The Hidden (The Hidden Trilogy) (32 page)

“Yeah,” Beth said. “Us and a couple other people.” She grinned again. “Come on, get your bathing suit and let’s go. Invite Thomas if you want.”

It’d been a week since I talked to him, since I found out he was…
not
human. I couldn’t ignore him forever. I either had to find a way to move past this, or end it. I grabbed my phone again and sent him a quick text:

Swimming @ the pool. U in?

I tossed my phone on the bed and started to change. It beeped several seconds later. I finished tying my bikini top, adjusted the girls once more, and picked up my phone. Thomas’s text read:

Be there in 10.

My stomach lurched a little when I read it. I hadn’t realized until now how much I wasn’t ready to see him.

When we got to the gym, I saw Thomas waiting under one of the street lamps lining the sidewalk. My heart began to race. He smiled tentatively, and I hung back from the group, pulling Beth aside.

“I’ll just be a sec,” I whispered to her.

She nodded and glanced at Thomas, giving him a small smile and wave before disappearing inside with the rest of the group. The loud clank of the metal door swinging shut behind them echoed in the stillness of the night.

“I’m surprised you invited me.”

I felt awful about avoiding him, but I’d needed the space to think. It hadn’t solved jack shit, though, because I
still
didn’t know what to do.

“You haven’t been in class this week,” he continued quietly. “You haven’t answered any of my phone calls or texts. Are we…over?”

I sighed and said, “I don’t want us to be, but… I just don’t see how this can work.”

His mouth pressed into a hard line. “It can, but you can’t just disappear for a week and try to decide things about us all by yourself. That’s not how this works.” His jaw softened. “You have to talk to me, Em. It’s never gonna work if you don’t.”

It wouldn’t work even if I
did.

No matter how much we worked on our relationship, it was doomed to fail. Period. We were too different. We had
no
discernible future together. It was just a matter of how much time we had left.

The thought was horribly depressing. “I’m sorry. I know it wasn’t fair, and I–” I rubbed my eyes and exhaled. “I’m sorry,” I finished lamely.

He pulled me to him, wrapping his arms around me. “You had me scared for a while. I thought you wanted nothing to do with me, now that you…know.”

That wasn’t what this was about. Thomas’s “otherness” didn’t really change anything for me. I mean, yeah, it was a
big
fucking shock, but at the end of the day, he was still the same person I fell in love with.

I shook my head against his chest, gripping him tighter. “I just don’t want to have to face losing you.”

He looked down at me quizzically. “What are you talking about? You’re not gonna lose me, Em. I swear.”

Scowling, I pushed away from him. “That’s easy for you to say now, but what about twenty years down the road when I’ve got crow’s feet and a fat ass? I’m not stupid, Thomas, I know you’re not gonna stick around for that.” Tears blurred my vision as white-hot anger swelled in me. “You knew we could never have a real future, and you went after me anyway.
Why?
” Big, fat tears rolled down my cheeks, hitting my lips as I spoke.

Thomas looked away, his voice hushed. “Come on, Em, don’t talk like that.”

Rage bubbled over and I exploded, shoving at his chest. “You didn’t take my feelings into consideration at all, did you? You didn’t stop to think how this would affect
me
. But, hey, as long as you get what you want, then that’s all that matters, right?”

“I didn’t force you into this,” he shot back. “You could’ve turned me down. Hell, you
did
turn me down. Over and over again. So don’t put this all on me.”

I threw my hands up, looking at him incredulously. “How is this
not
all on you?
You’re
the one that pursued
me
–relentlessly, I might add–and
you’re
the one that knew, not me. If I had–”

“Then what? You wouldn’t have gotten involved with me?”

“I–” Floundering, I snapped my mouth shut. “I’m not saying that, I just… I don’t know.” I exhaled sharply and wiped my eyes.

Thomas’s voice softened. “Please don’t worry about any of this right now.” 

Bitter laughter escaped me as Gabriel’s words ran through my head. “Enjoy it while it lasts, right?”

His mouth mashed into a tight line, the muscles of his jaw clenching and unclenching as he stared past me, shaking his head. His nostrils flared as his eyes landed on mine. “Em, I love you so much it hurts. I would do
anything
for you. I’d die for you, and I
know
you’d do the same, so don’t you dare stand there and tell me you’d rather have a lifetime of nothing special than a few years of something extraordinary.”

In my heart, I knew he was right. I’d take a few fleeting moments with him over all the time in the world with someone else. So I’d have to make the best of what little time we had. Starting now.

The chilly night air was finally getting to me, and I pulled my sweatshirt closer. “Come on.” I grabbed his hand, pulling him towards the gym’s doors. “I don’t want to fight anymore.”

Everybody was already in the pool by the time we went in. The familiar chlorine smell hit me and I relaxed a little. Something about it was comforting. It reminded me of childhood summers spent cooling off in the water to beat the Texas heat.

“Marco!” Josh yelled, his voice echoing in the pool house. He blindly waded through the shallow end, his arms outstretched before him.

Everyone collectively yelled out, “Polo!”

Since the deep end was empty, I led Thomas there so we could have some privacy. I kicked off my flip-flops and rolled up my pant legs, then sat at the edge of the pool, dipping my feet into the water. Thomas followed suit and sat next to me.

I looked up at his face, noting its perfect contours and the way the underwater lights of the pool softly illuminated them. Those lights were the only ones on in the entire pool house, giving everything a distorted, watery glow.

I kicked my feet through the water, splashing and creating little ripples. Lowering my voice so it wouldn’t carry, I said, “I still have a couple questions, if you don’t mind.”

“Not at all.” Thomas leaned back, putting his weight on his hands behind him.

I looked across the pool at everyone–horsing around as they splashed and squealed, their game of Marco Polo long forgotten–and tried to get my thoughts in some semblance of order, but they were all over the place. It was like trying to herd cats.

I frowned and said the first thing that came to mind. “When you said you were immortal for all and intents and purposes, what did you mean?”

“Well, we can’t die from natural causes, like old age or failing health,” he said. “However, if enough trauma’s sustained, we will die. And unless you decapitate us while we’re dead, we’ll come back.”

My leg dropped back in the water. “Come back? Like a zombie?”

Thomas laughed. “No. Our cells don’t die–even if our body sustains a fatal injury and dies. While we might be clinically dead, our cells would still be alive, so they’d regenerate. We’d heal to the point that our heart would start beating again, brain activity would start again, and blood would start pumping through our bodies again.”

“Why do you have to be decapitated in order for you to stay dead?”

He smirked. “Because we can come back from everything else.”

My eyes narrowed on him, and my first instinct was to call bullshit. “What if someone cut out your heart?”

He shrugged, like it wasn’t a big deal. “We’d just grow another one.”

Say
what
? “You could
grow
another heart?”

He nodded. “We can re-grow organs, tissue, muscles, bones–things like that. We can even re-grow severed limbs, but not a severed head.”

“Why not?”

“Because the brain is the command center of the body. Without its orders, our bodies don’t know what to do.”

“Okay, but what happens to your body once you’re decapitated?”

“Nothing. We don’t decay or anything. We’ll always look like we just died. And we can reattach a severed head. All you have to do is put the head against the neck to heal, and you can do it any time. There’s no time limit.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you can decapitate me today, set my body back together fifty years down the road, and I’ll come back.”

“Oh.” I shuddered, picturing it in my head. “Have you ever…died?”

“Once,” he said.

My eyes shot up to his. “How?”

He shrugged. “In battle.”

His nonchalance irritated me. “
What
battle?”

“Vietnam. I walked onto a landmine.” He shook his head and half-smirked. “Hand to hand combat is as easy as breathing and I can damn near dodge bullets, but landmines…”

I gasped at the mental image and closed my eyes, as if to block it out. He said he stopped aging at twenty-two, but how long ago was that? Apparently it was a while ago if he fought in Vietnam. I opened my eyes, staring at him intently. “How old are you?”

His smirk quickly faded as he looked away. “Two-hundred and ninety-six.”

My eyes grew wider as I tried to process this new bit of info. “That’s a bit of an age difference,” I mumbled. Not only was my boyfriend not human, but he was older…
a lot
older. I scrutinized his face, truly amazed because he appeared to be in his early twenties at the most.

It dawned on me then that I knew almost nothing about his life. The bits and pieces he’d told me were apparently to a much, much larger puzzle than I’d imagined. 

I blinked and rubbed my forehead, like that would help everything suddenly make sense. It didn’t, of course. “Why’d you go to Vietnam? That was a human war, so why get involved?”

“I got drafted.”

“Oh…” I sighed, and said, “I still don’t understand something. Out of all the things you could be doing right now, why are you in college?”

The corners of his lips lifted. “What else should I be doing? Sitting in an office or a cubicle somewhere?”

I smiled at the thought. “I guess not. But you could be doing
anything
. You could be a model, or a professional athlete. Hell, you could be a superhero.”

“Becoming famous would only complicate things. We don’t need proof we were alive fifty years ago and haven’t aged a day.”

I understood where he was coming from, but… “It still seems like a waste.”

He shrugged. “It’s better than the alternative.”

“What’s the alternative?”

“Living with my own kind.”

I frowned. “Why would that be so bad?”

“I guess you could call it politics.” He lifted his feet from the water and set them on the edge, bringing his knees to his chest. “I used to work for a man named Isaac. He’s not exactly our leader, but he’s got a lot of influence. He’s one of the oldest left, and he’s behind the move towards creating a government for us. He’s been around long enough to know that the way we’ve been doing things has to change if we want to survive as a species.”

“I thought you said your kind has been around for thousands of years. It sounds like you’ve survived just fine.”

“Our numbers are the smallest they’ve ever been. The Hidden are broken up into two groups, and both sides have been at war with each other for…forever, basically. We keep killing each other off. Isaac is trying to bring us together and put an end to our fighting. He’s put several treaties into effect, and so far, it seems to be working.”

“Isaac sounds like a pretty decent guy.”

Thomas shrugged and looked out over the water. “He wasn’t always trying to bring us together. He used to be hell-bent on destroying as much of the opposition as he could, but for the last twenty years he’s been all about peace and
co-existing
. I guess he realized the race’s downfall was going to be self-inflicted.”

“Who was on the opposition?”

“Anyone who didn’t see things Isaac’s way.”

I frowned. “Okay, never mind. Isaac kind of sounds like a douche. Why’d you ever work for him?”

“It’s a very prestigious job among my kind.”

“Then why are you here, instead of at your ‘prestigious job’?” I asked, making a face as I made air quotes.

“Because I wanted to keep the little shred of humanity I still had.”

At my quirked brow, he said, “When I worked for Isaac, I did things that I’m not proud of. Most of us–most of The Hidden–they’re ruthless. They have no shred of decency or compassion…they have no conscience whatsoever. I didn’t want to be like that.”

Images of an ancient race of beautiful but savage immortals danced through my head. It was hard to believe such a world of make-believe actually existed. “So if you don’t live with your own kind, then…where are they?”

“For the most part, they hide in plain sight, just like I do. They have colonies all over the world–usually in major cities–where they keep to their own kind and avoid human interaction as much as possible.

“My parents, for example, live in a colony just outside DC. It’s a gated community, exclusively for Healers.”

I had no idea his parents were so close. It’s a shame they weren’t on good terms…

I blinked repeatedly, clearing my head, and realized how many more questions I still had about his life. “So before college you worked for Isaac.”

He nodded.

“How long did you work for him?”

“Two-hundred and thirty-nine years.”

My eyes bulged. That was a loooong-ass time to work for the same guy. I couldn’t even
begin
to contemplate how long Thomas had actually lived. Hell, a decade seemed like a long time to me, especially when I stopped to think about how much had happened in the past one, since I’d been nine.

God, that felt like a lifetime ago. And Thomas had lived for dozens of them. He’d had dozens of lifetimes without me.

Shaking my head, I told myself to stop. I couldn’t have depressing thoughts like that
and
enjoy my remaining time with Thomas. It just wouldn’t work.