Immortal Beloved

by Cate Tiernan

  Now he was looking at me as if he’d never seen someone having a psychotic break before and found it fascinating.

  I flung down my dish towel, humiliated to be doing something so—clichéd. “Plus,” I hissed, “you’re such an asshole!”

  I whirled away and rushed through the heavy wooden swinging door, out into the dining room. If I were Scarlett O’Hara, he’d rush after me, seize me in his manly arms, and sweep me upstairs to make a woman out of me. Instead, the door behind me stayed shut, I still looked like a complete and utter idiot, and I heard the laughter and footsteps of happy, well-adjusted people approaching the front door.

  I took the stairs two at a time, became panicky when I couldn’t find my room right away, then threw myself through the door, slammed it, and leaned against it, panting, just like in the movies.

  This, this is why I go to great lengths to numb all emotion.

  Because it hurts.

  CHAPTER 6

  The one thing this place had going for it was tons of hot, hot water. I was dealing with the fact that this hot, hot water was in the women’s communal bathroom halfway down the hall from my room. There was one deep, claw-footed tub in its own little compartment, and then separate stalls for toilets and a couple of showers. A boarding-school row of five sinks lined one wall, each with its own small mirror over it. No makeup lights, no full-length mirror—nothing to indulge vanity here!

  Which is a good thing when you haven’t paid much attention to personal grooming in, say, several decades. I sank into the deep bathtub, suddenly transported to another fabulous deep tub I’d once known, in a somewhat ramshackle but gracious house I’d lived in for a while in New Orleans. That tub could have held a polar bear. The real estate agent had told me it had been made for a judge back in the thirties—he’d had two regular tubs sawed in half and then welded together, creating one mammoth, claw-footed behemoth of a bathtub that I could lie down flat in.

  But this tub was not bad, despite the inadequate fluorescent lightbulbs that cast a cold, cadaverous gleam on everything. The water was steaming hot, the soap was homemade and rough with dried lavender, and there was a small wooden box filled with dried herbs. What the hey—I grabbed a handful and sprinkled them under the water gushing from the faucet. Herb-scented steam filled my nose and throat as I lay back and closed my eyes.

  The steam reminded me of being in Taiwan, back in 1890, one of the times it was being colonized by Japan. I’d had tuberculosis for a while, and the coughing was making me crazy. I’d tried any number of remedies, and finally someone recommended I take the healing waters in Taiwan, on the mountain Yangmingshan. On one side of the mountain, the air was full of egg-scented steam, wreathing the green mountain like a fine, fog-colored silk scarf. The rotten-egg smell was disgusting at first, but within just a couple of days I didn’t even notice it. Twice a day, every day, I would sit in an invalid chair at the edge of a natural hot spring and breathe in the warm steam for an hour. Many other people were there for different health reasons—mostly lung- or skin-related. I watched as locals crouched at the shallow edge of the spring, where water bubbled up gently through the sandy bottom. They would take wooden chopsticks and make little fences out of them, sticking them into the sand in a circle. Then they would put a couple of eggs inside the circle, where they would be cooked by the hot geothermal spring. Eating eggs cooked like this was considered extra healthy. I stayed there two months, enjoying the lush beauty of Taiwan and breathing in sulfurous air. My TB was cured.

  Now I breathed in unsulfurous steam, more than a hundred years later. I was jolted back to the present. Was it just two days ago that I’d been in London? Yesterday? Unexpectedly, tears stung my eyes beneath my closed lids as, once again, the cabdriver’s face loomed before me. Was he still alive? What was his family thinking, feeling, doing?

  I sat up, guilt sticking to me like soapy film, and grabbed the shampoo. I hadn’t done it—it had been Incy. All I’d done was… walk away.

  I washed my hair and dunked underwater to rinse it. The water was starting to cool a bit, and I took a sea sponge off a hook, soaped it up, and scrubbed all over my body, feeling as if I were taking off the top layer of skin. Everywhere I scrubbed turned pink and tingly, and I felt weirdly clearheaded, breathing clearly, seeing the water start to swirl down the drain. I felt clean and smooth-skinned and alive.

  Stupid, huh?

  Luckily, I got back to my room without seeing anyone else. I found my bed turned down and a cup of hot tea on the small table beside it.

  “No chocolate?” I murmured, and rooted around in my suitcase. I hadn’t packed any sleepwear but found an old T-shirt that didn’t seem too bad. I couldn’t find a comb, either, but raked my fingers through my short black hair, getting out most of the snarls. Then I wrapped my wool scarf around my neck, climbed into bed, and sniffed the tea. It smelled herbal, of course. These people were all about herbs. Herbs coming and going, every time you turned around.

  The tea tasted kind of minty and a touch licorice-y. My room was chilly, my hair was still wet, and the warmth felt good going down. I turned off the light and snuggled under the blankets and down comforter, surprisingly cozy and comfortable. The bed was tiny and hard, but I’ve slept in boat bunks, the backseats of cars, and a million train compartments, so it was no problem. I hated the fact that there was no lock on the door, but before I had time to worry about it, I was asleep.

  I’m not a great sleeper. My brain usually doesn’t turn off. I’ll be almost asleep, almost there, and then I’ll start thinking about going somewhere, or refurbishing a farmhouse in France, or where I left a pair of shoes, or if I can find a particular food in this particular city.

  Then, when I’m asleep, I usually have bad dreams. Not dreams, actually, like where I’m talking to a pretzel and then a squirrel is laughing at me and it’s all about my subconscious working through weird crap. More like memories. Bad memories. Memories of people, human and immortal, whom I’ve known and who have died, of really horrible years I’ve had (I was literally in a Turkish prison. In the 1770s. Not a picnic.), of plagues and world wars and car accidents and horse-and-carriage accidents and train wrecks and… It’s like a heavy weight of bad things, and when I close my eyes at night, when I’m so exhausted that I can’t help letting my eyelids sink down—that’s when the memories come calling, insisting that I look at them all over again, like they want me to feel more emotion this go-round.

  Usually I self-medicate to the point where even if I dream, I can’t remember nothin’ in the morning. It works pretty well, to a point, but the side effects can be kind of brutal.

  When I woke in the morning, keeping my eyes squeezed shut against the pinkish light swelling through the window, I immediately shied away from any memory of the night before. I waited for the physical wretchedness to overwhelm me, and tried to calculate how many steps away the bathroom was and if it would be better to just hurl out the window.

  But I… felt okay. I opened one eye. A clock on the bedside table said 6:17. AM? Gee, that was… early. Last night—I winced, but actually the worst thing that had happened last night was my acting incredibly stupid in front of the Viking lord. In the grand scheme of things, not so bad. I took a couple of breaths and didn’t feel at all sick. In fact, I felt pretty good. I felt like I’d actually slept. I sat up slowly and remembered that I hadn’t drunk any liquor, hadn’t had anything except the most boring food known to man or beast. Huh. The room was chilly, the radiator just starting to hiss slightly, and I pawed through my suitcase, finding “clean” clothes—and I use that term in a relative sense. I shimmied into them quickly, seeing my breath making fog in the cold air. Then I tossed all my stuff back into my suitcase and zipped it up. I would lug it downstairs—right after I mooched a cup of coffee.

  I set it by my door and pulled on my motorcycle boots, my fingers skimming one heel. I was probably imagining it, but I thought I could feel the amulet’s energy. As if someone could hide it inside a book in a huge libr
ary, and I could run my fingers over all the spines and immediately know when I found it. I’m so sure.

  My car keys were in my pocket; the map was still in the car. I could easily find my way back to Boston, or maybe there was a closer airport, like for commuters. I paused, my hand on the doorknob. The thought of going back to London was a dark cloud looming in front of my face. I felt—dread. It was the same feeling that had made me lie to Gopala, to use a passport Incy didn’t know about. Why? I was acting on instinct, but what instinct? Incy had never harmed me. Annoyed? Yes. Exasperated? Frequently. But hurt me? Scared me? Never.

  I didn’t know where to go, what I was doing, or why. And that was such a familiar feeling, but in a completely different way.

  I let out a breath and opened my door. I would decide where to go when I got to the airport. But first, coffee, that precious life-giving fluid that would unstick my eyes and lubricate my brain cells. Oh, God, please, please have coffee, real coffee, here.

  No one was in the dining room, and I wandered back into the kitchen, my nose twitching. Slowly I pushed open the heavy door, and in stark contrast to the silent, empty gray dining room, the kitchen was full of heat and bustle. The lights were on, people were talking and laughing, and the air was full of smells.

  “Nastasya!”

  My head whipped sideways to see River smiling at me.

  “I thought I’d just grab some coffee,” I began.

  “Breakfast isn’t quite ready—most of the others are still doing chores,” said River.

  “I never eat breakfast,” I said. “But coffee—”

  “Come here,” River commanded and, oddly, my feet obeyed her. “Let me see your hands.”

  A fingernail check? I held them out, relieved to see they were clean, thanks to my scrubby bath the night before. Was she going to read my palm? It seemed all too possible.

  “You have incredible hands,” River said, sounding pleased. “Strong. Here, do this.”

  “Huh?”

  River pushed my sleeves up past my elbows. I flinched when she swung my wool scarf over my shoulder so it hung down in back of me. Then she grabbed my hands and literally stuck them into a huge mound of warm dough lying on the wooden worktable like a great big larva.

  “Uh…” I felt frozen, like my hands were stuck fast into this tar baby of dough.

  River’s eyes, a clear, tanned-leather brown, looked deeply into mine. “I know you know how to knead bread.” Her voice was soft. My cheeks flushed; she was referring to the fact that many immortals had been born before there were bread factories. Many immortals (the women, at least) had probably made their own bread thousands of times—unless they’d been born rich and had somehow stayed rich all their lives.

  I’d been born rich but had been as poor as a peasant by the time I was ten. I’d lived on farms, several different farms, until I figured out that I liked cities better.

  I knew how to knead bread.

  “It’s been a while,” I said, still not moving. Like, hundreds of years.

  “Yes,” River said, more softly. “Yes. But one never forgets how.” She put her hands on top of mine and scooped them together. Together we pushed the larval dough away from us, then brought in the sides, then pushed down again.

  Across the room, someone—Charles, with the bright red hair?—started frying bacon in an iron skillet on the big old-fashioned stove. The black girl—possibly Brynne?—took a couple of loaf pans out of the oven, flipped them onto a clean dishcloth on the table, and thumped them firmly. Fresh-baked, steaming bread popped out of the pans and gleamed golden in the dawn light.

  Yes! I smelled coffee! Yes! Thank you, God, Brahma, Saint Francis, whoever. There was coffee in my future!

  I realized River had left me to start pouring pitchers of apple cider. Still I kneaded the bread, my hands and arms moving automatically.

  Once I glanced up to see Brynne smiling at me. “You do that well,” she said, and wiped some sweat from her forehead.

  I muttered something unintelligible, and it occurred to me that I couldn’t remember the last time anyone had told me I did anything well. Actually, there wasn’t much that I did do well. Not anymore.

  “Here,” said River. She held a heavy stoneware mug up to my lips, and without taking my hands out of the dough, I sipped some hot coffee, cut half and half with boiled milk and already sugared just a bit. It was the most perfect freaking coffee I’d ever had.

  I think I made a pathetic whimpering sound of pleasure, because River laughed then, and she looked so pretty, her tanned face flushed from the warm kitchen, her silver hair pulled back in a practical knot, little wisps escaping. I took another sip while she held the mug, and I thought, She’s almost thirteen hundred years old. Which was such an incredibly bizarre thought, even for an immortal, and I would have pondered it more, but there was this intensely good coffee sliding down my throat, and I felt awake and clear-headed and not ill, and then the Viking lord came through the back door, breathing steam, wearing a heavy plaid shirt like a lumberjack in a Monty Python skit.

  He glanced around the room, taking off leather work gloves, and there I was, the scum of the earth, kneading dough like a pro and drinking coffee made by the head honcho of the whole shebang. The fun of whacking and kneading warm, yeasty dough? Say twenty dollars. This perfect coffee? I’d gladly pay seventy-five dollars for it. The expression on Reyn’s face when he saw me working in the kitchen at barely daybreak? Priceless. I smirked at him when no one could see, and a muscle in his jaw twitched. He went to the coffeepot and poured himself a mug while I divided the dough into two equal parts, draped a dishcloth over one of them, and started to roll the other one out on the table. I got it to about half an inch thick, then started at the top, using my fingertips to roll it into a long snake, very tightly. When it was all rolled up, I pinched the seam shut and bent the two long ends beneath it. Then I popped it, seamside down, in a buttered loaf pan and made a shallow slash in the top. And that was one loaf, ready for the oven.

  Reyn looked so disappointed that I couldn’t help snickering. My stomach growled; the air was full of good bacon smells, baking bread smells, cider smells, and it had been so, so long since I’d gone anywhere close to a breakfast. I usually couldn’t stomach breakfast, was never hungry before noon, if then. But I was hungry now.

  Maybe I could stay another day. No one knew where I was, and I could see how my bread came out.

  CHAPTER 7

  At breakfast several people smiled or said hello, and the ones who didn’t just seemed like they weren’t morning people, not like they totally hated my guts already. I didn’t eat much, felt uncomfortably full really fast, but the toasted bread with butter was surprisingly satisfying, and the bacon had much more flavor than bacon usually did—salty and chewy and crisp with fried fat.

  After I’d dutifully carried my empty plate into the kitchen, River said, “Come with me.” I grabbed my beat-up black leather coat and trotted after her into the chilly autumn air. She led me past a stand of maple trees, dropping their scarlet leaves to the ground like blood. Several dogs ran up to us, and I watched them warily until River patted their heads. “Yes, Jasper, yes, Molly, there’s a good dog.”

  A long, narrow barn was kitty-corner to the house, and its large double doors were closed. River took me through a regular-sized door in the side of the building, and once we were in, I saw there were no animals, no hay, no tractors. Instead, high windows let sunshine flood the whole building. It was divided into large rooms that opened out onto a middle hallway. Already people were filing in, lighting gas heaters, moving chairs into place. This was the schoolhouse portion of River’s Edge.

  River took me into the third room on the left. Solis was there, sitting on a flat pillow on the worn, unvarnished floor. He looked up, and a glance passed between him and River that I couldn’t read. Then River gave me one last smile and left, making no sound.

  A few people—Jess, the old man; Daisuke, the smiley Japanese guy; and Brynne, who was
black and pretty and had her hair twisted in tight rolls against her head—came in and hung their coats on some hooks on one wall. They looked at me curiously but took their places around the edge of the room, opening worn books. Blimey, I’m at Hogwarts, I thought, then Solis motioned me to sit down next to him. I did, keeping my coat on, my scarf snug around my neck.

  “Nastasya,” he began, speaking low so only I could hear him. “River wants me to teach you—she’s asked me to. But I can’t take you as a student. I won’t.”

  This was unexpected, and I sat in silence. I’d been halfway out the door, anyway. But—

  “Yeah? How come?” I tried to keep my voice down, but it came out as belligerent. My cheeks were heating as Solis’s words sank into me.

  Solis looked sad and kind, like a thoughtful California lifeguard, and I felt like throttling him. “You’re not committed,” he said simply, no bullshit. “Maybe you had a crisis. Maybe you thought you needed a change. You remembered River and thought this would be a good halfway house. But you’re not really here, not to stay. Your heart isn’t here. You’ve already got one foot out the door. I don’t—I don’t want to waste my time.”

  A bunch of sentences jammed together in my brain, all trying to get out at the same time. Shockingly, what came out was: “How do you know where my heart is?” I sounded like a street punk.

  Solis blinked, the overhead sunlight highlighting his short curls of dark blond hair. “Well, I know,” he said, as if I’d asked how he knew the sun would come up tomorrow. “I can feel it.”

  I felt embarrassed, humiliated in front of the other students. I sneered. “Yeah, right,” I said in disgust, getting to my feet. “Whatever. You’re right, I don’t want to be here. I won’t waste your time—and mine.” I pulled open the classroom door, aware of the curious looks boring into my back. “Whatever,” I said again, over my shoulder. Then I closed the door way too hard and stomped down the hallway, my boots shaking the floor. I slammed out the barn door and practically plowed right into His Holiness, who threw out his hands to catch me.