CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

That Kind of Love

Since there was an attached bathroom, I moistened a face cloth with cold water. I wrung it out as best I could and draped it across Christian's face.

“Thanks,” he said as he pressed the cloth deeper into his eyes. “That’s a relief. Don’t let me sleep.”

“How am I supposed to keep you awake?”

“Talk to me. Is there a game we can play?” he asked, shifting onto his side.

“No. There is not even a pen or paper here.”

“You’re hilarious. You think I need a pen or paper to play a game with you?”

I chuckled, but my voice was dry and flat. “Obviously not.”

He adjusted the wet cloth on his face and made sure his eyes were completely covered. “This is new to you, but it is not new to me. I have already been through several rounds with these people. The first stop is measuring how long it takes to heal. They cut me, and watch my blood clot a hundred times faster than an average person. Second stop, they drowned me. It’s very similar to being waterboarded. No fancy pool. They just put my head in a barrel of water to see how good I am at static apnea.” He smiled sickly. “I’m very good at it. Third stop, they tried to cut out my kidney. It didn’t work. The fourth stop might be beheading. I never got as far as step four before I escaped.”

I looked around warily. “I am deeply concerned about why we have been locked in this room together. They must not want to cut off your head.”

He took the cloth off his face and looked at me. “I can make a very educated guess as to why they have done this.”

“They’re hoping we’ll get bored and start fooling around?” I muttered unpleasantly, thinking of the camera that was still set up in the vent.

Christian replaced the cloth on his face. “They don’t need you for experiments like that.”

“What?”

“I don’t think these guys are very interested in that at the moment.”

“What do you mean?” I gawked.

“I mean that I have met a lot of other people who didn’t cut me, drown me or try to steal my organs. Those are all new things. Trying to get me to father a child is usually the first thing anyone tries. After all, for thousands of years, that was the best way to harness another person’s power.”

“Does it work?”

Removing the cloth, he met my eyes and the smile that played upon his lips was unreadable. “Does what work?”

“You being a father?”

“I really couldn’t say. I don’t remember.”

“But you remember the seduction attempts?” I sneered.

“I remember the one that struck me the deepest,” he said slowly. “I remember the one that got me. It undid me, ruined me, and made me fall apart. I remember that one.”

“What happened?” I asked quietly, very afraid of what he would say.

“I think it worked so well because it wasn’t intended to be a seduction. A long time ago, a girl was a woman at fourteen. People died young. A woman of thirty could be a grandmother in those days, but this story didn’t happen in those days. All those old customs had died and out of nowhere a man came to me and asked me to watch over his dying daughter,” Christian’s voice was slow and measured. “I refused, but he convinced me to visit her in the hospital once. Only once.”

My heart thumped in a pattern like wild bunny feet racing everywhere. He was talking about me.

“When I saw you, limp in your hospital bed, I was reminded of something very old, something I had forgotten. History was unfolding before me afresh. To me, you were not a child. I remembered something—a tiny flash of something important and it was happening again. I had to promise to take care of you, but I couldn’t figure out what I was supposed to remember fast enough. You were dying.” He paused and rearranged the wet cloth between his fingers. “That last night in the hospital… I worked it out.”

“What?” I breathed in heavy anticipation.

“Love, and it was a love I had not felt for a very long time.”

I stared in wonder. “You love me?”

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His eyes were like diamonds, full of points of light and shadow. “More than I have ever loved anything, and I would not call the love I have experienced little.”

I moved to dive into his arms, but he held me at bay with a single hand on my collarbone. “I have never been brave enough to believe you could love me when I was always lying," he continued. "The situation you and I lived with was maddening. If romantic love has to be like you and me, it explains perfectly why I always chose to love something else.”

“What?” I asked, my voice dry.

“I like the kind of love where you believe in something so strongly, you’re willing to let every day pass while you work for it. This past hundred years—I know Dr. Hilliar showed you my picture from a hundred years ago. Those years—they were supposed to be my holiday. The reward I gave myself for exceptional vigilance.”

“What did you do to earn a holiday that lasted a hundred years?”

He grinned and shook his head. “I can’t remember. It was important. I was important. Not just for one person, but for all people. I can’t remember. The only thing I know is that I couldn’t work anymore.”

I wondered what happened to him that he couldn’t remember, but I refused to interrupt.

“And then that night, the one where I held you, I didn’t want any more holiday. As a matter of fact, I didn’t want anything but you. I wanted you so fiercely, I was willing to take you under any circumstances, even if it meant agreeing to the disagreeable post as your guardian. How could you have asked me to kiss you? It felt like I almost died kissing you.”

“You can’t die!” I exclaimed.

“Perhaps not, but I have never felt closer to real death than in those moments. My heart stopped almost like it was doing a demonstration of what it would be like to die, of exactly what it would be like for you to die.”

He was close. He had never been closer to telling me the secret. What had he done to save my life? I waited, afraid to move, afraid to breathe.

He lazily leaned his head toward me. “It’s one of those days when I feel like admitting how I have lived through loving you so much…” His voice petered off. Then he seemed to wake up again. “I think they gave me something.”

“Like what?”

“Drugs.”

“Like a truth serum?”

He rested his head on the arm of the couch. “Maybe. I felt a pinch when they brought me here. There were so many hands on me, pain coming from so many different directions, I didn’t think one of them could have been a needle. Something isn’t right. I’ve been talking. I never feel like talking.”

I covered his mouth with my hand. I had been letting him talk because he was telling me all the things I wanted to hear, but now he had to stop. “Shhh… Christian. There are cameras and bugs in here. You have to keep your secrets”

I thought he understood, so I took my hand away from his mouth, but whatever they had given him, it was deep in his blood by then. He was mumbling, “I’ve never felt like this, Beth. Not even I remember the way back to my secrets. I leave. I cross the bridge and burn it. That’s the only way I can keep going, is if I can’t remember and I never will.”

I got up. I had to find something to gag him with. I snatched up the housecoat they’d given me and pulled the belt free.

Christian was still talking. His sentences were breaking down. “I didn’t like your father the first time I saw him. The dent in his cheek and the shape of his eyes belonged to his grandfather, but… he was nothing like him. Like something awful had taken possession of my friend’s features. I didn’t want to help Lance, but he knew my reputation for helping… and begged me.”

I didn’t listen to him. “You have to stop talking.” I straddled him to get the belt across his face.

He was still talking. “Did I tell you these guys didn’t cut my hand off?”

“What?” I asked, pausing in my work. I had assumed they had. He said his hand had been cut off by a spiteful man.

“No. I cut it off myself. It wasn’t the first time. It’s just that I can usually get it back immediately afterward. I’ve cut it off, put it in my back pocket and headed out only to sew it back on after I was free. Only that one time, when I rescued Brandon, I couldn’t get it back. I lost it.”

“Stop talking,” I pleaded. I grabbed his head, covered his mouth, and tied the belt tightly. I got off him and sat next to him on the couch. He grabbed my hands and held them tight in his. The fabric across his lips turned dark with saliva. Slowly, his breathing settled.

His eyes went glassy and then closed. I didn't know what to do to keep him awake. I thought of slapping him, but his face was already purple in patches from his capture. His grip on my fingers slackened. He was fading. He was going to be unconscious in a moment if I didn't do something, but I didn't know what to do.

Suddenly, I decided to check his pulse. I reached for his wrist. He didn't feel me touch him. Impatiently, I ran my fingers up to the place I could find it. I didn't feel anything. How deep was it? I pressed harder, but felt nothing. Panicked, I gouged my fingertips under his chin to feel it. Again I felt nothing. Finally, I put my head against his chest and tried to feel it the way I had all those years ago in my hospital room.

I heard nothing.

I pulled back and stared at him in confusion. He was immortal. What did it mean if he had no heartbeat? His eyelashes fluttered and his chest still heaved slightly with his breath.

I placed my head on his chest a second time and heard nothing.

Then, it all came together. He said his heart stopped when we kissed that night. He must have got the idea that he could survive without his heart. I shuddered, but once I made the connection, I remembered more. I thought of those moments before I saw Brandon, headless and strapped to the bed. I had expected to see a complete person, and to be told he was missing organs. I expected the injury to be something that couldn’t be proven in a way that would satisfy me. I would never have guessed that Christian was the one who was missing an organ. My mind flashed to another moment when Christian talked to me about Charles' little love and that some men loved so deeply they would allow their hearts to be cut out. I remembered myself in his arms being rocked back and forth as he promised me he wouldn't let me die.

My hand went to my chest and I felt the heart inside beat a rhythm it had beat so many times. I had thought it was ordinary.

That was the secret.

I looked at him, crumpled on the couch, and thought of that daredevil gleam he sometimes had in his eyes. Eyes that looked inside me, challenged me, and dared me to become something amazing. What was amazing? What was I?

He really was alive when he shouldn't have been.

Suddenly, his hand reached out with electrifying speed and he caught my wrist.