Page 3 of These Immortal Truths
She considers her. “Will they kill you for saving me?”
“Yes,” she says, voice shaky. She suspects they may do worse.
Another plump berry disappears past her full lips, but her stare has yet to falter. “But still, you chose to take me in.”
A statement, not a question. Anna answers it anyway, shaking her head and bracing herself against the wall. “You’ve done nothing to deserve the Hell they’d put you through.”
“Neither, I suspect, have you.” Her finger taps, a rhythmic heartbeat against the tabletop. Anna is caught by her stare—entangled by the unspoken decisions shadowing their depths. “Death will not come for you.”
Anna isn’t sure if the words are meant to console her, or if perhaps they’re some kind of prayer, but she knows better than to believe them. Death comes for everyone and often without mercy; she has no doubts that it’s coming for her now, wearing the faces of the Lord’s men.
Her lips part, but she’s unsure of what to say. Then, reaching into the folds of her dress, the woman pulls something from their depths and holds it out in offering.
“For you.”
Hesitantly, Anna takes it from her hand. It’s different from any fruit she’s seen. She turns it around, admires the fuzz of its flesh, and brings it to her nose. It smells sweet—like summer and honey. “What is it called?”
Her eyes shine. “Táo.”
“Tao?” Anna tries to match her inflection, but the word feels strange on her tongue.
She shrugs. “Or Persian apple. Depending on who you ask.”
“I am asking you.” Anna still doesn’t understand why she speaks in these strange riddles, but she’s learning that it’s easiest to play along. “What do you call it?”
Her smile is enigmatic. “A gift.”
More riddles. Time is only growing shorter; Death is sure to knock on her door within the hour. She will not waste the precious moments she has left.
Anna bites into the flesh, juice filling her mouth with a sweetness bordering on fantastical. She’s never tasted anything like it. She knows she should savor it, but she finds herself taking another bite, and another, and another. When she reaches the center, the flesh pink but hollow, and she realizes something’s missing. “There’s no seed.”
“No.”
“But … how?”
Her stare lingers on the remaining morsel, a faraway look crossing her face. “Priceless are the treasures that cannot be replicated.”
Riddles, it’s all riddles, but Anna’s too hungry to decipher them. She closes her eyes, lets the last bite sit on her tongue—savors what she knows will be her last meal and tries not to let its sweetness be tainted by the saltiness of the tears rolling down her cheeks.
She doesn’t want to die, but she’s far too tired to run from the inevitable. Too weak.
A heavy fist meets her door, so much sooner than she expected. Anna’s lips part, a warning on her tongue, but it dies before she can speak it. She is the only one in her shack of a home. The woman she saved, the stranger she housed, is gone.
They break the door open, grabbing her roughly by the shoulders and dragging her away. Anna lets them, her eyes trained on the empty space where a woman of beauty and silk stood only seconds before.
It’s not possible, but there’s no sight or sign of her, only the lingering taste of foreign fruit on Anna’s lips. A numbing horror seeps into her bones as she thinks of the riddles the stranger spoke in, her devastating beauty, and realizes the implications.
She wasn’t human.
The reverend always preached to fear the tricks of the Devil and God’s anger. As the soil beneath her feet gives way to coarse sand, as she sees the crude pyre and gathered crowd on the stretch of remote beach, Anna fears she has managed to do both.
Fear floods her. She had resigned herself to death, but not for this—not fortorture. A scream rips from her chest, thrashing against their iron grips, but their hold only tightens. She can feel the bite oftheir fingers bruising her skin. As they bind her hands to the post, the strangled sounds emerging from her lips twist into the shape of words. “Please, please don’t!”
She looks up, tries to find mercy in any of the people’s eyes, and finds none of it. They look back at her, whispers coiling and twisting like snakes off their tongues as they speak to their neighbors. And Anna knows she’ll find no kindness from any of them. They’re all too happy to see her gone. Too relieved to have an excuse to do it. The leper girl who hid away in the forest and just wouldn’t die. The one they wouldn’t risk killing in the village square because her blood could be cursed.
Anna chokes on a sob as the bindings around her wrists grow tighter. When he’s done securing her, the man sneers and spits at her feet. “Witch, devil’s whore.”
“I’m not,” she cries. The sweetness has faded from her tongue, replaced with bitter salt from the sea air, tears, and snot. “I’mnot.”
