No Less Days

by Amanda G. Stevens

For the next four hours, David didn’t stray from his charges. Zac would scoff at being called such, but the man needed care, undying or not. Twice David put a hand on his shoulder when he woke moaning, and each time he gave Zac a few swallows of whiskey. When Zac drifted off again, David paced the open path in the middle of the room, between the sleeping bag and the couch.

  As the sky outside crept toward an overcast dawn, Moira stirred in the sleeping bag and sat up.

  “Zac?”

  “Shh,” David said. “He’s sleeping.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Around five.”

  “Why didn’t you wake me?”

  She’d been wrung out. She’d needed the sleep more than David did. He shrugged.

  “Stubborn.” She scooted her legs out of the bag and stood. “Here, at least lie down an hour or two.”

  He took off his shoes and his button-down shirt. The sleeping bag was one for outdoor use, and he was hot-blooded, generally. In his khakis and undershirt, he slid into the bag and closed his eyes. The floor was harder than earth but not intolerable. If Zac and Moira hadn’t come, he could have gone home and read a novel this evening with his turtle for company, then slept in the comfort of his bed.

  Mortal wounds aside, this was better.

  TWELVE

  He awoke when the sunrise poured orange beams through the clouds, in the window, into his eyes. Voices brought him awake the rest of the way—Moira’s hushed, Zac’s too weak for much volume.

  “Bleeding’s stopped.”

  “And the pain?”

  “Shouldn’t be much longer.”

  A quiet sigh.

  “Hey. You know I’ll be fine.”

  “I’m sure you’ll tell yourself that if I’m ever stabbed and spend hours drowning in my own blood. I’m sure you’ll maintain perfect calm about it.”

  After a silence Zac drew a long breath. “I think I told David to knock me out.”

  “You did. He didn’t.”

  “That woman, Tiana … Did I say anything?”

  “You called David ‘John,’ and you called her ‘the mortal.’”

  Zac’s voice rose, spitting expletives.

  “Even if you’d been unconscious, we’d have a problem. She saw the damage.”

  “She didn’t have to know about all of us.”

  “David had already told her about himself. Do you remember?”

  Time to join the discussion. David sat up. Zac tried to do the same, got about halfway forward from the pillow before falling back. He found David in the gray light. “You … what?”

  “She didn’t believe it, but I told her a few days ago. Well … I don’t know, maybe she did believe it.”

  “What else does she know?”

  “Only that there are, to our knowledge, a total of five of us. But Moira told her that one.”

  Zac’s attempt at a glare was blunted by fatigue.

  “Think about it.” David freed his legs from the sleeping bag, stood up, and buttoned his shirt back on. “It wouldn’t do for her to be looking for immortals around every bush. This is better for her and for us.”

  “You trust her,” Zac said.

  “She’s a good woman, and safe.”

  After a moment Zac nodded. He stretched his legs from under the blanket and tried again to leverage himself up. Moira helped, repositioning the pillow at his back.

  “Showers?” David said.

  “That should be doable,” Zac said.

  He couldn’t get to his feet yet; David supported him to the Jeep and then tucked him into the back seat before Zac could protest being picked up. Convenient that he wasn’t taller. Did he mean for Moira to help him shower? David truncated the thought and got behind the wheel. They didn’t converse on the five-minute drive to his house. Tired, all of them.

  They settled Zac on the sofa in the den, across from the terrarium. He peeled the gauze, stiff with dried blood, away from the wound below his ribs. It had sealed overnight into a bright pink scar, fresh and delicate but without a seam. Whatever still reknit inside him, the outside wound would not reopen. Exposing the gut wound revealed a similar line of healing there.

  David shook his head. His own body would have taken three days to reach this point. “This is a typical recovery speed?”

  “For all of us? Not quite.” Moira gathered up the soiled gauze and tape. “Zac’s always been the fastest healer. The rest of us would take about eight more hours for this.”

  “Do you know why he’s different?”

  “Only guesses,” she said. “Blood type maybe, since Simon has a similar uniqueness with the whole aiding-rejuvenation thing.”

  Ah, that. And with David’s blood refreshed, he might be like them, might never take days to heal again. He told Zac and Moira he’d make coffee and fled with casual steps to the kitchen. Every time he thought he’d processed all of it, something new presented itself. They had shaken his life up and set it right in ways he’d never known to wish for. He set the coffeemaker to brew a full pot.

  It was the first time he’d done this in decades—made coffee, in his home, for someone other than himself. He leaned one arm on the counter, bent under the sudden weight of the moment. Their voices came to him from the other room, at ease here. David’s chin dipped to his chest. A need filled him, a sense of the Presence that sometimes felt distant but right now stood beside him, waiting for David to approach.

  “Lord,” he said. “These people—are they gifts? Did You bring them? Dare I hold on to them?”

  Too soon to say.

  He straightened as the scent of coffee permeated the kitchen. The pot began to gurgle. He set out not one mug but three.

  “Your ways, not mine,” he whispered. “Higher, I know. That these people should come to me now … You know I’ve forgotten how to do any of this.”

  “Promise me you won’t retreat.” Sarah’s voice, rasping with age. Her hand, soft as the page of an old book flipped too many times, cradled in his own—smooth and hard and ageless. “Promise me, John. Don’t retreat from them. Keep your heart engaged with them, though they age like me, though they die. Like me.”

  He had tried to honor her last wish for him. Succeeded for decades that eroded a hole in his spirit. And then there’d been Ginny, and after her, nothing left to give.

  What was there now?

  He poured two mugs and carried them to the den.

  Moira wrapped her hands around her mug and lifted it to inhale the fragrant steam. “Mm, thank you, David.”

  David lifted the second mug toward Zac, eyebrows up.

  Zac winced. “Still too many holes inside. I might have dinner tonight, though.”

  With Zac occupying the couch and Moira the only stuffed chair, David brought in a kitchen chair and sat. He sipped from his mug and listened to their silence, which wasn’t quite: Zac’s breath tightening for a few seconds, Moira sighing into her coffee.

  “About Tiana,” David said.

  They both looked up.

  “She’ll be coming by whenever I give her the all clear. She left last night only half convinced of all this.”

  Zac was nodding against the back of the couch even as Moira’s mouth turned down. “She’s welcome.” He gestured to his blood-stiffened jeans and bare chest with a smirk. “Shower first, though, yeah?”

  He let David carry his bag and help him walk to the bathroom. Then he shut the door in David’s face. Around random conversation with Moira, David kept his hearing tuned for the thump of a falling body; but in a while Zac emerged with damp hair, wearing fresh jeans and carrying a red knit shirt. His legs shook as he sank down on the couch, hunched forward, and handed the shirt to Moira. Together they worked it over his head, his arms into the sleeves. All bravado had leaked out of him by the time Moira pulled the shirt down over his torso and helped him lie back on the couch. He closed his eyes, sweat on his forehead.

  “Go away,” he whispered.

  “You’ve overtaxed yourself.”

 
“And take your obvious statements with you.”

  She sighed and motioned David to follow her into the kitchen. She drained the last of her coffee and deposited her mug in the dishwasher.

  “If Tiana doesn’t want to be cursed at,” she said, “she should give him half an hour.”

  Tiana answered her phone on the third ring. She asked if they’d like her to bring breakfast, took orders from David and Moira, and showed up twenty minutes later at his door. The smells of the bag she carried made his stomach rumble. A sense of déjà vu flooded him; she’d come here with food three days ago. This wasn’t their new normal, was it?

  Tiana had included a blueberry muffin for herself. The three of them ate and threw away the take-out boxes while she continued to dart looks toward the den.

  At last Moira’s face softened. “Go ahead. If he’s sleeping, please don’t wake him.”

  “Of course not,” Tiana said, but no edge resided there now, with morning broken bright outside and Zac alive one room away. She paused before stepping into the room, anticipation in her smile. David turned away, poured another cup of coffee, and ignored Moira’s eyes on him as they entered the den.

  Tiana was sitting in the kitchen chair, pulled closer to the couch. Showing both scars but not the tattoo, Zac’s shirt was pushed halfway up his torso. No doubt he’d have stripped it off, were he in less pain.

  “I can’t believe it,” Tiana said, clearly not for the first time.

  “Convenient, eh?” Zac grinned and tugged the shirt back down.

  “It’s all true.”

  “Yep.”

  “How old are you?”

  “One hundred fifty-nine in January.”

  “How old when you stopped getting older?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “Your online bio says you’re twenty-nine.”

  “Gives me a few years to grow into.” The grin again, but it fell as his eyes shut tight and he drew a sharp breath.

  Tiana jumped to her feet. “Zac?”

  “Give him a moment,” Moira said.

  Zac’s body seemed to cave deeper into the couch.

  “Is he …?” Tiana’s voice trembled.

  “He’s nearly healed,” Moira said, “but this last bit is draining.”

  Tiana took a step back. “I’ll leave him alone then.”

  Zac’s eyes opened with effort. “Am …’kay, just have … to rest now.”

  “Sure, of course.” Her eyes grew shiny. “Rest well.”

  A small smile, and then his eyes closed.

  Tiana watched him a moment, then turned to David, voice hushed. “I was hoping we could talk. You and me.”

  David nodded, and she went to the library without hesitation. This conversation would be nothing like their last one in this room. A smile pulled inside him but didn’t make it onto his face. Not with a would-be celebrity killer somewhere, maybe in town. Not with wounds knitting in Zac’s body that would have killed someone else.

  Tiana shut the french doors and sat on the library floor with her back to the only open wall, an unsure expectance in her eyes. Rather than sit above her in the sole chair, he sank down across from her and let the chair support his back. Bookshelves filled every other wall.

  Tiana watched him with a half-squinting fixation as he folded his legs, set his hands on his knees. Her gaze rose to his chest, his shoulders, then his eyes.

  “Tiana,” he said. “I …” He let the put-on accent, natural as it was after so long, fall away. She would hear truth from his true voice. He sighed. “I’m only a man. I’m unchanged from yesterday, from last month. You know more of me, that’s all.”

  She jolted upon first hearing the brogue, but by the time he stopped speaking, she was nodding, as if somehow all he said made sense to her—no, fit with something she’d been trying to understand.

  “So go ahead. Say what you will.”

  She fidgeted on the floor, folded her hands in her lap. “It feels odd to talk about this with them in the house. But I guess it shouldn’t.”

  “They can’t hear us.”

  “So you don’t have any other … special powers?”

  “What I described to you before is the extent of my—our—abilities. Nothing that can compromise your privacy.”

  “Okay.” She scrubbed both hands through her hair and continued to stare at him. “I … I didn’t really sleep last night. Too much thinking. There’s so much I want to ask.”

  He nodded her on.

  “No, it’s not that easy. I was writing them down, like I was going to interview you or something. Like you were one of Jayde’s research topics and I was going to barge in and pry into all the secrets of this historical figure … but you’re here, and you’re alive, and you’re …” She shook her head. “You’re David.”

  That statement still meant nothing to him, but he offered a smile. “Aye, I still am.”

  She jabbed a finger at him. “Your words, your accent, what …? Are you—were you—Irish?”

  “I was born in Scotland. My parents immigrated here and formed a community with many other Scots. Other nationalities too—everyone in that time was from somewhere else—but you learn to speak what you hear at home. And my father was a proud Scotsman, never would curb his accent. It was many years before I was willing to alter mine.”

  “Why did you?”

  “Because of the questions. Was I English, Australian, Canadian, Irish … then how long had I lived here, what brought me to the States, was my family still in Scotland or had some of them come with me …? Whole conversations of one lie after another, you see?”

  “I hadn’t thought of it like that.”

  “Easier to blend. Constant lies weary a soul, even lies to strangers you never see again.”

  “How old were you when you came … to America?” She shook her head. “That was the nineteenth century. You were alive in the nineteenth century. I know we established this part, but I … believing it is … I have to say it myself.”

  She laced her fingers under her chin, propped her elbows on her knees, and waited. She was hearing him. Believing him. Accepting him. He couldn’t speak for a moment. He held her eyes, and she seemed to see the barrier within that he had to push past. The moment of patience was her gift to him.

  “I came here at nine years old,” he said. “1857.”

  “Four years before the Civil War.”

  “Aye.”

  “And at thirteen you wore that uniform and went to battle.”

  “That’s how it was.” A drummer boy didn’t often fire his weapon, but he marched with war around him every day. Saw war. Heard it. Tasted and smelled and touched it.

  “What were you fighting for? You personally.”

  “Ach, I was thirteen. A man’s age at that time, but too young to understand all the intricacies of life. My parents were in favor of abolition, of preserving the Union. I thought it would be an adventure.”

  “They gave you permission to go?”

  “Not at first. I wore them down. But no one expected four years of war, of …”

  He looked away from her for a moment. Some of those images remained with him to this day. Some of the scars that foolish boy gained had only faded, not disappeared. That war had made him aware that adventure was no worthy goal.

  “You … you’re … an old man,” she said.

  He laughed away the heaviness. “Indeed I am.”

  “It’s just—you don’t seem like one.”

  “Glad to hear it.”

  So tempting to put the walls back up. But what Tiana had seen last night, this morning—circumstances had catapulted her over his walls. She was left feeling her way through the labyrinth that was John Russell and David Galloway, both. Too bad for her.

  Yet she was pressing forward. Fighting to understand … him, of all things.

  “Not your looks,” she said. “I mean—obviously, your looks are … um … not old …”

  The blush spread over her curved nose and cheekbones
.

  “But I mean, you don’t act old. Well, maybe occasionally.” A smile tugged her mouth. “Actually, I can see you telling kids to stay off your lawn.”

  “I’d never.” His turn for a reddened face.

  “You have! You so have!”

  Her laughter chimed around the room. She took a few seconds to sober. When she did, David squashed the desire to sit beside her and reach for her hands, which she tucked under her thighs.

  “Do people frustrate you?” Her voice dropped nearly to a whisper. “Are we like a giant cloud of gnats you want to swat away all the time? Do you hate it here, do you wish …?”

  He closed his eyes. “Yes. No. No. And no, never for long, only the days …”

  Fabric ground lightly against the carpet. The sound came again, to his right, close. Very close. Her hand alighted on his arm. David didn’t move, and neither did she. She wasn’t going to ask more questions. Not if he left this answer unfinished.

  “The days pass,” he said. “Yet ahead of me I see no less than there were before.”

  “I can’t imagine that.”

  No, she could not. He waited for her to say more—a platitude, a verse from scripture, a promise she couldn’t keep. Tiana was silent. Her hand didn’t move away.

  “Remember what you said before about the created order of things? It isn’t dying I want, Tiana. Only to see … the purpose in the fact that I can’t. Only to see His hand in it. But I don’t.” He drew up one knee and rested his forehead, kept his eyes shut.

  The soft weight of her hand lifted from his arm. Settled between his shoulder blades. “I’m sorry.”

  He lifted his head, opened his eyes. “You owe me no apology.”

  “It finally hit me last night, what this really means. How many people you’ve known and loved, and grieved. How much you’ve seen. And no one to know.”

  He couldn’t move.

  She set her hand over his that rested on his knee. Still he was motionless, as pressure built in his chest and behind his eyes.

  “So if it’s okay with you, I’d like to know you.”

  Dangerous, wasn’t it? Hadn’t it always been? But he gripped her hand. “It’s okay with me.”

  “I’ll do my best not to treat you like a historical figure.”