The Immortals

by S. M. Schmitz

  “Back up,” he exhaled, not having the air to warn Dylan any louder. But Dylan heard him and backed away, even though he was clearly reluctant.

  Colin closed his eyes and said a quick prayer.

  It burst out of him, much like the water had from the bottle in the forest, and like that water, he could sense this energy arcing around him. But this was not harmless like those droplets had been. This was a destructive force, and he heard the shattering glass, the splintering wood, doors being blown inward. Debris from the blast rained down on him, but he wasn’t overly concerned about what might fall on him because he could breathe again. And he could get up.

  He had no idea if this demon was dead or gone since he hadn’t been able to feel it or even see it. But it wasn’t on him, and Colin scrambled to his feet, stepping over the rubble as best as he could in the dark to look inside the room closer to him. He turned his flashlight on. He cast the beam into each corner, but the room was empty. He was only vaguely aware that the other hunters had joined him in the camp and were murmuring to each other, something about what he’d just done, but he wasn’t paying attention to them.

  The second door was hanging crookedly on its hinges and Colin pushed it open the rest of the way. His flashlight fell from his hand and hit the floor with a hollow metallic clang because, there, against the back wall of this small dank room, Anna lay on a thin blanket. She looked like she was sleeping.

  He wanted to run to her. He wanted to go to her and pick her up and get her out of this place, but his legs would not cooperate. The hunters had gathered behind him, excitedly saying her name, but Colin stood in the doorway, frozen, the fear that he had lost her finally overwhelming him. He took a few steps closer to her, but he could no longer walk or stand. He fell to his knees in front of her and cried.

  The murmuring from the hunters stopped, but Colin didn’t notice that either. One trembling hand reached out to brush her dark hair away from that alabaster complexion, that perfectly smooth and flawless skin. “Anna,” he whispered, “my love, can you hear me?”

  She continued to sleep peacefully. Except she wasn’t really sleeping. Colin knew she wasn’t sleeping, because he knew all of the noise would have woken her, his touch would have woken her, and Anna never slept with half her face buried in her arms like this. The window above her allowed light in from the moon, and he touched her cheek, felt the dampness from her tears. “God, Anna, please, come back to me,” he begged. He realized he was still crying, too.

  He wanted to carry her out of here, but didn’t trust his strength right now. He doubted he could even stand yet. So he talked to her instead. “Anna, do you remember the time we went to the Highlands? We’d been invited to stay with an actual laird after he met your father in London.” Colin couldn’t imagine Anna had forgotten the only time they’d ever slept in an honest-to-God castle, but he was trying to bring her back to him with a happy memory.

  “It was good for you there. You liked the air and the water was so clean it was actually safe to drink. It was almost like being back in Ireland. From our room, we could see the barley fields stretching out to Heaven, you said. During the day, we’d take walks in the heather fields, and he had an enormous library right in his castle. That was your favorite part. There were Shetland ponies in his stables, they used them for plowing and pulling carts, but you’d never seen such a small pony and you were completely enchanted. You teased me and told me they belonged in Ireland for the leprechauns. And in the evenings, he always had guests for dinner, and his cooks prepared the most elaborate dishes. Far more than we could eat. That was before the famine, and long before the bad one. We tried corn for the first time. It was the most exotic thing we’d ever tasted.”

  A shuffling sound from the doorway made Colin stop talking. How was he ever going to explain why he and Anna had never tried corn before this trip to Scotland? But Anna had stirred. His attention was still fixed on her.

  “Colin,” Dylan’s voice was soft, quiet, compassionate. “How exactly do you know Anna?”

  Colin kept stroking her forehead, silently praying, pleading. “She’s my wife.”

  He heard the quick inhalations, the murmuring starting up again, but he no longer cared what they knew. Anna’s eyelids fluttered, and his heart thumped wildly against his chest. “Anna,” he spoke her name louder. “I’m here. You’re with me now.”

  Her dark brown eyes were suddenly on him, damp and red from her crying and Colin felt the agony of losing her, the agony of what she’d suffered, all over again.

  “Colin?” she whispered.

  “Oh, God, Anna, what’s happened to you?” he cried, burying his face against her thick dark hair.

  He felt her hand reach up to his head and rest on the back of his neck, her fingers searching, probing. “It’s you, Colin. What have they done to you?” She was still running her hand along his skin, along his jaw now, searching for injuries that weren’t there.

  Colin sat back from her and grabbed her hand. “Anna, I’m fine. You must have had a nightmare. They only took you.”

  Anna blinked then looked around her for the first time. She tried to sit up so Colin put an arm around her and helped her. “No,” she breathed. “Where am I?”

  Colin watched her carefully. “An abandoned camp deep in the woods we were in yesterday morning.”

  Anna’s eyes settled on Colin’s again. “That was just yesterday?”

  Colin nodded.

  “This room …” Anna started. Colin looked around him. The ugly brown paneled walls, the cheap print art of ducks flying over a pond hanging crookedly from a nail, the sliding door closet with nothing but wire hangers on its sole bar. “He must have moved me.”

  “He?”

  Anna told him about the man, who wasn’t really a man, who had kept her prisoner in the gray-blue sterile room, so cold she couldn’t speak without her teeth chattering and her voice shaking, her body so sluggish she couldn’t draw her knees to her chest to try to keep warm. She looked down at the blanket she had been laying on. “And I was on a cot,” she continued. “A vinyl cot. It crinkled every time I moved.”

  New tears spilled down her cheeks as she looked in Colin’s eyes again. “And, oh God, Colin, they had you, and they were torturing you, and you were screaming and calling for me over and over and I couldn’t stop it, I could only pray. I couldn’t help you. He wanted my …”

  Colin kissed her. Her lips, so soft and full, those lips he’d kissed countless times before, but for three months, he hadn’t allowed himself to because when you had lived for one person for so long, being separated from that person seemed like a worse torture than whatever Anna had thought they had been putting him through here. And when it came to each other, they both knew how weak they really were.

  He pulled away from her and brushed the tears from her cheeks with his thumbs and promised her he hadn’t been here. He hadn’t been hurt. But Colin sensed Anna had felt it, this new gift from The Angel, and she looked at him, puzzled, but she wouldn’t ask in front of the hunters. But Colin realized he had sensed what Anna was feeling and thinking again. “Anna?” he asked cautiously, not wanting to get his hopes up, but she was there. It was like regaining some part of his own memory or self after an episode of amnesia and Colin never wanted to lose it again.

  Anna smiled weakly at him and collapsed into his arms. “Oh, Colin. Take me home.”

  And he lifted her from the mildewy floor of that camp deep in the woods near the Amite River and carried her carefully down the sodden steps with the six other hunters lighting his way with their flashlights.

  That night, for the first time in three months, Colin slept next to his wife. After their ordeal, they were both exhausted, but they lay awake for a long time anyway facing each other, both thinking and talking about what The Angel had told Colin, about the bizarre mind tricks the demon had played on Anna in that camp, and what their experiences in Baton Rouge meant for them. Because they’d been promised two things: Anna could live and t
hey would never be separated. If those promises were in jeopardy now, their contract may expire much sooner than they’d expected.

  Chapter 15

  It was much easier for Anna to fall asleep now that Colin was beside her again. She thought maybe now that he was here, she’d have a dreamless sleep, but it was almost like Heaven itself tried to apologize for what had happened to her because instead of a dreamless sleep, she remembered. One of the most beautiful memories she held, the most important memory in her long life: the day she’d married Colin O’Conner.

  They had both just turned eighteen, and even though it was far past the legal age to get married, a lot of couples didn’t usually marry that young. It was financially too difficult for most. But Colin had started saving from the day her mother had allowed him into their home and let Anna serve him tea from the same cups the priest drank from. So by that summer almost two years later, Colin had rented his own flat and was no longer just an apprentice but was employed by the printer. He could take care of Anna, and true to his word, he’d converted to Anglicanism to please her parents.

  Anna hadn’t wanted to get married inside the church though. She’d spent too much of her life indoors, so the priest agreed to marry them in an orchard outside of the city. Anna’s mother sewed her wedding dress for her, using pieces of fabric from the dress she had worn when she married Anna’s father, who had also spent entirely too much money buying new silk for his daughter so she could have something as exquisite and beautiful as she was. Or at least that’s what her father told her.

  She and Colin were so nervous. The bright green leaves and small, unripened apples of the trees formed an archway above her as she joined Colin and the priest who were waiting for her. The sun cast ripples of shadows through the trees onto the ground. The air around her smelled sweet and alive, and as Colin held her hand, repeating the vows that would bind them forever, Anna felt both wonderfully excited and melancholy. She loved him so fully and would live her life for him, yet she couldn’t give him children, and she most likely wouldn’t survive into old age with him.

  Colin understood these truths about her. He’d always known about the toll the scarlet fever she’d contracted as an infant had taken on her body, but he loved her and refused to consider a future with anyone else. And so, on a warm, humid summer day in early July, Anna agreed to become his wife.

  No matter how much Anna’s parents genuinely liked Colin, he was still an Irish immigrant, a formerly poor, Catholic Irish immigrant, and he married the daughter of a middleclass English businessman. None of her family’s friends would attend the wedding. None of them were interested in attending a dinner in their honor. But Colin and Anna didn’t care. They returned to London that evening, and Anna fell asleep in the coach on the ride to her new home.

  Everything was so much different then. They were so young, so inexperienced and naïve, and neither of them knew much about sex at all. Anna’s mother had tried to prepare her, but she clearly wasn’t comfortable talking about it, and Englishwomen weren’t supposed to enjoy sex anyway. So Anna had listened to a lecture about her duties as a wife instead, but truthfully, she’d mostly pretended to listen, because she knew it would be different with Colin. They’d done something that would have scandalized her parents had they ever found out: she and Colin had talked about it already, and she knew he would never expect anything from her.

  That night, they spent a long time exploring each other’s bodies before they finally made love for the first time, and this was one of Anna’s favorite memories, too. Too many well-meaning women had tried to prepare her for what they perceived as painful truths, but it wasn’t her truth, not for her and Colin. She discovered that making love to her husband was thrilling and pleasurable, and she wanted him so desperately. She fell asleep wrapped in his arms, and all these years later, there was nothing Anna would change about that day.

  She had known long before taking his name that she would spend the rest of her days on this planet living for this young man, just as he lived for her. As the dream dissolved into the blackness of unawareness, she thought, neither of us knew then how many days that would be. But she had thanked God for every single one of them.

  In the morning, Anna woke to Colin smiling down at her, brushing the loose strands of hair away from her forehead, and he kissed her softly and asked her how she’d slept.

  Anna smiled back at him. “I dreamed about our wedding day.”

  Colin’s luminous green eyes danced with the memory. “That was the happiest day of my life. I still can’t believe you showed up and went through with it.”

  Anna reached up and touched the silver St. Augustine medallion hanging around his neck. “What can I say? I have a soft spot for Catholic Irish boys with shamrock eyes and golden brown hair.” She ran her fingers through the soft strands of hair that were falling around his face.

  Colin squinted at her. “Shamrock? Really?”

  Anna laughed because teasing him about anything stereotypically Irish still annoyed him. No matter how much time passed, he just couldn’t seem to get over this false belief he wasn’t good enough for her because of where he’d been born.

  “We’ve had several text messages already,” Colin continued. “Jeremy and Dylan and some of the others. Wanting to know how you’re doing. Really wanting to know what the hell our story is.”

  Anna stretched then pulled the covers tighter around her. “So we tell them I’m fine. And how much do they really need to know about us? They know we’re married now, that’s enough.”

  Colin sat up, which pulled the blankets off of Anna again. She sighed and yanked on them, but they didn’t budge. “Anna, I had to tell Dylan how I knew you’d disappeared. And they all witnessed what happened in the camp when that demon was on top of me and Dylan couldn’t touch it.”

  Anna thought about how much they would have to admit then. “Dylan’s blessed now, too. So we tell them we have a few gifts. They don’t have to know everything.”

  Colin was still watching her though, and Anna could sense his reservations about continuing to hide their past. “There’s something going on here that we’ve never faced before. Even The Angel doesn’t know what it is. In the past, it was always something humans started that gave them so much power, but this isn’t the case here. At least, not that we can tell.”

  Anna gave up. She tossed the blankets off of her and sat up, too. “So you want to tell them, and freak them out for no other reason than we are in the unusual position of being just as clueless as they are.”

  “I want to tell them because I’m freaked out, and I can’t go through something like yesterday ever again.”

  Anna reached across the bed and took his hand, caressing the smooth skin that was permanently frozen as this twenty-six year old man no matter how many years actually passed. She brought it to her lips and kissed his fingers, and he brushed his hand along her jaw, behind her neck, and kissed her. They had been separated for three months. Whatever they decided to tell the other hunters could wait.

  It was past noon before either of them responded to the numerous text messages that had filled their phones. Colin only invited Jeremy, Dylan and Max over to her apartment. He wasn’t sure yet how much he trusted the others, and the only other person Anna would have wanted here was Jas. All three of them arrived within half an hour. They’d apparently been waiting anxiously for Colin or Anna to answer their many questions, maybe even hoping their secrets would provide more answers than they actually had.

  Jeremy arrived first and had a difficult time meeting Colin’s eyes. Anna suspected he was embarrassed about all the times he’d hit on her now. She almost felt sorry for him. After all, it’s not like he’d known she was married. And he certainly couldn’t have guessed she was married to Colin. But Jeremy had to address it before the others arrived, so as soon as he sat down on Anna’s sofa, he finally looked at Colin and took a deep breath.

  “O’Conner, obviously, if I’d known …” Jeremy didn’t seem to know
how to apologize for continually hitting on someone’s wife.

  Colin shrugged it off, even though Anna knew how much Colin had hated Jeremy for it. “We couldn’t tell anyone. We were told to keep our marriage a secret because, apparently, these demons are looking for a married couple working together. Heaven can’t physically separate us, so trying to disguise who we are was the best they could do. But now that you know, I do expect you’ll never talk to my wife that way again.”

  Anna watched Jeremy’s face, and she was pretty sure he was actually blushing. “Why couldn’t they separate you?” he asked. Anna guessed the not hitting on her anymore part was just implied.

  A knock on the door prevented Colin from answering. Anna let Dylan and Max into her apartment, both of whom watched her carefully like she must be part-divine or something. As soon as Dylan sat down, he folded his hands across his knees and studied Anna. “So you’re really ok after being abducted by some presumably wickedly powerful archdemon who kept you hostage and kept messing with your head?”

  Anna snorted, not because there was anything funny about her ordeal, but Dylan just had a way of wording things that cut through all the useless subtleties most people would throw in. She kind of liked that about him. “I am, because it never hurt me physically. It was trying to wear me down and get me to surrender my soul to it.”

  Dylan’s face registered his surprise. “Holy shit, Anna, you and Colin must have the strongest faith of any two people I’ve ever met.”

  Anna raised a shoulder as if to say she wasn’t sure about that. “It’s a different kind of faith. We have so much more knowledge than most about God and angels, but there are still many aspects of our lives and what comes next we do take on faith still. But we know a lot of what is considered sinful was created by man, and much of what is considered sinful by Heaven is mostly ignored by him.”