Cara MIA - By Book One of the Immortyl Revolution - By Denise Verrico Page 0,90

once all around us, the voices of his long memory. I saw glimpses of his past, his dysfunctional childhood, the tutor he’d fallen in love with, the baby girl he fathered with a slave, his unhappy marriage to Sally Anne and his joy in his two sons. All these demons he’d held close for so long.

Then inside me, wind howled and rain began to fall, bolts of lightning cut a ragged gash across the sky over a city with cobblestone streets. I knew it was long ago, New York, seeing it through Ethan’s eyes. There in the gaslight stood Brovik, dressed all in black like a vampire in a movie, with a long cape, and his flaxen hair blowing long and free. He held out a gloved hand and smiled serenely, so that Ethan let go of the weapon he held.

Brovik took him to a nearby house where inside stood a table piled with delicacies and bottles of wine. Ethan was thinner and pale as if he’d not had decent food in a long time. Brovik told him to sit and eat. Ethan fell on the food ravenously, with not one shred of the fine manners he took such pride in. Brovik sat beside him, speaking low and pouring wine. Ethan looked on in wonder as Brovik told of sea voyages and exotic places.

Brovik held out his hand. Ethan hesitated then clasped it in his. Brovik led him up the stairs to a bedroom and took Ethan into his arms. Now snow began to fall, blizzards of ice and cold filled me. Ethan and Brovik stood under the pines on Brovik’s island, but no Bauhaus concrete and glass palace stood there yet, only a dark wood structure like a large cabin. Ethan turned away from his master and trudged off through the snow, leaving Brovik, enigmatic and cold as the northern lights blazing overhead.

Many years passed in his mind, I saw Ethan returning to his ruined house and tearing vines away from the brick. He wandered far and wide, searching in many different places for something he couldn’t define, frightened and lost in a world that was rapidly changing.

Then I saw Philip and Ethan on a boat approaching Brovik’s island where his sparkling house now stood on the hill. Great longing filled me as Ethan’s memory drew closer to his master’s dwelling, exactly like the same magnetic force binding us.

Brovik met them on the shore, holding his arms and embracing them both. As they went into the house, Brovik gestured to the long stairway where Kurt was descending. A searing pain rocked me as I took in my lover’s shining youthful face looking adoringly at his master. The pain was Ethan’s more than mine. Brovik bid him to sit at the piano and play. As Kurt wove his angel’s song, jealousy consumed Ethan. Angry words passed between Ethan and Brovik. Kurt trembled with rage and launched himself, a small, deadly missile. Ethan caught him by the throat and squeezed. Brovik’s voice thundered and all the glass in the house shattered, raining down as Ethan dropped Kurt on the floor. The glass cut their faces and hands. Brovik took Kurt into his arms to protect him. Ethan turned away and left them together bleeding among the shards.

Snow blew into Ethan’s face and eyes, stinging his open wounds as he boarded the boat and departed. A plan formulated itself in his mind, of the only thing he could do that would wound Brovik as deeply as he had been wounded. The snow fell and fell and when it cleared I saw the neon glitter of New York, as I knew it in the fifties, where rainbows of light and spilled petroleum sparkled on the wet pavement and a cacophony of car horns, human voices and rumbling subways filled my ears. Ethan sat in a hard chair in the small theatre where we met. I entered like in the dreams I had before he found me, in my Hilde costume, but not looking as I saw myself but rather in an idealized light where my eyes burned like a Valkyrie.

It hurt too much, I tried to pull away but he held me fast to him to allow the vision to conclude where he willed. This was the place I feared to go, the demon I kept tightly locked within me. I lay cowering, drenched in my child’s blood and my own as he took me up in his arms and his love filled