Immortown

by Lily Markova

  Tonight it’s my turn to stay awake. The sound of Chase’s breathing wafts out from the tent in slow, rhythmic puffs. It’s nearing dawn. Invariably, Krystle stands on the pier, and I’m lying on my back by the fire. Sometimes, when I switch my vision to Levengleds, I can see planes fly over the beach. If I took a picture of one now, a lonely little plane would appear in the photograph, falling with its nose pointed down in a sinister, gray-clouded sky. I feel as though I’m pitching down, too. I’m still airborne, but the ground is closer and closer, and I’m about to crash.

  Demon Mitch never leaves my side anymore. I try to remember in detail what happened in the lighthouse. The walls of the room were lined with old, dry planks, but the “flammable poison” Astra spilled all over the floor was just colored water. . . . Alex—Mitch—was cowering under the table; I ran into the room. . .and everything blazed up. Mitch screamed my name, my real name, and then it all collapsed. . . .

  “Freya!”

  For a moment, I still think it’s Mitch shouting my name again, but it turns out to be Remy. He’s dashing full speed toward me, and I jump to my feet, ready to defend myself.

  “We have a lot to discuss, me and you,” he says, out of breath, as he stops a few yards away, “but right now, I need help from someone alive. The Skarsens’ house is being erased. India and Kai are still inside—they couldn’t get out in time!”

  “Wake Chase!” I shout to Krystle, rushing after Remy.

  Kai

  I’m standing on the table in front of a wall curtained with black velvet. The first floor of my house is alive as never before with whispering ghosts—we invited everyone we could reach. Flurried, Freya bursts into the hall, and Remy, India, Tom, Terry cluster tightly around her, driving her deeper into the leering crowd. Freya looks around, her distress briefly giving way to bemusement only to return amplified tenfold. The trap worked.

  Now, all we need is for her to have a full-blown panic attack so that Astra can break free. Freya’s green eyes find mine; she stares at me as though I’m a traitor, and I am—but the ghosts tighten their ring around her, and her expression changes. She compresses her lips and tilts her chin up. She’s angry. But something fiery behind her eyes tells me that though I played on her greatest weakness, she’s still attached to me. I’m not Kai to her anymore—I’m Alex. And her face is the face of Astra.

  “People of Immortown,” I say, and all gazes are riveted on me at once, “I have a little present for you. Take a good look at yourself.”

  I pull the drape off the painting I’ve been working on blindfolded for several days. I applied silver paint to the canvas, layer after layer, wishing to show them who they truly were, wishing to open any eyes that would look upon it. Behind me is a great mirror—at long last, my childhood fantasy, a cursed mirror of my own.

  The congregation of spirits looks puzzled, at first, but soon their pale countenances alter as they peer harder at their reflection. I see fear. Confusion. Remorse. Shock. Many start crying and screaming; only Remy roars with laughter like a madman. I jump off the table and squeeze through the crowd toward Freya, careful not to glance back. I don’t want to see myself. I’m not sure I will be able to stand myself any longer if I have so much as a peek into my own true reflection.

  Freya seems to be fighting something, someone within her. I take her hand. “I’m only trying to help you. I’m sorry I had to exploit your worst fear, that I made you go through the terror of your childhood again. I know you’ll hate me forever for this, but I saw no other way.”

  When her ability to breathe returns, Freya looks back at my sister and pleads. “India. . . . God, I am so sorry. . . . What I did to you—if you can ever forgive me. . .”

  “Nah, it’s okay,” India says in a small voice, never tearing her gaze off the mirror. “I deserve worse,” she adds in a much darker tone.

  “It was me. I did it,” Freya keeps repeating, her eyes wide, horrified, as they meet mine once more. “I must have started the fire, too. I sent Mitch into a coma. I almost killed him. And I almost erased your sister. You must really—”

  “I don’t hate you,” I assure her quickly, failing to suppress a smile. “If we hadn’t found her in time, I would have—but she’s going to be okay. We all get carried away sometimes. We want to create something powerful, forgetting it’s our own power the demons we’ve made will feed on.”

  Freya’s face clears for a moment. “I don’t hate you either,” she says. “I wouldn’t have believed that I killed India if you’d just told me. You had to make me see. I understand. I see.” With this, her expression transforms again, contorts with irritation, and Freya all but hisses, “Now, this is simply ridiculous!”

  “Freya!” A high-colored Chase barges in through the front door and, elbowing ghosts aside, pulls Freya away from me. “The ocean—it’s time!”

  She shoots me an apologetic look, and they both rush outside.

  ∞.

  Kai

  Curious as to what’s going on, I follow the two of them. From time to time, Freya stops running and tries to shake off Chase’s hand firmly grasping hers, but he stubbornly drags her along with him.

  “No time for good-byes, Freya. We need to hurry!”

  Once on the pier, Chase releases his grip on her hand, and Freya clutches at the railing. The entire visible expanse of ocean is glittering with thousands of blue sparkles—it’s being erased.

  I finally realize what their plan is. Everyone and everything that I had drawn before the fire burned together with their painted copies—even the pond in Monet boiled away, down to the last drop of water. But surely I wasn’t powerful enough to destroy this bottomless, monstrous chaos? Immortown only possesses this storm that I painted fifty years ago, while the living ocean is still where it belongs—and these two oceans are about to merge.

  “Chase, jump!” shrieks Freya, covering her eyes with her forearm against the salty rain.

  “You stop being foolish right now! I’m not going without you!” he shouts back, and with an air of angry decision, Chase strides back toward her from the end of the pier.

  Freya seems to be wrestling with herself again, clinging desperately to the slippery railing as though some invisible force is trying to push her into the water. Everything about her look is begging for help. I can see why it’s so hard for her to make this choice. Her brother will stay here forever. But she needs to let him. She needs to let him go.

  “Kai! You can’t let me leave! You have to stop me!”

  I shake my head. “Go. Live. It’s too soon for you to be frozen in time here, suspended in death like us. So many unplayed roles still waiting. . . .”

  “Kai, please, you don’t underst—” She breaks off, biting her lower lip so hard that it starts to bleed.

  “Iver will visit you,” I say. “I know he will. Don’t leave Levengleds tonight. The moment you fall asleep in the living world, he will come. And I promise I won’t. But tomorrow, run, Freya. Don’t give India or anyone else too much time to invade your dreams and talk you into coming back. We can be quite. . .persuasive.”

  If someone had told me just a few months ago that I would find her and choose to let her go, I would have even laughed at them—and I’m not easily moved to laughter. But Freya will be better off away from Levengleds and Immortown, away from me and my sister. Our family has a thing for her.

  It was naïve of me to believe that Freya Aurore was the ephemeral one I’ve been waiting for, a deep-rooted invocation come true; I was naïve to think that there was “the one” for me at all. But part of me—the artist, the child in me—wanted to believe that hers were the same green eyes that have been haunting my own dreams all these years. I wanted it to be true so desperately that both our powers—my wish-upon paintings, her chameleon nature—allowed me to find that perfect image in her ever-changing, elusive features. Still, I know I will miss her. Freya may not have been created just for me, but she was there for me all the same.

  “Oh, this is going to be
cold,” Chase mutters as he reaches her.

  He pushes her, and her fingers slip, and both of them disappear underwater. The waves today are higher than usual—Levengleds is in for a ghostly storm. The ocean shines, diamond-like, in the rays of the rising sun.

  Chase surfaces first and spins around, his eyes searching the water. Freya still won’t emerge. I peer down into the flickering abyss, and I think I can see her silhouette tumbling madly inside the waves. I don’t understand what she’s doing—she’s not swimming away from the pier, one moment trying to dive as deep as she can, the next struggling to reach for the light piercing the surface layers of the water like myriads of tiny glowing needles. She’ll suffocate. . . .

  Another surge picks her up and crashes against the pier.

  The water is so clear now that I can see the ocean’s dark floor, toward which Freya is slowly falling. Undercurrents whirl her like an October leaf torn from a branch by a blast of wind. Her red hair stretches upward and seems to grow longer and then detach itself. . . . Blood. That’s blood. She hit her head. The ocean will be erased any minute now. Even if Freya makes it to Levengleds, she won’t be able to swim out.

  “Freya!”

  I dive in, and the water closes over me, cutting and burning. Chase plunges deeper too, turning around, looking for her, but I find Freya first and gesture to him to move farther away from the pier.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I notice that Chase is still swimming beside me, and I inwardly curse him for the needless self-sacrifice. If he still wants to escape, he’ll need to get as far away from land as he can by the time it all ends. But it seems that Chase really meant it when he said he wouldn’t leave for Levengleds without her.

  I feel as though hundreds of little needles stuck into my skin and my legs were being sucked into a maelstrom. The ocean is striving to take Freya away from me so she can drown in Levengleds. And me? It’s pulling me elsewhere, into the unknown—and this time, she can’t prevent it.

  With one last desperate lunge, I throw us both into a giant wave, and it flings us onto the beach, pebbles greeting our bodies with a new dose of pain. I can hear ragged breathing nearby—Chase got out in time, too. A new breaker rises like a foaming sea monster above us, ready to crush us and drag us back into the depths, and I pin Freya to the ground with my weight, shielding her, clawing at stones, hoping that we’ll hold on somehow, but before the wave can collapse on us, it is gone. The ocean shimmers with tiny stars once more and then it’s extinguished. We’re lying on the edge of a boundless pit, its floor covered with black sand.

  Weakly, Freya tries to push me off, and I release her. She crawls a few feet and rolls over onto her side, coughing up water. Her temple is cut open, and dark, thick blood won’t stop streaming from it.

  “Chase, why the hell didn’t you—?” I turn to him, but it isn’t Chase who has been hurled ashore next to us. It’s Krystle. Meeting my perplexed stare, she turns over onto her back, spreads her arms wide, and laughs.

  “Kai. . . .” Freya calls, scrambling to sit up, in vain. “The crowd back at your house. . . Krystle. . .sneaked up on me, and I was too. . .shaken to fight her off. . . But she lied to you. I didn’t do it. Astra didn’t kill India. She did. At the bar that night, I was passing out and she. . .took control of me. And at that first party, when. . . Amnesia. . . Even then, she knew I was alive. She knew she could possess me. . . . In your mirror, I saw all of it. I was trying to warn you, but I couldn’t break through for long enough. . . . She was suppressing me. . . . It was all her. . . .”

  Still reeling from both of us nearly dying and from what Freya is saying, I’m half-aware that there’s someone else on the beach with us. Chase. I can’t see him, but I can sense him. He got out. He made it to Levengleds. Not as dumb as I thought, after all.

  “Lucky little lamebrain,” Krystle sneers lazily, sensing him too. “Should have possessed him instead. Oh well. I wouldn’t fall asleep in Levengleds if I were him. . . .”

  “Chase?” Freya says, shaking all over with the cold. She looks around, but her eyes seem suddenly vacant, staring into the middle distance. She blinks, and there is lucidity to her gaze again, but soon that is replaced with a panicky confusion. “Why can’t I see him? Why can’t I see Levengleds? Why can’t I see Chase?”

  I don’t know what she’s talking about. She’s alive—of course she can’t expect to sense him the way Krystle and I do. Why does Freya think she should be able to see him? All I know is I can’t stand to see her like this. I move closer and pull her into my arms, trying to warm her hands, which are even colder than mine—colder than the hands of the ice-hearted boy stolen away by the Snow Queen.

  “Welcome back,” my Snow Queen says grimly to Freya, standing up and brushing sand from her sleeves, making sure of spraying us with it.

  “Why?” says Freya, gaze sharp with pain. “We never did anything to you. Why Iver and me?”

  Krystle lets out a callous laugh. “Why? Why? How do you think it felt, all that time, to be with him and know he’d never care about me? Always about you. . . .”

  “You killed him.” Freya’s lips seem almost paralyzed as she pronounces this. “Did you expect Iver to fall for you out of gratitude?”

  “Iver?” Krystle’s voice rings with laughter again, even as tears of anger trickle down her cheeks. “I don’t give a fade about Iver, now do I? I’m talking about Kai. He had been drawing you before you were even walking this earth! I died because of him, and he still wouldn’t spare a second to worry about me. But you. . .”

  “Then WHY did you call him here?” From this abrupt shouting, Freya’s voice becomes strained, so I can barely hear her when she continues. “If you didn’t need Iver, why did you take him?”

  Krystle shrugs, unrepentant. “Collateral. I love to wander the dreams of Levengleds at night. . . . It relaxes me, you know. Or it used to. Can you imagine my irritation when I found out that even there, I couldn’t escape your stupid face? Can you imagine my annoyance, when, after being forced to look at your miserable eyes everywhere I went around Kai, I came across them in one of those dreams?” Krystle sounds bitter for a moment, and she hasn’t looked at me since she started talking, but when she goes on, her tone is thick again with its usual arrogance. “It was Iver’s dream, of course. So I kept coming back. I kept asking him about you. I learned many interesting things about you, Freya, from your brother’s dreams. Your lives were pathetic—but not pathetic enough. It was my duty to give you some sense of perspective, to show you what real pain was like. Frankly, honey, you were just getting on my nerves. That’s why I took your sweet brother. I told him that if he didn’t do as I said, I would come for his sister instead the next time she—you—visited him in Levengleds. Gullible boy that he is, he believed me. Ha, I would never have called you here. Why would I? So I could watch you and Kai eye each other? ‘I don’t hate you.’ ‘Oh, I “don’t-hate” you too,’ ” Krystle mimics, and she pretends to spit. “You both are so nauseating.”

  “No. No, I don’t believe this,” says Freya, closing her eyes. “I can’t. Iver spent an entire year here with you. You were looking after him. . . .”

  “Oh, I was. And a lot of work that was, too. Poor quiet Iver. He honestly bought my reassurances that I was simply oh-so-lonely. . . .” Krystle makes a piteous face and flutters her eyelashes. “I even gave him his Kai-damn piano. I had to make him trust me. I knew you’d turn up sooner or later: Kai always gets what he draws. I waited for you by Levengleds cemetery. Went there every day. . .and then you arrived. I could see you, but I knew right away that you weren’t a ghost. The urge to kill you on the spot was so tempting, but to spend eternity in the same town as you? No, I had to make it so that Kai would never even want to look at you again. India was always going on and on about how you’re so artistic and susceptible, how you immerse yourself in your characters. . . . I thought it would be funny to convince Iver not to talk to you so he was out of my way. And he believed me again. Looks like you’re not the
only one who’s good at acting here.”

  I shake my head, feeling incredibly stupid. It turns out I have been blindfolded much longer than I imagined. How could I have missed this? There was no way I could have sensed it that Krystle was controlling Freya, but I should have noticed she wasn’t herself. . . .

  It seems that Krystle isn’t done mocking Freya just yet. “Your brother trusted me so much, in fact, he even told me about your little incident at that concert,” she says smugly. “Which was very nice of him, as it made me see how easily I could break you. Just lure you into a crowd, and I can fashion you into whatever I want. I thought, ‘How convenient it is that she ran away after the fire. Someone might think she’d started it. Someone might think she’s lost it.’ I had so much fun at your welcome-to-Immortown party. You all slow-motion thinkers saw it the way I wanted you to see it. ‘Oh, Alex.’ ”

  I cringe at the memory of the moments Freya and I shared after that party. “You duplicitous. . .snake. There was no Astra, was there? It’s been you all along. And when you were hurting India—” I let cold hatred build up inside as I remember my sister crying in that basement. “Did you think I’d never figure out it had been you? Or did you think I’d just let it slide?”

  Krystle finally looks at me, and her eyes water again. “Oh, so now you want revenge? I was surprised you didn’t kill Freya the moment you knew she was still alive. You could keep her here forever. You’ve always been selfish. You would do something like that. But you proved to be more insidious—you decided on a heart-to-heart chat with her instead. I had to do something, don’t you see? I was sure that if your muse dared encroach on the sacred, on your precious India, you would destroy Freya yourself, so I wouldn’t have to. But even then, you rushed to her rescue. Un-Kai-damn-believable!”