Eternally Yours (11 page)

“I will conduct a complete sweep of this property,” said Ottavio. “Sometimes a fresh pair of eyes sees what others can’t.”

“I’ll help.” Anne looked concerned, as if already thinking of places something could be hidden, something that could affect any of us or spy on us. On me.

Solis was remaining silent, and I hated that he still wanted me gone. Then River nodded at Asher, as if in reply to a question, and Asher picked up a small wooden box from the end table next to the couch.

Solis looked up. “You know I disagree with this.”

River nodded gently. “I know. But I believe it’s for the best. Nastasya, come here, please.”

Asher held the box out to me, and I took it cautiously.

“This is yours,” he said. “We were waiting for the right time.”

I pressed the release of the lid. Inside, nestled on a bed of coarse salt, was… my mother’s amulet, repaired and whole and on a chain, exactly as it had been the night she died.

In wonder, I lost myself in it, the room around me fading as my fingers traced every detail. The half I’d always had was as familiar to me as a blade of grass; the half Reyn had given me was both new and dearly remembered. And in the middle, glowing and milky and translucent, was my moonstone, the moonstone I’d chosen blindly from a velvet bag last fall. The moonstone that had helped save my life that night in the warehouse.

The amulet was not as heavy as I remembered, but the last time I’d held it whole, I’d been ten years old. The ancient gold gleamed with fresh polishing, the runes and sigils still distinct. It was a living thing in my hand, warm and full of energy, like a bird.

With difficulty I looked away from it to search River’s
face. She was both watchful and loving, but I picked up on tension among the others. “It’s mine?” My voice was thin, almost childish.

“Of course,” River said. “It always has been.”

“Are you out of your mind?” Ottavio said, looking horrified.

I gave him a big grin, but inside I felt awash in emotion. This was the only thing I had from my original life, my family. I’d gotten used to having just the broken half. It had never occurred to me that someday it could be made whole again. Now I examined it, holding the chain, seeing the pendant twist slowly. In my head I heard my mother’s voice singing her song of power and magick-conjuring.

Would it work as well for me?

“What if—” I began, looking at River. “I mean—my parents were Terävä. The magick they made was Terävä. And this—”

“Will help you channel
your
magick,” River answered, “light or dark. We’ve worked powerful spells of cleansing and purifying on it, and tomorrow we’ll show you how to bind it more completely to yourself. It, in itself, will not make Terävä magick. Unless you want it to.”

More solemn faces. You could practically hear everyone thinking,
Let’s hope this isn’t a huge mistake, to give it back to her
.

I nodded. It was so much to take in—my mother’s amulet, whole again! I knew Asher had been repairing it, but at
this moment I realized that I hadn’t actually believed it could be repaired, that I truly would have my family’s tarak-sin, perfect and complete.

My eyes began to sting, and I knew that I was about to cry. Which I absolutely could not do in front of Ottavio.

“Thanks,” I managed to whisper, and then I ran out of the parlor and up the steps to my room, clutching my amulet to my chest.

Y
ou’d better move,” I snarled quietly, engaged in a fierce stare-down with a chicken. This one chicken, the devil-chicken, was hell-bent on hatching her clutch of eggs. Usually I didn’t even bother with her, not wanting to get my eyes pecked out. But today I was Lilja af Úlfur, possessor of the Iceland tarak-sin, and I was going to get these freaking eggs.

Or… um, maybe not. The cold, glittering stare in her beady eyes made me think that perhaps I needed to be Lilja, possessor of asbestos fireplace gloves that went up to my elbows, before I could really tackle this situation. Giving
her one last dirty look, I grabbed my basket and ducked out of the short door of the chicken coop.

“So, you have it.”

I stopped just short of running into Reyn, lurking right outside the coop. No human being should look that good this early in the morning. I myself was sporting my traditional cat-dragged-in look, but Reyn was beautifully rumpled, with a sheen of beard stubble that begged to be touched.

“What?” I wanted to climb him like a tree.

“Your amulet,” he said, falling into step as I headed toward the kitchen.

“Yes. It’s so… beautiful,” I said, still in awe. “I never thought I’d have it. I can’t believe—”
Oh, I can’t believe I’m gushing about it when it killed everyone in your family.

“I’m glad you have it,” Reyn said as he opened the kitchen door for me. “I’m glad it could be repaired.”

I stopped and looked up at him, reading the honesty in his strong, chiseled face. There passed between us an understanding: Reyn did not kill my family, though he was connected to it, and I did not kill his family, though I was connected to it. But neither he nor I had
caused
those tragedies. He and I were guilty merely of surviving.

What were we, to each other? What could we become? Maybe it was my hormones talking, but I thought I saw the same questions, the same wondering, in his eyes.

“Thank you,” I said inadequately.

“You’re letting in the cold air.” Daisuke stood in the doorway, looking at us. “And we need the eggs.”

“Sorry,” I mumbled, handing him the basket. How could I be alone with Reyn again? When? I wanted it as much as I was scared of it.

Everyone seemed subdued at breakfast, lost in their own thoughts. There were so many weighty matters going on: River’s brothers and their suspicions; wondering about the larger picture; wondering about me and my tarak-sin; our general safety…

“Hey!” I said, breaking the silence. “Did y’all know I can summon dead spirits with my amulet? It’s
awesome
!”

Sometimes one has to shake things up a bit.

“Here.” River pushed a shopping list at me. “Lorenz has to go to town to see the dentist, so you might as well join him and get these things for us.”

I nodded and took the list. “How’s Ott?”

“He’s lying down,” River said pointedly. “Having to be Heimliched upset him.”

“That bit of sausage was bad timing,” I agreed.

“Please don’t forget the whole-wheat pastry flour,” she said.

West Lowing, Massachusetts, is a small town with one main street, imaginatively called Main Street. Five weeks ago I’d gone there every day to work at MacIntyre’s Drugs.
Then I’d gotten fired, twice. I hadn’t been there since I got back from Boston.

“Okay,” said Lorenz as I parked the car. “I’ll be back in about half an hour. I hope.” His long-fingered, elegant hand rubbed his cheek as if it ached.

“Let’s hear it for modern dentistry, eh?” I said, and he grimaced. Actually, as much as people dislike going to the dentist now, try doing it two hundred years ago, when having a cavity meant some quack knocking it out with a chisel and hammer in the market square. With no anesthetic.

That’s the kind of thing that makes me crazy when immortals (or even regular people) gripe about missing the good old days and how much more civilized things used to be. I’m like, civilized? Like before indoor plumbing? Before novocaine? Before bug spray? Please.

The one grocery store, Pitson’s, was actually pretty well stocked. We grew most of our own food at River’s Edge, but we hadn’t gotten around to grinding our own flour yet or making our own baggies. I guess River was just slacking off.

My basket had four smooth wheels and didn’t list severely to either side, so, score. Up and down the aisles I went, crossing things off my list, feeling productive. In one corner of the cart I stacked an assortment of contraband items to squirrel away in my room: Pop-Tarts, Twizzlers, some Fudge Grahams, a six-pack of Coke for medicinal purposes. Sighing,
I thought longingly back to Coke’s early years, when it had trace amounts of cocaine in it. Talk about a pick-me-up.

After checking out, I put the groceries in the car, then leaned against it to wait for Lorenz. It wasn’t too bad today, weatherwise, and with the sun shining brightly, I could pretend that spring was on its way.

What this town needed was a cute coffee shop. One girl’s opinion. I had no idea when Lorenz would be done, and I would have killed for a nice, hot latte right then. The only time I’d had coffee with Dray, we’d had to go to a garishly lit diner way down the street.

Dray. One of the two nonimmortals I’d become acquaintances with here. She and my other sort-of friend, Meriwether MacIntyre, were high schoolers and about 180 degrees from each other. But something had drawn me to each of them—and then I’d ruined both friendships, of course. Because that’s what I do.

Come on, Lorenz, I thought, starting to feel chilly. I didn’t want to just sit in the car. Maybe I should go check out Early’s, the general store next to Pitson’s. I could stock up on some Now and Laters. Then I happened to glance across the street, at the row of run-down, empty buildings there.

West Lowing had once been four times as large and much more bustling. When the local mill had shut down in the late seventies, the town had lost more than ten thousand jobs. It wasn’t exactly a ghost town yet, but apparently it was too small to support, say, one freaking coffee shop.
Nowadays Main Street looked like a ratty patchwork quilt, with the few remaining businesses popping up between abandoned buildings and empty lots.

Abandoned buildings like these, right here. Crossing the street, I saw that what looked like four separate shops were really part of one larger structure. They looked individual on the first floor, but the second floor was more unified in design. A weather-beaten sign hanging by one nail said
APTS. FOR RENT
with a phone number.

The shops had wide bay windows in the front and inset doors—a style popular back in the thirties. Small, hexagonal blue tiles spelled out
SCHWALBACH’S
in one entryway. Pressing my face to the glass, I saw a large empty room with the same kind of pressed-tin ceiling as in MacIntyre’s Drugs, and tall, round columns supporting the roof. Chunks of the walls had fallen in, and there was water damage beneath one broken window. Someone had tagged one of the walls with graffiti.

“What are you doing?” Lorenz’s voice startled me, and he smiled lopsidedly when I wheeled to face him.

“Waiting for you,” I said. “How was the dentist?”

He made a so-so gesture with one hand and cupped the other around his swollen cheek. “I need to get a prescription.”

“Okay. I’ll wait at the car.”

Lorenz grinned at my too casual tone.
“Bawk, bawk, bawk.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Fine. I’ll go with, shall I?”

Bigger grin, on only one side, because the novocaine hadn’t worn off yet.

So my pride—and it’s always good to be bullied into something by one’s pride, isn’t it?—made me march across the street and push open the door to MacIntyre’s. The last time I’d been in there, Old Mac, the owner, had fired me for the second time. The time before that, I’d been shouting awful, hurtful things at him, with Meriwether standing there looking like I’d punched her in the stomach. That was when I’d been fired the first time. And I’m not saying I was jonesing to have my promising and glamorous career as a stock girl back, but it had been humiliating, and I’d felt like a failure.

Inside, Lorenz headed toward the back, where Old Mac filled prescriptions. No one was minding the front counter. All the cute posters Meriwether and I had made had been taken down. I wanted to stay put and be able to leap through the door should Old Mac come near me, but disgust at my total weenieness reared its judgmental head, and I forced myself at imaginary gunpoint to actually look for Meriwether, see if she hated my guts.

I found her a couple aisles over, unpacking one of the large blue plastic bins that stock came in. She sat on the small stool I used to sit on, seeming in her own world as she took boxes of nasal spray from the bin and pushed them into place on the shelf.

For a moment I stood and watched her as she moved
methodically but without thought. Her hair was a pale ash-brown color, and again I was struck by how her hair, her skin, and her eyes all seemed so much the same tone as to make her virtually colorless. At first glance, one might not even notice her. But now that I knew her, she seemed lovely, in a quiet, old-fashioned way.

Something made her look up, perhaps just me being all creeper at the end of the aisle. When she saw me, her eyes widened and her mouth opened, but no words came out.

What should I say? One gets so tired of apologizing for being an insensitive ass, doesn’t one?

“Hey,” she said, and stood up.

“Hey” was my witty riposte.

“I haven’t seen you in ages.” She gave a slight smile. “Thought you’d started shopping in Walgreens or something.”

“Heaven forbid,” I said, and she smiled wider. “No—I was… sick for a while, and then I just didn’t need to come to town.”

“I’m glad to see you.” Her simple statement undid me, and with huge relief I hurried to her, surprising both of us with a hug.

“I’m glad to see you, too,” I said. During that awful night with Incy, I’d thought of Meriwether and Dray and realized I would never know what happened to them, wouldn’t see how they turned out, because Incy was going to kill me. Seeing Meriwether today made me extra glad he hadn’t. “Anyway. How have things been?” I tilted my head toward the back of the store.

After a fast, instinctive glance to see if her dad was nearby, Meriwether said, “Well, since that day—he seems like he’s trying to be… less hard, you know? Like he’s trying to mellow out a little. I mean, he’s been sadder but hasn’t been yelling as much.”

“I’m so sorry for the stuff I said,” I told her. “My mouth never waits for my brain to catch up.”

She nodded. “We were both—shocked. But I think what you said—about my mom—maybe made us both think a bit. Like, after my mom and my brother died, Dad had gotten rid of every single picture of them that we had around the house. Like if we couldn’t see them, they hadn’t died or something. But after that day, a couple days later, I saw that he had put one of the pictures back on the wall in the kitchen. One of the four of us.”