Immortal Beloved

by Cate Tiernan

  “Ah.” I nodded, opened my eyes wider, and finished my drink.

  The bartender wordlessly slid another one toward me, and I nodded my thanks and pushed a ten her way.

  “Kim!” Bea said, struck by a thought. “Show Nastasya your thing!”

  Whuh-huh? I thought.

  “Oh, that.” Kim looked modestly unsure. “It’s just a party trick, really.”

  “No, no, do it,” Bea said, sipping from the tiny straw in her drink. “It’s so cool.” She turned to me. “Kim has created this thing, and it’s divine. Kim, you have to show her. And look—there’s Leo, and Justin. And Susie. They’d love to see it!”

  “Oh, well, if you insist.” Kim blushed beautifully and slid off her stool. Bea ran over and started gathering people, only immortals, none of whom I knew.

  “Come on!” said Bea, motioning us toward the back of the bar.

  She led about nine of us through a dark back hall to a rickety staircase that led up. And up. And up. We climbed four flights of stairs, and then Bea pushed open a black metal door that led outside to the roof of the building, smelling of cold tar and wood smoke and cooking scents from the restaurant next door.

  Most of the buildings in this area were six stories or less, since that had been the limit of how high a roof cistern could pump water by gravity, back when they were being built. There were still some cisterns to be seen, rusted metal standing primly on three supports, their small, broken ladders hanging to one side.

  “Okay, now,” said Bea. “This is so cool. But all of you have to put down your drinks and smokes. Is nine people enough?” she asked Kim.

  “Should be. Can we get into a circle and hold hands?” Kim held out her hands.

  We were going to make magick. I felt a tingle of mingled dread and excitement. I hadn’t been in a circle for—about two hundred years? I avoided “big” magick, and most of my friends were too lazy to learn all the stuff necessary to make it work. The few times I’d tried anything more than a minor spell, I’d almost always had a bad reaction, including barfing, headaches, and fainting.… That reveal spell I’d done to find River’s Edge had been the first even tiny one I’d done in ages. I was reluctant to try again, but everyone around me seemed to have no hesitation, and I’d feel stupid if I backed out now. Maybe I should get over my anti-big-magick prejudice. Maybe it would be better this time. Maybe I would be better at it now. I nodded, feeling reckless and determined, and I cheered up. This was just what I needed. This was exactly what I couldn’t get at River’s Edge.

  I stepped up and took one of Bea’s hands and one of Susie’s. We all grinned at each other, and Bea squeezed my hand. I felt interested and excited and lucky to be there.

  “Okay, you all know how to lend me your power,” Kim said, and we nodded. “Wait till I ask for it, then say the words. But first I have to set things up.”

  She took several deep breaths and closed her eyes. For a minute everything was quiet, the only sounds being people talking and shouting, five stories down. Cars honking in the distance. Faint music. A couple yelling in the next building over. But up here it was still, serene. I slowed my breathing and closed my eyes. Helgar, when she’d gotten over the mystery of my parents, had described our magick as having a black snake coiled up inside you, and when you say the right words, its power is released through your mouth. Gross imagery aside, that was still how I thought of it.

  Now I concentrated on gathering my power. It wasn’t simple, like clenching muscles. It was more a focused concentration, like in yoga or meditation. Both of which had always bored me to tears.

  I heard Kim start to sing, and her words were as ancient and dark as the few I knew, but from a different root language, maybe a Romance language. I felt a prickling in my chest and focused on breathing in slowly and out slowly, one, two, three, four. Kim sang, and her spell began to weave itself around us, interlacing through our hands, joining us together. My hands grew warm from Bea’s magick on one side and Susie’s on the other, and my chest began to feel tight. I always hated this part, when I felt I couldn’t draw enough breath, and my head felt as if it might explode, and I was afraid if I screamed for help, nothing would come out. But it always passed, so I kept a short rein on my panic and focused on breathing. I felt our power growing, felt the magick coming to us the way insects come out of wood to escape fire.

  I recognized Kim’s words now: She was calling on our power. Quietly I sang, “Gefta, ala, minn karovter. Pav minn gefta, hilgora silder.” I sang the words several times, not knowing their actual translation. They had been taught to me long ago as a way to give my power to a spell-maker. I’d used them only a few times, but once learned they were impossible to forget.

  Minutes later I heard someone gasp. My eyes popped open. There, silhouetted against the night sky, was Kim, smiling grandly, her arms outstretched.

  Susie laughed and clapped her hands, dropping mine, which felt burning hot.

  There were other whispered words of praise and admiration. Kim’s party trick was truly stunning: Her neck and shoulders were covered with songbirds, arranged according to color. Goldfinches made a bright yellow outline, soft gray titmice lined her arms, wrens made a feathery brown cape along her shoulders. The air was crackling and alive with magick, the birds holding perfectly still, blinking slowly, warblers, kingbirds, orioles—they made an intricate, precious pattern, full of energy and life and small, quickly beating hearts.

  It was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen, but I couldn’t help wondering what on earth had possessed her to even try this. To think of it. What was the point? Yeah, we all have a lot of time on our hands, but…

  “Isn’t it incredible?” Bea whispered, putting her hand on my shoulder. “I just think it’s amazing.”

  “Yes, it’s something, all right.” I couldn’t look away—so many pairs of black, shiny eyes looking dully off into the distance, as if they were drugged. My stomach twisted, and I was suddenly so sorry that I was here, that I had agreed to be part of this. Another stupid wrong turn.

  “Thank you, thank you,” said Kim, making a tiny curtsey. “But I can’t keep it up any longer, so—” She breathed out and said a few words that released the birds from her spell. I waited for them to shake their heads, come to themselves, and fly off, bewildered, into the night.

  But as the first few of us headed for the stairs, I saw the birds close their eyes, leaning their small, smooth heads to one side. Then one by one, they toppled off of Kim’s back, falling silently to the roof. Dead.

  “Whoa,” said Harry. “They’re kind of single-use birds, eh?”

  People laughed, and Kim shrugged gracefully. “It does do a number on them.” They headed to the door, and soon I was left alone on the roof of this Boston bar, with a splitting headache, a bad taste in my mouth, and my feet surrounded by a hundred vibrant, lovely songbirds, their soft feathered bodies already growing cold.

  CHAPTER 9

  That night the dreams came again.

  I left Clancy’s right after Kim’s spell. I was the only one who’d minded it, the only one whose drinks curdled in her stomach at the thought of the tarred roof upstairs littered with bright bits of dead fluff. Plus, what with the shocking headache and the usual nausea, I’d begged off, leaving Beatrice, Kim, and the others looking at me with bemused expressions. It had been about midnight, and I’d gone back to my hotel, feeling unclean.

  I’d worried about not being able to sleep, but exhaustion and worry hammered me into a deep unconsciousness that sucked me down, down into the black horror of my childhood, back to the night my life first changed.

  A big shaking feeling woke me, and I glanced across at my older sister, Eydís, asleep in the bed we shared. Had it been a peal of thunder? I loved storms. I looked at the narrow window, sealed with small, thick panes of real glass. Light flickered outside. Lightning? More like fire?

  The sound came again, a huge, hollow boom that shook our bed. I saw Eydís blink sleepily, and in the next mo
ment, the door to our room flung open. Our mother stood there, her eyes wide, long golden hair flowing down her back from beneath the small linen cap she slept in.

  “Móðir?” I said.

  “Quick!” she said, throwing shawls at us. “Get up! Put on your shoes! Fast, now!”

  “What’s happening, Móðir?” Eydís asked.

  “No time for questions! Hurry!”

  I felt the next boom in my ears as I pushed my feet into my winter slippers, made of elk hide and lined with rabbit fur. It was freezing in our room; the fire had died down, and the stone walls were skimmed with lacy frost.

  In the corridor we met my older brother, Sigmundur, who at fifteen was as tall as my father. He held my little brother, Háakon, by one hand. Tinna, my oldest sister, was already wrapped in a heavy woolen shawl, her long yellow braids falling over her shoulders.

  “Come, children, quick!” My mother whirled and flew down the wide main staircase with us so close behind her that her hair whipped into our faces.

  Shouting and pounding footsteps greeted us as we reached the first floor, and there we saw Faðir’s men, armed with swords and bows, wearing heavy leather armor. We pressed back against a stone wall as they ran past, shouting orders. In a single column, they rushed down the narrow back stairs, which curved downward in a counterclockwise spiral. Sigmundur had demonstrated to me and Háakon the brilliance of its design—if you were heading downstairs, defending the castle, your right arm with its sword had plenty of room to cut down invaders. If you were an invader heading up, your sword arm had no room, and you were forced into an unnatural fighting stance.

  And again the huge boom, the shaking. Dust from the stones above our heads trickled down, making me sneeze.

  “Móðir, what’s happening?” Seven-year-old Háakon had been ill for the last two weeks with chills and fever. It had left him thin and pale, with blue circles under his eyes.

  “The outer wall has been breached,” my mother said tightly, herding us to my father’s study. “Northern raiders.”

  Eydís and I looked at each other, eyes wide. The thundering noise came again, and Tinna grasped my hand. “A battering ram,” she said under her breath.

  As we raced down the hallway, my mother knocked the torches from their iron wall sconces. The sticks hit the ground and sputtered out in a shower of sparks, leaving darkness behind us.

  We reached my father’s study. Inside, my mother turned the large brass key in the door’s lock, and then she and Sigmundur put the heavy wooden beam across the door, resting it in its brackets. My sisters and Háakon and I huddled by the fireplace as our mother went to Faðir’s big wooden cupboard and unlocked it with quick, trembling fingers. As soon as the doors were open, Sigmundur strode forward and plucked the largest sword from its stand. It was several inches taller than I was, straight and sharpened on both edges, with a simple wooden stock wrapped in thin strips of leather.

  My mother looked at the weapons for a moment, then grabbed one for Tinna. My sister’s arms bent under its weight. Eydís was next—at twelve, she’d had six years of weapons classes, but usually we used smaller daggers that we pretended were swords. I was ten, and I held out my hands. After a moment of hesitation, my mother gave me a short sword, maybe sixteen inches long. I grasped it in both hands, unable to comprehend what was happening. Even Háakon got a dagger, which he regarded with round eyes.

  “Where’s Faðir?” Sigmundur asked, hurrying to the window and peering out its narrow slit.

  “Downstairs with the men.”

  “Will you have a sword, Móðir?” Háakon asked, still admiring his dagger.

  “I have something more powerful.”

  Móðir felt beneath the neck of her nightgown and pulled out her heavy amulet, the one I loved to look at. I’d sat on her lap and held it in my hands, studying it, but she never took it off, never let me try it on. It was round, almost as wide as the back of my hand, with a flat, translucent, milky stone in the middle, about two inches wide. All around the stone were carved symbols. Some were our alphabet, runes, that I recognized, but some I didn’t know. I’d asked her what it was made of, and she’d said, “Gold. Gold and power.”

  Now she took the amulet in her two hands, closing them around it. As another boom shook the room, she closed her eyes and started to sing.

  I woke up gasping, icy sweat running down my face. The back of my neck burned, and I tore off the thin scarf I slept in, running my fingers over the puckered skin.

  I hadn’t had that dream in a long time. I shook my head, still panting, then stood on trembling legs and went to the bathroom, where I turned on the tap and splashed water on my face. It hadn’t been a dream, of course, but a memory. The memory of my mother trying to save our lives that night. She hadn’t known, there’d been no way for her to tell that in gathering us all into my father’s study, she’d actually herded us toward our own deaths.

  Except me.

  Still breathing hard, I patted some cold water on my neck, then retied my scarf. In the room I drew the heavy hotel curtains and saw that the sun was coming up—I’d slept about six hours. Once I was breathing more normally, I got dressed and used the hotel’s computer to find used-car lots.

  Three hours later, I crossed my arms over my chest, feeling the chilly fingers of autumn creeping into the car—the used, beat-up brown hatchback that I’d bought this morning in an anonymous lot outside Boston. The engine was off, and so was the heater, and a deep shiver started in my stomach and made my entire body tense. Though the sun was shining through high, wispy clouds, it was still barely forty degrees.

  I didn’t want to get out of the car.

  I’d hated what Kim had done with magick last night. Magick meant death and pain. Pursuing magick was pursuing power, and if you have power, someone will want to take it from you. Someone will go to great lengths to take it from you. I hated that Incy had called about a million people, looking for me, telling them to look out for me. More than ever, I wanted to be away from him, from all of them.

  Then I’d had the memory. I tried hard never to think of that night, and for the most part I was surprisingly successful. I hadn’t dreamed about it in decades. A week ago, all my feelings and memories had been safely wrapped in layers of cotton wool, insulated from inspection. Now my shell had cracked, and pain was leaking out. I laughed drily—was this how Eve had felt when she tasted the apple? That she suddenly saw things she didn’t want to see?

  I swallowed, my throat feeling tight. Here I was. I had nowhere else to go. Being around my kind in Boston had been a disaster. The thought of going back to England filled me with revulsion. Worse than revulsion. Fear again. Dread.

  Really, what choice did I have? I’d hit a wall. After more than four hundred years of drifting along, I suddenly had no idea who I was or what to do with myself. I’d changed names countless times but had always felt like the me I was presenting on the outside. Now I was feeling like the me I’d left behind so long ago, and the thought was making hysteria rise in my throat. Now I felt like a brittle casing around something dried up, blackened, and dead.

  Ten years ago—five years ago—I would have been envious of Kim’s spell, impressed, almost wishing I knew enough magick to do it myself. What had changed in me? Who was I becoming?

  I jumped at Solis’s gentle tap on my window. I was ashamed, humiliated to come crawling back, such a loser that I had nowhere to go, such a mess that I had to ask for help from strangers. I tried to swallow again and opened the door, feeling extremely old as I climbed out of the car. It was much worse now than the first time I’d come. It was mortifying to be back here, and so quickly. But I just… didn’t know what else to do.

  Solis nodded at me, his eyes watching as I scowled at the ground, scraping dried leaves around with the toe of my boot. He nodded again and touched my arm. “This way,” he said, and started walking.

  I followed him to a vine-covered stone wall behind the big barn. A wooden door, taller than me, was almost hidd
en beneath the ivy, and Solis opened it and gestured me inside. I almost groaned when I saw the neat rows of raised vegetable beds, the cold frames, the greenhouse. I reexamined my wood-chipper suicide idea and again reluctantly dismissed it.

  Several people were working in the garden. I refused to look at them, afraid of seeing the Viking lord or, worse, Nell, all friendly, insincere treacle. I was also not looking forward to running into River—no doubt she would be understanding and generous, which would make me practically hate her.

  Solis leaned down and tugged on some thick green leaves. A turnip popped out of the dark earth, and I almost gagged. I hate, hate, hate turnips. Once you’ve gone through a couple of famines where all there is to eat are turnips and lentils, you never want to see either one again.

  “Plants get their nourishment from the earth,” said Solis, as though he were speaking to a simpleton. I was silent, the only response coming to me being No freaking duh.

  “They take what minerals they need,” he went on, “extracting and processing them with their roots and leaves so they can grow and seed and repeat the cycle. But they can’t grow in darkness, yes? They need sunlight, the energy of the sun also.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from screaming. Now he would talk about recycling and composting and taking care of Mother Earth. I really, truly, no kidding this time, wanted to die.

  “Terävä are like plants,” he said, surprising me. My eyes opened and I glanced quickly at him. Most immortals avoided talking about Terävä, the dark and the light. Helgar had been one of the few I’d ever heard say the name out loud. “They make their magick by taking energy, life, from things around them. Just like plants, which can deplete the soil they grow in, making it barren and unable to support life, Terävä deplete the life force of everything around them. That’s why things die when Terävä make magick. As I’m sure you’ve noticed.”