CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The Place He Hates

On the long flight back to the Yukon, Christian eyed Pricina wearily and kept touching my face, like he wanted to make sure I was who I looked like I was, but he didn’t know how to check other than just to look at me. He lifted my hands and laced his fingers between mine like if he looked at my hands long enough, he would see the real me.

Pricina removed her motorcycle helmet.

Upon seeing her, Christian’s expression soured. I suddenly wondered if he would have been willing to get on board the helicopter in the first place if he’d known she was the pilot. “You’re Pricina?”

She nodded. “It’s a pleasure to see you again,” she said brightly. “Do you remember me?”

“I remember something about you. Where are we going?” he questioned, turning abruptly away from her and giving me his attention.

“Nhagaspira,” I answered.

The expression on his face was crushed. “Those people from the village are the whackos that kidnapped you?”

I nodded.

“And now they’re helping us? This couldn’t be more suspicious.”

“Brandon is there. He’s one of them. I believe he has your finger.”

Christian looked down at his pinkieless hand. “I don’t like any of this, but I suppose I have to get that back. Doubtless, he’ll ask me for something in exchange for it. Any idea what he wants, Pricina? Tell me so I can get ready for it. Does he want another one of my fingers? That’s the only thing I can think of that has exactly the same value.”

Pricina sniffed and turned her whole body to face forward in the pilot’s seat. I couldn’t see her face, so I couldn’t read her, but Christian was obviously ten kinds of uncomfortable. Usually, anything he felt was hidden. If he wasn’t hiding his unease, how disturbed was he?

“Rhuk?” I asked, thinking of how Christian and I could have some privacy in the enclosed space. “Can you make me a sound barrier the same way Pricina makes one so that we don’t hear the chopper blades?”

“Yes,” it whispered in my ear. “What sound would you like to block out?”

“I’d like it to block out the sound so Pricina can’t hear what Christian and I are saying.”

“Who are you talking to?” Christian interjected. “You were talking to someone in the prison as well, but there was no one there.”

“Done,” Rhuk said.

I patted Christian’s hand. “Princina won’t be able to hear us now. Look, at first, I was angry with them for kidnapping me. I got over it quickly once I saw what they are really like. She and her friends are desperate and pathetic. I have no doubt that she and the other immortals who live underground have done a lot to annoy you over the last six hundred years. You don’t need to talk to her about your grievances now. You must be exhausted. If you want to sleep while we fly, I’ll watch over you. You can even use me as your pillow,” I offered, attempting to sound tantalizing.

“Right. You’ve lost thirty pounds and you’re offering yourself as a pillow? They didn’t take good care of you if you’re so slim.”

“They didn’t have anything to do with it,” I refuted him. “You did this to me yourself.”

He gawked at me. “I made you lose thirty pounds? Darling, you didn’t have thirty pounds to lose.”

If he wanted to tease me, he should have said that I wouldn’t be comfortable to lean against because of the black sword protruding from my chest. He couldn’t see it. The Other Christian had failed. I tried not to be discouraged. Maybe he’d remember more if I talked to him more.

I pulled my hair aside and showed Christian the huge diamond in my ear. “This is Rhuk.”

“You’re naming your jewelry? How unlike you.”

“I’m trying to answer your question. This huge diamond is who I’ve been talking to when I’ve been handing out orders. I have a larger version of it in the village. I’ll show it to you. It’s my pet rock. It’s very helpful. Sometimes I move matter alone and sometimes I use it to help me interface with many different pieces of matter at once. Do you remember that about yourself? That you used to be able to move mountains?”

His jaw hung open for a moment before it snapped shut. “I don’t remember.”

“Okay,” I said. I’d been pumping him for information for under a minute and I was already fed up with it. If he knew about the village in the mountains, maybe he knew something much more meaningful. “Who was your mother?” I demanded.

“Huh?”

“Who was your father? Do you remember them?”

“N-not really,” he stuttered. “It was a long time ago.”

“Yeah, a long time ago. Not a few years since you last saw them. Not a dozen years since you left home. Not thirty years since you were a baby. It was thousands of years ago. It wasn’t even on this planet. You slashed and burned your own brain. It sounds like you meant to do it, but now it’s time to get all that back again. We have to restore you to who you were.”

“Why?” he barked, squirming like he wished there was somewhere to flee in the tight compartment of the aircraft.

“Because this world is falling apart and you and I might be able to fix it. If you could remember, you’d know that a part of you used to be able to control matter and when you gave me your heart, you gave me the ability to manipulate matter too. Do you know everything that our heart switch meant?” I grabbed his hand and placed it under my collarbone.

His teeth chattered against each other. He couldn’t answer me.

My voice was steady. “I know you wanted to marry me after you rescued me from my father and Dr. Hilliar and then it would have been easy to draw the line. Before that ceremony, I had been a child in your care, and after the ceremony, we were a couple. You would have liked it if I thought of that ceremony as the thing that cemented us. That way, you could say we were married from that point on, but that’s not true, is it?”

I had never seen a person look more uncomfortable as he jerked his hand away and covered his face with both hands.

Clearing my throat, I continued. “Eternal laws are different from human laws, aren’t they? And you and I have already been married for seven years. Haven’t we?”

He turned and grabbed both of my wrists and held me in place so that our eyes met. “It was the only way to save you.”

“Yes!” I cried. My whole being lit with intensity. “I’m glad you saved me. I’m glad that we’ve been bonded together in this way and that it’s something that can’t easily be undone. I want you. I’ve always wanted you. I’m not angry if that’s what you feared,” I said softly, but deliberately. “You were enough of a gentleman for me. I just don’t want to play any more games about what we are to each other.”

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His grip on my wrists slacked. “Stop playing games?”

“Yes.”

Letting go of me, he leaned back in his seat. “This isn’t a good time to stop playing games, Beth. That woman, Pricina, is one of the people I’ve been hiding from all these years. What do we owe her for her help tonight since she brought this chopper out of hiding to spring me from jail?”

I ground my teeth together. “Brandon and the others want you to get better.”

“Maybe. From my memory of her people, they’re crazy… in a bad way.”

“They’re not going to try to cut you apart,” I said, feeling that the friendship I had received from Pricina was real and ought to be defended.

He sniffed in reply. “Might I remind you that they are holding a part of my body? You’re right, the people from Nhagaspira have never cut me apart that I can remember, but that hasn’t stopped them from engaging in all kinds of terrible tricks to try to trap me and make me do what they want when I can’t. I can’t do what they want. We’re not safe with them. Nhagaspira is not a good place to have a honeymoon. It’s a disaster. I can’t go there to be with you. You must know that.”

I felt completely choked as he said those words. What had I been expecting? What had I been hoping for if everything went well at the prison? That I would retrieve him and he’d still be a five-engine fire, burning with love for me? I felt like a child all over again as I listened to him explain that the immortals were only a shade less terrible than the people I’d murdered half an hour ago.

“Beth, I love you, and I’d love to believe what you clearly believe about these people, but I’m fighting a terrible urge to throw your girl out of the cockpit and hijack the helicopter.”

“You can’t do that!” I hollered.

Luckily the soundproofing Rhuk had put up was working well. Pricina didn’t flutter an eyelash at the harsh sound of my voice.

He shrugged his shoulders. “I can pilot a helicopter and she won’t die. Believe me.”

I lowered my voice. “That’s not the problem. There’s no engine in this helicopter. She’s operating the blades with her mind alone. Can’t you see that none of the instruments are working? I don’t know if I could control this machine in her place and right now she’s taking us to the village where, hopefully, you can get your finger back.”

“Okay. Okay. Okay,” he said, pulling himself together. “I’m panicking and it isn’t helping. We have to go to the village, so I can get my finger back. I do need to talk to Brandon about what game he’s been playing all these years and I can’t do that if I’m pounding my fist like a caveman who refuses to understand. I’ll calm down.”

He took a few measured breaths, blinked a few times, and then breathed some more.

I waited.

Finally, he started moving his tongue. He didn’t talk at first. He just moved his tongue around in his mouth like he wasn’t sure which way to move his tongue to produce which sound. “You wanted something from me a minute ago and I became evasive because… I never wanted to have that conversation with you. You asked me if I switched hearts with you knowing that it was a marriage ceremony.”

I nodded.

He looked around uncomfortably before turning to meet my eyes. “I knew. But I also knew that it wasn’t a real marriage unless you proved yourself to be immortal too. So, from my perspective, we weren’t married until you opened your eyes after your father shot you. So, no, I haven’t been married to you for seven years. I’ve been married to you for six months. Before that, I guess we were engaged for all those other years.” He wetted his lips with the edge of his tongue. “I asked you to marry me that day. Does that explanation satisfy you?”

I kissed him, locking his lips with mine and keeping him pinned until he pushed me off.

“I can’t do any of that stuff with her here. I can’t let my guard down enough to do a hundredth of the scenarios I see playing behind your eyes.”

I smiled, though it was through teeth gritted in frustration.

***

Pricina landed the chopper in a cave in the frozen north.

The hangar for the chopper was a secret room inside a larger cave. When Pricina got out of the helicopter, she closed up the entrance.

We got out onto the cold cave floor. Christian’s feet were bare and he was frozen as we hurried to a more civilized part of the village.

“This place is freezing,” he complained.

“Rhuk? Warm up the air around Christian and keep it warm all the way to his room,” I said aloud.

“Yes,” it replied.

Immediately, Christian stopped shivering and the muscles in his shoulders relaxed. “That was very handy,” he conceded as we walked.

The orientation of the village was strange, almost like the whole thing could spin on an axis.

Pricina pointed down a corridor. “His room is that way,” she said before she disappeared without further comment.

When we arrived at the facade to his bedroom, he dropped the blanket that he had been clutching around his shoulders and let it fall to the floor. His eyes were wide as he took in the sight of the shining doors. “I do remember this place. Did she say this is my room?”

“She did.”

He rested his forehead against the gold. “I have bad memories here,” he said grimly. “This was a bad place for me.”

“What happened here?”

“Nothing,” he denied, cracking the door open and stepping inside.

I followed behind him into the room I had gained a sudden familiarity with. “Whatever happened in the past, it’s over now.”

I ran my hand across his shoulder blades possessively as I knocked the shining doors closed with a corner of my mind. How I had longed to touch his bare skin like that when he used to take me swimming.

He caught my slim white hand in his square brown one, a suspicious look in his eyes as his gaze darted around the room.

“This place isn’t safe,” he said.

“There’s no bugs if that’s what you’re worried about. I was just in here before I came to get you. We are completely alone.”

He didn’t budge, not in looks or in movement. He held my hand like it was a snake that might bite.

I narrowed my eyes, “You don’t trust me? Do you think I might be someone else wearing a face like mine?”

“It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“Then you should kiss me,” I said, putting myself directly in front of him. “I bet you know exactly what a girl with my face is supposed to taste like.”

He shook his head in resigned abandon. “That’s how my girl talks to me,” he said as he jerked me toward him.

It was a good kiss. He felt warm like he still knew how to drop his guard when he really wanted something, and like his time in prison hadn’t scrambled his brain so bad that he didn’t know how to handle a woman.

“Sorry,” he said, once he’d finished having a good taste. “I didn’t have those weird doubts when you picked me up from the jail or when we were in the helicopter. This place gives me the creeps and sets off all my alarm bells. We can’t be together here.”

The way he said ‘together’ was as intimate as if he’d whispered it in a line down my throat, but the word itself meant the opposite of what his tone implied. He was blowing me off, stepping past me, looking for clues about what kind of space we’d just entered.

My mouth hung open. The matter in this room wouldn’t dare disobey him. The complex forms of matter in his bedroom were his slaves even more than I was.

But his guard was up as he stepped further into the room. “If I remember correctly, my bathroom is in this direction.” He swiftly moved that way.

I shut the door and scrambled after him. I had not explored the adjoining rooms.

The bathroom was a splendid room of white marble. Plants grew everywhere, even ivy and roses. There were enormous baths sunk into the floors.

“There are no faucets,” he observed dryly.

“Oh,” I said, waving my hand and without words, I opened the valves to let in the water, while at the same time ordering that water to a reasonable temperature.

Christian saw it with his eyebrows raised. “I thought you had to talk to your pet rock.”

“No. Rhuk can’t do anything I can’t do. It’s just nicer to get someone else to do what I don’t want to do myself. Sometimes Rhuk is faster than me. That’s all.”

Christian put his hand under the stream of warm water and pointed with his other hand. “If I’m not entirely mistaken, there’s a dressing room in that direction. Find something else to wear. Anything is fine. We can’t stay here and once we get back to the surface, I don’t want you being recognized for the prison break.”

“You don’t want to meet the other immortals or hear their side of the story?” I asked slowly.

“Beth, I don’t understand this. I don’t understand how you got connected to a place I tried so desperately to escape. I don’t understand how being here is allowing us to be together. From what I remember, these people are not like your father and Dr. Hilliar, but they’re not good. I have been blowing them off for decades. I didn’t know Brandon was one of them, though I guessed he might be when you said you were contacted by someone to help rescue his head. If I’d known he was in so deep with them that he’d kidnap you, I would have left his body and his head with Dr. Hilliar.”

I was surprised by his discomfort. As far as I knew, there was no reason to stay in the village if our connection wasn’t forged. It wasn’t like we could pop down the hall and work the poles when Christian couldn’t manipulate matter.

“We can leave,” I said easily.

“And we will,” he said, cutting the air with the harshness of his words.

Rhuk stopped the water when the bath was full.

“But for now,” Christian said. “Go play in my closet. I need to wash up.”