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Rose Walker sits in the corner of the bar, attempting to drink warm beer and doing her best to feel immortal. Neither pursuit is going very well.
She likes England, she really does. Especially since she’s decided to try London this time. The English countryside is beautiful, but it always gives her the feeling that she’s in a period film about boarding school.
Yes, she likes England, but they definitely don’t know how to serve beer.
“Alright there, love?” A man with an inebriated list to his gait ambles over, leaning heavily on her table. “What’s a pretty girl like you do’in all by herself?”
Rose smiles at him blandly. “Waiting for my boyfriend.” A dumb, easy lie.
The man squints, like he’s trying to look at her through fog. “What’s he doing keeping someone like...” He loses his train of thought momentarily. “—Someone like you waiting?”
“You’ll have to ask him when he gets here.” Rose lets her attention wander away from the man, and a few seconds later he loses interest, moving onto the next table and hitting on two girls who are sitting much too close together to be interested in anything he’s got to offer.
Rose gives the beer one last sip, before pushing it away to the center of the table. No, thank you.
Over at the bar, a group of men in football jerseys break into a cheer. They are grouped around a tiny television, watching players no bigger than their thumbs running back and forth. A group of woman in business suits and pumps come in out of the breezy evening. Rose imagines she looks like she belongs with these people. Until she opens her mouth, at least, or reveals her astonishing lack of cultural awareness.
And there’s the fact that she hasn’t aged in eight years. Immortality. It’s a weird thought.
One day, a few years ago, Rose had decided she wanted to remember, and she had. All of it, from the strange, pale man who had wanted to kill her for simply existing, to Grandma Unity giving up her life to save Rose’s. She remembered Gilbert and the dream she’d had where she and Jed had attended a funeral for someone who couldn’t ever truly die.
Immortal. So far it hasn’t been too strange. It’s sort of like moving out of home or losing your virginity—you expect to feel different, but really you’re just you somewhere else. Nothing changes, especially not all in a jolt. If people do change, it takes years and years.
The lonely man who’s had a few too many looks like he’s found someone who’s willing to talk to him—a girl in a red scarf, sitting by herself at a table full of couples.
“That’ll never work out.” There’s a voice in her ear. “Take my word for it.”
There’s a man sitting beside her. Or possibly, a woman. It’s hard to say. He’s dressed in a thin black suit, hair cut short and androgynous around his ears. His makeup is very slight and very well done. He is easily the most beautiful person Rose has ever seen
“Hello, grandfather,” she says.
The man lights a cigarette smoothly, the momentary glow of flame hollowing his cheeks, making his eyes shine, dark and amber. No human has eyes like that.
“So you remember me. That’s a change.”
Rose realizes, with irritation, that she’s been waiting for him all night. That’s why she’s here, in this noisy bar, instead of somewhere else where she might be able to put a beer in the goddamn refrigerator for a couple of hours.
“I’m remembering a lot of things, Mr.…do I have to call you grandfather?”
The man blows a long, thin line of smoke out of the corner of his mouth. “You don’t like it? I like it. It’s like calling me daddy, but kinkier.” He arches an eyebrow. “But I suppose, if you really must, you may call me Desire.”
Desire.
That makes sense. It’s completely ridiculous, bordering upon the insane, but it makes sense.
“Why are you here?”
“I’ve been thinking about family quite a bit lately. With everything that’s been going on.”
“What’s been going on?” Rose asks.
“Oh, a little of this, a little of that.” Desire taps the end of his cigarette into the ashtray. “You know how family can be.”
Rose thinks about her mom and about Jed, how he’d looked when she’d found him in Florida, half-starved and unable to remember who she was. She thinks about Zelda lying in the hospital bed, Gilbert rescuing her from a gang of boys in a dark backstreet. She thinks about the daughter she’d given away three years ago.
“Yeah,” she says. “I do.”
Desire reaches across the table and helps himself to Rose’s beer. “Mmm. Of course you do, darling. I just wanted to ask—have you met the rest of the family? Have any of them stopped by to say hello?”
Rose wonders if her grandfather is very bad at being offhand, or if there’s something else going on here. “I don’t think so. Why?”
“Nobody?” He stubs his cigarette out in the ashtray. His nails are blood red, and look sharp enough to cut throats. “Not even, say…a dear uncle?” His eyes gleam, tongue flicking out to moisten perfectly-shaped lips.
“No uncles,” Rose says. She reaches down by her feet for her purse. She needs to get out of here. The room feels like it’s getting smaller, oxygen slowly spiraling down to nothing, like Desire is soaking it up with his presence. There’s a slow itching beginning under her skin, heat trailing up her cheeks.
Rose can tell that the rest of the room is feeling it too, even if they don’t know where it’s coming from. They’re shifting their shoulders, running fingers through their hair, gulping down drinks. The final score is up on the tiny television, but none of the men are looking at it anymore. They’re looking at each other. The lonely man and the third-wheel girl are kissing, hands pulling at each other’s clothes, making sounds that you didn’t typically hear outside of a porn video.
“Well.” Desire lights up another cigarette. “Keep on eye out, would you? Some things have been changing lately, and my dear brother might start trying to mend bridges.” He leans in close, smiling, teeth glittering and white. “Be a good girl, and let me know if you see him?”
Rose hooks the strap of her bag over her shoulder. “Fine. Yeah.”
Desire winks at her. “I love it when things are interesting, don’t you?”
That night Rose dreams of a man dressed all in white. It’s the sort of dream that you know you’ve had before, a long time ago. The two of them walk down a hall lined with windows, and he tells her something important—everything important—but in the morning she can’t for the life of her remember what it was.
There’s a café down the street from Rose’s apartment where the coffee is at a fine balance between affordable and drinkable, with a view of the river a few steps away. She can afford better coffee and a better flat—she still has loads of Unity’s money—but if she’s going to live forever, she’s going to have to conserve funds. She’s never been too good at jobs, and the idea of trying to go to college fills her with an unspeakable sort of dread.
The days have begun to blend together. Sometimes she’s bored, but most of the time she isn’t. She’s been doing a lot of observing recently, and it isn’t really that bad.
“Nice day, isn’t it?”
Rose isn’t sure how she knows the greeting is for her—something in the quality of the voice, one amidst dozens. She turns around to find a small woman in a neat blue sweater and sensible shoes looking at her. Her glasses are perfectly round, and they make her eyes look huge. Her lips are turned up at the corners, but it isn’t a smile exactly.
“It’s a little cold,” Rose says, as the woman joins her at the railing. She has that sort of vagueness to her features that makes it impossible to even guess at her age.
She turns to face into the wind. “I suppose it is. I haven’t noticed things like that for awhile.”
It’s the weirdness of that statement more than anything that makes Rose say, “I know you, don’t I?” She’s been getting to know a lot of weirdness, recently.
This time she really does smile. “We’ve met. Briefly. At a funeral.”
“Right.” Rose’s coffee is getting cold. “The one in my dreams, right?”
The woman nods. “I’m Thessaly.” She offers her hand, and Rose shakes it.
Rose looks up at the sky, shivering a little in the breeze. The sun looks like it’s seriously considering pushing its way through the clouds, if only it could get over its stage fright.
“You know, life used to be so simple.”
Thessaly squints a little. “Really?”
Rose thinks about it for a moment. “No, I guess it never was.”
“It took more effort than I would have expected to track you down,” Thessaly says. She’s drinking iced tea out of a glass bottle, tiny sips that don’t appear to lower the level at all. “You are fairly illusive, Miss Walker.”
Rose shrugs. “I don’t try to be.”
“The name on the lease isn’t yours.”
Rose stands up a little straighter. “What?”
“The name on your apartment’s lease. It isn’t yours.”
“How do you know that? How’d you get a hold of my lease?”
Thessaly folds her hands neatly around her bottle. “Information is easy, Miss Walker. There isn’t much in this world that cannot be bought, and what money won’t get you, threats usually will.” She’s still smiling, but now the expression makes Rose’s stomach go cold and funny, sort of the way it does whenever she tries to eat takeout curry.
It’s strange—Thessaly only comes up to about Rose’s chin and her glasses make her look like someone’s headmistress, but Rose doesn’t think she’s ever met anyone more frightening. And Rose has known some fairly frightening people.
“What do you want?” she asks after a couple seconds. “Why bother paying people and, and threatening people to find me?”
“I know your family,” Thessaly says, as if that should be enough of an answer. “Or rather, I knew your family. They could end up being a lot of trouble for me in the near future. Things are beginning to happen, you see. Important things.”
“What things?”
Thessaly shakes her head. The sun finally drifts out from behind the cloud-cover, mid-morning light making her face look very wise and very old. “Nothing I can say for sure yet. But I thought I should meet you, just to have a leg up.”
Rose finishes her coffee, feeling the gritty rasp of grounds in the back of her throat. She coughs a little. “What do I have to do with anything?”
Thessaly narrows her eyes, squinting against the sunlight. “You used to a be a dream vortex. That takes a long time to wear off. Things will continue to be pulled toward you for quite awhile.”
Rose remembers Desire’s warning last night. That things are going to get interesting. “How long is ‘awhile’?”
“Oh, a century or so should probably wear it thin.” Thessaly laughs. “Don’t look like that. I know you have the time.”
Rose thinks she should probably ask how she knows that, but then Thessaly smiles again, like she’s anticipated her question. Right. Threats and money.
“Well, I’d keep an eye out,” Thessaly advises. “And when things get bad, just remember—you don’t get to choose your family.”
Rose gets her third unexpected visitor in as many days around one in the morning, outside of the front door of her building. She can feel him like electricity, like a buzzing beneath her skull.
She sighs. “I guess you want to talk too, huh?”
He steps out of the shadows between the buildings, eyes gleaming cool and green in the dark.
Interesting, Rose thinks, unlocking the door. Right.
Eternity looks like it’s going to be busy.