by Frankie Rose
“Here. Squeeze it. Like this.” Agatha mashed the small red Styrofoam ball in her hand.
“I’ve been doing it all morning. It doesn’t hurt anymore, I swear.” I was growing irritated with Agatha’s never-ending physiotherapy.
“It’s only been six days. Of course it still hurts. Now squeeze.”
I obliged Agatha, if only to shut her up. It really didn’t hurt that much. Aside from the dislocation, it turned out that when I was slammed into the wall, a small steel bracket had pierced my shoulder. Apparently Agatha had never seen so much blood, but I suspected that was hyperbole. It seemed to me that the other woman had probably seen a lot of blood in her time.
I sighed and flexed the stupid ball. “Has he called yet?” Daniel had bolted after the accident and hadn’t been back since. I was dreading his return more than a trip to the dentist, and I really hated the dentist.
“Nope.”
Perfect.
“He’ll be worried about Aldan. He’ll be back soon.”
“Worried about Aldan? The man tried to kill me!”
Agatha pursed her lips into a hard line and cut me a sideways look. “You have to understand, Aldan never meant to hurt you. Please believe that. I’d explain more, but it’s all too intricately linked with Daniel. It wouldn’t be fair of me to discuss it with you without his consent.”
She was being ridiculous if she expected me to buy that sorry excuse. “It’s not like Aldan accidentally tripped me or something, Agatha. He could have killed me.”
And that was the end of that particular conversation. Agatha refused to discuss it any further. Instead, she told me about herself. She told me how she’d left the Four Quarters a long time ago—she couldn’t stand the way the Reavers took life—and refused to be a part of their society.
I knocked out a distracted rhythm on my water glass with a pencil. “Have you always been with Daniel and Aldan?”
“No, not always. I spent a long time just traveling, seeing what was out there, y’know? I didn’t even know who they were until I came across Daniel one day.” She laughed. “He tried to kill me. I’m glad that was back when he hadn’t refined his skills and not now.”
“How long ago was that?”
Agatha thought for a moment. She looked up to the ceiling in concentration, frowning. “A really long time ago.”
That didn’t really help. “This side of the year two thousand?” I asked. Daniel would have been a kid before that.
“Ha! No, when I say a long time, I mean a really, really long time.”
My jaw dropped. “But…I thought it was just the Reavers who didn’t die. You said only the men of the bloodline were immortal.”
“That’s true. But members of the Four Quarters live a lot longer than normal people. We die eventually, yes, but most people in our society can expect to live for at least a thousand years or more. I’ve been alive four hundred and ten years. I guess in your terms I’m around thirty-six or thirty-seven. I was born in 1601 in Stirling, Scotland. I came to America a hundred and forty years later. I missed most of the formative history of this country, however. We always kept to ourselves.
“Once I left, I did get to experience the Industrial Revolution and the twentieth century, though. And that was a very exciting time to be around, I can tell you. Daniel was in his element. He learned how to design and build every kind of steam and combustion engine imaginable.” She cast a glance over to the dismantled engine that still lay on the sheet before the main entrance, totally missing my horrified reaction to her speech.
Everything had ground to a halt. There were a hundred questions I wanted to ask, but I was too busy freaking out over the fact that Daniel wasn’t my age. He was old. Like, really old. History class sucked, but I still paid attention. The Industrial Revolution had been sometime in the nineteenth century. That made him well over a hundred at the very least. The number was probably much bigger, though. That knowledge was, for some reason, earth-shatteringly upsetting. It took a lot of effort to wrestle free from my weird emotions.
“So you’re from the First Quarter?”
Agatha snapped out of her reverie and smiled. “Yes, the first of the houses. We’re the oldest after the Reavers. Our history goes back the furthest. We were alone with the Immortals for a very long time.”
“And which house is Daniel from?”
Agatha pursed her lips and drummed her fingers on the desk. “Daniel doesn’t come from any of the houses. He’s…something else.”
“What do you mean, something else?”
“Sorry, kiddo. It’s Daniel’s story. Not mine to tell.”
There was no point probing further. Agatha would only give me the spiel. The topic was clearly out of bounds. I groaned and rested my head on my arms folded on the desk, wishing there were no more mysteries.
Agatha laughed under her breath. “He’ll be back soon. I’ll get him to tell you everything. Until then, you’ll just have to be patient.”
Patience had never been my forté. “He’s not going to tell me anything,” I grumbled into my arms.
“He doesn’t have a choice,” Agatha murmured, so low I barely heard her, and then stood up. The tiny woman left me with my face still buried in my sleeves.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Thank Daniel