The Immortals

by S. M. Schmitz

  Anna wanted to argue but she yawned instead. She had just stretched out on the sofa when they both felt her. Anna sat up quickly and scanned the room. Colin leaped to his feet. She appeared on the sofa next to Anna, looking at her affectionately with those soft gray eyes. “My Anna,” she said, “you don’t know how happy I am to see you like this.” She reached out with one of her delicate hands and tucked a dark curl of Anna’s hair behind her ear.

  “You’re here,” Anna whispered, and immediately felt stupid for stating something so obvious.

  But The Angel just smiled at her and reminded her, “Where you find love, you will find us.”

  “Here?” Colin asked. And he actually looked around him, confused.

  It was The Angel’s turn to look confused. “How well do you know this man whose life you’re saving?”

  Anna tried to think how long they’d known him. Not long. “We met him a few months ago. His wife died a while back, and he’s alone.”

  “And yet, you’ve been here with him all week. Caring for him. Nursing him back to health. Isn’t that the most selfless love humans can offer, Anna?”

  “Because we can’t get sick,” Colin protested. “It’s no sacrifice for us.”

  The Angel turned her kind eyes toward him and held out her hand. “Colin, do you think I would have come to you that night you prayed for help if you both didn’t possess the kind of spirits that made you want to help others, no matter the cost?”

  Colin shook his head. “That’s not true. I’d put my wife above anything, and you know that.”

  The Angel nodded. “Yes, and there’s nothing wrong with loving one person more than others. But you treat others with compassion and respect. All others, no matter who they are. And that’s a rare thing in this world.”

  “I had no idea how rare it was,” Anna said quietly. She lowered her eyes and looked at The Angel’s hand, still holding her own. Surely, The Angel knew how much the violence and bloodshed she’d witnessed the past fifty years had been weighing on her.

  “I know. I wish the world were a different place, Anna. I wish I’d never had to ask you to do this for us.”

  Anna looked up at her. “I don’t mind fighting evil. I’ll gladly fight for you, for God and Heaven and all you represent. It’s what people do to each other. That’s what I wish I never had to see.” But The Angel had already known that, of course. And she had been watching it far longer than either Colin or Anna.

  The first time they’d met The Angel, the night she’d saved Anna’s life, was the first time they learned there were others like them – not many, but there were a few other rare souls that had demonstrated a great capacity for compassion and love and who were willing to take on this burden. Not all of them had been desperate like Colin; some had just been motivated by their faith or were already fighting demons when an angel approached them and offered them gifts and immortality in exchange for their service. Luca belonged among the latter. And that night, The Angel had told them he would be coming to London soon to train them. Two months later, Luca arrived and their new lives as hunters had begun.

  Colin relived the memory of The Angel’s second visit with Anna. How could he not? Everything she felt or thought, he experienced. There was nothing they could hide from each other. It had been strange in the beginning, and Anna had wondered if it wouldn’t drive them both mad, but they quickly adapted and they were so used to having their thoughts always connected now, that when the demon had somehow cut them off from one another, it was like losing one’s sight or hearing. The Angel wouldn’t have given them this gift if she hadn’t known they could handle it.

  As they pulled into the apartment complex’s parking lot, filled now with emergency vehicles, Colin and Anna realized they wouldn’t be able to get anywhere near Jeremy’s apartment. The fire department and energy company wouldn’t find any evidence of a gas leak then the cops would treat the apartment like a crime scene, if they weren’t already. As they stared at the activity ahead of them, a knock on Anna’s window made her jump, and because it startled her, it startled Colin, too. Sometimes, having their senses so closely tied together did have its drawbacks.

  Dylan and Max stood outside of their car so Colin unlocked the doors and they both crawled into the backseat. “Well, this was an oversight,” Dylan muttered.

  “Yeah,” Colin sighed. He felt kind of stupid for not thinking of it beforehand, but they were all still in shock.

  “So how are we going to find him?” Max asked.

  Anna turned to look at Max and Dylan. “He’s most likely working for these archdemons here in Baton Rouge now. We may be able to find Jeremy the same way we’ve been hoping to find those bastards.”

  “We should probably stop calling it Jeremy,” Dylan added.

  The silence that hung in the air after Dylan’s pronouncement was stifling. It was no longer Jeremy. Their former leader, their friend, was dead.

  Colin finally broke the silence. “Neither of you are in any shape to be chasing after archdemons that are somehow interfering with the way everything is supposed to be working. Anna and I will try to find him … it … tonight.”

  Dylan started to protest, claiming he was fine and he wasn’t about to let them go without him, but Anna stopped him. “We’re not losing anyone else. You’re going home, Dylan.”

  When Dylan tried to protest again, Anna shut him up. “Jeremy put us in charge, remember?”

  Dylan bit his lip, his dark eyes full of sorrow over the loss of two of his friends within a week. Anna reached into the backseat and squeezed his hand. “I’m so sorry, Dylan. We will find him. We won’t let him suffer. I know you feel like you owe this to him, but we can’t afford to lose you. Not as hunters or as your friends.”

  Tears finally spilled down Dylan’s cheeks and he looked down at their hands and nodded in acquiescence. “Sorry I’ve been such an asshole.”

  Anna fought the urge to crawl into the backseat with him and hug him. “You have every right to be hurt and angry. And friends forgive each other when it’s misdirected. So don’t worry about it. The Angel chose you, Dylan. You’re special for a reason. We need you, so please, just be careful, ok?”

  He kept his head bowed but nodded again. Max put his arm around his shoulders, and Anna smiled at him. Maybe Anna had never agreed with The Angel that there was anything exceptional about her, but she knew she was right about one thing: Anna loved easily. She had loved so many friends in her long life, and had lost so many, but she could never get used to losing them too young. She didn’t think The Angel did either, though. She could see the pain and sadness in her eyes when they spoke of human loss. Anna would never understand how something so perfect and benevolent could care so much for such wretched creatures as humans.

  “Anna,” Max asked, “this angel of yours. I don’t doubt she exists, but how can she be as powerful as you and Colin say she is when she couldn’t help find you? When she couldn’t stop this from happening to Jeremy?”

  Anna looked at Colin helplessly. Colin twisted in his seat to face Max. “Even after everything we’ve seen and done, there are some things we still have to take on faith.”

  Dylan snorted, a sobbing laugh that hurt Anna’s heart. “Well, I’m running a little low on faith right now.” He opened the car door and climbed back out, walking back to his car to wait for Max.

  Colin started his own car. Anna had every intention of Max and Dylan going home now so they could get this mission over with, but she didn’t want to leave Dylan this way.

  Max sighed and opened his car door. “Look, if she shows up again, tell her to take it easy on him. He was in love with Jas, you know.”

  Anna balked. She had most certainly not known that. “Did Jas know? She never said anything.”

  Max raised a shoulder as if to say he had no clue how much Jas knew about Dylan’s feelings for her. They’d never dated, so maybe he’d never told her. Anna fell back into her seat. “God,” she whispered, “poor Dylan.”

&nb
sp; Colin was watching him with a new sympathy, a better understanding of the heartache he must be suffering. “Keep checking on him, ok?”

  Max promised he would, and he’d get Ben to go over later. Dylan and Ben were the same age and often hung out; even if Dylan didn’t think that highly of his skills as a hunter, he liked him as a person.

  Max lumbered slowly back to his car to meet Dylan, turning only once to cast a dejected glance in their direction before driving off with Dylan so Colin and Anna could go hunting for their friend. And as much as Colin had hated Jeremy for hitting on Anna, he’d recognized he was being a little unfair to him – his jealousy that had driven him to act in ways he still felt ashamed of had clouded his judgment about his former leader as well. Colin and Anna drove away, too.

  They were on their way back to her apartment when Colin’s phone rang. He didn’t recognize the number so he handed the phone to Anna. He knew who was on the other end before she had a chance to say anything. Luca had called him about his email.

  Anna didn’t give him much chance to talk. As soon as she heard Luca’s voice, she sobbed out the entire encounter with Jeremy from that morning and what they needed to do now, and how she couldn’t stop thinking this was their fault. If that demon had just killed him in the field, it would have been a better fate than this hellish transformation.

  Luca listened patiently as Anna cried in her sorrow and frustration, and Colin tried to wait just as patiently, but he desperately wanted to know why Luca had called. He was the most knowledgeable hunter they’d ever met, and far older than anyone else they knew. Maybe he’d only called to warn them about the inevitable outcome, and that’s why he didn’t bother interrupting Anna now.

  Colin pulled into a parking spot at her apartment complex and Anna finally finished. Luca didn’t say anything right away and both Colin and Anna grew nervous.

  “He’s going to blame us. He’s going to tell us we never should have used that gift without knowing what it could do,” Anna lowered the phone from her ear and put him on the speakerphone, even though Colin would have heard the conversation through Anna.

  “If he does, then he’s an asshole, and I’m never speaking to him again.” Colin didn’t really mean it, but they had been in a difficult situation, and it had killed both of the demons. Sort of.

  “You two have a tendency to find yourselves in unusual situations,” Luca finally said, the Italian accent of his own youth, over six centuries past, still lingering in his speech. Colin suspected he’d intentionally held onto his accent, though. Apparently, women found Italian sexy and Luca had always – or almost always – been single.

  “Helpful, Luca,” Anna grumbled.

  “What the hell are all these demons doing in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, anyway?” Luca asked.

  Colin sighed impatiently. “Luca, what makes you think we know? Next time I see you, I’ll buy you a beer and fill you in on the whole secrecy of this assignment to begin with. Right now, we’ve got three archdemons and a former human turned demon to deal with, so can you concentrate?”

  “What do you mean secrecy?” he asked. Colin thought he was incapable of concentrating, apparently.

  Colin quickly recapped The Angel’s instructions to come to Baton Rouge and to pretend not to know one another, her suspicions that he and Anna were on some sort of hit list, the way they interfered with their gifts and Anna’s abduction, and their own theory that maybe The Angel had sent them here because of this particular group of hunters, rather than the presence of so many high profile demons, who may have actually followed them here. Luca listened quietly again, and when Colin got to the end, he announced, “I need to finish up here in St. Paul, but when I’m done, I’m coming to meet you down there.”

  Anna and Colin glanced at each other. Immortal hunters rarely worked together. Because they were married and it was part of their deal, Colin and Anna were the only two who did. There were too few of them and they were needed in too many places for them to congregate in one area, and Luca, the legendary badass-demon-hunter-extraordinaire, the hunter who had come to Colin and Anna and taught them everything they needed to know to begin their own lives as hunters, was coming to meet them in Baton Rouge.

  “Luca,” Anna said uneasily, “what do you think is going on here?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never heard of anything like this, honestly. Your theory makes a lot of sense, but it doesn’t explain how they’re doing any of this. I’m kind of surprised my own angel hasn’t visited me to tell me what’s going on down there.”

  Colin snickered. “Surely those guys talk to each other.”

  “It’s the clouds. Probably interferes with their cell reception.”

  Anna rolled her eyes. She still didn’t think joking about angels was funny.

  “What about Jeremy?” Anna asked. “What can you tell us about him?”

  “It,” Colin corrected.

  Anna narrowed her eyes at him and Colin tried to look innocent about it.

  “Well,” Luca answered, “it’s a demon now. It’s going to be out there doing all the things demons do unless you stop it.”

  Anna thought it was a good thing he was in Minnesota, because she kind of wanted to kick him in the shin right now.

  “I’ve only heard of this before, never actually seen it,” Luca continued, “but Hell broke the rules in transforming him, which means, theoretically, it should be reversible.”

  “How?” Anna asked excitedly.

  “Sorry, Anna,” Luca sighed, “I don’t know if it’s actually ever been done. I wouldn’t even know how to attempt it. Your friend is a demon now, and it’s a threat to humans. It will have to be hunted.”

  Colin could feel Anna’s anger radiating from her. He didn’t need telepathy for that. “Then why even tell us it may be reversible? Why put the idea in our heads we may be able to save Jeremy if you’re just going to insist he’s hunted down anyway?”

  “Because you asked me what I knew, and I don’t want to lie to the only friends I have that don’t grow old and die on me.”

  “Easy, Anna. He has a point. We have very few friends who will be with us until the end.”

  Anna crossed her arms defiantly, still seething, but didn’t reprimand Luca anymore.

  “How long until you’re done in St. Paul?” Colin asked.

  “Few weeks, I think,” Luca replied, sounding relieved Anna was no longer grilling him.

  He and Colin talked for a few minutes about sports and Anna got bored. She got out of the car and walked back to her apartment. It didn’t take long for Colin to catch up to her. “Don’t be mad at him,” he reminded her.

  “I’m not,” but Anna wasn’t really sure about that. Hunting the beast that was now Jeremy would have been a hell of a lot easier if he’d never told her it may be possible to save him somehow.

  “Anna, if you’d found out the truth years later, imagine how angry and betrayed you would have felt if he hadn’t told you. You’re putting Luca in an impossible situation.”

  Anna paused by the foot of the stairs leading up to her apartment because she knew Colin was right, but it pissed her off anyway. Or maybe the whole situation just pissed her off and no matter what happened, she was going to be irritable and sullen about it, because even though Jeremy’s flirting had annoyed her, there were plenty of moments she had genuinely liked him. And the attractive young man with auburn hair and persistent five o’clock shadow had been murdered, morphed into a hideous creature that would terrorize the same city he’d once worked to protect. Yes, Anna was definitely pissed off.

  “He wasn’t that attractive,” Colin grumbled.

  Anna shot him a don’t-be-an-asshole look and clomped up the stairs. “Bradley Cooper is a sex symbol, you know,” Anna retorted, not because she was sexually attracted to Bradley Cooper or Jeremy, but just because she wanted to mess with Colin.

  “Now how would I know something like that?”

  Anna could hear the sigh in his voice even though he wasn’t s
peaking aloud. “I hardly think Jeremy was wasting his days celibate while he was pining for me. He had as much trouble getting laid as Luca.”

  “God, Luca’s going to want to talk to me about it, too, when he gets to town. Why does he think I want to hear about his sexual exploits?”

  “Because he has no one else to talk to about them.”

  Anna unlocked her door and Colin begrudgingly acknowledged she was right, even though it still made him uncomfortable to listen to him talking about his sex life. As Anna stepped inside her apartment, she was thrown across the living room by a force she couldn’t see, by something she couldn’t sense. Whatever had blocked them before was doing it again, only this time, it had found them. It was in her apartment.

  Colin hurried to Anna’s side as she struggled to get back on her feet. The tingling electric feeling of this new gift from The Angel was charging within them again, but they didn’t know where the damn thing was. Movement from the kitchen made them both draw their daggers, and a gray beast with bony growths protruding from its face lunged at them. The invisible force hadn’t come alone. It had found Colin and Anna by bringing Jeremy with it.

  The gray demon knocked Colin to the ground and Anna cut one of its forelimbs to push it off of him. The creature screamed and rolled its goldenrod eyes toward her, but Colin was on his feet again, ready to stab it, when the invisible demon knocked them both against the wall. Colin’s dagger fell from his hand and Anna’s heart leaped into her throat.

  “Blow the goddamn apartment down!” she yelled, and that power surged from them, exploding windows and light fixtures, overturning furniture and throwing debris in the air as if silent bombs had been detonated inside the apartment.

  As fluttering papers and stuffing from the furniture settled to the floor, Colin and Anna moved away from the wall. He bent down and picked up his dagger, keeping it in his hand just in case. The walkway was filling with nervous tenants who had left their own apartments to check on the cause of the explosion, the second one at an apartment complex in the city that day. The door had been blown off its hinges and the glass had been shattered in all of the windows. There was no point in trying to get any privacy from the curious onlookers now.