I would tell you that I felt fire, and hell and pain. It would be the only justifiable payback for the way I killed so ruthlessly throughout my life.
But I didn’t.
All I felt were dazzling gold, and diamonds of light.
Turn the Page for an Excerpt from Rebecca Maizel’s Next Book
Stolen Nights
Available in early 2011
Copyright © 2010 by Lovers Bay, Inc.
Prologue
There is a bay before me. A small inlet, and spring, it seems, has finally arrived. The branches sway now, happy in their release from their heavy burdens of ice and snow. Did I tell you I licked the snow with my tongue? Yes, perhaps I did. I cannot remember which days I write in this journal and which days I spend talking to you in my head. Today, I write.
Lenah, I wish you could have seen my face. I bent down, wrapped in a blanket, stuck out my tongue and licked the snow. A grown man! It was…wonderful. The wind was biting. Chills ran down my spine and I could taste the salt in the air. I have hundreds of words now for things I had so long forgotten.
The locals here ask so many questions. Where am I from? Why is a handsome man of so young an age by himself with no wife or girlfriend? I would tell them I wait for you but that is only half of the truth. I do wait for you—though I know you will never come.
The truth is, I mourn you. Because there is an aching in my soul; I know this—I have one now. I would sprout wings and soar to the highest tower so you might see me, so I could tell you I am whole and sound. But we both know angels make very rare appearances. And I am no angel.
I would scream for you if you would hear me. I would burn this place to the ground if it meant you would see the smoke. The only item I burn is sage and that’s to cleanse myself of worry of you—yet you remain. No salt on my window will cure your ghost.
Even the waves cascading in this bay lead out to an ocean that flows to the shores of England. I can connect anything to you if I try. This rock in my hand, smoothed by ages in the sea. If I toss it back, could I will it to reach you?
England.
I don’t ever want to see it slaughtered by modern day. Let it remain in my mind as it was before all of this happened.
Before you and I in an apple orchard. Before you in a white dress.
These words roll in my head day after day but I find no peace. My dreams haunt me—my worst fear—your death, I see it in thousands of incarnations. I must believe that you will transcend this darkness. That you will find a way to prevail and forgive me.
For leaving you.
Part I
There are more things in heaven and earth,
Horatio. Than are dreamt of in your
philosophy.
—HAMLET, ACT I, SCENE V
Chapter One
Let me see Rhode.
I know I don’t deserve it but let me see his face….
Just once before it’s all over.
I stood on the porch and raised my arms from my sides. I was ready…to burn. The morning sun came over my body in a sharp beam. I waited for the scorching pain that would send me to hell.
But there was no pain. There was only warmth that rolled from my head to my toes.
I wanted to take a breath but a great pressure lay on my chest. As the sun radiated on my skin I felt a great weight lifted from my body. One layer peeled away. A release. Another layer, another release. I stood alone on that porch but something heavy was coming away and up into the air. I was getting lighter and lighter.
I kept my eyes closed but the peeling continued. The light seemed to swirl through me, down through my muscles and into the bone. There was a jolt of energy and the bottoms of my feet left the ground. Bathed by the light, I levitated above the tiles. I opened my mouth to scream, but nothing came out—at least nothing I could hear. Then the world spun a thousand times, ten thousand times. I opened my eyes, but Wickham was a blur spinning so fast that when my knees buckled I slammed full force into the floor. Only then did I realize that I had survived whatever should have killed me.
I had survived the ritual.
My knees stung from the fall, but I was distracted by the pounding in my throat. I drew in breath, immediately brought my hands to the base of my neck, and inhaled again. My fingers clenched around my throat; a pounding vibrated deep within me. It was the rhythmic knocking of an old friend who reminded me she was still there…my heart. I tried to steady my balance by pressing my fingertips onto the tiles. Stand up, Lenah, I thought.
I shook my hands out and then my arms, too. Oh, I thought. My body and my mind are connected. I can feel. I can think.
I surveyed my surroundings, remembering where I was.
Think, Lenah. You are on the porch at Wickham. As these words came to my mind, so did the images of the last moments before I had stepped out onto that porch. I sat on the bed with Vicken and performed the ritual. I had destroyed my coven, a coven of vampires. The ritual called for bloodletting and, only moments before, I had sliced open my wrist, giving all of my blood to Vicken so that he might be human once again.
But I had survived…and the ritual wasn’t supposed to work that way.
I remained on my knees and brought my wrists before my eyes. The skin wasn’t broken! It wasn’t cut from the silver letter opener. How was that possible? Something glittered below my eyes and I looked to the porch floor.
Around me was a pile of luminous dust. Thousands upon thousands of tiny sparkles. I had seen this before.
I looked back to my hands and the skin was rejuvenated—no cuts, no bruises. I leaned forward, still on my knees, and placed my palms in the dust. When I dragged my hands back toward my body, my palms made a scraping noise against the gritty remains and the tiled porch floor. These microscopic diamonds were cool and gritty—just like before. Just like when I was first made human and Rhode sacrificed himself on that same porch. All he had left behind were the same gritty, sparkling ashes.
Knee caps. Bare thighs. Arms and bare breasts. I was naked just like the first time when Rhode had performed the ritual for me. Whatever happened on that porch had incinerated my clothes—had burned up the vampire within me and I was human again. I placed my hand down on the wood and something hard dug into my palm. When I looked down I saw my necklace with a vial as a pendant; the thick chain curled in a circle.
My necklace holding Rhode’s dust lay in my glorious glittering vampire remains. Mine. They looked just the same as the dust within that tiny vial pendant. Tiny glitters sparkled on my palms. I looked from those particles to Rhode’s necklace and back again to mine. A creeping thought, almost like a nudge, came to me, slowly unfolded and the dots connected, one by one. The realization came in one sentence: they didn’t just look the same…they were the same.
If I survived…could it be possible? No, I thought. Rhode is dead. Like Tony. My gut wrenched and I looked to the lines snaking through my palms. My lifeline was the same even though I had been transformed. Transformed back to a human. As I stared at the lines, images flashed through my mind so quickly I wasn’t sure which one to focus on first.
Vicken pleading with me not to perform the ritual. His skin was so white. Suleen, at Wickham, in his traditional white garb, standing by the Chapel, his arm outstretched to me.
Justin at winter prom.
Me telling him good-bye.
The sheer magnitude of the moment came over me in that early morning light. The ritual had worked but in a way I had never expected. No—Rhode is dead, I insisted. I sucked in a heaving breath, then another, filling my lungs, and I exhaled again. That’s when I heard a man’s cry from behind me. A soft cry, the kind of cry that can only come from someone in deep pain.
Justin.
I opened my mouth and stuttered, swallowed, and pressed my tongue to my teeth. I tried to speak but spit came flying out. I lifted my right foot but collapsed back onto the tile with a thud.
I had to get inside.
Justin’s wail made my stomach clench.
I reached one hand forward and turned my body to face the porch door. The curtain blew out and fluttered in the morning breeze. I reached and pulled my body forward—this was harder than I thought. My legs were dead weight but I kept dragging myself across the porch even though my legs lay behind me, motionless.
I snarled from the effort and grunted, too. There was a surprised hiccup and then silence. I reached out, so my fingers gripped the cool metal of the bottom of the door frame. I ducked my head under the curtain.
Justin was on his knees, his face in his hands. He looked up at me, lines of tears streaked over his bronzed cheeks. His mouth formed an O-shape and he reached out to me.
“D-D-Don’t touch y-yet,” I slurred, continuing to crawl.
Justin stood up as I pulled myself from the patio to the middle of the living room. I had linked the heavy necklace chain through my fingers and it crunched against the floor as I crawled. The vial scraped against the floor and my skin ached from the pressure of the heavy silver digging into my fingers. My temples throbbed and it matched my heartbeat. My knees kept slipping on the floor and my arms gave way because my wrists weren’t strong enough yet. Adrenaline rushed through my stomach as I caught myself on my elbows sending zings of pain through my arms.
I was positively beastlike. I shook my head. No, I thought, but I couldn’t stop it. More images shot through my mind. I knew, like all those touched by supernatural forces, that those images were placed in my mind intentionally.
Rhode standing on the porch of my apartment with his hands raised from his sides. His eyes are closed, and he looks so peaceful he could be sleeping. A white light comes from the sky in a strong beam—it engulfs him. Tiny globules of diamond refractions pour off Rhode in a sparkling sandstorm. The gritty ash collects around him, his clothes stripped piece by piece as he bathes in light. His vampire soul collects around him in a heaping pile. He collapses onto the porch and stares at his hands, shocked that he had survived.
I gasped and the images rippled out of my mind, leaving it blank. They were clear at first and then as I kept dragging myself into the apartment, Justin’s face pushed them away. My wrists wobbled and my head ached but I threw my body forward. My heartbeat fluttered in my ears.
Keep going, Lenah. Keep going…but my arms gave out and my cheek hit the hardwood. I exhaled and inhaled, one breath after another. I let the sting of the hardwood ebb away. I closed my eyes, focusing on one image that stayed in my mind amid the blackness.
Rhode stands in the glittered ash. He is gorgeous, naked. I follow the meaty carvings of his chest, down to the firmness of his abdomen, down and down to the bone in his shins. He could be made of marble. My god, I think. I love the sculpted angles of his body. I look back up when he brings his palm over his chest and covers his heart. I am utterly entranced as if the images were real.
“Lenah?” Justin asked again. In a breath the image disappeared and my eyes opened in a shot. My cheek was still planted against the hardwood floor. I pushed up with my hands but my wrists shook so much that my hair fell from behind my shoulders making a curtain on either side of my face. In a clumsy collapse, my strength gave out, and I hit the floor again.
For a few moments there was only the sound of my breath. I felt a softness on my lower back, and I realized Justin laid a blanket over me. He sank down to his knees and wrapped me in the blanket. His fingers were cautious, they hadn’t touched my skin. I could barely hear him breathing. I looked up, moving the curtain of hair out of my eyes.
“Touch me,” I said, finally making my mouth work the way I wanted.
Justin’s face collapsed, his slim but proud nose was red. His eyes were swollen and his lips were still quivering. “I’m sorry,” he said, wrapping the blanket around me even tighter. He was on his knees. I gathered whatever strength I had to reach for him and to wrap my cold arms around his waist. Pressing my face into the soft cotton of his shirt, I could hear his heart thudding madly.
“I’m sorry,” he said again and again.
“Why?” I asked, feeling his arms and body quiver and shake beneath my weak grasp.
“For crying. I don’t know.”
We sat on the floor like that for a moment while I caught my breath and the shuddering from Justin’s body slowly wavered and then stilled. His shoulders trembled, then stilled, then trembled again. He reached out and cupped my cheek with his palm. He was so warm. Now it was my turn to shake, only I wasn’t sure if I was shaking because of Justin’s beautiful face.
“You’re cold,” he said, hugging me closer. He sniffed and wiped a stray tear from the bottom of his jaw.
I nuzzled into the comfort of the fabric. He kissed the top of my head and drew me even closer. We were silent as I breathed in and out, taking in Justin’s familiar smell. Like fresh grass and earth.
“How?” Justin asked. “I mean, how did this happen? You said you were going to die.”
“I don’t know,” I said, sitting up and leaning on the wall behind me. I wiped the sweat away from my forehead. There was the silence between us, Justin’s golden glow was tainted by his sadness. I wanted to wield the light like I had only hours before and try to brighten back up our lives. Something about him seemed grayer, so I ran my thumb down another wet line on Justin’s face. He closed his eyes at my touch.
I dropped my hands by my side and sighed. I looked about the living room of my apartment and, of course, my eyes fell on Rhode’s sword. My eyes slid from the sharp point, down to the blade, then to the hilt. Right above the handle was the strongest part of the sword, the blood grooves. They were small wells, which would catch the blood of the enemy.
“It doesn’t matter if you’re smaller or weaker,” Rhode had said. “With this you can defeat—”
“Lenah?” Justin interrupted Rhode’s words in my head. “How are your legs?” I wiggled my toes and found that some of the feeling was coming back to me. On the porch they had been dead weight.
“Better. I think it’s just going to take a bit.”
According to Rhode, the ritual killed whoever performed it. Something within me, a burning hot ball in the pit of my stomach told me I was supposed to live. I had no guide this time. I had to follow my intuition.
And my intuition told me that Rhode was alive.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank the incomparable Michael Sugar. None of this would have happened without your belief in my work. Your generosity never ceases to amaze me.
A special thank you to Anna DeRoy, who loved Lenah and her story from the start.
To the St. Martin’s team, especially Jennifer Weis and Anne Bensson, for helping me to fully realize this wonderful trilogy.
Thank you, thank you, thank you to my unparalleled agent, Matt Hudson. You are patient, dedicated, and brilliant. This book would not be what it is without you. (I’m probably calling you on the phone right now….)
To the CCWs: Mariellen Langworthy, Judith Gamble, Laura Backman, Rebecca DeMetrick, Macall Robertson, and Maggie Hayes. Your feedback is invaluable.
I would like to extend a special thanks to the following people who have helped Infinite Days come to light: the talented Monika Bustamante, Amanda Leathers (the very first reader), Alex Dressler (Latin extraordinaire), Corrine Clapper, Amanda DiSanto, Tom Barclay, Local History Librarian at the Carnegie Library (the most generous librarian in Scotland), Joshua Corin, Greg D. Williams, and Karen Boren, who taught me what it means to love fiction.
And last but not least:
In memory of Henoch Maizel and Sylvia Raiken, who understood the beauty of words. I wish you could see this.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
INFINITE DAYS. Copyright © 2010 by Lovers Bay, Inc. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
www.stmartins.com
ISBN: 978-1-4299-
9169-8
Rebecca Maizel, Infinite Days
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