Immortal Beloved

  Innocencio whirled on Cicely, enraged. “She won’t think anything about it! She’ll understand! She knows I need her! She needs me, too! She’s somewhere going crazy without me!” His eyes became haunted. “Maybe she’s being held against her will. Maybe she’s been kidnapped.”

  “Oh, please,” said Cicely, and Incy shoved her into the wall.

  “You don’t know what it’s like!” he screamed.

  “Fuck you!” Cicely screamed back. She smacked his hand away and headed to the front door. “Call me when you’re done being an asshole!”

  “No, Cicely, I’m sorry,” said Incy, contrite. “I’m sorry! Don’t go!”

  She shot him the finger and slammed the door on the way out.

  “That bitch!” Incy raged. “That hateful bitch!”

  Boz looked exhausted. He rubbed his hand over his face and slowly sank down against the wall.

  Incy opened his mouth to shout something, then saw Boz. His face immediately changed again, and he crouched down by Boz. “Boz? I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I just—I haven’t been away from her in so long. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m sorry. I… just miss her. I want to be with her.”

  Boz spoke, sounding very old and very tired. “You miss her power.”

  I jumped back, feeling River’s fingers digging into my shoulders. I blinked rapidly, and the classroom came back into focus.

  My breaths were shallow as I glanced around. I felt like I was waking up from a faint. Jess, Daisuke, and Rachel were all solemn, watching me, their metals untouched in front of them.

  My shoulders dropped and my hands opened, spilling the silver chunk onto the table. It was burning hot, practically glowing. I swallowed.

  “Unh,” I said.

  “Who was that?” River’s voice was quiet and hard.

  “My… friends,” I said, and swallowed again. “You met Incy that night… when you met me. Did you—did you see them? See it?”

  River nodded slowly. “Yes. I’m not sure why—I wasn’t trying to.”

  My next question was very quiet. “Could he find me here?”

  River shook her head. “I’ll fix it so he can’t. We’ll fix it. You’ll be hidden, as long as you’re in West Lowing.”

  “Oh, good,” I said lamely.

  Of course, I didn’t get off that easily. That night after dinner, a solemn Solis, Asher, River, and Anne confronted me in the dining room. After seeing the horrible vision of Incy, seeing Reyn at dinner had hardly registered. Yes, there are different levels of horror, of fear, of pain. Everything is relative. Right now Incy was taking center stage.

  “River told us what happened,” Solis said, with no preamble. “That you had a very real vision during your metalwork class.”

  I nodded, wishing, not for the first time, that I wasn’t so “special.”

  “These were friends of yours?” Solis asked.

  “Yeah. I used to hang out with them.”

  “Why would Innocencio be so upset that you’re gone?” Anne asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully. “He was—we did almost everything together. But I thought it was… normal best-friend stuff. Looking back, I guess he was kind of dependent on me.” The way he was on air, for example.

  “Do you think he would harm you? Does he have strong magickal power?” Asher looked concerned.

  “I would have said no, to both,” I said, thinking back. “I never would have thought he would harm me. Now—I don’t know. He’s pretty… upset.”

  “Is he strong?” River asked. She meant in terms of his magickal ability.

  “Again, I didn’t think so,” I said. “But right before I left, he used a spell that… broke someone’s spine. Crippled him. Just with magick. I had no idea he could do that.”

  “What did the other man mean, that Innocencio missed your power?” River’s eyes were grave and kind.

  “Boz. I don’t know,” I said again. “I never made big magick—you’ve seen what it does to me. I don’t use much magick at all. I had no idea I had any abilities. I don’t know what Boz meant.”

  River nodded and patted my back. A tiny noise made me look up, and I saw the kitchen door moving slightly. Nell and Charles had been assigned to clean up after dinner. Had Nell been listening in?

  “Let me walk you up to your room,” said River, standing up. “I’ll fix you some tea.”

  We walked upstairs together, and the steps felt familiar, the hallway seemed like home. “What’s in that tea?” I asked. “Something to make me sleep, or not dream?”

  River smiled. “Nothing overtly magickal,” she said as I opened the door to my room. “Other than the plants’ own magickal properties. Mostly it’s catnip. It has a relaxing effect on people. Catnip and chamomile and valerian. No spells, no man-made drugs.”

  The door three down from mine opened. Reyn’s door. He put his head out, saw it was River and me, and nodded stiffly. We heard his door close, and I closed mine.

  Rive made me tea and stayed with me for a few minutes, I guess assuring herself (and me) that I was okay.

  As she left, she said, “Remember—tomorrow is a new day.”

  It was a weird, trite thing to say, but I was too tired to wonder what the hell she meant. Sleep claimed me like a tidal wave, and I was out.

  CHAPTER 19

  The next morning my nerves still felt jangled and anxious. And to further unbalance my mental state, I was forced to catch a ride to work with the grim Viking. I wanted to protest and just take my own car, but something in River’s eyes made me close my mouth and simply climb into the truck. Where I sat as close to my own door as possible, holding on to the handle.

  As we drove away, I saw Nell watching us from the front parlor window, and I groaned to myself. Great. She already thought I was horning in on her, and frankly she was starting to seem a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Now I would be self-conscious and paranoid about her all day.

  And the sad thing? Despite everything—my memory, Reyn’s disdain for me, our obvious incompatibility, Nell’s increasingly threatening interest—I still thought that he was hot, physically, and I actually appreciated his responsibleness. I mean, right now I didn’t trust anyone except River and the other teachers, but let’s face it, no one would have trusted Boz or Incy with their tractor or their truck or their… student. And I’m someone for whom responsibility has never been a selling point. I myself have never been responsible or reliable in any way. Incy, before he apparently went insane, had been amusing, exciting—but reliable? No. If one of my friends said they’d pick me up at four, maybe they would, and maybe they wouldn’t. And maybe I’d be there when they got there, and maybe I wouldn’t. Everything was much more free flow. But if Reyn said he’d be back to pick me up at four, by gosh, he would be tapping his foot impatiently on the curb outside at exactly four. Weirdly, these days I found that appealing rather than annoying. I found the fact that he wasn’t shrieking and spray-painting bitch on the walls attractive. My world seemed so topsy-turvy now, my emotions so heightened, that it was like, northern raider, schmorthern raider! He said he’s only 267! Whatever!

  But I still held on to my door handle all the way to town, ready to leap from the moving truck if Reyn suddenly pulled out a longsword or something. In front of MacIntyre’s I quickly opened the door and jumped out, tucking my scarf tighter around my neck. “Thanks for the ride,” I forced myself to say, not looking at him.

  “I’ll be back at four,” he said. “You know—” He stopped, his lips pressed together.

  I looked back at him warily. “What?”

  “Nothing.” He shook his head, looking straight ahead. I turned to go, and he said, “Your hair. You’ve got kind of a skunk thing going.”

  He’d never made any comment about my appearance, and my impression had been that he tried to look at me as little as possible. My eyes flared, and I looked into the truck’s side-view mirror. Oh, geez. My mouth fell open in dismay. Among the
other elements of my appearance that I’d let fall by the wayside, there was my hair color. My natural hair color was growing out, and I hadn’t redone the black. So, yes, I did indeed have a whitish-blondish stripe down the middle of my head. So attractive.

  I shut my eyes and shook my head. “Just when I think it can’t get worse,” I muttered.

  “It can always be worse.” Was that bitterness in his voice?

  Bastard, I thought, slamming the truck door.

  Focus, I told myself. Focus on work. When I entered MacIntyre’s Drugs, I saw firsthand that some things actually can get better. This drugstore looked better. Meriwether and I had done a lot over the last couple of weeks. Old Mac had refused to spend money on new displays or shelves, and had roared in fury when I’d asked, but we’d still made a big difference. We’d thrown out old, faded displays and come up with new ways to arrange stuff we wanted to highlight. Meriwether had cleared a bunch of crap off the checkout counter, so it now looked clean and accessible. The front windows had practically been blocked by junk, and we’d tossed it out and washed the windows, so the store was filled with light. This place actually looked as though it had made the leap to the twentieth century, if not the twenty-first. Old Mac grumbled and complained, but I had seen his face when customers commented approvingly about the new look, and I’d grinned cheekily at him when he glared at me.

  Meriwether, though she had warmed up to me, still seemed faded and worn-out herself, and Old Mac still barked at her meanly. I didn’t like leaving at four, because it seemed like he saved all his vitriol for her when she came to work after school. I got the feeling that as soon as I left, he started in on her. I didn’t know how to effect change there.

  I was surprised that I even wanted to.

  I hadn’t seen Dray in several weeks and didn’t know if she was embarrassed about shoplifting or mad that I’d made her pay for the stuff. It was too cold outside now to loiter around, drinking beer on the curb, and I wondered idly where she was hanging.

  That day my chest began getting tense at three, and I was quite tightly wound by the time Reyn came to get me at four. I was outside waiting, my nose running in the cold. The pickup pulled in next to the curb, and I got in, remembering the skunk comment all over again. I wasn’t going to think about it. I just wanted to go home and drink some hot tea and see what I had to do before dinner. I might even be on the dinner team—I’d forgotten to look. I had to get better about checking in advance, so I’d know what was coming. I shook my head and leaned it against the truck window. This whole train of thought was totally foreign and weird for me.

  Reyn glanced at me, but I didn’t explain.

  I felt anxious around Reyn, though I’d convinced myself he couldn’t have been the man in that memory—he was too young. I hated the fact that my screwed-up subconscious had chosen to put a face I was attracted to into one of my worst memories, but I was here to work out all that crap, right? And maybe that explained the vaguely familiar feeling I got from him—maybe he was just reminiscent of a physical type I’d seen before, and not always in a murderous, village-burning marauder way.

  I was, in fact, on the make-dinner team, but fortunately not on the clean-up-dinner team, which was worse. So I scrubbed a small mountain of parsnips, cut up ten pounds of pears for a pear crisp, and made like a little kitchen elf while the world got blacker and colder outside.

  After dinner, River said, “Come with me,” and held out her hand.

  Oh, God. Please no more magick for a while. Every time I got close to it, some sort of psychological hand grenade went off in my consciousness. I couldn’t take any more. River gestured to my coat, and I shoved my arms into it, thinking, No, no, not the wonder of stars! Not tonight. Actually, I was pretty familiar with stars—it was the one class I could sort of hold my own in. I had crossed different oceans on boats more times than I could remember, back when crossing oceans could take weeks or even months. Believe me, when there’s nothing to do but stare at the frigging stars, you stare at the frigging stars. I just had never gotten the importance of Canis Major, is all.

  She led me out the back door, toward the school barn building. We went into the barn and down the hall, and at the end of the hall was a small, narrow staircase I hadn’t even noticed before. It led up into another series of rooms, much smaller than the ones downstairs.

  “This used to be the hayloft,” River told me. “It still smells like straw, especially in the summer.”

  “Hmm,” I said, wondering what was up.

  River opened the door to a very small room, maybe nine feet square. Its slanted ceiling had a skylight that was chest high, and the highest point of the room was maybe seven feet.

  “We use the rooms up here for smaller circles or private work,” she said, lighting a gas lamp and adjusting the wick. “For one thing, it’s warmer up here.” She gave me one of her timeless smiles, then busied herself at a small, roughly made cabinet against one wall. Handing me a piece of ordinary chalk, she said, “Here. Draw a circle on the floor, big enough for us both to sit in.”

  I looked at her. “Um,” I said. “I haven’t really recovered from the silver disaster, or the awesome, heaving experience of our last circle. What are we doing here?”

  “It’s not a circle like that,” River said. “I don’t think you’ll feel sick afterward. And I can weave some threads into the spell to help you feel fine, if you want. Now go on—draw a big circle, as perfectly round as you can.”

  I had a bad feeling about this, but gosh darn it, I’m nothing if not trusting and obedient!

  Hunching over, I slowly and carefully drew a chalk circle on the rough boards of the floor. It came out kind of squished and lopsided, but oh well.

  “Don’t close it,” River reminded me, and I left a two-foot-wide “door” in it. She came behind me and sprinkled kosher salt, straight from the box, in a circle outside my circle. “Salt purifies things and offers protection,” she said.

  “I knew that!” I said.

  She grinned at me, then motioned me to step inside the circle. “Now we just close it,” she murmured, closing first the salt circle and then the chalk circle. I guessed we were stuck now.

  She put four stones at the four compass points, and I started to feel alarmed. It looked like she was getting ready to create lightning or something.

  “So, uh, what are we doing here?” I asked again.

  “We’re going to do a reveal spell,” she said.

  CHAPTER 20

  A reveal spell. Well, that clarified nothing. My first instinct was to step right out of the circle and run. Or simply say no and cross my arms over my chest. And I was about to—

  “Okay, sit down, facing me.”

  And somehow I did. We sat cross-legged, our knees almost touching. River held out her hands, and I hesitantly took them. What were we going to reveal? Buried treasure? A murderer? The place Solis had squirreled away his copper bracelet, which he couldn’t remember? Anything, as long as it didn’t have anything to do with me, or my past. I was already dreading the inevitable nausea, no matter what River said.

  “There won’t be nausea,” River assured me, and I started, staring at her.

  “You read minds?”

  She laughed. “No. But I can read people’s expressions very well. For this spell, I’m going to draw limitations around your power, channeling it and controlling what it does. I suspect usually it just goes all over the place, and your system can’t handle it. All the forces warring together would make you sick. That’s my theory, anyway.”

  “Huh,” I said.

  “Now, we both look at the lit candle,” she instructed, nodding at the small taper burning between us.

  “What do I need to do?”

  “Just follow my lead,” River said in a calm, determined voice.

  “What are we going to reveal?”

  “You.” Her tone was dreamy now, removed. Her clear brown eyes grew heavy-lidded as she watched the flame flicker and dance. She’d stuck it
to a small mirror with its own wax; now white wax ran down its sides and flowed onto the silvered glass.

  “No.”

  “It will be okay, Nastasya,” River said calmly. “You just have to… trust me.”

  Oh, God, I’m gonna die, I thought miserably. I can’t do this.

  “You can do this.” Her quiet strength radiated out from her like heat. Swallowing, despite my fear, I tried to focus on the flame, tried to slow my breathing and release all thoughts, the way I’d been learning in classes. I could feel my heart beating hard and fast.

  I became aware of River’s voice, singing softly. She was singing actual words, none of which I recognized, and I resigned myself to joining in with humpback when it felt right. Letting go of my hands, her slender fingers traced symbols in the air, all of which I recognized: runes. I knew runes very well. People here used the Elder Futhark, and I saw Eolh, for protection, and Beorc, for new beginnings. That one made me smile—it seemed corny. Eoh confused me for a second—horse? Then I remembered that it signified change of some kind. River’s hands moved so quickly that I didn’t catch some of what she did, but then she traced the rune Peorth on my forehead. Peorth for hidden things revealed.

  She’d said she was going to reveal me. I had no idea what the hell that meant, and hated the implications. Like, reveal my whole life to her? That would be very bad. I wanted no part of that. Reveal what I was really thinking? Who would want to do that? I felt her eyes on me and looked up to see her serene face, her tanned, barely lined skin, the silver hair drawn back in a ponytail. Using her hands, she traced the shape of my face in the air, not touching me, and I suddenly felt a wave of…

  Power.

  Oh, God… Slowly I drew in a breath, closing my eyes, feeling the power well up right inside me, like light. I felt it swirl around us, felt it discover another power—River’s. It was like… like two ancient streams suddenly meeting up. I don’t know what it felt like. But bathing in light would sort of come close. Feeling awash in joy and life.