CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT

My Tombstone was a Mountain

When I finally woke up, I couldn’t understand it. I had been able to wake up after I had been shot in the head, but not when I was chloroformed?

What did Brandon want with me now? Didn’t he have his tongue back? Hadn’t Christian killed everyone Brandon wanted dead?

I couldn’t open my eyes immediately, and when I did, the entire world was different. I was on a bed, a comfortable bed. My person had not been touched or changed, so I was still splattered in dry blood. My head hurt and my sinuses were raw.

As I looked around, I realized I was not in a normal room or a normal building. I was somewhere else, like a different world. It looked like the walls around me had been assembled by a mad man. They were made of rock slabs, and placed out of alignment so the pattern and the walls were not flat. The ceiling was too high, with large windows almost as tall. Heavy curtains were pulled aside and I could see rugged mountain faces. In every direction, there were windows and out those windows, I saw mountains that looked like they were pulled directly from the heart of the planet. Flat plains met almost vertical climbs. The crooked castle was built high on the side of the mountain and as I looked down, I couldn’t see how a person could get in or out at that impossible angle.

I moved and noticed another problem. My ankle was tied. Sitting down on the bed, I put my ankle on my knee to examine it. It was not like the nylon Brandon had tied me with before. It was a metal circlet that would only come off if I cut my foot off. What was the point of this?

I rubbed my eyes, looked around and found a note in Brandon's hand writing on the bed in the place Christian should have been.

The scrawl read:

Dear Beth,

Congratulations, you'll never die. If I were Christian I would tell you this is the fate of everyone immortal. Someone will catch you and do experiments on you to see how far your immortality goes. That is exactly what has happened here. You have been placed by yourself in a mansion on the dark side of Tombstone Mountain.

Your mission, while you are here, is to figure out how to command the metal around your leg to release its grip on your ankle. If you can do that, you are free to join our group of immortals.

If you saw your leg off in your haste to be free of us, you’ll find we won’t tolerate your lack of cooperation and we will replace the brace as many times as it takes.

We did not kidnap Christian. He does not know where you are. He’s not coming for you. He already knows how to do what we’re asking of you, he’s just forgotten.

The house is heated and there is a water reservoir. There will be food delivered from time to time, but I do hope you enjoy canned and dried food because that is what your diet will be until you accomplish your task.

This doesn’t need to take forever, Beth. You took a bullet to the head and woke out of it in under an hour. You are powerful. Take care and no one, not even us, will be able to stop you. You might even save the world.

All the best,

Henry Brandon

I shuddered. This was the very opposite of what I wanted. Christian had asked me to marry him! I was supposed to be somewhere feeling his kiss, getting under his clothes and completely giving up being a lady. He didn’t know where I was.

Aside from Brandon’s habit of tricking me into believing he was someone else, once the gig was up, he always told me the truth, no matter how unpleasant that truth might be.

I fingered the ring around my ankle. I didn’t even know what kind of metal it was, and I didn’t feel like crying or screaming.

In the bedroom, there were clothes hung up on wall hooks. They weren’t pretty and they were too big for me. I grabbed a dress to wear after I washed and went to the bathroom to clean myself.

Wherever Christian was, he was pulling his hair out. They may have stashed me on a mountaintop to hide me, but it wouldn’t be forever and they would pay for having done this to me on my wedding day.

The End