by Stacey Jay
“As I said, choices made in the past will—”
“He looks like my cousin Benvolio Montague. Exactly like him.”
She hesitates. “You remember his face so well?”
“He was like a brother to me after my own brother died. He was seven and I was five. We grew up together. While I was alive, I spent more time looking at his face than I did my own. It was Benvolio I spoke to today, though he believed himself to be Benjamin Luna.” I pause, waiting, but she says nothing. “I swear to you,” I insist. “It was Benvolio, body and soul. Here in this town, seven hundred years after my cousin lived and died. How is that possible?”
She gives me a pitying look. “You were very close to him?”
“He was the only member of my family who wasn’t cruel, insane, or after my father’s money. But that doesn’t matter. I know what I saw.”
“Sometimes what we want to see can be a powerful—”
“I wasn’t seeing what I wanted to see.” I clench my jaw, fighting to keep my frustration in check. “I saw what was there.”
“I’m sure many people look like your cousin. He was an average boy, if I remember correctly. But you …” She turns back to the picture in the corner. “There is no doubt that that is your handsome younger self. Ariel has a talent.”
And that’s it. My concern has been dismissed. But I won’t let her off that easily. “Whether it was Benvolio or not, don’t you understand what this means? If we’d been summoned to this version of the world, Juliet would never have met the real Ben Luna, or fallen in love with him. She might still be an Ambassador, working for your cause.”
“Yes, she might still be alive,” she says. “You might not have shot her, or stolen a precious soul from the world.”
My chest tightens as Juliet’s wide, dying eyes rise in my mind. The pain is worse now. It was Juliet’s soul, but those were Ariel’s eyes. Now that I’ve looked into her face and seen love unlike anything I thought I’d know again, it’s even harder to stomach what I did. Even if I felt I had no choice.
“Yes,” I whisper.
“She might even be here instead of you.” Nurse’s voice is hard, merciless. “But she’s not. You are. And confusing coincidences aside, the most important thing is to prevent Ariel from being turned.”
“I can’t kill her,” I choke out, throat aching. “I can’t.”
Her hand comes to rest on mine. “It might be the only way to save her.”
“Please, no,” I beg, knowing she’ll find someone else to do the job if I refuse. “Please. There has to be another way.”
“There may be something …” She casts another glance toward the bed. There’s a softness around her mouth that gives me some comfort. Maybe Ariel isn’t simply a means to an end or a way to save the world. “Let me consult the other Ambassadors. If the Mercenaries can enter her dreams, there may be a way we can as well. If so, we can offer her protection.”
“I’ll help. Any way I can.”
“There’s nothing for you to do. There may be nothing that can be done,” she warns. “But … in light of this news, I don’t think it’s safe for you to leave Ariel just yet.”
My breath rushes out, the force of my relief making my arms shake. “Thank you.”
“Stay with her; don’t leave her side. I’ll contact you tomorrow.” She steps away from the window, and the light emanating from her hands dims. “If you don’t hear from me by sunset, meet me at the cave on top of the mountain at midnight.”
“Could we meet somewhere else, closer to town? I promised I’d take Ariel to the dance.” She lifts a disbelieving eyebrow. “I know it sounds ridiculous, but it’s important to her. And to me. I know I can’t stay, but if we could have one more night, a few hours to share something at least, she may remember …”
“She will remember you. And you’ll remember her if you want to badly enough,” she says. “Juliet chose to forget certain things, but you will have a choice. We are not cruel, Romeo. Unlike your former masters, we care for our converts and would not send them to the mist if we had the power to keep them on earth. We won’t steal your mind or your memories. You will guide your own destiny as much as any soul who serves a higher purpose.”
A higher purpose. A few days ago the thought would have made me laugh. But now I intend to serve one. Just not the one Juliet’s nurse has in mind.…
“That’s good to know,” I say, pretending to be grateful for her kind words, though I know I won’t need them. I won’t be going to the mist. I will be staying here. With Ariel. “In that case, another memory of her would be even more appreciated.”
“Very well.” She reaches out. Light leaps between us. Her magic stings as it surges beneath my skin, but not nearly as badly as it did the first time. When it’s over, I feel recharged, as if I’ve slept all the hours I spent staring at the ceiling, memorizing the feel of Ariel’s body against mine. “The power I’ve given you will keep you in this body until midnight tomorrow. Not a moment later. If you haven’t taken your vows to me by then, you will be returned to the specter of your soul and live out the rest of your days in a rotted corpse.”
“Midnight. Like Cinderella,” I say.
“You’ve always reminded me of Cinderella.” Her dry tone makes me smile in spite of myself. “Do you understand me?”
“I understand.” Her lips curve. “Good.”
Good indeed. I nod and promise to meet her at eleven-thirty in the woods behind the school, even as I begin to plan my escape from the mercy I was willing to kill for a few days ago.
Nurse disappears into the night, and I turn back to the bed and climb in beside Ariel. The covers are warm and her scent weaves through me, soothing all my hurts. I will never forget the smell of her skin. Even when my nose burns with the stench of my own decay.
As soon as I lie down, she shifts in her sleep, her head finding my shoulder, her hand smoothing across my chest until it rests over my heart. I can feel the love in her touch, even when she is far away from me in whatever dream she’s dreaming. I hold her close, kiss the top of her head, and hope that her dream is a sweet one.
And then I lie staring at the ceiling, working out the details, trying to ignore the crushing pressure as my new heart learns how to break.
INTERMEZZO THREE
VERONA, 1304
Juliet
“My nurse is going to make Romeo an Ambassador,” I say again, knowing my fate depends on whether or not the friar believes this lie I’m not entirely sure is a lie. I did see something in my dreams. I saw Romeo bathed in golden light, filling with Ambassador magic. “She’s going to steal him from the Mercenaries.”
“Impossible.” But I hear him stop walking away. He stops, and I tremble. If he leaves, I will die in this hole. But not until I suffer for another day or two before dehydration claims my life. “How do you know about the Ambassadors?”
“Does it matter? I know, and I had a vision of what Nurse is planning.”
“Only the high Ambassadors have true visions of the future,” he says. “And you are not one of those, girl. You have been touched by magic, but—”
“My nurse is able to reach me. In my dreams.” I would swear I heard Nurse’s voice while I was sleeping, echoing through the skies of my nightmares. “She showed me what will come to pass.”
“And why would she do that?”
“To punish me.” Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s not, but there’s enough doubt in my mind to make it sound like I’m stating a fact. “She wants me to suffer. That’s why she sent me here.”
“You came to the tomb in the back of a cart. I witnessed it with my—”
“No, not here. Not the tomb. This time. I was in the future. I was an Ambassador. For more than seven hundred years.” I can feel the change in the air as I speak. He’s intrigued, finally wondering if I might be worth fishing from his trap. “Romeo and I did live on to become enemies. For centuries. And then you captured me and he defied you. He tried to spare me from torture, but he f
ailed, and somehow my nurse sent me here.”
“You’re lying,” he says, but his certainty is slipping.
“You said I was a bad liar. You should know I’m not lying now.” I pray my mix of fact and fiction is working to my advantage. “Nurse sent me here to die for refusing to renew my Ambassador vows, but I would rather live. I will kill for you, swear my allegiance, whatever it takes to survive to make her pay for giving Romeo a place in her world when he deserves nothing but pain.”
“Hm.” It’s almost a laugh, but it’s not. I don’t know what to make of it, so I remain silent, waiting until he speaks again. “If what you’ve said is true,” he says, his voice becoming clearer as he moves closer, “if your vision is sound and you are from the future, then Romeo is beyond our reach, safe in another time. Mercenary magic is bound by time and place. I’d thought it was the same for the Ambassadors, but … that’s neither here nor there.” He grunts as he leans down to whisper through the notch in the stone. “The sad truth is that I can’t send you into the future to fetch Romeo with your knife. So … what have you left to offer me? As sacrifice?”
“My father.” I ignore the lump that rises in my throat. “He isn’t as dear to me as Romeo was, but I love him.”
“Your father,” he repeats, unimpressed.
“I haven’t seen him in centuries. I want his arms around me more than anything else in the world.” The lump in my throat grows, becomes a fist that feels as though it will cut off the air to my lungs. “But I will rip him apart,” I choke. “If you will let me out.”
He’s quiet for what feels like forever. In the silence I have time to seriously consider my words. I am trapped in the dark in my own filth, with thirst and hunger and terror wrecking my mind. Would I kill to be free? Would I violate my belief that no good can come from murder? Any murder? Even the murder of the friar, a man who has done nothing but spread evil across the earth for hundreds of years?
No. I can’t. Ben was right. Killing won’t make anything better; it will only make me worse. But lies … I am at peace with lies. And I will tell as many of them as I must to escape this hell.
“You would like to become a Mercenary,” the friar says, his tone flat, emotionless, unreadable.
“No, I wouldn’t. But I will, if it’s the only way to have my revenge.”
He hums beneath his breath. “You would do that? You would fight the Ambassador that Romeo will become?”
I nod in the darkness, ball my hands into fists, and whisper, “Yes.”
“Very well,” he says after a moment. “I suppose your father will serve our purpose.”
I flinch as the rough scrape of stone on stone fills the air, vibrating the walls of what would have been my deathbed. The gray light of the tomb pricks at my eyes, the slightly less stale air of the mausoleum wafts over my face, and my weakened blood rushes with relief. Even the arms of the monster reaching in to pluck me from the darkness are better than the long, torturous death that awaited me.
And I will escape these arms. I will find a way.
“Are you ready?” The friar’s fingers dig into the bruised flesh at my hip. I try to pull away, but my knees buckle and I’m forced to lean my weight against him. I’m not strong enough to stand on my own. But I will be. Soon. He has to revive me—I couldn’t kill a gnat in my current state, let alone my father—and when he does, I will run, hide.
“I’m ready.” I turn my face toward the stairs leading up to the churchyard, desperate for a breath of truly fresh air.
“Then I hope that everything you’ve said is true,” the friar says with a sharp thrust of his arm.
Fire ignites in my belly and spreads with a ruthless intensity. My hands fly to my middle to feel the sticky heat of my own blood spilling through my fingers. I have a split second to realize what he’s done, and then I’m falling. I crumple to a heap of stinking skirts at his feet, the last of my hope burned away by the time I hit the floor.
He knew I was lying. He wins. Again. Always. Forever.
He kneels beside me. I close my eyes against his vile face. “If she sent you here, she will come for you,” he says. “Your nurse isn’t cruel. She’ll be wanting to give you another chance. But when she arrives, she will discover you dead and me waiting. Then I will find out if time is as easily traversed as you think, my child.”
I open my eyes, wanting to tell him he’s wrong, that Nurse doesn’t care what happens to me now that I’m no longer one of her slaves, but he’s already gone, moving swiftly through the mausoleum and up the stairs, out into the night. Or the morning. I don’t know which, and now I never will. I watch him go, watch his feet step out of sight, as I struggle to breathe past the agony spreading through my core.
This is it. After all the centuries, after all the struggle and sacrifice and lessons learned, and now—
She comes from the shadows on the far side of the tomb, emerging from behind the most ancient of my family’s sarcophagi, shuffling across the space between us with a quick glance over her shoulder to where the friar disappeared. Her cloak is pulled tight around her gray hair, and her face is paler than I remember, but I recognize the old woman immediately.
“Nurse,” I gasp.
“My sweet girl.” Her work-roughened hands find my face, brush the hair from my eyes. “There isn’t much time,” she whispers. “You must renew your vows. Let me save your soul a second time, Juliet.”
Not Nurse. The Ambassador inhabiting Nurse. She’s been here the entire time, watching the friar torment me the way she watched Romeo trick me the first time I was pulled from my tomb.
“No.” I bat her hand away with blood-slick fingers. “Sending me here hasn’t changed my decision.”
Her lips part in surprise. “I didn’t send you here. I swear I didn’t.”
I don’t respond. She’s as much of a liar as Friar Lawrence.
“I think perhaps the universe itself sent you, certainly a power greater than any Mercenary or Ambassador.” She leans close, brushing her lips across my forehead, making me shudder with disgust. “You are meant to walk this path, Juliet. You are meant to be something greater than a mortal girl living one mortal life. I am so happy I found you.”
“How?” I lick my lips, fighting to speak past the pain twisting through my gut. “How did you find me?”
“After you left Ariel’s body, the fabric of reality was altered. The places where you and Romeo touched the future and the past changed. I’m able to see the possibilities of our planet, keep track of time and space as it is altered by man’s decisions and by supernatural influence. There was a dramatic change in all versions of the world shortly after your final shift. It wasn’t difficult to see what caused those changes and, from there, to realize what I had to do to bring you back to your true place.”
“So it’s true. You’ve made Romeo an Ambassador.”
“You saw.…” She sighs. “I didn’t mean to reveal that to you. I meant only to send comforting thoughts while you slept.” She looks away, over her shoulder, as if checking to see if the friar is creeping back down the stairs, but I can feel her hiding from me. “But no. I haven’t. I’ve only given him a chance.”
“Why?”
She turns back, a strange glint in her eye. “Don’t you think people deserve a second chance?”
“Not him.”
She smiles. “I agree, but your fate and his are intertwined. I had to remove Romeo from the equation in order for your destiny to be fulfilled. If I hadn’t put him on a path to existing outside of time, you would never have become one of us again.”
“I will never be.… Never.”
“Juliet. Please …” Nurse takes my hand, casts a sad look down to where the blood soaks my dress. “You’re dying.”
“I was dying before,” I whisper, finding it harder to speak. “And then I woke up here. I’ll see where I wake up the next time.”
“There won’t—” She casts another nervous glance toward the entrance to the tomb. “It’s differen
t now. There won’t be a next time.”
I close my eyes, wishing she would go away, wishing the friar would come back and give her something real to worry about.
“Look at me!” She jostles my shoulder, sending a sharp stab of pain flashing through my stomach and into my spine. “I did this.”
“I thought … You said …”
“I didn’t send you here, but I changed things when I put Romeo on a different path.” She cups my chin and leans close, until I can feel her breath on my lips. “You were sent here to have another chance at life, and if I hadn’t interfered, you would have found it. You would have found a man to love and made a family. You would have died when you were sixty-three of an infection in the blood. I saw it all, the tragically short human life you would have lived if I hadn’t taken action.”
I shake my head. What is she saying? If that …
“Then … why …”
“In order for you to live that life, Romeo was also brought back and given happiness,” she says. “A long life with a woman he loved. A child. Five grandchildren. Twenty great-grandchildren, twelve of which he lived to see brought into this world. In that possible future he was nearly a hundred when he died peacefully. In his sleep.”
Her lip curls. “You clearly think an eternity of service to the Ambassadors is too good a fate for the likes of him. Can you imagine the alternative? All the blessings he would have reaped if I hadn’t stepped in? While you died without a chance to change the world for the better?” Her laughter is one of the harshest sounds I’ve ever heard. “I couldn’t allow that to happen.”
“So you … took my happiness away?” My eyes sting, but I’m too empty to cry. “To prevent Romeo from finding his?”
“No, my darling.” She strokes my hair like I’m a favorite pet. I wonder if that’s all I ever was to her. A pet. If I’d been anything more, she wouldn’t have played with my heart the way she has. “I haven’t taken anything away. I’ve given you a chance for so much more. Any girl can get married and have children. Not any girl can change the course of history, save the world, further the cause of love and light through the ages. You are special.”
