“Not that different. Not so anyone would notice too much,” Jo said softly.
“What are we missing?” Clay growled. His hand tightened around his fork as he held it just over a pile of mashed potatoes.
Flo huffed. “You’re immortal. Kind of.”
“What!” Clay, Baer, and Grey shouted in unison.
Flo rolled her eyes at them as if the idea of sudden immortality was such a non-topic.
“What the fuck is ‘kind of immortal’?” Clay demanded.
“Language,” Jo said firmly, but Clay ignored her, keeping his eyes pinned on Flo who was sitting at the head of the table at his left.
“It means that once you get your powers, you officially stop aging. You’re always going to look this age you are now.”
“And you couldn’t have found me before the gray hair kicked in?” Grey asked, waving a hand at the gray at his temples.
“Oh sweetheart, I think it looks distinguished,” Jo cooed at him.
“It also means that you’re not going to get some disease and die. You’re never going to catch the flu or a cold again. You’re not going to develop cancer or even high cholesterol.”
“Whoa,” Baer breathed.
Flo pointed a finger at him. “But you can gain weight. This isn’t a free pass to eat anything you want. You’re our fighters. The Earth’s champions. You stay in fighting shape.”
Baer slumped a little in his chair and dug into his food again. Jo reached across the table and patted his hand, earning a little smile from the Animal Weaver.
Clay’s hand relaxed a little on his fork and he narrowed his eyes on Flo. “And the catch?”
“You get your head chopped off and you die,” Flo said bluntly.
“Or stabbed in the heart,” Jo added.
“Or burned alive!” Willie chimed in with a twisted glee.
“Got it. We’re vulnerable to physical damage,” Grey said.
Baer bounced back from his earlier disappointment and asked, “But do we have super-human healing?”
“No.”
There was a chilling finality to that single word from Flo. It was like a coffin lid had slammed shut on top of them. Ruby released a low whine under the table, and Baer reached down, likely to rub her head.
“And we have no magic to heal you,” Jo admitted. Her wrinkled face had paled, and Willie sniffed next to her.
“It’s been the one problem we’ve not found a way around.” Flo said in a low voice. She moved her food on her plate, frowning at it as if she was expecting it to give her the answer that had apparently eluded her for centuries. “We’ve lost you all so many times, we’ve lost count. Usually it would be just two or maybe three of you at once. But the last time…last time was the worst.”
“As you can guess, we lost you all,” Jo whispered.
“How?” Clay asked, but there was a part of him that wanted to take that word back the moment it had left his lips.
Flo cleared her throat and shook her head sharply twice. “No. Not tonight. That’s another, much longer discussion. We need to focus on other things. The point is that you’re all vulnerable to being hurt. Taking you to the hospital is not impossible, but dangerous. It brings attention to what you’re doing. Who you are.”
“But if there’s magic in the world…if we exist…isn’t there a chance that there’s someone else out there? Someone who knows how to heal?” Grey demanded.
For the first time, the biggest fucking smile bloomed on Flo’s face and she stared at Grey like he was a genius. “And finally, you’re asking the right questions!”
“And?”
“We don’t know,” Jo admitted.
“But we’ve got an idea. A…kind of lead on a possibility.” That grin became wily and crafty as Flo leaned forward. She tapped her temple with one finger. “We think we’ve got an interesting lead on something that could make a big difference this time around.”
“As one of the Circle risking his life, I’d appreciate any new advantage you can give us. I’m not eager to live forever, but I don’t mind the idea of not getting killed violently by these pestilents,” Grey groused.
Clay looked at this plate. The food was amazing, but he’d largely lost his appetite with this discussion of pestilents, immortality, and dying what could be a particularly painful death in order to save the world and humanity. This was not the life he’d expected for himself.
“So, we’re the Earth’s champions, and we’ve got these powers to fight the pestilents from stealing the powers of the Earth,” Baer recapped. “We’re sort of immortal and those things are rotting, which puts them under a time crunch while they are here. If we’ve got powers, does that mean they’ve got powers too?”
“Yes, some do.”
“Really nasty powers too,” Willie added.
“Seriously?” Clay’s head popped up and he looked at Flo. “We haven’t seen them do anything magical yet.”
“That’s because they haven’t sent their wizards against you yet,” Jo murmured.