Immortal Beloved

I hauled the big plastic bins to our special aisle, already looking forward to relating the story to Meriwether.

  Close to lunchtime, I felt someone standing next to me, and looked up.

  I gave Dray a mock frown. “Why aren’t you in school?”

  She made a face back. “Already graduated.”

  Standing up, I stretched and dumped an empty cardboard box back into the bin. “Did not, you big liar. You can’t be more than sixteen.”

  “Seventeen. What do you care? You’re not in school either, and you’re what, maybe seventeen, too? Eighteen?” Her frown this time was real, and then I glanced down and saw she was holding a pregnancy test.

  She saw my look and stuck her chin out. “Which one of these is the cheapest?”

  Solemnly I checked all the prices. “This one,” I said. Then I had a thought. “Bathroom’s over there.” I pointed. “Go do it.”

  She drew back, ready to refuse, but she hesitated.

  “Go on,” I said. “Do it now, while I’m here, instead at home by yourself.”

  For a split second, I saw a crack in her tough-girl facade, saw the scared teenager beneath. Her fear won out, and she grabbed the test and headed to the public restroom that we were required to have but that no one ever used. Guess who got to keep it spick-and-span? Yes.

  Finally Dray returned. “Are these reliable?”

  I nodded. “Afraid so.”

  She let out a huge breath and pulled out the stick. It was negative. “How much do I owe you?”

  “Eight seventy-nine, plus tax,” I said, starting to head to the front. “Hey! I have an idea! Why don’t you buy some condoms? Then we won’t have to go through this again. Not that it hasn’t been fun.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “No, thank you.”

  What an idiot. “They come in different colors,” I coaxed. She shook her head.

  At the front counter, I took the opened box and rang it up, then threw it in the trash. “Isn’t there, like, a women’s clinic, on the road that intersects Route Twenty-seven? I’ve passed it.”

  Dray shrugged. She was hugely relieved but didn’t want to show it. “I don’t know.”

  The register popped open. I took her ten and started to make change. “Well, there is,” I said. “It’s a women’s clinic. They could put you on the Pill, for cheap, I bet. Or check you out, make sure there’s nothing wrong, ’cause I’m sure you associate with only the highest-quality guys.” I rolled my eyes.

  I could see her process the information.

  “It’s within walking distance,” I said in a bored tone, looking at my fingernails. “If they’re gonna give away stuff cheap, might as well get it.”

  Dray shrugged again, but the idea had definitely taken up residence in her brain. She pushed her way out the door, then leaned back and said, “Rockin’ hair, BTW. Wicked!” She flared her eyes to make sure I got the sarcasm, and I stuck my tongue out at her. She was smirking as she went past the store window.

  And there you have it: my mitzvah for the day. Nastasya Doe: savior of teenage girls.

  It was late when I got back that afternoon, already dark. I was rising before dawn and getting home after sunset, seeing the day only through MacIntyre’s windows. It sucked. I had a few minutes before dinner, and miraculously, wasn’t signed up for any chores, so I trudged upstairs in my stocking feet. Or sock feet, I guess.

  I headed down the long hallway, passing one dark window after another, returning to my room as surely and as mindlessly as our cows came in at milking time.

  I automatically turned at my door and reached for the doorknob. Then stopped. Why? I looked up and down the hallway. No one was near. Something felt weird, off. My door was shut—there wasn’t a bucket of water on top of it, for example. Everything looked fine, reason told me that everything must be fine… and yet it felt strange, forbidding, and I was reluctant to go in.

  I went and got River.

  CHAPTER 22

  Hmm.” River looked at my doorframe.

  Downstairs, dinner was almost ready. My stomach was growling. I felt like a big sissy whiner. “It’s nothing, I’m sure,” I said. “I was imagining things.”

  “No,” said River. “You weren’t.”

  “I don’t see anything,” I said.

  She looked at me. “But you felt something. Something made you not go in.”

  It sounded stupid. I nodded. I didn’t know if I was now afraid of so many things (Incy, Reyn, the dark, myself, my history) that I was seeing danger everywhere.

  River reached in her pocket and took out a small, beautiful silver box, its top embossed with a hunting scene. I thought she’d been squirreling away silver for centuries. Inside the box was a fine, gray-green powder. A small silver spoon rested inside the box.

  “Coke gone bad?” I guessed.

  She shook her head, taking the small spoon and scooping up the powder. She murmured a few words over it, then held up the spoon and blew hard. The powder flew through the air toward the door, and I stepped back quickly, almost gasping. There were symbols all over the doorframe. The powder had illuminated them, and now they glowed with a faint silvery sheen. A few were runes, but I didn’t know most of them.

  “What is all that?” I asked.

  River was examining them. “Sigils. Spells.” She crouched down, following them with her finger.

  “For what?”

  “They’re not very powerful,” she said, standing up straight. “And they’re not deadly. They’re mostly designed to draw bad luck to you—so you’ll trip and break your ankle, or lose your keys, or burn something in the kitchen. Have a fender-bender.” She cocked her head to one side, thinking. “Hmm.”

  “So that’s what I felt? These… spells? And they would have worked on me if I’d gone in?” Who had done this? River had said she’d spell the place so Incy couldn’t find me. I still found it hard to believe that he would know this kind of magick anyway. So, Reyn? Who else? Nell? She was pissed this morning, when Reyn freaked out.

  River nodded. “They would have worked on the first person who went through the door. It’s hard to believe that you picked up on them—they’re pretty weak.” She paused, looking thoughtful. “I wonder… could probably use Asher here.”

  As if on cue, we heard steps on the stairs, and moments later Asher came into view.

  “Need me?” he asked.

  River quickly explained the situation. Asher frowned when he saw the sigils, seeming surprised, and then looked more surprised when River told him I’d felt them.

  He stood there silently for a minute, his dark brown eyes thoughtful. He stroked his short beard. Finally he looked up. “There’s something inside. That’s what she felt.”

  “Something inside?” I echoed. “Like, a tiger? What’s inside? That’s my room!”

  “All right, then, let’s null them.” River seemed brisk and no-nonsense.

  “What’s inside?” I almost shrieked. My amulet was in there.

  “More spells,” said Asher. “Much darker. Stronger.”

  I’m not a rocket surgeon. I’m pretty bright and have a kind of street savvy that’s served me well. But I’m not a genius. All the same, I’m embarrassed to admit that it was only then that I truly realized that someone had actually done this to me, deliberately. Not just the door spells. Something worse inside. Someone here had wanted to hurt me. I felt that frisson of fear that had haunted me, off and on, since I’d left London. Had some stranger snuck in? I didn’t see how they could. Which left someone here, in the house. Maybe Nell? I seemed to be getting in the way of her beeline to Reyn. Someone else? Great.

  River and Asher checked the other doors nearby. They were clean.

  “We’ll do a comprehensive sweep later,” said River. “But right now let’s get these off.”

  “Magickal Windex?” I asked faintly.

  River grinned, looking blissfully normal. “Sort of.”

  Anne came up to get us for dinner, and her eyes bugged out of her head when Asher tol
d her what they were doing. She looked from them to me in shock.

  All she said was, “Hmm.” Then she headed back downstairs.

  River and Asher did the spell to nullify whatever spells had been placed on or in my room. They stood forehead to forehead, eyes closed, murmuring words. Sometimes together, sometimes only one of them. It took a couple of minutes. It occurred to me that they had probably been making magick together for years, even decades. I didn’t know how long they’d been together. River was probably older than Asher, but I didn’t know by how much. River was the oldest immortal I’d ever known or heard of. I wondered if she was the only one. No, of course not—she’d said her oldest brother was the king of their house. And there would have to be others.

  River and Asher’s tuneful chanting ceased, and they slowly opened their eyes and pulled away from each other.

  “That should do it,” said Asher. “It was some ugly stuff.”

  “Like what?” I asked, as River reached out to open the door.

  Asher shrugged, then followed River into my room. I confess I hesitated, waiting to see if a bear trap snapped around their ankles, or spiders fell on them, or they burst into flames. I poked my head around the door.

  “It’s okay,” said Asher. “You can come in.”

  “You sure?” When had I turned into such a sissy? When I began caring about what happened to me, a small voice answered inside my head. I told it to shut up, like always.

  Inside my room, River had blown more powder onto my door. It too was covered with rapidly fading spells. Asher was running his hands under my mattress, turning over my pillow, even getting on his hands and knees to look under my bed. When had I last swept under there?

  Oh. Never. Oops.

  “Ah,” he said, and reached under my bed. He pulled out a small leather bag as River and I crowded around.

  “Any signatures?” asked a voice from the door. Solis stood there, his hazel eyes sharp in his youthful face.

  River frowned. “I don’t know.”

  Solis came in then. “You don’t know?”

  “Signatures like what?” I asked, but everyone was ignoring me.

  Asher opened the leather bag and carefully dumped it out onto the bed. It was a jumble of pins and needles, a tiny glass vial full of dark, reddish-brown liquid, and a dark, shiny stone that looked like metal. Hematite, I remembered, patting myself on the back.

  “Is it, like, a joke?” I asked, peering over Solis’s shoulder.

  “No,” said Asher. “Not a joke.”

  “What is going on?” I said, raising my voice slightly.

  Solis looked at me, then went back and shut the door to my room. He opened his hand at it and murmured a few words that I didn’t recognize. Then the three of them, as if choreographed, looked at me.

  “What?” I said. “I didn’t do this.”

  “We know,” said River. “Tell me, did you know anyone here, before you came here? Besides me, I mean. Is anyone else familiar to you?”

  “No.” Yes, I’d had those flashes where Reyn seemed familiar to me, and I’d also had that vision of berserker Reyn. But I really hadn’t met him before I came here, I was sure of it. I ran through the others’ faces again, trying to picture them in different guises, and couldn’t remember ever seeing anyone here before. “No, I don’t think so. Why?”

  River looked into my eyes solemnly. “Someone here wants you dead.”

  I dunked my bread into the leftover stew broth in my bowl. The four teachers and I were all sitting at the dining room table, having a late dinner. In the kitchen we could hear Jess, Nell, and Lorenz doing the cleanup. Lorenz was singing an aria from Tosca—he had a beautiful voice.

  “So what happened with Reyn this morning?” He hadn’t been at dinner, either, and I wondered if he had any connection to my spelled room. Despite everything, I didn’t think so, but something about me had definitely spooked him this morning.

  “You suddenly looked familiar to him,” River said frankly. “Something about the color of your hair, the way you looked standing there—he had a painful flashback.” She grinned wryly. “Like you do. Are you sure you don’t know him?”

  “No, I really don’t think so,” I said again. “I’ve mostly been… hanging out with more or less the same crowd for a long time. I don’t think I’ve met anyone here before. There was…”

  “What?” River asked.

  I hesitated. “Well… during that circle—I had a, not a vision, but a memory. I remembered something that had happened to me a long time ago. A really long time ago, like before 1600. In that memory, I saw someone who looked just like Reyn. As being the one who… almost hurt me. A raider. One of the raiders who came in the winters back then.” Ugh. I had never actually told anyone about that whole episode. I’d been burying it for four hundred years, along with a bunch of other awful memories that were bubbling up to the surface of my consciousness.

  River’s eyes looked into mine, and I dropped my gaze and busily dunked my bread into my bowl again.

  “But I mean, Reyn’s only two hundred sixty-seven,” I said. “So it wasn’t him. Just someone who looked, you know, exactly like him. Or my mind playing tricks on me, just inserting Reyn’s face into that memory. It was… weird.”

  The teachers were silent for a while, and I got the impression they were all looking at each other over my head.

  “Has anyone here expressed anything negative to you? Have you pissed off anyone?” Solis’s youthful face was concerned.

  “As likely as that is, no, I don’t think so,” I said. “I mean, not really, not to that extent. I think Nell definitely dislikes me, but it’s more schoolgirl stuff, you know?” Another thought occurred to me. “Although Reyn did tell me to leave, my first day here.”

  “He told you to leave?” River’s dark eyebrows arched gracefully.

  I wished I’d kept my mouth shut. Now I felt like a sissy, whiner snitch. It kept getting better and better. “It was just my first day. No one thought I would stay. I didn’t have an aura of probable success all around me, you know?”

  River gave a small smile.

  “And the jury’s still out,” I felt compelled to add. I didn’t want them to be too disappointed or surprised when I eventually flunked out and went down in flames.

  “Anyway—Reyn’s all about choosing good, over and over, and flogging his soul and whatnot. He wouldn’t lose karmic progress by doing something like this. Right?” I looked at River, then the others. They all nodded slowly, thoughtfully. “Um, what did you mean by signatures?” I asked.

  “Magick is a very personal, intimate thing,” said Anne. “Each person makes magick in his or her own way. As we’ve discussed, what spells you use, what sigils and runes, what elements you work with, whether you use moon spells or sun spells or wind spells or water spells—people develop patterns of what they like to use, what’s successful for them. After working magick with someone a couple of times, you can often identify the person’s kind of spell. It’s imprinted with their persona, their vibrations.”

  “Some people actually weave signatures into their spells,” said Asher. “They’re proud of their craft, or they want to send a warning. So their name is built into part of the spell.”

  “And no one left their name on this? It would be stupid of them to,” I realized.

  “No one left an outright signature,” said Solis. “But the spells seemed deliberately—disguised. Created by one person but crafted as if they were done by someone else. And then the whole thing obscured, fudged.”

  I stared at him. “Can someone actually do that?” Oh, God, this was all so much more complicated than I could have imagined. I would never get a handle on it.

  “Yes,” said River.

  “But they were spells to make me… die?”

  “Yes, pretty much,” said River. “Which is actually silly, given the immortal thing. Not outright, like murder. More like, get pneumonia and die. Have a fatal accident. Be killed during a robbery. Not anythin
g actually premeditated, someone coming to kill you. On a regular person, they would be deadly indeed. For you, for us… they were spells to draw a great darkness to you. It wouldn’t have killed you—you know how hard that is—but you would have attracted a terrible darkness. Something that could immobilize you with fear, for example, or an unshakable depression. I haven’t seen anything like it since—well, a really, really long time.”

  “And the talisman under your bed,” said Asher. “Dark stuff.”

  “The sewing kit?”

  Asher tried to smile but couldn’t. “It would have been working on you strongly, every moment you lay in that bed.”

  My stomach was in knots again. I remembered what it had felt like, reaching for my door, then hesitating. It had felt like a cold, dark shadow had been waiting for me in my room. A shadow that would snatch me up, envelop me, so no one would ever see me again. Could it have been Reyn? No—despite everything, I couldn’t imagine him doing it. But then who? Nell? Yes, she was a bee-yotch, but did she hate me this much? Was she this good at magick? One of the others? My head started to hurt.

  “Maybe I shouldn’t be here,” I said faintly. “I mean, we all know I shouldn’t. This is just proof.”

  “On the contrary,” said River. “To me, this means you should be here more than ever.”

  Solis, Asher, and Anne nodded, though I saw Solis shoot a glance at River.

  Anne nodded. “I agree. This is what we were talking about,” she said to the other teachers. “She has an unnaturally strong power, something ancient and powerful. She must learn to harness it, understand it, use it for good. Or she’ll be vulnerable forever.”

  “The question is, does someone else know about her power? Is it threatening to someone?” Asher asked.

  River shook her head, looking at me, while I tried to act casual and not hyperventilate. My skin had gone cold with the phrase ancient and powerful. “Besides her friend Innocencio? And I guess Boz, since he mentioned it. Other than that, I don’t think so. She’s too unknown, too untaught. Yes, she has power, but she’s incapable of doing anything with it. She just doesn’t know enough.”