Forever

by Natalie J. Case

  I held to the blackness as though it would keep me from the pain, but woke soon enough with the knowledge that I was laying broken upon the ground. It came slowly, each tiny piece of shattered bone calling out its injury in its own tiny voice until my body shook with the chorus. Blood seeped into the ground below me, my blood, his blood … though I couldn't identify its source or the depth of the injury. My eyes were open, but there was precious little within my range of vision, a few stars, a sliver of the forgotten moon. At times that faded and there was nothing at all. I could feel my lungs struggling to breathe, to take in some measure of air, but they seemed to be crushed by the incredible weight of my ribs which lay in pieces in my chest. I couldn't speak, though all I wanted to do was scream out in agony. I would have been crying if I could only have figured out how.

  My thoughts flickered to the Hunter, and I tried to sense his presence, to lift my thoughts from the rocky ground where they seemed mired. There was nothing. I thought I heard sounds, like people approaching. No one came. I drifted in and out of conscious thought, and further and further away from reality. Time seemed to have stopped as I struggled against the agony.

  I heard someone coming. I tried to make some sound to bring them to me, but nothing came. After a small eternity a face came close to mine. It startled me, so close, right above my face. Who? Who could this be? It wasn't Rebeka. That seemed somehow wrong. It was a young boy, with a pale face and dusty brown hair cut short above his ears. He seemed stunned. I thought I moved my hand to touch him, but it never moved. His hand floated above my nose and mouth, his head pressed against my chest. “She's breathing,” he said. There was someone else hovering nearby. It must have been Racelle. No, the voice was deeper.

  “There isn't time to get her to safety, it's nearly dawn. Cover her, and we'll come back for her tonight.” The boy covered me with a dark, heavy cloth, blocking out my limited vision. Then they both withdrew. I felt them leaving and wanted to scream out to them to return.

  I spent the day there, beneath that stifling cloth, staring through it into the bright summer sky, unable to even feel the material against my skin, save as a heavy weight. The pain, never fully registered, was gone, or more to the point, it had become so intense that I could no longer consciously feel it. I thought to myself that I must be dead, at long last dead. It didn't occur to me at that moment that were I dead, I would not possess such thoughts. My mind wandered.

  I wanted to know where the Hunter had gone, if he too was dead, broken upon the stones. I worried for Racelle and the boy, alone with one of the old ones. Where had that Other gone? Why had he come there? Oh, yes, the Hunter. He must have come for the Hunter. But why? And, who was he? I had sensed no malice from him toward me or Racelle, but who can know another's mind? What had he meant with those final thoughts from the precipice?

  I think somewhere through the day I came to understand that I was indeed alive, but only barely so. The heat of the sun registered through the dark cloth as a distant, half-felt memory that couldn't quite reach me. I saw Jesse, felt him nearby. I reached for him, but he stayed just out touch, his face floating in my delusion. It occurs to me now that I was quite insane, driven there by my own guilt and hatred and the unfathomable pain of my fall. Insanity would be my companion awhile, perhaps saving me in the end.

  Chapter 12

  With the setting of the sun they came, the boy and the Other, lifting my broken body from the stones of the ravine floor and beginning a long trek to some unknown place. The pain rushed back as if my body had suddenly remembered it. In absolute anguish I felt each jarring step up the trail. I concentrated on the pain of it, hoping it would give me just enough of something to make some sound they might hear. I couldn't read the Other, he was distant, closed to me, but I could hear his soft voice as he spoke to the boy, instructed him to wash me and brush out my wild hair. I was being prepared for my burial. The thought terrified me, amplified by the remembered ordeals of a lifetime.

  I needed to tell them that I was alive. I screamed inside, but no sound came. My heart beat so sluggishly even I was uncertain at times I lived. I lay upon some rock as the boy slowly bathed me in cool water from the spring near the place where I had fallen, my eyes open and staring into the night sky. The stars were bright and sparkling above us. Occasionally I could see a glimpse of one or the other. Each touch of their gentle ministrations brought back new reminders of the pain until it filled me and I could almost feel nothing at all. I thought of all the times I had wished for death, willed it to come, wanted it … and now, here, truly facing it perhaps for the first time, I wanted nothing more than to escape the icy grip of its greedy hands. “Careful boy, she'll not thank you for greater injury,” the voice said as my leg slipped from the boy's hands.

  “I don't know if you can hear me, Amara,” that voice said, hovering just over me. He was very close. “I must hide you now, while I see to it that the Hunter and his friends are gone. You will recover, and I will return for you.”

  Then, unexpectedly, I felt a warm flow of liquid on my lip, blood, slipping across my tongue, dripping into my throat. I could only taste the lingering flat taste of one who has been dead, but it heartened me that he would feed me before consigning me to my grave.

  Once more I was lifted, and they wrapped me in a dark cloth, winding it around me, blocking out what little I could see. I was carried to the grave, which had already been dug, and lowered into it. Roughhewn timber scraped my raw skin. Each shovel full of dirt hit the close plank of wood above me, like lead as it struck. I was barely alive, scarcely breathing, and yet I could feel that little bit of air being robbed from me. My heart suddenly resumed its beating, roaring in my ears, the blood pounding through me so that I wondered if they couldn't hear it. Then, quite suddenly, it was quiet. I heard no more.

  For a long time, I had little or no awareness save for the beating of my heart and the furious anger of my broken body. I couldn't count the days, months, years that passed. I was alternately on fire and frozen. I felt my limbs swell and contract and swell again. I felt the weight of the dirt pressed coldly against me. My conscious thought drifted from memory to memory. The absolute quiet overwhelmed me, and I prayed for some small sound. When the silence became too great, I would try to make some noise, but for a long time my voice still failed me. When at last it returned it was small, weak, and I would talk to myself aloud until it became little more than a whisper. I babbled incoherently.

  In one moment of lucid thought I realized my eyelids had finally closed and I spent a great deal of time exploring that little wonder, opening and closing them as if they had never before moved. In another moment I felt the light kiss of air, small and nearly unnoticeable, across my cheek. At times I did nothing more than laugh hysterically at the unbelievable horror of my situation, unable to do more. My thought processes were slow and cumbersome, and more and more what true thoughts I had formed around the fiery hunger building within me. I had not fed in a very long time, and what I had taken from the Hunter had soured and burned inside me, contributing perhaps to the madness that held me. The little that the Other had offered was small comfort against the desire. The hunger went beyond the mere physical need at times, and there were moments when I felt sure I could claw my way up out of the ground if only a hot blooded creature would simply pass overhead.

  Other times I lay quietly and accepted my fate, but never for long. I would sleep, long dreamless sleep where the blackness claimed me for its own. Eventually something, anything would touch my consciousness and bring me back to the fear, the pain, the desperation. At some point I discovered that the sides of my tomb were shored up with wood, and wood kept the cold earth from smothering me. Somewhere near my face a thin, hollow reed channeled outside air to my desperate lungs. I would weep for days on end, scream until my voice and thoughts abandoned me, whisper to myself deliriously.

  More than once I caught myself talking to those I had known as if they were there beside me in my mountain grave. I heard the
m from time to time as well, the sounds of children laughing, the chanting of religious rites, Crenoral's cold and unforgiving tones, Rebeka's voice crying out for vengeance. I saw Jesse's face repeatedly, as the Change came over him for the first time and he fully realized what he had become.

  Sometimes the faces blurred and Adan was Jesse, Jesse was the Hunter, Rebeka became Adroushan, Adroushan became Damen until I was spinning trying to sort it out. I saw the gestures and expressions on Rebeka's face that I found so enduring on Adroushan's. I heard Crenoral's words about Jesse, how he'd given him to me again, and I began to wonder if it might somehow be true. If Jesse was Adan returned to me, and the Hunter was Jesse come back for revenge, could Rebeka have been Adroushan come back? Were such things possible?

  Through it all my body healed. Slowly, achingly, until the overwhelming pain was largely gone. I did not know how long I lay there, how many years passed by. It was many, many years however. This I did know. With the pain went much of the insanity, and in its place was left only the hunger. It burned like a thing alive and apart, until I felt that it alone would drive me from the remainder of my senses.

  Then, he came. I felt him for days before he came close enough that he might hear me, screaming with all of my inhuman rage and strength, calling him to me, directing him to the unmarked spot where I lay. I couldn't know who he was, or why he had come this way. I doubt there was any conscious thought on my part at all. My body had healed as far as it would without nutrition, without blood. The hunger controlled me. It was the hunger that called him, that brought him to me. It was the hunger which brought me to begin clawing at my prison walls, even as he began to dig down to me.

  How delicious was the air that first kissed me through my dark shroud … how warm the breezes that caressed me as he lifted me from that grave … how sweet the blood pounding through the little vein in his neck as he loosed me from my burial cloth. My own heart echoed the flow of that blood in perfect rhythm, the hunger roaring, demanding. The Change slipped over me almost unnoticed and I could not help myself had I chosen to. I fell upon him and drank, all the years of starvation pulling me into the dizzying dance of death.

  I tasted one older than myself when finally, I did more than swallow greedily. He lay beneath me, patient, trusting me to stop. He was the same as the one who had come on the night of my death, who had buried me here all those years before. I stopped and pulled back, licking at the blood that clung to my lips. I looked at him in astonishment, not truly recognizing him, but taken by his age and faith. He was dressed simply, not quite elegantly, the darkness of his clothes interrupted by the splashes of dirt and mud. He sat quietly, regarding me with something of a smile on his face.

  And what I sight I must have been that night, my body covered in dirt and mud, my hair gone long and wild around me, reaching nearly to the ground; dirty, broken fingernails far longer than seemed possible. My face must have been kissed with madness, the last vestiges of the Hunter within, caressed by my own turn at lunacy. I stared back at him for a long, long time. “Dovan,” I finally said, my voice hoarse and hardly recognizable as my own.

  “Amara,” he responded, the small smile growing slightly.

  I could feel the blood … his blood … flooding through my weak body, and calling out for more. It was all I could do not to fall upon him and drink again. I was shaking with shock and need, my heart thundering in my chest. Dovan. The last of the three brothers who had begun us all, a memory from my childhood. I sat back away from him, as if his presence was a harbinger of my end, an omen of my past sins returned to haunt me.

  “Don't be frightened child,” he said softly, lifting one hand to me. “I came for you, as I said I would.” He stood, brushing the dirt from him with a single swipe of one hand. “Come. We should find you some food, you must surely be starving.” He scooped me from the ground into his arms like a small child. “I doubt you can walk yet, and if you can, it won't be for long. I've prepared us a place.”

  He didn't speak again, carrying me through the dark mountain night in silence until his keen, nocturnal senses located a nearby stag. He laid me gently on the ground, and disappeared. He wasn't gone very long, but to my depraved mind it seemed an eternity, and I began to fear his absence as much as I feared his presence. When at last he returned, the deer was with him, docile in his hands. Two small puncture wounds adorned its neck. It was full-grown, but still young, full of life. I all but sprang from the ground to wrap myself around it, riding it to the ground as I drank away that life. My stomach growled, even as the hunger cooled some. My sharp, raised teeth tore at the meat between them, ripping bloody ribbons of it to chew and swallow. I was like some animal feeding in a frenzy, unable to stop myself even when my stomach was filled.

  Dovan pulled me from the animal's carcass and held me tightly as I shook with excitement and hunger and finally tears. I could not make the Change leave me, my face remained that of the monster I had tried to control and never fully had. When the tremors ceased at last, Dovan gathered me up once more and we journeyed further down the mountain. Half the night we went, and I was nearly asleep on his shoulder when he stopped, stooping to enter a cave not unlike my former residence, although with much more elegant appointments.

  The outer cave was small, unremarkable and bare. Further inside was a larger chamber, with a plush rug and hand-carved furniture, strange lamps that burned with a soft glow and lit the room like the sun. Beyond that was yet another room, a bedchamber fit for royalty. The bed was hand-carved as well, its four posters rising up to support the black velvet drapes and canopy. Black lace adorned the mattress and pillows. Upon that mattress he laid me, with the softest movements and a gentle kiss on my raised brow. “Are you still hungry?” he asked and I nodded.

  “I shall bring you something. Rest. Your body still has much healing to do.”

  I had a thousand questions to ask of him, of myself. I wanted to know why he had rescued me, where he had been all those years … what had happened to the Hunter, and to Racelle … but sleep beckoned me and almost before he was gone from the room, I slept.

  I was disoriented when I woke, half believing his coming had been a dream and that I was still in my grave. I could hear him nearby, and I could smell … food. I sat up quickly, too quickly I judged by the way my vision swam and pain I had forgotten registered in my head. He steadied me with one hand and offered me a bottle in the other.

  “I doubt I'm as good at it as you must be by now, but it should be passable,” he said as I raised it to my lips, barely hearing his words. The flat, not-quite right taste of the formula ran past my tongue and down my throat as I guzzled quickly. I drained the bottle completely and handed it back.

  “Not bad, actually,” I managed to say, already reaching for the next bottle he was uncorking. I drank that half way, then paused to catch my breath. On the tray beside the bed was a bowl of dark, rich looking broth and a half a loaf of bread. He saw my eyes on it and handed it to me.

  “You might want to take it easy, child. You don't want to make yourself ill.” I drained the broth, and sat back with the bread cradled to me like a baby.

  I could feel the combination of meals working the magic of healing inside of me, and knew from the feeling that it would be awhile yet before I was up to my own hunting. “Why?” I asked, gnawing on the bread.

  “Which why?” he asked, sitting almost hesitantly on the chair beside the bed. “Why did I come for you? Why did I leave you there? Why did I return? There are many questions. I have some of the answers.” He watched me, his dark eyes veiled beneath his thick lashes as he thought about his words. “For now, let me answer the questions I see in your eyes, the rest will work itself out later.”

  “I came that night to warn you of your child's activities, the one you call the Hunter. His name is Daniel, if that matters to you. I knew he was coming for you. Don't ask me how, I knew. I would have reached you before him, or even before Racelle, but I ran into some of his mortal brethren. When I arrived,
it was too late. You were gone.” He shifted in his seat and I thought I sensed something of apprehension about him. “I chased him, but he got away. Racelle was hysterical when I returned. It was her companion and I who covered you to protect you from the sun, and who buried you.”

  I set the bread on the bed and raised the bottle, draining the remainder in one swallow. “Why? If you knew I was alive, how could you bury me there?”

  “To protect you. Daniel was still in the area, so I didn't want to hide you in a cave where he or anyone else might find you. In the ground he wouldn't be able to sense you, he might think you dead. You needed the time to recover. It was all I could think of. Perhaps it was cruel.”

  “Perhaps? Perhaps it was cruel?” My voice was harsh, more so than I meant it to be. I tried to remind myself that he had come back for me. “How long?”

  “Is it important?”

  “How long did you leave me there, Dovan?”

  “Seventy-two years.”

  I felt like he had kicked me in the stomach. “Seventy-two…?” I tried to imagine all that might have taken place in those years, of where Moira might be.

  “She is safe,” he said. “I saw her only a year ago. She is quite well.”

  “How dare you?” I spat the words out, sitting forward, trying to read him as easily as he had just read me. I was furious, but I wasn't really sure if it was anger at being buried in the ground for so long, or for the way he read me, or his presumption to interfere at all. “What gives you the right?”