TO KILL AN IMMORTAL
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Chapter 2
Kade’s eyes fluttered open to the cool air of a howling wind, cold rain pattering his bald head, a pounding headache, and searing pain in his midsection. Shuddering, he cried out.
The metallic taste of blood was heavy on his tongue; its scent filled his nose. Vision blurry, he blew out wheezing breaths, but even they hurt. As did other parts of his upper body, but those were a pittance compared to the pain in his belly. Any attempt to move amplified that torment.
He couldn’t feel his legs. It was as if they were illusions, severed from his existence. Desperate, he tried to kick, tried to wiggle his toes, but his lower limbs remained unresponsive.
Kade made to look down at his legs, to see what was wrong, but pain spiked through his stomach. He froze, teeth gritted.
As the pain subsided, his vision cleared, and his surroundings came into focus. He found himself suspended across from the hump of one of the roller coaster track’s inclines, several dozen feet above the ground.
The track’s wet metal pressed cold against his back, while there was something colder still… in his stomach. Nearby, the rest of the tracks were a chaotic mess of twisted metal and shattered dreams.
People were on the ground sprawled in awkward positions. Others were standing around, just standing, not uttering a word, watching as if they had nothing else to do, watching like death’s silent harbingers.
His mind became a maelstrom of panic and despair as memories assaulted him. The sword and person plummeting from the sky. The sword destroying the tracks. The roller coaster flying off the tracks, turning the world upside down. The crash.
He relived the phantom of Ray’s laughter, Nicole’s excited chatter, Little Ish’s cackling, Aunt Harriet’s warm smile, Uncle Rob’s reassuring presence. His family. The only family he had left.
They were his world. His lighthouse in the stormy sea of his life.
Frantic, he tried to move again, but he couldn’t. The effort brought a fresh wave of burning pain, shooting through his stomach, accompanied by nausea. His breaths came in anguished ragged gasps, bloody spittle flying from his lips.
Attention drawn to the source of his torment, he glanced down. And gaped at the sight.
Jutting from the left side of his stomach was a curved metal shard the size of his arm. Blood soaked his T-shirt.
“Oh Goddd.” Lips trembling, he burst into tears, the sobs causing another pain-filled eruption in his midsection. Hands shaking, he reached down to the metal shard jutting from him even as he realized he couldn’t make it or himself budge.
Wheezing painfully, blood and drool bubbling at his lips, he glanced from one side to the other, wincing as he did so. He was impaled on one of the track’s support structures.
The horror of the revelation made him try to move again. And as before, his legs refused to respond. His upper body, his arms, felt different. Numb. Tingly. Kade’s mouth fell open as another thought filled his mind.
Am I partially paralyzed?
Even as he had the thought, something else below him caught his eye. Something among the crumpled remains of several roller coaster cars. He froze, pain a distant memory as comprehension dawned.
He was looking at bodies. Bodies trapped in cars. Bodies strewn about the ground. Mangled bodies. Dead bodies.
Aunt Harriet, Uncle Rob, and Little Ish were still in their car, bloodied and broken. Ray was not far from them, twisted at an odd angle. Kade’s eyes found Nicole amidst that carnage.
“Noooo!” he wailed and looked away, igniting a fresh round of pain in his belly, but the disfigured corpse of his favorite cousin, his beacon of comfort and joy since his parents died, was seared into his mind. “You can’t be dead. They can’t be dead. They can’t beeee.”
His chest ached. Tears poured down his cheeks. An agonized keening issued from his lips.
He wished he could change what he’d seen, wished he could trade places with them. Trade places with Nicole. If only he’d acted on his darkest thoughts, if only his cancer had claimed him first, they would still be alive.
On and on, the regrets swam through his mind. Everything seemed a blur. Perhaps, this wasn’t real. Maybe his eyes had played tricks on him.
Compelled by an inexplicable need for further confirmation, he mustered the strength to face the nightmarish tableau once more. The horror was indeed real. With that came an additional realization.
The silent watchers who were standing around weren’t people at all. They were wispy. Ethereal. Dead. They were ghosts. Ghosts with forlorn expressions, ghosts who’d taken up position beside their corpses. He tore his gaze away from his family’s ghosts.
Another thing caught Kade’s eye within the deluge. Something gigantic and glinting with every flash of lighting. Something splitting the destroyed tracks and driven into a gaping rent in the ground. The thing was at least the width of a car.
He gaped as a sliver of understanding took root.
It was a sword. The sword. A weapon of such colossal proportions that even by craning his neck he couldn’t see the top of the hilt. He could barely make out a cross guard beneath the brooding charcoal clouds.
Lowering his gaze, his brows drew together as he realized the landscape itself had undergone a profound transformation beyond the sword, beyond the ruined roller coaster tracks. The highways and buildings were nowhere to be seen.
Thinking the billowing smoke and incessant rain were distorting his perception, he squinted, determined to make sense of the altered terrain. And there, stretching before him, was what appeared to be a line of white hills or cliffs.
As he followed the line of hills and cliffs, they took on a definitive shape. An eerily familiar shape.
He screwed up his face. That couldn’t be right. Blinking several times, he tried to comprehend the impossible. Was that a person? A body so big it looked like a line of hills larger than buildings?
But there was no denying it. He was staring at a giant dressed in robes, face down, its body taking up dozens of blocks.
Emergency lights flashed to Kade’s right at the same moment he heard the wail of sirens. From above him came the rapid beat of a helicopter’s rotors and the whine of its engines.
He saw actual people now. Not ghosts. People in uniforms, rushing toward the area.
Abruptly, the first responders froze in place. The sound of the helicopter cut off. The wind ceased its howls. Even the raindrops froze in mid fall.
Frowning, Kade reached a shaky hand out and touched a raindrop. It fell apart, but tiny bits of water remained suspended.
A robed woman appeared, floating before Kade. A woman whose skin was glowing ebony, her face an ode to beauty as fiery clouds were to the sky at dusk.
Brilliant citrine eyes regarded Kade, making Kade feel as if the woman could see into the depths of Kade’s very soul. Intricate braids fell past the stranger’s shoulders, braids so fine they resembled twine.
A wide embroidered belt cinched her resplendent white robes whose kimono sleeves were so large Kade could fit inside them. Over the robes was a tunic that stretched to her feet, divided in four sections from the waist down.
Large metal rings hung from the bottom of each section. Protruding from the shoulders of the tunic were over-sized pear-shaped spaulders, the pointed tips ending at her elbows.
The woman’s robes flowed, rippled as if blown by a gentle breeze, but there was no wind Kade could feel. Suspended raindrops formed an outline around the woman as if she floated in her own pocket of space.
This could be only one person or thing.
At the thought, Kade’s hands convulsed. Fighting terror, he rubbed the underside of his middle finger with his thumb, the stubby digit flicking repeatedly.
“Death, my old friend,” Kade wheezed and smiled wryly. “We finally meet. I always thought you’d be a monster with a sickle. Not some gorgeous creature.”
The woman regarded him with a raised brow. When she spoke, her voice was tranquility given life, water lapping at a shore, “Thank you for the compliment, my child, but we are not death.”
Kade opened and closed his mouth. He hadn’t expected a response.
The strange floating woman continued, expression now thoughtful, “You possess an exceptional connection to aether and qi. You unknowingly harness both. And you have an incredibly strong soul. To think a soul like yours was spun out in such a young Seedworld.
“No wonder you saw our son’s battle against the Wraithlord. And no wonder you can see the spirits of the dead before the Nether claims them.”
The woman paused, brow wrinkling as she appeared to look beyond him. “Though, we wonder, what takes so long for the Nether to do its work in this universe? Some of these spiritual vessels are years old. And why are none higher than an Anima?” She grunted. “A mystery for another—”
“This isn’t real.” Kade closed his eyes, shutting out the scene around him, making a futile attempt to ignore pain as he’d done countless times in his short life. “This can’t be real. I’m trapped in a nightmare. Wake up, Kade.”
But when he opened his eyes, the woman was still there, watching him with unblinking citrine eyes that held as much emotion as a stone.
“This is very real, Kade Constantine.”
At the mention of his name, Kade was struck with a sudden sense of awe, of reverence that this strange and wonderful being would know him. “Am I dead? You said you aren’t Death… are you… are you an angel? Have you come to take me to Mom and Dad in heaven?”
The woman’s lips twitched as if she wanted to smile. “No, on all counts, Kade Constantine. In fact.”
And just like that, the pain Kade had all but forgotten vanished. Then Kade moved. Or something moved him, drawing him forward and off the metal shard with a wet, sucking sound to leave him suspended in the air. At the same time, Kade felt as if the world shifted in reverse.
Floating above the tracks, he glanced down, eyes widening in disbelief as his wound closed to leave perfect caramel skin, the tear in his T-shirt re-knitted itself, and the blood staining the shirt and soaking his jeans melted away. He glided down until his feet touched the ground.
The raindrops disappeared. The sky became clear and azure again. Everything else remained frozen.
It took but a moment for Kade to realize it was all the woman’s doing. Some power not of this world. Any previous disbelief vanished. The woman drifted down like fluff until she floated three feet off the ground in front of Kade.
“What… who are you?” Mesmerized, voice filled with wonder, Kade stared up at this being. “You said you’re not an angel, but still, you must be from heaven.”
“A Heaven.” The woman tilted her head. “One of many. We are a Keeper. An Immortal. Our name is Netatia.”
“An Immortal?” Kade’s eyes widened, his mind struggling to comprehend the enormity of that declaration. “So… you’re like… a god. A goddess? Is that why you keep talking about yourself in the plural?”
“Neither. Though some people would name us so. Immortal is what we are.”
Overwhelmed by the idea of standing before a divine presence, Kade made to get down on his knees.
“None of that, child.”
Kade straightened. “S-sorry, I didn’t mean to offend you.”
Keeper Netatia dipped her head. “You did not.”
Kade shifted his gaze past the Immortal to his dead family, his loved ones, their corpses and ghosts making his heart ache. Tears brimmed in his eyes. Hope stirred in his chest. “The way you healed me, how you made everything reverse.”
Swallowing, Kade hesitated, and with tears trickling down his cheeks, he gazed pleadingly upon Netatia. “Can-can you help my family? Can you do that for them? Bring them back to life?”
“We could, but it will cost you.”
Kade clasped his hands beneath his chin as his hope now soared. “Name your price. I’ll do anything.”
Keeper Netatia’s face was impassive as she regarded him with those brilliant citrine eyes. “You must agree to complete a task for us. Then, you must die.”
