Page 53 of Saint of the Shadows

“Sort of.”

“You’re a result of that research.”

He chortled, thick with derision. “I’m not.”

That left… alien? “What are you?”

Vincent bounded to the other side of the study. He tore down a tapestry, revealing a gargantuan painting of a look-alike ancestor. He was dressed in armor, with a ruffled collar around his neck. His wavy golden hair coiffed at his ears, and a Van Dyke beard framed his haughty pout. He posed with one hand on a globe. In the other hand, he held a helmet.

“With the strength of ten men, I am above the ravages of time and disease. I am deathless. My name is Vicente Vasquez. I’m over 500 years old.” Saying his name, his real name, unearthed a long-dead Spanishceceo, sounding a lisp on the c and z of his name.

The floor felt like it warped beneath her. Her limbs seemed boneless. Vertigo and anemia hit all at once. Immortal. Annie hadn’t mentioned a fourth option. Marisol caught herself against the desk. She breathed out, “Oh.”

18

Everything You Touch Dies

Rain drops continued to patter against the window. They confirmed, to Marisol’s relief, that she could still hear. She and Vincent waited in silence for so long, she had doubted it. How long had they been like this? Her, with her eyebrows raised, rolling Abuelita’s pendant in her fingers? Him, with his brawny arms crossed over his chest, leaning against the corner? He had bowed his head.

Her brain registered his words in slow motion.

Pieces of his 500-year-long story sounded through—“Sixteenth-century expedition for the Queen Regent to the New World,” “drinking from the Fountain of Youth,” “exploitation, betrayal, and death.” The last words he said before bowing his head swam to the surface of her mind. “It wasn’t supposed to be permanent. One drink gave us the power of the gods but took our human gifts. To create life, for instance, a condition set in place to ensure we’d return the power with another drink.But we shed blood in the Fountain’s waters and destroyed it. For that, I can never age or die. I am cursed with eternal life until the balance of Justice is restored to the world.”

Tiny vibrations rumbled the room as the thunder faded. “So…” She wasn’t sure what to say next, waffling between “What’s it feel like to be America’s first villain?” and “If magic is real, what else is—fairy tales, legends, God?” But her voice breaking through the tinny pitch in her ears said, “There are others like you.”

He lifted his head enough to say, “There is no one like me.”

She finally let go of the pendant. “How so? You said—”

“Our bodies can handle damage, but we still need to take care of ourselves. If we are too reckless and take on damage too great, we can become...” He paused and sighed. “Permanently affected.”

“That’s why you needed the blade out.”

He tipped his head. “Only the curse holds the others together. Barely human. They’re waiting in cryostasis for the day I can fix them. They’re stored down below.”

Marisol recalled the vault glowing blue. “The weapons.”

He nodded.

“You’ll fix them when you lift the curse?”

“The curse will never lift! I’ve spent lives trying to undo the viciousness of humanity, to restoreJustice. I’ve tried to learn from our mistakes—to stand by those crushed between our wars and revolutions. I can’t do it. It’s never enough.” He pounded his fist into the wall, cracking the marble.

Marisol adjusted the belt of her coat tighter, as if it would protect her. “How will you fix them, then?” The question she really wanted to ask was how he was going to fix himself before he became some thing held together by the rotting sinews of an everlasting curse.

“Aut inveniam viam aut faciam.” Lightning flashed and thunder drummed, its rumbling strength ever closer in the distance. “I will find a way, or I will make one.”

“The words carved on your estate.”

“I’ve placed my faith in science to find my way.”

His past lives were all men searching, discovering, and exploring. One of those lives belonged to his father—him, Victor Varian. And... the cells that Annie discovered were Victor Varian’s cells. Or Vincent’s cells. The cells that she used for the serum to improve the flawed regenerative serum he had already created.

The serum that cured her tumor-ridden mouse only to leave it as a monster, deathless and vicious.

A fire burned inside of her, an anger for withholding the truth from her. “It hasn’t worked.” But she felt angry on behalf of her history. Vincent’s people created the ripple of death and destruction across early America. They were the reason herabuelita spoke Spanish. The sins of Vincent’s people twisted every branch of Marisol’s family tree. She saw it in the raw, overworked hands of her mother, the desperation of her father, and the acquired cruelty of her brother.

He talked to the ground. “I should have never acted on my feelings for you. Not when I can’t—” He held his face in his hands, his hair caught between his fingers.

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