Bound

by Jennifer Dean

  “I love you and I can’t avoid it anymore. I can’t even control it. It’s just like I need you, and I have never needed anyone other than Sean.” I breathed in deep from the thought of him. “But it’s so different with you. I never thought this kind of love existed.”

  He swiped away a piece of stray hair that stuck to my face.

  “I could never control it. Even when I didn’t see you, I couldn’t refrain from seeing you in my mind,” he said.

  He shifted his body so that I now lay on his warm chest. I was never so glad to know that I had the house to myself, because only now did I remember that.

  I moved my head to place my ear to his chest, where I could hear an abnormal sound. It was a constant swooshing of beats. It reminded me of hummingbird wings.

  “Is that your heart?”

  “It’s different from a human’s. It beats faster.”

  “It sounds like hummingbirds in there. Lots of them,” I said.

  “It is going even faster than its normal beat too,” he said.

  My eyes shifted up enough to meet his gaze. “Because of the . . . ”

  He nodded once.

  I laid my head as flat as it would go on his chest in order listen to the sound. As odd as it was, it felt comforting to me. Like a nighttime lullaby, it had the same effect and could put someone to sleep the same as a human’s could. I guess a heart was still a heart no matter how different it was.

  “So what are we going to do?” I asked.

  I felt him kiss the threads of my hair. “It’s the blind leading the blind,” he said.

  I lightly exhaled with amusement at the intoxication of my love for him. It oozed out of me. But my mind suddenly shifted back to remember his last words.

  “So is it relevant now?”

  I sat up with the covers still over me as I looked around in search of where Liam had dropped my clothes. I hadn’t even blinked but once, before I watched him place my undergarments and blouse in my hand. I was suddenly aware just how naked I was, and I couldn’t concentrate with the insecurity of that. So I slid my underwear on under the covers and pulled my blouse over my head. As I looked over to see Liam’s adoring smile, I noticed he seemed quite comfortable in his immortal skin. He held no desire to put anything on because he held no embarrassment or shame.

  “I suppose it is, now that we’ve decided to go against it,” he said.

  With my distraction out of the way, I narrowed my eyes when I heard his words repeated in my mind. Against it?

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “Well, I think this time it’s best to start with my own origins.”

  “All right.”

  “With that in mind, I will tell you what I withheld by the river.” I nodded as he spoke. “I’m different from my family,” he said.

  “Different?” My eyes squinted as my mind contemplated what that meant.

  He only nodded.

  “Yes. You see, I was never supposed to be an immortal at all,” he paused, looking at my hand with hesitancy before looking back up into my waiting eyes. “I should have died a human, one hundred and eighty-six years ago.”

  My entire brow lifted.

  16. Different

  It didn’t frighten me. It was just surprising. It seemed like a natural reaction after someone tells you they ought to have died nearly two-hundred years ago. Liam had never told me how old he was and I don’t think I would have felt the need to ask. At least not for a while. But now that I knew, I couldn’t help the curiosity that began running through me. I was like a dormant faucet, perfectly content until someone had turned the handle, letting the water free.

  My eyes shifted around in a circular motion as I calculated the years.

  “That would make you born sometime in the 1800s,” I said. I looked back to him for something to confirm.

  “My human life began on the 7th of November in 1805,” he said. “In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.” My eyebrows lifted back up, only slightly, as Liam stiffened with a cautious gaze as he waited for me to discover his true age. He was two hundred and five. Understandably by his body language he hadn’t been sure how I would take the information. But to me what was a small issue of age compared to the acceptance of him as a supernatural being that moved things with his mind. If you eat the cake you might as well eat the frosting that comes with it. Finally, I looked up to meet his eyes fully, nodding with a grin for him to continue, watching his body loosen with my acceptance. “I was the only child born to Judith and David Lewis. Both socially matched by their wealthy parents, I was the one thing that held their loveless marriage together.”

  How awful, I thought. But I knew that I would be no such person to ever judge. It was no secret that my mother had gotten pregnant young with Sean before my father and she had even planned to marry. Though she was happy with her new life’s turn, it was only a fleeting moment as she soon began to realize the love between her and my father was expiring. Just a mere nine months after Sean was born, she had decided on leaving Washington to move back with my grandparents in Charlotte, when her life’s plans were interrupted by the pregnancy of her second child—a girl. Suddenly with the news of me on the way, she changed her mind, feeling a breeze of new hope for their marriage. But it didn’t last and soon their love once again started to fade. Neither one of them was to blame, some people just aren’t meant to be together. But somewhere along the way—against their better judgment—they still decided to remain committed for the sake of their new family.

  I was looking up to Liam, waiting for more on the obvious knowledge that this his own story was going to get worse. He wouldn’t be in my bedroom right now if it hadn’t.

  “In 1823, just two years after my parents had moved to Philadelphia, I learned of the growing tumor on my pancreas. Though I would have denied it then, I knew the outcome wasn’t going to end well for me.”

  “Pancreatic cancer?” I said. Liam confirmed my guess with his nod.

  I was familiar with the term. My Grandpa Adams had lost his fight with the cancer six years ago. And sadly over the years there have been many celebrities in the news that had unluckily succumbed to the disease. My mom watched Dirty Dancing for a month straight after Patrick Swayze died from it. Unfortunately, I didn’t know many people—famous or not— that won that battle. I pursed my lips to the thought. It was a blessing on how much medicine had progressed in the past two centuries, but also disappointing. We still had a lot of work to go on cures for diseases like cancer. I was curious to know if they would ever find a cure in my lifetime for Multiple Scoliosis or Alzheimer’s.

  “By the time I was nineteen, the disease had started to wear on my body, therefore my parents, affording the expense, privately hired one of the best nurses from the local hospital to care for me at home. But as fate would have it, the woman’s own son suddenly died from Typhoid fever the day she was to start.” I made an involuntary moan at the story’s turn. “She was alone crying in the supply closet of the hospital he was brought to, when another, normally shy and reserved nurse, by the name of Mary, found her. After hearing of her grief, Mary volunteered to take the position instead, until she had time to recover from her loss.” I watched the grin on Liam’s face as he said the name. He carried a fondness for his substitute nurse. “But it was upon hearing that Mary’s husband, Patrick, had been a former guest lecturer at Harvard that my parents requested her permanent service so that she might convince him to continue my education in the days I was well enough. They hoped, instead of a financial contribution, that I could use his influence for getting into the university once I was healthy again. He agreed.”

  I could practically picture the husband and wife as a team at Liam’s bedside, one reading aloud as the other changed his IV bag. It seemed to ask a lot to make your child study when he was fighting for his life, but I knew times were much different then.

  “They must have not known how serious it really was,” I said. “To care so much for schooling.”

  He nod
ded his head in agreement. “But I believe that was because it was hard for my parents to accept the looming death of their child.”

  It was me who nodded my head to agree this time. No, I can’t imagine any parent that would want to accept that. Wasn’t having to bury you own child supposed to be one of the worst things for a parent? Denial was the easier option.

  “I saw Patrick every two weeks, sometimes once a week, if it was a good month. Mostly my time was spent with Mary. She would spend the moments I was conscious to talk of her husband and their twenty-three-year-old widowed daughter, Abigail.”

  Liam touched my face with a guiding comfort. “I, who had grown up seeing the way marriage was corrupted, became envious of the passion Mary held for Patrick. It was beyond anything I had known from my own parents. I longed for that kind of love with my own wife someday.”

  “Did you meet her daughter? Abigail?” I asked. The name felt familiar as I said it.

  “Yes, Mary finally brought her one day. I remember my surprise to see that she didn’t carry any resemblance to her either of her parents at all, except for her eyes. The blue was different than her mother, but the beaming light behind them was nearly identical to both parents.”

  “Did anything happen with you and Abigail after you met?”

  He smirked.

  “No. Grace was always beautiful but it was quite different once we met. We bonded easily but I could never see her that way.”

  That was Liam’s polite way of saying she wasn’t his type apparently. I resisted a grin until I heard the name repeat in my mind.

  “Wait,” I said with my eyes squinted toward the window. He had called her Grace and not Abigail. Could she be the one I knew today? The regal princess with the sapphire blue eyes. “You said Grace just like your—?”

  I looked back to Liam who waited with a patience gaze as if he were following my every thought. “My sister, yes. Abigail Grace,” he said. “She has always preferred to be called by the latter. I’m the only one she will let call her Abbey…most of the time.”

  Abbey! Yes, now I knew where I had heard the name. “So that was your sister you were talking to outside of the school about me.”

  “I’m sorry for the deception, but you can understand why I had to be so evasive at the time.”

  It was true. I couldn’t be mad about his lie because it technically wasn’t a lie. I was actually kinda amused by his technique. “Yes,” I said. My eyes shifted left to right as they began to now process the story. It seemed I had been right to question Grace— or Abbey. She looked older than a teenager because she was. Though it was obvious she was much older in birth years, her body was still physically twenty-three. An age averaged by most recent college graduates.

  “That means Mary and Patrick are—”

  I looked at him with the conclusion but unable to say it aloud.

  “My immortal parents,” he said. “Mary and Patrick Alexander.”

  I was almost blinded by their entrance within the immortal story because I had never heard their names before. From my friends, I had heard about all three siblings but never their parents. Liam lifted his arms with invitation, before I moved to snuggle against his body, laying my head to his shoulder. I had just learned who was responsible but now I was about to learn why.

  “It was clear that even with all that was medically possible, I was dying of a disease that not even my immortal nurse knew much about.” I felt the touch of his fingers begin to gently trace the veins on the top of my right hand. “But Mary never left my side in that final month, even joining in on the ironic celebration of my twentieth birthday.” I placed my free hand over Liam’s. His thumb reached out, to rub the side of my pinky finger, conveying the appreciated comfort of my gesture. “It has been one hundred and eighty-six years and I have never forgotten the brightened anguish beneath Mary’s eyes that day. They lingered down on me until the short gasps from my lungs seemed to beckon her nurturing lips to my forehead, leaving a few escaped tears on my skin as she bid me a final farewell. But just when I thought the end of my suffering was minutes away, I felt a sharp slice on my left wrist. I had but only a few seconds before a new fire built tsunami of pain shot through my body.”

  He sighed, as I tilted my head up to find his heavy bright emerald eyes that were forever in the body of a twenty-year-old boy.

  “Did you know what was happening to you?”

  “I thought it was the last fight of my body, a pain from its final struggle. It wasn’t until I woke twenty-four hours later that I realized it wasn’t a hallucination that came from dying. What Mary had been whispering to me about transformation, was true. It was a rebirth.” I watched as Liam gazed around the detail of my room. “But with my new life came the birth of her own shame.”

  “But she saved your life,” I said.

  “Yes, but a life she wasn’t meant to save. Though it was short, it was destined to end as a human.”

  “Why did she do it, then?” I said.

  I could feel his fingers playing with the ends of my hair.

  “I cannot ever be certain of her mindset, only that of her words to me. She had grown to love me as if I were her own son. The very thought of my death from the world ached her immortal heart.”

  “I don’t understand her shame of that,” I said.

  I could understand the guilt that came from her compassionate impulse but not shame. Shame made it sound as if she had accidently let loose a murderer, carrying the emotion simply from the knowledge that she was at fault for creating him. I felt Liam’s knuckles to my face, rubbing his thumb on the skin near my temple.

  “Do you remember when I said I was different?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “It has to do with the design of our kind. The humans chosen to become immortals, like I told you, are done specifically by the higher beings.” Liam said.

  “Higher beings?” I asked.

  “They are the ones who decided the need of our existence on earth as much as they did of yours.”

  I knew the very description of control on earth sounded similar to something believed by many humans, but I wasn’t going to touch it. I would get that dizzy spin again if I tried.

  “So it’s the fact that you were not chosen by these beings, but created anyway, that makes you different?”

  “It’s beyond that.” He tilted his chin down to watch me. I remained still, listening. “When a higher being chooses an immortal they also choose another that will be paired with them. They are not created at the same time but inevitably one will be sent to find the other,” Liam said.

  “Like soulmates?”

  “That is one word used. We call them pairs. Each holds the polar opposite power of their mate.” I stayed within his hold but lifted my head, to rest back against the wall and turn my neck, to see his eyes level with mine. “There are those created first and then the ones who are needed to be found.”

  “Who was created first in your family?” I asked.

  It almost sounded like the age-old question about the chicken or the egg.

  “Patrick or Patricius son of Burrel, as he was born. He was turned immortal in 1256 England, when he was barley thirty human years.”

  “1256? As in Henry the third’s reign?”

  Sometimes I found it funny the things my mind actually could recall from history class. Liam paused to wait for the shock to vanish form my eyes. It took a moment longer than I had thought but eventually it passed. “Yes,” he said.

  “Where did the Alexander name come from?” I asked.

  “He adopted the surname for its meaning after he was created.”

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  “Defender of man,” Liam said.

  Perfect, I thought.

  “He guarded the small northern England territory until he was sent over to Colonel Virginia in 1670. There he found his created half, Mary, in her twenty-ninth year of life.”

  My body shifted back a little with my neck as my mind qui
ckly calculated, in shock, an estimate of the age difference between them.

  “He had to wait over four-hundred years for her?”

  There was a small smile on Liam’s raised lips as if he had expected the question. “It’s not always fair but our destiny is already planned, predestined if you will.”

  I tilted my head back and forth as I bit my lower lip.

  “Well, I guess if you live forever it’s not so bad. But it still seems cruel.”

  “I can understand how it may seem that way to you.”

  I guess he was right. To me that was an eternity. But to someone who was eternal it would probably pass quickly.

  “When did Grace join them?”

  “Around the eighteenth century.” Immediately I found my interest peaked by the era. I guess Liam could see that too by his resisted grin. “She was Abigail Grace Hammond in her human life, before she married a man by the name of John Bogden. They had only been married two years when the Revolution of the British colonies began. Though she begged him to stay for their unborn child, John felt obligated to volunteer for the fight of independence, for that very same reason. But it was an independence he would never see because he was killed in Charleston at the battle of Bunker Hill.”

  “What happened to the baby?” I asked.

  “Two months later, a twenty-two-year-old Abigail, gave birth their son James Bogden. He would live three days before he joined his father in death.”

  “She lost both of them? How unfair.”

  “For her human life it was.”

  “Has it been hard to live with all these years?” I said.

  “With immortality we all have the ability to let ourselves forget the memories of our human past. It has become like a dream after you wake. The more years the less she can recall.”

  I was glad to know that she wouldn’t have to live with the pain of losing a child for eternity.

  “Has she found her immortal half?”

  Just because he wasn’t in school didn’t mean there wasn’t someone waiting for her afterward.

  “Yes,” Liam said hesitantly. “Roughly two-hundred years later.”