Begin Reading
Table of Contents
A Preview of IMMORTAL BELOVED
Copyright Page
With love to my advance readers,
Nina and Piera—thanks for your help.
CHAPTER 1
I want you.” Reyn’s voice, low and insistent, seemed to come at me from all angles. And no wonder, because he was looming over me obnoxiously as I filled a big glass jar with basmati rice from the twenty-five-pound sack we keep in the pantry.
Look at me: “we.” I’m all about the “we-ness,” as if I belonged here at River’s Edge, rehab central for wayward immortals. Sort of a twelve-step program. Which in my case had more like a hundred and eleventy steps. I’d been a Riverite only two months and had no idea how long it would take to undo 450-plus years of bad behavior. At least several more weeks, for sure. Probably more like seven or eight years. Or longer. Ugh.
I shifted closer to the big wooden kitchen worktable and hoped I wouldn’t spill rice everywhere, because God knows that would be a pain in the ass to clean up.
“You want me, too.” I could practically hear his fists clenching and unclenching.
“No, I don’t. Go away.” Welcome to the freak-show circus of Nastasya’s romantic exploits. It isn’t for the faint of heart. Or the faint of stomach. Is that a phrase?
Nastasya: C’est moi. One of your friendly neighborhood immortals. Except for the friendly part. If I’m being honest. A couple months ago, I’d realized I’d good-timed myself into a wretched place of depraved indifference, and I’d sought help from River, an immortal I’d met back in 1929. Now I was here in rural Massachusetts, learning how to be one with nature, magick, peace, love, harmony, etc. Or at least trying not to feel like throwing myself headfirst into a wood chipper.
There were other immortals here: four teachers and currently eight students. Such as me. And Reyn, Viking wonderboy. For example.
Reyn: the thorn in my side, nightmare of my past, destroyer of my family, constant irritant of my now, and oh yeah, the hottest, hottest, most beautiful, stunning guy I had seen in 450 years. The one whose image haunted my brain as I shivered in my cold, narrow bed. The one whose fevered kisses I had relived over and over as I lay exhausted and unable to sleep.
What fevered kisses, you ask? Well, about ten days ago we’d had a mutual sudden brain attack and given in to the inexplicable, overwhelming chemistry that had been building between us since my arrival. This had been closely followed by the soul-destroying realizations that his family had killed everyone in my family, and my family had basically killed a lot of his family. That was our shared heritage. And we were on fire for each other. Fun, eh? I mean, when I hear about couples struggling because they’re different religions or one’s a vegan or something, I think they just need to get some perspective.
Anyway, since our make-out session/horrible realizations, Reyn had continued to pursue me with winter raider persistence and ruthlessness. And yet night after night, he—who has kicked down hundreds of doors, battered his way through hundreds of doors, set fire to hundreds of doors—had not brought himself to knock on mine.
Not that I wanted him to, or would know what to do if he did.
Are you dizzy from being flung into my world like this? I feel the same way every morning when I open my eyes to find I’m still me, still here.
Outside, the late December sunlight, as thin and gray as dishwater, had faded rapidly to a darkness seen nowadays only in rural areas. Which I was in.
“Why are you avoiding this?” In general, Reyn kept his emotions under very tight control. But I knew what he could be like—for the first hundred years of my existence, Reyn and his clan had terrorized my homeland of Iceland, as well as Russia and northern Scandinavia, earning himself the title Butcher of Winter. I hadn’t known it was him back then, of course. Just that the raiders were bloodthirsty savages responsible for looting, pillaging, raping, and burning dozens of villages to the ground.
Now the Butthead of Winter slept two rooms away from me! He did farm chores and set the table for dinner and a bunch of other homey things! It was positively creepy. And of course meltingly attractive. But I still found it impossible to believe that his current “civilized” status couldn’t just be ripped away like wet tissue paper, revealing the marauder I knew was still inside.
I filled up the glass jar, carefully tipped the bag back onto the worktable, and screwed the lid on the jar. A handful of snarky, sarcastic retorts hovered on my lips, and just two months ago, I would have been flinging them at him the way James Bond’s car spews nails. But I was trying to grow. To change. As nauseatingly clichéd as that was and as wretchedly painful and difficult as it was proving to be—still, I was here. And as long as I was here, I had to keep trying.
What a revolting notion.
“I prefer to avoid things,” I said truthfully while I tried to come up with something stronger.
“You can’t avoid this. You can’t avoid me.”
He was so close that I could sense the heat of his body through his flannel shirt. I knew beneath that shirt lay hard, smooth, tan skin, skin that I had touched and kissed. I felt an almost irresistible longing to press my face against his chest, to let my fingers trace the eternal burn scar I knew was there. The burn that matched the one I had on the back of my neck. The one I’d kept hidden for more than four centuries.
“I could if you left me alone,” I pointed out irritably.
He was quiet for a moment, and I felt his golden eyes raking my face. “I’m not going to leave you alone.” Promise? Threat? You decide!
I was saved from having to come up with a more worthy defense by the sound of voices coming toward the kitchen from the dining room.
This house, River’s Edge, had once been a Quaker meetinghouse. The downstairs had a couple offices, a small workroom, a front parlor, a large, plain dining room, and this, a somewhat inadequate kitchen that had last been updated in the 1930s. Before this, my most recent living situation had been an expensive, much-in-demand flat in London with amazing views of Big Ben and the Thames. I’d had a doorman, maid service, and a catering kitchen right downstairs. But my life here was… better.
Like I said, everyone here is immortal, and a fun bunch we are, too. Actually, not really. Considering we were all here because our lives were grievously flawed in many unique ways. There is in fact a River, of River’s Edge. She’s the oldest person I’ve ever met—born in 718, in Genoa, Italy, back when it still had a king of its own. Even among immortals, we were like, Whoa. She owns this place, rehabs immortals who are wrestling with their darker inclinations, and is pretty much the only person in the world that I even halfway trust.
I myself am 459 years old, though I have the looks (and apparently the maturity) of a seventeen-year-old. Reyn is 470. He looks like a very hot twenty.
The swinging door pushed open and Anne, Brynne, and River came in, talking and laughing, their cheeks pink from the cold air outside. They were carrying bags of groceries, which they set down on various counters. We produced most of our own food, actually, but River still bought the occasional items from the one grocery store in town, Pitson’s.
“And I said, is that a mustache?” Anne said, and the others almost collapsed with laughter. “And if she could have killed me, she would.” River leaned against the kitchen counter and wiped tears out of her eyes.
Reyn muttered something and left through the outside kitchen door, going out into the black, freezing night without a jacket. Not that I cared. At all.
“Oh goddess, I haven’t laughed like that in…” River trailed off, as if trying to remember. I’m guessing she was thinking since before Nell (another student here, who tried to kill me, BTW) went schizo and had to be loaded up with magickal tranqu
ilizers and carted away. Just a guess.
“Is he okay?” Brynne asked, gesturing at the door. She’d been here a couple of years, I think, and of all the students was the one I was closest to. Close being a relative term. “Did we interrupt something?” Her brown eyes widened with sudden interest and speculation. The night she had cracked, Nell had shrieked that she had seen Reyn and me kissing. I’d hoped people would chalk it up to the hysterical ravings of a nutcase, but there had been too many meaningful glances since then to really lie to myself effectively.
“No,” I said, scowling. I took the burlap sack of rice back into the pantry, then put the glass jar on the shelf.
“Well,” said Anne, apparently deciding to let the Reyn thing go, “the big news is that my sister is coming to visit!” Anne was one of our teachers and looked around twenty, with a dark, sleek pageboy and round blue eyes, but I knew she was 304. Despite being 150 years younger than I was, she seemed light-years ahead in knowledge, wisdom, magick—okay, everything.
“You have a sister?” For some reason I was still surprised when I met immortals who had siblings. I mean, of course many did. But in general I felt that most immortals were more solitary creatures—like, after seventy, eighty years, anyone would get sick of their family, no matter how nice. Three hundred years was a long time to keep doing everyone’s birthday parties, you know?
“Several. And two brothers,” said Anne. “But Amy is nearest to me in age. I haven’t seen her in almost three years.”
Immortal sisters who were close. I hadn’t run into too many of those. I was starting to feel like I had spent the last four centuries living with a kind of tunnel vision, a varied but narrow existence, choosing not to see, not to know so many things.
Finally, Anne and Brynne went out to set the long table for dinner. River unpacked the groceries, handing me a few things to put in the fridge.
“Everything okay?” River asked.
“In that sentence, does okay mean tortured, confused, sleepless, and worried?” I asked. “If so, then yes, I’m dandy.”
River smiled. She’s had a thousand years to develop the patience to deal with the likes of me.
“Am I the worst person you’ve ever had here?” I don’t know what made me ask that question. Just—one can make a lot of bad decisions in 450 years. A lot.
River looked surprised. “Worst in what way?” Then she shook her head. “Never mind. No matter how you define ‘worst,’ you aren’t it. By a long shot.”
I was dying to ask who had been worse, and how, but there was no way she would tell me. Then it occurred to me that of course Reyn, for one, was worse than me, probably worse than most immortals who had come here aching to be made whole. Reyn had slaughtered entire towns, enslaved countless people, plundered and pillaged and whatnot. I mean, I’m a total loser in many ways, but you can’t pin anything like that on me.
And yet Reyn was the one I wanted. Above all others. Karma had pretty much drop-kicked me into an unending universe of irony.
“So, Anne has a sister, huh?” I said, lamely changing the subject.
“Yes. She’s very nice. You’ll like her.”
“I know why I don’t have siblings,” I said, skirting by that thought quickly, “but I feel like I haven’t really met many other immortals who have siblings, either.” I didn’t weigh in on whether I would like Anne’s sister or not. I don’t really like most people. I can tolerate them pretty well, but like? Much harder.
“I think you’ll find that immortals who are less than about four hundred years old might have siblings,” River said, washing her hands at the farmhouse sink. “And those older than about four hundred rarely do.”
“Why?” I asked. “You have brothers still, right?”
“Four of them,” said River. She turned to me, her almost unlined face looking thoughtful. She brushed a strand of silver hair off her forehead and shrugged. “It’s kind of unusual for someone my age.”
“Why?” I asked again. Some weird immortal genetic thing?
“In the olden days,” she said slowly, “immortals made it a habit to kill other immortals around them, to take their power.”
My eyes widened. “What?”
“You know how we make Tähti magick, magick that doesn’t destroy other things?” she said. I nodded. “And you know how to make Terävä magick, where instead of channeling your own power, you just take power from something else, destroying it in the process.”
I nodded. The whole good-versus-evil thing. Check. Starting to get a handle on it.
“You can get that power from plants, animals, crystals… people.” Her lips pressed together. “You can take someone else’s power and use it for your own. But it kills them, of course. Or worse.”
It should have occurred to me that such a thing could happen. It seemed stupid and embarrassingly naive not to have made that leap. But I hadn’t.
River saw the surprise on my face. “You know we can be killed,” she said gently.
A pain twisted inside me, a pain so familiar, so long a part of my life that it seemed natural to feel its sharp rasp with every breath. Yes, I knew. My parents had been killed in front of me. I’d seen my two brothers and two sisters also killed, beheaded. I’d walked across a carpet soaked with their blood. So, no siblings. I tried to swallow and felt a knot in my throat.
“If an immortal kills another immortal, they can take that person’s life force, add it to their own power,” River went on. “And then also—that’s one less person who might try to kill them.”
My breath was coming shallowly now, my quick descent into my family memory seeming to dull everything she was saying. “I see,” I said, my voice thin. “So that’s pretty much what Reyn’s father was trying to do when he killed my family. While Reyn kept watch in the hall.”
River was very solemn, and she let one hand glide along my cheek. “Yes.”
CHAPTER 2
River had bought this property, with its several buildings and about sixty acres of land, in about 1904, I think. Like most immortals, she’d been one person, then pretended to die, then came back as her own long-lost daughter to claim the property again. All immortals have a bunch of different names, histories, passports, and so on. We tend to have networks of excellent forgers, hoarding the best ones the way some people hoard their favorite clothes designer or hairstylist. But I sure do miss the days before picture IDs and social security numbers. It’s so much more complicated nowadays to drift from country to country, incarnation to incarnation.
My bedroom, like all the others, was on the second floor. Each room is pretty sparse, with a bed, a sink, a few other items. I’d just finished throwing some clean laundry into my tiny wardrobe when I heard the dinner bell chime. Like animals responding to a feed call, all of us on this hallway left our rooms and headed downstairs. I said hi to fellow students Rachel, who was originally from Mexico and was, I think, about 320 years old, and Daisuke, from Japan, who was 245. Jess, who was only 173 but looked much, much older, nodded stiffly at Reyn, who was closing his door. I tried not to think about Reyn sleeping in there, lying on his bed—
In the large, plainly furnished dining room, the long table was set for twelve. An oak sideboard held steaming serving bowls, and a large gilded mirror reflected it on the other wall. As I lined up behind Charles, another student, I caught a glimpse of myself. Before coming here, I’d been stuck in a nineties goth vibe, with spiky black hair, heavy eye makeup, and a junkie’s skeletal pallor. With yet more irony, I now looked totally different from anything I had looked like for the last three hundred years—because I looked only like myself. My hair is its natural whitish-blondish color, common among my clan in Iceland. Both my gaunt face and too-skinny body had filled out and now looked healthier. With no contacts in, my eyes were their original dark, almost black color. Would I ever not be surprised about looking like myself?
I took a plate and went down the line. Another change in my life had been my diet. At first the simple food, mostl
y from our own gardens, had made me feel like I was choking. There’s only so much fiber a girl can get down. Now I was more used to it—used to picking it, digging it, preparing it, and eating it, whenever it was my turn to do any of those things. I would still give a lot for some champagne and a molten chocolate cake, but I no longer screamed silently when confronted with kale.
“Hello, all,” said a voice, and I looked up to see Solis (teacher) coming in from the kitchen. I’d heard he was originally from England, but like most of us he had an unplaceable neutral accent. Brynne had told me he was around 413, but he looked maybe in his mid-to-late twenties. Asher, down at the end of the table, was the fourth teacher and also River’s partner—I didn’t think they were married. He was originally Greek and was one of the older-looking people here—which meant that at 636, he looked like he was in his early thirties. The three of them, plus River, did their best to teach us about herbs and crystals, oils and essences, spellcraft and magick-making, stars, runes, sigils, metals, plants, animals, etc. Basically, every single freaking thing in the entire world. Because it was all connected, somehow—to us, to magick, to power. I’d been taking lessons for about five weeks, and my head already felt close to exploding. And I was still in, like, magickal preschool. I had a long slog ahead of me. I hated thinking about it.
“Solis!” said Brynne, waving her fork at him. As usual, she was wearing a colorful combination of head wrap, scarf, sweater, overalls, and work boots. The fact that she was lovely in a tall, slender, teenage-model kind of way somehow helped it all work. She was 204, the daughter (one of eleven children!) of an American former slave owner and a former slave.
I sat down at the table, stepping carefully over the long bench so I wouldn’t whack Lorenz with one of my high-top Converses. I hated these benches. Chairs. Chairs would be the way to go here. River should set up an “ideas” box somewhere so we could all make helpful suggestions. I could come up with a significant number, actually.