A sharp pain cut into my heart like a knife. “Luke, you must know I love you. I wouldn’t be here now if I didn’t. I know I have no right to say this to you, but it hurts me to hear you say these things. To say ‘it was always Jonathan or Adair, and never any room for me.’ I loved you, Luke, of course I did. If I didn’t love you, I could’ve just walked away. It would’ve been a damn sight easier.”
He was quiet, thinking. The monitors beeped in the background. “I suppose,” he said.
“We were happy together,” I insisted.
“But you never loved me the way you loved those two. You can admit it to me now. I won’t hold it against you, but I’d rather die knowing the truth. Jonathan and Adair—they were always on your mind. I could tell.”
My cheeks flamed. I couldn’t deny it.
“I don’t hold it against you, really,” he continued. “I mean, I saw Jonathan with my own eyes. He was a god. One in a billion. Even in death I could see why no woman was able to resist him.”
My stomach twisted, remembering the purpose of my visit to the underworld. “Luke, Jonathan’s in trouble. That’s why I’ve come here,” I blurted out. “He is being held by a queen, the queen of the underworld. Have you heard of her?”
He shook his head. “It sounds like something from an old myth, doesn’t it? Hades and Persephone and all that. Sorry, I can’t help you, Lanny. Like I said, nothing’s been explained to me. The queen of England could be here for all I know. I’m not like Jonathan or you or Adair. I’m just an ordinary guy, a speck of dust in the cosmos, and I’m going to die an ordinary death.” He had the same expression I’d seen many times, a quizzical look he’d worn during the odd quiet moment. “I have a question for you, Lanny, and I want you to tell me the truth. Did you ever love me, or was I just a convenience that night when you were brought into the hospital? What was I to you? Just a gullible man who could help you escape from the police . . .”
I threw up my hands in exasperation. “Luke, I just told you five minutes ago that I love you. Wasn’t I with you for the past four years?”
“You stayed out of obligation, because of your promise, not love.”
“Isn’t obligation a part of love?” I felt my blood rising. “I made a commitment to you, and I honored it because I love you.” I squeezed his hand.
He made a sour face. “Do you know what it was like knowing that you didn’t love me the way you loved the other two? That you loved them more,” he said, unable to say their names at that moment.
“Does love have to be a contest? I’ve had a long life and it’s always been that way for me: you lose one love and, if you are lucky, you find another.” I tugged him closer to me, though he tried to resist. “Listen to me: I was alone for a long time, Luke. For many years, before we met, I had no one in my life. I didn’t want to go through it again, you know: growing close to someone, tangling my life up in someone else’s, only to lose them. I just couldn’t do it—but then I met you. I couldn’t remember when I’d known such a good man. I knew I was lucky. Don’t tell me that I squandered the last years of your life. It would make me very sad to think that you had been unhappy.”
He bumped against me. “You know that’s not true. I wasn’t unhappy. But I know what you wanted, Lanny. You wanted Jonathan to love you the way you loved him, to love you above all others, to be his one great love. I suppose that was all I wanted: to be your great love. That was foolish of me, since there would always be Jonathan, but . . . none of us is immune to our heart’s desire.”
I sensed his time was short. I was conflicted—unsure what to say, for it was clear that he wanted to be refuted. He wanted me to tell him that he was the great love of my life, and what difference would it make if I lied to him as he teetered on the brink of annihilation? Yet I couldn’t bring myself to tell him that it was Adair, not Jonathan, I loved more than anyone. After years of chasing after Jonathan, I’d come to love him like a brother; he was the one connection I had to my past, to my family, to my home. He was the only one to whom I felt any sort of obligation, not Luke. I was the one who’d brought Jonathan into this mess; I had to do everything in my power to get him out. I took a deep breath, decided which course to take—and spoke.
“Isn’t it enough to be one of my great loves? I’ll never forget you, Luke. You were the best man I ever had in my life. A much better man than Jonathan.”
He snorted. “A better man than Jonathan? That’s not much of an accomplishment, is it? From everything you told me, he was—a jerk, to be blunt. I don’t know why you’ve come here after him, Lanny.”
“I have my reasons. He needs me—let’s leave it at that. I don’t want to talk about it right now.” Meaning I didn’t want to use up the last minutes of his life talking about Jonathan.
He blinked at me, as though fighting to see through a film. “You know, I’m about to be sent into the great unknown and I still don’t know what I was supposed to do with my life, what it was supposed to mean. I want resolution. There must be a reason you’ve been sent to me, Lanny. You’re the immortal one. You must know something that isn’t revealed to us ordinary people. I want answers.”
“I don’t have an answer for you, Luke, other than to say you were a wonderful father and partner. Your daughters love you. You made me happy every day we were together. Maybe that’s what your life was about. Isn’t that enough?” I kissed his forehead. His last moments were upon us. He was dissolving, blurred in some spots, thinned in others. He looked like a ghost.
He’d closed his eyes, leaned against my cheek. “Now that we’re at the point of sharing secrets, I have something to tell you. I always thought it a shame you couldn’t have children. You’d have made a wonderful mother.”
“Me?” I blurted out a laugh.
“You were great with the girls,” he said softly, as though he were falling asleep. “Always so patient. They loved you right from the start. It made Tricia a little jealous, you know.”
“Shhh,” I said. His hand was getting colder in mine. The air in the room seemed thin all of a sudden, as though we were on a high mountaintop. I’d woven our fingers together tightly now, feeling the stretch as I accommodated his larger hand in mine. However, his grip was weakening by degrees and the bulk of his hand felt lighter with every second. He was fading before my eyes, drifting away piece by piece—his end was truly here.
I ran my fingers through his hair, but it was as though I were raking frigid air. He was almost gone; the hospital room was almost gone, too. It was freezing, as though a window had been thrown open on the coldest Maine night—no, surely colder than that—and the blinks and hisses and chirrups of the hospital room ceded to the rasp of empty, endless space. Infinity was calling. Eternity comes for us all in one form or another, and it had found Luke. We teetered at the edge of a huge abyss and I sensed that if I wasn’t careful, I’d be pulled into it. This was the abyss Adair had told me about, and now that I faced it, I understood his horror. It was impossible to believe that our consciousnesses could live on in that absolute emptiness. If they did, how lonely they must be; how bereft an existence they must have in the flat black void. This was what Adair had saved me from for a great long while by making me immortal. I could not save Luke from it. This was the inescapable end.
“Good-bye,” I said to Luke in a last gesture of tenderness, but he was already gone.
Within seconds, furniture and hospital equipment started disappearing all around me. Afraid of what might happen to me when the last piece vanished, I hurried to the door, cracked it open, and peered out. The passage was empty, so I crept out. It seemed positively quiet and serene here, now. I proceeded to retrace my steps, thinking that I might come across the door from my nightmares and, behind that door, Jonathan. But as I turned a corner, I came face-to-face with a demon.
My blood froze in my veins. Maybe two feet separated us. He could’ve reached out and snatched my arm.
But he didn’t. Instead, he lowered his huge head and brought one topaz eye close, looking me over. He snorted and his brimstone breath washed over my face. He was one of those demonic creatures, yet there was something familiar about this one, something in his expression, a haughty yet wistful look I’d seen before.
The demon pulled himself up as tall as he could, given the low ceiling. He swished his tail elegantly. Again, he fixed me with his golden eye.
“Lanny.”
I recognized the voice, even though it was one I hadn’t heard in a long time. “Dona? Is that you?”
The demon snorted again and turned his massive head away from my curious stare, embarrassed. “It is I.”
I hadn’t seen Dona since we’d lived under Adair’s roof in Boston, in the early 1800s. He’d been one of Adair’s companions, too, a foul-tempered aristocratic Italian who’d had little use for me then. I couldn’t help but think how the mighty had fallen; the always fastidious Dona couldn’t be happy to have been turned into a beast. He had been a beautiful man in life. It must’ve galled him to be transformed into this creature.
“Dear God! Dona! I thought I’d never see you again! How long have you been here?”
“Not so long, I suppose, and yet it feels an eternity. An eternity as this monster that you see, with a tail and horns, more beast than man. . . .” His eyes were large, their expression soft and quite touching, even if they were an eerie golden color. He reached up and ran a hand distractedly down the length of one silky, long ear, perhaps a nervous habit, perhaps to confirm that he was still in this unfortunate form. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized what it meant to find Dona here. As had been the case with Savva—who, it occurred to me now, would surely transform into a beast as vile as this before long—Dona could be in the underworld only if Adair had taken his life.
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