The Immortals

by S. M. Schmitz

  Chapter 21

  The hunters backed out of Jeremy’s doorway slowly, and he watched them, eyeing each one with those golden eyes, but knowing he couldn’t take on all three. But it was Jeremy. However the demons were masking their presence here, Jeremy was no exception, because no one had felt him. And none of the hunters could bring themselves to drawing their daggers and killing him now. Maybe they should have. Maybe it would have been the humane thing to do, what a good friend would have done for someone they cared about, but none of them could forget that just last night, they had sat with Jeremy on this same bed and tried to calm his fears and offer him the reassurance that he would be fine.

  Anna really needed out of this apartment. She felt nauseated and lightheaded and was certain she’d never be able to close her eyes again without seeing Jeremy’s deformed face, those almost human eyes studying her with so much deadly malice. They reached the doorway to his apartment where a crowd of neighbors had gathered to investigate the explosion, and Colin and Anna frantically thought of a convincing reason to get them away from this place.

  “Gas leak,” Anna gasped. “The whole building needs to be evacuated. Now!”

  Most of the people hesitated for a moment before deciding to get the hell out of there. From inside the apartment, they could hear Jeremy moving. “We need to leave, too,” Dylan said quietly. Dylan had known Jeremy a long time. Anna couldn’t even begin to imagine the kind of shock he must have been in.

  “Meet us at Anna’s apartment,” Colin told him. “We’ll call Max and we’ll need to let the others know.”

  Dylan just nodded and climbed into his car. Anna watched him as he drove away. On their way home, she called Max and tried to explain what had happened to Jeremy but she had to keep stopping to steady her voice, to calm herself down, to force herself not to cry. Max insisted on meeting them at their apartment as well, and even though Anna knew he’d been pretty beat up from getting thrown into the ditch, she didn’t argue. She wasn’t ready to call the other hunters, yet, though. They would all need to be warned because if Jeremy retained any of his human memories, he would know exactly who to look for, but someone else could make those calls for her. She didn’t think she could have this conversation over and over again.

  Dylan had beaten them to Anna’s apartment and was waiting by her door, his face stoic and unreadable. They sat in the living room in silence waiting for Max to show up. He wasn’t far behind them. But even with Max there, no one seemed to know what to say. Anna’s trembling fingers wrapped around Colin’s hand and he gently held onto her, but he didn’t have any thoughts he could comfort her with.

  Finally, Dylan looked up from the spot on the floor he had been staring at absentmindedly and asked, “Which one of us is going to kill him?”

  Startled, Anna shot back angrily, “What?”

  Dylan fixed her with his dark eyes. “Exorcisms only work in the movies. There isn’t a goddamn thing we can do for him.” He let his gaze fall back to the spot on the floor.

  Max exhaled a weary breath. “How exactly did this happen? I’ve never heard of people actually becoming possessed. I thought that was something that only happened in the movies.”

  Colin shook his head. “It’s incredibly rare. It can happen voluntarily by talking a person into it, but demons don’t usually need a human’s body. Most can mimic a human. To be honest, I’m not sure how else it happens. We know Jeremy didn’t allow it to happen, so something else …” he trailed off as a horrible thought occurred to him, and of course, that meant it occurred to Anna, too.

  “Oh, God, Colin, you think we did this to him?”

  “I don’t know. But we killed that demon just as it was killing Jeremy. What if we … fused them or some crazy shit like that?”

  Anna’s nausea grew worse. “Excuse me,” she muttered and she stumbled into the bathroom to throw up.

  Max and Dylan looked at Colin, concern for Anna now piled on top of all of the other chaos in their lives. “She ok? She’s not pregnant or anything, is she?” Dylan asked.

  Colin flinched. Dylan couldn’t have known how badly those words hurt him, or worse, how badly they would hurt Anna. Even before they became hunters, Anna couldn’t have children, and the painful aching longing in her eyes every time they passed a mother and her child on the street hurt Colin just as deeply as Anna’s knowledge she would never be a mother. Even now, it was still physically impossible. Immortal servants of Heaven didn’t have children, and it was still the one thing Anna wanted most and could never have.

  “No,” Colin answered softly, “she’s not. We’re just afraid what we did in the field may have caused this somehow.”

  “Y’all had no way of knowing that. And that demon was kicking all of our asses. He was dead either way,” Max replied.

  Anna stood in the doorway of the bathroom watching him, and Max blushed and looked down at his hands. He obviously hadn’t realized she was listening.

  “I would much rather be dead than turn into one of those monsters,” Anna said. “And I would much rather die than have to kill someone I once considered a friend.”

  Colin thought she may be exaggerating a bit by calling him a friend, but he sure as hell wasn’t going to correct her.

  “I’ll do it,” Dylan said suddenly, still staring at the mysterious spot on the carpet underneath Anna’s coffee table.

  Max took a quick, shaky breath. “I’ll help you.”

  “What is wrong with you? This is Jeremy!” Anna shouted.

  “Not anymore,” Dylan reminded her. But Anna didn’t want to listen to him. She didn’t want to hear them discussing Jeremy’s murder.

  “What other choice do we have, Anna?” Dylan asked, not quite yelling, but he was just as frustrated. “He’s not Jeremy. Jeremy is dead.”

  “So you’re just going to kill him?” Anna yelled back.

  “If it were you or Colin, what would you want us to do?” Dylan asked, lowering his voice.

  Anna stared back at him, but he was right. They couldn’t let innocent people get hurt because of what Jeremy had become, and they owed it to Jeremy to stop whatever he was now.

  Max lifted his head from his hands where he’d buried it and looked at Colin and Anna hopefully. “Is there any way out of this for him? Have you ever met someone who’d been possessed before?”

  Anna sank onto the sofa by Colin and took his hand again. “Once,” she sighed. “Only once, and we had to kill him.”

  Chapter 22

  Nanjing, 1858. Anna and Colin hid beneath a pavilion outside the walls of the Palace of the Heavenly Kingdom. A column of soldiers passed in front of them and they waited until the last red jacket was out of their sight before emerging from the shadows. Foreigners had never been welcome here, but this civil war had been particularly brutal and now more than ever, people were suspicious of Europeans and often hostile to them.

  Colin and Anna had tried to stay out of the city as much as possible, but the demon they had been chasing for two days had followed the army back to the capital so they’d had no choice but to trail along after it, too. As Europeans, they shouldn’t have even been in Nanjing at all, but demons didn’t care about details like port treaties and rebellions and civil wars. Those were human concerns, and as it turns out, those kinds of things just made demons’ jobs much easier anyway.

  There was no blending in here. They were hopelessly out of place in a world they didn’t understand where people were fighting a war they couldn’t make sense of. People in the countryside suffered from famine and epidemics, and everywhere they’d traveled throughout this strange country they’d never been in they encountered entire villages decimated by the effects of this war. This was child’s play for Hell.

  There was something peculiar about this demon though; something was different. It didn’t take the forms of multiple creatures like most demons, but preferred this ivory colored misshapen form, much like a hairless crouching dog. Its face, though, betrayed this wasn’t a pitiful aberrati
on of nature, but something sinister and evil.

  Anna and Colin had lost track of it when they’d hidden from the passing Taiping Army. They hurried through the crowded streets in the direction they’d last seen the demon, mostly ignored by the people on the streets who had far bigger problems than a couple of westerners running past them.

  “It’s there, in the market.” Colin noticed it before Anna, but she sensed it now, too.

  “We need to get it out of there. We can’t fight it in a crowded space.”

  They had honed in on it now and wormed their way through the dense stalls. They were attracting more attention here than they had on the street, and they needed to get out of here quickly.

  “It’s under the stall.” Anna’s focus was on a fish stand about a hundred feet in front of them.

  She could feel Colin’s frustration seeping off of him. This bastard wasn’t stupid. It had found a good hiding place where Anna and Colin couldn’t touch it without alerting the entire city that not only were two westerners running around Nanjing, but two armed westerners were running around Nanjing.

  “Let’s try to flush it out,” Colin suggested.

  Anna noticed how many people were watching them already. “I think we’re going to have to leave China after this.”

  Colin agreed, but he’d had enough of China for a while. This civil war had been one of the worst he’d ever seen. They approached the fish stand and pretended to examine what was on display, much to the astonishment of the vendor. The demon was still under the table.

  The vendor was talking to Colin – angrily, it seemed – but they were both trying to concentrate on the monster crouched near their feet. It was sidling back and forth, trying to decide if it should run, stay where it was, or attack them. Anna leaned over the stand to look at a particularly bloated fish and felt a tugging at the hem of her dress. Because Anna felt it, Colin knew about it, too. The demon had apparently decided to fight them.

  Colin pulled her back and saw the sickly white appendage retreating under the table; he crushed it beneath his boot and a sickening screech drowned out the other noises from the market. Nobody else heard it. The demon rushed out of the stall away from them, limping on its injured limb, and Colin and Anna chased it again, only this time, it wasn’t able to dodge them as easily.

  As it led them down another crowded street, Colin noticed an empty alley as they ran past it. “I’m going to get in front of it, try to send it back here, so we can herd it down that alley.”

  Anna kept her eyes on the beast. She’d gotten a closer look at its face in the market and its orange eyes had almost looked human. She’d never been this scared of a demon before.

  Colin had already run ahead of her and his long legs soon overtook the wounded demon. He turned on it and forced it to turn around. Anna had dropped back beyond the deserted alley, hoping it would detour as soon as it realized it was trapped between them.

  As Colin chased it back toward Anna, the milky white demon caught sight of her and dove into the empty alleyway, just as they’d hoped. By the time it realized it was cornered, Anna and Colin had blocked its path back out. It turned its odious orange eyes on them and Anna shuddered again. She couldn’t shake the feeling they were almost human, despite the bizarre color and the same fearsome loathing that lurked behind all demons’ eyes.

  The beast was making that terrible screeching sound again and they were worried it might be calling for help. They needed to act quickly. Colin stepped closer to it and it lunged at him, knocking him to the stone ground of the alley. Anna dug her dagger into its back and that screeching noise reached new decibels that made her ears hurt. Its orange eyes rolled in their sockets toward her and she threw her elbow into the side of its face to try to get it to look away from her. She didn’t want those eyes on her ever again.

  Colin’s dagger connected with its belly and as he rolled out from underneath it, eviscerating the creature as he did, the milky white cloud that gave this demon its power started to ooze out and it slowly sank to the ground. Just to make sure it was dead, Anna opened another incision in its back, and it was only then she noticed the strange marking on its side.

  “Colin, isn’t that the mark of one of Mammon’s?”

  Colin had noticed it, too, and it certainly did look like it, but they’d never seen it on a demon before, only on their victims, and considering Mammon’s minions preyed on those who were greedy and power hungry, they saw this marking often. Colin dragged his fingers along the vermillion inscriptions underneath the creature’s forelimb.

  “They’re definitely the same.” Colin rolled the monster onto its back and Anna instinctively backed away from it. Its eyes were still open, glassy and vacant, and even though the orange hue was still creepy as hell, Anna was sure they looked more human now without the evil malice behind them. Colin studied the deformed body but agreed with her.

  “It couldn’t change. It stayed this shape, even when we were killing it. And I hurt it by stepping on its … arm? Anna, I think this thing used to be human.”

  And then Anna turned around in that alleyway in Nanjing, China and threw up.

  Chapter 23

  Max and Dylan watched them with a mixture of shock and sadness, perhaps fully understanding now what was going to happen to their friend. Dylan finally looked away from Anna and Colin and closed his eyes, sinking lower into his chair. “Wait, a minute,” he said, “last night you said you thought he’d be fine. But you’ve killed one of these before. You lied to us.”

  “No,” Colin insisted, “we weren’t lying. We’ve never known anything about that demon in Nanjing and we had no way of knowing this would happen to Jeremy. It shouldn’t be possible.”

  “I’m so tired of hearing you say that,” Dylan mumbled. Colin didn’t blame him. He was getting tired of saying it.

  But Anna defended him anyway. “This isn’t Colin’s fault. Or mine. We told you what we knew. The mark we’d seen just like the one on Jeremy was on a dead body, so we thought Jeremy had just gotten extraordinarily lucky. And we don’t recognize this mark. It doesn’t belong to any demon we’ve ever encountered. The mark on the demon in Nanjing was clearly one of Mammon’s.”

  Dylan opened his eyes and put his head back on the chair. “We should have killed him at his apartment. What kind of friends would let something like this happen?”

  Max fidgeted with a small string at the edge of the armrest on his chair. “Do you think it’s hurting him? This transformation?”

  Colin remembered the way Jeremy had looked lying in his bed, the bony growths protruding from the skin in his face. How could it not be painful? “I don’t know,” he answered instead. Because maybe Jeremy wasn’t human at all anymore. Maybe there was nothing left of him to hurt.

  “We shouldn’t wait. Let’s go back to his apartment, see if we can figure out where he might have gone,” Dylan suggested.

  Colin glanced at Max. “You ok to do this? You were pretty banged up yesterday.”

  Max nodded. “A little slower than normal, but you three make up for my tardiness.”

  “Colin, we’re really going to hunt Jeremy?” Anna’s fingers had tightened around his hand. He didn’t want to go either, but what choice did they have? Jeremy had spent the last six years of his life hunting and killing demons; they couldn’t let him become one.

  Colin tried to comfort Anna on the drive back to Jeremy’s apartment, but she kept staring out her window. She didn’t want to talk or think. In the years since fighting that human-turned-demon in Nanjing, she’d largely forgotten about it, although she’d occasionally come across one with a similar milky coloring or even orange eyes that just lacked the same human characteristics that had told her there was something different about this particular demon.

  They’d left China shortly after killing it, and they’d traveled for a while to find one of the few hunters in the world who was living an immortal life like they were. Anna and Colin were hoping he’d have some sort of explanation as to what
the hell that thing had been. They found Luca in South Carolina where another civil war on a different continent had just begun. And Luca told them what they’d expected to hear, but what they’d also feared: the demon they’d killed in Nanjing was different because it had still been human, a living human, when it was transformed, but he didn’t know how it had occurred either. He’d only seen it once before himself.

  Colin and Anna ended up staying with Luca for a while in South Carolina, then moved farther eastward to Tennessee where the battles were exacting an enormous human toll. More misery. More suffering. More hatred. It had been a long time since Colin and Anna had sought reassurance from The Angel, but after China and now this, they needed a reminder humans were worth the existence they led. But they had a much better understanding now of how to find The Angel when they needed her.

  It was far easier to find places of hatred than places of love. When they’d first started on this life together, they’d thought they needed to find grand spectacles like the wars and massacres and revolutions they so often followed. But their corollaries, massive displays of what could make humans good and compassionate, were nowhere to be found. They’d wait in obvious spaces like churches or at weddings, but there was never anything there except people. After years of looking, Anna and Colin began to wonder if The Angel had lied to them. Or maybe they just misremembered. Maybe she’d never meant she’d actually appear again.

  Half a century had passed when Colin and Anna were staying at a friend’s house who had contracted typhus. They were immune to illnesses now, so they were taking care of him. He’d had a particularly difficult night, and neither Colin nor Anna had slept much. They may be immortal, but they still had human needs, like food and sleep. They were exhausted. Anna collapsed on the sofa next to Colin and he put his arm around her and kissed her. “Get some sleep,” he told her, “I’ll stay up with him.”