I remembered Reyn’s stray dog comment and tried not to flinch. “Huh. What kind of skills?”
Brynne shrugged. “Watch it, Jess—there’s a splinter there. Oh, anything. Magick, cooking, gardening, whatever. One year I helped River repaint a bunch of rooms. One year I focused on baking. One year I did nothing but study gem and crystal magick. One year—oh, do you remember, Jess? I came here and taught everyone how to dance hip-hop.” She laughed, throwing her head back, the line of her brown throat silhouetted against the sky.
Jess grunted, nails in his mouth. Apparently not into hip-hop.
“How old are you? I mean, if you don’t mind my asking.”
Brynne thought a moment. “Ooh. Two hundred and thirty-four. Whoa.” She smiled again. She looked maybe eighteen.
“How did you meet River?” Was it tacky to grill her? I didn’t know.
“Okay.” Jess nodded at me and gestured to the board. I held a nail in place and slammed it with the hammer. Best. Chore. Ever.
Brynne quit smiling. “I got mad at someone and set them on fire.”
I blinked, running the words through my head again. Had she said that? Jess didn’t even look up. I decided to let my jaw drop open.
“Say what?” Funny, she didn’t seem like a psychopath.… I thought back uncomfortably on some of the things I had done, remembered Incy’s cabbie, and picked up another nail.
“It wasn’t real fire,” Brynne said, leaning against the board to hold it in place. “It didn’t really burn them. But I wanted to scare the hell out of them, and I did. Anyway, River was walking by the alley—this was in Italy, maybe in, what, 1910? 1915? Before the First World War. She saw that clearly I was misusing magick, and came up to me, gave me a little pep talk.”
“And then you just came here?”
“Oh, no. I punched her.”
Jess snickered and handed me another nail.
“But eventually I came around. I first came here in 1923. After the war.”
“Where are you from?”
“Louisiana. My mother was a slave, from Africa. Angola. My father was a white landowner. Ha! Try being an immortal slave! God.”
I finished with that board and held one up for Brynne to nail.
“What happened?” This was great stuff.
“My father realized my mom was immortal, of course. They waited it out, waited for his wife to die, and then they ran away together. He sold the plantation, set everyone free.” She laughed. “They’re still together. I’ve got ten siblings. You might meet some of them—they drop by sometimes.”
I handed her a nail, thinking about this. I hadn’t known many happy immortal couples, but clearly here was one. And they had added eleven more immortals to the world. It seemed weird, to have children for years and years, so you had siblings who were a hundred years older than you. I’d met a couple. All of my own siblings had been just a year or two apart, for whatever reason.
“How about you?” I finally said to Jess.
“I’m not going to talk about it,” he said in his gravelly voice, and fit another board into place.
All righty, then.
“Do you know other people’s stories?” I asked casually. “Like Lorenz or Nell? Or Reyn?” Oh yes, I’m subtle. Soooo subtle.
Brynne shrugged easily. “They can tell their own stories,” she said. “I know that Lorenz is about a hundred, and he’s from Italy, obviously. I got the impression that his family was friendly with River’s family. Nell is English, and only about eighty or so. Reyn I don’t know much about. I think he said he was about two-sixty? Something? And Dutch. Other than that, you’ll have to talk to them.”
I nodded, thinking.
“What about you?” Jess asked. His voice was like shaking a can of rusty nails.
My first instinct was to give him his own line back—I’m not going to talk about it. But I was here to grow and to learn to love myself, right?
“I’m older.”
Brynne grinned. “Okay. How old? Where are you from? What’s your story?”
And just like that, the darkness of my past came crashing down on me again, and I couldn’t go there, couldn’t share anything, couldn’t do the normal give-and-take of conversation.
I looked at Brynne, and I guess she saw something in my eyes, because her face softened and she patted my arm. “It’s okay,” she said. “Some roads are longer and harder than others.”
I nodded mutely, thinking that some roads seemed to lead straight to hell.
Different teams of people, usually two, sometimes three, made dinner each night. Other people cleaned up. People went for walks almost every night after dinner, even if it was raining or bitter out. I was forced to go sometimes, though I hated being out in nature in the dark. Surrounded by everyone else, though, it felt less threatening, and I stayed in the middle of the group so if something attacked us, it’d have to go through a bunch of people to get to me.
Hey, if I were totally rational, I wouldn’t be here.
“Wasn’t there a movie about this?” I asked a couple of days later, as I peeled a mountain of potatoes. I’d dug these effing potatoes out of the ground two days ago, and the crawly feel of dry dirt still clung to my hands. Sadly, not every chore was as satisfying as pounding nails. “And all of a sudden I’ll turn into a karate expert?”
Asher, washing kale next to me, smiled. “Yes. It’s been our secret plan all along.”
“You’re a teacher here,” I said. “So how come you’re still doing grunt work? Haven’t you achieved nirvana yet? Are you not appreciating every minute you wash kale?”
Asher smiled again. “Au contraire, mon petit chou. I am appreciating every minute. But it’s important that you truly comprehend that you don’t just do x, y, and z, and then you’re happy and can relax for the rest of your loooong life.”
His sense of humor surprised me, and I realized that River shared it. In fact, it seemed I was often overhearing a joke, hearing laughter drifting to me across the garden, or the yard, or down the hall. Of course, I’d yet to see Reyn crack a smile except in my imagination, but I wasn’t holding my breath on that.
“What do you mean?” I asked. “Like, I’m not ever going to be… better?”
“No, no, don’t misunderstand,” said Asher. He put another pile of clean kale on the counter and dunked more in the sink. “It’s just that it’s not like climbing a mountain, and you’re done, and you’ve climbed the mountain, and you never have to climb it again.”
Shit. “I have to climb the mountain again?”
“No.” He turned off the water, dried his hands on a dish towel, and looked at me. “It’s just that once you climb the mountain, you realize the view is so spectacular that you want to keep going toward it.”
I shook my head. “I’m lost. Drop the climbing metaphor. Give it to me straight.”
“None of us here just decided one day to embrace good, or light, and leave darkness behind forever,” Asher said patiently. “It’s not a decision you make once. Being Terävä is how we’re born, but not how we have to stay. Being Tähti can be achieved, but once it’s achieved, it’s easily lost again.”
I was still shocked at how easily people talked about this here.
“Being ‘good’—and by good I mean not dark, not evil—but not like a Goody Two-shoes, you understand?”
I nodded.
“Being good is something that one must choose over and over again, every day, throughout the day, for the rest of one’s life,” Asher said. “A day is made of a thousand decisions, most small, some huge. With each decision, you have the chance to work toward light or sink toward darkness.”
“Oh, God,” I moaned. “I don’t even want to be that good!”
His smile lit his face. “I’ll tell you a secret: None of us makes every single decision all the time on the right side. Not even River, and she’s the most genuinely good person I’ve ever met.”
“Then what’s the point of trying if you can’t even win?”
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“You win in lots of different ways,” Asher said. “Lots of little wins. The point of this life is not to be good all the time. It’s to be as good as you can. No one is perfect. No one does it right all the time. That’s not what life is.”
The kitchen door opened, and several people came in: Lorenz, Nell, Anne, and… the Viking god. I saw Reyn every day, of course. After our mutual dog-washing episode, I’d had the misfortune of working next to him, or close by, on a couple of other occasions. He spoke only when spoken to, never smiled, never laughed—in short, he was forbidding and chilly and a pain in the ass.
I continued to find him familiar without knowing why. The more I looked at him, the more irritating he was, the more forbidding—and with true karmic irony, my psyche had chosen to find him more attractive than every other person I’d ever met. It had surprised me. And Reyn had given me nothing to work with, no sign whatsoever of interest. But I was drawn to him as if we knew each other, had a past together. For a fevered minute I had wondered if we’d had a past life together, like, reincarnated, and then realized that the idea of more than one life as an immortal was, like, please, no.
And yet I couldn’t stand him—he didn’t have a single admirable trait except his total, boring devotion to goodness. Okay, let’s just say he didn’t have a single admirable trait. He was the most annoying, restrained, stuck-up, gooder-than-thou, stick-in-the-mud jerk I’d ever met. And yet every night in my hard little single bed, I… missed him, as if I’d once had him and now wanted him back. I burned for him, longed for him to come to me, for his touch, ached to kiss him, to make that facade break, to make him lose his cool, make his breath come fast.
I mean, I don’t like most men in general and have only very limited, short-term uses for them. But Reyn had gotten under my skin, and I had a visceral, intense attraction to him, whether I wanted it or not.
“Nastasya?” Asher was looking at me. Everyone was looking at me.
I took a breath, picked up a potato, and started peeling it viciously. “Okay, explain the whole good/evil thing again.”
The others laughed (except Reyn) and turned to leave, all smiles and rosy-cheeked wholesomeness. At the door Nell paused.
“Oh, Reyn? My door is sticking. Do you think you could take a look at it?” She gave one of her smiles, looking all peaches and cream.
Reyn nodded and started to follow her.
“Reyn?” Asher said, stopping him in his tracks.
“Yes?” Reyn’s tone was deferential—not warm, exactly, but not the disdainful tone he used with me. Nell paused, but Asher gestured that she could go. After a moment’s hesitation, she smiled and left.
“I’ve described our quest as being a continuous series of decisions throughout the day, throughout our lives,” Asher said. “And tried to explain how none of us is perfect, how no one can actually choose to act for goodness every single time without fail. I’ve said that’s not what life is. Can you put it a different way, to help Nastasya get what I mean?”
Oh, God, yes, please put it to Nastasya, I thought evilly, then mentally slapped myself upside the head. There I go: making a choice not for good, right here, right now. I was hopeless.
Reyn looked appalled, which made me feel a little better. He didn’t like being around me any more than I liked being around him.
“How’s your quest going?” I asked flippantly, sending potato peels flying into the sink. He looked… just unbelievable, hair tousled by the wind, bright-eyed, face slightly flushed. It was all I could do to not knock him down right there in front of Asher and climb on him. If I stunned him with a frying pan first, he might not struggle too much.…
“It’s hard,” Reyn said. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. It’s a constant battle. It’s life or death.”
Asher looked taken aback.
Reyn usually didn’t give up that much, and I looked at him. I understood about the life-or-death part, but you’d think he’d be more cheerful, fighting the good fight.
“And why do you try?” I wasn’t trying to be a smart-ass—I genuinely wanted to know.
Reyn was quiet, and I thought he’d leave without answering me. But he said, “Because to not try is to admit the other side has won. To not try is to embrace death and eternal darkness. And in that way lies madness and despair and unending pain.”
Both Asher and I were wide-eyed.
“Oh, huh,” I said.
Reyn’s gaze was unreadable. He walked out of the kitchen without another word.
I glanced at Asher, who looked thoughtful and maybe concerned.
“He’s a fun guy,” I said.
Asher just stroked his beard and left me and the potatoes alone to struggle together.
CHAPTER 11
Are you going to stay?” River’s gentle question made me pause in the middle of folding clean dishcloths.
I opened my mouth to say, No, just can’t, but it didn’t come out.
It was not a total holiday, being here, but when I thought about it, I didn’t feel like I was in searing pain all the time, either. And it had felt painful being in Boston, being in London. I’d felt like I was dying, already dead.
I didn’t feel like that here.
I still wondered, of course, what Incy and the others were doing now, if they missed me, if they were concerned. I’d never just up and disappeared before, not this completely. I mean, I’d skipped town, leaving notes like Meet me in Constantinople or whatnot, but this time I’d tried to drop off the face of the earth. How had they reacted to that? I shivered with a sudden chill.
My life had changed completely, in every facet. Wasn’t that what I had wanted? I woke each morning in time to see the first chilly fringes of dawn creep over a distant hill. I made my bed (at least pulled the blanket up), got dressed, and went downstairs. Sometimes my name was on the roster to help make breakfast. Sometimes I had to do something else, like collect eggs, or sweep the porches, or set the table.
My mornings were filled with work, usually with a teacher or one of the more advanced students: Daisuke, Charles, or Rachel. Sometimes they asked me questions, which I tried to answer; sometimes they talked about random stuff, and it was only later that I realized they had imparted Important Life Lesson #47 or something.
I now knew everyone, their names, where they were from, where their rooms were, how long they’d been here. Jess was in fact only 173. But he was coming off a worse bender than I was, and this was his fifth attempt at being here. I’d never seen someone so young who looked so old—gray, grizzled hair, lined face, nose covered with broken blood vessels. His last time out, he’d gotten drunk and accidentally hit someone riding a bicycle. The cyclist hadn’t died, but Jess said the guilt weighed about a thousand pounds on his shoulders. He had a lot to reconcile in his life. As I did.
Rachel was usually pretty serious but could, on occasion, be wickedly funny. Her stories of what she had done during the twenties were hilarious and made us all laugh.
Anne, the other teacher besides River, Solis, and Asher, was cheerful, smiling, and always in a hurry. And she was physical, touching my arm, putting her hand on someone’s shoulder, rubbing River’s back. I had gotten to where I no longer flinched. She was 304 and ascribed her youthful appearance to “all this clean living,” which caused the other teachers to snort, making her crack up.
Yes, they were a merry bunch.
Lorenz and Charles—they were nice enough, interesting enough. I hadn’t invested a lot of energy getting to know them, since I probably wouldn’t be here long, but they didn’t piss me off or anything. Lorenz was in fact Italian, with a striking black hair/blue eyes combination and a lovely Roman profile right off an ancient mosaic. He was kind of loud, with big, expressive emotions. Charles was originally from Ireland and still had a very slight accent, as most of us did, but he had lived in the American South for the last two hundred years. He was gay, with bright red hair, green eyes, and freckles. He managed to look trim and dapper even while hoeing weeds or
milking cows. Brynne, as I said, looked like a model—tall, slender, and graceful, with a beautifully symmetrical face. Like Lorenz, she was incredibly vibrant, a hothouse flower. She seemed to have it all together—when the fryer had caught on fire, she’d simply doused it with salt, not even missing a word in the story she was telling.
Reyn was himself. Nell still went out of her way to be friendly and helpful, but it took only about a minute to see how fake it was, just a show for other people. Especially Reyn. I had figured out that Nell was a wolf in preppy clothing, but no one else seemed to notice it. No one seemed to notice how wrapped up she was in Reyn, either. She was subtle, but not so subtle that I couldn’t see it. Outwardly, she was the sweetest little thing: all smiles and helpful offers, hardworking, serious about her studies, and kind to everyone.
But underneath I saw her quiet desperation over Reyn, who treated her like an indulged lapdog. He thought they were friends, coworkers, because he was a dense, oblivious schmuck. She wanted to ride off with him into a Tähti sunset and have him all to herself literally forever. Again and again I had seen her work things so the two of them would be assigned to the same chore, working side by side. She asked him for help with her studies and did all sorts of little thoughtful things for him that he hardly noticed.
People usually either really adore me or really hate me, and Nell seemed to fall into the latter camp. I didn’t know if she actually hated me, but if she saw Reyn and me working together, she got this look in her eyes, as if she’d turn me to stone if she could. Then I’d blink, and it would be gone.
It added interest to my days.
I realized that River was waiting for an answer.
I wished I could say, “Yes! I am loving this! Bring it on! My heart and soul are here, and I am ready for a change!” But I couldn’t.