Immortal Beloved: Darkness Falls Part 5

"It's better, no?" he asked Charles, and Charles made a noncommittal gesture.

"It's better, but you can't really do much, with that sweatshirt," he said, not meanly, and Lorenz sighed and nodded.

"True. Nastasya, you have an adorable figure. The sweatshirt does nothing for you," he said definitively. "Jewel tones, yes? More fitted. A little cashmere cardigan."

"I am polishing tack in a barn," I felt compelled to point out.

"Ah," said Lorenz, and nodded. "Yes, true. But you dress like that all the time. Like a man."

My eyes widened. "I don't dress like a man," I said. "I dress practically. Because I live on a farm. And do icky, farmy things all the time."

Lorenz grinned, which was breathtaking. "A cute little man."

I took a deep breath, then headed to the tack room. The two of them chuckled out in the aisle as they resumed sweeping.

"I miss carriages," I heard Charles say.

"They were so elegant," Lorenz agreed.

I took all the metal stuff off of a harness and began to whack at the dirt with a brush. Someone had been riding out in mud, and it was caked on. I knew Reyn sometimes rode-of River's six horses, three of them were for riding-and so did Lorenz and Anne. Probably others. I never did, though she had offered them to me.

Lorenz began humming, then softly singing a pa.s.sage from Aida. I tried not to listen to the romantic words as I began to soap up a bridle with the aptly named saddle soap. He and Charles actually missed horse-drawn carriages. Here was another reminder of how different we all were, we immortals.

Me + horses = painful memories. I wiped off the saddle soap and started rubbing in tack oil, trying hard not to think about any other time in my life when I had done this. Think about something else. My brain was suddenly awash in memories of the previous night, kissing Reyn in the dark, cold woods. My cheeks flushed with heat and I bent over my task.

Reyn. What was he doing pursuing me? He didn't seem happy about it, like, ZOMG, I met my soul mate and now my life can begin! It was more like he was being compelled against his will. And not that that wasn't fun for me, but still. And I continued to totally resent the fact that I was so drawn to him, found him so overwhelmingly hot.

I'm really good at not thinking about difficult stuff, and I put that skill to use right then. I wondered what was for dinner, how Meriwether's New Year's had gone, what Dray was up to, since I hadn't seen her lately. I wondered why Charles was here, why Lorenz was here....

Why, perhaps I should ask!

"Lorenz!"

A few moments later his handsome head peered around the doorway, gull-wing eyebrows arched perfectly over deep blue eyes. "Yes?"

"Why are you here?" I gestured largely, denoting "at River's Edge" rather than "in the barn." He blinked in surprise, and I could almost see him weighing the decision to tell me, what he should say, if anything.

He stepped into the stall and stood by the door. I was struck by the change in his demeanor-he was usually brash, c.o.c.ky, charming; self-confident in the way that an incredibly handsome man can be. He opened his mouth to say something-raised his hand, then let it fall.

I polished a saddle very quietly, my eyes locked on him. This ought to be good.

His fingers plucked the fabric of the Italian wool trousers he had chosen to muck out the barn in. "I..." he said, looking at the ceiling, the floor. "I have..."

I held my breath. Cheerful, lovely Brynne had tried to set someone on fire, so I couldn't imagine what had brought Lorenz here.

"I have two hundred and thirty-five children," he said, and I almost fell over. "Or so." He didn't look at me, was trying to seem nonchalant, but I'm the queen of nonchalant and I saw right through it.

I realized I was gaping at him slack-jawed, so I closed my mouth, nodded, and worked on the saddle some more, my mind screaming questions.

"Wow," I said calmly, as if, oh yes, gosh, I run up against stuff like this all the time! Only 235, you say? Why, I knew a man who...

"That's a lot," I acknowledged. "All immortals?" Holy moly, our numbers were really increasing.

"No." He brushed thick black hair off his brow. "About sixty immortals. I think."

Instantly I saw it: He was facing the death of about 170 of his own children, one after another. Why would he do that to himself?

"I have tried...." He gave the wall an ironic smile. "Vasectomies heal."

Of course. That's what we do. And he was apparently too self-destructive for the obvious condoms or other kinds of birth control. Lordy day.

"And yet you keep going up to bat?" Clearly.

"I'm trying to understand," he said. That's why he was here. To find out why he would perpetrate such pain on himself, on his children, whom he surely wasn't being a father to, not all of them-and the women he abandoned.

"Holy c.r.a.p-you're only about a hundred!" The thought escaped my mouth before I could stop it.

He nodded solemnly. "A hundred and seven."

Oh my G.o.d-say he got started when he was twenty. In eighty years he had fathered 235 kids, that he knew of. Surely some of them were already dead-disease, accidents. But he was facing another ninety years of watching his offspring die. And then there were all the immortal kids, demanding their allowance, forever.

"I am trying to understand," he said again, and gave me a polite, distant smile. Then he turned and headed out, and a few moments later I heard the swish of his broom again.

Well. I picked up the leather oil and tilted a small bit onto a rag. That had been... rea.s.suring. I mean, not to be all sucks-to-be-you on Lorenz, but the notion that I'm not the worst person in the world was something I clung to like a chunk of the t.i.tanic. And I was blowing my whistle in the dark.

Okay, I don't know where I was going with that-have to stop flinging metaphors around-but you get the picture.

Jeez. All those kids. The half-immortal ones would mostly live very long lives-you tend to read about them in the papers because they're more than a hundred or whatever. And either Lorenz would have to pretend to age in front of them so he would seem normal, or he would simply have to split and never see them again. Either way would suck. But the immortal ones... they were his children, but he'd probably never have a real relationship with more than a handful of them. Or maybe he could. Who knows? Maybe living forever meant he'd have tons of time to get to know each one. But any way you sliced it, it was weird and destructive.

"Oh, nice-looking aisle, guys," I heard River say. Her booted footsteps thunked on the brick floor of the barn. I began to polish industriously. Tack has to look nice but not too shiny, because shiny means possible slipperiness, which is the last thing you want to be dealing with as you're trying to get a twelve-hundred-pound animal to do your bidding. It's hard enough tacking them up when they're not slippery. And sometimes you can't take the time to tack them up at all....

In the 1860s, I was in England, in some d.i.n.ky little town up north. I was there, like, waiting to catch a train to London or something. I think I had to wait another two days. What had been my name? It wasn't that long ago... what was it? England, England, after the gold rush in America... Rosemund? Rosemary. Rosemary Munson. Yeah, Rosemary. Oh my G.o.d-I remember the name of the inn where I was staying. The Old Blue Ball Inn (I am not making that up).

Anyway, in the middle of the freaking night (this stuff always happens in the middle of the night), I woke up because people were yelling and screaming. So I jumped up and threw open my window, looking out into the darkness for the fire or the invading army or the escaped circus tiger. And saw nothing.

But, you know, when people all around you are running and yelling, it makes a person sit up and take notice. I mean, you can keep your head while others lose theirs, but for G.o.d's sake figure out what's causing the shrill screams of panic. My two cents.

Then I saw it. It took a while to figure out what the h.e.l.l I was looking at, but I put all my context clues together and cottoned on to the fact that people screaming "The dam broke! The dam broke! It's coming this way!"-plus an enormous gray slug rushing down the valley, weirdly fast-meant we were all about to die.

I grabbed my jacket and threw it on over my nightdress. (We're talking a Victorian-era nightdress-lace, yards of fabric, long, the works.) I raced downstairs and found the innkeeper and his wife throwing everything they could into the back of their old box wagon. The horses were neighing and rearing and kept almost toppling the wagon.

Much pandemonium. I remember it was cold, and my feet were bare. I ran out to the stables and found about eight horses freaking out and trying to kick down their stalls. In a split second I tried to figure out which one was the least likely to kill me, and then I undid its stable door bolt. It was a mare, a dappled gray with beautiful lines. I had no idea whom she belonged to. She reared and kicked and I whipped around her slicing hooves and looked for some kind of saddle. But most people took their saddles into the inn with them, because of thieves.

The screaming was louder, and then I heard a series of explosions that rocked the ground like thunder, almost shaking me off my feet. I read later that the rushing flood broke a gas main that had then been ignited by a spark-the showering flames had set most of the buildings on fire. I grabbed the horse's nose halter and clambered onto her back while she tried to throw me off. But I had been riding horses since I was three years old, so I grabbed her mane with both hands, clamped my knees to her sides, dug my bare feet in, and shouted, "Go!"

And she leaped right out of the barn into the fire. I had no reins, no way to steer this horse. I yanked her head sideways, my fist in her mane, and she turned like a ballerina, swinging left on her two hind feet.

And we raced out of that town, running through the fire, only a hundred yards or so ahead of a great, gray wall of water that was crushing everything in its path. We tore out of there as if creditors were chasing us and ran and ran uphill for what seemed like hours.

At one point I looked back, and all I saw was the flooded valley and the rooftops of buildings, a few still burning and sticking oddly out of the churning, rushing river.

My nightgown and the sleeves of my jacket were charred and singed; I had some blisters on my arms and legs. But I had made it, had escaped being badly burned (immortals feel pain just as regular people do), escaped having to fight the flood, get knocked around, drown but not die, etc. Most people hadn't survived. Sheffield. That was the name of the town.

I came out of it fine-the jacket I had grabbed had all my worldly goods sewn into the seams and the lining, so I was quickly able to buy new clothes, sell that pretty, lovely, brave mare, and get a new ticket to London. It had made quite a story. I had been victorious over disaster!

Now I couldn't swallow, sitting here in the stall at River's Edge. I was still, my hands aching, my chest about to burst. The clean saddle in my lap seemed like it was mocking me, my pathetically tiny penance.

The other horses. All the other horses in the inn's stables that night. What had happened to them? I could have set them all free, in seconds. They could have run to safety. I probably could not have, in all actuality, saved any people. Maybe another small one, on the back of my horse. But the people had all been trying to take care of themselves, and at the time it never even occurred to me to bother about them.

Or the horses. I'd gotten my a.s.s out of there, leaving trapped and panicked animals behind. I sank miserably into the barn floor. I'm just-such a waste. Such a failure as a person. I couldn't think of words bad enough to describe me. That, my friends, is only one of hundreds of similar tales, tales where I came out on top, happy and lucky and in good shape. Leaving death and destruction and victims all caught up in the dust cloud on my tail.

CHAPTER 8.

Uh-oh. Are you having a moment?"

I looked up to see River grinning at me from the doorway. I rubbed my hand over my eyes and couldn't muster a smile.

"A whole lot of moments?" Her voice was kind. She came and sat next to me on the dusty floor, littered with bits of hay and stains from tack oil.

I bobbed my head with my usual suave sophistication. I didn't know why these old memories were affecting me this way-I was literally remembering them differently, from a more acute angle than I ever had. And it was so, so awful.

I looked away from her, still loathing even the suggestion of crying in public.

She rested one hand on my filthy knee. "Drag all the skeletons out where we can see 'em," she said softly. "That's the only way to get rid of them. They hate the sunlight."

Oh, like I would ever admit stuff like this to anyone. No way.

"Maybe I'm not worth saving." I hadn't planned to say it-it came out in a whisper. I'd felt guardedly optimistic this morning; now I wouldn't be surprised if River kicked me to the curb and told me not to come back.

River was silent for a moment. "You don't believe that."

I shrugged. I didn't know what to think. I was writhing inside, like an ant under a magnifying gla.s.s.

"I think... I'd like to show you something," she said.

I squelched an unhappy sigh. Here was another teachable moment, hurtling toward me like a freight train.

"I'd have to link our minds together," she said, and I felt a flicker of interest.

"Why?"

"I have to show you-I can't just tell you about it." She waited for my answer.

I couldn't pa.s.s this up. I nodded.

We swept a s.p.a.ce clean on the floor, and River drew a perfect circle freehand using some of the rock salt we put on the walkways to make them less icy. An old green candle stood on a shelf; River blew the dust off it and kindled its flame. I made a mental note to ask someone to teach me to do that.

"Now we sit, our knees touching," she said. Just like we had the night she had stripped all the black dye out of my hair, making me look like the real teenage me.

"Okay."

"And we'll call our power, and I'll cast the spell, and I'll put my hands on your face," she explained.

"And you'll suck my consciousness out through my eyeb.a.l.l.s?"

The corners of her mouth turned up. "No. Promise."

"Okay." I let out a deep breath, then closed my eyes and tried to concentrate. I heard River singing, chanting, and after a while I joined in, following along. I inhaled deeply, as if I were breathing in lights of many colors, enough to crowd out the blackness that was coiled inside me, aching to get out.

I inhaled again, filling with serenity and beauty, peace and joy. A leftover tear leaked from my eye as I felt the miracle that was magick casting its radiance over me, over us. Filled with magick, I felt only awe, only a brilliant, crystalline perfection drawing me to it. And then River's cool fingers touched my face. I wondered what she was going to show me at the same moment that I had the nauseating duh that this mind-meld might very well work two ways. Would she be able to see the random and mundane grotesqueness inside me, as I could see inside her?

"No," said River, and then she was standing in front of me, holding her hand out toward me. I looked around-it was daytime; we were outside somewhere. The scene had a dreamy feel to it, but I felt like we were really there. I reached out, seeing my hand take hers as if from a long distance away.

"I won't go into your consciousness unless you ask me to," she said as we walked. "And you know how to block me or anyone else, even if I tried."

I was digesting these thoughts when I saw we had come to a tall stone building, the kind you find in old European cities. This one looked pretty new-it wasn't weathered or chipped. The stones were smooth and stacked together with perfect precision. I heard voices as we came out into a square, a piazza, because we were in Italy-I recognized it.

A crowd of white-robed, foreign-looking people were swarming around a raised platform set up at one end of the square. Flags showing coats of arms hung from several of the buildings. River and I stood at the back of the crowd. I tried to make out what the shouting was about, but I could only barely understand the occasional word, sort of.

"Why can't I understand them?" I asked River. "I speak Italian."

"They're speaking Middle Italian," she explained. "This is Genoa, the year 912. Come on."

We moved easily among the crowd-not like we were going right through people, and not like we floated over them, but just that we went forward and somehow eased our way through. Sharp, strong smells filled my nose. The bright colors, the loud shouting, the scents-it was in complete contrast to, say, present-day western Ma.s.sachusetts.

I remembered that River was from Genoa. She'd been born in... 718? And she was from one of the main houses of immortals, the Genoa branch. So she'd inherited a lot of power.

"Oh..."

I could see now. The platform was maybe eight feet off the ground and had a flag on the front: a coat of arms in red and green, featuring a three-headed snake, hissing. Nice. There were at least twenty people on the platform, and it took a minute to understand what I was seeing: the bargaining, the calling for bids. It was a slave auction. I'd seen them before, in different times, different parts of the world-it was amazing how common slavery had been in so many places until relatively recently. These looked like ragam.u.f.fin white people being sold to...

"Who's buying them?" I asked River.

"Mainly men from the Muslim countries to the east," she said.

"Where'd the slaves come from?"

"All over. A lot of Slavs. Some Baltic, some Turkish. Mostly Slavs."

I was wondering why she'd wanted me to see this, when my eye was caught by a flash of red. Up on the platform, behind everyone, stood a woman. Her back was to me, and she seemed to be directing the order of slaves being sold. At her word, beefy guys dispa.s.sionately hauled people forward. There were men, women, and children. The auctioneer was yelling constantly, working the crowd, describing a slave's attributes and trying to get the bids up. Two tall men with dark hair and eyes stood over on one side. One of them spoke to the woman, and she turned around, laughing.

It was young River, not quite two hundred years old. She was beautiful, with long black hair hanging down her back in complicated braids. A small white linen cap was tied under her chin. Her dress was simple but luxurious, and compared to the rest of the crowd, she was clearly of a higher cla.s.s.