Fallen Eden

by Nicole Williams

  Another set of footsteps rushed forward, following him. They were close, so close I knew he’d be breaking into view in a few more strides.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” Patrick hollered, two sets of footsteps coming to a halt just out of view.

  “Get out of my way. Now.”

  “Guess what, brother? She stopped caring awhile back,” Patrick replied, not about to back down. “Maybe it’s time you do the same.”

  There was silence and, feeling panic rising up, I thrust forward, managing to sprint while limping. I charged towards the voices, not because I had no choice, but because that feeling had died—as instantly as it had appeared. I was a loose tether, nothing to be tied to.

  The greenhouse came into view, but only one figure was waiting for me, glaring their disdain at me like I was a parasite.

  “William?” I yelled, ignoring Patrick. I rushed behind the greenhouse, desperate to find him. Nothing but emptiness waiting for me. “William?” I charged around the woods, never feeling like he was so close, but so far away.

  “You’re not going to find him,” Patrick called out to me when I jogged past him the fourth time. “He’s gone. Long gone.”

  I glared at him as I passed by.

  “Besides, why are you so concerned with finding him? Taking a machete to his heart once wasn’t enough for you?”

  “William?” I whispered, spinning a few more circles.

  “Stop it,” Patrick said, pacing towards me. “Stop saying his name. Stop pretending you give a damn. Because you’re not fooling me.”

  “I don’t really care if I am or am not fooling you,” I said, trembling. “I know this might crush the narcissistic world you live in, Patrick, but everyone around you does not live their lives caring about what you think.”

  “You don’t care what I think?” Patrick repeated, crossing his arms.

  “N. O.”

  “You sure about that?” he asked, sounding like he was issuing a warning.

  “Positively,” I seethed, vocalizing my frustration.

  “Good. Makes my life a heck of a lot easier, not to mention more pleasant,” he said, turning and marching into the trees. “Find yourself another talent trainer. One who you actually care about what they think.”

  He vanished a few paces later, swallowed up by the trees or teleporting away, I don’t know, but another rush of sadness hit me when I realized I’d lost two Haywards that day, all in two minutes time.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  FIGHT

  “Remind me why we’re roaming through this over-priced, open-air market in forty degree weather?” Paul asked, shrugging deeper into his down jacket.

  “For the experience,” I answered. “And you can’t get a carrot this fresh in a grocery store.” I handed him one of the carrots in my basket to prove my point.

  He turned it over, looking unimpressed. “It’s a carrot. Any one of the fifty stores we passed on our way to get here would have had exactly the same thing. For half the price and double the temperature.” He tossed it back in my basket and ambled to the next vendor who was peddling some kind of liquid steaming from a kettle.

  “But we would have missed out on all the stimulating conversation,” I mumbled, wandering over to him.

  I didn’t understand how he couldn’t find the cornucopia of noises, scents, and wares of Munich’s oldest open-air farmer’s market, the Viktualienmarkt, enthralling. It was as whimsical as a circus and as comforting as my mom’s strawberry-rhubarb pie. Basically, heaven. I only wished I’d discovered this gem weeks ago.

  “So experience thing aside,” I said, fingering through the contents of my basket “dinner will be amazing.”

  “Now you have my attention.” Paul grinned and handed me a cup billowing with steam. “Drink this. If my teeth are chattering to the point of breaking, you’ve got to be freezing.”

  Of course I wasn’t. It felt like it was sunny and seventy and it would everyday forward. Some people might grow to hate this, resent never feeling the roller coaster of seasons and the fluctuation of temperatures that came with them, but not me. I was comforted in knowing what to expect, what was waiting for me everyday.

  “What’s this?” I asked, eyeing the paper cup.

  “Moonshine—or at least the German equivalent,” Paul said, his smile curling. “Frederick here”—he motioned to the attendant counting back Paul’s change—“promised if flowers, chocolates, poetry, and groveling weren’t working on a girl, this would.” He lifted the cup to his lips and tilted it back. All the way back.

  I eyed him with parental disapproval. I didn’t take Paul for the binging type.

  “Relax,” he said, crumbling the empty cup and tossing it into the nearest garbage can twenty feet away. Show-off basketball star. “It’s apple cider.”

  “Oh. In that case, bottom’s up.” I tipped the cup, feeling the cider spread its warmth all the way down to my toes. It was like taking the first bite of a dozen just picked sweetish-tartish apples. “How can you not love this place?” I asked, taking the last sip.

  I hadn’t meant for Paul to answer, but from the bend of his brow, I knew he was getting ready to. “I love being with you. Anywhere with you,” he said, scratching the back of his head. “Even in some crummy, overpriced market where the turnips are more popsicle than beta-carotene.” He smiled, rattling one of them against the metal bar of a vendor’s tent.

  “You have no sense of culture,” I said, shuffling through a river of bodies as I headed in the direction of our car parked blocks away. “I won’t make you suffer this medieval form of torture any longer.”

  “And the congregation said Amen,” Paul shouted, shouldering up to me. “Besides, you’ve got to get dinner started. From the looks of it, you’ll be washing, peeling, and dicing until your fingers fall off.”

  Perhaps I’d gone a little overboard. Our basket was overflowing with leafy, shiny, speckled, dirt-crusted produce fit to feed OSU’s football team during summer training.

  “I think I’ll catch up on some shut-eye when we get back since it looks like dinner won’t be ready until midnight.”

  I elbowed him. “That’s a good idea. You need to get some more sleep. You’re overdoing it,” I said, trying to bridge a very delicate topic. Whenever I’d attempted to bring up Paul’s health and obvious diminishing element of it, he’d answered me with sealed lips, turning and walking away, or by changing the subject.

  “Hello, Miss Obvious,” he said under his breath. “Subtlety isn’t one of your strong points, is it?”

  “And facing the truth isn’t one of yours,” I said, looking skyward to keep the tears down. “I know you’re trying to hide it from me, but I can tell you’re getting worse. I can see how some mornings it practically kills you to get out of bed.”

  Paul chuckled darkly. “Well, one day soon it will kill me.”

  I roared to a stop, grabbing his sleeve. “Stop joking. It’s getting old. You might not care about your life ending in the near future, but I do and I’m not about to let you wallow your way to your grave if something can be done to delay it.”

  He wheeled around to me, his expression glacial. “Don’t you start this. Not now,” Paul said, biting at the side of his cheek. “Don’t play the death card now, not after parading around Europe with me, extreme snowboarding, and pretending what’s happening to me isn’t really happening.”

  Paul was one of the most laid-back people I’d met; the only other time I’d seen him this upset had been at our meeting in the café in Corvallis. “What are you talking about? Why don’t I have a right to be concerned about you?”

  “Because the concern I want from you isn’t the kind that stems from pity. I want you concerned because you care about me,” he said, charging forward down the sidewalk.

  “I do care about you,” I said, rushing to catch up with him.

  He stopped so abruptly I ran straight into him. “There are two kinds of care,” he said, gripping my shoulders. “I�
��m talking about one and you’re talking about the other.”

  I lowered my eyes. “You know I can’t care for you that way.”

  “Why?” he said instantly, glaring at the necklace that had bounced its way out of my coat. “Because of him? Because of that loser who was nothing but wrong for you?”

  I tried to pretend Paul’s words weren’t cutting me like a knife. I doubted I was doing a good job of it.

  “He had his chance and screwed it up. Time to wake up and smell the heartache, Bryn. He’s not coming for you. Move on.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this,” I said, my lips trembling.

  Paul snorted. “Of course you don’t,” he said, walking away from me backwards. “Looks like I’m not the only one who’s been dodging serious chats.” He spun around, heading towards the car. “Do me a favor, will ya? Don’t bring up my crap again until you’re ready to talk about yours.”

  I exhaled, dreading the hour drive home. Paul was right about one thing—the grocery store would have been a better idea—at least in terms of the duration of awkward silence that would follow.

  I fished out the car keys, heading towards William’s SUV and the man who—had fate not thrown me a curveball in the form of an ink-haired man who was godlike in every sense of the word—could have been the man I fell in love with.

  The drive home was unbearable. Paul’s mouth stayed shut, clamped shut, but I could feel the fuming he kept bottled inside like it was about to burst. Time had never gone so slow. My shoulders fell in relief when we pulled in the garage. I heaved the door open, eager to be free of the emotions stifling the car’s interior. Paul’s hand closed around my wrist, pulling me back down into the driver’s seat. “So, I don’t want to have any regrets and if I go in the next few hours, I’ll have to carry around the guilt of being mean to you for all eternity. Not the way I want to spend my time in the hereafter. No, thank you.”

  I tried pulling away from him. I couldn’t take any more of his jokes or sarcasm or his twisted sense of humor. He was dying, not getting an appendix out.

  “I’m sorry my attitude towards my advancement to six feet under upsets you. I don’t expect it to be the way you would handle it, or anyone else would, but humor is what’s keeping me from going off the deep-end. You know, that deep-end that reduces men to thick, black eye-liner and crappy, just-shoot-me-now music?” He laughed tightly. “Now that’s enough to kill someone.”

  I squeezed the bridge of my nose and inhaled. “Okay. I can accept that. But I can’t accept that you won’t go to a hospital or a doctor or something. You’ve got to fight, Paul,” I said, almost a shout. “It’s like you’ve just given up on your life and are letting the runway lights to the pearly gates come at you without even trying to put the brakes on.”

  “I have done all those things and there isn’t anything else that can be done. I don’t want to spend my last days strapped to a dozen beeping contraptions in a hospital bed with my arse hanging out of a nightgown.” He smiled at me from the side. “As much as you’d like that, I’m sure.”

  “I would like that,” I said. “Minus your . . . arse hanging out. You need to be in a hospital. I don’t know the first thing about anything medical, I can’t even read a thermometer properly. I can’t take care of you the way you need to be.” As I said it, I knew there were two ways this was true.

  “You already take care of me,” he said, twining his fingers through mine. “Just by being here. And besides, I am fighting, despite what you think. I’m just fighting for something else.”

  “How’s that going for you?” I asked, huffing in my seat.

  He grinned one of those ear-to-ear ones. “Kind of a losing battle right now, but that’s alright, I’m up to the challenge.”

  I so did not want to have this conversation right now. Not that I could imagine ever wanting to have this talk with him . . . “Paul—”

  “So how about that dinner you’ve been promising me all day?” he said, popping out of the car. “I need a nap before we talk anymore about death, pathetic ex-boyfriends, and losing battles. Okay with you?”

  “Great with me,” I said under my breath.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  BLACK HOLE

  I’d taken the motorcycle tonight. For a couple of reasons. Mainly because William’s scent clung to the SUV in such a way he could have been curled up in the back waiting for me, but also because I wanted—I needed—to feel careless. To feel free and alive and to feel my age. To give myself over to being twenty and doing something reckless for no other reason than, Why not?

  The road snaked around the terrain outside of Munich like the roads had been laid down for no other reason than cruising them at a hundred miles per hour. The air cut my face—yes, careless included wearing no helmet—and whistled through my ears and that instinct that was fast becoming addictive took over. It was only in these moments where my Immortal body was on autopilot that I was able to forget about him, forget about everything but the task at hand. It was a piece of heaven I hadn’t expected to find in this new phase of life, but I’d take it, no questions asked.

  I screeched the bike to a stop at the pub Patrick had told me to meet him. When he’d appeared smack in the middle of the trail while I was out running yesterday, my first instinct was to throw my arms around him. After the other day, I never thought I’d see him again. I’d held back the hug when he crossed his arms tighter, basically ordering me to meet him here tonight because we needed to talk. His mouth closing around the last word, he disappeared, leaving me alone and reeling. I’d come up with a myriad of logical reasons we could be meeting tonight, but from experience, logical was something Patrick was not. I had no idea what I’d find waiting for me.

  I could hear the music playing within, mixed with the roar of conversations that were more laughter than talk, streaming from the Bavarian style pub. The beveled windows threw the yellow light glowing within like prisms. It was inviting in the friendliest of ways. I would have gone inside if I’d been walking by, even if it wasn’t where I was supposed to meet someone.

  I pocketed the keys to the bike and jogged across the street, dodging a couple of dwarf-sized cars by mere inches in the process. I was already throwing open the door when their horns blew. The noise that a couple of licensed clown cars were able to generate was unexpected. The screaming duo of horns roared through the open door, announcing my arrival to every diner in the pub. Not a single exception.

  I froze mid-stride. “Guten tag?” I said, waving my hand unsurely.

  To my relief, everyone went right back to sipping from their beer steins or tearing off pieces of their salted pretzels. Germany was my kind of country; best friend to wallflowers around the world.

  Only two sets of eyes stayed on me, although I’d only expected to be meeting one tonight. They’d selected the table in the back corner, away from the noise and masses. How inconspicuous.

  “You certainly know how to make an entrance,” Patrick said, whistling through his teeth. “And if I might say, you make holey jeans and a bomber jacket look good.”

  I rolled my eyes and slid into the booth. “Hector,” I said formally, “nice to see you.” He made a motion with his head. “Patrick,” I said, more sneer than welcome, “always a pleasure.”

  He crossed his arms, chuckling. “You’ll have to excuse us, Hector. Bryn and I have what one would call a love-hate relationship. Although as of late, it’s been tipped to the latter.”

  Hector exhaled. “I believe that goes without saying.” He looked over at me, his face telling that he wasn’t going to put up with Patrick and me bantering the night away. “Excuse me for getting right to the heart of the matter, but with a gift such as yours, we don’t have the luxury of time.”

  I scanned the room, ascertaining there was no one within eavesdropping distance. Even if someone would have been close enough to hear us, I doubted if there was anything but the pilsner and polka-esque music that could detour the patron’s attention.

&nb
sp; Patrick cleared his throat. “I asked Hector to come tonight so we could come up with the best course of training to take with you. I’m not an experienced talent trainer and even those that are have never had the . . . privilege”—his jaw clenched around the word—“of working with an Immortal with a gift such as yours.”

  “So I’m an Immortal abnormality is what you’re saying?” I asked, sounding more sad that confrontational.

  Hector broke in before Patrick could unleash his response. “We’re in unchartered territory is what we’re saying. That’s all. You were given this gift for a reason, nothing is by accident, so along with that, I’m certain there is a way to train it. A way to harness it,” Hector continued, more to himself.

  “You think there’s a way for me to control . . . it?” I asked, leaning towards him. It didn’t seem possible given I didn’t have the first clue about how it worked.

  Hector paused, long enough for my shoulders to slump. “I do, it’s just complicated. It’s going to be difficult. Extremely difficult,” he said, his brows furrowing together. “Both you and Patrick will likely face death to get a full handle on it, but I have faith the two of you are up to the task. If anyone’s chomping at the bit to punch death in the face, it’s Patrick Hayward.”

  Patrick motioned to his empty glass at the waitress that looked like she’d been the inspiration for the Bavarian barmaid depiction. “On that note, I think another root beer is in order.” He glanced over at me appraising his empty pint glass. “Don’t look so surprised. I’m not the irresponsible, wild Hayward brother you think I am.”

  “Prove it,” I mumbled, crossing my arms.

  “That’s enough. Both of you,” Hector said, his voice booming. “You’ve both got an unfathomable task before you and it’s going to be over before the word go if you can’t figure out a way to set William aside and get over it.”

  I felt something inside me twist when he said William’s name.