When the last brother had been thrown out onto the sand and the slider door was fastened securely behind them, Cora flew over to me and grabbed one of my comparatively large hands in her tiny one. “I’m so happy to meet you. The real you!” Her eyes were dancing with excitement. “William’s talked about you non-stop for eons and I was almost beginning to believe like the rest of them—that you were just a figment of his imagination . . . a happy place his mind had created as a safe haven from the deaths—”
“Cora!” Abigail scolded, her eyes ablaze.
Cora shot her a confused glance, which then turned indignant. “Settle down, Abigail. She has a right to know.” She pointed outside towards the forms of the brothers that were growing smaller as they walked down the beach. “If he’s too big a lug-head to admit to her how important she’s been in his life, that’s not my fault.”
Abigail sneered at her. “That is his business. You should know better than to interfere—William knows what’s best for him and this family.”
Again, I was reeling, trying to keep up with the conversation I felt disjointed from. I reached for Cora’s shoulders and grasped them tightly. “Slow down, please. I’m lost,” I pleaded. “Can you explain?”
Her eyes sparkled brighter. “Of course, I will. Why don’t you have a seat and I’ll grab us something to drink.”
Happy I’d be enlightened soon, I released her shoulders and selected a chair.
“Abigail, would you like some iced tea?” Cora sung from the kitchen. She didn’t wait for Abigail’s answer before she danced back to the table seconds later, carrying three tumblers of tea. She sat one in front of me and handed another to Abigail, and sat down in the chair beside me.
She took a sip of her tea and tilted her chair towards me, lifting one leg up to curl it to her chin. “So what do you want to know?”
“Ummmm . . . how about you start at the beginning?” I said, not knowing where the beginning was.
She took another sip before beginning. “Has William told you about his gift?”
I wasn’t sure which one of the many she was referring to, but took a guess. “Do you mean his ability to Foretell Mortal’s deaths?”
She bobbed her head and continued, “When William was first Immortalized, he was horrified by his Foretellings. To him, they were just dark, evil visions that never left his mind. He couldn’t escape them, and was too young to be able to divert himself from them. Joseph’s told me about how miserable and lost William was the first few decades of his Immortality . . . how he became a slave to his Foretellings.”
I ran my fingers down the sides of my glass, which had started to sweat small beads of condensation. The cool beads of water sliding underneath my fingers helped center me from the torment I imagined William suffering early on in his Immortality.
“Several decades after his Immortalization, William had a dream of a young woman, and to his great surprise, it was not a Foretelling of her death. For the first time, he’d dreamed an everyday sort of dream of this woman, and that was it for him. The small ray of light he needed to get him through the darkness had arrived, and he clung to it. His life was lived from one dream of her to the next—the dark visions taking place in between, the price he had to pay to see her again.”
I noticed Abigail shift stiffly in her chair, making her disapproval known with pursed lips and crossed arms. Her iced tea sat untouched beside one of those shiny black cell phones that doubled as a handheld computer.
“William became strong, able to make judgment calls and decisions for the greater good of the Guardian believers and his family—unhindered by the bonds Nathanial and Joseph had formed with us,” she said, motioning to Abigail and herself. “Sure, Patrick’s never been United, but he’s too flighty . . . too indecisive. William became the natural leader of our family and the Guardians. His strength, intelligence and devotion to our mission made him the obvious choice. The quiet rumors started to go around that he was the one—”
Abigail’s assailing disapproval for whatever direction Cora’s story was taking, was materialized through the hissing that came through her teeth. She sounded fierce, and I was not the only one that saw her that way. Cora’s story took an instant about-face.
“About fifty years ago, William grew more distant from the family, spending more time away . . . for months on end at times. He excused the time away due to the missions he was sent on, but we all knew there was something else going on.”
The timer went off on the stove and Cora bounced up to remove the rectangular, bread pans from the oven. She removed them with her bare hands, not even flinching at the 350 degree heat burning hot on the metal pans. She continued, while removing the rounded loaves from their tins onto cooling racks, “One day, the boy’s father followed him on one of his commissioned missions—”
“Whoa . . . did you say his father?” I said with bewilderment. This family was getting larger by the minute. “As in, his biological father?”
Cora glanced over at me and a smile of apology crossed her face. “I thought William would have told you about his father . . .”
Abigail huffed in her seat, but Cora continued, ignoring her, “Yes, his biological father. Charles is the Chancellor of our Alliance of Guardians.”
My eyes widened somehow even more—not only was William’s family pretty much perfect, the head of it just so happened to be one of the most powerful Immortals in existence. Great, nothing like feeling like I was in love with the son of a priest-slash-king-slash-ruler of the galaxy . . .
“Charles followed William on a mission, and he discovered the truth for William’s extended absences and increasing distance from the family.” Cora looked up at me through her full, light-brown lashes, and she sighed wistfully. “He was looking for her . . . searching for her.”
So this had been the woman Patrick had referred to yesterday. The one he was sure William would never get over until he met me. The woman I didn’t want to know anything else about, but my darned curiosity wouldn’t allow me to ask Cora to stop . . . not to say anything more about this mystery woman William had spent his life dreaming of and searching for.
“Charles was furious—he told William he was on a fool’s mission—that this girl didn’t exist, and if she did, he would never find her. She was lost in time and he would never know if she’d already existed, or if she hadn’t yet, when and where she would exist. Even if he did manage to find her—against all odds—how could he ever be with her when she was a Mortal?”
I gazed out the slider doors to the ocean waves yards in front of the cottage, and then down the shoreline where the four brothers had disappeared. I wanted—more like I needed—to be in his arms right now. To be convinced of his love for me, and assured that his decades of devotion to some nameless woman didn’t matter to him anymore. That the scars she’d left behind no longer held sway in his life since I’d entered it. I needed him to whisper those three words I thought would sound so insignificant next to the way I felt for him into my ear, over and over again . . . for at least ten years.
“It was following this argument with his father that William took on one of the most dangerous missions our Council dared to call out to our Alliance—infiltrating the inner circle of the Inheritor’s most dominant and prestigious Alliance. He volunteered for it readily. He said he was eager to face death if he and this dream woman would never meet, and that he might as well put his death to good use by gaining valuable information.”
A chill ran through my body at the thought of William dying. Would the world continue on as usual with the greatest of its creation gone? I was sure it wouldn’t.
The phone in front of Abigail jittered over the table from it’s vibrate mode. “Excuse me,” Abigail said formally, grabbing up the phone and exiting the room. I heard her answer it before she shut the door of the room she entered.
“She’s a Coordinator,” Cora explained, as simply as one would say their husband was an accountant.
My eyebrows must have pulled together, because she further explained, “Abigail’s Station is a Coordinator—she’s the one that takes the calls whenever a Foreteller has a vision. She gets the information to the right people and assembles the team.”
I nodded my head, but didn’t want to ask any questions as I normally would whenever a new tidbit of Immortal information was presented—I needed her to finish William’s story before I was ripped in half by the anxiety.
“A week later, William was gone, only occasionally able to check in with us to let us know he was alright. Patrick left a year later, practically begging for a commission similar to William’s, and our Council—greedy from the valuable information William was forwarding to them—was all too eager to let another brother from the same family infiltrate John’s circle of Inheritors.” Cora returned to her seat, and placed her hand over mine that was still wiping vertical streaks down my glass.
“Is this too much information for you, Bryn . . . am I giving you too much at once?”
I raised my eyes to look at her. There was no denying her genuine concern for me. “No, I’m fine. Please continue,” I said, attempting a smile.
“Alright,” she said, patting my hand affectionately. “We all moved here about ten years ago, splitting our time between here and our home in Montana. We wanted to see William and Patrick, and since they could only steal away from John and his crew for a day or two at most, we purchased this home so we could all meet here and be a whole family again from time to time. Things had been pretty quiet lately—no real news of anything good or bad happening up there in Newburg—until one night a couple of weeks ago, we got a frantic call from Patrick letting us know William had been caught interacting with a Mortal. He was panicked, not knowing what punishment, if any, John would have dealt out to William. Joseph and Nathanial got so worried they were planning a trip up to Newburg to rescue William and take Patrick with them, back to the safety of our Alliance and aborting the entire mission.”
This was the part in the story I was familiar with. I was the Mortal William had been caught interacting with. I was the reason the family had nearly called off the entire mission William and Patrick had fought for so many years. I felt a sickness swirling in my stomach as I let my mind wander to what could have happened if Joseph and Nathanial had tried to escape with William and Patrick. Who could have been hurt, or much worse?
“Patrick called us a few days later and explained what had happened. You can imagine our surprise when we learned of William’s additional gift.” Cora’s eyes widened and she shook her head, as if she still wasn’t certain she could believe it. “Patrick said he’d call us back when he could, but assured us that both he and William were safe and well for the time being, so Nathanial and Joseph stayed here and we waited. We didn’t get another call until last night when Patrick called and told us they’d be making a stop here today, and they’d have one other in tow.” She smiled as she pointed at me. “I could tell Patrick had no idea who you were—why William had risked so much to save you—but we all immediately knew who you were once we heard the whole account.”