Regency Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles Book 5) (9 page)

Worse, Anna wasn’t with me.  In the bustle to get me out and the fake Talleyrand mopped up, she and I had been separated.

The carriage ultimately took me to the room and the bed, where I did some more bleeding, and got some more stitches—this time from a surgeon—and drank some more to dull the pain.  Bleeding, cheap whiskey, and stab wounds is how I remember Vienna now, which could be why I haven’t visited since. 

Anna came by after a few days.  She was dressed simply, as a common woman rather than as noblewoman or a young man.  As with every version of her, the description
common
didn’t come near explaining how amazing she looked.

I was really happy to see her.  I nearly jumped out of the bed, but my stitches might have had a complaint or two about that.

“How do you feel?” she asked.  It was evening.  The window shades were drawn and the only light was from a candle.  The flame danced in her eyes.

“Well enough.  It’ll be a while before I ride a horse again, but I’ll survive it.  Where have you been?”

Aside from the surgeon and the housemaid who brought me food and emptied the chamber pot, I had only been visited by serious men I didn’t know and who didn’t introduce themselves.  These men turned up on three separate occasions to ask how I was feeling.  At first I assumed the organization I had accidentally aligned myself with was actively concerned with my health due to my self-evident heroics, but now I was beginning to think otherwise.  These were not happy, grateful men.  Confused, displeased, and possibly constipated was how I would describe their demeanor.

Anna sat on the bed and put her hand on my forehead.  “No fever,” she said.  “Your eyes are clear.  You’re sober?”

“I am.”  I ran out of alcohol the day before and nobody had brought me a new bottle, but I wasn’t going to tell her that.

“Good, because we have a problem, and I’m afraid you may need to test yourself on a horse sooner than you would otherwise hope.  The pig died.”

“Are you speaking euphemistically?”

“No, Christoph.  A very literal pig.  On the night you were brought here, Adrian stuck it with the knife to see if there was truly poison on the blade.  Though the wound wasn’t mortal, the pig screamed in agony for a full day before someone decided they could no longer stand listening to the cries, and slew it out of mercy.”

The poor pig.  “What kind of poison was it?”

“No-one knows.  This organization has knowledge of many poisons and many kinds of people, but they have never seen a being such as the one we killed, and they have never encountered this poison.  It was designed to make a man suffer enough to beg for death. And you… you look fine.”

“Lucky for me.”

She smiled.  “This isn’t luck.  You’re different.  I’ve known that since the moment you pulled out a three hundred year old sword from a cheap leather scabbard.  Maybe that’s why I couldn’t see you bleed to death in that alley.  But… while I have a lot of questions about who you are, at the same time I know
exactly
who you are.  Not everyone feels this way.”

“I kind of…
saved
everybody, didn’t I?”

“You did.  But the man we killed didn’t look like Talleyrand on the day he was sent to me.  We think it’s likely that...”

“Rakshasa.”

“Yes.  That creature likely killed the man we
thought
he was, perhaps some time ago.  It could have been how he infiltrated the organization’s ranks.  And now that they know such a thing is possible nobody is sure who can be trusted.  It seems all they can agree on is they
can’t
trust the strange man who is immune to poison and seems to know far too much about monsters.”

She looked down at her hands, which were balling up the sheets on the bed.

“They’re going to be questioning you in the morning,” she said quietly.

“About what?”

“About your connection to the impostor.  And you connection to me, whom they no longer fully trust because of all this.  And about anything else they can think of accusing you of doing.”

All of that sounded really bad, and illustrated why I don’t involve myself in the world very often.  The consequence of doing a good thing sometimes outweighs the good thing itself.  The number of times I relearn this after the fact is a little alarming.

“I don’t have anything to tell them, so…”

“So they won’t care.  We’re past that point.”

She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips.  It was a whole lot better than the last time she did it, if only because I was more prepared and more sober.  I was about to make a joke about re-opening my stitches when she pulled back and held my head in her hands. 

“We have to leave tonight,” she said.

“What?”

“You and I.  It’s the only way.  You can’t go alone in your condition and I can’t let you escape not knowing if you’ve made it to safety.  So, we leave together, and we leave right now.”

I was a little stunned.  Some of that might have been the kiss.  “We would be fugitives,” I said.

“Oh, definitely.  Adrian’s organization has tendrils in every government in the Western world.  I doubt they’ll rest until they’ve run us both down.  There would be constant peril.”

“For some reason you make that sound like a lot of fun.”

She gave me a broad smile, and my heart fell into my stomach.  “Doesn’t it?  Now get your pants on, we don’t have much time.”

*   *   *

We fled in the night, past two unconscious men—I assumed they were only unconscious—who were supposed to be guarding me.  Anna had horses waiting for us, and all the things from my rented flat.  And she had my sword.

It was probably a good thing, then, that I had said yes.

The horses didn’t take us too far—just out of Vienna and to a safe house she promised was off of Adrian’s radar.  If I had been in better condition we could have traveled farther and for much longer, but a knife wound in the buttocks is what it is, and I couldn’t stay a-horse all that long.

It was far enough.  We holed up for a week there, and then when my condition improved, we disappeared into Prussia.

Anna was right.  Adrian didn’t stop looking.  He kept us on the move for a while, not quite catching up until…

Well.  I’d tell you more, but this is a story for another time.

Special thanks to Sue London for the rakshasa, and also for Anna, who I’m not giving back

Other works by Gene Doucette

Immortal

“I don’t know how old I am. My earliest memory is something along the lines of fire good, ice bad, so I think I predate written history, but I don’t know by how much. I like to brag that I’ve been there from the beginning, and while this may very well be true, I generally just say it to pick up girls.”
--Adam the Immortal
Surviving sixty thousand years takes cunning and more than a little luck. But in the twenty-first century, Adam confronts new dangers—someone has found out what he is, a demon is after him, and he has run out of places to hide. Worst of all, he has had entirely too much to drink.
Immortal is a first person confessional penned by a man who is immortal, but not invincible. In an artful blending of sci-fi, adventure, fantasy, and humor, IMMORTAL introduces us to a world with vampires, demons and other “magical” creatures, yet a world without actual magic.
At the center of the book is Adam.
“I have been in quite a few tight situations in my long life. One of the first things I learned was if there is going to be a mob panic, don’t be standing between the mob and wherever it is they all want to go. The second thing I learned was, don’t try to run through fire.”
--Adam the Immortal
Adam is a sixty thousand year old man. (Approximately.) He doesn’t age or get sick, but is otherwise entirely capable of being killed. His survival has hinged on an innate ability to adapt, his wits, and a fairly large dollop of luck. He makes for an excellent guide through history . . . when he’s sober.
Immortal is a contemporary fantasy for non-fantasy readers and fantasy enthusiasts alike.

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Immortal

*   *   *

Hellenic Immortal

“Very occasionally, I will pop up in the historical record. Most of the time I’m not at all easy to spot, because most of the time I’m just a guy who does a thing and then disappears again into the background behind someone-or-other who’s busy doing something much more important. But there are a couple of rare occasions when I get a starring role.”
--Adam the Immortal
An oracle has predicted the sojourner’s end, which is a problem for Adam insofar as he has never encountered an oracular prediction that didn’t come true . . . and he is the sojourner. To survive, he’s going to have to figure out what a beautiful ex-government analyst, an eco-terrorist, a rogue FBI agent, and the world’s oldest religious cult all want with him, and fast.
And all he wanted when he came to Vegas was to forget about a girl. And maybe have a drink or two.
“I am probably not the best source when it comes to who invented what. For a long time I thought I invented the wheel.”
--Adam the Immortal
The second book in the Immortal series, Hellenic Immortal follows the continuing adventures of Adam, a sixty-thousand-year-old man with a wry sense of humor, a flair for storytelling, and a knack for staying alive. Hellenic Immortal is a clever blend of history, mythology, sci-fi, fantasy, adventure, mystery and romance. A little something, in other words, for every reader.

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Hellenic Immortal

*   *   *

Immortal at the Edge of the World

“What I was currently doing with my time and money . . . didn’t really deserve anyone else’s attention. If I was feeling romantic about it, I’d call it a quest, but all I was really doing was trying to answer a question I’d been ignoring for a thousand years.”
In his very long life, Adam had encountered only one person who appeared to share his longevity: the mysterious red-haired woman. She appeared throughout history, usually from a distance, nearly always vanishing before he could speak to her.
In his last encounter, she actually did vanish—into thin air, right in front of him. The question was how did she do it? To answer, Adam will have to complete a quest he gave up on a thousand years earlier, for an object that may no longer exist.
If he can find it, he might be able to do what the red-haired woman did, and if he can do that, maybe he can find her again and ask her who she is . . . and why she seems to hate him.
“You are being watched. Move your loved ones to safety . . . trust nobody.”
But Adam isn’t the only one who wants the red-haired woman. There are other forces at work, and after a warning from one of the few men he trusts, Adam realizes how much danger everyone is in. To save his friends and finish his quest he may be forced to bankrupt himself, call in every favor he can, and ultimately trade the one thing he’d never been able to give up before: his life.
From the author of Immortal and Hellenic Immortal comes Immortal at the Edge of the World, the breathtaking conclusion to the best-selling trilogy. Will Adam survive?
 

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Immortal at the Edge of the World

*   *   *

Fixer

What would you do if you could see into the future?
As a child, he dreamed of being a superhero. Most people never get to realize their childhood dreams, but Corrigan Bain has come close. He is a fixer. His job is to prevent accidents—to see the future and “fix” things before people get hurt. But the ability to see into the future, however limited, isn’t always so simple. Sometimes not everyone can be saved.
“Don’t let them know you can see them.”
Graduate students from a local university are dying, and former lover and FBI agent Maggie Trent is the only person who believes their deaths aren’t as accidental as they appear. But the truth can only be found in something from Corrigan Bain’s past, and he’s not interested in sharing that past, not even with Maggie.
To stop the deaths, Corrigan will have to face up to some old horrors, confront the possibility that he may be going mad, and find a way to stop a killer no one can see.
Corrigan Bain is going insane
. . . or is he?
Because there’s something in the future that doesn’t want to be seen. It isn’t human. It’s got a taste for mayhem. And it is very, very angry.

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Fixer

*   *   *

Surviving Hector (a short story)

“You can call me Hector. Nobody else does, and I only thought of it three seconds ago, so you will not find anything about me by knowing this. It’s better than
you with the gun,
however
.”
Before leaving work for the weekend, Anita’s boss gave her a file for safekeeping. Now the killer sitting in her bedroom wants the file, and is willing to kill Anita and her wounded, unconscious husband if he doesn’t get it. But if she hands it over, he might kill them anyway.
Alone, unarmed and dressed for bed, can Anita save her husband and herself? Can she survive Hector?

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Surviving Hector

*   *   *

(as G Doucette)

Club Himeros

Himeros: one of the Greek Erotes, Himeros is the primordial god of erotic lust.
“It seemed at first as if there were only maybe a dozen people in the room. They all had their own masks on, and while the lighting was not fantastic, it seemed like each mask was a distinct color. Beyond that, everything looked as normal as it could be in a party where everyone has a matching mask.
"But as her vision improved she became aware of some of the happenings on the edges. Just off to the side of where people were sitting and talking quietly over what looked like bottles of water, there was activity that was so discordant she wasn’t positive it was actually happening…”
As the adage went, when one door in Lindy’s life closed another door certainly did open, but she never expected anything like Club Himeros to be on the other side of that door.
It was a strange time in her life. Lindy’s relationship had just fallen apart—for reasons she couldn’t pinpoint—her friends were asking questions she couldn’t answer, and now a secret club was asking her to wear a mask and attend. Alone, into a private world full of mystery an danger. It wasn’t the sort of risk Lindy normally took.
Once there she could hardly believe what she was seeing. Soon, she couldn’t believe what she was doing. Then she discovered all she’d been missing.

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Club Himeros