Free Immortal at the Edge of the World by Gene Doucette Page A

faeries to chase,” I said. “I spotted mine.”  
    *   *   *
    The events taking place on the television screen were as follows: a man stood near the edge of a fence next to a redheaded woman and a blond woman. The blonde—Clara, although the name is not apparent from the video—wore army fatigues, while the redhead and the man both had on the sort of one-piece jumpsuits issued to prisoners.
    I’m the man in the jumpsuit. The redhead is someone who has no doubt had hundreds of names, but for convenience sake I’ve been calling her Eve.
    In the video I can be seen speaking to Eve as Clara runs up, carrying a rifle. Just before that, a man named Robert Grindel was shot—by Clara—and carried off under a hail of gunfire by his bulletproof demon bodyguard.
    When Clara arrives she draws my focus, and for a few seconds neither of us is looking at Eve.
    Eve then turns and walks away from us.
    I hit pause at that point, a moment before everything on the video stopped making sense altogether. I knew this because I’d looked at the footage a thousand times, and a thousand times through it I still couldn’t understand what was happening.
    “What are you watching?” Mirella asked. She was staring out the window, probably wondering if I’d brought a movie and if it was any good.
    “It’s difficult to explain,” I said.
    We were 35,000 feet in the air on board a private jet I own, and let me just say if you have a lot of places to go and the money to spare you should definitely get one of these for yourself.
    “I’ve been looking at cloud formations for half an hour. Why don’t you show me and not bother with the explanation? Maybe I can figure it out?”
    “Sure. It’s more interesting than clouds.” This is something I probably wouldn’t have said not so long ago, when flying was new to me. Then, the idea of looking from the sky down was astonishing.
    She walked over and sat next to me on the couch. Of course I have a couch on my plane. I also have a big TV and a wet bar, and the couch opens into a bed. This is a great time to be obscenely wealthy, I’m telling you.
    I backed up the video and explained to Mirella who everyone was, in broad terms, then let it play.
    “Okay, now watch right here,” I said, once we reached the point where I had previously hit pause. On the screen, Eve has turned away from me and Clara once more, and as happened every other time I watched this video, she simply vanishes.
    Mirella blinked a couple of times then said, “It’s a special effect.”
    “If I wasn’t one of the people in the scene, I’d agree with you.”
    “Wait, so this is real?”
    “It’s real. She really did vanish, and I really don’t know how she did it.”
    “Play it again.”
    I did, and I slowed it down for her.
    In the video, Eve notes that nobody is looking, turns around, takes three steps toward the fence, and then she just isn’t there anymore.
    “I still don’t believe it,” Mirella said. “It doesn’t even look like a good special effect.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Give me the remote.”
    I handed it over. She played with it for a few minutes before figuring out how to get it to move in super-slow motion. This was something I had never tried because I didn’t know there was such a thing as super-slow motion.
    We watched the events play out once again, only now it took a tremendously long time. Finally, Mirella saw what she was looking for and paused it. “There,” she said.
    She’d frozen the image at the very instant Eve disappeared from the camera.
    “She’s . . . bigger,” I said.
    “Yes, that’s what I mean. It’s a terrible effect.”
    “Except it isn’t an effect.”
    “As you say.”
    She started it up again and we watched as Eve expanded until she was no longer visible. It was like watching a balloon stretch so thin it becomes transparent, as if the parts that made up the person of Eve decided they wanted to be further apart from each other, until there was