A Crime Forgotten

        Where was I?

        Who was I?

        I placed a hand against my temple and pushed myself off the cold cement. Bits of rock crumbled like ash into my hand.

        The sky was a cloudy grey, and dark castles—no, skyscrapers—seemed to touch the heavens.

        I slowly stood and caught a dim reflection of myself in the jagged triangles of a broken window, amidst the stools, cobwebs and tables inside.

        I was a girl. Blonde, with a thin streak of dark brown that fell near my face, and grey, no—I leaned closer—blue eyes, and. . . and what? The glass was cracked where the rest of my face was. My nose better be straight at least. . .

        My eyes were drawn to my arms. I wore a grey, plain jacket. Goodness, why would I wear something as drab as this?

        This once more raised my previous question: Who am I?

        I turned and staggered from the alleyway, my head light.

        Suddenly, the side of a knife was pressed to my neck and an arm wrapped around my shoulders from behind.

        The knife burned against my skin with what seemed like a kind of acid.

        I opened my mouth to scream, but it withered in my throat like a poisoned flower.

        "Come with us,” said a burly man as he stepped into my field of vision. He wore a dark grey suit the color of storm clouds, and an odd little bowtie. I'd never seen him before.

        Or you only think you've never seen him, a thought chided.

        I struggled in the grip of my other captor but the hot dagger bit into my neck, a painful reminder that I was not free to run. 

        My heart pounded with thunder and my brain swirled with thoughts and panic. Who were these men? What was going to happen to me? How could I escape?

        Handcuffs pinched the skin of my wrists.

        Handcuffs. Handcuffs meant I'd done something wrong. Why couldn't I remember?

        "What 'ave I done?!" I choked out between gasps.

        "You know what you did." I felt the other man's breath on my neck and a chill prickled down my arms and spine.

        His words pounded through my head like a clapper in a bell

        —But I had no idea.

        I was jerked roughly towards a white van on the side of the road and shoved inside.

        They drove me, roped down and gagged, for about thirty minutes before pulling me inside some old, abandoned building and dragging me down an old, abandoned corridor. I thought it not unlike the halls of a Nazi prison lab. Why did I know this? I begged my brain to reveal something more, but nothing else came.

        They dragged me to a room and forced me to my knees before a wooden desk.

        A man—eighteen, maybe twenty—sat at the desk, a gavel in his hand and a narrowed, soured look on his face.

        "Do you know why you've been brought here?" he demanded. His voice was slightly hoarse, as if he was used to yelling.

        One of my captors yanked the rag from my mouth so hard that it forced my head to the side. A grunt tore itself from my lips.

        "No, I don' know why I'm 'ere," I replied mockingly, and then mentally chided myself for speaking that way to someone who could kill me in a second.

        "Don't"—he began loudly—"speak that way in my court again." He exhaled. "You have been charged under accusations of being with a mortal. This is a serious accusation, Adaminos—one that will not go unpunished in my court."

        I didn't know what to say. I just blinked.

        These guys couldn't be serious, could they? Were they insane? 

        "Being with—are ya insane? Daft in the head? O' course I been with—who are ya an' what do ya want from me?! Is this yer idea of a joke?" I had a seriously strong accent. That was an interesting thought to store away. What was I? Scottish, perhaps?

        He raised his eyebrows. It was then that I noticed that, while one of his eyebrows was brown like the rest of his hair, the other was blond. "Control yourself, Madam!" He banged his gavel against the table. It echoed sharply in the room, mimicking the beat of my heart.

        I felt the point of the acid knife against the back of my neck and inhaled sharply.

        "Guilty or innocent?"

        "How ken I plead either to a crime I know nothing of!" I cried. The knife dug into my neck a little deeper and I cried out as fire blossomed around the point.

        "You claim ignorance, then?" asked the Judge.

        "Aye."

        He grunted and stood from his desk, a small remote in his hand. Without looking at anything else but me, he pointed the remote over his shoulder and clicked.

        Behind him, a screen I hadn't previously noticed lit up with a blurred photo. It cleared, and I recognized the image of myself I saw in the shattered window.

        —But I was in the arms of a man.

        The screen changed to show us laughing with each other over dinner. The restaurant was nice—very nice—with painted vases and draping curtains that looked like they were from the early 1900s or so. My hair was pinned up in an elegant bun and I wore a dress straight out of a history book—with puffed sleeves and a high collar. He wore a suit and bowtie, as well as a bowler hat. We were both young—sixteen or so at the most.

        He looked much younger in this picture than the last. I hadn't aged at all.

        Where were we? Why were we there?

        "Still not convinced of your guilt?" The judge asked. I noticed by now that he was very unlike normal judges. This judge had no wig, or fancy cloak or anything to mark him as such, not to mention the building's state of disrepair. He pressed the button again and turned to face the image.

        There I was, likely at sixteen, in more recent times, holding the hand of what looked like someone's great grandfather.

        —But he had the same bowler, the same dark hair, and the same sort of happy, almost laughing smile, as if he was always about to say something ironic or humorous.

        I felt a pang in my heart at this image, and I knew my subconscious must have remembered something, but I still had no memory of the man.

        "Remember now, Adaminos?" he asked, turning back to look at me.

        "No," I whispered.

        "What was that?"

        "I said no," I repeated louder—too loudly.

        "Watch your tone. You're on thin ice here." He closed his eyes and sighed. "Test her," he ordered to the figure behind me.

        The knife dug deeper and I winced as a bead of blood ran down my skin. I heard a bottle—likely a vial—lid screw shut behind me and a good while passed before the figure said, "There's Thyramin in her veins, Milord." 

        The judge cursed the potion beneath his breath. "Then she truly has forgotten. Likely the pain of Winston's death was. . . too much."

        I blinked at him. He sighed again and clicked the remote. A graveyard appeared, but a single headstone was the main focus of the photo.

Jonathan Nathaniel Winston 1903-1992

        I gasped. Winston's death. . . Had I. . . been in love with this man? Had I. . .

        I hadn't aged.

        In every photo, I hadn't aged once—not once!

        My breathing quickened.

        "We've been searching for you, Adaminos. For two hundred years, we've been searching." He shook his head. "You go around drinking your blasted Thyramin, thinking you can get away with anything—do you not care about the others? All the other immortals that could be found because of you?!"

        I once more blinked stupidly at him.

        "Of course you don't." He shook his head. "Do you know what that knife is, Adaminos?" he asked me, gesturing towards the weapon in question. "It's made from pure silver—the only thing capable of killing an immortal." He snorted. "Humans have developed stories off of silver—like how it kills monsters—but they were based off of us. Immortal, yes, but only to an extent."

         I realized then what he was about to say and quickly ducked just as he finished saying, "Kill her." I rolled and kicked up with my feet, knocking the dagger out of the man's hand. I grabbed it with my cuffed hands and sprinted out of the room. The floorboards of the old hall creaked and seemed to bend beneath my feet as I ran, but I didn't stop.

        Suddenly, the floor gave way and I began to fall.

         —But not before I felt a sudden sting in my shoulder.

        "Wherever you hide, we'll find you!" yelled one of the burly men. "You won't survive long without remembering!" His voice was distant as I clung on to the splintered floorboards. Below was dark and I had no idea how far it went.

        My head felt as if warm water were sloshing inside it. It was an odd feeling—one that made me sleepy.

        I slipped, taking crumbling bits of wood with me, and fell a distance before landing on dirt ground. The glow of sunlight came from the right, likely from beneath the building. It was an escape. Suddenly the warm water in my head seemed to evaporate, leaving a blank hole, and a single question.

        Where was I?