“How did you know where I live?”
“I followed you.”
The house looked frightening without John, but Lillian led the way inside and directly out the back door to her gardens. She heard Will’s heavy steps behind her, but didn’t spare him a glance. She pressed the post card to her chest, where it vibrated unnervingly.
She inhaled until she felt her lungs swell to the breaking point, filling her head with the scents of her flowers. The garden sprung up around her, comforting and as bracing as a warm hug. “I can think better here,” she said, meeting Will’s eyes.
“You did all this?” He gawped at his surroundings, and she tried to experience it through his eyes. A bower of white roses arched over the back door, droning softly with bees. The cobbled walk was lined with curving beds of flowers, a bright profusion of color and old-fashioned charm. Hollyhocks and hydrangeas, phlox and catmint. Blues of all hues.
“Blue. Do you wear any color but blue, Lillian?”
She bit down on her lip, crushing it beneath her teeth to ward off the tears.
“Okay. You don’t need to wait for him if it makes you panic. Calm down and think. It’s only a note.”
“
’La Vie en Rose
,’” she cried, tearing at her hair.
His big hands enveloped hers. “It means the sculpture?”
“Yes.” The dulcet tones of Louis Armstrong wheeled through her mind, but worse, she saw herself in Nathan’s arms, swaying to that song, a crowd of dancers around them, candlelight touching the golden hair of his jaw. Nathan lifted his gaze to Lillian, and she saw it was green-eyed and hot. Blazing.
“Lillian!” Will shook her by the upper arms.
“A Vision. I had a Vision,” she gasped, and sank to the ground in a puff of skirt.
“All right. That's enough. I’m calling Nathan.” Will whipped out his cell phone and dialed before she could formulate words. The ballroom spun, reeling with dancers, and Nathan’s palm pressed her lower spine, bringing her hips nearer and shocking her through the touch of her immortal tattoo.
“Nate. It’s Will.”
“No,” she cried, diving at his legs. He sidestepped her.
She felt herself lying carefully back in the perennial bed. Fluffy white clouds dotted the dark blue sky like polka dots.
“Nate, it’s a mess. She’s a mess. She can’t function. She keeps passing out. I think she’s out now.”
She heard Nathan’s words through the tiny slots of the phone. His voice beckoned to her. Her blood rose to him, as strong as magnet to steel.
Will knelt at her head, his voice far off and muted. “
La Vie en Rose
.’ A Vision,” he was saying. The sky grew darker, a circle of blackness around the edges. Like a blow to the stomach, John’s name reached her.
She blinked.
“Oh, Lil,” Will breathed, swiping a hand over his face. “Yeah, she’s coming around. Just a second. I’ll see if she is able to.” He held out the phone. “He wants to talk to you.”
Her mouth went dry. Blood throbbed against her ear drum like a bass drum. The sky throbbed blue, violet, black. Her heart throbbed a quarter of a beat off of Nathan’s.
The phone flashed back to Will’s ear. “No, I don’t think she can talk right now.”
“John,” she murmured. Her pores were expanding in the way that meant he was near. She shrieked it. “John. John’s coming!”
Will processed the information instantly. “How long?” he asked, eyes darting sideways, judging the distance to the car and how long it took to speed down the drive.
“Two minutes. Run,” she screamed. Before the command left her lips, she heard him slamming through the house and into the car. The engine whined to life and the tires whirred against the driveway at top speed.
When John found Lillian, she was sitting on the path, rather than in the flower bed, but could only sit there dizzily, staring at the sky. She had had the presence of mind to fold the postcard into a tiny wedge and cram it uncomfortably into her bra.
As he scooped her off the ground and rushed her inside, she wondered if he felt
“La Vie en Rose.”
It was a hard lump between them.
* * * * *
The morning sun was already sweltering where Lillian and Will sat on her garden bench, watching the roses lift their faces to the heat that burned off the night’s dew. Will stretched his long legs and Lillian spun on the bench, placing her head in his lap. He went momentarily still with surprise, and then his fingers threaded into the hair at her crown. She shifted to make herself more comfortable, bringing her immortal tattoo into contact with his thigh. He started.
“Sorry,” she said.
“It’s all right. It’s just a surprise.” His eyes held a question as he stared down at her. “Does it always feel like that when John touches it?”
“Yes, but I’m accustomed to it,” she said. “What happened with Nathan after you left yesterday?”
“Well, obviously, he was beside himself. He was frantic when he heard your voice, when you screamed that John was coming.”
She sighed, seeing a long, artistic finger and thumb pinching the bridge of a straight nose. “That was a close one. I can’t imagine what would happen if John found you here. If he found us like this.” She raised their linked hands.
“How did you know he was coming, Lillian?”
She shrugged. “Sometimes I can feel him. His position in the universe. Does that make sense?”
His eyes were dark as they contemplated her. “Honestly, what you say frightens me beyond words,” he said, but before she could respond, he spoke again. “You cultivated these gardens?”
“Yes. It comes naturally.” When he looked at her quizzically, she wondered how to explain without showing him. With a blush heating her cheeks, she sat up and lifted the hem of her blouse to expose her tattoo. Will gasped. When she lay down on him again, she was careful not to touch him with her spine. If he hadn’t felt like a brother to her, she would never have given him a glimpse of her tattoo or bare skin. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s gorgeous, Lil. Really, the most beautiful work of art I’ve ever seen,” he said with such vehemence, she feared his emotions may be shifting toward something else. After studying his eyes, she saw no change.
“Will,” she said suddenly, remembering. “Who is Dante?”
Shock rippled across his features. “What? Where do you know that name?”
“In my Vision yesterday, I spoke it.”
“You’d better tell me,” he said grimly.
“The Vision had to do with ‘
La Vie en Rose’
. You know the Louis Armstrong song?”
He laughed. “Lillian, I was born in a different time than you.”
“I’ll play it for you someday. But in the Vision, Nathan and I were at some kind of event. There was a band, and he had requested the song, intending for me to dance with him.” She could still see him leaning into the band leader to speak into his ear, his eyes on Lillian. Hot and green. She shivered. “I was frightened to dance with him. I told him no, because John was in the library with Dante.”
Will’s normally animated face grew still. She stared up at him in awe, realizing he was beautiful like Nathan, like John. Perhaps all immortal men were dashing.
“I think the place you were in your Vision is my home, which is Dante and Maria’s estate. Was the band against the window wall?” He searched her face.
“Yes. Your home?”
He nodded. “Dante is an ancient immortal. He’s been wandering for countless centuries, and Maria is his immortal mate. They have an estate in Vermont, not far from Nathan’s home. Two other immortals live with them—Ricardo and I. I think the event you saw is an annual ball Dante hosts. You said there was a library, and it makes sense Dante would be there with John.”
“Will,” she said carefully, feeling the world shift and begin to revolve. “What does it mean?”
He smiled boyishly. “I think it means you’re going to Vermont soon. And John is going to be with you.”
She plastered her hands to her face. Will’s hand gripped hers. “Why do you have no wedding ring?” he asked. “Are you and John not formally married?”
She lifted her wrists. “What do you think these are?” she asked, referring to the twin silver cuffs.
“Uh. . . handcuffs?”
She fixed him with a disapproving stare, but he only laughed.
“All right, all right. I’m sorry. I know how hard it is on you without my ribbing.” He touched one bracelet gingerly. “Why bracelets?”
“They’re old, an heirloom. John’s great grandfather was a silversmith in old world Ireland. He gave these to his bride.” She admired the beautifully turned cuffs. If she removed them, Celtic love knots would glimmer on the inside, where they touched the skin.
“I see,” Will said quietly, and when she looked at him, she saw that he did see. He saw her love for John.
He pressed a big, warm hand against her cheek, and they both sighed. “What a tangle,” he said after a bit.
“Yes, and there’s one more complication.” She sat up. “John’s coming.”
Will stood abruptly and began loping down the stone path in the direction of the woods, where he would disappear and walk the mile back to his car at the post office. Just before he was lost behind the wisteria, he turned and grinned.
“I’ll see you at the airport.”
“In two hundred feet, turn left,” the GPS in Nathan’s rental truck announced. Chills climbed his body, standing up every hair in its wake. He gripped the steering wheel hard.
“Two hundred feet,” he said, his voice hoarse.
The driveway leading to Lillian and John LeClair’s house was long enough to make Nathan run through every reason she would reject him, and short enough to break into a sweat. He rounded a bend and the house burst into view.
He breathed a ragged sigh of relief. At the airport, he had had a Vision of her speeding away in an ostentatious little Roadster, but her home was small and quaint with as much charm as his Vermont farmhouse.
He quietly closed the door of the truck, but the metallic click was loud in the still air. The house listened to him. “You are trespassing,” it said.
Feeling along the sill of one window, he located the spare key and climbed the wide front porch steps, images of Lillian flying through his head. Seated in that wicker rocker, reading. Kneeling in that flower bed. Carrying a paper sack of groceries inside.
The key turned sweetly in the lock, and he pressed the door inward, his heart pinching in fear. Entering the house was like stepping back in time—a world of antiques and flourishes that modern people didn’t care for. A home of immortals.
A rough wooden bench stood against one wall of the foyer, and Nathan went to lay his hands on the place where Lillian had sat. Under the bench a pair of high heels stood. He touched one before straightening.
A shaft of sunlight burned through a high clerestory, illuminating the dust swirling in the air. And the house smelled of Lillian, of sweet musk and lavender. He filled his lungs with her scent and captured a brilliant blue cashmere scarf hanging from a peg on the wall. Lillian’s scarf. He brought it to his face, burying his nose in its luxuriant depths. A small shock against his skin told him a stray hair was caught in the fibers. He saw the way she knotted it about her throat, fluffed her hair around it.
Nathan looked up at the rest of their house. His vision would be crystal clear in this space, the space where John LeClair and Lillian loved each other. He looped the scarf about his neck and began to explore the lower level.
Like a hungry man, he moved from item to item, room to room, devouring the essence of her. She had chosen smoky blue and grey tones, colors which set her coloring aglow. He saw her painting those colors, a paintbrush in hand and a smear on her cheek. He saw elegant fingers arranging fresh flowers in a pottery jug. He touched the back of a dining room chair and saw. . . too much. Too much.
He turned away.
Off the kitchen was a back staircase which Nathan climbed warily, aware of the ghosts that might materialize at any turn. The steps were ancient wood, ascending in a tight corkscrew, the treads triangular. He trailed a finger along the horsehair plaster wall as Lillian had countless times.
The room at the top was filled with light from several tall windows overlooking a garden. Lillian stood in this spot and enjoyed the view. Beneath his feet, pine floors gleamed and a brass bedstead filled the center space, neatly made in handmade quilts. He moved about the room, touching a bench at the foot of the bed, a gossamer shawl, and a wooden chest, which upon opening, he saw was a jewelry box. Too much.
He spun away and took the stairs before he could be bombarded by glimpses of Lillian and John LeClair’s lovemaking, but he didn’t escape without a bad case of the shakes. He stumbled to the refrigerator and located a bottle of water. Trembling horribly, he leaned against the counter and drained it. As the icy water slipped down his parched throat, he gained an ounce of control.
Through the glass of the back door, he saw the garden slumbering. He unhinged the old-fashioned metal lock and stepped into the sweet heat of a Virginia autumn.
Roses arched over his head, and he tilted his face up and breathed their cloying scent, then took the two steps to the path. The traces of Lillian’s bare feet burned the soles of his shoes. As he strolled through the gardens, he saw her in a dozen ways. The messy rope of hair over one shoulder and a light-hued petal caught in the fine hairs, the dark sweep of lashes against her cheek as she worked over a profusion of color, loam sifting through her hands, and finally, collapsing under the weight of the Vision of them dancing at the fundraiser ball.
He sank to the bench where Lillian had lain with her head in Will Cochran’s lap. He felt Will’s fingers against her crown and the light probing of his thumb behind her ear.
No, I can’t go on.
Back inside, Nathan entered the only room he had previously avoided, the library of John LeClair. The glass French doors swung inward with a ringing sound. He stopped, expecting to be blasted by rage, but was surprised to be touched by tenderness. This library was mostly Lillian’s space.
He smoothed a palm over the velvet sofa back and caressed a humorous looking antique iron frog knickknack. He crossed to the bookshelf and using a fingertip, removed the thick tome from its place. Lillian’s fingerprints were silk beneath his. The book fell open and he saw the postcard he'd sent shoved into the crease, dog-eared from being folded at some point. The yellowed pages of the volume drew his eye, and he saw with a start the title of a poem.
On Her Loving Two Equally
by Aphra Behn. He scanned the words, their olden rhymes hammering his mind. A wall of white pain clouded his vision. His throat shut on a growl. He snapped the book shut and jammed it haphazardly onto the shelf.
An instant later, he slammed out the front door and raced down the steps. He stalked to his truck and took the drive at high speed, mashing the gears when he reached the main road. He drove wildly, clipping a great oak tree and scraping the length of the truck. He looked in the rearview mirror and saw the tree standing upright and bristling with offense. Before he straightened the truck from that incident, he nicked the front end of a box truck, double-parked with a ramp lolling from the back like a tongue. He fishtailed and rammed his boot to the gas pedal, making the truck scream toward the Interstate north.
I can’t go on, he thought, and switched on his driving music. The voice screeched from the speakers like the voices of stone, and he forced his mind away from Lillian and John LeClair and the goddamned poem that told him she was in love with two men.
Halfway through the night, he realized the cashmere scarf was still about his neck. With trembling hands, he stretched it across the dashboard to allow the heater to send it's scent through the truck.
When Visions of Lillian sprang up between the barriers of Nathan’s mind, he quashed them like fragile flowers. And after eleven nonstop hours of driving, he arrived at his destination—not the farmhouse that had sheltered him for centuries, but the mansion of Dante and Maria in Barre, Vermont.
* * * * *
The heavy walnut door opened and a sleek, dark-haired woman caught Nathan and jerked him inside. “Maria,” he choked, letting his duffle bag and laptop case slip to the glistening marble floors. The scarf he kept between his fingers. It dripped upon the floor like entrails. If Dante had answered the doorbell, Nathan might have held up. But when he met Maria’s compassionate gaze, he broke.
His shoulders heaved. Her wiry arms spun around him, holding him with a strength he didn’t know she possessed. The contact of her immortal tattoos shocked him, bringing a measure of calm, a measure he needed to speak.
He bent over her as the sobs took him. “I can’t do it anymore.”
He didn’t hear Dante’s approach, but turned when the solid hand rested upon his shoulder. He swiped a hand across his face, alarmed at how it trembled.
“Nathan, come inside. Sit and let us help you.”
Nathan coiled the scarf around his hand like a bandage and followed the pair down the long corridor leading to the kitchen. The space was full of echoes, and Nathan cringed from them, hearing Lillian’s voice at every turn.
Maria seated him at the cozy kitchen table and reached into the cupboard for a coffee mug. She set it before him, steaming with the strong South American coffee she loved. She and Dante exchanged a look born of centuries together, and Nathan’s jealousy flared to life—the only strong emotion he’d felt in several hours.
He buried his nose in his cup and sipped in silence.
After a time, Dante said, “Your search has ended.”
“Yes. I cannot go on.” Nathan drew the coffee into his mouth, scalding himself. But the pain helped him to control the other pain a little.
“Has she rejected you?”
“No. I never found her. I’m not going to make her choose.”
“We’ll help with whatever you need. I see you have luggage with you. Stay here. Don’t go home to the farmhouse alone. You don’t have to be alone with this,” Maria said, her gaze making his eyes glaze over with fresh tears.
“Thank you. I was hoping you’d say that.”
“I think you need a hot breakfast. I can see you haven’t eaten in too long. And when was the last time you slept, Nathan?” As Maria clucked over him, she located a bowl and started cracking eggs into it. “You need breakfast, a nice hot shower and sleep. Your room is prepared for you.”
After three thick slabs of French toast and copious amounts of coffee, Nathan climbed the sweeping mahogany staircase, sliding his hand up the smooth banister as he ascended, thinking of Lillian’s hair.
He showered and fell naked into bed, where he slept fifteen hours straight. He woke in the dark, groggy and with no idea where he was after his whirlwind tour of the country. He lay blinking like an owl, processing nothing other than the fact it was deep night and he’d slept the day away.
When he pulled himself into a sitting position, his hand brushed something soft. The scarf. He had snagged it from the dresser before falling into bed, and held it to his chest during the long hours of despair.
His chest burned even now. I can’t sit here a moment longer, he thought. He dressed in the pitch black, fumbling for his jeans, boots, Tee shirt and leather jacket. He dared not touch the breast pocket.
Slipping silent from the mansion, Nathan stole into the frigid night, walking. Without thinking, he searched the sky for the North Star. Tears burned in his throat and he choked them back. By the time he reached Hope Cemetery, his misery was so great he hurled himself at the foot of a monument he’d carved half a century ago.
The moon kissed the granite shapes, turning them to sculptures of ice. He slumped against the female figure and stared at his hands. The moonlight transformed them to granite too, and he wished to be frozen—to end this pain and the eternity of living but never really being alive.
When the fingers of dawn began to thread through the sky, he watched his hands lighten from grey to chalky white to flesh. The rustle of dry leaves mingled with the awakenings of small animals. Nathan shifted, grown cold and stiff from his desolate pose, and when he did, he looked across the sunlit clearing. And into Lillian’s startled grey eyes.
* * * * *
Nathan had never seen her eyes in a Vision and was shocked by them—their size and color and the secrets they held. The secrets they promised. For a moment he thought he was dreaming. But he could see her teeth sunk into her full lower lip. The stirrings of his body told him she was no illusion.
The air vibrated between their locked gazes, beating like a tribal drum. He leaped to his feet, swaying.
Lillian’s lip was released, sliding slowly from her teeth. Nathan lurched forward, only to draw up once again at the sound of her voice in his soul, filling him like water in a desiccated vessel.
Nathan.
His eyes fluttered.
She paced toward him, and he was rooted to the earth, watching her come. He’d never imagined the feminine look of her body as she moved. Her slender form floated, giving the impression that her feet were not moving, that she drifted on the fog. Her arms swung lightly at her sides, and the breeze tore tendrils from her braid to dance about her temples. One hand lifted to brush them away, and dear God, she was smiling.
A flash of silver from her cuff stood Nathan’s hair on end. She halted mid-step, her face in profile, looking over her shoulder at the place where John LeClair entered the clearing.
Nathan’s muscles locked, and Lillian’s heart flipped, causing him to wince. He knew she felt his absolute desire to kill John LeClair as assuredly as he had felt the missed beat of her heart.
John stopped at the sight of Lillian’s slim back. She was exuding a kind of joy that no man could have mistaken, much less a man who loved her. Nathan tore his gaze from hers to meet the eyes of John LeClair. Recognition was a fist in his gut.
“You,” he spat.
“Yes, I was going to say the same,” John said, eyes hard as ice.
Lillian’s head jerked from one to the other. “What is it?”
In a cold voice, John spoke. “Pittsford Ridge in 1776 teemed with young boys and men, all dying. Falling like ants under a boot. Their screams echoed in the air, ripped through my soul, and I tried to close my mind to it, to the suffering of mortals. And yet I still walked. I would walk through battle after battle while men fell about me—good men who were my friends.
“I was with the rear guard. We were retreating, after engaging the British for most of the morning. It was hot, almost unbearably humid. I picked my way through the destruction, through underbrush and fallen men, my foot lifting to step over another corpse. I only knew I must keep walking, regardless of the fallen around me. As my boot came down in the leaf mold, I glanced down into a startling pair of green eyes, shining through a haze of pain.