CHAPTER 44
The black hood got yanked off of my head rougher than I would have liked and the light beyond it had me hissing in pain as it burned my corneas. "Hey, a little warning, douchebags!" I snapped. The guy behind me snorted a laugh.
I was zip tied to a steel chair. "Arrogant prick." I growled, leaning back in my seat and crossing my legs. The chair I was in was a distinct contrast to the room I was in. Behind the window, it was thundering. I watched lightening whip across the dark sky and highlight contours of grey clouds. I was in a personal library. An expensive one. Wood paneled walls, a Persian rug beneath my booted feet and a leather high backed armchair behind a mahogany desk. She sat in the chair.
She was taller than me though not my much, with dark, deep brown hair cut severely to her collarbone and dark grey eyes with pale icy skin. She's early familiar.
"How are you feeling, my dear?"
"I'm fine. Who the hell are you?"
She smiles.
"I apologize. We're not ones to interfere this much." she leaned back, sipped a glass of amber liquid. "Though, your friends keep stumbling into our path."
"I'm pretty tired of the cloak and dagger." I snapped. "What's going on?"
I find myself genuinely relaxed. The guy behind me cuts off my zip ties. She leans over the desk, selects a crystal decanter among many on a silver tray and pours a burgundy wine in a low-ball crystal glass and reaches over to hand it to me. I narrow my eyes but take the glass and sip it, surprised to find I really like the drink. Its dry and heady, like brandy and raspberries and chocolate.
"You seem lost, my dear." She says after a moment.
"I'm fine, I just don't know what's going on. Who are you." I said simply.
She smiled. "It's not so much who, as where." She said, taking a long sip. "Who we are is irrelevant, because everyone is who they are. But where we are? That's a better question. There are some places we are not."
My eyes narrowed and my lips parted at the critic words. After a few seconds i gave up on following her logic. "Look, lady." I said, putting the glass down. "I have no idea what you're talking about. And it's starting to piss me off." I was sounding more and more like Matthew.
"Forgive us." She said with a chuckle. "We're not usually this frank." She takes a drink. "You were very young when your mother died."
"Yes?" I said simply.
"She was lovely, I knew her for a time. You remind me of her."
"Who, exactly, are you?" I asked, narrow eyed.
She chuckled. Took a sip. "I'm a dead woman."
I raised both eyebrows.
"Who. Are. You?" I asked.
She smiled. "You're asking the wrong question."
I thought for a moment. "Where are you?" I tried.
"I am here, with you. And nowhere else, which is dangerous for you. It puts you on the map. But, to be frank, you were on the map before. Accidentally but intrinsically."
"Intrinsically?" I asked.
"Katerina likes to stumble in where her hands don't belong." Matthew's mother? "She's a bit bull headed that way, running into things she doesn't understand to destroy them."
"How do you know Matthew's mother?" I asked.
"Not all dead, stay dead. You should know that better than anyone." She hid her smirk behind a sip.
"Are Kat and James okay?"
"No." she said it kindly, gently, with a shake of her head and a sad smile. "I'm sorry, my dear." She said it with sadness in her eyes I never quite understood.
"Are they dead?" I asked. She smiled serenely. "One of them is."
"For real?" I asked.
She shook her head. "Not the kind of dead that comes back."
Something pinched my chest and the words came out choked when I whispered, "And my mom?"
She reached across the desk and lay warm fingertips across my cold ones. "I'm sorry, sweet Katherine, also not the kind of dead that comes back."
"Uhm." Tears choked the back of my throat. I cleared it. "Okay." I didn't quite know what to do with the information, so I just sat there, struggling in silence.
She smiled again, kindly. Placed her glass on the desk. Poured herself some more.
"When your mother passed away," she started, amber pouring from an oblong decanter. "- she and your father arranged a trust for you. We arranged to gain control of said trust until such time we thought you would be ready."
She handed over a small envelope.
"Who were you before you were.... Not dead?" I asked, the niggling in my mind drawing me to her eyes.
She grinned. "For asking the right question, you'll get an answer."
I waited. She said it slowly, with reverence. "Viera Lee Veynox." My blood pressure spiked and I fumbled the glass as my eyes flew wide. "Kat's mom?" Matthew's grandmother.
She smiled. "I have not been Katerina's mother for a very long time."
"But i-" I choked. "But you-" I took a deep breath. Let it out. "I thought you were the devil." I whispered.
"Yes."She said slowly, serenity finally replaced by a sour expression. "Kat has a way of seeing things her own way, doesn't she?"
"I'm sorry?" I asked.
"Kat has a way of creating stories and narratives. She could convince anyone that something simply wrong was truly evil. And while I was her mother, a bad one, I admit, she should have done as she should have done, and stayed out of it. She always thought herself good at deciding what was good and evil. You know which she decided I was."
"Are you evil?" I asked quietly.
"No." she replied quickly. "When they found me I certainly wasn't good, but I was trying to fix that, letting that little boy playing cop into my ring. Undercover, please." She scoffed "You could smell the uniform on him, he was so clean. But, that was the past. Now, we keep the balance. The balance is neither good nor evil, the balance is... balanced." She sat back in her chair and stared into her glass. "Circles always end in circles. Triscale, infinities, the snake and its tail. We come around, and around and around." she traced a finger over the rim of her glass, thoughtfully. I took another mouthful of the wine I found unusually pleasant.
"It is Kat's bull-headedness that landed you here, my dear, in that chair in which you sit with immortality in your veins." She looked disgusted. "Being treated without preparation. At such a young age. Bah!"
"I'm sorry." I cut in. "Treated?"
She laughed, cruelly, sardonically. "Your curious predisposition to lack death."
She took a moment, to collect her thoughts. I fiddled with the glass in my hand.
"You, my dear, got the accidental dosage."
"Oh." I blinked twice. "I thought-"
"Of course." she cut me off. "Of course you thought. It's never been done to anyone of such a young age, and I have no idea how Katerina managed to find that antidote, after all there are some of us who choose not to take this path."
"Are you saying you're all immortal?"
She winced. "Immortal is a horrible word, don't you think? I believe we're just circles with one end meeting the other later than most."
Something registered in my brain. "Wait, antidote? You have a cure?"
She smiled at me sardonically. "No, you have a cure."
If she was going to tell me this was some bullshit about thinking your way free and believing in yourself-
"You have the cure. And if you're not going to use it, I would like it back."
"What?" I asked.
"Katerina stole it from me very long ago, and I would like it back."
I stared, confused. The beats of silence passed.
"What are you talking about?"
"Come on, my dear. You still haven't figured out that you own the antidote to eternal life?"
I slowly reached beneath Matthew's letterman jacket, and pulled out the silver chain, the glittering emerald hanging off the end and sparkling in the warm, low lighting. She smiled at me, the same smile parents give their kids when they say something like "momma, look, the sun is out."
"Circles." She said with a smile, tracing her finger around the rim of the glass. "Circles, circles, circles. Where it begins," she nodded at the necklace "-it shall end." She met my eyes with hers and smiled and cocked her head.
"I don't-" I started.
"Of course you don't." she said. "Heat, my dear, heat."
"What?" I deadpanned.
"I'm going to assume you don't know biochemical physics. That necklace? Pop it in the oven, turn the heat up high. After a minute it'll start to smoke. Open the door and breath in, deeply. The compounds will get in your lungs and spread to your blood. And the virus will get into your system. The easiest way to insert genetic code is through a virus- it worms itself into your cells and inserts an RNA strand. That's what viruses do, they make your own cellular reproductive system betray you. Which is what aging is, my dear. The chemical bonds in your DNA are weak, and as the DNA is reproduced, cell by cell, that weakening continues. It leads to trivial things- wrinkles, a lack of melanin production. But those trivial things lead to death. We found a way to recode the genome, to remove that weakness. Cells reproduce un-endingly. And their life span after host death is extraordinary, giving the host the ability to revive him or herself from mortal wounds."
I stared with my mouth open. I dint understand any of this. She indicated my neck. "That gem does the opposite. It contains a virus which strips the human cells of their falsified gene code. Cells go back to normal." She shrugged.
"When you were in that burning building, you had that necklace's sister around you. That red gem caught fire and the virus fell straight into your bloodstream, and your genes were edited."
I shook my head.
"Kat or James is dead?" I asked. She nodded. "And my mom and dad are dead, real dead?" she nodded again.
"So, what do I have?" I whispered. "After all this, after everything you've done to me, what do I have left?"
She smiled, kindly. "Very little, my dear. I'm not going to pretend."
"So what's the bright side?" I asked on a sigh.
"To live forever is a horrible thing." Her heart broke in her eyes. "When I signed up for immortality, they killed my husband and his new wife after I did as they asked and cut myself from them. It was for the greater good. I've tried to same as many lives as I can, but I couldn't save Katerina or her father. And I cant save myself." she said it quietly.
"You, however, have avoided that contract. You have been given immortality for free. If I were you, before considering the depth and breadth of what you'd give up, I'd take that red gem and breath it in. and then I'd live my life to death a few times." she sent me a lecherous wink. "And, judging by the way you look at my grandson, I get the feeling you have a few ideas on how to do it."
"What do you mean? Everything's been taken from me." I whispered, sinking low.
"No, nothing can be taken from you that hasn't been given." She said seriously. "You barely remember your mother and father, you know nothing of Kat and James. You were given a loving family in a small town, that is a gift. But what has been taken from you is nothing worth keeping or holding onto. The thing about circles is they connect beginnings to ends, but they have loops. In a sense, over and over again. And you, my dear, are a straight line, going from a beginning to an end. No one understands the beauty of that. They all see yesterdays, todays and tomorrows, but they don't recognize the lines they draw. You are a straight line, an arrow fired from a bow. Use it, and fly."
I looked at her with my eyes wide, not really understanding.
She downed her drink and sighed before rising to her feet. She came to my side and took my hand.
"Duncan is a moron." She started unceremoniously but with a haughty declaration. I tucked the envelope in the letterman's pocket and followed along next to her as she lead me from the room through an opulent house. "He's only interested in murdering people. He doesn't recognize the value of life."
We crossed a hallway to a staircase that lead down. The air got colder as we went and I realized I was being lead to a basement. She flicked on the lights and I blanched. It was a weapons room, and in the middle, there was a bag. She walked to it and left me to stare, stunned. Duncan has them in an abandoned bank, not the warehouse your friends are going to storm. He's arrogant enough to believe it matters if he kills them himself. He thinks it makes him a man." She gave an un-lady like snort and bulled back the bag's zip. "I, however, don't suffer that affliction."
She pulled a fist full of black fabric from the bag and threw it at me. It was a catsuit – not the slutty, latex kind. It was made of a thick, coarse fabric in pitch black. Next, she tossed a harder, sturdier piece of fabric at me – a bulletproof vest that looked like a corset that would fall to over the hip bones. She then handed me black leather in a twist of belts and loops with two holsters. I stared at the collection in confusion. "My team will be taking you to get your friends. I'd prefer it if you had the protection of a bullet-proof outfit." She smiled.
"Uhm, I'm still immortal, remember?" she blinked.
"Oh. Right, yes, I forgot. Well, you'll look fabulous anyway." She said with a strange grin.
****
Comments are appreciated.
****