The Immortal Game (book 1) (4 page)

Ash’s nostrils flared.

“By the time you’re giving up a bishop and both your rooks they’re convinced you don’t know what you’re doing.”

His fists tightened on the table in front of her.

“You sacrifice your queen and they think they’ve got you.” She paused, knowing that he knew what came next. She shrugged, feeling smug now. “Then you checkmate them with a few minor pieces. They don’t expect it. It’s called The Immortal Game—”

“A diversion tactic,” he said on top of her words, like it was a cheap trick pulled out of a felt hat.

She bristled. “It’s a good game of chess. Like William the Conqueror and Harold II. I faked. You fell for it.” She took another sip of the cold vanilla coffee and relished its sweetness.

He stared at her. She wondered if he would storm out, still having a tantrum about losing one chess game. To her shock he laughed. The sound was deep and true. It startled her. She felt warm, despite having cooled down from her ride.

“When were you born?”

“Huh?” She scrunched up her nose at the sudden change in topic.

“Your sign?” he insisted.

She thought it must be a joke. Wasn’t that a bad pickup line from the ‘70s? But he continued to look at her like he’d asked her to explain away the mysteries of the universe and she was being deliberately vague.

“December,” she said. “Sagittarius. Why?”

“Fire sign.” He nodded, but he didn’t answer her question.

“What do you mean?” she crossed her arms. The smug feeling of recounting her chess win was gone. “What are you talking about?”

“Where did you grow up? Your father was killed; what about your mother?”

“I grew up here. My mom died in a car accident when I was a baby. Why are you asking me all these …”

“Siblings? How many? Where are they?”

“None, nowhere.” She pulled back at the unexpected interrogation.

He searched her eyes. “Yoga? Meditation? You’re so …” He gritted his teeth. “
Calm
.”

Ruby thought of her life, her intense studying schedule, the laundry everywhere around her house. She ordered dinner out most nights for lack of fresh food and clean dishes. She didn’t
feel
calm.

“How about you answer a few of my questions instead?” she said. “How do you know so much about the Battle of Hastings?” She paused for only a split second. “The truth this time?”

He stared at her.

“Why is your eye healed? And your hand? Why are you in this coffeehouse? Why do you care so much that I beat you?”

“You can tell a lot about a person by how they play chess.” He leaned forward in his chair. “Are they guarded and cautious? Or are they bold and stupid?” He picked up the sunglasses on the table between them and fiddled with the folding arms. “Maybe they’re greedy, and all they want is material. You …” He swallowed, his Adam’s apple working.

“What about me?”

He shook his head. “I’m not sure about you.”

She swallowed too and looked to the tabletop, to the window, to the cars outside, and then back to him. “Do you just play chess all day?” she asked, realizing that she never saw him do anything else. “Don’t you go to school, or have a job, or a girlfriend … or something?” She came up short at the implication of her last question.

“Me?” His head reared back.

“I mean …” She tried to backpedal.

“Just chess,” he said, as if it was normal.

“I have to go. I have a study group.” She began to stand.

“Sage is the only ambitious one of us,” he said, as though she weren’t about to leave.

“Sage?” she asked, confused at the connection. Her messenger bag dangled in midair.

“Langston worked once. He was an EMT for a little while, but …” He paused. “It didn’t work out.” He put the glasses down and looked out the window again.

“Langston?” she asked. “The poet who reads at Athenaeum?” She remembered the shared look between Langston and Sage when Ruby thought Ash was married and Sage had laughed.

“We don’t need money,” he said absently. His eyes shot to her from the side. “I mean … We have money. Our family does. We don’t have to work.”

She lowered her bag back down to the floor and sat again. “I didn’t know you were related.” She thought of Langston’s white-blond hair and Sage’s unusual grey eyes. “You don’t really look alike.”

“Half-siblings. Different mothers.” He twisted the dark metal ring on his healed hand. “My family’s pretty … complicated.”

She thought that most families were pretty complicated, though her family wasn’t complicated at all. It was only her. She picked at the plastic wrap of her uneaten sandwich.

“My father wasn’t always faithful,” he said. “Actually, he wasn’t even
usually
faithful.” He laughed, but it was a humorless sound that soon turned into a long low groan. He slowly doubled over and his hands went up to cradle his head. His long fingers tightened and pulled at his dark curls.

“What is it?” She looked all around his face and head, not sure what was wrong.

His breath came out in a whoosh. “Give me your hand.” He reached across the table and grabbed for her.

She clasped his warm hands between both of hers. “What—” She started to say, but the electric sizzle of energy that came off of him took her breath away. She tried to pull away from the frantic sensation but he held her tight. The buzzing slowly quieted and the wild pulsing faded. A tranquil feeling filled her. It mixed with the subtle rush of excitement of his skin on hers.

His shoulders relaxed. His breathing slowed. He kept his eyes closed. “Calm.” He nodded.

When he looked at her his blue eyes were rimmed in red and the sockets were surrounded by dark circles. It had all happened in a minute.

“I get headaches,” he said. “They’re sudden. It’s gone now.”

A small smile flitted across his lips and Ruby felt like her chest might explode. Self-conscious and confused she let his hand slide out of hers.

“I better go,” she said. It was midafternoon and she was sure the study group had long started.

“You want to go do something?” he said, and she saw a lightness come into his shaded eyes.

“Huh?”

“There’s something I want to show you.”

Recognition dawned on her. So he was
that
guy. He wanted
to
“show”
her something. How gullible did he think she was? She knew about guys, though she hadn’t dated much.

“Listen,” she sighed. “I have a lot of studying to do.”

“You say that a lot.” He leaned back again and crossed his arms.

“I say what?”

“That you have to study.”

“Well, I do. I have plans,” she said. “And they require work.”

“What?” he shrugged. “What
plans?” His head was cocked to the side, looking at her, daring her.

“Well…” She picked up her coffee cup and rattled the latte-colored ice at the bottom. The familiar architecture of her future flowed naturally from her. “Medical school. Double residency in emergency medicine and surgery. A contract with Medics for Mercy.”

At this point people usually nodded and congratulated her on her ambitious future. Instead Ash shrugged again. “What about having a little fun?”

A rush went through her. “I …”

He stood and reached for her hand. “Do you drive?”

FOUR

The little blue truck’s doors squeaked. An ancient crack ran along the windshield’s lower edge and rips in the plastic seats let yellow foam show through. The truck had been Ruby’s father’s. Ruby and the nannies that cared for her when she was young had what they needed in the city, but when her father was home between trips to war-torn countries he liked to go camping. She could almost smell the faint woody scent of campfire on the upholstery.

She distracted herself from these memories by watching Ash fold himself into the small space next to her. His head brushed the ceiling. His knees jutted up in the gap between him and the dashboard, which was also beginning to crack, she realized.

There was a loud screech from the engine as she started it. She quickly threw it into gear to silence the loose belt, but Ash didn’t notice the sound. The dark circles and the redness in his eyes from the headache were gone. Now there was nothing but eager excitement there.

There were no roadblocks or traffic as Ash directed her to drive out of the city and up into the mountains. Ruby felt the electricity of his body close to hers in the tight cab of the truck. Butterflies fluttered in her chest and her head felt like it was floating above her body. Twice she misheard his directions and they had to turn around.

“What’s this?” Ash touched the ID tag that hung by a lanyard from the rearview mirror.

“My dad’s,” she said. “His first Medics for Mercy ID.”

Ash turned the badge over and looked at the picture. She glanced too. She saw how young her father was then, not much older than Ash, mid-twenties.

“You have his eyes,” he said and glanced from the picture to her.

She squinted out the side window, embarrassed he noticed anything about her. The tall evergreens created an impenetrable wall on either side of the road. “Where are we going?” she asked.

He flashed a playful look from beneath dark eyelashes, but he didn’t say anything.

Her heart sped up, first at that look he gave her, then at the idea of being alone here with him. She realized she was breaking some pretty basic rules by going off with a man she hardly knew. But if Ash was preparing to do away with her, he hadn’t planned very well. She thought of the purpled-haired barista and the couple in the coffeehouse who smiled at them when they left.

In the end it was a matter of artless intuition. Ash simply felt safe.

Cool mountain air flowed into the cab windows as they followed the twisty road. The truck strained up the unrelenting hills and the conversation, like the mountain, didn’t flag.

She told him about her father’s work with Medics for Mercy and how she wanted to make him proud, how she changed her major from history to premed after he was killed, and how she wouldn’t let his death be in vain.

“But you love history?” he asked.

“History doesn’t really help people. Not like knowing how to heal someone does.” It was her mantra. It was what she told herself when she switched majors. What she told herself when she read through the history department’s course offerings every term and chose only one class as an elective, though choosing felt impossible.

“Those who don’t remember their history are doomed to repeat it,” he quoted the famous line.

“I think we’re doomed to repeat it anyway,” she said. “At least from what I’ve seen. People have always been at war. I think they always will be. Humans can’t seem to figure out how to simply love each other.”

He scoffed and looked out the window. “So that’s it then.” He sounded annoyed. “You don’t think of the present? Only the future?”

She shrugged. “I have goals.”

“You could die tomorrow. Or today,” he countered. “Life is short.”

No one knew that better than she did. “That’s why I have to make my life count.”

“You’re not,” he shot back. “You’re wasting it.”

She blinked at the green trees and tried to make sense of what he said. “I’m making the future count,” she finally said, stating the obvious.

He shook his head. “All you really have is right now, Ruby. This moment. You better look around and enjoy it before it’s gone.”

“I don’t see it that way,” she said.

“But that’s the way it is.” There was no humor in his voice, no apology over giving her unsolicited, and unwanted, advice.

There was silence for the first time since they got in the truck. She thought of the chemistry test the next morning. She shouldn’t be here now. She should be at the study group, or home, or at the library; anywhere but here, driving into the mountains with a stranger for who-knew-what. She sat up straighter in the driver’s seat and glanced in the rearview mirror, but there was only the receding forest to see.

“I thought all you did was play chess,” she said, annoyed that he had called her out. “What could be out here?”

Instead of answering he pointed ahead of them. “Make a left up there.”

She turned off the main highway and onto a narrow dirt road. Thick trees ran outside the windows and branches scraped at the already useless paint of the truck as it crept along, bobbing in and out of craters on the old complaining shocks.

Ash peered ahead. “We’re close.” They passed over a set of railroad tracks. “Pull over up there.”

She parked in the weeds beyond the rails and turned the truck off. The clamor of its old engine and the rattle of its loose body were replaced by birdsong and a soft breeze coming in through the open windows. The silence made it seem like they were even more alone. She glanced at him, looking for a clue as to what could be here, but he was already out of the truck, motioning for her to follow.

The mountains were textured by the spikey tips of evergreens and the scent of pine and fern filled the clear autumn air. Ash walked toward the railroad tracks that led into the forest on either side of the road.

“This way,” he said, walking down the tracks to the left.

She walked there too, slowly, second-guessing her decision to come here with him. Clumps of wildflowers grew up through the wooden railroad ties and she saw the tracks running straight ahead into an infinity point in the distance.

“Where are we going?” she asked, still several feet from him.

“It’s up here.” He held out his hand to her.

A pleasant shiver ran through her at the thought of touching him again, but she hesitated. What did he want to show her?

“Why should I trust you?”

He shrugged. His eyes were steady on hers. “You’ll have to trust yourself.”

She felt like she couldn’t breathe as she fought between reason and instinct. His hand was still stretched out to her. When she took it, a current ran up her arm and all the way into her chest. Her muscles relaxed and breathing came easy.

The smell of creosote drifted up from the timbers beneath their feet. Soon trees gave way to an empty space and then there was nothing but the tracks held up by wooden supports suspended over a gorge with a stream far below. Boulders littered the streambed and they looked like pebbles. Her hand became sweaty against Ash’s.