Another seven hundred years, and dozens of battles with the warrior Juliet became, slipped by in a haze of wickedness, but still her misery reached me. Even when, between her missions, she left the earth and returned to the mists of forgetting, I could feel her out there, lost in the gray void, and it brought me pleasure. She was my bird in a cage, and I was a mad, damaged monster. But when I held her in my thoughts, I was strong enough to plot and plan, to conceive a way out.
I did not love her any longer, but I needed her. I’d stolen a spell from the Mercenaries and found a way for us to reclaim our true forms and escape the service of the immortal creatures who had deceived us. There is no heaven or hell, no ruling force but the cold logic of the universe that demands that all equations be balanced. The Mercenaries of the Apocalypse and the Ambassadors of Light knew that truth and made gods of themselves. Juliet and I could have done the same.
Could have.
If she hadn’t fallen in love with that twenty-first-century boy.
If the friar hadn’t discovered my plan and bid me turn Juliet to darkness.
If I hadn’t been forced to kill my love a second time to protect her from a fate worse than death.
If the friar hadn’t punished me by showing me that there are worse things than forgetting how to feel.
There is remembering.
TWO
SOLVANG, CALIFORNIA, PRESENT DAY
Romeo
I crouch in the shadows in the corner of the abandoned train station, watching the morning light creep into the birds’ nests near the ceiling, clutching the blanket I’ve stolen from one of the crackheads who called the condemned building home. There were five of them, one a Mercenary, judging from the blackness hovering in his aura. They ran screaming when I crawled through the door, my skeletal hands scratching the bird-shit-covered boards, rotted flesh dripping a trail of horror behind me.
Even the Mercenary ran. He knew what I was, saw what I’ve become, and feared that the curse I’ve acquired might be catching.
Cursed, damned.
It’s true, and I’ve suffered greatly in the weeks since Juliet passed the second time. My senses have been returned to me, so that I might know I smell like a plague pit and look like a monster. So that I can feel pain slam into my chest, echo in my brain with every step I take. I am truly a thing of darkness now, a being so wretched I can do nothing but hide in humanity’s corners, fighting to stay warm as the wind whistles through my bones.
The only thing that keeps me from taking what’s left of my sorry life is the friar’s warning that if I do, I will become a phantom, without voice or form.
How pleasantly do you think a few million years such as that will pass? When you are an invisible nothing and no one can hear you scream?
The greatest liars always tell the truth when they can. Everything else he said has come true. I have been cast out of the Mercenaries and forced into the specter of my soul, a cruel parody of my true body, ravaged by the atrocities I’ve committed.
What if the rest is true? What if my soul will remain even after this body is gone? Even this has to be preferable to that. Something preferable to nothing, to the torture of a voice without an ear, to existence without confirmation.
Even a scream as people run away is something.…
Hoarse sobs break the silence, a wounded animal keening at the sun streaming across the wall. I have cried more in the past weeks than in my entire life and afterlife combined. The ghosts that haunted me when I was a Mercenary rub against my insides, crowding me with remorse. Regret. Hate. Fear. Love …
I loved her all along. I didn’t realize how much until I crept back to the place where she died the second time and touched her lifeless hand, cried over her wide, sightless eyes. Juliet. Her soul is gone forever now. I can feel the difference in the universe, the absence that is a world with one less spot of light. I tried to save her. I hope, in some fashion, I finally did. I hope she’s at peace in the mist … or wherever it is good people go.
I hope that boy she loved is there with her. I didn’t weep for him, but I felt sadness for his loss. For the first time in hundreds of years I wished I’d had some other choice, that I could have spared them both. But I couldn’t overpower the friar, and their love wouldn’t have survived his torture. The best I could do was kill them, and offer myself in their place.
Maybe someday I’ll regret my decision, when these weeks of agony stretch into centuries and finally I am nothing but dust, and even the luxury of tears is denied me.
Best to cry while I still have eyes.
My sobs bruise the silence, stirring the birds from their nests. They leap into the air, wings snapping like sheets hung to dry in the wind, so loud I hunch lower in my blanket, letting it cover my ears. There are hundreds of them, so many the floor is mounded with waste, humming with flies.
This hole isn’t fit for anything human to live in. It is perfect for me.
“There you are. I’ve been looking for you.” The voice comes from the door, a melody of chipper notes that sting what’s left of my skin. It’s a woman, a beautiful redhead with flesh so pale the blue of her veins shows through at her temples and beneath her dark brown eyes.
“That’s quite a trail you left.” She smiles at me, the bow of her lips curving with hard determination.
So she’s come to gloat. I’d thought the Ambassadors above such petty pleasures, but she’s definitely one of them. One of the golden ones. Her aura is so bright, it outshines the morning sun, makes me squint as she crosses the room and squats down by my side.
“Now then, Romeo. How are you finding your retirement?”
I slit my eyes and hiss, squirming my blackened tongue through what remains of my teeth.
She laughs, a soft chuckle that assures me I am a very small, foolish monster indeed. “As good as that?” She nods. “I thought that might be the case. I didn’t imagine this was what you had in mind when you tempted my Juliet with eternity on earth.” So it’s her, Juliet’s nurse. I suppose I should be afraid, but what can she do to me now? Now that I am brought so low even the flies decline to lay their eggs in my flesh? “That’s why I’ve come. To offer you a way out.”
A way out. I haven’t allowed the possibility to enter what’s left of my mind. There is no way out. This is the way I will end. This is the inescapable pit at the end of the last road.
But perhaps …
“Why?” I rasp, as distrustful of Ambassadors as I am of their dark cousins. Ambassadors and Mercenaries are similar creatures in many ways. They both glean converts from the weak, both use the vital energy those converts generate with acts of goodness or wickedness to sustain their eternity in their alternate realms. Once they were members of the same coven, before the spell that split them in two.
This “way out” might very well be a “way in” to even greater trouble.
“The Mercenaries have been stealing our converts for centuries.” Juliet’s nurse tugs the edge of my blanket until my head pops free. “Some of my colleagues disagree, but I don’t see why we shouldn’t do the same. A complete reversal of allegiance generates great power. We need that now, when so many of our high ones have been lost.”
Not lost, murdered. Slaughtered by Mercenaries who fight dirty, who kill for what they want, who will not stop until their fires are the only toxic light burning at the end of the world.
“Is that something you would consider?” she asks. “Becoming one of us?”
I know relatively little about the inner workings of the Ambassadors, but I know the Mercenaries. And I know they will win. The Ambassadors are weak, their hands tied by the goodness required of their magic. Becoming an Ambassador would be suicide.
I smile and nod, eager as a puppy. Yes, I will shift my allegiance. Yes, I will serve the Ambassadors. Yes, I will trade this misery for mindless years in the mist and long days in bodies that can feel. Yes, I will serve for however many hundreds of years they require, and then I will be free. To die as she died.
The Ambassadors didn’t cast Juliet into the specter of her soul. When her service to them was finished and she refused to renew her vows, they let her die a natural death. It is more than I could have hoped for, if I’d dared let that feathered thing take roost in this cage.
“Excellent.” She holds my chin in her hand as if I’m not vile, as if I’m something precious she’s plucked from the water before the current carried it away. “But you must prove yourself true, Romeo. You must prove your commitment to us above all else. If you do so, I will come to you and administer the vows of a peacekeeper, one of our most valuable servants. If not, the magic I lend you will run dry and you will find yourself back in this body, without a single hope in the world.”
My head bobs again, brushing against her hand, smearing my death on her clean fingers. I will be true; I will be faithful. I will serve as no Ambassador has ever served, because no Ambassador has ever known the horror of being what I am.
“Good. Here is what you must do.” She leans in close, whispering in my ear, telling me impossible things, spinning an improbable scenario, tying it all up with a promise to come for me at the end when I have saved a life and perhaps even the world.
I. Romeo. I will save the world. Or at least, one version of the world.
A strange sound rasps in my throat. It takes a moment to realize it’s laughter. When I do realize, I laugh again, to see if she will pull away, if she will recognize what a broken thing I am.
But she only pats my hunched back and tilts her face closer to mine. “You will do as I say? You will fight for me? Love for me?”
I smile. “When I am finished, the girl will believe she is the sun, the moon, the stars in the sky. She will think my name and ache with how wondrous it is to love. To be loved. To hold such a treasure in her hand.”
Juliet’s nurse laughs. “Good. Ariel will require all of your extraordinary charm.”
Ariel. But she’s dead. I killed that body, the one that hosted Juliet’s soul. Put a bullet in her brain to put Juliet beyond the friar’s reach.
Nurse stands, watching my face, somehow reading my fear in the scraps of skin clinging to my cheeks and chin. “I know what you did. That is why only you can undo it. Our choices create many realities. I can send you to a reality with a different past, give you the chance to make another choice and create a place for Ariel in the world.”
I let the blanket slip from my shoulders. “I’m ready. Send me now.”
“Patience,” she says, even as she presses her hands together, summoning a light so bright it burns my eyes. “I must send you back to the body you wore when you killed Ariel, to a moment when Dylan Stroud’s fate split in two different directions.”
“Very well. He will serve my purpose.” Dylan’s body suited me well enough during my last shift. The boy is handsome, reckless, damaged—all the things young girls love before they grow wise enough to realize it isn’t smart to play with fire. But Ariel is young. She will be drawn to him, seduced by the flames. I smile at the thought of her big blue eyes, her white-blond hair.
This might not be such a chore after all.
“Remember, you must make her believe in love,” Nurse warns, moving her hands farther apart, building the knot of power she holds until the air hums with potential energy, with magic. “It doesn’t matter what you feel or don’t feel, but you must make her love you, instill in her the unwavering faith that the human heart is worth fighting for. Banish the darkness inside her and set her on her true path.”
I wave one skeletal hand in the air. “Done.”
Her lips curve again, but this time there is something predatory in her smile. “Then go and do well, Romeo. Make the most of your one and only chance.” Her hands fall to her sides, and the golden ball flies at me, striking me in the face. The world explodes in a shower of sparks. I am on fire, dropped into a pit of flames, a torturous molten place where there is no air to breathe, no mercy to be found. I burn for what seems like hours.
And then, just as suddenly, it’s over. I’m in another body, on a dark road, driving through a spring evening.
Cool air streams in through the open windows, carrying night smells—evergreen trees, freshly cut grass, rosemary growing wild on the hills, and the faint hint of cow manure. It is … glorious. My fingers curling around the warm steering wheel, the wind in my hair, the world popping outside—it is everything I thought I’d never have again. It is life. Real life, not the shadows I’ve been trapped in for so long. I pull in a breath and hold it until my lungs ache, before letting it out with a satisfied sigh.
From the passenger seat comes a sound close to a growl.
I’m not alone. I turn my head and catch Ariel Dragland’s impossibly big blue eyes. She huddles in the seat next to me, glaring with thinly veiled hatred, her arms crossed, those long, spidery fingers rubbing at the collar of her shirt. I feel Dylan’s memories of her swim inside me, a strange sensation after so many years dwelling in the empty bodies of the dead.
As a Mercenary, I lived in a hundred or more corpses, but every one was the same. They were lonely prisons that kept me from the world. Now not only do I have senses that allow me to experience my humanity, I have access to the thoughts and feelings of the body I’ve borrowed. My last occupation of his body ended in death, but this version of Dylan is still alive, and will return to his physical form when my work is through. Until then, he’ll wander the mists of forgetting, that place outside of time where I will dwell between my missions for the bringers of goodness and light.
If I please Nurse and the other Ambassadors.
I will. I can’t go back to being a dead thing. I won’t.
I focus, searching Dylan’s memories.
He loathed Ariel for her weakness, for being such a willing victim, an easy target. But he thought the shirt she was wearing tonight made her prettier, made it less of a chore to fulfill the bet he’d made and seduce the school freak. He nearly succeeded too, nearly won five hundred dollars. If Jason hadn’t texted him, if Ariel hadn’t seen …
But she did see. And she was enraged enough to scare even a young villain like Stroud. He worried that Ariel might really be crazy.
I glance at her from the corner of my eye. Crazy is relative. From my perspective, Ariel is quite sane. But she’s certainly angry.
And faster than one would think.
I barely have time to flinch before the wheel is in her hands. She pulls to the right and I curse beneath my breath, understanding the Ambassador’s hard smile, as the car hurtles toward the ravine where another version of Dylan died and I first entered his body.
I’ve been sent back in time to woo a girl who hates the body I’ve entered. Even if we survive this crash, I’m doomed. She’ll never love me.
No, she’ll never love Dylan. You’re a different monster, one with soft words and gentle hands.
Sometimes gentle, sometimes not. I reach for the wheel, ripping it from Ariel’s grasp, turning the car, offering just enough resistance to slow our spin. We hit the guardrail and bounce back onto the road, the tail end of the car skidding across the center line before we come to a stop on the deserted highway.
For a moment, the silence is broken only by our swiftly drawn breath, the narrowness of our escape stealing all our words.
Ariel is the first to recover. “I hate you. I will destroy you, Dylan Stroud. Just you wait and see!” And then she’s out the door, running down the highway back toward Los Olivos, silver hair shimmering in the moonlight.
I watch her run in the rearview mirror, an unexpected smile creeping across my face. She is glorious in her hate. It’s a shame I have to put out that particular fire, smother it with the sweet press of true love’s kiss.
“True love’s kiss. True. Love’s. Kiss!” I turn the words into a song as I spin the wheel and pull around, heading after the girl who has no clue she’s going to love me.
THREE
Ariel
Hate, him, hate, him, hate, him. My feet pound the b
eat and my thoughts scream the words. I hate Dylan Stroud. I can’t believe I let him touch me. I should have known better. Things are never going to change. I will never change. I’ll always be the Freak with the scars, even when I finally make it out of this town. Tonight proves it. I’m stupid. Crazy. Broken. And I always will be.
How else could I have thought I was falling in love with him?
I should have realized it was a joke. But I didn’t, and by tomorrow the entire school will know that Dylan and I almost did it. Or maybe he’ll tell everyone we did. I wouldn’t be surprised. Then they’ll have one more thing to pity me for, the girl who lost her virginity on a bet. Maybe Dylan will even tell his friends that I took the money he offered, and Hannah and Natalie and all the other girls who look at me like their worst nightmare come to life will think I’m a whore in addition to being the most pathetic loser on the planet.
Stupid girl, stupid freak, stupid girl, stupid freak.
I pull in a breath and choke on it. I wish we’d gone off the road. I wish we were both dead. I taste salt at the back of my throat. Tears burn my eyes. I want to stop running, lie down in the middle of the highway, and wait for some unsuspecting person to run me over. But I can’t. Because the only car on the road is his car, and I won’t give him the satisfaction.
If he wants to hit me, he’ll have to pull onto the shoulder.
The headlights behind me get brighter, a slow creeping glare that makes me feel naked. I want to crouch down and cover my head with my arms, but I don’t. I keep running, facing forward. Even when Dylan’s car putters up beside me and the passenger window buzzes down, I don’t turn to look. I won’t let him see that he’s made me cry. Again.
“Why don’t you get back in the car?”
Why don’t you choke on your tongue and die?
“Please, Ariel. I just want to talk,” he says. “I think there’s been a … misunderstanding.”