan drove them back to the second house so they could buy the white Toyota Camry, but before leaving, he asked if they could meet them back at their hotel. He wanted to talk about Anna’s dream.
Dylan and Max were waiting outside of their room when they got back, but Anna honestly didn’t know what else she could tell them. She’d already shared the part about Leipzig, the strange noise, being surrounded by the bright whiteness everywhere.
It was eerily similar to the pattern of dreams she’d suffered while imprisoned by the archdemon in the camp near the Amite River, except she’d never dreamed about hunting demons before. She was always with Colin in a happier life, a simpler life before hunting became their existence. But then those dreams would dissolve into a horrifying nightmare that didn’t feel dreamlike at all but far too real. And she hadn’t been asleep long enough to know if that white world she’d been thrown into would have been the same.
As they let Dylan and Max into their room, Colin noticed Dylan was holding a paper bag.
He reached inside and pulled out a six-pack from a local brewery. “I kid you not, this place is meant for people like us. Check it out. Demons of Ale.”
Colin laughed and took a bottle out of the cardboard container. “Mephistopheles?”
He was reading the label but it came out as a question.
Dylan nodded, grinning at Colin and Anna for the first time since finding out Jeremy was still alive. “Right? There are two other flavors. We’ve got to try them all. I’ll go back for The Beast when we break in our new apartments.”
Max popped one of the bottles open then choked on the black liquid inside. “Holy crap, that’s what they serve in Hell.”
Colin smelled it. “I’m Irish. I haven’t met a beer I can’t drink.”
Anna actually backed away from the bottle when Dylan tried to hand her one. “I’m English. I’ve met plenty of beers I don’t like.”
Colin shrugged. “It’s not so bad. You should try it with a can of corn, Max.”
Max squinted at him. “Everyone knows Purple Haze goes with canned corn.”
Dylan nodded and tipped his demon beer at Max. “Good point. Abita has a beer for every food. It’s the Louisiana way.”
Anna sighed loudly. She didn’t need to taste a black beer to know she’d prefer her Abita Amber, and she didn’t eat corn from a can, so she really just wanted to know what other information Dylan and Max were looking for.
Dylan set his Mephistopheles’ brew down and clasped his hands in front of him. “What happened with those three demons in Leipzig? I’m assuming it was a real event, right?”
Anna sat on the edge of her bed and nodded. “Yeah, we isolated them from the troops, chased them out of town and killed them. Why?”
“Well, I was just wondering why that memory? If this archdemon is back messing with your mind, why choose a memory where you killed three of its minions at a time?”
Colin yawned. He hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before and the beer was pretty strong. “It’s not the first time it’s messed with our dreams. Shortly before Anna’s abduction, we both started having dreams about different experiences. I dreamed about being back in Berlin at the end of World War II, Anna dreamed about being in Paris during the French Revolution.”
Max looked up from his drink he was still eyeing suspiciously like he actually expected Mephistopheles to materialize from it. “And those were memories. Not dreams.”
Colin and Anna both acknowledged they had been real experiences.
“But no demons in those dreams?” Dylan pointed out.
“No, but maybe we just woke up too soon. In both of those cases, we ended up fighting demons later in the day. In Berlin, we found an older woman dying of pneumonia or something like it, so I tried to find help but that was in April 1945. The Russians were at our doorstep and everyone was hiding. You can’t blame them. You can’t imagine the stories we heard.”
Dylan snorted. “Worse than what you must have been hearing about the Germans?”
Colin shook his head. “There’s no scorecard. Doing terrible things to innocent people is evil. Period.”
Dylan tilted his beer back and grimaced as he drank from it, and Colin finished his story. “The woman died later that day. By then, the Russian tanks had rolled into the city and it had already started. Those early days were the worst. We meant to put hunting on a backburner for a while to go around the city to find people, mostly women, we could help, but the city was crawling with demons. There are few times in history we’ve seen that many in one area. They were literally crawling all over the city – over buildings, through the streets, riding on the tanks. They were everywhere.”
“Holy shit,” Dylan mumbled.
“Yeah,” Colin agreed, “it was pretty damn terrifying, honestly.”
“Wait,” Max set his mostly untouched beer down on the hotel table. “What about Paris? During the Revolution? Did you see the same thing?”
Anna and Colin glanced at each other, but Anna answered, “Not as bad. Not nearly as bad, but yes. It was during the Reign of Terror and they flocked to France in those days.”
“And in Leipzig?” Dylan asked excitedly.
He must have felt like he was about to grasp some piece of a mystery, but Colin and Anna didn’t think it could be that easy, could it?
“Well, there were the three and then once the battle started, more came. Napoleon was eventually defeated and chased back to France and
they followed the armies,” Colin said.
Dylan slapped his knee. “It’s a pattern. For some reason, they’re sending you these memories of all the times you had to fight a bunch of demons at once. But why?”
Colin and Anna shrugged. How were they supposed to know?
Max still looked deep in thought. “You said Berlin was one of the worst you’ve ever seen. Doesn’t sound like Paris or Leipzig was bad in comparison. What could compare?”
Colin and Anna looked at each other uneasily then Colin took a deep breath, clearly uncomfortable having to relive this event. “The only thing that ever compared was Bosnia.”
Chapter 9
Srebrenica, 1995. Colin and Anna had been in the Balkans for the past couple of years. When the civil war started, they had recognized all the telling features that this conflict was going to turn brutal and horrific, and after centuries of chasing brutal and horrific acts by their fellow humans, they also knew there was little hope that the world would step in and stop this conflict from becoming so deadly. And of course they’d been right.
They followed the Serbian army into Srebrenica even though it was supposed to be protected by the United Nations, but they had little faith in the U.N. to protect the people here. After all, the town had been subjected to violence and ethnic cleansing for the past several years. They expected nothing to change now.
Anna watched nervously as another man collapsed in the street before her. People had been starving to death due to the siege by the army surrounding the city. This was nothing new either. Colin helped her drag him out of the street and into the shade of a nearby building. He was still alive, but Anna couldn’t imagine how. He was emaciated and delusional, and Anna couldn’t understand any of what he was trying to tell her. She suspected even if she spoke the language, she wouldn’t have understood him.
Colin reached into his bag and pulled out a bottle of water. The people who lived here, especially the refugees, hadn’t had clean drinking water since the siege began, but Colin nor Anna had ever seen anything like this. The Serbian army was preventing most of the U.N. aid from reaching the city.
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