Anna rolled her eyes and finished her coffee. “If so, I’m telling Jas to come haunt you just for asking such a stupid question.”
Dylan’s smile broadened. “So that’s a no then.”
A knock on Dylan’s door made them all jump even though Anna had just insisted ghosts didn’t really haunt people. It most likely wasn’t a ghost at the door, but the coincidence made them all look sheepishly at each other for reacting that way to a knock. The person knocked again and this time, Colin recognized the sound.
“That’s Luca. Not a ghost. Just the oldest person you’ll ever meet. That’s almost the same.”
Dylan let Luca in and Andrew followed him. Dylan immediately offered them both coffee as well. Anna’s hand instinctively reached up to touch the St. Casimir medallion she was still wearing around her neck as she watched Andrew approach the kitchen.
He caught what she was doing and offered a sympathetic smile. “You’ll see, Anna. He’ll help you.”
Anna’s fingers wrapped around the pendant as she listened to Colin repeat the same dreams they’d experienced with Jas and Max. Luca and Andrew listened attentively, Luca’s eyes darting between the O’Conners and he bit his lip nervously as Colin talked. That made Anna clutch the medallion of St. Casimir more firmly. Anything that made Luca nervous made her really nervous.
As soon as Colin finished, Dylan turned to Luca and asked him, “So do you have any experience with ghosts?”
“I once had an ex-girlfriend track me down at least forty years after breaking up with her. Woman must have been almost dead by then. Does that count?”
Andrew snickered as he poured his coffee. “Why the hell did she hunt you down? What did you do to her?”
Luca brushed him off. “I always told her I couldn’t marry her. She just didn’t listen. Come to think of it, she may not have been completely sane.”
Anna was about to ask him why he was in a relationship with her in the first place then, but Colin stopped her before she could speak. “Don’t ask him that. Because he’ll actually tell us.”
Dylan was drumming his fingers on the counter again. “So no ghosts. What about you Andrew?”
Andrew shook his head and poured a generous amount of creamer in his coffee. It turned a milky burlap color and he stirred it absentmindedly. “No ghosts. Who knows? Maybe Heaven’s figuring out a way to circumvent some of these rules, too.”
“What do you mean? How are ghosts appearing in people’s dreams getting around demonic rules?” Dylan asked.
Luca reached across the counter for what was left of the coffee. “Because usually once a soul has crossed over, that’s it. They’re in another place, not here. But if Jas and Max are showing up in dreams, they’re sort of here but not really. It’s getting around the principle that souls move on to a world that’s not our own.”
Anna stared at Luca, trying to wrap her head around this possibility that even Heaven was trying to bend the rules now.
“The Angel didn’t say anything…” she stuttered.
Luca didn’t even look up from his coffee. He was counting out packets of sweetener. He fished out three and tore them all open at the same time to dump into his mug. “Your angel works for Heaven, just like mine does. Can’t expect them to know everything.”
Anna put her slender fists on her hips and glared at him until he finally looked up at her.
“What?” he asked.
“They’re angels, Luca. They bring people back from the brink of death and give them superhuman powers. Of course I can expect them to know things we don’t know,” Anna retorted.
Luca smirked and asked for the creamer, and Anna thought about kicking him again. She loved him as much as if he were her real brother, but he also tried her patience just like a real brother.
“Every power angels have comes from the same source, Anna. They’re conduits. They may be closer to the source but that doesn’t make them inherently more knowledgeable.”
Colin realized he was the only one who didn’t get a cup of coffee and the pot was empty now. He watched Luca put the empty carafe back on the hot plate. Anna shook her head at her husband who was as helpless as a child sometimes.
“Dylan, where do you keep your coffee grounds?”
Dylan motioned to a cabinet and Colin half-heartedly protested, but mostly, he was thankful he was getting coffee.
“Hey, I’ve always been a progressive husband. I learned to cook in the 1640s so you wouldn’t have to when you weren’t feeling well. And I’m a pretty good cook.”
Anna smiled at the memories. Sometimes, she missed their old life. She didn’t miss being sick so often or how worried Colin always was about her. But they had been happy. They’d had so much peace and love and comfort in their home together.
Every Sunday when they went to church, she prayed for the same thing: to live to middle age with her husband and not leave him a widower too young. She never told Colin that’s what she prayed for every night before going to sleep, every morning when she woke up, every Sunday as she sat with Colin in one of the pews near the back of the church in case they needed to leave if she started to feel unwell.
Every anniversary that passed, she considered it an answered prayer. By the time she was twenty-five, she allowed herself to believe that maybe she would be allowed to have the life she and Colin wanted. They only wanted to be together, and they asked for nothing else.
By her twenty-sixth birthday, she felt she had defied the odds again. She had grown too confident, too sure now that she and Colin would be gifted this life together. That winter, though, tuberculosis ravaged the city and she knew as soon as the doctor diagnosed her with consumption that she would not survive this. Her prayers had not been answered after all.
Colin had stepped into the kitchen with her and put his arms around her, kissing the back of her head as she watched the coffee dripping into the clear carafe. The other hunters were used to these private moments the O’Conners often shared and had started their own conversation, but neither Colin nor Anna was listening. They were both back in London in 1647.
“There were so many orphans back then. If I had been only a little bit healthier, we could have adopted one and had absolutely everything we’d ever wanted, Colin.”
Colin kissed her again and she leaned against him, wishing her mind would disentangle itself from the past. It was a life lost to them now, and it was one they could never get back.
“When I think of that life, I think we both died that night. You died from the disease and I died along with you. This is our afterlife. Our purgatory. But at least we’re in it together.”
Anna turned her head to look up at her husband. “What did we do to deserve purgatory?”
“Sometimes, none of this seems real, and I wonder if I imagined everything that night. Maybe it’s not what we did, but what I did. When you died, I was thinking of killing myself. And maybe that condemned us both.”
“Oh, Colin. Then we’d both be imagining the other immortals, our friends. Their angels. Besides, we already know there’s no such thing as purgatory. People make a choice, and they only have two choices.”
The coffee finished brewing but neither of them moved to grab a mug for Colin. “I know it doesn’t technically exist. But isn’t this a kind of purgatory? We’re not dead but we’re not really alive. Not like other humans. Our sole existence is to help Heaven in its battle against evil, and we have no way out. Not until the end of our servitude. Kind of sounds like purgatory.”
Anna pulled away from Colin and interrupted Luca who was, once again, in a heated debate about the college football season, which had just started. Dylan still liked LSU’s chances of getting into the playoffs and Luca insisted he must have added something stronger to his coffee than aspartame.
“Luca,” Anna asked, “have you ever thought about what we do as a kind of purgatory? Especially those of us who have the half a millennium tacked on to our servitude?”
Luca paused mid-argument and mid-drink,
his coffee cup still in the air between the counter and his lips.
“Purgatory?” he asked incredulously.
Anna nodded.
“My sweet girl, I know you’re not Catholic, but you know what that is, don’t you?”
Anna nodded again.
Dylan set his cup down. “Actually, I’m not Catholic and I don’t know.”
Luca sighed and put his coffee down and Andrew mimicked him. “Purgatory is believed to be a place of suffering where souls go to repent their sins. But none of us are suffering, and none of us have been asked to repent for any sins. Why would you think this is a kind of purgatory?”
Colin shrugged and grabbed an empty coffee mug. “Because it’s not Heaven or Hell either, but we’re not really human anymore. I don’t know what we are, but humans get to live normal lives, have kids and grow old and die. We just stay the same forever.”
“Not forever,” Andrew reminded him. “When my five hundred years are up, I think I’m done. Luca’s one of only two people on this planet who’ve signed on indefinitely. They’re out of their minds.”
Luca waved a hand at him dismissively. “We’re just dedicated.”
Andrew was just as dismissive and insisted he was crazy. After all, he apparently didn’t think twice about entering relationships with women who were most likely insane and would later hunt him down for not offering her marriage.
“Yeah, but you didn’t see this woman. The younger one who was only twenty-seven when I met her, not the older one who blamed me for her life as a spinster. She was Aphrodite herself.”
Anna heard Colin warning her not to say it, but she ignored him. “How long ago was this? For all you know, you did ruin her life because no one would marry her after she slept with you.”
Colin’s voice sighed in Anna’s head. “I am ten seconds away from leaving.”
“Not true,” Luca argued. “I wasn’t the first man she’d slept with and I’m sure I wasn’t the last. No one married her because she claimed she could speak to the dead, like a medium or something.”
Colin stopped chastising Anna in his mind and actually focused on Luca. “Wait, how do you know she couldn’t?”
Luca laughed then realized Colin was serious. “Oh. Because it’s not possible...” But Luca’s voice trailed off as he realized Anna and Colin were basically doing just that. “Ok, but lots of people have claimed to be psychics or mediums or whatever, and they’re most certainly just cons. Or crazy.”
“Or,” Colin retorted, “we’ve always assumed we’re so damn smart because we can see demons and angels, but we don’t understand even a fraction of what’s possible in this world.”
Dylan nodded in agreement. “I don’t know about your ex-girlfriend, but I know until a couple of months ago I never thought angels walked around this planet like demons, I never would have thought there were immortal people here, and I sure as hell would have never thought we could have powers like the kind I have or have seen. And now Jas and Max have figured out how to do this dream-stalking thing.”
Even Andrew was starting to waffle and he played with his coffee mug as he watched the exchange among the other hunters. “So we keep an open mind from now on. We obviously need to, because we’re all at a loss right now. Still doesn’t make this purgatory, though, Colin. Far from it.”
“No such thing anyway,” Luca added. “And this is coming from someone who’s been Catholic since before the Reformation. But the Church got this one wrong.”
Anna reached for her medallion again and Andrew gave her another sympathetic smile. She wondered how many times St. Casimir had offered him consolation during these long years as a hunter. But then she started thinking about St. Casimir himself, and the Church and being sanctified and the contrivances of men that so many people still held sacred.
“Maybe they got everything wrong. Or not everything but most things. How would we know?”
Luca had been mid-sip again and for the second time, his hand froze in the air as if his body couldn’t understand the question anymore than this brain. “Now’s not exactly a great time to be questioning your faith, Anna. Not when there are a group of pissed off archdemons that have you at the top of Hell’s hit list.”
Anna kept her fingers around the image of St. Casimir, though, and kept her eyes on Luca. “But we know there’s no such thing as purgatory. We know there’s no such thing as damnation. A person makes a choice. They choose good or evil. And we know wherever humans are causing more suffering, these demons congregate and are stronger. We always assumed we humans were the pawns in this game, but what if we’re the ones controlling it? What if it’s people who make Heaven or Hell more powerful depending on the choices we make and they’re the ones who are pawns in our game?”
All of the hunters stared silently at Anna, and even Colin’s mind became quiet.
Luca, their oldest friend and leader who had trained every Immortal still alive, finally set his cup down and shook his head slowly as he thought about what Anna was suggesting. “If that’s the case, my dear friend, we’re fighting a war we can never win.”
Chapter 18
Anna and Colin knew they were going to have to get used to functioning on little sleep now, but they were both tired and cranky by that afternoon as they met Andrew in another empty field to practice using this power neither of them wanted to practice using.
Luca and Dylan were a few miles away, as Luca trained Dylan how to use his new speed and strength. It wasn’t an entirely new gift to Dylan, but he’d been given those gifts as a mortal in order to help find Anna after she was abducted. Now, with five hundred years of hunting looming ahead of him, he would need to know how to use them as expertly as the others.
Anna covered her mouth as she yawned again and tried to apologize to Andrew through her weary breath, but he hadn’t slept much either. He may not have demons haunting his dreams, but the loss of Lacey and Max weighed on him heavily, too. He had just confided to Colin that he felt responsible for what happened because he hadn’t done more to stop the demon that was attacking Anna; he’d hesitated and been far too unsure of himself, and he’d left Colin no choice but to save his wife the only way he knew how.
Andrew’s confession had led to several minutes of the two men arguing about whose fault yesterday’s tragedy wasn’t before Anna stopped them.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake, it was nobody’s fault except the demon’s! Can we practice now?” Anna felt like she was yelling. She didn’t usually yell at people, especially her husband, but she was so tired and she was getting a headache. She was already wondering if they could stop on their way back to Devil’s Thumb to get that Demon Ale Dylan wanted. This time, she wasn’t turning it down.
Andrew motioned to the plastic buckets and reminded them what Dylan had suggested right before Jeremy had shown up on the horizon. Since Heaven had always intended for them to work together, perhaps he’d been wrong in directing them to practice separately and they should learn to control this gift together, too. Colin and Anna concentrated on the plastic cylinders in the distance then watched them splinter into tiny fragments. The pebbly dust on the ground swirled in angry tornadoes where the buckets used to stand.
Anna thought about asking Andrew if they could call it quits for the day. This was only the first set of buckets they’d destroyed.
“Anna, come on. We can learn how to control it. Andrew’s already running out there to replace the targets.”
“Where are they getting all these buckets anyway?” Anna folded her arms again and she felt like she was pouting. She wondered if she looked like she was pouting.
“Yes.”
“Colin…”
“You were wondering, just trying to be helpful. And I don’t know where all the buckets are coming from. Luca’s getting them from somewhere. He’s probably got another half-crazy girlfriend stashed somewhere who hoards used five gallon buckets.”
Anna giggled because with Luca, there was no telling. “Some of these look new. I thi
nk he’s buying them.”
Andrew jogged back to their sides and motioned to the row of orange buckets he’d just laid out. “Ok, this is probably only going to make sense to Colin and I didn’t want to say this in front of you, Anna, but… when I was practicing, I used the same kind of… stamina tricks. You know, distractions...”
Colin snorted and eyed the buckets in the distance then shrugged. “I don’t think that’s going to help Anna.”
Anna shook her head. “I don’t know. I’ve known every thought that’s gone through your head for 368 years. I think I know what Andrew’s talking about.”
Andrew actually blushed and kicked at the ground, leaving shallow ruts where his boots slid back and forth. “Well, try it then.”
Colin thought for a few moments. “Basically, we just need to focus on anything that’s not related to what we’re doing, but it really needs to keep our minds engaged. Like a real problem or something, not just if Luca really has a crazy bucket hoarding girlfriend.”
Anna nodded in agreement even though she was kind of curious about Luca’s current list of lovers, considering he’d just added Lacey to that list and they’d buried her in a different prairie the day before.
“That’s not helping, Anna. Think of something besides our dead friends.”
“Sorry,” she mumbled aloud. “What about a memory? We get pulled into memories together. They can be really distracting.”
Colin liked her idea and searched for one that would keep both of their minds on the past and not on those ridiculous orange buckets on the horizon. He brought them to South Africa. Anna traveled with him to the turn of the twentieth century where her native homeland, which had turned itself into the world’s largest empire, was attempting to usurp the two last strongholds of Afrikaaner power and semi-independence in South Africa.
By the time Colin and Anna arrived, the British had already adopted their scorched earth policies and erected concentration camps for the native Afrikaaners. Starvation and disease epidemics were ravaging the mostly women and children who had been herded into these camps, and even though it wouldn’t be the last time Colin and Anna witnessed humans corralled into camps in deplorable conditions, it was the first. And Anna never forgave her country for it.
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