Beautifully Dead - Chapter 40
An Immortal Affections serialized novel
May 5, 2025
Fredericksburg, Virginia
The call came at 5:17. Eli was still at his desk, the journal still open, his own handwriting staring at him across centuries.
“Eleanor.” The name he did not use in front of anyone else. “It’s early, even for you.”
“She texted me. Fifteen minutes ago. From her personal number, not through the Foundation channels.”
Eli sat forward. “What did she say?”
“She asked how long I’ve known you. And whether I actually trust you.” She paused before she addressed him by the name she first met him as. “James, if she’s texting me at 5 o’clock in the morning, that means she was up all night thinking about it.”
Her utterance of his name sounded more like chastisement than affection.
“How do you know that she has been up all night?” He sat back in his chair.
“Because she’s still alive. She’s not like us, James. She needs sleep.” He could hear Eleanor take a deep breath and exhale—something she did to accentuate her point—not because she had to. “I know it has been hundreds of years since you’ve needed sleep, but you have to try to remember what it was like. I don’t know what you did, or said, but she still doesn’t trust you and it’s eating at her.”
“I’m not sure—” She cut him off.
“She’s running on instinct while struggling to sleep—and she has an immune system that’s rewriting her circadian architecture.” Another pause. “I know you know what that phase feels like. So do I.”
He did. The weeks when the body abandons its old rhythms and the mind follows—sharpening in the dark hours, growing suspicious of everything it trusted in the light. He had watched it happen dozens of times. He had lived it once. Eleanor had lived it once. And now it was Amelia’s turn, alone in a hotel room, with his notes from another era three feet from her head.
“Exactly,” he said. “That is what I was going to point out before you cut me off. She’s at a state where her lack of sleep doesn’t mean she’s stressed out over anything.”
“Yes, but—” This time Eli cut her off.
“She’s been reading James’s notes—all of them.” he stressed. “That’s what she told me yesterday. She said he wasn’t discovering Eleanor’s symptoms, he was confirming them.”
Silence on the line. He could hear the faint tick of a clock in whatever room she occupied in Geneva.
“She’s right,” Eleanor said.
“I know she’s right.”
“Then you know what comes next.”
He sighed, “It’s not the notes. It’s me she’s reading.”
Silence on Eleanor’s end.
“She told me about a man she worked with. Senior faculty. He took her research, published it as his own, completely cut her off.” He paused. “She said she finds it hard to trust people now. Men.”
“And she sees it in you.”
“She probably does.” He set the journal down. “The Foundation’s connections, the laboratory staffed, the access I had prepared before she ever arrived. Very high handed. Very controlling, as you would say.”
“Just you being you.”
He didn’t answer.
“James.” Eleanor said his name the way she used it when she wanted him to hear himself.
He heard Eleanor shift. The slight creak of leather, the settling of weight. She had always thought with her body, adjusting position when her mind changed direction.
“You’re doing what you always do,” she said. “You know that.”
He didn’t respond.
“Finding someone brilliant. Making yourself indispensable. Deciding what’s best for them before they’ve had the chance to decide for themselves.” Her voice was not angry—yet he could hear how displeased she was with him. “I’m telling you, it won’t work the same way twice.”
The words landed where she meant them to. He let them.
“Her symptoms are progressing,” he said. “The adaptation rate doesn’t match the typical exposure timeline.”
“I know. I’ve been reviewing Thanakit’s preliminary data. Her metabolic markers are—unusual.”
“I have seen. Unusual is an understatement.”
“Fine. Unprecedented. In living subjects, at least.” The professional tone returned, but the edge beneath it stayed. “I need more samples. Bloodwork at forty-eight-hour intervals minimum. Tissue cultures if we can get them. And I need her to understand what the monitoring is for—not some vague wellness check, actual pathogen tracking. If she starts refusing access because she doesn’t trust you—”
“She won’t refuse you.”
“She might refuse what comes through you. Everything comes through you right now. If she doesn’t trust you, then the whole channel closes.” She takes a breath. “And then it’s not just you who loses out—I lose the most significant case I’ve seen since my own, and she loses the only thing that might keep her alive.”
“What do you want me to do?” he asked. He knew exactly what she wanted him to do, but he wanted to hear her say it.
“Give her something real. She’ll see through anything else—she is a smart woman. If you try to manage her with empty half-truths, she’ll know.” Eleanor’s voice dropped. “You have to actually give something up. And Eli, one more thing.”
“Yes?”
“When you talk with her about the—her progression, her symptoms, the anomalies in her data—you cannot sound the way you used to.”
He shifted in his seat. “Meaning?”
“Typically you sound like a man describing a subject, not a person. I need you to use her name, like you’ve done in this conversation. Talk with her, not to her. Did you realize, you haven’t referred to her as ‘the subject’ once this whole time.”
“I don’t—”
“You do. Please, James, think before you speak. Be careful what you say. For her sake—and yours.”
“I understand,” understanding crept into his voice.
“Good luck.”
The line went silent. He hung up and set the phone beside one of his journals.
Give Amelia something real.
He thought about his brother.
Not the version he would tell Amelia. The real one. Dougal was the one who had saved him over 700 years ago from the people of his village before they had a chance to burn him alive. Eli was unable to return the favor. Dougal died like so many others during the Great Pestilence.
That grief was what he’d use.
Eli sat back down and began to construct his story.
This time he was going to tell her the truth. Just not all of it, and not in its original shape.
His brother was real, his loss, the grief, was real. That would be enough to carry the rest.
A small lie, the pain of his brother’s passing as the catalyst for his own behavior.
He wrote down the beats and rehearsed them until they sounded real. Because Amelia’s case could be the key to all he had pursued since he lost Catriona, he needed her to believe him.
Still, some part of him wanted to skip the performance entirely. Something in him wanted to tell Amelia the truth about everything. The whole unedited truth, offered without calculation, without knowing what she would do with it.
He couldn’t. wouldn’t. But the want was there.
Once he felt his performance would pass Amelia’s scrutiny, he picked up his phone and sent her a text.
-
to be continued…
© 2025-26 E.M. di V. - writing as Morgan A. Drake & Joe Gillis. All rights reserved.