Immortal at the Edge of the World (18 page)

“What?”

“You called me Bres.”

“It is one of the names I have heard for you. I thought you knew it.”

“I don’t. Where did you hear this name?”

He stared at me for several seconds before responding. “I will tell you another time,” he decided. “Can you continue?”

I could, and so we resumed our sparring match. And Hsu never told me the story behind the name he gave me that night.

*
 
*
 
*

I’ve been wounded before, plenty of times. I imagine if the scars didn’t fade after a century or so my body would be covered in them, because it’s not easy to go through life in any era and not end up with some skin damage here and there, even if it’s only the consequence of a bad paper cut.

I’ve been cut by swords and knives, taken a few arrows, and been bitten by large beasts that didn’t appreciate the spear I was stabbing them with. I’ve also been shot, and burned, and beaten. I’ve broken one of my legs five or six times, one of my arms ten or eleven times, my shoulder blade twice, and my nose more times than I can really recall. And I have been incredibly lucky, because nothing I have had damaged has been something that wouldn’t heal over time. I’ve never lost a finger, or an eye, or had to deal with a spinal injury.

I was not thinking about how lucky I was as the car took us back to the airport, though. I was thinking my stomach was about to spill out on the floor. I trusted Mirella’s opinion that the wound hadn’t been deep enough for this to happen, but only a little bit. Once the adrenaline left and the shock hit I was in significant pain, and it’s hard to be reasonable when you reach that point.

The car we were in was the car we had hired to bring us from the airport to the museum in the first place. The driver had not disappeared entirely, but only relocated to another street after being told by “a man with an American accent” that he couldn’t park where he was. There was a story behind this that I made Mirella promise to get from him after I was safely aboard the plane.

“We should go to the hospital,” she said quietly. It was the third time she’d said it, possibly because she had nothing else to say. Her arm was around my shoulders while I had my hands on my stomach to try and keep the bleeding from being too obvious. I would have balled up my sports jacket to help with this—it was sitting on the seat next to me—but I wasn’t going to risk damaging the letter still in the pocket of the jacket. It would have been a terrible irony to go through all this trouble only to bleed on the letter and render it unreadable. Then I thought of Mr. Acar’s clean room and the gloves he made us wear and I nearly laughed out loud.

“I told you,” I said, “drugs don’t work on me, so we can sew this up ourselves or you can put me in the position of answering a ton of questions from somebody in the medical profession. Neither of us wants that.”

“It will hurt.”

“It already does. And it won’t hurt less if a doctor does it. You’ve stitched a wound before.”

“How do you know?”

“Lucky guess.”

She looked out the window. I couldn’t really see much of the city from my position, crouched in the back and leaning on her, but I couldn’t imagine I would much like what I saw. “Tell me why drugs don’t work on you?” she asked.

“I don’t know. I can’t get sick, and I can’t be poisoned, and I think those things are related to drugs not having an effect.”

“And you’re over a thousand years old, you say.”

“Yes.”

“How much more?”

“Why?”

“If you bleed to death I want to know what to carve on your gravestone.”

“I don’t know how old I am.”

“Ah. That’s all right. I don’t know what name to put on it.” She poked her head up and looked around as the car came to a stop. “We’re here.”

*
 
*
 
*

Getting your stomach stitched up with nothing to dull the pain but hard liquor is exactly as fun as it sounds. And since I have an obscenely high tolerance for alcohol—Clara called me a high-functioning alcoholic and she was probably right—it was a little while before I even felt drunk enough to let Mirella tie me down and start stitching. The only good thing about the alcohol was that it made it easier for me to pass out when the pain got to be too bad.

I was down for about ten hours. Since I’d left no instructions regarding where the plane was supposed to go next we stayed at the airport. When I came to, I found Mirella at the desk on my computer, the video of Eve’s disappearing act paused on the television, and the skyline of Istanbul out the window.

“You need to restock your commissary,” she said when she saw me staring at her. “There is only a few more days’ worth of food in there. If you were thinking about living on this plane for a while we may need to plan for pizza delivery at wherever we end up.”

“How’s the alcohol?” I asked.

“There’s still plenty of that. But if you want some you’ll have to get up yourself to retrieve it.”

I tried to do just that and realized my belly was sewn to my thighs. Or that’s how it felt.

“Maybe I should stay here instead.”

“That’s a good idea. I can get you some water if you’re thirsty.”

“Water would be lovely.”

She got up and handed me a bottle of water, and I noticed she was wearing a light dress instead of her usual ready-for-action tight-fitting clothing. It was like seeing a police officer off-duty.

I also noticed her wince when she stood.

“Don’t worry, I can still protect you while wearing a dress,” she said, noting my observation. “I didn’t expect us to be going anywhere for some time.”

“I saw you kill a demon yesterday. I’m not worried. And you’re injured.”

“You say it like killing one is difficult. And I’m just bruised. He caught me with a backhand.”

“Last time I saw someone kill a demon in single combat the winner was a six-hundred-year-old vampire. And that was also the only time.”

She shook her head as if this was the silliest thing she’d ever heard. “The mistake is trying to match their force with your own force. But demons are slow and angry, and rely on their presumption of invincibility too much. Stick them in the right places and they’ll fall, just like anybody else.”

She sat back down at the computer and continued doing whatever it was she was doing, while I fought the urge to fall in love with her.

“So are you playing solitaire on that or what?” I asked.

“I had thought that while you were out I might use the time to figure out who you actually are.”

“On my password-protected computer?”

She laughed. “You picked a very good password, but you shouldn’t have written it down.”

“I was told to change it monthly by some people who know more about those things than I do. I didn’t want to forget it. And it was written down on a piece of paper in my wallet.”

“So it was. And your wallet is on the desk here. I had to take it out of your pants to pay the driver. Then the flight crew asked for some walking-around money so I gave them some cash, too. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

“No, that sounds like about what I’d do.”

“I know. It’s what you did in Tbilisi.”

“And then you happened upon my password.”

“Yes. Unfortunately you have the least interesting personal computer I have ever seen.”

I imagine I should have been upset that she was looking through my computer, but I’m still not used to the idea of electronic contents of a computer—or a phone—being something that belongs to me, in the same sense that the things in my wallet or my pockets belong to me. I say this even though with that computer she could probably steal a ton of my money if she wanted to. “What were you looking for?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. Something that would help some of this make sense.”

“You could have waited for me to wake up and then asked.”

“I’m impatient.”

“I see that. I’m mostly interested in why I’m still alive.”

“Because I should have taken you to a hospital?”

“No, not that. I mean taking on the goblin.”

“You fight very well for a human,” she said. “Especially for one as old as you seem to think you are. That goblin was surprised, I’m sure.”

“He hesitated. It was only for a second or two but when I run through it in my mind . . . if Iza hadn’t popped him in the eye just then I’m not sure he would have finished off that blow. I don’t think he was there to kill me.”

“You have stitches that say otherwise.”

“That’s another thing. I’m wondering if the severity of this wound was intentional. I think he short-armed it on purpose.”

Mirella smiled and leaned back in the chair. “Actually, I agree, and I’ve been wondering the same thing. If the goblin wanted to kill you he could have done it without engaging you directly at all. And whoever was responsible for those two being there could have done one better and just planted a man with a rifle in the woods to shoot you when we walked outside.”

I thought about the scene again, because she was right. Assuming the people who sent the demon and the goblin were the same bunch that had visited Tchekhy—this seemed like a good assumption—they had been following me for a while. Changing up suddenly and jumping me on an Istanbul street didn’t really make a lot of sense.

But then I didn’t know why they were bothering to follow me at all. I was starting to get a notion of who was doing the following, though.

“You talked to the driver about who asked him to move the car?” I asked. We had possibly already had this conversation prior to my getting stitched up, but I couldn’t remember, for pretty obvious reasons.

“He gave a description that fit nearly every white American male in the world. He could have been describing you.”

“I’m not technically American.”

“I realize that, but the point is the same. We’re looking for a white man with dark hair, thin, and your height, who speaks Turkish but with an American accent. That’s a largely useless description.”

“That might be intentional.”

“You mean this was an intentionally bland person? I don’t think you can decide to be bland.”

“I often strive to be bland and forgettable. It’s a lot easier to disappear into the background that way.”

“Then you’re failing miserably.”

“I’m not sure how to take that.”

“Take it however you like. But what’s your point?”

“You were watching the tape,” I said, pointing to the television.

“I was. You have no movies and I can’t seem to get a decent television program to come through, so I watched this instead. Stop changing the subject.”

“I’m not. This video was sent to me by someone with access to the footage and an awareness of who I was
and
what this footage would mean to me. I know only one person who fits all that criteria, and he swears he knows nothing about it. So I think it was sent by the same people following me now. And I think those people might be the CIA.”

“You think the US government is secretly following you around the world?” Mirella asked, in a tone that suggested something less drastic than full-on disbelief.

“All the pieces fit, yeah.” That was only sort-of true. The pieces fit, but the pieces could have fit to form a picture of another large secret government apparatus belonging to a different country. I never learned who Bob Grindel was in bed with financially, so it was entirely possible the owners of that footage were Mossad or whatever took the place of the KGB, or some group I never heard of. That was always the problem with secret organizations—they tended to be secret.

But CIA seemed right. That was clearly what Mike thought, even if he wasn’t prepared to say so explicitly over the phone.

“This sounds paranoid,” she said. “And I would have said as much a week ago. But between your Russian friend not trying to kill you with a rifle and the CIA not trying to kill you with a goblin, I’m ready to accept just about anything. But why would they? Who are you to them?”

“I don’t know.”

She got up, grumbling something I couldn’t quite catch that might have been about me. “You have this video of a woman vanishing, you have the government chasing you but not interested in catching you, there is a damned tame pixie flying around this room, you killed a goblin in single combat with a sword, and you are over a thousand years old.”

“That’s about right.”

“No more secrets.” She tossed the envelope holding the letter I’d stolen from the Istanbul museum onto the bed next to me. “Tell me everything, starting with what this is a drawing of and why it’s so important to you. And if you think you need to hold back a detail because it’s something I might not believe, don’t bother. I’m already standing on the other side of the looking glass.”

I opened the envelope and unfolded the letter. It felt wrong to touch it without gloves on, but I wasn’t ever returning it to the museum so it didn’t really matter.

Briefly, I wondered if Mr. Acar was still alive, and whether this was something I should check on. If they had killed him, the prime suspect was the billionaire who was last seen with him. I’ve found that it’s always useful to know in what part of the world one is wanted by the authorities so one can avoid that part of the world, so it was something worth knowing.