Garden of the Gods (The Immortals Series Book 3)

by S. M. Schmitz

  “If she tells me anything, I’ll share it,” Amanda promised.

  Dylan took a deep breath and closed his eyes again. “I’m sorry I never told you how much I love you. But I never would have believed I was good enough for you. The reason I never asked you out isn’t because I was worried I’d get turned down. I expected that. I’ll always think you’re too good for me, Jas, but I thought you deserved someone better than me. And in the rare event you might’ve actually said yes, I just thought you shouldn’t end up stuck with someone like me.”

  Amanda was quiet for so long, Colin and Anna began to wonder if Jas had already left. Dylan was still kneeling by Anna and she put her arm around his shoulders and leaned her head against him. She decided to tell him she would tell Jas herself the next time she showed up in her dream, but Amanda finally spoke.

  “I don’t know how to say this, so I’m just wording it the exact way I heard it from her.”

  Dylan looked up from the ground he’d been staring at so intently, Anna had begun wondering if there were some demon about to crawl through the crack in the pavement. “You’re an idiot.”

  Dylan’s laughter cut Amanda off. Anna had to laugh with him because that was exactly what she knew her friend would say. Dylan nodded because he agreed with her.

  “It’s because you were arrested before, isn’t it?” Amanda continued. “You went to jail for a few months for marijuana possession. You were nineteen. So what if you were a stupid kid? The twenty-four year old man I met and knew for five years was not that stupid kid. You talk about thinking I was waiting around for some perfect man to show up, and really, I just got tired of waiting around for you. But I was waiting for you to change your mind about me and then I gave up hope. And now that I know, Dylan, five hundred years ain’t nothing when there’s eternity stretched out before me.”

  Amanda stopped and looked at each of the hunters, confused by the message she’d just conveyed. Dylan was crying but smiling, and Anna kept her arms around him, but Amanda was suddenly uneasy and uncertain about the hunters here. “What does she mean five hundred years?”

  Colin looked up at Luca for help. Andrew looked like he desperately wanted to disappear. Or maybe he was still more interested in the fire-eater and potential sword swallowers.

  “Well,” Luca said, “there’s a reason you don’t recognize our, um, auras. You’ve probably never met anyone who’s immortal.”

  Amanda’s eyes widened and she shook her head. “I think I need to hear your stories. Now. Because I’m starting to wonder if those doctors were right and I’m crazy, after all.”

  “We all have slightly different stories,” Colin offered, “but I’ll tell you how Anna and I ended up living this long, what we do, and why we need your help.”

  Chapter 5

  London, 1647 - 1648. The morning after Anna was healed by The Angel, she and Colin sat in their London flat trying to figure out what they were going to tell her parents. Colin knew her mother would be knocking on their door soon. He hadn’t gone to their flat in the middle of the night to announce the death of their daughter, which meant Anna was still alive, and her mother always came right after sunrise. She would bring Colin breakfast and try to get him to eat, but Colin never ate much.

  This morning, they’d decided to pretend Anna’s fever had broken over night and that she seemed, miraculously, to be getting better. Anna had already helped Colin strip her deathbed of the dirty linens and by the time they heard Anna’s mother knocking on the door, she was ready to crawl under the clean sheet and blankets and pretend to be recovering from a disease that was actually supposed to have killed her. Truthfully, Anna was anxious to see her mother again because she knew how heartbroken her mother must be, but at some point, she and Colin would have to leave London. The people who knew them would notice they weren’t aging.

  Anna listened as Colin went to their front door to let her mother in and Colin explained how their prayers had been answered: she had survived the night and she no longer had a fever. Anna faked a cough and her mother rushed into the bedroom, needing to see for herself that her daughter was still alive. As she grabbed Anna’s hand and put a cheek on her forehead, that maternal thermometer needing to test Colin’s assertion that she really was getting better, Anna opened her eyes and tried not to smile too much. She was supposed to be sick still.

  Anna’s mother cried and begged Colin to go get her husband; Anna’s father had assumed their daughter was dead and Colin had been too distraught to come to them in the middle of the night, but her mother had refused to give up hope. And here, the miracle she had been praying for had occurred. Colin met Anna’s eyes briefly before leaving to get her father. A miracle had definitely occurred, but it hadn’t been the one anyone had been praying for.

  Anna had to pretend to be recovering from consumption for the next few weeks. She didn’t leave their flat, but she didn’t stay in bed that whole time either. By the end of the first week, she assured her mother she was well enough to sit in the parlor and read. By the end of the second week, she convinced her mother she was well enough to help her knead dough. Anna even offered to help with the sewing her mother brought over because she was that bored.

  After the third week, her mother stopped insisting on spending the entire day at her flat with her while Colin was at work. She finally accepted her daughter wasn’t dying and wasn’t going to have a sudden relapse. As desperately as Anna loved her mother, she was thankful she no longer had to pretend she was recovering from an illness she didn’t have. She and Colin had been so focused on keeping up the illusion of her remarkable recovery that they’d hardly discussed what The Angel had told them they would spend the next five hundred years doing. It wasn’t until her parents accepted Anna’s recovery that their new reality even hit them.

  They’d had to learn how to cope with the influx of each other’s constant thoughts tumbling through their own brains, mixing with their own thoughts and feelings. Even when Colin was at work, Anna could hear him and sense him and, at first, she sometimes couldn’t tell if it was her own thought or emotion or his as she experienced it. She would be helping her mother repair the hem on a pair of trousers and suddenly feel frustrated and aggravated, but after the first time of slamming the pants down on the table in anger and having to talk her mother out of going to get the doctor to make sure the consumption hadn’t affected her brain, she learned to tease out what she was actually feeling from what her husband was experiencing.

  Colin had an easier time learning to cope with the telepathy The Angel had given them. Anna was confined to their home, and other than boredom, she didn’t have those strong emotions from encounters with people who tried her patience or insulted her. That was a regular occurrence for Colin: the English had never really liked the Irish, and they seemed particularly averse to them now. Colin was genuinely sorry he’d have to take Anna away from her parents one day, but he wasn’t going to miss London.

  The Angel had told them Luca would be coming to visit them, to train them in this new life, and about two months after Anna’s life was saved by The Angel, Luca showed up at their door. He arrived on a Sunday, so Colin was home, too, and it was then that their new life, their new reality, really hit them both.

  They found themselves asking Luca so many questions, and Anna anxiously kept refilling his cup of tea or insisting he accept more scones or biscuits or whatever else she’d baked recently because she was filled with a nervous energy and had nowhere else to direct it. Even then, Luca was so patient and compassionate, and he graciously accepted whatever Anna forced on him. After a while, Colin silently reminded his wife that if she kept it up, she was going to make him sick, so Anna turned her nervous energy on her husband and kept refilling his cup and plate.

  “We’ll have to get out of the city to practice,” Luca continued.

  Now that Anna was no longer focused on his cup or plate, he allowed himself to put his teacup down. He opened the bag he’d brought inside with him and took out the w
eapons Colin and Anna still carried.

  “Demons can’t all be killed the same way. Different metals or combinations of metals are needed, so keep all of these weapons I’m giving you on your body at all times. You often won’t know which one you’ll need until you’re fighting the demon.”

  Luca placed four daggers and two knives on the table in front of him. “After a while, you’ll get used to the minions of certain greater demons being vulnerable to the same kind of weapon, and you’ll be able to anticipate what kind of blade will kill them.”

  Colin picked up one of the daggers and examined its blade. It looked identical to the other daggers’ blades. “How are we supposed to tell them apart?”

  Luca pointed to the hilts. “They are all different and that’s the easiest way to tell your daggers apart. You’ll only have one knife, so there’s no confusion there. The blade on the dagger you’re holding is an alloy. This other one has an iron blade. The knife is a carbon steel alloy.”

  “I have no idea what this guy is talking about,” Anna thought as she studied the weapons on the table in front of her. That just made her even more nervous. If she couldn’t even follow the conversation about blade types, how was she supposed to fight these demons?

  But Colin quickly assured her he felt just as lost.

  Luca seemed to pick up on the O’Conners’ confusion and smiled at them. “Don’t worry. It’ll make sense tonight when we go hunting.”

  That didn’t help Anna’s nerves at all.

  That evening, Luca led them through some of the narrow London streets as they went on their first hunting trip. Being new, they would have to try to get whatever demon they found out of the city because Colin and Anna wouldn’t know what they were doing and Luca would need to be able to instruct them.

  It was still winter in London and it was cold and damp, and Colin’s old habit of immediately worrying about Anna’s health almost stopped them from leaving their flat altogether. As soon as he stepped outside and realized how much the temperature had dropped, he turned around to get Anna back inside. Colin already had visions of starting a fire and making her some tea and piling warm blankets on top of her.

  Anna smiled at her husband and put her gloved hands on her hips. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t immortality mean I’m immune to the illnesses you used to worry so much about?”

  Colin sighed and locked their door. “In my defense, I was obviously right to worry about them.”

  Luca was already waiting on the street and he looked up at Anna and grinned. “You had consumption, right? That one kills plenty of healthy people, too.”

  Anna decided she really liked Luca.

  It took them less than half an hour to find a demon preying on some of the miserable souls in the city who were also ravaged by the effects of tuberculosis. Sometimes, it was a family member who was desperate enough to barter his soul or sometimes, it was the sick person himself. When Luca pointed out the sensation from the demon’s presence, Colin and Anna both realized this was nothing new to them. They had both felt this before. Having never known what caused it, they’d assumed there was some religious significance to it, but they’d also assumed everyone experienced those moments of sensing that something was out of place in this world.

  Anna inched closer to Luca and whispered, “We’ve felt this our whole lives, but this is the first time either of us has actually ever seen a demon. Why is that? Is that part of The Angel’s gift?”

  Luca shook his head but kept his eyes on the muddy brown beast at the end of the street. “You’ve always been able to see them. Sometimes, people just don’t believe what their eyes are seeing or sometimes, they disguise themselves as humans. But they move remarkably quickly, as well, so it’s possible you sensed them but never had the chance to see them.”

  Colin knew The Angel had promised they would be faster and stronger, but as he watched the demon creeping past windows at the edge of the street, looking for a person at the right moment of hopelessness, he was filled with self-doubt. And he really wished The Angel had let him do this on his own so that his wife wouldn’t have to get involved in hunting creatures of Hell.

  Anna reprimanded him for thinking that and reminded him they had five hundred years of this life to go: he’d better get used to having an invincible wife and stop treating her like she would break at any moment. Colin told her he didn’t think he’d ever be able to do that, not entirely anyway.

  “This speaking in each other’s mind thing is new,” Luca muttered. “First Immortals I’ve ever met with this gift. Gets annoying after a while for those around you, you know.”

  Colin and Anna both blushed and apologized. They hadn’t even realized how long they’d been conversing silently.

  Luca smiled again and shrugged. “It’ll come in handy when you’re hunting. Just remember to speak out loud around other people. Now let’s see if we can get this guy out of London. Ready to run?”

  Luca didn’t wait for them to answer. He ran down the street and the muddy brown demon stopped its prowling and was going to try to fight this hunter that had just emerged from the shadows at the opposite end of the narrow alleyway when it realized this hunter was being followed by two other hunters. It was outnumbered. Instead of fighting, it turned and tried to escape.

  The hunters chased it for several miles before it was in an area that wasn’t heavily populated. Colin and Anna couldn’t talk to Luca in their minds, so they had no idea what he wanted them to do. But they could talk to each other, and Anna had an idea. “If it gets into the woods up there, we might lose it. There won’t be enough light from the moon for us to see. Let’s try to flank it. Luca told us what we needed to do to kill it, and he’s awfully fast. If we make a mistake, it won’t take him long to reach us and rescue us.”

  Colin didn’t want to anger their new teacher, but he thought Anna’s idea was a good one, and she was right about the forest ahead of them. If it got into that thick growth of trees, they could easily lose this demon. He and Anna broke away from Luca and ran on opposite sides of the demon. Luca must have realized what they were trying to do because he sped up, which astonished the O’Conners considering they were already running as fast as they could, and somehow managed to get in front of the beast they were chasing. The demon pivoted and ran back in the opposite direction but Colin and Anna were waiting for it.

  They attacked it from each side, and the O’Conners had also decided to each use a different dagger to increase their chances of having a weapon that would actually work on this monster. It was Colin’s dagger that penetrated the demon’s side and left a gaping wound. Anna tried not to gag as she reached for her other dagger to help her husband kill this demon. It was the first time she’d been close enough to one of these bastards to smell that stench of rotting meat and sour mulch, the overpowering odor of decay and death.

  Luca stood nearby and watched them, but that night, the first time the O’Conners ever killed a demon, their first night as hunters, they didn’t need his help. The hideous, odiferous beast crumbled to the ground in a powdery dust, blending into the dirt of the earth.

  Colin and Anna backed away from the spot where the demon had stood seconds before, panting and tired now that the chase was over, and Luca stepped closer to them. Anna felt nervous again, and wondered if they were about to get yelled at for making a decision on their own, one that could have ended badly for all they knew. But Luca was smiling at them.

  “My angel told me you two were special. I see what he means. We’re grateful to have you on board with us.”

  And it was that night when Colin and Anna allowed themselves to believe they may have something extraordinary to give back to The Angel, to give back to the God who had blessed them with each other.

  Chapter 6

  As soon as Colin finished relaying how he and Anna became immortal hunters, Luca jumped in with his own personal addition to Colin’s story.

  “I was right, too, by the way. All of the Immortals admire the hell
out of the O’Conners.”

  Andrew nodded in agreement. “I was sent here to help them learn a new gift, and Colin can already do something I wouldn’t even know how to begin attempting. That’s probably why these demons are targeting them first. They want all the Immortals dead, but they’re selecting them in order of who they consider most dangerous. They figure if they can get rid of the O’Conners first, they’ll go after Luca next, and then the rest of us.”

  The look on Amanda’s face told Colin and Anna she was trying not to panic. She’d slid her hands underneath the table so the hunters couldn’t see them shaking, but Colin had noticed her trembling fingers as he was talking. Anna wished she’d at least keep the money she continued offering her. After the night they were putting her through, it was the least they could do.

  “And how many of you are there?” she asked. Her voice quivered, too.

  Anna wanted to offer to get her that six-pack of Demon Ale.

  Luca drummed his fingers against his leg, probably trying to calculate how many had died in the past hundred years, how many had been added. It could be hard to keep up with sometimes. “Worldwide? A few dozen.”

  “That’s it?” Amanda asked incredulously. “I was expecting an army of Immortals. This hardly seems worth Hell’s time.”

  Andrew snickered, but Colin couldn’t blame her for not understanding how powerful Immortals were in this fight between Heaven and Hell.

  “We’re not the same as regular hunters. Mortal hunters, I mean,” Colin answered. “Between the gifts we’re given and the experience we accumulate after living so long, and being chosen by Heaven because we have something unique about our personalities that make us a good fit for this job in the first place, we’re far more dangerous to Hell than an entire army of mortal hunters. Most of the demons that are killed on Earth are killed by Immortals, even though there are far fewer of us.”