Timeless (Transcend Time, #2)

by Madow, Michelle

  Of course, he couldn’t tell me all that until I figured out on my own that I’d been reincarnated.

  I suppose that meant after I died in this life, I would have to make a similar choice between Nirvana or becoming a Memory Guide. I planned on choosing Memory Guide. I would love the opportunity to help someone like Alistair did for me.

  But hopefully that wouldn’t be a decision I would have to make for a long time.

  Right now I had something more important to worry about—why bad things were following me everywhere I went, and why I couldn’t shake the feeling of doom surrounding me.

  I felt at home the moment I entered the shop. It was dark inside, the only light coming from the antique lamps scattered throughout the store. The shop was packed with various trinkets from all over the world. I recognized one I’d admired the first time I visited—a horse pulling a golden carriage with crystals inside. It looked romantic, but after the terrifying flashback I had a few days ago of when I died in a carriage accident in my past life, I had no desire to go in one myself.

  “Back so soon?” Alistair asked from behind his big wooden desk. He reached for his cane and stood, motioning for me to walk to him. He wore a tweed suit, which made him look like a wise old professor, and his eyeglasses were tucked into his front pocket. His grey hair shined under the low light, and his eyes had a familiar twinkle to them, like he knew something others didn’t.

  I grabbed Drew’s hand and led him through the maze of tables. “Hi, Alistair,” I said once I reached him. I was sure he was wondering why I was here, since my last visit to the store was Saturday afternoon.

  I couldn’t believe only two days had passed since he sat down with me and told me about his history. It felt like so much had happened since then.

  “Who is this with you?” Alistair asked with a knowing smile.

  “I’m Drew,” Drew said, holding out his hand to shake Alistair’s.

  “Drew Carmichael?” Alistair asked.

  “Yup,” Drew replied. “Lizzie’s told me a lot about you and how helpful you’ve been to her in the past few weeks. I’m glad we’re finally getting to meet.”

  “Me too, me too,” Alistair said. “Let’s not stand, though. Come sit down.” He motioned with his cane to a round table, and the three of us each took a seat. Once he got situated, he said, “Now, tell me what’s on your minds.”

  My eyes met Drew’s, silently asking who should start. He nodded for me to begin.

  “We have a question, and you were the first person we thought to come to for answers,” I started. Alistair nodded, and I continued, “We did everything we were supposed to do with stopping my death in the past from happening again. But now strange things are happening, and I don’t think any of it is normal.”

  Alistair sat up straighter. “What kind of ‘strange things?’”

  “Birds have been … threatening me,” I said, not sure how else to word it. “The first one was at Drew’s house. We were in his living room making s’mores, and then a bird—a crow—fell down the fireplace. It burned to death.” The image of the feathers catching flame and the sad look in the crow’s eyes as it gave up fighting for its life entered my mind again. I shivered at the memory.

  “What else?” Alistair prodded me to continue.

  I told him about the other two incidents—the birds crashing into my car last night, and the mob of them pecking at Drew’s windows when we left school. It sounded like I was stuck in an old-time horror movie. The kind I refused to watch because they spooked me out to the extreme.

  Hopefully Alistair would have answers.

  “Before I tell you what I think this means, I want you to try recalling anything else out of the ordinary that’s happened to you in the past few days,” Alistair said. “I need as much information as possible before I can come to a conclusion.”

  I ran through recent events in my mind. Two things—disregarding the birds—stuck out. “My watch stopped,” I said, motioning to the silver watch with the round face that Jeremy got me for my birthday last year. “I’m not sure if that counts as out of the ordinary, but I changed the battery last month, so it shouldn’t have died so quickly. And then there were the pictures last night …”

  “The pictures?” Alistair raised a bushy eyebrow.

  “Two framed pictures of me fell off the wall,” I told him. “It didn’t strike me as strange when it happened to the first one, except for how the nail wasn’t broken. But when the second one fell after I put the first one back up … I thought maybe it was a ghost.”

  “Not a ghost.” Alistair sounded sure of what this meant. “It’s something else.”

  “Do you want to elaborate?” Drew asked.

  “I will, but you’re not going to like what I’m about to say.”

  “I can handle it.” My voice sounded steadier than I felt.

  “I sensed something dark surrounding you when you walked into the store today,” Alistair began. “And what you’ve told me confirms that my suspicions are correct. Someone has cast a curse on you.”

  I blinked a few times, unsure if I heard him right. “Come again?” I said. No way could he have said what I thought he did. Because reincarnation—I accepted that now. Soul mates, I’ve always believed in, so I accepted the truth there. But curses? That was extreme. There had to be a place where the line was drawn between fiction and reality, and a curse sounded way more on the fiction side of the spectrum.

  “This isn’t any old curse, either,” Alistair continued. “It’s been cast by someone with true magic in their blood, or someone who’s received the rare gift of borrowing true magic.”

  “You need to back up.” I raised my hands in a “stop” motion. Alistair sounded sure of this, but I didn’t want to believe it was possible. “Why do you think I’ve been cursed?”

  “What you’ve explained are dark omens.” Alistair’s voice was deeper now, more intense. He leaned forward, his eyes wild. “Omens of death. The crows, the watch, and the pictures … it’s quite clear. Someone has cast a strong curse on you; it surrounds your entire being. If you don’t find out who’s responsible and fix it …” He looked away from us, as if he didn’t want to say more.

  Drew’s fingers curled into a fist, so tight they turned white. “If we don’t find out who’s responsible and fix it, then what?” he asked, his voice tense.

  “Then Lizzie will die,” Alistair said simply.

  I stared at the table, my chest empty. It hurt to breathe. I didn’t want to believe this was possible. Hadn’t I been through this already? Hadn’t I already been doomed to die a violent death? And hadn’t I stopped it so I could be a normal teenager from now on?

  But something wasn’t right, and Alistair had always been truthful with me.

  “Why?” I asked, my voice cracking. “Why is this happening again?”

  “This darkness wasn’t around you when you visited on Saturday afternoon, so my guess is that between then and now, someone with magic who is very angry at you decided to retaliate.”

  “But I don’t know anyone who has … magic,” I said, the word sounding ridiculous. “I’m not even sure if magic exists!”

  “Oh, it does exist,” Alistair said. “And I only know one person who has it. Or at least one who lives here.”

  “And who is that?” Drew asked, tapping his foot on the wooden floor. I could tell it was hard for him to be patient, but he seemed more accepting of this explanation than I was.

  Then again, how else could I explain the crows, and the dark feeling I couldn’t shake? Maybe it wouldn’t hurt to go along with this and see what happened.

  “Genevieve.” Alistair’s eyes darkened when he said her name.

  “Who’s Genevieve?” I asked. The name sounded old-fashioned. It was one I would remember if I’d met her before.

  “Genevieve has been connected to me and my brother Tristan for all our lives,” Alistair said. “She’s shown up in each of our incarnations. She loves Tristan, and she blames me for his d
eath.”

  “So you think Genevieve did this?” Drew’s eyes blazed with anger.

  “I believe Genevieve hates me enough to want to get back at me and make me fail as a Guide.” Alistair raised his index finger to his lips, as though he were deep in thought. “But this curse … it’s very dark. And very strong. It’s the kind of curse that can only be successful if the person casting it is emotionally close to their intended victim. Perhaps, in your case, someone who was close to you in your past life as well.”

  “Meaning it can’t be Genevieve,” I concluded.

  “Correct,” Alistair said. “It would have to be someone close to you who felt vulnerable enough, and angry enough, to be enticed by Genevieve to do her bidding.”

  Chelsea and Jeremy popped into my mind, although I suspected one more than the other. “I know some people who that could be,” I said, although I didn’t think either of them hated me enough to want me dead. They were hurt and upset by what I’d done to them—and rightly so—but to be so angry that they didn’t want me to live? I’d known both of them for years, and neither of them could want that. It was too extreme. Too violent. Too … evil.

  I shuddered to think that either of them could do such a thing.

  “Chelsea or Jeremy,” Drew said in disgust.

  I nodded. “But I don’t know how to bring it up to either of them. Do I just walk up and say, ‘Hey, did you cast a curse on me on Saturday or Sunday?’” I ran my fingers through my hair, feeling defeated. “And if they did do it—which I find hard to believe they hate me enough to do—why would they admit it? Wouldn’t it be easier to let the curse work, to wait until …”

  Until I’m dead, I thought, unable to say the words aloud.

  “No.” Drew’s voice was steady. “We’re not going to allow that to happen. We’ll get one of them to admit it, and then we’ll make them reverse it.”

  “About that.” Alistair cleared his throat, balancing one hand on his cane. I could tell I wasn’t going to like what he was about to say. “Once a curse is cast, it’s irreversible.”

  Any inkling of hope I’d felt before was sucked out of me.

  I was doomed.

  “But there are other ways to fix this,” Alistair said before Drew or I could panic more than we already had. “Once we find out who did this, and exactly what they did, there will be a way—some way—to fix it. We’ll just have to think outside the box.”

  “For sure?” I asked, my voice sounding small. “Or are you just saying that?”

  “There are ways to do these things.” His wrinkly grey eyes met mine, and I could tell he meant it. “Magic works in cycles, so the darkness won’t have complete hold over you until the next full moon. Since last night was a full moon, that gives us a month to figure this out.”

  “What do you mean, it doesn’t have complete hold of me?” I asked cautiously.

  “Magic takes time to work,” he explained. “It works in tune with the cycles of the moon. Right now it’s simmering. Surrounding you, learning about you, scaring you. Gathering strength as it feeds off your fear. It won’t be able to do what it was called on for until it’s at its full power. We just have to figure out how to stop it before the next full moon. Which is, I believe, on Christmas day.”

  “It could have killed her when those birds hit her car last night,” Drew muttered.

  “It didn’t, though.” I rubbed the top of his hand with my thumb, trying to be reassuring. “I was fine.”

  “This time,” he said, the muscles in his face tightening with determination. “But we need to stop this, and we need to stop it now.”

  “I agree,” Alistair said. “And we can. But you must focus on the task at hand.”

  “Figuring out who did this to me, and getting the details on exactly what they did,” I repeated what he’d told us earlier. “Then we can come up with a way to fix it.”

  It sounded simple when put that way. But I had an awful feeling that if Jeremy or Chelsea were responsible, there was no way I could get either of them to admit it.

  CHAPTER 8

  I decided to approach Jeremy first. It wasn’t because I suspected him the most, but because I was afraid to talk to Chelsea—if I could even get her to talk to me, which I wasn’t sure I would be able to do. At least if it was obvious Jeremy wasn’t responsible, I could eliminate him as a suspect and focus on getting Chelsea to admit her guilt. Process of elimination was a good thing, right?

  Probably not when you’re under a time crunch, but talking to Jeremy wouldn’t take more than a day. We had the rest of the month to get to the bottom of this.

  Well, we had the rest of the month to make all this go away. After I figured out who was responsible, I suspected that fixing what they did was going to be harder than getting them to admit to doing it.

  “The best way for me to get Jeremy to be honest with me is to talk with him alone,” I told Drew as we left the car repair shop.

  “No.” He shook his head. “I don’t like that. I should be there, too.”

  I got it, I did—no guy wants his girlfriend to be alone with the guy she just got out of a long-term relationship with. I hated knowing that Chelsea had stopped over Drew’s on Sunday before I got there—even though he told her he loved me and kicked her out—and their relationship hadn’t even been serious. I couldn’t imagine how much harder it would be for Drew knowing I would be alone with Jeremy.

  “I want you to be there too, but Jeremy will be more likely to admit he did something if he’s just talking to me,” I said. “If it’s both of us, he might feel ganged up on.”

  “Or maybe he’ll be more likely to admit to it under pressure,” Drew said.

  “But I don’t think Jeremy’s the one responsible,” I replied. “If any of this is even possible. Do you really believe that stuff Alistair told us about curses and magic?”

  “I’m not sure.” Drew shrugged and looked at me, the vulnerability in his eyes taking me by surprise. “But it’s all we have to go on right now, and I will do anything if it means keeping you safe.”

  The raw honesty in his statement took my breath away. “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll try to get Jeremy to meet at Starbucks, so there will be other people around. But I really do think it will be best if you sit this conversation out and let me handle him.”

  “Promise me you’ll come over right when you’re done?” he asked.

  “I promise.” I didn’t need to think about my response.

  “You’ll need a car, though,” Drew said. “Since yours won’t be ready for a few days. You can take the Hummer.”

  “The Hummer?” I widened my eyes. “That thing is huge! How am I supposed to drive it?”

  “You drive it just like any other car.” Drew laughed. “You’ll be fine. With everything going on, it makes me feel better to know you’re in one of the safest cars on the road.”

  “Fine,” I gave in. With Death after me, it made sense to drive the sturdiest car possible.

  Although I suspected that once Death gained its full hold, a small thing like a car wouldn’t stand in its way.

  * * *

  Jeremy agreed to meet me at Starbucks after his soccer practice. We used to go there a lot when we were dating, so the neutral territory would be a good place for us to talk.

  I only hoped other people wouldn’t listen to our conversation. It would sound pretty strange.

  All day at school I could tell Jeremy was curious about what I wanted to talk with him about. He kept looking at me with hope in his eyes, and it made me feel bad. I didn’t want him to think this had anything to do with “us”—that I wanted to get back together. The last thing I wanted was to hurt him more than I already had.

  But I needed answers.

  I did my homework at Starbucks while I waited for him, since I had time to kill between school and when his practice got out.

  “I’ve been wondering all day what you wanted to talk with me about,” Jeremy’s voice brought me out of the essay I was writin
g for European History.

  I looked up from my laptop—I couldn’t believe I was so focused on writing that I hadn’t seen him come in. He had showered after practice, so his sandy-blond hair was wet and darker than usual. He stuck his sunglasses into the front pocket of his jeans (I always told him he would smoosh them one day, but he never listened to me), and slid into the seat across from me. His cheeks were flushed—they always got like that when he finished soccer practice—and he watched me with his familiar blue eyes. The eyes I’d looked into every day until breaking up with him a few weeks ago.

  I was right in breaking up with him, but I still felt awful about it. Despite the arrogant way he’d been acting since being voted co-captain of the varsity soccer team, Jeremy was basically a good guy. Maybe he wasn’t completely considerate of others, but he never did anything with the intention of hurting someone. I trusted that given a few years, he would mature and become more thoughtful. Someday he would make a great boyfriend to someone—but that someone wasn’t going to be me.

  I closed my laptop, unsure how to begin.

  “So, what’s up?” Jeremy asked, taking a swig of the yellow Gatorade he brought in with him. He loved his sports drinks after a work out.

  I sipped my tea, contemplating where to start.

  “I just wanted to catch up,” I said, willing my voice not to betray my anxiety. “With all the recent changes, I wanted to make sure things were okay between us. Since we were friends before we started dating, and now we’re not together anymore …” I wrung my hands together, unsure where I was going with this. I had to get to the point. “I wanted to make sure you’re not angry with me.”