Regency Immortal (The Immortal Chronicles Book 5) by Gene Doucette

seems all they can agree on is they can’t trust the strange man who is immune to poison and seems to know far too much about monsters.”
    She looked down at her hands, which were balling up the sheets on the bed.
    “They’re going to be questioning you in the morning,” she said quietly.
    “About what?”
    “About your connection to the impostor.  And you connection to me, whom they no longer fully trust because of all this.  And about anything else they can think of accusing you of doing.”
    All of that sounded really bad, and illustrated why I don’t involve myself in the world very often.  The consequence of doing a good thing sometimes outweighs the good thing itself.  The number of times I relearn this after the fact is a little alarming.
    “I don’t have anything to tell them, so…”
    “So they won’t care.  We’re past that point.”
    She leaned forward and kissed me on the lips.  It was a whole lot better than the last time she did it, if only because I was more prepared and more sober.  I was about to make a joke about re-opening my stitches when she pulled back and held my head in her hands. 
    “We have to leave tonight,” she said.
    “What?”
    “You and I.  It’s the only way.  You can’t go alone in your condition and I can’t let you escape not knowing if you’ve made it to safety.  So, we leave together, and we leave right now.”
    I was a little stunned.  Some of that might have been the kiss.  “We would be fugitives,” I said.
    “Oh, definitely.  Adrian’s organization has tendrils in every government in the Western world.  I doubt they’ll rest until they’ve run us both down.  There would be constant peril.”
    “For some reason you make that sound like a lot of fun.”
    She gave me a broad smile, and my heart fell into my stomach.  “Doesn’t it?  Now get your pants on, we don’t have much time.”
    *   *   *
    We fled in the night, past two unconscious men—I assumed they were only unconscious—who were supposed to be guarding me.  Anna had horses waiting for us, and all the things from my rented flat.  And she had my sword.
    It was probably a good thing, then, that I had said yes.
    The horses didn’t take us too far—just out of Vienna and to a safe house she promised was off of Adrian’s radar.  If I had been in better condition we could have traveled farther and for much longer, but a knife wound in the buttocks is what it is, and I couldn’t stay a-horse all that long.
    It was far enough.  We holed up for a week there, and then when my condition improved, we disappeared into Prussia.
    Anna was right.  Adrian didn’t stop looking.  He kept us on the move for a while, not quite catching up until…
    Well.  I’d tell you more, but this is a story for another time.

 
 
 
 
    Special thanks to Sue London for the rakshasa, and also for Anna, who I’m not giving back

Other works by Gene Doucette
     
    Immortal
    “I don’t know how old I am. My earliest memory is something along the lines of fire good, ice bad, so I think I predate written history, but I don’t know by how much. I like to brag that I’ve been there from the beginning, and while this may very well be true, I generally just say it to pick up girls.”
--Adam the Immortal
Surviving sixty thousand years takes cunning and more than a little luck. But in the twenty-first century, Adam confronts new dangers—someone has found out what he is, a demon is after him, and he has run out of places to hide. Worst of all, he has had entirely too much to drink.
Immortal is a first person confessional penned by a man who is immortal, but not invincible. In an artful blending of sci-fi, adventure, fantasy, and humor, IMMORTAL introduces us to a world with vampires, demons and other “magical” creatures, yet a world without actual magic.
At the center of the book is Adam.
“I have been in quite a few tight situations in my long life. One of the first things I learned was