Page 67 of These Immortal Truths
The words are so similar to the ones she gave him while she watched her home burn under a night sky. The night she shattered, the night he pulled the pieces of her back together.
She lays on her side, knees curled around her pillow and brushing against his arm. Their faces are only a foot apart. “Tell me a story,” she says, a breath above a whisper. “Something fantastic. Something true.”
He frowns, confusion lining his face. “You want me to tell you a bedtime story?”
“No. I want you to tell me something you’ve seen that’s so beautiful, it sounds like a fairytale. I want … I want to forget the ugliness of the world.”
He stares back at her, the tiniest of smiles touching his lips. Anna thinks it looks a bit like hope.
He tells her of black sand beaches and ocean waters so warm and clear one can see a forest of coral fifty feet below the surface. He describes a canyon carved so deeply into the earth they go for miles, of glaciers so large they resemble mountains, and pyramids older than he is that jut up from the desert sands and seem to touch heaven.
Some of these places Anna has heard of, some she hasn’t. She soaks up each and every one regardless, closing her eyes and listening to the way his voice gradually softens into something that echoes wonder.
Anna doesn’t know what wakes her.
Maybe it was a nightmare she can’t remember, or maybe it was Charlotte’s snoring. But once her eyes open, she finds herself unable to fall back asleep no matter how long she stares up at the ceiling. There’s an anticipation humming under her skin, making her restless.
She rises, slipping her arms through her robe and pulling it tightly over her chest. Her bare feet are silent on the floor as she leaves the nurses’ quarters and steps into the cold. She feels like a ghost going through the empty walkways connecting all the wards. She reaches the scene of the demolished ward. The bombing was a few weeks ago, most of the debris cleared, but the dust and grime sticks to the bottoms of her feet, the cold seeping through her thin nightgown. Her breath fogs.
Her eyes fall to the place she fell. There’s still blood staining the floorboards. She’s still not convinced that it’s hers.
Is this why she woke up? Some unconscious need to face what would have been her death?
“Anna!”
The sound of her name, sharp and echoing down the empty hall, startles her. She turns, but there are already arms pulling her in, a hand cradling the curve of her skull and a military uniform pressed against her cheek. German. A German uniform.
She looks up, catches the fear and determination rimming his brown eyes, just as blistering heat blooms across her back and the world shifts around her—twisting and turning, expanding contracting—so fast that she feels like they left her lungs behind.
Frigid cold replaces the heat, the sound of empty silence replaced with distant explosions.
They’re in the field between the hospital and the railway, the sound of explosions and screaming echoing around them. Anna turns her head and sees the hospital on fire and knows, immediately,the damage is so much worse than what they saw a few weeks ago. She releases a shaky breath, a tremble dancing across her skin. She knows it’s more than just the cold.
She breathes his name into the dark. A question. A thank you. “Khiran?”
He doesn’t pull away, doesn’t let his hold loosen. The German officer pin presses, uncomfortably sharp against her collar. She can feel the points of it through her nightgown with every heavy rise and fall of his chest. His cheek presses against hers, his hand still cradling the back of her head and his shaky breath whispering against her ear. “I didn’t know,” he says. “These bombs—and last time—I’m not certain. I couldn’t risk you.”
Anna’s heart stutters.
She thinks of the blood stain on the floor, the way her fingers came back slick and red. She thinks of the horror in Margaret’s face—her insistence that she couldn’t find a pulse.
“It was mine,” she breathes, not understanding. She looks up at him, relieved when the face she looks into is the one she’s familiar with. He’s shed sandy blonde hair for his dark, shoulder length curls and brown eyes for the shade she’s grown so attached to. “The blood was mine.”
His hands rise, palms hot against her cheeks. “I was wrong. I thought—” Cringing, he rests his forehead against her own and drags in a ragged breath. “I didn’t think anything could touch you. Not physically. But this—”
This is different. Bombs and chemicals. What is a magical peach compared to the horrors of war?
“I don’t know where the line is anymore, Anna.”
His admission rattles her. She has never known him to be unsure of anything.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
He always believed she would wear immortality well, but he could never have predicted the way she would wield it—unraveling his defenses with nothing more than a few words and eyes that see far too much.
NEWYORK, UNITEDSTATES
SPRING1920
