Juliet Immortal (6 page)

Really? She’s going to have a fit about
this
? After everything I’ve just said?

“You’ll just have to figure out where you left it.”

“I left it in Dylan’s car,” I say, wondering how Romeo is going to explain his wrecked car to his new “parents.” Hopefully his welcome into his new family is going even less smoothly than my own. “I can’t get it back.”

“You
can
get it back.”

“No, Mom. I can’t. I’ll pay for the phone myself, I—”

“With what? The money from the part-time job you never applied for?” She makes a sound that’s more of a snort than a laugh. “I swear, Ariel, I—”

“I never applied because
you
said no one would hire me!” My voice rises to Ariel’s usual, strident whine. If I don’t lose my cool at this point, Melanie will surely suspect her daughter has been possessed.

“Probably not for counter service work, but you could’ve worked in a kitchen or something! Ah! This just … drives me crazy.” She closes her eyes, sucks in a long, slow breath and lets it out, apparently unaware that there are antidiscrimination laws in modern America. Too bad there aren’t any laws against discrimination in the home. “You know what? It isn’t
worth another fight. You’re about to graduate and you can find a job next year. Maybe something part-time at the college.”

Assuming Ariel overcomes the certainty that she’s too hideous to be seen in public, and the general awkwardness and self-loathing that make most people her age consider her a social disease. At this point, that’s a big assumption. I have to turn Melanie into an ally instead of another obstacle to overcome.

But not tonight. I’m exhausted and hungry, and Nurse is waiting for me.

“It’s fine,” Melanie continues. “I’ll give you my phone, and I’ll get an iPhone. I can get a good discount, and everyone else has one. I’m the only person at the hospital who isn’t checking their email every ten seconds.” She laughs, a strained sound that seems uncomfortable in her mouth. “So … don’t worry about the phone. I’ll leave mine on the counter for you in the morning.”

“Thanks.” At least she’s trying. It’s … a start. “I’m going to get something to eat. Do you want anything?”

Her upper lip curls, as if the thought of food is vaguely repellent. “No, I had a sandwich.”

I turn to the refrigerator and tug open the door, searching for something to ease the ache in my stomach. Ariel doesn’t have strong memories of food. She eats to live, doesn’t live to eat. Good thing too, or the contents of the refrigerator—a few Chinese takeout containers, lunch meat, a jar of shriveled black olives, a hunk of orange cheese, three bottles of wine, and an old container of cottage cheese that’s expired—would be enough to inspire a second suicide attempt.

Yuck
. So much for taking comfort in food.

I reach for the cheese and the olives, then think better of
the olives and put them back. I have high standards when it comes to olives. My family grew them on our estate and pressed olive oil so fine I can still recall the smell of it spreading on a warm plate.

The memory makes my shoulders sag.

“Honey, are you sure you’re okay?”

“I’m fine.” I let the door drift closed and turn to find Melanie exactly where I left her, stranded in the middle of the kitchen, staring at me with a curious expression.

“You just seem … not yourself.”

I freeze, considering my behavior since I came inside. Ariel and Melanie argue all the time, but Ariel usually loses her temper and runs for cover before things get as intense as they did tonight.

Maybe I’ve started off too strong.

I shrug. “It’s been a rough night.”

“I know. I’m just … I want you to …” She sighs and fists her robe once more. “I’ve never been good at this, but you know what I mean.”

No, she hasn’t, and I guess I do. She means that she cares, no matter how bad she is at showing it. But Ariel wouldn’t know. Ariel would see this interaction as yet another time she’s failed to be what Melanie wants her to be, another reason to get angry or give up and quit trying.

Still, that doesn’t keep me from feeling bad for this woman. She isn’t an awful person, or even the worst mother in the world. At least she waited up to make sure her daughter got home safely. My own mother couldn’t have cared less, so long as I didn’t attract scandal and stayed out of her sight.

“It’s okay, Mom,” I say, adding the words I suspect both of the women in this family need to hear more often. “I love you.”

Her lips part before a smile slowly brightens her face. “I love you too.” She reaches out and pulls me close, crushing our thin frames together for a moment that is equal parts awkward and wondrous. There is love in this hug, no matter how clumsy.

Maybe there’s hope for this family. The realization helps me breathe a little easier … once Melanie releases her death grip. We pull apart and stand staring at each other—her hands fluttering back to her waist, mine clutching a hunk of rapidly warming cheese—until Melanie breaks the silence with a nervous laugh.

“Okay, I’ll let you get to bed,” she says. “I’m working the late shift tomorrow, so I’m going to sleep in. Is Gemma giving you a ride to school? Or do you need to take the car again?”

“I’m not sure.” Gemma hasn’t been picking Ariel up every day lately, but Ariel doesn’t know why. “I’ll try to call and ask,” I say, inspired by my small success with Melanie. I might as well contact Ariel’s friend and try to get that relationship back on track. The more put-together Ariel’s life, the more attention I’ll have to devote to my soul mates.

“Well, if you need to take the car, just go ahead and take it.” She moves to the fridge, pulling out a half-empty bottle of white wine and fetching a plastic cup from the cabinet above. Lady Capulet would have fainted at the idea of sipping wine from anything except the finest glass from Venice. At least Melanie doesn’t seem like an insufferable snob. Ariel could definitely have it worse. “I can get a ride to work with Wendy.”

“Okay,” I say, strangely touched by her concern for my transportation needs. “Good night, Mom.”

“Good night, honey.”

I return her smile before heading out of the kitchen,
munching my cheese as I go. It’s disgusting, but at least I won’t starve to death before dawn.

Straight ahead is a shadowed living room and to my left a narrow hallway. I turn down the hall, find my new room, and shut myself inside. It’s small but bright and welcoming, with pale yellow walls and a white bedspread dripping with ruffles. It looks like a bed a younger girl would sleep in, and isn’t something Ariel picked out.

Her aesthetic is represented in the artwork filling every free inch of wall space, haunting paintings of fairies sleeping in fall leaves, lonely trees atop epic mountains, young men in dark clothes with sad eyes, and an aging unicorn dying at the edge of a silent pool.

The last one takes my breath away. I find myself on the other side of the room, running fingers across the animal’s detailed face. When I was a girl, everyone believed in unicorns. They’re mentioned in the Bible, and their existence was taken as fact. Finding out that the creatures are myth was more difficult than I like to admit.

But the death of magic, of hope, is never easy.

Ariel has captured that beautifully. The painting makes me ache to pick up a brush. I lived to paint as a girl. Maybe I can steal some time for it while I’m here. At the very least, I have to finish the sets for the school play.

Thankfully, my talent and Ariel’s seem to match up well. Certain skills—riding a horse, driving a car, performing other day-to-day tasks associated with life in a given era—seem to be physically ingrained and translate easily from one soul to the next. Talents, however, are a different story. A gift for mathematics or science, the ability to play an instrument or sing like an angel, are soul gifts, ones I’ve had difficulty emulating in
the past. It will be nice to share a soul gift with my borrowed body.

The thought cheers me as I shove the last hunk of cheese into my mouth and step away from the painting, surveying the rest of my new domain. It isn’t nearly as bad as Ariel’s memories have led me to believe. The room is cramped but ordered, with a place for everything and everything in its place. A chest of drawers is wedged in tight against the bed and the opposite wall is filled by an empty easel and a white desk topped with a sleeping computer, a stack of textbooks, and a phone sitting in its cradle.

I’ll use it to call Gemma, but there’s one call I have to make first.

Above the desk hangs a mirror. It’s a light, flimsy thing, and covered with animal stickers Ariel pasted there when she was younger, but it will work. I shift the books to the side and lean close to the mirror’s surface, shutting my eyes, doing my best to clear my mind, to visualize the golden light Nurse and the other high Ambassadors inhabit when not on earth. Any moment I will hear her familiar voice. She’s bodiless in her realm, but her voice is always the murmur of the woman who raised me.

Nurse borrowed that woman’s body for only a few months, but somehow—through some trick of high Ambassador magic—she retained the voice. I suspect she knows I find it comforting, a piece of my past that travels with me through the years. I also suspect that’s why she encourages me to call her Nurse instead of by her true name, though she says it’s because her given name is too difficult for modern people to pronounce.

“Modern people” referring to the people of the fourteenth century.

For the hundredth time I wonder just how old Nurse and the other high Ambassadors and Mercenaries really are. Hundreds of years older than me? Thousands? Were they ever mortal? Or are they a completely different species from the converts they’ve each gathered throughout the centuries?

There’s so much I don’t know about the beings I serve. I know only that they are magical and good, and that they want me to be good. Nurse insists that my ignorance of their world is something I’ll be grateful for someday, that it protects me from the Mercenaries in a way nothing else can, but sometimes … I wonder.

Sometimes … I doubt.

I doubt that lovers are worth fighting for. I’ve seen too many soul mates turn to darkness to believe that love conquers all.

I doubt that my efforts matter—there are others like me who will keep fighting if I stop. It isn’t as if the fate of the world—or even true love—rests on my shoulders. Shakespeare made my story famous, but to the Ambassadors, I’m just one servant among many.

I doubt that I’m really Ambassador material. I’ve taken vows to serve goodness and light, but in my heart I am filled with hate. I hate Romeo, I hate stealing other people’s bodies, and sometimes I even hate Nurse. For finding me on the floor of the tomb before it was too late, for giving a dying girl a chance at “life” that isn’t really life at all.

Sometimes it seems wrong, what she’s done. Sometimes I dread seeing that golden light stream from a mirror as much as I long for it. Sometimes I wish it wouldn’t come, that the mirror would remain a mirror, that I would open my eyes and find that the madness of the past seven hundred years has been nothing but a dream.

But then, there was a time when I wished for forever with Romeo Montague.

I should have learned to be careful what I wish for.

I haven’t.

My eyes fly open, confirming my fears. There is no golden light; there is no comforting voice. There is only a frightened young girl in a room full of shabby twenty-first-century furniture.

“No.” I jump when I realize I’ve spoken aloud. I press my fingers to my lips, lean closer to the mirror, staring into my strange new eyes, praying for the light to come.

Please, please, please
. I promise not to doubt, I promise to be better, finer, stronger. I promise and focus until I can feel electricity dancing inside my borrowed skull. But still … nothing. For the first time in hundreds of years and over thirty shifts:
nothing
.

“Nurse, please.” I lay my hands flat against the cold glass, as if I can will her into the reflection with my touch. “It’s Juliet. I’m here. Please.
Please.
”

Outside, thunder rumbles, sending a tremor through my bones.

Since the second I slipped into Ariel’s body, something has seemed off about this shift. I dismissed it as bad luck—or perhaps my instincts warning me that Romeo was closer than I expected during those first moments—but now there is no comfort to be had. My line to the Ambassadors of Light and their guidance and support has been severed.

For the first time, I am completely alone on earth.

I
run from Solvang’s town square, sprinting through the driving rain, imagining how the drops will needle my skin when I can feel them—a thousand bliss-filled stings, a million points of tiny, perfect pain. I open my mouth and let the cold stream inside, laughing until the water gurgles sickly in my throat—the sound of something dying.

No, the sound of something being born.

Alive, alive, alive
.

The stories are true; the time has come. My time. Mine! Finally, after all these years, after an eternity of torture and a dozen lifetimes of lies, the mirrors are dark and the town empty
of others like me. I haven’t seen a single other Mercenary, and I would have. If they were here,
I would know
.

I will look for the black auras again tomorrow in the daylight, when more humans crawl across this precious town with its windmills and gingerbread roofs and endless string of pancake houses. But I am already certain, already sure. I am
alone
.

We
are alone, my lady and I.

Juliet
.

Her name still cuts at things inside me, brings phantoms of human emotion to haunt my stolen flesh. Some part of me remembers the exquisite ache of love, the crushing pain of loss.

I cling to the flutter in my chest, relishing the agony. It is terrible, beautiful. It spreads like the sweetest poison. The ghost of misery is a welcome friend. I crave the wretchedness it will bring, the writhing of my soul inside my stone prison. Pain is so much easier to recall than pleasure. I can’t remember pleasure anymore, don’t know if I’m capable of taking joy in anything, even if the specters make their predicted appearance, even if the spell works, even if—someday very,
very
soon—I can feel again, taste again,
live
again.