A Chance for Charity (The Immortal Ones) by S.L. Baum Page A

this
situation. Most children are taught not to believe in the
unnatural. There are no boogey-men in the closet, no ghosts in the
attic, no witches flying on Halloween, and nobody can live forever.
I’m sure he was raised this way too. Yet here he was, in my
kitchen, holding onto me – a woman suspended in time... whose body
could heal itself, who would never grow old, and may never die.
    “ Catherine’s here,” I
stated as my ears registered the sound of her car pulling into the
drive.
    “ How do you know,” he
asked.
    “ I hear her car
outside.”
    “ How?”
    “ Another mystery,” I
shrugged.
    “ What is the ‘semi-bad
news’?” Catherine called out as she walked through the side door.
She entered the kitchen and then came to a halt, “Hello, Link. I
wasn’t expecting to see you here. What is going on?” She asked as
she surveyed our expressions.
    Unable to speak, I slid the open photo album
across the counter to her.
    “ Where did this come from?”
she asked, her voice calm and steady. Catherine, as always, was a
pillar of strength.
    “ Link showed it to me
today,” I whispered.
    “ And how did Link come by
these photographs?” She was being vague, not wanting to admit that
the young woman in the pictures was clearly me.
    “ That little boy,” I
pointed at the photo, “is Roger’s little brother. That’s Lincoln’s
grandfather,” I answered. “Link remembered the photograph when he
saw me dressed this way,” I said looking down at my
outfit.
    “ James is here,” Catherine
breathed. “Let’s continue this when he gets inside.”
    “ That super hearing thing
is kinda creepy,” Link said.
    Catherine froze, realizing she’d let her
guard down.
    “ I told him, he knows,” I
admitted.
    “ What is the ‘semi-bad
news’?” James echoed Catherine’s greeting as he walked into the
kitchen. “And why is Link’s vehicle in the drive?” he’d obviously
caught what Catherine had missed.
    I pointed to the photo album. “Link knows,
he figured out who I was - am. Roger’s little brother was Link’s
grandpa,” I repeated the semi-bad news again. It got less semi-bad
the more I said it out loud. Now it was becoming just a simple
fact.
    James stared at the photograph for a few
seconds. It seemed like an eternity as I waited for his
reaction.
    “ Well kid, it looks like
you didn’t destroy all evidence of your past when you torched that
scrapbook after Roger died. I’m glad you have something to remember
him by now.” His smile was comforting and he reached out to stroke
my cheek. James shifted his gaze to Link. His eyes narrowed and his
expression hardened, “Can you be trusted?” he asked.
    “ Absolutely, I wouldn’t
tell a soul. I knew there had to be a reason all this was happening
to me, why I chose to come to Telluride and why I just couldn’t
stay away from Emily, I mean Charity, from the moment I spotted
her,” he smiled at me and pulled me tighter into his embrace. “Now
I know why I was so drawn to her. I want nothing but her safety.
But I don’t understand the alarm,” he told James, his expression
puzzled.
    “ The alarm, as you put it,
comes from our fear of discovery. There are those who want to kill
us because they believe our kind to be an abomination, something
evil. There are others who would love to capture us and make us
their little science experiments. I cannot have either of those
groups of people knowing our whereabouts. I’ve worked very hard to
cover our tracks and make us disappear each time we relocate and
start over,” James explained.
    “ When you say ‘those’ do
you actually know who ‘they’ are?” Link asked.
    “ The Lords, an aptly named,
family of religious zealots who kill in the name of God, have been
on the hunt for Immortals since before the Civil War. They have
passed down tales of our kind through each generation. Another
threat comes in the form of Adrien Beauvais. He is a European
billionaire, obsessed with immortality. A