Eternal (5 page)

S
IX

W
ind rocks the weeping willows, setting their long green tendrils swaying, as Julia sprints into the forest. She feels encumbered by her clothes and is surprised to realize that she isn’t wearing her usual jeans and T-shirt. Instead, a scratchy wool bliaut presses into her diaphragm and makes it hard to breathe. It trails from her elbows and snags on branches, billows around her ankles, and forces her to shorten her steps. The dress is a deep shade of emerald that matches her eyes. Underneath, she wears an ankle-length linen chemise. How can she possibly run in all these clothes? Some misogynistic man must have designed this outfit. She’s surprised to find that, in spite of the itchy, voluminous, inconvenient clothes, she is filled with so much joy that it erupts from her in a spontaneous laugh.

In the distance, she hears the peal of church bells announcing the end of another autumn day. Leaves in brilliant hues of red and yellow swirl around her feet. She tries to avoid the crackling brown leaves in their midst, so as not to give herself away. Still, her progress is so slow, and she knows that her pursuer is gaining ground. The thought doesn’t scare her but only makes her giddier. She hides behind a tree as she pauses to catch her breath.

The dense crunch of dry leaves announces he’s closing in. Suddenly, the footsteps stop, and she holds her breath. He leaps out from behind the tree.

This time he isn’t wearing a blue button-down shirt. Instead, he wears a knee-length tunic that accentuates his muscular arms, despite the chainse undergarment that covers them. He throws down the knapsack he is carrying, grabs her by the waist, and draws her close. She can feel his heart beating fiercely beneath his shirt. With a giggle of delight, she throws her arms around him, allowing him to pick her up and carry her from her hiding place to an open spot on the forest floor. He sets her down gently but doesn’t let go. He presses his forehead to hers. A shaft of sunlight breaks through the thick foliage and illuminates his eyes, so she can see their vivid color. He seems to gaze into her very soul. She muses that looking into his eyes is like falling into an ocean and discovering how peaceful it might be to drown.

“Not fair!” she says. “A woman’s attire is made not only to be modest, but apparently to make her easy prey. I would like to try again, but this time with my legs as free as yours, Pierre.” She’s surprised to hear that name come from her mouth and more surprised to hear herself speaking not English, but French.

“Lovely legs I’m sure they are too,” he says, eyes twinkling with mischief as he pretends to lift a corner of her skirt. She pushes his hand away, playfully. “But I thought it was a free mind you sought?”

“I would have both. Or no, all three: freedom of mind, body, and spirit.”

“Few people know what to do with such bounty,” he says. “I’ll give you this: You’re surprisingly agile for an intellectual. But I would never let you get away.”

‘As a student of the Philosopher,” she says, “I was not seeking to achieve too much, only to reach the golden mean: to be just fast enough. I seek the middle way, a balance.”

“You’re a quick study.”

“And a fast runner.”

“Just fast enough. Though I suspect you’re secretly like me—one who prefers to push beyond the mean.” He grows thoughtful. “Of course, the Philosopher meant those ideas for men, not women. But you have given me cause to consider that, despite the musings of Aristotle, women may have potential to meet the intellect of men.” He smiles with the pride of a teacher.

“I am a good student, then?”

“The best I have ever seen. And the most beautiful.” He reaches up to gently trace the contours of her face with his fingertips, sending a shiver of delight through her spine. “ You are the golden mean in every sense—your mind and spirit, form and face are all a study in symmetry, proportion, and harmony. If beauty is truth, then there is nothing truer than you.” He lifts her chin and brushes his lips against hers, filling her with longing. Then he falls into an uncharacteristic silence. As he searches her eyes again, he seems to be considering something. Then he sighs, rubs his cheek against hers, and turns away.

He strides over to the previously discarded knapsack and sits down next to it. “I have something for you.” He reaches for her hand and gently pulls her down next to him. His hands quiver as he opens the knapsack. He rummages through the books within until his hand withdraws a small linen bag. He fumbles with the drawstring and removes a finely crafted gold chain, at the end of which hangs a pendant in the shape of a golden heart, encrusted with rubies and sapphires.

“Oh, Pierre!” she gasps, “It’s breathtaking.”

“The heart opens,” he says.

She opens the locket carefully. A tiny piece of parchment is folded inside. She unfolds the paper and reads the words, written in beautiful calligraphy: “Love is two hearts living in the same soul.”

“Never has the Philosopher written truer words,” he says.

She swallows and tries to blink back the tears in her eyes before she looks up. She cries so easily. She reaches for his hand, presses it open-palmed against her chest, and whispers, “My heart is yours forever.”

She sees both relief and joy lightening the countenance of the nobleman who faces her. Though he’s ten years her senior, his eyes at this moment have the innocent look of a schoolboy. “Until I met you, I thought love was for the weak,” he says. “Though I studied the Philosopher’s words intently, I questioned the entire idea of a soulmate. I found pleasure only in learning. But now I know what I was missing. Now I am a disciple of Aristotle in every sense of the word. My soul is yours, now and forever. Nothing on heaven or earth—not even the very jaws of hell—can sever our bond.”

His words stir in her a passion she has never before experienced, a desire that rises from a place so deep within that she never before knew it existed. She thinks the fiery ache running through her might consume her if she doesn’t answer it somehow. So she gives the only answer she can: a kiss. A kiss that lingers, devours, and envelops all her senses. His lips begin to search beyond her lips, to the tingling lobes of her ears, the throbbing pulse at her neck, the warm heartbeat that thrums under her chest. Soon, she loses track of the world around them.

She grows aware of a sudden storm descending on the forest. She feels her beloved’s lithe body press more tightly against hers, as if to shield her from the storm or something lurking within it. Wind tears at their clothes. Rain bursts from the darkening sky and cascades in sheets, soaking them to the skin. A sudden flash of lightning and simultaneous clap of thunder shock her into opening her eyes. Then another flash illuminates the shadows among the trees. For a split second, she thinks she sees a face in those shadows, a familiar face contorted with jealousy and rage.

The forest goes dark again, and she realizes that it isn’t just rain dampening her face, but tears. Tears of joy blended with tears of fear and … sorrow. She smells something burning. Like ozone. Like electricity. Where is she? When is she?

“Pierre!” Julia’s own shouting woke her. Her face was drenched in tears, and her clothes were soaked in cold sweat that felt almost like rain. Waking up wasn’t exactly comforting. When she opened her eyes, the first thing she saw in the misty, early-morning light was a tombstone looming over her head, a trickle of dried blood drawing a crooked line down its center like a crack.
Am I dead?
she wondered. Then she remembered that she had gone to her mother’s grave.

Julia’s dream was still fresh in her mind—it was unlike any other dream she’d ever had. She remembered every moment vividly, as if it had all happened somewhere in her distant past. She recalled the scents from her dream: the dying stink of fall leaves and the living musk of a man—a mix of sweat, exotic oils, and herbs. She ran her tongue over her lips. The taste of his mouth was still on them. A chill shook her body as she recalled the dark, somehow familiar figure she’d seen at the end of her dream.

But it couldn’t be real. She couldn’t imagine Austin prancing around in that medieval garb. And she had no idea where she’d picked up the name, “Pierre.”
Weird.

Weirder still, why was she still here when it was almost morning? Where had the past few hours gone? Her head started pounding, sending a wave of nausea through her body. She reached up and touched something sticky next to her eye.
Blood.

The events of last night came flooding back. She’d had an exceptionally vivid dream. Right after she had been attacked by a shadowy stranger. Right after she had asked her mother if it was possible to come back from the grave.

Julia stood up and rubbed at the bandaged scratches on her arms where Dr. Bertel had grabbed her the night before. She rolled her neck, which hurt from sleeping on the ground, and massaged it with her hand. She started to walk away from the grave and was surprised when a bolt of pain shot up her ankle, reminding her of the jump from the top of the gate. She reached down to roll up her pant leg and see if it was swollen. As she did, she smeared blood on her ankle, the blood she’d wiped from the gash in her head. “Girl, you are a mess!” she said aloud, trying to lighten the mood and distract herself from a growing panic.

She stumbled back to her mother’s grave and fell forward onto her knees. She stared at her mother’s name etched into the tombstone along with the years of her birth and death—just 44 years between the two. The epitaph below read: “Though her body lies beneath, her soul is borne aloft.”
Is that what happened last night? Was my soul borne aloft?

As she limped back toward the gate, she turned on her cell phone. An alarming text from Nadia appeared: “Intern friend from hospital says Dr. Hottie disappeared from room. Call me.”

S
EVEN

J
ulia’s hands shook as she read Nadia’s text.
First the graveyard, now this.
Were they being targeted I because of their research? Did her attacker get to Dr. Bertel first? Although Bertel warned that their research could be dangerous in the wrong hands, Julia had always approached it with naive optimism and had never feared its potential consequences—until now.

She fumbled for the car keys that were miraculously still in her pocket and opened her car door. Moving as quickly as she could in her battered condition, she locked the door, dug through her purse, and found the card that Austin had given her only a few hours before. She placed the call, shaking from the effects of too much adrenaline. When he didn’t answer, she left a message: “Austin, this is Julia Jones. I—I’ve just been attacked. In the graveyard. I am going over to the hospital right now. Could you … could you give me a call?”

She took a few deep breaths and finally felt calm enough to start the car. She was bruised from head to toe, and her entire body hurt. She could tell that her body was beginning to go into shock. As she drove toward the hospital, she called her dad, but he didn’t pick up. Neither did Tyler. She tried to remain calm as she left them messages but couldn’t hide the panic in her voice.
I guess I’ll have to handle this one on my own,
she thought. The events of the previous night weighed upon her mind, and she began to sob from fear, relief, and utter exhaustion. She was a wreck, inside and out.

Her thoughts shifted toward Dr. Bertel. After all the work they’d done together, Julia and Bertel had become something akin to friends. It was both more and less than that. It was a meeting of two scientific minds—the first intellectual connection she’d felt with any man besides her father. Bertel shared her excitement in odd research milestones, like the sudden factor that balanced an equation, the discovery of a new use for a chemical byproduct, or the plotting of unexpected points of symmetry between science and religion.

As she drove, she thought about the strange change that had come over Bertel yesterday when he’d grabbed her by the arms. It was such a contradiction to his usual nature, which was gentle and soft-spoken to the point of being withdrawn. Yet he had become much more animated in recent weeks, ever since their breakthrough.

A few weeks earlier, she and Bertel had shared a moment that no two people before them had ever known when they’d produced a momentary chemical change in the pineal gland of a cadaver brain. It had been so faint and so brief, it was barely recordable. Still, they’d both exclaimed at the same moment, “Oh!” and turned to each other with looks of such dumb wonder, that Julia had blushed. The excitement was like nothing she had ever experienced.

“Julia, do you know what this could mean?”

“That maybe someday we can bring back people who are brain dead?”

He nodded. “And it all starts where I thought, in the pineal gland: the seat of the soul, the third eye chakra, the house of the Holy Spirit.”

The stubborn scientist in Julia wouldn’t die that easily, and she still remained skeptical about the spiritual connotations of Dr. Bertel’s work. As much as she missed her mother, most of the time she found herself believing the experiments would fail—or that something in their research would prove that the human personality was nothing more than a series of chemical and electrical impulses, with no soul required. “How do we know the chemical activity is from the guy who used to inhabit this brain? It might just be the drug itself, or some sort of residual nerve impulses, some final reflex.”

“The longer we can keep it going, the better chance we have to find out,” he said.

“But really the only way we can find out is if we can get a brain to talk to us.”

He nodded and looked directly into her eyes. His usually sad gray irises were bright with excitement. “And I think we can do it! We’re an amazing team. Science superheroes!” As goofy as he sounded, she hoped he was right.

But right now he was in terrible danger. After her close encounter, she was convinced that Dr. Bertel was also the victim of an attack. For all she knew, the reason Bertel wasn’t in his hospital room was because he was dead. She pulled into the parking lot next to the emergency room just as her cell phone rang.

“Hello?” she answered expectantly. “Austin?”

Instead, a thin, raspy voice spoke to her in French.

“Heloise, did you miss me, dearest? I’m coming back for you.”

She hesitated, heart thumping. “I’m sorry, I think you have the wrong number.”

“No, I’m quite sure this is exactly the right number.”

“Who is this?” she demanded, though it seemed as if the answer were on the tip of her tongue.

Then the other end of the line went dead.