CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

Half Married

Christian hung his head miserably. “Are we married if I haven’t got your heart?”

I paused and licked my lips. “I see now why you wanted a wedding. You don’t know the answer to that question and neither do I.”

The waiter returned, and while Christian spoke to him, I put my hand to my ear and whispered to Rhuk. “I need you to find Charles Lewis.”

“What does he look like?” the diamond asked.

I transmitted a collection of my memories of Charles. “Do you think it will be harder to find Charles than it was to find Christian?”

“Yes, harder. Christian is a god of this world. Quite a lot of matter has received instructions from him over the last six hundred years. The molecules know him, his face, his voice, his very being. He’s their prince, but this man, Charles, is nobody and your heart is hidden deep within him. I can begin by finding the doctor who escaped the prison, but if he doesn’t have any immediate contact with Charles, it may be difficult. It could take months, if not longer.”

“So what you’re saying is that you’ll work on it, but I might as well relax with Christian while we wait?”

Rhuk puffed a little air into my ear. “It grieves me to see a greater god fall as far as he has. Do you think there’s anything you can do to lift him up?”

I pursed my lips and thought about it. Rhuk was right. We shouldn’t just wait around.

Turning back to Christian, I saw his conversation with the waiter had made his outward calm return, though his inner turmoil undoubtedly remained unchanged.

“I’ve got Rhuk looking for Charles,” I said once the waiter was gone.

“What do you think?” he asked, strumming his fingers on the table and glaring at the rest of the room. “Will I be your ex-husband until I retrieve your heart?”

I almost snorted. “Not at all. Let’s get married the way you want. Spare no expense. Do whatever you need to do. Put a veil on me. A garter belt. Something old, something new, something borrowed and blue. I’m game. I want to choose a wedding ring for you. Can we do that tomorrow?”

When his gaze returned to me, he looked at me like I was an alien. “All that is really fine with you? You weren’t fine with it ten minutes ago.”

“There’s a lot going on you can’t see. For instance, are you aware that I have two and a half feet of a pitch-black sword piercing your heart inside me as we speak?”

He made a show of looking at my chest. “I can’t see anything that’s not supposed to be there.”

I directed his eyes back at my face with a chuckle. “It’s not made out of matter, but it’s real and there is this constant pinching at my heart like I could die every a hundredth of a second and then live again just because you told me to.”

He hesitated in his reply. He didn’t want to say the wrong thing. “I don’t understand. Are you confessing to a similar problem? Did you mess up somehow in the realm of immortals in a way that’s too advanced for me to understand just now?”

I patted his hand. “Not in the least. I’m telling you that I am uncomfortable and if my heart was in your chest the way it is supposed to be, I would be coaching you on how to fix me because only you can. However, if you don’t have my heart then you can’t. If you can’t, then we may as well get as close together as we can by having our own wedding because there’s not much more we can do at the moment.”

“And you’re not mad?” he asked cautiously.

“I am mad, just not at you. Brandon told me that I would be frustrated as an immortal because immortality is something everyone can have if they want it. If they’ll just stop, think, believe, actualize and achieve. The opening steps are nothing. For those scientists to be so bloodthirsty that they cut out your heart in order to satisfy their greed and curiosity, I want to go to war all over again. I’m relieved I killed so many of them.”

“I don’t like killing, Beth. It has consequences in the real world that can be really complicated to dodge.”

“Yeah, and I was going to be able to retrieve you from that prison with blonde hair and tight pants? You know that the act we put on when I retrieved Brandon’s head would not have worked at the prison.”

He groaned in agreement. “I’ll start working on making you a fake identity.”

“Was my blood bath in the news?” I suddenly asked. I hadn’t bothered to care before that moment.

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Christian pulled out his new phone and started searching for information. After spending a decent amount of time researching, he put his phone away. “There’s nothing. They hid the deaths. They know it was you and they’re searching for us. You can’t stay in a different room, after all. We need to stay together. Tomorrow, we’ll need to change hotels.”

“No wedding?” I blurted. I didn’t give a rip about the celebration itself, but I wanted to make the vows.

“We can fake it,” he said. “We’re in more danger with every person we speak to.”

My face fell.

I wasn’t sure how I felt about that. I wanted real love like the way I had felt when I listened to the Other Christian, not a superficial shower of confetti, but maybe I just wanted everything when it came to Christian. ‘Till death do us part’ was more than nothing.

But I wasn’t thinking well. He had taken my hand in his brown, lean one, and led me from the table. His other hand was on the small of my back as he executed the ritual of paying and leaving the restaurant.

He wasn’t taking me back to my room. He had done that a lot over the years. Escorting me to my room, putting me inside like a jewel being placed in a case, before closing the door on me like it was a lid. In those days, I had to stay where he placed me, but now he was leading me to his room like I was a treasure so valuable he couldn’t let me out of his sight.

***

I let my head fall on the pillow next to Christian. What did it mean exactly to be half married? I was married to him, but he wasn’t married to me? I should have been angry as I settled into bed next to him, but instead, a familiar giddiness took over.

I was getting in bed with Christian. I could have squealed.

He was pulling me close under the blanket and letting me rest my head on his shoulder. It was magical. He let me feel his warmth, breathe his scent, and slip my hands around his middle.

“You’re sure this is safer?” I asked as I nuzzled my nose into his arm.

“Yes,” he said, sounding confident and controlled. “It’s nicer because I no longer have to hide my nonexistent heartbeat from you.”

“You know, I’m not the least bit scared that someone could hurt me. If someone picked a fight with me, I’d pull the air from their lungs, pull the carpet out from under them, make the ceiling fall on them, and find something to pound the life out of them.”

“I’m not worried that anything will happen to you. You’re here to protect me. I’m the one who is all weak and whiny,” he said, keeping his voice light, like what he had just admitted to didn’t bother him.

Except, it did bother him.

“Do you really have no idea why you gave up so many of your skills? If you lied to me before… if you toned your explanation down so that I wouldn’t ask any more questions… or whatever you said to cover yourself, I’ll understand. Do you know what happened to you so that you stopped being a greater god?”

“What makes you think I was ever capable of more than what you’ve already seen me do?”

“Because of the versions of you in my heart.”

He cocked his head.

I told him about King Christian in more detail and explained his immense power inside my body, detailing how many times I had been shot and how I couldn’t feel the bullets. Then I told him about the Other Christian who had given me the power to manipulate matter.

“There are two more versions of you in my heart. One is hanging by a rope with weird words written all over his face.”

“What do you think he can do?”

“I think he’s the power to manipulate living things. I couldn’t have healed you when I found you in prison. You had to do it yourself. Brandon says he can heal others better than he can heal himself and he can speak the language of the gods. I think the words written on your face are the way you need to speak to a living thing to make it obey you. It was odd. Brandon said it wasn’t a language you can speak. I don’t understand it. If I could understand it, I probably would have been able to unlock that version of you and learn everything at once.”

“What have you done to try to wake him up?” Christian asked.

I scoffed. “Nothing. King Christian has been very busy working on my body. I didn’t think it would be good to have too many of you running amok inside me. I thought I’d let him finish before I tried anything much.”

“Sounds wise. And the last one?”

“He’s gagged and bound and tied to a mast.”

“What do you think he can do?”

“The only hint I’ve had is that it could be matter creation. That’s not supposed to be possible, but what could you accomplish if you could make new matter from nothing?”

Christian looked contemplative. “I don’t know. It sounds dangerous. Here’s what I think happened. I don’t know it, but from what I remembered and sensed when we were in Nhagaspir, this is what I have pieced together.”

I waited anxiously.

“All those people, all those immortals, are walking corpses. That’s why I thought they were all dead. They were people who had managed to take their first steps into immortality, but they should be dead. All of them. I think I abandoned them, hoping that they would all die. I was getting tired of covertly killing them. I have no idea how many people I’ve killed, Beth. Once I came to live on the surface, I tried so hard to live a normal life and stop killing people.”

“You seemed pretty confident when you killed the soldiers who took me captive,” I reminded him, thinking of the one he had shot through the neck.

“Oh, I was. They were nothing. I think I thought that Brandon was a new god. That was why I trusted him. I thought he was from an entirely new batch. It is a shame he is just another one of them. They’re less awful than the scientists we’ve dealt with so far and they’re right about wanting to heal the poles, but they’re not going to make it.”

“What about you? You came so close to death.”

“There’s something I want. Something I couldn’t have unless I brought myself down low.”

“What was it?”

He shrugged his shoulder and bounced my head with it since I was resting on him. “I can’t say. I can’t think of anything I want except you.”

Wouldn’t that have been wonderful? If he did all that so that somehow he could be with me?

As I pondered that, his breathing regulated and I realized that he had fallen asleep. At least, he finally felt safe enough to sleep. Odd that I had been the one to give him that.