An Immortal in London: Corruption

by Hardie, Bethanie

  “I’m so sorry, V, I don’t know what to do.”

  I took my pen knife from my bag and cut across the palm of my hand. I held my hand out to him and for a second he hesitated. I opened the wound again as it healed and he took it greedily and gratefully to his chapped blue lips.

  I held him to me and felt the rush of pleasure as my blood healed him from the inside out. He was of my blood, he was mine, and I suddenly understood why Gabriel looked to me as he did.

  I wiped my bloody palm and put my clean hand to his cheek. “Your colour is coming back already.”

  “Why…”

  “Don’t ask,” I said quietly. “You should stay here until you change.” I wiped his mouth gently and smiled as I kissed his forehead.

  I stood to leave but he took my hand. I looked down to him, my eyes searching his. “Thank you Victoria.”

  “You owe me.”

  “My life, V, you can have it, it’s yours.”

  I kissed his forehead lightly and left Rainbow’s End and my blood child.

  As I walked towards George’s home I saw a shadow flicker past in the distance. I looked around before I picked up my pace and ran towards the shadow that was beckoning me.

  “Roberta!”

  She caught me as I tripped and held me to her chest for a second too long. Our eyes, portals to our souls, were locked together. Her red shimmering lips parted and I swallowed before I closed my eyes. I stood up and out of her cool grasp as something within me shook me and took a breath to settle my racing heart.

  “I thought that you were still bedridden?”

  “Apparently not,” I said as I dusted the metaphorical darkness off of my jacket. “Oliver,” I said in a breath. “What do you know?”

  “Enough to know that we shouldn’t be talking here,” she offered me her arm and we disappeared into looming shadows that lay at the back of an alleyway.

  I looked to Roberta and thrust my hands into my pockets.

  “What do you know?”

  “How is Gabriel?”

  “I’m not here to talk about Gabriel. What do you know?”

  “Why do you ask so many questions Victoria, questions that I alone cannot answer?”

  “Roberta…”

  “Come to me later, alone,” she said, panic flashing in her calm ancient eyes.

  I looked around and when I turned back to her she was gone. I stood in the shadows and wrapped my arms around my chest.

  Everything was wrong.

  “I am cruel to you aren’t I?” Levi asked as I put on my coat.

  I had returned to George’s house and sat around talking to them both for hours until I deemed it an acceptable time to leave again.

  I laughed and walked across the hall to him. “We are as bad as one another. Why would you say that?”

  “It was just something that Gabriel said.”

  “You spoke?”

  He nodded. Something on Levi’s face changed and I couldn’t help but feel that something about him all round had changed. The veins in his neck were strained. His entire body was tense as if he was waiting for something. I hoped in my heart that it wasn’t something awful, something that couldn’t be fixed or stopped before it was too late.

  “Levi,” I said as I reached out for my shoes.

  “Yes?” he said turning to face me, his eyes dangerously distant.

  “Is everything ok?” I asked cautiously.

  He forced a smile which looked like it could shatter at any moment and litter the ground with fragments of his lips. “I worry about you is all.”

  I laughed and kissed his cheek cautiously, “Don’t, I always win in the end.” I kissed him longingly and smiled. “I’m going back out, only for an hour or so.” He watched me leave, his hands coming up to his lips, confusion painting his face as it took over my mind.

  I didn’t knock, for I knew that she could feel my presence.

  “You come with a life time’s worth of questions in your heart,” she said with a small laugh as she offered me a seat on a rather precarious looking stool, after I barraged her with questions about everyman and his dog.

  “You and I both have all of the time in the world. I want answers and I want them now.”

  “Your impatience is a problem that you will have to overcome in time.”

  “I don’t have time Roberta.”

  “You said yourself we have all of the time in the world. Why discover all of the truths of the universe now, when you have tomorrow, next week, next century?”

  I sighed and turned from her, my fists clenched. I took a deep breath and turned back to her with a small patient smile lining my lips. “I don’t want to know everything right now. I want to know what it was that you said to Oliver that got him into so much trouble.”

  “I told him what each of us knows, at least what each of us should know.”

  “Us?”

  “Immortals of course.”

  “What should we know?”

  She smiled taking a step towards me, and held out her hand. I took it reluctantly and before my eyes centuries flew past me and all of the hidden secrets of immortality wrapped around me and buried them-selves deep within my soul.

  “The dark and the light were not created to fight one another, they complement one another. When one has performed its duty the other takes over. Just as night and day work together.”

  “Why would that lovely little anecdote send Oliver to his death bed?”

  Her eyes became but a slim sly line, and her lips curled up into a knowing smile. “Light and dark, the…”

  “The dead and the living,” I uttered.

  She snapped her fingers uncharacteristically and I frowned with a smile as she grimaced at the motion.

  “We were not created to fight over the world; we were created to protect it, together.”

  “Katelyn told me that when we first met.”

  “Katelyn was one of the wisest young huntresses I ever had the pleasure of seeing. What many don’t know is that we were created as one being, but the light and darkness were too powerful to rule in one body, so it was decided by the fates that there must be a divide. Hence the two sisters, a legend I assume you have heard during your time with the living?”

  “The first immortals,” I answered. “They destroyed each other for power, they forgot their purpose, and in doing so they each other.”

  “So, what do you think the moral of the story is?”

  “Not to trust your sister?”

  She laughed and shook her head, “You wanted answers, and I am giving them the best I can under the circumstances.”

  “What has this got to do with Oliver?”

  “It has everything to do with everyone Roseanna, you will see in time.”

  In time, in time would be too late.

  “So, what is this really about?”

  “You need to keep in mind that the living and the dead were created to live together in harmony and that we were made to help each other retain the balance.”

  “Try telling that to Victor.”

  “You push Victor away because he is dead, but you forget that Levi killed him, the man to whom you return each night. They are both needed, and they will need each other soon enough. It is your duty, as I told Oliver, to make them see this, to make them all see this.”

  “What if they won’t listen? What then? Will we lose the city, the country?”

  Without any warning she closed her eyes and fell to her knees and began to scratch the floor manically with her nails. The dust beneath them creating images that sent chills through my blood. Upon a hill stood I, beneath me were two men, one surrounded in shadows the other wielding a sword. Beneath the two men was an army of immortals, darkness overwhelmed the landscape, fire reined over the sky scrapers, and I stood above all my hands tied, literally.

  She paused and took a deep ridged breath before she looked over her drawing and I was certain that shock hung over her face for a second before she stood and began to contempla
te my reaction.

  “They have to listen,” I said.

  She nodded, “I’m afraid you will have to make the impossible possible.”

  “Will you help me?”

  A smile was all it took to tell me everything that I needed to know. She would help.

  Chapter 13

  Jesse stumbled down the stairs and pulled himself together laughing lightly with a blush on his cheeks, rosy red from his latest hit. “Sorry,” he mumbled, as he smoothed down his fitted trousers, “born a klutz.”

  I sighed from where I stood at the foot of the first stair case in Rainbow’s End and shook my head. “Hopefully there are fewer stairs where we are going.”

  “Where are we going exactly?”

  “To see a man about a cure.”

  Victor had found me on my way home from Roberta’s warehouse of horrors the night before. It had been raining; it was beginning to become a bore, constant sodden clothes were no longer an amusement, if they ever had been.

  “You have been seeing a lot of that prophet.”

  I jumped and turned to see Victor stood beneath a black umbrella, a long black raincoat covering most of his body.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said as he held the umbrella over me and took my arm in his.

  “You’re rather chipper,” I commented as I met his huge green shadowed eyes.

  Out of his coat he produced a slim vial. “You are one very lucky young huntress.”

  We stopped walking and I took the vial from him, a smile steadily building on my frozen lips. “This is the cure for Gabriel?”

  He nodded and smiled at my joy. “Don’t get too ahead of yourself; this is only half of it, it won’t be much good on its own.” My smile began to drop and a frown painted my brow. He smoothed it with his cool fingers and said, “He wants to meet you.”

  “Levi’s father?”

  He nodded and smiled with tightly closed lips. “He said that he wants to give you the other half in person.”

  “When?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “Where will I find him?”

  He gave me the details on a piece of small cream card and left me with a kiss.

  I handed the cab driver the card and sat in the back of the taxi with Jesse. My fear had been drowned by far too many brandies whilst waiting for Jesse.

  “You’re drunk, you know that right?” Jesse asked, fastening my seatbelt for me.

  I shrugged. “It’ll wear off by the time we get there, don’t worry old man.”

  “I’m twenty six.”

  “Three years older than me,” I said with a smile.

  He laughed and nodded, “right, of course. How could I forget?”

  “Perhaps it is because I have been twenty three for a rather long time.”

  “That’s probably it.”

  We pulled up outside of a petrol station, it was half an hour or so away from the city centre. There was a small flat above the shop, small flowering pots lined the windowsills giving the impression of a quaint country cottage. It wasn’t what I was expecting. I paid the taxi driver and walked through the desolate station into the small shop. Apart from being empty and sorely lacking business, it was well kept, as one might expect to find a petrol station, it was nothing special.

  The young man behind the desk looked up as I entered, his eyes played over me and he kept them fixed on me as I walked to him, Jesse by my side.

  “Hi,” I said quietly. “I’m looking for Marcus.”

  “You’d be surprised how many people are looking for Marcus.”

  His voice was dark and almost as seductive as his son’s, his accent was a blend of a thousand cities. Looking closer I could see beneath the wig and the contacts. He had probably spent most of his life on the run, hiding from Levi, ancient enemies, and most probably himself.

  I held out my hand and my fear from earlier vanished. “Victoria Roseanna Jewels.”

  “What name is he using these days?”

  “Levi.”

  He looked mildly amused, as if a joke had been told before I walked in to the room.

  “The third son of Jacob’s twelve,” Jesse said, fingering the cross around his neck with a smile tainted with embarrassment.

  “You are far more beautiful than Victor said. He never was one with words, Levi was always much more confident in rhetoric. My son doesn’t know about this meeting?”

  I shook my head. “I assumed that you kept your existence quiet for a reason. I am well informed and experienced in family feuds.”

  He laughed and nodded. “Good. I suppose now you want me to give you the other half of the cure for your maker.”

  “Gabriel Andriacchi, he is a good man.”

  “But my son dislikes him I am told. Why might that be?”

  “I am somewhat of a catalyst,” I replied.

  He laughed and ran his hands over his wig and pulled it off. His hair was of the finest black silk, longer than Levi’s, but in every other way the same.

  Pulling out a vial identical to the one that Victor had given to me he asked, “What do I get in return?”

  “What do you want?”

  “Perhaps your friend could wait outside.”

  I turned to Jesse, who looked far from amused, and handed him a twenty pound note. “Go call a taxi. I’ll meet you back at Rainbow’s End.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I raised my brow and thrust the money into his hands. “I’m sure.”

  Marcus continued his delightful laughter as Jesse left the shop begrudgingly and called for a taxi.

  He turned to me and rested his left hand onto the desk. “I look like him, don’t I?”

  “Painfully so,” I uttered.

  He looked down and took a breath, smiling back up at me. “He was a baby.”

  “I’ve heard the stories.”

  “You know him well?”

  I nodded. “He taught me how to hunt, and he gave me a home. He has been good to me.”

  “Good, my son? I suppose a girl like you could make a man change.”

  “What do you want for it?”

  “You really would give anything?”

  “All but my heart,” I said with a sweet smile.

  He nodded and laughed, “Of course.” He walked around to me and twisted his fingers around through my hair. “If I asked, would you give yourself to me?”

  “You wouldn’t, but I might.”

  “Might or would?”

  “Take out your contacts.”

  He did as I asked and looked down to me, the image of his son.

  “Ask me now,” I said. As his lips parted I whispered, “Call me Roseanna.”

  “Would you give yourself to me Roseanna?”

  Looking into those eyes, eyes that I had taken comfort in, eyes that had guided me and punished me, I didn’t need to think for one second more. “I would,” I uttered, the reality of my words awakening something within me.

  He placed the slim cool vial into my hands and watched my smile, developing his own lost smile, sad almost.

  “Thank you.”

  “You are family after all.”

  I nodded and held onto the vial like my own life depended on it. I had gone so long without a traditional family that my rag tag group of friends and acquaintances had become, to me at least, my true family. Blood tied some of us, and a mutual understanding of the pain of immortality tied the rest.

  “You want to know why I stayed away from my family,” he said, no question, but somehow the question that had been circling in my mind.

  I slipped the vial into my handbag and put my hands onto my waist. Nodding slowly I stepped towards him. “They have never spoken about you.”

  “I had no choice but to leave, I was known in villages a hundred miles from ours, I was a danger to my family. I loved them more than life itself, which was why I sought to find the cure to mortality so that I could protect them. When I returned to save them their mother had gone too. I watched over them until Victor
was killed, which was when I took him in as my own. I took him far from our homeland to protect my children, I couldn’t stay, Victoria, he was too dangerous.”

  “Why didn’t you ever go back to them? Once they were safe, and your enemies lost from age?”

  He closed his eyes and sighed. “That is something that only a parent could understand.”

  As he opened his eyes he caught my own and his brow furrowed. I cannot say what he saw, but somehow he saw the truth, he saw something that I had kept hidden, forced myself to forget.

  He pushed himself from the counter and put his hand onto my shoulder. “Victor hasn’t told me the whole story has he?”

  “That’s because he doesn’t know the whole story, no one does, no one alive at least.”

  “It seems we have more in common that I first thought. Your friend doesn’t have much time left, you should go to him.”

  I turned to him, kissed his cheek lightly and left the garage. I was grateful that he said no more, that I didn’t have to think about those memories that brought with them such pain.

  Levi believed that his father was dead, and it would stay that way. As long as Marcus kept my secret I would keep his.

  Jesse was pacing outside of Gabriel’s as the taxi pulled up.

  “I waited for an hour, figured you’d be here. I thought he’d killed you.”

  I rolled my eyes and took out my key. I told Jesse to stay downstairs as I ran up to Gabriel.

  I placed my handbag down and took the two vials across to his bed.

  The shadows beneath his eyes consumed his face. His skin was covered in his own blood from the boils, and his skin was ravaged by the infection. I parted his lips and held his head up. His weak attempts to sit broke my heart and I soothed him as he shuddered in agony. I poured the first vial into his mouth and quickly followed with the second. I hadn’t asked any questions about the cure or the illness, the two questions that perhaps I should have thought to ask first.

  I sat back and watched as the liquid cure took its effect. At first he was still, but his body soon started to react. His skin began to heal, the boils smoothing and his skin regaining its usual complexion. Without warning his body began to convulse as it had done earlier in his sickness. I stood and pushed his shoulders down, trying to keep my voice calm. The force of his fit pushed me off of the bed and I slid across the floor colliding with his chest of drawers.