Immortal Beloved

  I’d been kidding about his being a Viking god, and a couple of days ago that had seemed funny. The fact was he looked really typically northern raider. They all kind of looked alike, ha ha ha. Of course, that didn’t mean he was one. It was totally possible that he was 267 and basically Dutch. And it was also possible that my twisted psyche had taken a horribly vivid memory and just cast it with whoever was on my mind nowadays. It hadn’t happened before, but all kinds of thoughts and memories were getting stirred up lately, and God knows I spent a lot of fevered minutes thinking about Reyn.

  “Nastasya? Hello?”

  I realized he must have been speaking to me for a while, and the hamster wheel of my mind had tuned him out while it spun.

  “Huh?”

  We paused outside the back door of the house, leading into the kitchen. I could hear people talking, pots and pans clanking, laughter, water running. Out here it was quiet except for some early birdsong, a faint breeze blowing the last few leaves off the trees.

  “What happened last night, at the circle?”

  I glanced at him quickly, saw his gaze focused on me. I was uncomfortable—not scared anymore, not exactly, but just… glad there were lots of people nearby.

  “The usual,” I said, striving for lightness. “Visions, getting sick, barfing. I love circles!”

  “Why does that happen to you?” he asked. My nerves were frayed and shot, and I desperately wanted to be inside, away from him.

  The back door opened, and Nell, looking pink-cheeked and rested, leaned out. I saw her try unsuccessfully to keep suspicion and jealousy out of her face, but I bet that Reyn didn’t notice a thing.

  “Don’t let Nastasya make you late!” Nell admonished Reyn cheerfully.

  It’s a measure of my lack of progress and immaturity, coupled with a healthy dose of self-destructiveness, that my first instinct was to say, Oh, we were hooking up in the chicken coop. But my nerves were raw, and I couldn’t joke about it.

  “We’re talking,” Reyn said. “We’ll be there in a minute.”

  Nell’s face faltered. “Brynne’s yelling for the eggs.”

  “I got ’em,” I said, and climbed the stairs, leaving Reyn behind. I brushed past Nell, and as I did, she hissed, “He’s mine!”

  My head jerked up, and I looked at her. But just like that, her face was bland and normal, and she was smiling at Reyn, holding the door open for him as he climbed the steps with his two buckets.

  Yesterday he’d been my hottest fantasy; today he was one of my worst fears and memories. And on top of everything, Nell thought I was trying to take her obsession from her. Great. Karma must be laughing herself sick about now.

  And speaking of karma, I went to work again that day. Two days in a row! On time! The last time that had happened was… I couldn’t remember a last time. Maybe never. And, gosh, I felt so fulfilled and purposeful and like I was so much farther along the path of healing and wellness and being one with the universe… nah, not really. I mean, no one could like doing this, no one could actually find it fulfilling. But mindless work seemed somewhat less depressing than mindless indolence, and I trusted Solis and River to know what they were doing. I wondered how long they wanted me to do this, have an outside job. Two weeks? Would two weeks be enough?

  At three thirty, Meriwether MacIntyre showed up and stowed her school backpack behind the counter in front.

  “So, you’ve already graduated from high school, huh?” she asked shyly, putting on the striped apron she wore when she worked here.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you going to go to college?”

  “Um, sure. I just wanted to work awhile, save some money,” I said. “What about you? You’re a senior, right?” I’d found out that she was in twelfth grade and that basically she went to school and came here and apparently had no other life.

  Meriwether nodded.

  “College plans?”

  She hesitated, looking uncomfortable. “Not sure I’ll be able to leave my dad,” she said in a low voice, as if afraid he would hear her. “The closest college is only about an hour away—but I don’t think he’d want me going there.”

  Hmm. My recent brainflash about how Incy had been so clinging and controlling made me extra sensitive about poor Meriwether getting yanked around like a puppet on a string. But what could I say? To hell with him, do what you want?

  I knew it wasn’t that easy. Which, I guessed, was more than I’d known a month ago, when Meriwether’s plight would have been truly incomprehensible to me.

  “I guess there are correspondence courses,” I said lamely, knowing she needed so much more than that.

  “Yeah,” she said without hope. “Oh, wow, you got a lot done.” She seemed uncomfortable around me, but I guessed I was pretty different from her normal school chums.

  “Yep—busy little beaver, that’s me,” I said, recognizing that she wanted to change the subject. I looked at the tidy shelves and tried not to think about walking down the steps of an opera house in Prague in a stunning gown. Heads had swiveled, men had stared, and women had hated my guts. The good old days. Really old, a hundred fifty years ago. “I have to stay here till four,” I went on, brushing my dusty hands on my jeans. “You know what I was thinking? Isn’t fishing season over? Why don’t we move the fishing junk toward the back of the store, and move, like, I don’t know, the Kleenex and cold remedies or whatever toward the front of the store?”

  Her almost-colorless eyes widened. “That’s what I’ve been wanting to do for ages! I asked my dad about it, but he said—”

  “What are you two gabbing about?” Mr. MacIntyre yelled, walking toward us. “I’m not paying you to stand around and yap!”

  Meriwether jumped, but having just relived a nightmare featuring northern raiders, I was unimpressed by a grumpy shopkeeper.

  “I was just saying that we should move all the fishing stuff to the back and move wintry things to the front of the store,” I said. “You want people to walk in, see something, and think, Hey, I need that. Then they think, MacIntyre’s has what I need. You know? There’s no reason for the sunscreen and fishing lures to be right here when they walk in. It’s freaking November.”

  Mr. MacIntyre stared at me in silence, and I waited to see if literal smoke would come out of his ears.

  He turned and looked around the store, almost as if seeing it for the first time—the faded advertising posters, the rust spots on the metal ceiling, the old-fashioned shelves, the worn linoleum tile.

  “You’ve been here, what, two days?” he asked me. “And now you’re an expert?”

  I snorted. “I’m not an expert store owner, but I’ve got, you know, eyes.”

  Meriwether hadn’t taken a breath since this conversation had started, and I was wondering if she was going to keel over anytime soon.

  After another minute of complete silence, during which Old Mac and I stared each other down, he snapped, “Don’t make a huge mess,” and headed back to the pharmacy. “You better clean up everything you touch!”

  I almost laughed at Meriwether’s silent OMG expression but instead motioned her to the front of the store.

  “I can’t believe he agreed,” Meriwether breathed, her gray eyes wide. “When I suggested it, he bit my head off.”

  “Yeah—he doesn’t get the warm-and-fuzzy award,” I said. “Let’s make a plan, one that we can do in little chunks, so he won’t notice it too much. I can start on it tomorrow, and when you come in, you can take over.”

  “Sounds good,” said Meriwether, and gave me a fleeting but real smile. I dutifully clocked out, then got in my battered little car and drove—kind of home.

  CHAPTER 18

  So let’s see: my previous life of designer clothes; fabulous parties; guys climbing all over me; gorgeous, exciting, fun friends; traveling on a whim; fun fun fun—or my current life of jeans, flannel shirts, and work boots; my menial job at a tiny, run-down drugstore; getting up at dawn; falling into bed at, like, nine. There was no reason why
this life should feel better, but it did.

  Here, for the first time in decades, possibly centuries, my stomach felt—not bad. I’ve always had a place inside that felt like I’d swallowed a throwing star or a sparkler. A place deep in my gut that was sharp, jangled, painful, tight, tense. Sometimes if I drank enough or whatever, it would fade a little, then come back with a vengeance. It didn’t even really bother me—I just noticed it, is all. I lived with it. Sometimes it was worse than others, but mostly I was barely aware of it, this knot of irritation and raw burning, deep inside.

  This morning I’d realized that I could hardly feel it. And I hadn’t self-medicated in weeks—since I’d come here to River’s House of Rehab. It was shocking to realize that I’d been at River’s Edge for five weeks. It felt both brand-new and like I’d been here for months or years.

  Everything was different.

  I was taking more real classes now. With Anne, sometimes Asher, Solis, or River herself, I was being taught meditation, astronomy, botany, geology—you name it. If it was dry and incomprehensible, they were throwing it at me. I was learning about plants, and not just the farm plants. There were so many plants and herbs and flowers that had specific properties, either physical or magickal, and these could be used in spells. There are different forms of magick that use plants, or metals, or gems and crystals, or oils, or candles. Different people resonated with different types of magick; like, that kind of magick flowed best with who they were as a person, so their spells would be especially successful using it. I still didn’t know what I resonated with. I was learning that basically everything around me, everything in the world, was connected to magick somehow. And therefore connected to me. They’d touched more on the whole eight-houses concept, and I’d tried not to flinch or pass out when they talked about Iceland, about the House of Úlfur.

  I was seeing change. Even to my own eyes, I looked less ill. Of course, my natural allure was completely obscured by the calluses on my hands, dust and straw in my hair, butch clothes, and perpetual eau de chicken coop that lingered on me, but my skin and eyes did look healthier.

  I was sleeping. Instead of four or five restless hours, I now conked out early and slept like a drugged rock until I had to get up. I was stronger physically; I could easily lift crates and cartons at MacIntyre’s, push cows into milking gates, and lift the biggest, heaviest pots in the kitchen. My dreams were not bad. I often couldn’t remember them, but I wasn’t having constant nightmares and wasn’t waking up sick and exhausted.

  And yet all this healthy living was starting to feel like it was gonna kill me. Ha ha ha. And even though I was seeing change, I was seeing difference; I didn’t think I was seeing progress.

  One Sunday I was in a class with River, working with different metals. Everything (not just my amulet), whether natural or manmade, has an energy, a vibration, kind of. I know—oooh, how New Age-y, how touchy-feely. Hey, I’m just reporting how it is, people. I was learning to become more aware of the vibrations and energy, and how to align mine with them. It was part of the whole Tähti experience— to create power and magick out of working with things, rather than just sucking their power out till they die.

  It’s much easier to just suck the power out of other things and channel it than to actually craft a white spell and work within all the limitations you have to set up—the limitations that we dark immortals never bother with, if we do magick at all. So I was sitting at a table in one of the classrooms, fondling chunks of iron and copper and silver and barely picking up on anything at all, and of course the others, Jess, Daisuke, and Rachel, were all, like, glowing with the rapture of being so in tune with their magick that the metals were practically singing to them, and suddenly it was all too much.

  “This sucks!” I said, and slammed down my chunk of copper.

  Everyone jumped.

  River came to my side and put her hand on my shoulder. “What’s wrong?”

  “This!” I waved my hand at the copper, the room, the whole building. “I’m not getting anything. I don’t belong here.” Five weeks ago I would have really meant that—now I was so afraid it might be true, and I didn’t want it to be. Not anymore.

  River looked at me, and she seemed so—solid. I expected her to try to calm me down, walk me through the process again, maybe give me a little lecture, and I steeled myself.

  Instead she seemed to look through my eyes right to my soul, tattered and misused as it was, and she asked, “What do you want, Nastasya?”

  “I want to get the whole metal vibration thing,” I said, thinking, Obviously.

  She shook her head. “What do you want?”

  Was this a trick question? I squinted, thinking quickly.

  “I want to—know this stuff?”

  “What do you want?” River gazed at me unwaveringly, and I was vaguely aware of a roomful of fascinated spectators, none of whom had probably ever acted this way.

  Maybe…“I want to—feel better?”

  “No. What do you really want?”

  Okay, now I was getting pissed. I mean, WTF was she getting at? Was this some kind of rehab therapy mumbo-jumbo?

  “I want to feel better!”

  “No. What do you really want?” The words were bitten out.

  “I don’t know!” I shouted, standing up so quickly my bench toppled over.

  River wasn’t upset with me—her brown eyes were calm and accepting as she looked at me. She nodded and took her hand away and then sat down at her own table.

  I wanted to stomp out of the room and down the hall and go back to the big house. Upstairs, I would fill the big bathtub and soak in it, letting tears roll down my cheeks and mingle with the water.

  That was what I wanted to do.

  What I did was pick up my bench. My face was burning. I felt like a huge baby. I set my bench down grimly and sat on it. I decided copper was not ringing my bell, so I tried a large piece of raw silver, twisted and smooth and unrefined. Knowing everyone’s eyes were on me, I closed my eyes and controlled my breathing. My eyes were hot, and my nose had that pre-crying stuffy feeling, but I kept it all in. Crying in public on top of my scene would be too much.

  The silver was heavy and smooth and quickly grew warm in my hand. I concentrated on it as much as I could (not that much) while trying, unsuccessfully, to clear my mind of every other thought. Did I feel vibrations? No, couldn’t say that I did. I never wore silver—thought it looked too cold against my skin. My mother had never worn it, either.

  Incy wore it.

  Incy wore a lot of silver, all the time. Chains, bracelets, an earring, cuffs, belt buckles, buttons—you name it. If it could be made out of silver, he wore it.

  I felt River standing close to me. “Silver is very powerful, magickally,” she murmured in her soothing voice. “It’s associated with the moon, with feminine energy and healing. In the old days, people wore silver to ward off evil spirits.”

  “Evil spirits?” I whispered. “Do those exist?”

  River rested her hands on my shoulders. “What do you think?”

  With a sudden clarity, I saw Incy. The room around me faded away, and all I was conscious of were River’s hands on my shoulders and the heavy chunk of silver, warm in my hands. I drew in a breath. It was as if a porthole had opened up between my world and his. It was nighttime where he was, and with shock I recognized his apartment, though it had been totally destroyed since I’d last seen it. There were huge holes in the walls, spray-painted words. A chandelier had been torn down… furniture was upturned and broken. What had happened? As I watched, Innocencio heaved a huge Iranian pottery vase—which had cost a fortune—against a wall. It exploded into a million shards as he roared, “Where is she?” Boz and Cicely were standing miserably by a door, trying to avoid getting hit.

  “She’s just on vacation, Incy,” said Cicely. “She went to Paris to do some shopping.”

  “She’s not in fucking Paris!” Incy bellowed, slamming his hand against the wall by Cicely’s head. She tried
not to flinch. I saw the word spray-painted on the wall by Incy’s hand: bitch.

  He was talking about me, looking for me. My breath caught in my throat. Dimly, I was aware of River’s hands touching me, but I stared in horror at the scene in front of me. “She’s not in Paris! No one’s seen her! I can’t—feel her anywhere! Do you understand? I can’t feel where she is!”

  He looked like a madman. Incy—suave, sophisticated, handsome Incy, with his beautiful handmade silk shirts and four-hundred-dollar haircuts, looked like a crazy homeless person. He hadn’t shaved, his hair was wild, his clothes were torn and dirty. He grabbed Boz’s lapels, screaming into his face.

  Boz’s face went hard, and he gripped Incy’s wrists. I saw the skin whitening around his clenching fingers. “Vestuvio!” he bellowed back, and Incy blinked, shocked. I couldn’t breathe. Vestuvio was the name Incy had been born with, almost four hundred years ago.

  “Look at yourself!” Boz spat, flinging Incy’s hands away. “You’re ridiculous! Pathetic! Nas went shopping, you fucking idiot! Maybe she ran into someone! Maybe she’s hooked up with some French asshole! Maybe she decided to go someplace else! She’ll be back!”

  Innocencio looked at Boz with wild hope and an almost childish trust. “She will? Do you think so?”

  “She’ll be back,” Boz said firmly. “She always comes back. And what is she going to think of you, of this?” He gestured contemptuously at Incy’s ruined apartment. The twelve-thousand-dollar-a-month apartment.

  Incy looked around, suddenly calm. He frowned at the wreckage around him as if finally seeing it, comprehending it.

  “Really, Incy,” said Cicely. “This is too much. We all miss Nasty, but it’s no big deal. You know she’ll be back. Her apartment is still there; all her stuff is there. Boz is right—when she comes back, what is she going to think about this?”