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With the opportunity finally here, it took all Talbot's willpower to wait while Matthew settled in.
She watched him select a bottle from a cabinet over his kitchen sink, pour two glasses of whisky, then move methodically around his townhouse shutting off all the lights. Only two remained on: one on the end table next to the sofa, and one on a stand behind her chair. Shadow smoothed everything else.
Through it all, he didn't speak.
The silence gave her time to observe. She'd been to Matthew's place before, of course, though never for more than a few minutes at a time as she dropped off or picked up files. She'd thought then that the interior fit him in its simplicity. He'd chosen practical furniture in practical colors, and set up the layout to fit a person who used his living room as an afterthought. And she'd wondered, even then, if the plainness of his living space was the effect of spending so much time at work, or the reason he did.
On closer inspection, there was less to see than she'd realized.
Her apartment was crammed with personal touches: family pictures on the walls and in frames on the tables, a collection of figurines gifted one-year-at-a-time from her grandmother, stacks of CDs and DVDs that had not yet been returned to their proper shelves, copies of Nat Geo and Rolling Stone on her coffee table that she hadn't yet gotten around to reading, magnets and postcards from places she'd visited on the fridge, movie posters everywhere she had space remaining.
Matthew had none of that.
He didn't, she realized with a start, even have a TV set.
This was the space of a person who moved often and carried no traces with him, a man, she realized, who'd outlived his need for collections — the kind that needed dusting, anyway. There was no visible connection to other people at all.
Was this what immortality did?
"All right," Matthew said, settling onto the couch. "Ask away." He blew out a shaky breath, eyes briefly squeezing shut.
Talbot tilted her head. This wasn't the Matthew she'd spent a year partnering. That man was confident and bold, always eager to chase leads and secure in the knowledge that he'd find the answers he wanted. For the first time, he looked afraid.
Of her?
Why would he be afraid of her?
He was the one who'd turned out to have an absolutely epic secret, and all the secrets and stories from a long life.
Talbot had trained for a variety of interrogation scenarios, from people-pleasers to psychopaths—and she'd thought she had a solid-enough understanding of the human condition to adapt for whomever she faced across an interview table—but never had she imagined that she might someday have to face and question someone supernatural. She'd seen at least one movie on exactly that topic, and now here she was.
Talbot had thought she'd understood who her partner was, and then it turned out she knew nothing at all.
But he'd promised to give her the chance to ask all her questions — and here it was, her chance to live out all her X-Files fantasies.
She was already settled into the arm chair, one foot tucked beneath her knee, the other twisting idly on the floor. She'd come over dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt, a signal that she was off the clock. The small act of informality was doing nothing to ease the tension that thrummed through the room.
"It's funny," she said. "I've been thinking about this conversation for days now, planning every part of it over and over in my head, and I still don't know where to begin. Maybe, at the beginning?"
"If I may, I'd suggest that you ask specific questions. It … helps prevent misunderstandings."
Talbot considered Matthew in assessing silence: What did he mean by that? She'd already seen him get killed, and then come back. He'd taken her to his grave in Rapid City, South Dakota. She'd seen the newspaper articles about the blizzard that killed his family.
He'd used the word "immortal."
The broad strokes of what she'd walked into were clear enough. Now she wanted the details, the highlights. Here was someone whose very existence violated every rule she'd learned for how the world worked. This was a future profiler's dream!
Matthew had pressed his lips in a tight line and was looking down at the table where his drink sat, as if he wanted to pick it up and didn't know if he was allowed to.
"OK," she finally said, leaning forward, hands clasped loosely in front of her. If she was going to completely understand him, then she needed to know everything from the ground up. "Then let's start with the basics: What's your name? Your real one?"
She knew the answer. She'd read it in the newspaper articles about the death of him and his family and seen it inscribed on his headstone. All she wanted now was to hear him say it, the full name that didn't — yet somehow did — belong to the man she knew. This wasn't a polygraph test. There was no pen scritching out a stress line or electronics monitoring his heartrate, yet they both recognized the gambit: the first question, the easiest question, that established the baseline for truth.
"Matthieu," he answered.
Talbot startled, sure she'd heard wrong. "Matthew?"
"Matthieu," he repeated, articulating the pronunciation difference carefully.
Talbot waited, holding a space open for him to supply a last name. Matthew didn't.
Frowning, she asked, "No last name? What happened to Anders?"
"No. Not in the beginning. I didn't acquire any other names until after I was grown and able to earn the honor."
Talbot opened her mouth to question that, then remembered that Matthew had been an orphan. They'd glossed over that fact a couple different times throughout their partnership, most recently after they learned that the person they were seeking on their last case had been adopted as an infant. Matthew acknowledged the connection to his own life, while making it silently clear that he had nothing more to say on the topic. The lack of a birth family was obviously a sore point for him — which Talbot could appreciate, despite it being wholly alien to her. Her own family was huge and tightly knit, to the point where she preferred her family name over her given name.
"Anders is the name I took after I moved to South Dakota, in the same way McCormick is the one I use now," he explained.
"I see." Talbot eased back in her seat, understanding settling. That made sense; he hadn't had a last name of his own, so he likely acquired his first one as an adult, when he was able to start building a life. Name changes of this sort were so common as to be disappointing rather than revelatory. Rather than push on that wound, she decided to explore a different angle. "Matthieu. That sounds French," she commented. "Are you French?"
Matthew shook his head. "English, though I was raised bilingual with both English and French." He frowned, reconsidering. "No, that's not entirely true. Between the people who raised me and the education I received, I was fluent in French, English, Latin, Greek, and Welsh by the time I reached maturity."
Talbot blinked. She'd known that foster kids could go through many temporary placements in homes and orphanages; that someone could come out of it fluent in so many languages hadn't crossed her mind. "Only five languages?" A touch of jest colored her tone. With that selection of languages, he'd basically admitted to at least some of his years being in a church-run orphanage. Surely they could've squeezed in Hebrew or Aramaic instead of Welsh. Unless the orphanage was in Wales?
"Fluently. I also had smatterings of other languages, mostly—" He grimaced, his gaze darting over her shoulder, "—um, picked up from travelers I met."
By which he obviously meant the pilgrims and missionaries who passed through his orphanage. Who knew what kind of trauma all those temporary relationships had inflicted on the young Mathieu?
"That's … a lot. Can you still speak all of them?"
"I … I think I could hold my own. It's been a long time since I've used some of them. I've also learned a few more since then … and fleshed out some of the others with words that are more acceptable in polite company." With a small smile, he included her in that polite company, and Talbot felt warmth creep up her cheeks.
"I, uh, wow. And I thought being conversant in Italian was impressive."
"It is," he assured her, "especially in the culture you're from that doesn't provide much incentive or support to expand linguistic knowledge."
"'The culture I'm from,'" she echoed, "Which is not the same one you were raised in, even though you look only a few years older than me." Pausing, she let the realization settle in, a keystone on soft ground.
Matthew waited, finally sipping his whisky. Unlike her, he was still in his slacks and dress shirt, though he'd divested of the suit jacket he wore in the office. She'd always thought this was his version of dressing down, until she saw the picture of him taken in 1887 wearing overalls and a workshirt and a thicker beard than she'd ever seen on his face.
"So you were born in England and then came to the US?"
"Eventually, yes. I started in South America, then worked my way northwards."
"And then out west," Talbot continued. The path of his travels was starting to make sense, though the exact timeline still had a lot of blank space. Though, she supposed, she'd traveled across most of Europe in one summer between her sophomore and junior years. She twisted her foot, rubbing the toe of her sock against the rug spread over his hardwood floor. "You know, you showed me that picture, and I'm still having a hard time imagining you—" she indicated his seated form "—panning for gold or rustling cattle, or … any of the other things people did in the Old West."
"I ran an inn," he reminded her, his tone matter-of-fact. "There was always opportunity in carving out civilization for the men who didn't realize until too late how much they missed it. Inns, taverns, stores. Back then, there wasn't much difference." Matthew swirled the amber liquid around in his glass, watching it catch the light and infusing the air with the scents of woodsmoke and vanilla. "I've also panned for gold, rustled cattle, and held up a stage coach."
Talbot's gaze sharpened. "Seriously? But—" she shook her head, unable to believe what he'd just casually confessed to, "—why? You, breaking the law? That's not …" In character, she wanted to say. The phrase died as she realized that it very well could have been in character once. People could change across a normal lifespan. How many times had she seen it? Murderers released from prison who'd gone on to live peaceful, contributive lives. Pillars of the community who tumbled into addiction or vice. People who'd recognized an ugly stain in their personality and worked to wash it out.
It was very possible—probable even—that Matthew's dedication to the law now came as a result of once being the one who broke it.
But it meant that he was an entirely different person than she'd thought he was. Could she trust her conclusions about him now that she knew how much she hadn't known?
A smile flickered at the corner of Matthew's mouth, "I lived there, Talbot. A man had to do whatever he could to make a buck, and McDonald's and Wal-Mart hadn't yet been invented."
She nodded, accepting that once again, she was dealing with a timeline beyond what normal people ever had. If Matthew hadn't always been the dedicated federal agent he was now, then what did that mean for their partnership? "I guess that makes sense."
"Remind me sometime to tell you about what happened with the Transcontinental Railroad," he continued.
"You're not going to tell me now?"
"I will, if you want me to. But, I suspect there are other questions eating at you more, and—" he glanced at the clock on the wall where the hands had already crawled further than it seemed they should have. The sun had long set, though the light pollution of the city meant that the sky visible outside the balcony door had a gray glow that all but erased the stars. "—you didn't come here expecting to stay the night."
Talbot acknowledged that with a quick nod, then also picked up her glass. Instead of swirling the contents and letting them breathe, she took a careful sip, not sure what to expect and not wanting an unpleasant surprise. The alcohol he'd promised her was several steps over anything she could afford at a bar. Despite the burn that twisted her face and brought tears to her eyes, she didn't waver; she was too focused on formulating her next question.
Once she'd gotten over the initial panic, a lot of thoughts had crossed Talbot's mind in the wake of seeing Matthew revive from the dead. A lot of them had centered on the word How? There'd also been a lot of Why?, What?!, and Have I gone insane?.
Only after she'd started to push through those had the real questions found space, the kinds of questions that someone raised in Sunday School and CCD (not a Church orphanage) would have been told to not ask.
"I want to know everything!" she blurted out, despite herself.
"I'm sure you think you do."
"What do you mean?"
Matthew shook his head, almost as if she'd disappointed him. "I have found that a lot of the questions you think you would like answers to, you will not."
Talbot exhaled a slow breath, the fingers of her free hand rubbing together. "That's … not very comforting."
"Very little about my existence is," he admitted.
"Because the answers are that awful?" Talbot ventured.
"Because there aren't any, or because the ones that do exist only aim a spotlight on how much bigger the question is than you'd imagined. A certain amount of willful ignorance is necessary to get through the day — perhaps, especially for us."
Talbot shifted in her seat, the press of the cushion against her lower back suddenly uncomfortable. He'd dropped the word so casually at the end of the heaviest of the topics, and yet it landed hardest between them.
"Us?"
"Immortals. Like me. Like Melissa will be, if she comes into her potential."
"Right. Like Melissa." The woman they'd just saved from murder at the hands of a romance scammer who'd decided to capitalize on the fad surrounding reality TV shows.
What had she expected him to say? That there was a whole secret city of immortal beings out there that, somehow, the federal government didn't know about? (Unless they did, and she merely wasn't at the right paygrade?) Or that she'd accidentally ended up as the lone non-immortal in a secret division of the government? Were there other immortals in Special Homicides? Had she met others?
No, that was ridiculous. Surely, she'd have spotted signs of … something … if there were others? At the very least, Matthew would know—he'd said he could tell if someone was immortal—and he wouldn't have any reason to keep their existence secret from her now.
He would know, right?
"You never did tell me what you meant when you said you could sense her."
Matthew hitched a shoulder. "It's pretty self-explanatory," he said. He rubbed at the side of his neck. "If frequently disruptive. Sorry. "
And here they were again: no detailed explanations, no grand theorizing. Just a simple acknowledgement that a thing was true, shared with all the gravity of someone who had long since stopped caring if anyone believed him. Nothing could be more convincing.
"You know, all this time, there was a part of me that thought, it's not real. There's no such thing as people being immortal. I've just been caught up in some really weird hazing exercise."
"And the other part of you?"
"Is actually convinced by you not having detailed answers. It's one of the first tells we're taught about in training, that liars get too caught up in embellishing the details."
"Sometimes," he agreed. "And sometimes people know the details because they've had a lot of practice telling the story." There was a heaviness to his voice, a slump to his shoulders, that Talbot rarely saw. From the decanter on the table, he refilled his glass, his movements mechanical, rehearsed.
Talbot waved off Matthew's offer to refill hers too, which left him awkwardly holding the decanter until he remembered how to move on from the thwarted etiquette. "The thing is—" she lowered her voice, as if the neighbors could be listening through the walls "—it seems to me that there's a reason you wanted to have this conversation 'a little drunk,' as you said. No one needs liquid courage to share basic biographical information, no matter how unusual it may be."
Matthew glanced away, swirling the fresh whisky in his glass.
"So, I figure that there's something you're afraid for me to know. Something—" She gestured with her glass, like it could pull the idea in from the air—"I don't know. Big. Or dark. Taboo. That's the word I wanted. It's taboo." She clunked her empty glass on the table and leaned back, triumphant in her deduction.
Rather than being excited or impressed, Matthew seemed to be only tired — and not from the hour. "Big or dark. That sounds about right." He crossed his ankles, then promptly uncrossed them, as if he hadn't anticipated the discomfort of the position. "What I am … has complications—"
"Are you human?"
Startled, Matthew diverted his gaze to the wall behind her shoulder. "I don't know. I—" He rubbed at the late-evening whiskers on his chin. "I like to think I am. I do think I am. Despite the obvious differences."
"I've seen you eat and drink," Talbot commented. "You breathe, sleep, and, near as I can tell, eliminate. I've seen you die after your heart stops beating, so I know its function keeps you alive, and I've seen your blood. It's very red." She wrinkled her nose; in her lap, her now unencumbered fingers slid together, thumbs over index fingers, over and over. "You've had kids."
"Not biologically. That's one of the less-obvious differences."
Her eyebrows went up, and then she nodded, filing away that new detail. "But the mechanisms…?"
"Are all accounted for and work just fine, thank you. Except for fertility. That's true for all of us."
Silence stretched between them while Talbot worked up the nerve to ask the question she'd been dancing around. Matthew merely waited, his arm moving up and down as he sipped from his drink.
"What's it like," she finally asked, "when you die?"
She'd seen him die. She'd seen him revive. Now, here they were, sharing a drink, like she hadn't spent two weeks avoiding him, then three days negotiating whether she could ever trust him again.
Matthew regarded her in silence long enough that Talbot felt her skin warm with the suspicion that she'd asked too personal a question. He rolled the glass back and forth between his palms, then took another sip. His eyes drifted half-shut as he savored the flavors, as if he needed the boost to summon an answer.
"Ask the real question," he told her.
Talbot frowned; she'd thought that was the real question. She'd never been shot. Hell, she'd never even been shot at, though she'd had loaded guns pointed at her several times. But she'd had a great deal of professional experience seeing what happened when those guns fired. That, she figured, was enough for her to start on understanding.
"You want to know what death is like, not dying," he supplied.
"How did you know?"
"Everyone does. I've had versions of this conversation many times in my life. Though, I'll admit that people usually take longer to get to the existential questions."
"And…?"
Matthew shrugged, dismissive and unbothered. "If there's an afterlife, I've never seen it. I do still believe in one, though. Someday, I expect my soul will find its way to its eternal reward. Until then, anything that may or may not happen in the time between my last breath and next one is a blank."
She heard it that time, the rote answer, the practiced one. He wasn't lying, because he had no reason to lie. He also had nothing to say to make answering worth the effort.
"OK, so if the taboo isn't species, sex, or dying, that leaves … well, I don't care what your politics are, nor do I see how that would matter. So, killing." Her brown eyes lifted to his, all hints of tipsiness gone, as she awaited his reaction.
"I beg your pardon?" he asked.
"I think I first noticed it with Melissa. The way you talked about killing her was so … casual. Business-like. I originally thought that was because you knew it wouldn't be permanent."
Matthew inclined his head in a tight nod.
Talbot sagged back with the relief of having her hypothesis confirmed. She straightened immediately, another observation already primed for exploration. In conquering one incline, she'd immediately set her sights on the next.
"Then there was your obsession with that other guy, the one who shot you. That was … I thought you might have cracked." She tilted her head. "You planned to kill him, too."
Talbot's gaze flicked toward his balcony door, where the headlights from the cars passing on the street outside intermittently brightened the icicles that dangled from the eaves. A moment ago, she'd been so certain, following her conclusions without hesitation. He'd lived more lives than anyone and had secrets he needed to protect. Of course he'd made the hardest of choices. Her fingers resumed their rubbing, restless.
"Have there been others? Or, I guess I should ask, how many others?"
"I can't answer that," Matthew said, his voice quieter. "Despite what you may think, it's not something I do lightly, or without remorse." He hesitated, then added, "Usually."
Talbot felt the mood shift: a flicker of light on ice, a whiff of smoke and vanilla, a steady pulse of his heartbeat in his jaw.
Leaning forward, Matthew splashed another refill of whisky into his glass, not bothering to measure. "Talbot, my past is long and complicated. But what we're talking about it also my present. And my future. There may be decisions I have to make tomorrow or next week that aren't exactly FBI protocol."
Talbot nodded slowly. "That's what you said before. You said I'd need to be to lie for you. And I think I can, if you'll give me the chance. As much as you can be, anyway. I think it'll be easier for me to know what's going on than to wonder. My imagination can go to some pretty wild places."
She thought about some of the theories she'd floated as she tried to understand what she'd seen: Superheros, secret love children, double-agency, aliens. While they all made their own kind of sense, they also created rafts of new problems.
"Are you sure?"
"As much as I can be. I acknowledge that I may not like what you share." Her thumb and fingers pressed together, then she reached up and brushed a lock of hair away from her face, as if that had been the intended action all along. "But I think I need to know, not to worry about what I don't."
"OK," Matthew agreed. "With one caveat."
Talbot's brow creased and she captured her wrist in her suddenly-restless hand, a preemptive defensive against the likelihood that he was going to ask more of her than she could give. "What's that?"
"If I tell you to do something, I need you to trust that it's for a reason—and I may not always be in position to share that reason."
She studied him for a long moment. This was her partner, a senior agent under whose tutelage she'd already learned more than a lot of agents learned in an entire career. She'd suffered with him when they failed their case in Moss Grove, had rescued him from torture at the hands of deranged abductor, and had shared more meals with than she'd shared with members of her family.
True, he'd kept a massive secret from her. But, he'd never done anything to endanger her.
He might even have risked himself to save her before she knew that's what he was doing.
"That sounds fair," she agreed. "Need to Know and understanding mission sensitive information was drilled into us at the Academy. It's not a stretch to understanding you having your own." She stood up with a slight groan of stiffened knees unbending. "I should go and get some rest; it's getting late and you've given me a lot to think about."
"Have I?"
Talbot shook her head, recognizing the trap before she fell into it this time. "Considering that I came over here expecting to get answers, you sure did a great job giving me more questions to ponder."
"When you're ready to tackle them, Agent Talbot, I'll be here." He walked Talbot to the door, retrieved her coat while she put her shoes on, then helped her with the coat itself.
It was different this time. Matthew had always been courteous, exercising manners on the cusp of being old-fashioned. She'd thought they were leftovers from him being a Southern gentleman; now she recognized that they were even more deeply ingrained.
Talbot lingered, closing the buttons and situating the collar with more care than necessary. At last, she ran out of adjustments to make, and looked up, meeting his gaze. "You know, McCormick, what I said before is still true: You can talk to me. Even if you don't know how, I'm still here. Still your partner. I may not understand where you're coming from, but I can promise to try."
Matthew once more inclined his head. "The same is true for you, Talbot."
"No whisky next time, though," she added. "Not for me. I think I'd prefer to stick to something … less potent. Beer. Just beer."
"I'll make sure to stock some of your brand in the fridge," Matthew promised.
She reached for the knob, then hesitated with the door cracked just enough to let in a sliver of crisp winter air. "I'll see you tomorrow," she said. "Back to work, catching killers, doing what we can to make the world a better place. Have a good night."
With that, she slipped out the door, her partner watching her go.