Immortal Beloved: Darkness Falls Part 9

"What in the world happened?" Asher asked. "Are you all okay?"

A frigid gust blew through the broken window, swirling with the overpowering smell of flower essences and herbal oils.

More people came: Charles, River, Anne.

I stood slowly. I had done this. I had caused this.

"What happened?!" River asked.

The three of us were silent. The old Nastasya would immediately blame Solis, for teaching me incorrectly, or Jess, for distracting me, or life in general, for not going my way. Which was clearly the path to choose here-this was a whole world of bad.

"It was me," I said, touching my puffy eye. "I truly don't know what happened. We were doing a healing spell. I thought I was doing it exactly right."

"You were," said Solis, standing up. He looked at River. "Jess went first, then Nastasya right after. I was there, watching and listening. She did it perfectly, and everything was fine until the spell was supposed to go into effect. Then all the books started... flying off the shelves."

"Like in The Exorcist," Brynne said unhelpfully.

"Except we don't believe in the devil," Charles said, examining all the wreckage.

"You used limitations?" River asked.

"Of course," I said.

Solis nodded. "She did-she set up all the proper limitations. I really have no idea how this happened." He gave me a thoughtful look, and my heart sank: Unless I'm hopelessly dark. The thought came to me instantly, fully formed, and seized my heart like a cold fist.

River came into the room, stepping over debris carefully. "So, normal spell, everything fine, then books fly off shelves, go everywhere, break everything."

I s.h.i.+vered and wrapped my arms around myself. "Yeah." Oddly, the person I felt like seeing was Reyn. I flashed on the feel of his arms holding me, how illogically safe I felt with him. I didn't know why I felt that way, but I did.

"I'll clean it up," I said, stating the obvious.

"I'll help," said Solis.

"Right now let's find a piece of wood to board up that window," said River.

"I can do that," Jess said.

I looked at the ruined room, felt my various b.u.mps and bruises, and thought that so far, the new year was kicking my a.s.s.

CHAPTER 12.

It took me eight hours to clean up the room, even with Solis's help. While we worked, he walked me through the steps of the spell again, and we both examined every bit of it to see where it had gone wrong. We still couldn't figure it out.

Unless the thought I'd had was true, that my magick is inherently dark, like my parents'. Unless I can't choose to not be dark.

Just a week ago, I'd felt so much more hopeful. I'd seen progress. Now I couldn't do anything right. A dark, heavy cloud of Tervness was hanging over my head, following me wherever I went. Every time I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror, my puffy, purpling eye reminded me that I couldn't be trusted to do a simple spell by myself.

When Reyn saw me, his eyebrows rose. "What does the other guy look like?"

I wanted to come back with something witty and brave and casual, but I couldn't think of a thing. In general my head felt fuzzy, as if I wasn't getting enough sleep. But I was. .h.i.tting the sack by nine thirty, just to make these awful days end earlier. I had no other symptoms except listlessness, a foggy brain, and a desire to spend all day, every day, in bed.

I went to cla.s.ses, though I refused to work any actual magick, and, tellingly, no one pushed me to try. I did my ch.o.r.es.

One night Reyn, Brynne, and I were on the cooking team. I found being with Reyn both comforting and tension-producing. It was exhausting.

In my attempts to see him as who he was now, I was noticing how other people acted around him. With surprise I realized that everyone seemed to like him and feel comfortable with him. I hadn't really seen that before. At first glance, he seemed bossy and abrupt, forbidding and humorless. I was coming to realize that he was just-really self-contained. Withdrawn, even. Quiet, wrestling with all his inner demons. I still didn't know why, specifically, he was here. What had brought him to River's? How long had he been here? What was he hoping to get out of being here?

The answers to these and other questions may or may not be revealed later on, in Eternity: The Ongoing Docudrama.

"Oh! Turn that song up," Brynne said, pointing to the small, old-fas.h.i.+oned radio on a kitchen shelf. I turned up the volume, and Brynne started dancing as she chopped garlic. She seemed to know the words to any song that came on, reminding me again of how unaware I was, how little I paid attention to things.

"Baby, you know you got it going on," Brynne sang, chopping in rhythm.

I smiled and looked up to see Reyn also smiling. We met eyes and Had a Moment; then I went back to work.

A few minutes later, Amy came in and perched cutely on a stool near where Reyn was cutting sausages to grill. "Can I help with anything?" she asked.

Reyn shook his head. "You're a guest."

I stirred the onions and garlic I was sauteing. I wished that it was just Reyn and me in the kitchen.

"Nastasya?"

It took a second to realize Amy was talking to me. I turned around.

"Is this your first time at River's?" she asked. "I was here ten years ago, and there was a completely different gang. But most people seem to come and go and then come back."

"No, it's my first time," I said. "Do you visit Anne here often?" Time to brush off the rusty ol' social skills. I had gathered that Amy was actually a nice person. It wasn't her fault that she'd fallen under the spell of the Golden Glory. Probably most women did, I thought wistfully.

Amy smiled. "I come here every so often, but I last saw Anne three years ago. Every once in a while our whole family gets together somewhere, spends a couple weeks catching up. Last time it was Prince Edward Island. So beautiful there."

"Your whole family gets together?" I detected amazement in Reyn's face, even though it was subtle.

"Yep." Amy picked a piece of lettuce from the salad bowl and ate it from her fingers.

"Mine does, too," said Brynne. "Every four or five years. My parents, all my siblings."

"Isn't it great?" Amy asked her. "I mean, crazy and hectic, but great."

I glanced at Reyn again and found him looking at me. We understood what the other was thinking: We were both orphans. Our families had wiped one another out. He shook his head, as bemused by that thought as I was.

"What about you, Reyn?" Amy asked. "Does your family get together?"

"No," he said. "It sounds nice." He put the last sausage on the platter, then went out into the awful weather to use the big grill outside.

"You?" Amy asked.

"No," I said. "My family died a long time ago." I dumped a ton of diced potatoes into the onions and stirred. These people were into their potatoes-you could never make enough.

"Oh." Amy looked taken aback.

"It was over four hundred years ago," I told her, and she looked surprised. "I can't even imagine what they would be like nowadays. I can't imagine how they would have changed, modernized through the years, you know?"

Reyn came back in, stamping snow off his feet.

"Yeah, I see," Amy said.

"They're kind of frozen in time for me," I said, and felt Reyn stiffen as he realized what I was talking about. I never blurt out info about my family, preferring instead to cover my pain with scathing retorts. But I felt beaten down these days, little bravado in store. So I was dragging their skeletons out into the sunlight, as River had suggested. "I can only picture them as they were in the fifteen hundreds. It's weird."

"Yeah, I can imagine," Amy said, looking uncomfortable.

"Has it been interesting, seeing your family change through the years?" I asked politely.

"Not really 'interesting,' " Amy said, absently picking another piece of lettuce out of the bowl. "It just seems normal, you know? Clothes change, hair changes, cool new things get invented-but it doesn't happen all at once. It's all gradual, so nothing seems sudden or shocking. Just normal life."

I'd never heard anyone describe the immortal experience as normal, so this was a whole new concept for me. I went back to pus.h.i.+ng potatoes and onions around the pan, making sure nothing burned, but inside my mind was a quilt of new thoughts. To me my life had always seemed like an unending disaster-one long series of awful experiences intermittently broken up by something good or fun, then descending into tragedy again. The tragedies were what I remembered, what dogged me. I'd never been strong enough or determined enough to kill myself, and I'd also never been together enough to see my life as a positive thing, a long line of opportunities, chances taken, people loved, if only for a while. Normal. What a freakish concept.

I ate dinner like a zombie, barely able to pay attention to what anyone was saying. So much to think about. So many new ways to see so many things.

When I went upstairs, I couldn't remember the lockdoor spell on my room.

Back when Nell had been roaming the place, Anne had taught me a basic lock-door spell so no one could leave ill-wishes inside. Nowadays I almost always used it, whether I was in my room or not, because I felt too vulnerable to leave my door unlocked. Not that anything could get to me here. But... you never know.

Now I was standing here, exhausted, overwhelmed by new concepts, and I couldn't get into my own room. When I tried to remember the spell, my head clouded over, as if full of a swarm of bees. I started and stopped several times, my hand freezing in midair as I tried to trace a sigil I could no longer visualize.

c.r.a.p. What was going on? I heard footsteps coming up the stairs. I didn't want to be found out here like an idiot, especially after my room-destroying event of the week before. Think, think, think. It suddenly came back to me in a flash, and I murmured the short spell and drew the appropriate sigils and runes as fast as I could.

I turned the doork.n.o.b and nipped inside, quickly closing the door behind me. I had cold sweat on my forehead. What was the matter with me? Shakily I recited the lockdoor spell again, then crossed the room to draw the insulated curtains against the cold black night. I turned the k.n.o.b on the small radiator, hearing the steam start to hiss through its curved pipes. I kicked off my shoes and my jeans and crawled beneath the covers. The sheets were freezing.

My head was pounding. I closed my eyes.

"Darling, how well you look." Incy's voice, warm and friendly, made my eyes pop open again. He was sitting in a sleek modern chair, white brocade and dark wood, in what looked like the living room of a hotel suite. I thought I recognized it-was it the Liberty Hotel in Boston? A heavy silver tray sat on the gla.s.s-topped coffee table in front of him. "Tea? No-you're getting enough tea these days. Coffee, then." He poured me a demita.s.se of espresso and dropped one cube of white sugar into it. "Remember in Russia? We drank hot tea through sugar cubes in our teeth?"

My hand, as though disembodied, reached out to take the china cup. I nodded. The Russian tea had been strong and bitter, explaining the custom of sipping it through a sugar cube. It had taken several tries before I'd quit making slurping sounds or had tea dribble down my chin.

"What are you doing here?" My voice sounded as though I were hearing it through tissue paper. I still felt hazy, foggy-headed.

Incy leaned back in the chair and crossed his legs, elegant in black Armani trousers and a custom purple silk s.h.i.+rt. "Come to see you, of course." He smiled and sipped his own coffee. "You see, I'm rather dependent on you."

"Why?" My throat tightened and I forced the coffee down. It left a heated trail and kicked up some acid in my stomach. Why was he here? How had he found me? I'd tried to disappear, thought I was safe at River's.

Innocencio shrugged and examined the oil painting over the side console. "I thought I'd just gotten used to you," he said slowly. "But actually, it's much more than that. You and I are soul mates, two sides of one coin. There can be no me without you." His face changed, darkening, and his eyes were glowing coals when he looked at me. "And there can be no you without me." His smile was beautifully cruel, and I s.h.i.+vered as if icy fingers were drumming down my spine. He was saying everything I was afraid of, everything I wanted to not be true.

"We're not soul mates, Incy," I said. I drank some coffee to show how unconcerned, unconvinced I was, and almost gagged on it. "We're not lovers. We were best friends for a long time. But I think... I need to take a break."

The room grew dark, as if suddenly covered by an eclipse. Incy's face was thrown into sharp relief, the room's small fireplace flickering ever-changing shadows across his symmetrical features. He got to his feet, looking at me, then threw his cup against the wall, where it smashed. Coffee ran down the yellow wallpaper like a bloodstain. My heart throbbed irregularly and I felt like I couldn't breathe.

"No, Nastasya." His voice was tightly controlled. "No, Nastasya. No, Sea." Sea had been my name before Nastasya. "No, Hope. No, Bev. No, Gudrun." He was scrolling through my ident.i.ties, going back in time, decades. "You see, Linn, Christiane, Prentice, Maarit-we belong together. You remember, Sarah? You remember when we met? And I was..."

"Louis."

"Yes. I was Louis to your Sarah. Then I was Claus to your Britta." He p.r.o.nounced it the German way: klows. "Then I was Piotr to your Maarit. And James to your Prentice. Then Laurent. Beck. Pavel. Sam. Michael. Sky. Remember when we were the Sea and the Sky, together in Polynesia? Now I'm Innocencio to your Nastasya. And you are. Not. Taking. A. Break. From. Me!" He ended with a roar, kicking over the table, swiping a crystal lamp off the sideboard. He stood right in front of me, chest heaving, eyes bloodshot, and he looked totally out of his mind, like a junkie, like- Like he was a junkie. Like he was addicted... to me.

It was a stunningly clear realization, one that I wish I'd had, say, eighty years before.

I got to my feet, trying to project strength. He had never hurt me in a hundred years. It was hard to believe he would physically harm me now. "We're not soul mates, Incy," I said, feeling my own anger finally igniting and squas.h.i.+ng my fear somewhat. "I've never thought that-I don't know why you would. And of course I can take a break-from you, from everything. I'm going to rest up, hang out for a while, and then maybe we can get together in Rio or something. In time for Carnaval." Throw him a bone-Carnaval was in February.

"I don't think so, Nasty," Incy said with a hard smile. "I don't enjoy being alone. And given the price of leaving me, I'm sure you'll change your mind."

He made a graceful gesture to the right, as if demonstrating what was behind door number one.

I glanced over, and my whole body jolted in shock. It took seconds to comprehend what I was actually seeing. There were... heads sitting in a thick pool of dull blood that was scudded over and clotting. It was hard to see the features as human-but I saw past the drooping gray skin, half-open eyes, and slack mouths, and recognized Boz's face, and Katy's. A pasty hand showed from behind the couch-their bodies were there. Incy had killed them.

And then Incy was holding a huge, curved blade, like a scimitar. Blood had dried on its edge. He was smiling as he walked toward me. The fire in the fireplace had gone out, and a thick, oily black smoke was coiling through the room. I could smell it. I could smell the suffocating, coppery scent of the congealing blood.

"Come here, Nas," Incy said softly. "Come here, darling."

I stood stock-still, frozen. I hated crazy Incy-wanted fun Incy back again. The smoke was choking me; I was wheezing, sucking in air, suffocating- And then Incy was standing over me, eyes glittering as he raised the scimitar. I couldn't make myself move, couldn't leap out of the way, couldn't attack him- And with a smile, he brought the blade down hard.

Then I was jackknifing up, bolting awake so fast that I tumbled out of bed to land on the floor, my shoulder and hipbone thudding painfully into the chilly wood. I lay there, still and quiet, as if moving would make Incy materialize right in my room.

I inhaled slowly, silently, then checked all four corners of my room. Same room at River's. Empty except for me. Window closed. Door closed and spell-locked? I couldn't remember. Inhaling again, I smelled only the lavender we put in the laundry water and a trace of the white vinegar we used on mirrors and windows. No blood. No choking black smoke.

The floor was cold. I pulled myself into a sitting position, flicked on my reading light, then collapsed again and leaned against my bed. My face and back were damp with clammy sweat. I brushed my hair off my face with a trembling hand.

What was wrong with me?

This had started at New Year's... at the New Year's circle. Laughably, I had committed myself to being good, making Thti magick. I mean, I had-oh my G.o.d. I had cast off darkness. What if-what if I had only released darkness, unleashed it? What if I had sent my darkness-which was considerable, given my family history-out into the world? Now it was coming back like a rabid dog, nipping at my heels, scaring me with threats of so much worse.

Then I had another bad thought. I crawled under my bed and used my fingernails to pry out a piece of loose floor molding. There was a small s.p.a.ce behind it, chipped out of the wall plaster. Reaching in, I grabbed a colorful silk scarf, all wadded up. I pulled it out and leaned against my bed again. Still feeling trembly, I unwrapped the object inside.

The ancient, burnished gold gleamed at me, warm in my hand. It never felt cold. It was half of the amulet that my mother had worn around her neck always. To find it, possess it, was why raiders had stormed my father's castle, killed everyone except me within. But they'd found only half of it. I still had the other half. I'd picked it out of the fire, wrapped it in a scarf and tied it around my neck so I could run with my hands free. It had burned through the scarf, burned its pattern into the skin on my neck, the design, the symbols, everything. That burn had never healed-just as the one Reyn had on his chest had never healed.

I'd kept this my whole life-it was the only thing that I had from my family, my childhood.

But it was a tarak-sin: the ancestral object that helped channel tremendous magick for my parents, the rulers of one of the eight great houses of immortals. Each of the houses has or has had its own tarak-sin. It didn't have to be an amulet-it could be almost anything. Some of them have been lost. I hadn't had a clue about any of that until I'd come to River's Edge. I'd also learned that everyone believed that the tarak-sin of the House of lfur had been lost forever.

I had no idea if this broken half still had power, could still magnify my own power. For 450 years, I'd kept it solely because it had belonged to my mother.

Now I held it in my hand, wondering if it was the cause of my darkness, my failures. It had channeled dark magick for centuries, for who knows how long. Was it intrinsically dark itself? Was my carrying it around one of the reasons-the main reason-my life had, for the most part, sucked?

It was the one thing I had of my mother's. The one thing I had from a life that had literally been wiped off the face of the earth. Of the several fortunes I'd gained and lost over hundreds of years, this secret thing had always been my greatest possession. And maybe the key to my eternal downfall. Maybe an inescapable source of evil.