I held her as strongly.
“You are mine, my darling,” I told her, desperate to assuage her fears. “And I am yours. We belong together. Our souls are in love. You make me far happier than I make you. I only dread you leaving me.” Now my eyes had tears of fear for her, and I felt the moth-wings of panic.
I did not want her to die, ever.
But of course she would. Someday I would have to continue without her, just as I had when I lost my parents and my baby brother and sister. Whenever I thought of that, I shoved the idea out of my mind.
Sleeping alone was something I had done for over a century. Yet I could not remember what it was like. I know it was not difficult. There had been nothing unusual about it.
I could not imagine it now.
She squeezed me. “My love, my dearest. I could not bear life without you in my bed.”
“And you never will. Now that’s enough, Mrs. Montero. You’re my wife. And you will remain my wife until death do us part. You and I have decades left together.” I raised my head. “You aren’t thinking of leaving me, are you?”
She laughed. “You’re always so wonderful. You’re right. I really can’t picture us apart. It seems absurd, doesn’t it?”
“It is absurd. I’m afraid you’re stuck with me, my darling, because I’m never letting you go.”
I pressed my lips against her neck, spread my arms along her slim frame, clasped her to me, inhaling her, feeling my darling Karina, refusing to acknowledge there would come a day when I would have to live without her.
The children hadn’t noticed my difference at first. They lived with us until they were seventeen (Laurena), and sixteen (Tomas) and so did not have enough time to see any real disparity in our appearances. Their mother had been twenty-one when she gave birth the second time and so was only thirty-eight when they struck out on their own.
Every year, they came for Christmas, Easter and Lammas Day, bringing our grandchildren with them.
If, as a father, you want to give your children an important present, love their mother devotedly. James and Marguerite, my brother and sister now long gone, and I, adored my father for that. He treated my mother as if she were a queen. Together, they made a stable familial enclave, a peaceful sanctuary from the rest of the world. They never once talked about separating. Such a split is a terrible change for a child to endure, and gave a son or daughter the feeling that if something this big could happen, all of life was potentially unexpected and painful.
One year when our children had all arrived for Christmas, Laurena gave me a hug and so did my grandson Edward, both looking slightly perplexed at my appearance. Laurena was fifty-six now, and Edward thirty-three. Laurena’s husband had died of croup eight years ago. He and I had been close, the only man I knew who laughed at life as often as I did. In fact, his illness became so bad, he knew laughing would exacerbate his already damaged throat and lungs. He got the giggles one day and died in the middle of a fit of laughter. I don’t know if there is a better way to go.
That evening, while the children sang songs, Karina and I sat together next to the Christmas tree on padded cushions, sharing a glass of hot buttered brandy and eating sugar cookies shaped like baby animals. Laurena joined us. Karina and I had our heads close, our cheeks pressed together. She slid another cookie into my mouth. Her hand trembled, as it did sometimes these days. I bit half of the doughy treat. She put the other half in her mouth.
Laurena watched us, smiling. When we were this close, Karina and I made a strange-looking pair, I knew. For the last twenty years, some of the family had asked about it. At first, it had been curiosity born of wonder, but now it was something more akin to awe. The older one became, the greater one valued the vibrancy of youth.
“You are so lucky, mama,” Laurena said. There was genuine jealousy in her voice, the kind a woman can only have for another woman. “Papa is so good to you.”
“We’re good to each other,” I told her, kissing Karina on the cheek.
“Then you’re both fortunate.”
“Yes,” Kari said, “we are.”
Laurena stared at me the way she and her brother had for the last twelve years or so. “It’s so strange to be older than you, Papa. You look young enough to be my son.”
“You’re not older than me, young lady. And you never will be.”
She smiled. “Even looking the way you do, you sound like my Papa. You were really born in 1274?”
“In July.”
“Have you ever met another like you?”
“No. I’ve never even heard of another.” I did not need to ask her if she still kept my secret. No one in the Montero family would ever divulge my nature.
“Now I truly understand why you and Mama have moved so often.”
“Your father,” Kari said, “waited too long once. Rumors had begun to circulate about the magician, and people were truly frightened.”
I took her hand and kissed it. “You were right, Mrs. Montero. I should have listened to you.”
“Papa, are we. . . are we your first family??”
“Your mother is my first wife and you and your brother are the only children I have ever had.”
“You could have more, couldn’t you?”
“Yes, I suppose I could.”
“I wish . . . ” she whispered.
“I do, too, honey. More than you can know.”
Karina and I rode home from mass on Lammas Day, she 83 now, the sun warm on our faces, when a spasm of coughing wracked her. I steered Achilles close, put my hand on her arm.
“Kari?”
She pulled her handkerchief from her mouth and we both looked into it. There was some blood. The cloth showed other, dried stains.
“How long?” I asked.
“It’s nothing,” she said.
We had given up making love two years ago, because she was too fragile for such an exertion. She slept in the crook of my arm every night, her hair pressed against my chin, her arm lying across my chest, one leg over mine. Her soft breath glided over my bare skin. She had curled against me like that every night since she turned sixteen.
“Tell me,” I said. “You haven’t been yourself since the new year. How long?”
“I’m not sure.” Her hand on my arm was tense. “Six months or more.”
Heavy lines crossed her face and a thin white scrim replaced her mass of chestnut hair. Her joints ached. She rested often. When we slept, her breath was so shallow as to be almost undetectable. Karina’s body had become a shadow of its former self, as light as an empty box.
She lived in her eyes, though, and in them shone the same serene girl I had seen reading a book of Spanish poetry in a garden at her grandfather’s house sixty-seven years ago. Inside her gaze, I could be with the soul who had taught mine to sing.
We rode home in silence, walking our horses close so we could hold hands.
My darling girl did not see that Christmas. I never saw it either, not really. By then, it had only been a month since her death, and I still had not been able to accept the idea.
The incomplete sensation I suffered during the night, lying in our bed alone, eventually forced me to acknowledge her passing.
The day before she went, I carried her to the little clearing in the forest where we had spent our seventieth anniversary—and many other days as well. After I set her softly on the grass, I reached into my jacket and pulled out the book of poetry she had been reading the day we met. She clapped her hands when she saw it. She took it and I sat with her on my lap, holding her in my arms while she read the old stories of love and loss.
Watching her profile, I wondered: What sort of monster was I? That I should stay young forever, watching the people I loved die? My Karina. Time had made her as fragile as a familiar fragrance on the wind. We could feel it; her time was gone, like water draining out of a cup irretrievably cracked.
When I carried her home, she slept in my arms, the book of poetry in her hands. That night, she snuggled into her
usual position in the crook of my arm and was instantly asleep. I held her close, listening to the night as it ticked away, lying there for hours, trying to detect her breath, terrified she would leave before the coming day.
With the dawn, I sent for the children. Laurena was the only one close enough to arrive that day.
“Sebastian,” Karina said, pulling on my shirt. I leaned down to her. A spasm went through her and she winced. My tears fell on her breast. “You mustn’t cry for me. You know I go to a better place where I will be young forever, like you.”
“I do not cry for you,” I said. “I cry for me. What shall I do without you when you are gone?”
She smiled at that, then lifted a hand, caressed my cheek. “Always so handsome.” And in French, “You are my dream of love made real.”
“And you are mine.”
“I don’t know if I was wrong to make you stop killing, but I know being a farmer and raising a family is only a chapter in your life. I pray you find what you are looking for, my love.”
Her eyes squeezed shut and two tears rolled down the sides of her face. She opened them again and said, “I cry for me. If you live forever, when will I see you again?”
Her eyes fixed on mine. They stopped focusing on me. She was no longer there. I watched the light of her face dim. She had gone to a place where she would be happy.
A place I could not visit.
I ran my hand through her hair and leaned down to kiss her forehead, feeling a burning pressure in my chest. My mind short-circuited, hot and flaring. How could I bear this ache? The size of it was too great.
I laid my head on her chest. For hours, I remained there, unable to stop the flood of memories of our life together, a jerkily constructed series of fierce images.
Until Laurena touched my shoulder, I clung to Karina’s body, inhaling the fading perfume of my only love.
After I buried her, I walked to our private glade alone. There, I sat on the grass with a tree at my back, and pressed my hand into the damp earth where we had made love so many times during the warm nights of spring and summer.
Finally, I lay down and wept, miserable at her passing, knowing I had lost my sweetheart forever.
From Pablo Neruda: “Es tan corto el amor y es tan largo el olvido.”
So short is love and so long forgetting.
Chapter 65
Sunday, February 15, 4:46 p.m.
My phone rang. Hamilton.
“I was getting ready to head to Cha’s place, but I thought I’d call you first. Are you there?”
“No, not yet. I’ll come and get you.”
I kissed Aliena, climbed out of bed, and sealed the door on my way out.
My memory had fully recovered, and while driving to the Valley, I played the last few hours in my head.
Morgan had controlled me with one of the Ghosts of Atlantis, taking advantage of my amnesia and making love to me. She had then removed the ghost, knocking me unconscious. I could not fathom why she had left me with the Apollo Ring while I lay helpless.
Had I impregnated her? Yes, I was sure I had. Morgan oozed fertility. And I was virile, I knew. All of my wives had conceived within nine months of our first lovemaking.
Nine months from now, Morgan would give birth to the first child conceived by an immortal woman from the seed of an immortal man. Our child.
With the portal between universes inoperable, I would not see her birth, nor participate in her upbringing (I felt we had created a girl). The enormity of that loss stunned me.
Because of Morgan’s temporary control, I would spend the next century wondering when we would open the interdimensional tunnel again, and what my daughter would be like when I met her.
I pulled the Italia to the curb in front of Kristina Cha’s place and Hamilton and I went inside. In the living room, we faced the wall where the portal materialized. I pulled Spellman’s cell phone from my jacket pocket.
“You sure you want to do this?” Hamilton asked.
“Nothing should happen.”
I had told him about the obliteration of Atlantis on the drive over, and my belief that the interdimensional grid had been wrecked.
“I should probably still wait outside, in case this pup explodes,” he said, giving the champagne-flute-shaped wireless speaker a sidelong glance.
“That’s probably a good idea.”
He walked out the door and into the front yard where he could see through the windows.
I pushed CALL next to the number for Atlantis and held my breath.
The blue indicator on the small speaker did not light. No curtain of gel began to descend from the ceiling. I tried again with no result. Hamilton re-joined me.
“Want to try Spellman’s?” he asked.
“Yes.”
The portal in Darius’s office was also apparently out of commission.
“It’s nearly sunset,” I said as we walked from Ron’s to the car.
“You want to go home?”
“Yes.”
“Would you like me to come with you?” he asked.
“Yes,” I told him, grateful he had offered.
He reached out and I clasped his hand.
“She’s going to be fine,” he said.
Chapter 66
Sunday, February 15, 5:34 p.m.
Hamilton and I pushed into the house. Slanted light from the sunset streamed across the living room carpet as the great orb descended behind Catalina Island.
“I’ll wait out here,” Hamilton said, sitting on the couch.
I strode to Aliena’s bedroom, palmed my way inside, and sat on the edge of her bed. My watch read 5:35 p.m. I ran my hand through her hair.
She didn’t wake.
My phone dinged. Marcus. I stood.
“Hello Marcus.”
“How is Aliena?”
“Still unconscious.”
“What became of Morgan?”
“I don’t know.” I told him the sequence of events since sunrise. “I’m sure she survived, though.”
“No doubt. And the Apollo Ring?”
“I have it.”
“We owe you a tremendous debt, Sebastian. You and your friend Hamilton.”
“Not at all,” I replied. “As you know, I was highly motivated to bring about this result.”
“Will you meet us at 49 tonight?”
“I must,” I told him. “We’re not done with this adventure yet.”
I reported to Hamilton, “She’s still asleep.”
He nodded.
“Do you need to do anything right now?”
“I’d better head into the station,” he said. “Get some paperwork done. Are you going to talk to Marcus later?”
“Yes, at 49. There’s a meeting at midnight.”
“Am I invited?”
“My friend,” I told him, “you are the guest of honor.”
“Really? I can dig that.”
“Let me drive you to Van Nuys.”
We talked about the case on the way into the Valley. I pulled into the parking lot, stopped in front of the municipal building.
“Pick me up later?”
“Yes, around midnight.”
“Meet me at my apartment, then.”
Chapter 67
Sunday, February 15, 8:40 p.m.
I returned home and spent the evening holding Aliena’s hand.
At 10:45, she still hadn’t awakened. I kissed her forehead, stood, and sealed her inside.
11:37 p.m.
I stopped by BioLaw to bring Preston current. He seemed distracted during my story.
“Anything on your mind?” I asked him.
“Yes. I’m testing our new facial recognition program.”
“I saw your memo. How’s that going?”
Preston said, “I never expected to work for someone like you, not in a million. As much as I love math, this permutation never occurred to me.”
Preston’s statement seemed steeped in hidden meaning.
“Wha
t?” I said. “Running a profitable company, making a fortune, and having a billionaire privately fund your research projects?”
“That’s certainly why I came aboard.”
My spider sense tingled. “Go on.”
“Do you remember the blood we recovered at the Leoni crime scene?”
Lightning striking in the exact same place twice is a recorded event. “Yes.”
He leaned back in his chair. “How long have you been around, Sebastian?”
“Sorry?”
“That unidentified blood was yours, wasn’t it?”
“No. Why would you think that?”
“Listen,” he said. “I understand your position. You can trust me. Whether you know it or not, you already do.”
To play the role was automatic. I had little hope of my thespian performance convincing Preston. His attitude was easy to interpret: he had come to a scientific conclusion. Everything I did and said in denial from this point forward would be behavior he would expect. “Trust you? About what?”
“I could be a great asset to you, Sebastian.”
“You are.” Searching for a way to explain away any suspicions he might have, I watched him reach for his mouse. I glanced at his screen.
The cursor settled on an icon. An encrypted file. He entered a password. After double-clicking the folder, he scrolled down, selected an image.
A picture filled the screen. It was black-and-white, taken on the Marshall Island atoll of Kwajalein in February 1944. A U.S. war correspondent had snapped a photo of the triage tent. I was clearly visible in the background, wrapping a bandage around a wounded soldier’s arm.
“The facial recognition software program you’ve been funding works better than anything the feds have. I’ve designed worms that crawl through everything out there. And there are a surprising number of old images on the internet, with more every day.”
Ghosts of Atlantis (Immortal Montero Book 3) Page 33