Eternity

by Teresa Federici

  “I didn’t know how you took your tea.” He said as he set it down on the coffee table, his tone apologetic. He sat on the couch at the other end, staring into the fire, the space between us a gulf.

  “I don’t know that I need sugar tonight, but I’ll take it anyway.” I leaned forward and added sugar and milk to the tea. Cupping its solid warmth in my hand, I curled back up with the mug, and fixed a gimlet eye on Gareth.

  “I have something to say and you’re going to listen, and then I’m going to ask questions and you’re going to answer.” I said into the silence, watching his profile for a reaction. He didn’t give much away besides a slight flaring of his nostrils and a pained curl of his mouth.

  “Whatever is going on here is not something that you can keep from me, Gareth. My life is being threatened, my home has been broken into. You need to tell me what is happening. Who is doing all this?” I could hear the pleading note creeping into my voice, and I tried to temper it. I needed strength right now, not weakness.

  I didn’t think he was going to answer, but he did. It wasn’t what I wanted to hear though.

  “Let the police do their work to find out. I haven’t a clue as to who is doing this and why.” He never even looked at me, just kept his gaze steady on the fire.

  “Two people are dead, Gareth! If you know something, you need to tell the police!” My enraged shout echoed throughout the quiet house and I slammed the tea cup back down on the tray with a rattle.

  His head snapped around and he fixed me with an angry glare that had me second-guessing my rage.

  “I’ve told you I don’t know anything! Why do you keep persisting in this?” He stood and started to pace, hands shoved deep in his pockets. He was moving quickly, much faster than a person should move. He checked himself though, after one pass, and slowed down. He took a deep breath and composed his features.

  “There are things that you know nothing about, and I would keep it that way. I can’t tell you anything more than that.” He insisted when I started to speak, putting a hand up to silence me.

  “Just believe me when I say I’m going to protect you.” His tone was smug and very authoritative; he looked pleased with what he had to say.

  I stared at him as though he had lost his mind.

  “What friggin’ century are you from?” I asked incredulously and he swung his head around and stared at me in shock.

  “What did you say?” His face was paler than usual, his expression one of complete dismay.

  “I mean, this isn’t the eighteen century, where women need to be protected and sheltered. I have a stake in this, too, you know. It’s my life that’s in danger.” I spoke quietly, wanting to calm him down. He was completely agitated and I couldn’t begin to know why.

  His gaze caught mine, bore into me, and I stood frozen on the spot, unable to move under his scrutiny. He looked like he was searching for something, reading my features, looking for a deeper meaning to my words. After what seemed like forever, he nodded, satisfied with what he found.

  “I know that you have a stake in this, I’m not stupid. I know that you shouldn’t be kept in the dark. I will tell you some of what’s going on, but I can’t tell you all of it. Please trust me when I say that it’s better that way.”

  I cocked my head to the side, narrowing my eyes and studying him this time. Should I trust him? Since I’d met him my life had been turned upside down, and not always in a good way. Down in my soul I knew that he had no desire to put me in harm’s way and he seemed tortured about what was happening to me.

  He held my stare, quietly regarding me as I struggled to come to terms with what was essentially an ultimatum. Put my trust in him for only a partial explanation, or remain forever in the dark, constantly looking over my shoulder at shadows?

  I nodded slowly, watching him, and saw relief flood his features. He sat back down on the couch, facing me.

  “I do have a project at the lab, one that involves the immortality gene.”

  That I was shocked at his words was an understatement. It was what I was working on, though I didn’t know that he had a separate lab that was working on the same thing.

  I had heard about the discovery of the “immortality” gene a couple of years back, but not having the access to the type of lab equipment needed to research it, I had put it to the back of my mind, thinking that when I started working for a lab with the right equipment, I would start.

  With the discovery of the gene, and a pharmaceutical company willing to put the millions of dollars to the research of it, the impact would be global. Stem-cell arguments would cease, all diseases would be cured, and vital organs could be regenerated. People would have the choice of dying naturally, or living for an undetermined amount of time.

  “I do believe that someone thinks that you’re working on that project and you would be an easy target. The project is so secret that the scientists working on it don’t know who else is, it has no project name, and no one knows but me who is part of the project.” He kept his eyes on mine the whole time he spoke quietly and I tried to mask my features, wanting to give nothing away. I was debating whether or not to tell him what I was doing, what I was trying to find.

  “You are working on it. Not as part of the project, obviously, but on your own.” He wasn’t asking a question, he could only be making an assumption, but I was again struck by the way he seemed to always be able to read my mind.

  I nodded slowly. In for a penny, in for a pound.

  “Why didn’t you tell me? Why didn’t you tell the head of the lab? This is research that anyone would want to get their hands on! Genetics labs all over the world are working on this, and if they think someone has a leg up on them, they are going to find ways to get the research.” He leaned toward me, his eyes urgent on mine.

  “Because I had just started. I wasn’t working on it but two days when you showed up, and the day that you visited,” I suppressed the smile that wanted to form in remembrance of that day, “I didn’t exactly have the mind-set to tell you.”

  “Right, well, sorry about that. I let that go too far.”

  He was trying to look embarrassed, but it was obvious that he wasn’t sorry about it.

  “Anyway, so what you’re telling me is that you really feel that another lab is going to extremes to get this research that the company is working on.”

  He nodded, but I was not convinced. I could see another lab sending in a spy, although even that was stretching it, but breaking and entering, murder? I just couldn’t believe it.

  “That’s all I can tell you. I will see to it that you are constantly under surveillance, until the perpetrators can be caught. If I have to sleep in my car in your driveway, then that’s what I’ll do.” His tone suggested finality, like we weren’t going to speak of it again, but I had other questions I wanted answered.

  “You’re not telling me all of it, right?”

  “What do you mean? I think that I told you more than I should. You now have more knowledge of the lab than you did before, which puts you in more danger than before. That went against my better judgment.”

  I wasn’t thinking about the lab. For once I wasn’t thinking about the break-in, my gunshot wound, the vellum calling card left in my house, or the specter that slipped out of my garage as I watched.

  I was thinking about a man whose skin alternated from the extremes of hot and cold, a man who seemed to be able to read my mind; a man who might not have a heartbeat.

  I eyed him speculatively, judging the distance between us, wondering if I could reach him to place my hand on his chest before he realized what I was doing.

  I had barely thought through what I was going to do when he jumped up from the couch as though something had bit him. He was across the room before I could move a finger, standing by the front door, his hand on the knob.

  “I think it’s better if I stayed in my car. I’ll watch the back for awhile.”

  “Gareth, you don’t have to do that. Stay inside, I won’t
…”What could I say? I won’t make any untoward moves against you? It was like he was protecting his virtue.

  “Okay, if that’s what you want. It’s cold out there.” I gave in, seeing he was resolute.

  “It won’t bother me.” He murmured then he was out the door, shutting it quietly behind him.

  That night he came again in my dreams, but he looked at me with sorrow in his eyes.

  I was asleep on my bed, and I seemed to be looking down at myself lying there, as if I was standing next to the bed. He came through the French door that led in from the outside, walking in as if he had a key, then turning and closing the door softly as if he didn’t want to wake me.

  I knew I had locked that door securely before I went to sleep.

  He moved silently across the room, his gaze on my sleeping form, and came to sit beside me.

  I didn’t wake, and his ice-blue eyes were mournful as he looked down upon my sleeping form. He laid a hand on my forehead, as though bestowing a blessing, but it was just a gentle caress, the cool skin of his palm sending tingles down my spine, but the spine of the me that stood separate, not the sleeping me.

  “Anna, I won’t bother you again. I should have stuck by those words, and not come to you tonight, but I can’t seem to get enough of you. I will protect you, this I swear, but I can’t be around you anymore.” I could hear the regret in his voice.

  I wanted to scream at him, I wanted to hit him, I wanted to talk to him; I wanted to kiss him again and lose myself in his eyes. Why wouldn’t he come to me in the waking world where we could have a normal conversation instead of whatever it was we had in the bar?

  He leaned over me and kissed me tenderly on my forehead where his hand had laid, and then he stood and left quietly the way he came.

  I came awake with a start, as if waking from a bad dream, and sat up quickly. I looked at the French door and noticed the blinds still swaying slightly, as if someone had just gone out the doors and set the blinds moving.

  He had been here, it hadn’t been a dream. And if he had been here, if this was reality, then he wouldn’t be back. I would only see him in passing. His tone and the way his kiss was almost reverent, more like a painful goodbye, convinced me of that.

  I curled myself up into a ball, pulling the covers over my head, like a little child scared of the dark, but it wasn’t the dark I was scared of. I was scared of never seeing him again, I was scared of these feelings he set loose in me, and I was scared that I was even more scarred than I already was.

  I cried my grief out to a silent room, my tears coursing wet tracks down my cheeks to fall soundlessly on my pillow.

  Chapter Eight

  The next morning I laid in bed wallowing in self-pity. Feeling unreasonably bereft, I hadn’t fallen back to sleep since he had left me. Tears still occasionally fell and I angrily wiped them away, not even knowing what I was crying for.

  That he had been here last night and the first night he had come to me I now had no doubt. In the sleepless hours that had passed since he had gone, I had turned over both experiences in my mind.

  The way he came into the house, silent as a ghost. The way he seemed to read my mind. The way he touched my soul as no other had before him.

  What or who he was, that was still a mystery to me. Why he affected me the way that he did also puzzled me. I didn’t know him, knew nothing about him, and although he was staggeringly attractive, that shouldn’t make me feel this way over the fact that he would not be back to see me.

  I was in love with him; I could no longer deny it. I knew the first night he came to me that he would destroy me emotionally, and he had. Maybe the romantics were correct, and there was such a thing as love at first sight.

  I watched the sunlight trace patterns across the ceiling, the dark silhouettes of tree limbs and pine boughs creating a gothic design that went with my mood, and I remembered the feeling of standing next to the bed. I had never been into astral projection when I had been younger. To me, it would be too easy to lose control and lose yourself, and not come back to your physical body, and I had control issues.

  The feeling of being outside my body hadn’t been an unpleasant sensation, but neither had it been comforting. I hadn’t been able to wake up; I hadn’t been able to argue with him, to beg him not to leave. To beg him to stay with me forever.

  I wasn’t accomplishing anything at all while I lay in bed, and I was curious to see if he was still here, guarding me from a distance.

  I crawled out of bed and made my way to living room, where I could see up and down the street. I saw a police cruiser in my driveway, and as I watched, another one drove down the street slowly, but there was no sign of the black Rover. He had left then, most likely to go shower and change. I wondered how far away he would stay, and started to plot how I could change his mind. I didn’t give up easily when I wanted something, and I wanted Dr. Gareth Macgregor with every fiber of my being.

  I went back into the bedroom to take a shower, thinking along the way that despite someone coming into my house and murdering two police officers, I felt completely safe. Nothing had happened to me in the daylight, and I knew the cops were just outside. Still, my mind was in turmoil, with too much to think about logically while I was still waking up.

  I started to feel a little more human as the shower beat the heat into me, but I had a hollow space inside, as if when Gareth left he had pulled the essence of me with him. What was left in its place was almost a heightened sixth sense, as if the scientific, skeptical part of my mind had caved to the adolescent, imaginative side, and I was open to all manner of possibilities.

  I started to think again about how he could come into my house, how he could move so quickly he seemed to disappear. He wasn’t a ghost, because he owned real estate and other people could see him, touch him, and talk to him.

  I briefly touched on vampire, but even my newly rediscovered instincts shied away from that, because what I knew of vampires and what I knew of Gareth were completely at odds. He was out in sunlight, apparently had no aversion to the large cross that the head of my lab wore around her neck and was able to have his picture taken. Oh, and I hadn’t heard of any vampire-like deaths around town, but I guessed that a vampire could easily hide his tracks.

  I laughed out loud, shaking my head at my thoughts. I could believe in ghosts, I’d seen and sensed them. I had a mind that could believe in the possibility of vampires and witches and all manner of ghouls, but I couldn’t believe that one was visiting me in the night or running a pharmaceutical empire.

  I got out of the shower and wrapped my hair in a towel, made myself put on makeup and get dressed in a soft sweater, blue jeans and my favorite pair of soft boots. With a towel still perched precariously on my head, I went to fill myself up with coffee. I poured a steaming mug and wrapped my cold hands around its comforting warmth. It made me think of Gareth’s cold caresses, though, and that got me thinking about the vampire theory. Why would his skin always be icy to the touch one time and almost burning hot at others?

  I decided to do research. It was what I did best after all, so I sat at my computer and turned it on, trying not to think about who had last touched my keyboard.

  I accessed the internet and typed in Gareth’s name. Because of who he was, I got tons of results, but most of them had to do with the company. There was the company profile that was available to the public, there was a blurb on the XP research, but there really wasn’t anything personal.

  I dredged my mind, trying to think of all the office gossip I had heard about him, and all I could remember was the story about his parents, so I typed in his name plus the word obituary and found an archive link to his parent’s obit. His age wasn’t mentioned, but the date was 1992. So he would have been twenty. A picture of him at his parents’ graveside showed a Gareth that wasn’t changed much by time, but it was a grainy picture, scanned into the archive probably back when scanning technology was in its infancy.

  I logged into the company’s website
and looked over his profile again, noting where he went to school; a boarding school in Plymouth conveniently listed his name in the alumni section.

  There wasn’t anything printed about him other than his graduation year, which was 1989, and a little bit about Macgregor Biosciences. I couldn’t access the Harvard Alumni site. I could hack into it, but it would probably be just as lean on information as the boarding school.

  I sat back, trying to think. There wasn’t really anything much about a personal side on the internet. All business, except for the obit, but his parents had been pillars of New Hampshire society, or so I heard. I decided to go to the library, see if I couldn’t dig up anything there among the local archives.

  Not having any idea what I was looking for, just knowing the man was elusive, I was disappointed in my failure to find information on the internet.

  I went back to my bedroom and dried my hair. I couldn’t do anything with it, so I just pulled it back in a ponytail and threw on a jacket. Grabbing my sunglasses and purse, I headed out the door.

  After stopping and exchanging greetings with the two new cops in my drive, I thought it would be best to let them know where I was headed, in case my absent guardian came back.

  I was in Manchester twenty minutes later and stopped at a local donut shop for another coffee before heading to the library. The wind had picked up and it seemed as though it would snow again, but I was inside the warmth of the library before my coffee got too cold.

  I didn’t really know what else to look for, but it bothered me that I couldn’t find more about him on the internet. Even I was Google-able, and I didn’t have a tenth of the marketability that Gareth had. Either he had no life to speak of, or he kept his activities undercover; hiding something, but what? Why was he so elusive? He wasn’t just a local hero, he had divisions across the country, so he had a presence elsewhere, too.

  After only being at the library thirty minutes or so, I was just as frustrated as I was at home. Nothing in the local archives had much about him, other than the obvious, it was as though I had hit a brick wall.