Immortal chains, your tethered plea,
Only when found, will you be free.
Brigan had stumbled through the next several weeks, his unfamiliar body sore and unwieldy, his devastation and guilt over the loss of his wife as raw and exposed as the festering hole he swore had been put in his torso but which had immediately sealed up to reveal nothing but a perfect, unmarred chest.
He had hurled himself from the top of a cliff, thrown himself in front of a stampede. He had paid a man to shoot an arrow through his neck, swallowed a vial of poison. And nothing had ended his misery.
You shall see her again,a fortune teller had assured him after he’d dropped five stolen coins into her palm, months after Annora’s murder and Brigan’s subsequent purgatory, when he crawled, disoriented and confused, feeling like he might go out of his head trying to interpret the sorceress’s riddle.But it will be many lifetimes before she finds you.
So, he’d waited those many lifetimes. First two, then three, and after five interminable centuries, he had finally given up. Time passed, time that could be measured in generations, where he wandered the world growing increasingly bored and impatient, amassing wealth, bedding women, and feeling nothing but physical sensation, filling his body with every drug and concoction meant to make him forget—though none of them did—until the very last time he’d tried to be found, only a handful of decades ago. Moving pictures had been invented, and a tiny well of hope had bubbled up inside him.
Brigan had walked into the MGM offices and compelled the security guard to take him to the executive offices. He’d compelled the president’s secretary to let him in to see the president. He’d compelled the president of MGM to cast him in his biggest project to date.
And so he had.
Brigan had acted beautifully, he thought—and Hollywood apparently agreed: He’d been awarded an Oscar. Posthumously, of course, since only three months after the film came out to enormous commercial success, Michael Minnow had died. Which is to say that Brigan had faked his own death and vanished back into obscurity, waiting with certainty for that one person to emerge, the one person who would see the film and see him. For decades he’d gotten scores of passersby stopping him in the street, telling him,“You, sir, has anyone ever told you that you look just like that old actor Michael Minnow?”
But for all the millions of humans who had seen the film, no one, not a soul in nearly seventy years, had ever publicly declared,That is no mortal man! Does no one else see what I see?
And he only needed one soul to wonder it aloud, one soul toseehim, and the curse would be broken: His heart would shake off the eternal winter and begin to beat, his blood would run hot in his veins. The clock on his life would commence mercifully counting down, the way it was always meant to. He would no longer live forever, but he would never be alone again.
“Well, that is a perfect Halloween story,” Cat said, bringing him back to the present.
“Quite.” Brigan drained his drink and set the glass down. He met her eyes. This had been, without question, the best night of his existence. He hadn’t heard his own laugh in centuries. And he had to let it all go. “My darling, now is when I leave you.”
She quickly shook her head. “But I have one question left.”
Brigan held up five fingers, ticking each down one at a time. “How old am I, what powers do I have, what did I try to compel you to do, am I going to kill you, what manner of monster am I.” Remembering three more, he lifted his thumb, index, and middle fingers. “What is this pesky curse, how will my true love rescue me, what did I do that was so naughty a sorceress doomed me to lonely immortality. That’seightquestions, love.”
Catalina’s hazel eyes flared with frustration. “Some of those were follow-ups or just conversation or just, like,concern for my life.”
“Were they not still questions, my sweet lamb?”
“Youstill have three,” she insisted.
Brigan stood, dropping a bill on the table. “Ah, but you were right: I asked you four when we arrived, so I’ll play fair. Come. Let’s get you home.”
Chapter Seven
She wanted to protest, to argue, but then he offered to walk her back to her apartment, and she immediately agreed. Because under normal circumstances, the walk to the distant tip of Manhattan would take nearly two hours, but Cat planned to make it last a good deal longer.
She led him all around the streets of the city, weaving up and down blocks and through neighborhoods, and she suspected he knew what she was doing, but he didn’t protest.
They walked side by side deep into the night, and then she began shivering, and he offered his arm and then his coat, and she spent a perfect couple of hours wrapped in that magical woodsy smell of him, pushing away the knowledge of how devastated she was going to be when he inevitably left her at the door.
They talked about everything on the walk. Her childhood, her studies, the car accident she’d been in two years before. Her favorite foods and films and books. His life, which had stretched hundreds of years; the daily reality of it was hard for her to fathom, the immensity of what he’d seen, what he’d witnessed. His current circumstances seemed to her both wonderful and sad—he could afford any luxury but never cared about any of it, unable to share it with anyone.
But the closer they got to her building and the more she learned about this creature she suspected she’d already fallen deeply in love with, the more she wondered whether she’d been wrong about him, whether when he left her at the door, he might very gently close his hands around her neck, quickly and mercifully snuffing everything into darkness. And somehow, Cat couldn’t find it in her to push away from him, to attempt to run. Something rooted inside her told her he wouldn’t kill her.
That he couldn’t.
Brigan kept breaking his own rules, but none of it seemed to matter.
It wasn’t possible for him to fall in love, he knew that, but scraping back in time, he recollected it might have felt a bit like this. The desire to walk aimlessly through the night until the light of sunrise shimmered at the edge of the East River. The tentative progress in contact: from his jacket around her shoulders to his hand closing around hers, and then his arm, bringing her body close until it was pressed all along his.
And when they reached her place at last—a nondescript East Village building they’d passed at least five times already—she slowed and turned to him.
“I guess I can’t delay it any longer,” she said.
