Faith of the Divine Inferno by Leslie Thompson (e textbook reader txt) 📕

It was all very weird but harmless for the moment. There would be plenty of time to mess with it when Shaw began to starve and dehydrate. In the meantime, I would wait to see what happened next.
“We’re in the Faerie Mound,” Shaw said suddenly after staring at the black in thoughtful horror.
“What makes you think that?” The thought had occurred to me too, but I wasn’t going to talk about it. I had worried that Shaw was in denial and would make the situation worse by arguing with me about it. I had been worrying for nothing. Good for Shaw.
“I figured out that Bres was Fey pretty quickly,” he said, still peering out of the circle. “My grandmother used to tell me the old stories every chance she got, so I heard enough descriptions to know what he is and where we are now. Don’t eat or drink anything here, and don’t have sex with anyone, or else you’ll be trapped in here forever.”
“So how do we get out?” I’ve heard all of the stories too, but my knowledge was centuries old and largely forgotten. Shaw seemed to know what was going on, so I would take his word for it. “Can we fight our way out, or do we have to wait for some random faerie in a squirrelly mood to walk by and decide it’ll be fun to let us go?”
“I think we’ll have to wait. Everything I heard about escapes involves bargaining or requires a rescue. I’ve heard of Fey whose sole task is to rescue humans from the Mound, but those guys are few and far between and usually want sexual favors in return,” he replied. “We’ll have to hope that they want something specific from us.” He gave me a curious look then. “You haven’t done this before?”
“No. Why would I have ever come anywhere near a Mound?” I snapped back.
“You’re immortal, aren’t you? I would think that the faeries would have been eager to get a hold of you before now.”
“Who says that I’m immortal?” I make it a habit to deny everything even when the evidence of the truth is painfully obvious. Most people don’t want to know that something like me was running around. The human need to lie in order to maintain their view of reality has kept me free for a very long time.
Shaw gave me a condescending look. “My first clue was when you walked out of the hospital hours after your brain melted into jelly inside your skull.”
“My brain did not melt,” I grumped. “You’re making a mountain out of a mole hill.”
“I had the medical examiner look at your scans, Rebecca. He said that your brain had turned to pudding and if you were up and walking, then I had the scans for the wrong person. Meanwhile, five doctors all insisted that the scans were yours and they had the hospital lawyer looking for a legal reason to have your ass hauled back in so they could run more tests. When Bres brought it up, you didn’t even try deny it.” Shaw glared, daring me to try and lie to him again.
“Bres is delusional maniac. He’ll say anything.”
“Perhaps, but that doesn’t mean that he’s wrong about you.” He snapped back. “What is your chronological age?”
I let out a heavy sigh and finally gave in and told him. It was not something that I had done before and it frightened me to do it. I didn’t know how he would respond to the admission. I immediately thought of several very bad reactions that made my skin crawl.
“I’m about two thousand, five hundred and sixty-three years, give or take a decade.” I didn’t know whether to be relieved or hysterical after I said the words. The rare times it had gotten out in the past, the mortals grabbed their torches and pitchforks and chased me out of town. I’ve never had a rational conversation about it before. It felt strange.
“About? You don’t know how old you are?” Shaw asked. There was fear and astonishment of his face that made me cringe a little, but there was also a flavor of delight there too, as if he was discovering something wonderful. From his point of view, maybe he was, but to me it felt awkward and strange.
“I was born in an area and time when people had bigger worries than figuring out what year it was,” I shrugged. “Then the Renaissance started and I was stoned out of my mind for most of it. I can’t even remember what country I lived in then.”
Shaw laughed at that. “You’re going to have to share some of that with me later. Where were you born?”
“In Budapest, on the Buda side of the Danube River.” I don’t know why it is important for me to specify which side of the river I had been raised on, but it was. It seemed silly ever since the two cities became one, but I had never stopped thinking that way.
“You don’t look Hungarian.”
“Sure I do,” I laughed. “I look the way Hungarians did over two thousand years ago.”
“So the purple eye color was common back then?”
“No. That has always been unique to me.” I felt sad, remembering the vague faces of the people I had known and loved. It had become painful as they grew suspicious of what I was with the fear of what I represented. But there had been acceptance too, and I had plenty of friends and loved ones. I would have liked to say that it was a simpler time, but it wasn’t. Life has always been messy and complicated, regardless of the century or lifestyle I was living. No matter what old people and historians say, golden ages are all lies. If you don’t believe me, ask the people who had lived in squalor under the thumb of tyranny how golden their lives were.
Shaw’s face reflected the sadness I felt, and the conversation died there. With no way to tell the time, it felt as if we waited for hours. The fear of the unknown faded into anxiety and we were able to sit back down on the moss to wait. Periodically, Shaw would get up to pace to try to step out of the circle and fail. Then he would mutter and curse, pace some more and sit back down. I took it all in stride, refusing to get worked up until the appropriate moment. I remained where I was until my muscles cramped from inactivity and I had to stretch.
“Who is Rebecca Calden?” Shaw asked me suddenly as I bent to touch my toes.
Perplexed by the question, I straightened and frowned at him. “I am.”
“You’re over two thousand years old. You couldn’t have been called Rebecca Calden the entire time. You had to have changed your identity every generation or so, to avoid suspicion. Was she real a real person you stole the identity from, or did you pull it from the air?” I didn’t sense a hint of accusation in his voice. He merely wanted to know, and since I’d already told him more than I had anyone ever, I figured that I couldn’t make anything worse by telling him everything else.
“I maintain contacts that help me get new identities when I come out of hiding. I instruct them to find a girl who died around the time I’m coming back and matches my physical description,” I explained. “They hand over her social security number and birth certificate and I have an accountant and an estate lawyer transfer my money from my previous identity to the new one. Then I settle in and go on with life as usual. The true Rebecca Calden died of a drug overdose, and no one came to recover her body.”
“What do you do when your identity theft is discovered?” Shaw gave me a small smile that told me that he had already had an idea.
I smiled as I answered him. “These days I fake my death, move to a different area and emerge a decade or two later.”
“These days?”
“It was a lot easier to be anonymous before passports and driver’s licenses were invented. I didn’t have to pretend to die then; all I had to do was relocate.” I sat down and stretched my legs out in front of me.
“So who were you originally?” Shaw moved to sit next to me so that we could talk softly. I examined the darkness for some sign that there was something lurking in the darkness, but I saw nothing. It didn’t mean that nothing was there.
“I was a peasant girl of no significance,” I said.
“I find that hard to believe,” Shaw replied dryly. “You had to have been someone or done something in order for you to be immortal.”
“Sorry, but I wasn’t special. I was just another girl living in a village that just happened to become a city. I saw a few things and I learned a few things, but I was no one important.” I smiled at the disappointment on his face. No doubt he had some epic story percolating in his head, full of danger and glamorous details about how I became immortal. Even I wished that had been the case. It certainly would have been more interesting than the reality. There was nothing but the ordinary, mundane things that happened to everyone I had known then.
I saw the question of how burning in Shaw’s eyes, and I could have kissed him when he repressed it. That is one issue I’m not willing to talk about, mostly because I didn’t have an answer. If I did know how I became immortal, I certainly would have made more like me by now. I’ve grieved the loss of too many loved ones and known too many years of loneliness not to have succumbed to the temptation at least once.
“Is Rebecca your real name?” he asked.
“No, and before you ask, I’m not going to tell you my original name. Not now at least. There are too many things around here that can use it against me. I have enough trouble without having something nasty come along and hijack my mind and soul,” I told him.
“Who can do that?” Shaw was appalled.
“If the stories are true, witches, demons, and some members of the Fey. What’s the story behind the tattoo?” It was time to change the subject. I was getting nervous talking about me.
Shaw laughed at that and rubbed his fore arm. “I was in my second semester of college when I met a girl. She was beautiful and exciting and she was into paganism. A couple of months after we hooked up, she talked me into going to a Beltane festival that year. There was a lot of music, booze, and marijuana and before I knew it, I had gotten drunk and passed out. When I came to, I was back in my own bed and I had the tattoo. The girl liked