Juliet Immortal (16 page)

“Then you must give me your love. If you want them both to live, if you want to live yourself, there is no other option.”

I ignore him, gathering the cups from the ground. “What’s going on with you and Gemma? With Dylan and Gemma?”

He waves his finger back and forth and makes a tsking sound. “No, no. No more scratching your back until you’ve scratched mine.”

“When have you ever scratched my back?”

“Well …”

I hold up a hand. “Don’t. Just … don’t.”

“I was only going to say that I helped you now, by sending that boy running back to Gemma’s arms. I think he was starting to take an interest in someone else, in spite of these.” He reaches for the scarred side of my face, but I step away. He smiles, an eager smile, as if anticipating some excellent game. “I like them, myself. Ugliness only makes beauty more striking. Don’t you think?”

“Ariel isn’t ugly. And I don’t care what you like.”

He shrugs. “It doesn’t matter. Soon you’ll have your own body back.” He fiddles with the spigot, sending little bursts of wine to splatter onto the ground. “There’s another way I’ve scratched your back. I discovered the spell, our way out.”

“Stop that.”

Romeo grins, flips the spigot to the on position, and walks away. I sigh as I turn it off and tuck the cups back under the steel tank. There’s nothing left to keep my hands busy. I have to talk to him. At least enough to ensure he’ll leave Ben and Gemma alone. “This is Mercenary magic?” I ask, trying to sound vaguely interested while I warn myself not to be drawn in.

“It is old magic,” he says. “Original magic, before the Mercenaries and Ambassadors decided which side they were on.
Back when they were the very best of friends.” His look becomes a leer. “Some of them were even lovers.”

I roll my eyes. He’s mad. This delusional story proves it. The Ambassadors and Mercenaries are bitter enemies.

As are you and Romeo, but once upon a time …

It’s as if Romeo can hear my thoughts and knows the second weakness creeps into my mind. He sucks in a breath and begins his tale, words swift and sure. “Thousands of years ago, a group of ancients sought a way to escape the cycle of life and death. They were mystics of great power, and devised a spell that would grant their souls eternal life in the realms running parallel to the earth’s reality, that would make them gods with worshippers bound to them by their magic. But the spell called for balance. For light and dark, good and evil.

“One half of the ancients took the power of goodness as the energy that would maintain their souls throughout the ages. The other half chose the evil of man as their fuel. They spilled each other’s blood to work the spell, gambling their mortal lives in the quest for eternity. The magic worked, but not exactly as they’d thought.”

He pauses, licking a bit of wine from his fingers with a strange smile.

“As the ages passed, the dark ones thrived on human wickedness. After a time, they were no longer consigned to their alternate realm, but lived forever on earth, poisoning humanity, bloating themselves on the evil they helped create, turning against the Ambassadors. For centuries, the light suffered, losing power, until they were forced to share their converts with death itself, to send them to the mist when they weren’t needed. You are one of those souls, trapped between
life and death, never to be blessed with either. We are both slaves, forced into the worship of gods not of our choosing.”

I cross my arms, shivering though the barn is warm and dry. Romeo looks on expectantly, as if waiting for my thanks for his outpouring. “So the Ambassadors are … vampires? Who feed on goodness? That’s what you want me to believe?”

“You
must
believe,” he says. “They use the good deeds of their converts to fuel their own eternity in their golden kingdom, never telling those converts that the evil they fight is one the Ambassadors helped create. Or that there is a way out of their service.”

I shake my head. I don’t want to believe him—god, I don’t—but a part of me does. A part of me
believes
. Nurse’s own words confirm every one of Romeo’s. I have been forbidden to kill Romeo because murder “feeds the Mercenary cause.”
Feeds
. Maybe literally
feeds
these magicians sustained by evil instead of good.

Anger and sadness and the familiar sting of betrayal surge inside me. Still, a voice within urges me to remember that Romeo is a liar out to help no one but himself. He requires my cooperation for this spell. That’s the only reason he’s bothering with this talk. Otherwise, he’d simply take what he wants, the way he always has.

“But their magic can’t last forever. They can only hold their converts for so long,” Romeo continues. “When the initial magic fades, they must either renew their converts’ vows … or let the others take us.”

“The others?” The air suddenly feels colder.

“You’ve seen them,” he whispers. “I know you have.”

I could lie. I could continue to deny everything, but I don’t
see what purpose it would serve. And Romeo is genuinely frightened. This man who has lived amid violence and death for centuries is spooked, and I need to know why.

“I’ve seen them. You and … myself,” I say. “But how is that possible? Our bodies have been dead for—”

“They aren’t our true forms,” he says. “They are the specters of our souls, come to take us both to that hell you’ve been wishing for me.”

“Hell,” I repeat. The notion doesn’t ring true. “If there is such a place—and you’ve insisted numerous times that there is not—why would I be taken there? What have I done that—”

“You’ve stepped outside the natural order, become a tiny dot of space-time cancer the universe must destroy in order to balance the cosmic equation.”

“The universe as in … god?”

Romeo sighs. “The universe as in
the universe
, the primal forces of creation. Call it god if you must, but it is a nameless, mindless thing. It doesn’t care about good or bad. All it cares about is balance and order. What the Ambassadors and Mercenaries have done violates that order, but it is we who will pay the price. If the specters—”

“But what are the specters? If the universe is mindless, then who controls them? Why do they—”

“They are parts of ourselves, left over from what we would have been, influenced by what we’ve become, but compelled by primal forces beyond human understanding,” he says, obviously frustrated with my limited imagination. “All I know is that if they take us before we work this spell, we will go to that mist you’ve only lingered in until now, to that place outside of time where the universe dumps its waste. But the mist will not be a place of forgetting for us. We will be aware of every single
moment that passes, conscious but bodiless and alone for all eternity.”

I press my lips together. Yes, that sounds close enough to hell for me.

“The only way to escape that fate is to take control, to work the spell together and give the specters physical form, not simply psychic—”

“Have you seen your body? What it has become?”

He pales, runs a nervous hand through his loose curls. “Yes, well, I suppose wickedness does have its consequences. Hopefully the magic will fix … all that.” I lift a dubious brow, and he does a poor impression of his come-hither smile. “They say love can work miracles.”

I shake my head again, slowly, knowing that—even if everything he says is true—this is impossible. I can never love him, no matter how much I might fear the hell he describes. Fear can force obedience, but it can never transform a heart. But before I can say a word, laughter interrupts.

The laugh echoes through the long rows of barrels, drifting up to dance through the rafters of the barn, making us both turn toward the sound. At first I think Gemma has returned, but then it comes again, a rich, carefree giggle that’s eerily familiar. I
know
that laugh. I’ve
felt
it thrum through my chest, tumble out my lips. It’s
my
laughter. Someone has bottled the joy I felt as a girl and it’s pouring into the air, sweeter than the wine I’ve stolen.

“It’s her … you,” Romeo whispers. He grabs my arm, fingers digging in too hard. “Don’t welcome her, don’t embrace her before we work the spell or she will have you. Hell will have you!”

More laughter, this time from the opposite direction.
Romeo and I stumble in our haste to turn around. My heart pounds, terror thick in my veins.

I catch a flash of blue and then my old body dances from between a row of barrels. She finds me with her slightly vacant eyes and smiles.
“Love. So close.”
My mouth falls open. It’s me. There’s no doubt. But I’m not as I was; I’m not whole. There is a wound on my chest, blood drips down the front of my dress, and my smile is forced and strange.

Still, I am tempted to go to her, to take my old hand. Almost … compelled. I would go—despite Romeo’s warning, despite my fear—if Romeo didn’t grab my hand and shout for me to “Run!”

I see it a second later, the rotted corpse crouched in the darkness behind my body.
“Love.”
The word is a growl—low and feral—that rumbles through the air, a warning we don’t need to hear twice.

We turn and run, feet pounding faster than the rain pummeling the roof. Faster and faster, lunging to the left and then the right, racing down the rows, too terrified to stop and see how close the thing has gotten. I can hear it scrambling behind us, hands and feet slapping the slick floor, running like a beast, a nightmare.

Another turn to the left and suddenly, the door is in sight. I sprint for it with everything in me, hitting the metal bar just seconds before Romeo, hurling myself out into the storm. In seconds the rain has plastered my hair to my head, but I don’t stop running until I reach Gemma’s car. I fumble the keys from my pocket with trembling hands.

Romeo and I scramble inside, slamming the doors behind us. I hit the locks but still hurry to get the keys in the ignition. I won’t feel safe until we are far, far away from the barn.

I turn the car around and guide it back onto the narrow road, pulling in long, deep breaths and letting them out slowly. I keep the car moving toward the gate at a semi-reasonable speed, only checking the rearview half as many times as I would like. I can’t let fear take over. I have to keep my head, to think of some way to reach the Ambassadors.

They’ve never hurt me, never punished me, never shown me anything but kindness. I can’t betray them now.

But what if he’s right? What if—

“Do you want me to drive?” Romeo asks.

“No, I’m fine.”

“You don’t look fine, you look like you’re going to murder that wheel.”

I glance down, shocked by my white knuckles and the ropes of muscle straining against the backs of my hands. I relax my grip, but my thoughts only race faster as I punch the remote to open the gate and guide us back toward Solvang. Using that much strength, I should have broken the wheel, but I didn’t, a reminder of my uncommon weakness.

Romeo is right. I’m different,
we
’re different, and he may be my only chance at a tomorrow. But do I dare? Do I dare reach out to the enemy for help? Do I dare even ask him more about this spell?

“Are you ready now?” Romeo asks, as haunted as I’ve ever heard him. Even more than on the day he killed my cousin and learned he would be exiled from our home forever. “We can do this. Tonight.”

He killed my cousin. He killed
me
. And over the centuries he’s wrecked the lives and hearts of so many people. I cannot forget that. I
cannot
. He is a liar and a fiend and a monster.

“I know you hate me,” he says. “But please … think on
this tonight. Sleep and see if you can dream of a life where I am not your enemy, where I am the man who loves you. You heard the specters. We must love each other, or we are doomed.”

I laugh, a choked, desperate sound that makes me bite my lip.

“Leave me here,” Romeo says, motioning to an empty produce stand at the edge of town. I pull in to the parking lot but don’t turn off the car, don’t look over at Romeo. Just driving him to safety feels wrong; how could it ever feel right to join forces with him in magic? “I’ll walk home.”

I nod. “You do that.”

He sighs. “You have to try, Juliet, or it will be the death of us both. I’ll give you a day to think,” he says, catching my eye. “One day, without my interference with you or our young lovers. One day for you to spend in contemplation, as a show of my good faith. And then we act, before it’s too late.”

One day. It’s more than he’s ever given me before, but I already know it won’t be enough. I will never love him or trust him, certainly not in twenty-four hours, but maybe … just maybe …

“One day.”

Romeo beams as if I’ve handed him his life. “You won’t regret this, Juliet. You are still the light in my darkness, the only beauty I’ve—”

“Stop.”

He laughs. “A man has to try.”

“You’re not a man.”

“But I could be again. Believe it.” He clasps my hand, holds on even when I try to pull away. “
I
do. I believe.” I meet his mad eyes and for a moment I see the spark of something
human there. “Think, we could still make the story true, find our happiness. Even after death.”

“Please, just go.”

“Good-bye, my love, parting is such sweet sorrow, that I must say—”

“Leave,” I say, then force myself to soften my voice. “Give me the day and I’ll try. I promise.”

“It’s all that I ask.” He slips out into the rain and heads across the parking lot with a slow, seductive stroll, oblivious to the cold and wet. I watch him go, and think maybe I should feel guilty for lying. But I don’t.

I pull out without a backward glance, wheels spinning in my mind. If he keeps his word, I have twenty-four hours. Twenty-four hours to help Ben and Gemma finish the business of falling in love and put them safely beyond Romeo’s reach. And when they are finished, we will be finished. Perhaps the Ambassadors will send me to the mist, or perhaps my old body will drag me there never to return. Either way, it will be over.

Maybe before sundown tomorrow.