by Stacey Jay
Skin. The terry-cloth liner of the raincoat slithers along my arms as it falls to the ground, reminding me of the scars peeking out from beneath the T-shirt I threw on before I left the house. Scars. Skin. This isn’t my skin.
“Wait.” I choke out the word as I stumble back, hands flying to cover my mouth.
This isn’t my body. Ben and I might be soul mates, but I have no physical form of my own. I don’t belong here and I’ll never be able to stay. Despite the strangeness of this shift, despite the miracle of falling in love again, I can’t promise Ben this body’s future. I can never be with him, even for a night. Ariel’s soul is out there in the mist. She will be coming back. Sooner or later. Maybe sooner, if Romeo has discovered that Ben isn’t Gemma’s soul mate after all.
Somewhere out there, Romeo could have found Gemma’s real love and be making progress convincing him to slay Gemma in return for immortality. Ben and I could have a day, maybe less. And then I’ll be gone and Ariel will be here in my place. If I use her body as my own, I’ll be an abomination. I’ll step over the line I’m dancing on and become one of the monsters. When the time comes for Ariel and Ben to be together, it has to be Ariel’s decision.
I dig the heels of my borrowed hands into my borrowed eyes and fight the despair the thought of leaving Ben inspires, try to ignore the jealousy that curdles in my mouth when I imagine Ariel’s lips against his.
“I’m sorry,” Ben says, still breathing fast. “I wasn’t even thinking. We can wait. We can wait as long as you want. We can wait until we’re married if you want.”
“Married.” I sob the word.
“Yeah. Married. Why not? Someday?” He takes my wrists, pulls my hands away from my eyes. The love in his makes tears roll down my face. “I love you. I want to do everything with you. I want to marry you and have kids with you and get old with you. And then I want to die the day before you do, so I never have to live without you.”
I can’t say a word. I only cry harder. What have I done? How could I have let this happen? How could I have opened Ben up to the kind of pain he’ll feel when I’m gone? He and Ariel seemed possible together before, but now that I know it’s me Ben’s fallen so hard for, I know he’ll be able to tell something is wrong. He’ll recognize the difference of Ariel’s soul being in this body instead of mine. And it will tear him apart, wondering what has happened, wondering if love is as real as he thought if a soul connection can disappear so suddenly.
“Why are you crying?”
“Because I … I can’t be with you. No matter how much I want to be.”
“Why?” The word seems torn from his chest, as if the thought of not being with me is life-threatening.
“I can’t tell you. You’ll never believe me.”
“I’ll believe. I swear I will.” He reaches for me, but I step away, closer to where the rain falls outside the barn door. “Anything you tell me, no matter how—”
“You don’t understand. It’s … I’m not the person you think I am.”
“Yes, you are.” He reaches for me again and this time I let him wrap his arms around me. It’s too painful not to. “I know you. I love you, Ariel. I—”
“I’m not Ariel.”
Ben shakes his head, brow furrowing. “I don’t understand.”
“I’m not …”
I’m not Ariel Dragland. My name is Juliet, and I’ve spent centuries jumping in and out of other people’s bodies, fighting for love, trying to save soul mates from Romeo, the man who killed me. Yes, that Juliet. That Romeo. He’s in Dylan’s body. And I’m only borrowing this body for a short time.
Then I’ll be gone, and the soul that really lives here will come take my place. But no matter what she remembers, she’ll never love you the way I do. Never.
I swallow. It’s impossible. He’ll never believe me. No one ever has, no one ever will. “I’m … I’m sorry.”
“Don’t you dare. Don’t run away from me.” He holds me tight, his fingers pressing into my back. “I’m listening. You’re not Ariel. Then what should I call you? I don’t care. I’ll love you no matter what name you want me to use.”
If only it were so simple. A rose by any other name would still smell as impossible. It’s a body I need, not a name.
A body. The word floats across my mind, and temptation dances behind it, luring me with smoky fingers. If I work the spell and reclaim my old form, could Ben love me in another body? Would he be able to look into my eyes and see my soul and believe? No matter how impossible it seems?
“Mermaid?” His hand sweeps across my forehead, fingers teasing over bone. “What’s going on in there?”
I look up into his sweet face. “Nothing.” I can’t do it. Saving myself would mean saving Romeo, and Romeo deserves to die.
He could die just as easily after the spell as before. Especially if he has a little help …
And here I am again. Back to murder, but this time contemplating killing to keep my love, not simply to save him.
“We should go,” I say, taking his hand. “I barely made it through the water twenty minutes ago and the rain hasn’t let up. It might—”
“Oh shit,” Ben says, gazing over my shoulder. I turn to look, echoing his curse as I see what’s become of Melanie’s car. The water has risen rapidly. The trunk is already under and the hood will join it before too long. There’s no way Ben and I will be able to drive out of here now.
And Melanie is going to kill me.
“I have to call my mom. Did you bring your cell phone?” I ask. “Mine is in the car, but I can try to—”
“Don’t bother.” Ben pulls his from his pocket and holds it up between us. “No service out here. I checked when Gemma started going psycho. I was going to call my brother.”
I sigh. “I guess we should try to walk. Your house isn’t—”
Lightning flashes, and thunder booms seconds behind, a warning that makes us take a cautious step away from the door.
“It’s not safe to walk through that right now,” Ben says. His hands come down on my shoulders and squeeze. “Guess you’re stuck with me for a while.”
“Guess so.” If I were a normal girl, being trapped in a cozy barn with the boy I love would be heaven. But I’m not a normal girl. And my one shot at becoming something close to one is slipping through my fingers. Ben is slipping through my fingers.
I turn and wrap my arms around his waist, press my cheek to his chest, close my eyes, and hold on tight.
INTERMEZZO TWO
Romeo
Blood, blood everywhere but not a drop to drink. It spills from the old woman’s puckered throat, gushes down the filthy dress he’s kept her in these two days, pooling on the floor, the last of her human warmth stolen away by stone. He’s chosen a tomb as the location for the ritual to slay the high Ambassador, a mausoleum not far from town.
For nostalgic reasons. For a Gothic flourish. For laughs.
He isn’t laughing now.
He yanks her hair, pulling her head back, making the slash below her chin gape wider. It grins at me, a wink between friends. There is no magic here, no golden light spilling into the darkness, no mournful wail as an ancient is cast out of paradise. The woman from the bakery wasn’t lying when she said she didn’t know what we were talking about, that she’d never heard of the Ambassadors of Light. Despite the golden glow that filled her aura in life, Nancy isn’t the woman he’s looking for.
He was wrong, wrong, wrong, after he’d been so sure, sure, sure.
Hee. Hee. Hee.
“Is that a smile, Romeo?” he asks, voice as cold as the knife he still clutches in his red hand. “I can’t imagine why you’d be smiling.”
“I can’t either.” Some hard kernel of deeply buried sanity urges me to stitch up the grin ripping across my cheeks. But I don’t. I smile wider, letting the infection spread.
She doesn’t love me. She loves another. She blushes like a rose in bloom, though I ripped her up from the roots long ago. She is my soul mate. She
should never burn for anyone but me. It makes me want to kill her. Kill him. Kill everyone in this town, anyone who has ever born witness to their new love, their heated glances and lingering sighs.
But beneath the lust for blood, beneath the hate, beneath the fear and the anger, there is something else. For a moment, that one shining moment this morning when I thought the glow around Juliet’s heart was for me, I felt … happiness. No, more than happiness. I felt … hope, the spark of something pure, flashing like lightning through dry air, setting things crackling inside me.
“Well …” He heaves a great sigh and tosses the knife to the floor, where it lands with a dull clank. “This is most unfortunate.”
“Most unfortunate,” I echo, easing back a step as the blood at my feet spreads. For the first time in a very long time, I don’t want to touch that red mess, don’t want to smear my fingers with death.
“I suppose she’s out there somewhere, hiding from me, helping Juliet find her way.”
“I think not.” I shake my head. “Her nurse hasn’t made contact. Juliet is frightened and alone. If she were receiving aid, I would see it in her eyes. She has no secrets from me.”
“You’re a fool.” He shoves the woman’s chair with his foot as he walks past, knocking the corpse to the ground, making that new thing inside me cringe. She is dead. And I am … not pleased.
“The Ambassadors have secrets you can’t even imagine, and now Juliet knows our secrets as well. Doesn’t she?”
I open my eyes wide, feigning innocence as I have so many times before. “I wouldn’t think so.”
“Oh? You haven’t been telling secrets outside of school?”
“Of course not. I’ve told her nothing.”
“You’ve told her everything.” He reaches into my coat pocket, wiping blood on the fabric, pulling out the cell phone tucked away there. “I put a listening device in the back. Two days ago. I heard everything you said in the theater.” He smiles, eyes narrowing with pleasure at the fear no doubt dancing in mine. “Technology is its own magic, isn’t it?”
“Yes. It is.” I nod, and the skeletal remains of my smile clatter to the floor.
He knows. He knows I’ve only pretended to do his work while pursuing my own agenda. He knows I have knowledge far beyond what any lower Mercenary should possess. He knows I’ve lied and cheated and stolen sacred spells from the hands of their caretakers.
Their dead caretakers.
He must know that, as well. There’s only one way I could have gotten my hands on the ancient spells. He must know that I am the one who killed the two Mercenary guardians, severed their heads, stole their eyes, and spoke the banishing words so the dark magicians could never bring them back to tell who had dared defy the high ones. It has been nearly two centuries since that particular offense, but time is relative. Flexible. Merciless.
Especially for them.
“You’ve betrayed your vows, Romeo Montague,” he says, leaning against the wall of the crypt, surveying me with amusement. But I know better than to think I have amused him. He’s simply savoring my impending pain, contemplating all the wretched ways he will punish me. I have tried to overthrow my gods and now I will suffer as only the gods can make a man suffer.
I shiver as he moves closer, wrapping his hand around the back of my neck. The second his magic-filled flesh touches mine, my skin flares to life. I can feel. Really feel for the first time in nearly a millennium. Heat and pressure and the scratch of the clothes I wear and the unbearable softness of his oddly feminine-feeling hand.
Though I hate him as much as I ever have, though I know the pain is coming, I shiver again. With pleasure. To be touched. To be felt. To be real inside living flesh. This is what Juliet and I could have had. An eternity of these moments. Together. It was worth the risk, worth the crushing agony of failure.
His fingernails bite into the cords of my neck, digging, gouging, tearing, until my skin bursts and his fingers squirm beneath, leaving agony in their wake. I fall to my knees at his feet, screaming for mercy, screaming for Juliet.
Again and again and again, her name rips from my lips, howls through my mind. Juliet! I know better than to pray, but still something inside me begs the universe for mercy. Let her have someone on her side, someone to save her from the specter that would take her and from the hell that awaits. Someone to save her from me.
I know what penance the high one will demand, and I know I’ll give him whatever he asks, just to have the feeling taken away, to be consigned once more to my familiar prison. I no longer wish to feel. Not this pain, not the soul ache that reminds me of all I threw away when I believed Mercenary lies, when I believed killing Juliet the first time would send her to dance with the angels.
Instead, she has become one. Despite her ferocity, despite the bitterness that’s hardened her, she has remained so good, so pure of spirit. I believe I helped in my own way. I haven’t tried to turn her, not really. I haven’t done my best to bring her over to the darkness.
“You will turn her.” He whispers the words I knew were coming, loosening his hold just enough to banish the worst of the agony and ensure I understand my directions. “Her shifted allegiance will bring us great power. You will turn her or this will be forever. You will know nothing but pain. You will become one of the screaming things that haunt the earth, an immortal lesson to the fools who would follow in your footsteps.”
“You have no power over me.” Defiance boils beneath my words. “I am at the end of my service. I will not turn her, I will not renew my own vows. You cannot—”
“You will renew your vows and do as I say, or I will return you to your own flesh.”
That spark of hope leaps inside me again. My own flesh? Is it possible?
“But without the spell, without her love, the ravages time and sin have worked upon the specter will remain.” He flashes his too-bright smile. “You will roam the world in that form—rotten and diseased—until your bones turn to dust. And even then, your soul will remain trapped on earth without voice or form, never to reach the mists of forgetting, never to join the ranks of the high ones.”
He puts his lips against my ear, whispering his next promise directly into my brain. “I know you’ve found seven hundred years without physical feeling to be a great misery. How pleasantly do you think a few million years such as that will pass? When you are a phantom and no one can hear you scream?”
His fingers bite into my skin once more. Pain and more pain—hot and pitiless—and then the smell comes. The smell of Nancy’s death, of her body’s waste clinging to her filthy dress, the smell of her blood on the stones near my feet. I scream and gag, empty stomach heaving. “You wanted your senses returned so badly, Montague. Enjoy them. You’ll miss this when you are one of the spirits of the damned.”
He shoves my face into the blood on the floor. There will be no escape, no good choices, no mercy or pity. Not for me, not for her, not for anyone.
Somewhere deep inside me, the spark of hope dies, howling like a child left alone in the dark.
NINETEEN
The afternoon fades to evening and the storm grows teeth and snarls outside the door, dimming the gray light in the barn. Ben and I climb into the hayloft, make a bed of straw and the dry sides of our jackets, and lie down. And then we hold each other, whispering in the benevolent darkness.
He tells me about his childhood, about all the things he’s painted and wants to paint, about the weird odd jobs he’s worked to raise money for art supplies. He tells me about his brother and sister-in-law and his niece, who does dinosaur impressions that make everyone laugh. He tells me about his mother, how she loved him and his brother so fiercely, how he cared for her the way a parent cares for a child before she died, how there was never time to study and he fell behind in school.
He tells me how angry he was with his brother for staying away when she was at her worst, and, after his mother died, how his anger kept him living in a cramped apartment with cousins he knew were dangerous,
despite his brother’s insistence that he and Marianne wanted Ben to live with them.
I am more vague, telling him things I wish for, things I believe in, simple joys and everyday doubts and fears.
And finally, as the night turns colder and the darkness complete, I hug him close and whisper the question I’ve been turning over in my head for hours. “How far would you go? To save someone? To save yourself?”
“What do you mean?”
“Would you … take things into your own hands? If you knew it was the only way to save the person you love?”
He stiffens, the muscles beneath my cheek tightening. “Listen, I know … I probably looked scary today, but I swear it won’t happen again. I just went crazy when I saw Dylan with his fist in your hair. I lost it, but I don’t normally—”
“No, Ben, that’s not—”
“The counseling group the court made me go to is over in a couple of weeks, and I don’t want to stay in a group with Gemma,” he says. “But I’m going to keep seeing another counselor. My brother thinks I should. At first I thought it was a stupid idea, but he’s right. I’m still angry. At a lot of people. And I’ve got to get that under control so I don’t do what I did today unless I really, really have to.”
“I know. I’m not worried about you.” I find his hand in the dark and squeeze. “I’m worried about … I’m worried Dylan won’t stop until he hurts someone.”
“He’ll stop,” Ben says, with the assurance of someone who doesn’t understand the relentlessness of true evil. “We’ll tell my brother what happened and you can get a restraining order. I’ll get one too. We’ll make sure Dylan can’t walk within fifty feet of either of us.”
“I don’t think a restraining order will be enough. He needs to … go away. Forever.”
“Are you saying what I think you’re saying?” he asks, voice careful.
