Eternally Yours (14 page)

River hadn’t said anything, and I looked up. She sat next to me, wearing her patient face.

“What?” I said.

“I don’t want you to go,” she said.

Until that moment, I hadn’t realized that the idea had continued to slowly build inside me, even before Daniel offered to pay me to leave. But yes, in one bright insight I saw that it
would be far better for me to leave here, to quit drawing negative attention to this place of healing and respite. I should leave; I should take my amulet and—

Then I realized what she had done: read my face. This time before the thought was even
on
my face.

“God
damn
it,” I said, and she laughed. “You’re just
creepy
now.”

“I keep telling you: Your face is a map,” she said, holding up her hands. “Ooh, we should have poker night, and with high stakes.”

“Oh, ha ha,” I said. I leaned over and turned the knob on my radiator to take the chill off the room. I did want to leave and knew she would talk me out of it. Time to change the subject. “So. You have to have all the windows replaced.”

River nodded, looking serious again. “It was truly strange. It was… scary. We had raised so much good power, and I’d really hoped to get some answers. I want to know who the master is that Innocencio mentioned. I want to know who was controlling him.”

I fiddled with the ends of my scarf. “It’s because of me. If I weren’t here, this wouldn’t be happening.”

“I don’t know that,” River insisted. “I have no idea why our circle went wrong—we have to figure that out. But one thing I do know is that… you’re not really strong enough to be out in the world on your own.” Her voice was gentle.

I wanted to disagree with her, so wanted to be a strong, together person who wouldn’t be a liability, who could be
trusted to set off into the world with only good things ahead. But with humbling honesty I had to admit that River was right—I wasn’t strong enough to be out in the world by myself. I wasn’t solid enough to be able to fight darkness and resist temptation.

“Whatever,” I muttered, and she patted my knee, satisfied.

“I do have a suggestion,” she said.

If it was another meditation circle, I was going to scream.

“I suggest that you find a larger project to occupy yourself with,” she said. “I know you’re studying, and that’s good. But I’ve found it’s also good to have a larger focus, to work toward something outside yourself.”

I frowned. “Like what? Macramé?”

“No. Bigger. Something like…” River looked thoughtful. “Training a new horse? We could get one that’s just for you. Or… the horse barn needs painting. We have ladders and everything. You’d need to scrape it first. Or we could give you your own plot of land, for whatever kind of garden you wanted.” She seemed to warm up to this idea. “Like an old-fashioned herb garden, with knots made of boxwood! We could put a fountain in the middle. By the time it’s ready for planting, it’ll be warm enough. That could be really fun.”

I was trying not to stick my fingers down my throat at these suggestions. River was only trying to help.

“Okay, well, think about it,” she said, standing up. “But in summary: leaving, no; project, yes. Right?”

“Could you write that down for me?”

Smiling, she leaned over and kissed my cheek. “I’ll tattoo it on your butt while you sleep.”

“I wouldn’t be able to see that!” I called as she slipped out my door. I heard one final chuckle as the door closed, and then I was left alone with my thoughts.

And I’d forgotten to get her to speculate about what was going on between Reyn and Joshua.

T
here are books written about the known history of immortals. Every once in a while one makes it into some rare book auction, where it’s treated as a fascinating work of fiction. It’s common knowledge that quite a few books are in hidden libraries in some of the oldest monasteries around the world. The scuttlebutt is that the monks know it’s all true, but are keeping mum until they figure out how we fit in with God and the hereafter and salvation and whatnot. We’re, like, keep us posted.

Over the centuries, I’d seen books written by immortals. I mean, of course, there are many immortals who are writing
current bestsellers and cookbooks and children’s books, etc. (No, I’m not giving up names.) (Though you would no doubt recognize them.) But I mean books
about
immortals. I myself have never actually read one written by an immortal. Part of the whole keep-my-head-in-the-sand plan that I’ve clung to for so long.

But no more! New Alert Nastasya was hunkered down in the workroom this morning, poring over a weighty tome called
The Hause of Morcroft
. It was from 1679, badly typeset, and beautifully bound in embossed leather once accented with gold leaf. I’d been wading through the text, wishing that the quaint custom of standardized spelling had caught on hundreds of years before it did.

After I’d skimmed the boring and obsessive history of the illustrious Morcrofts (one of whom I’d actually met in the late seventeen hundreds—total yawner), the book got more interesting and branched into a more general history of immortals. This guy, Sir Thomas Morcroft, claimed to trace his family back almost two thousand years, but of course the earliest records were oral histories handed down for centuries. If you’ve ever played a game of telephone, you’ll understand my skepticism at believing that these tales even remotely resembled the truth. But Thomas included many of his dealings with other immortals and recounted what he knew of certain families or individuals. He’d tried to be a true historian, and it was interesting. If dense.

I wondered how far back my own history had gone, how
much my parents had known about their pasts. My father had had a library—a rarity at the time but appropriate for the local king. All the books had been burned to ashes, of course, in the fire set by Erik the Bloodletter. Had any of the books been our family’s saga? Or my father’s own diary? If only there were some way, some other source to find out where my family had come from, what they had done.

When my head started aching (so far, seven different spellings for the word
chronicle
), I put a candy wrapper in place as a bookmark and turned my attention to a book about crystals.

Though my interest in crystals and gems is most heightened when they’re set into gold and worn on my person as decoration, they
are
intriguing in and of themselves. I mean, this planet is basically made of dirt and water. Yet all over the world, physical events have changed some of the dirt into stunning crystalline formations in every possible color. Very early on, humankind attached special importance and value to these unusual rocks. And now, knowledge and interest in them can easily fill years or decades of study.

Which I, you know, was not willing to sign up for. But I was perfectly happy to flip through some books, look at the pretty pictures, and brush up on the most pertinent info.

Take salt, for example. From the earliest of times, salt has been considered sacred for a multitude of—

The workroom door opened, but I was busily making notes and wanted to keep going long enough for whoever it
was to see me busily making notes. Then I looked up, ready to enjoy the virtuous feeling of being found studying
on my own
, only to see… Joshua. He seemed more rested and was wearing clean clothes, his hair still wet from a shower. He still didn’t look civilized. Like someone else I know.

He left the door open behind him, his marbled hazel eyes taking in me, the room, the boarded-up windows. Reyn always did that, too—scoped any room he was in. It had taken me a while to realize why: He was unable to
not
plan escape routes. In case a rival horde sprang on him with no warning. Here in modern-day western Massachusetts.

“What do you want?” I said, launching the first sally.

“Asher said I could look through some of his books.” Joshua’s voice was low and even, not as raspy and ruined as Jess’s, but not even close to the modulated, sophisticated tones of his brothers.

I waved a hand at the low bookcases framing the window seats. “Wear yourself out.”

He moved the way Reyn did, with controlled animal grace and implied power. I had personally seen Reyn in action as a marauder, hundreds of years ago—he’d been terrifying, bloodthirsty, violent. He and his clan had been the scourge of the northern countries for several of my lifetimes, until I finally moved far enough south, out of their range. It was still odd for me to see him as the Reyn of today, the puppy-totin’, cow-milkin’, um, sword instructor, kissing master, and heart-stealer that I’d gotten to know a bit.

Now here was Joshua, clearly not a northern raider, not a Viking, but with all the Viking berserker qualities I recognized. Here because of me.

“I meant, what do you want with
me
?” I spoke to his broad back, the maroon henley sweater stretching over his shoulders as he knelt to see a lower shelf. He pulled a thick book out of the shelves, flipped through a few pages, and then came to sit at my table in a chair opposite me.

“Really?” I said. “You’re going to sit there and pretend to read, right across from me, and I’m not going to suspect a thing, right? Are you serious?”

His quiet gaze would have gotten to me if my skin wasn’t as thick as a rhino’s. “River said you bluffed a lot.”

“What? No, she didn’t! I’m not—I don’t bluff!” Of course, I bluffed all the time, but I couldn’t believe River was telling everyone.

“Ottavio said you were yappy and annoying, like a Chihuahua.”

I saw red. For one thing, Chihuahuas are awfully cute, and have been totally maligned in modern culture, in my opinion. “Well, Ottavio’s a pompous windbag, so there you go. And don’t even start with Daniel’s pearls of wisdom.”

Joshua opened Asher’s book on herbal spells and began to read. I didn’t for one second think he was truly here to read, but I took a deep breath and focused on the page about rubies while I regrouped. We both looked up when Brynne passed the doorway lugging a vacuum cleaner, but only I
saw her lean back in the doorway and make an OMG face, shaking one hand as if Joshua was
too
hot. Then she pressed her hand to her forehead and pretended to swoon out of my sight. Daniel was definitely a thing of the past, but I had no idea what she saw in Joshua. His major qualities were the ones I found the least attractive in Reyn.

Speaking of which. “So how do you know Reyn?” I asked.

The colors of his eyes were like… oil on water, shifting and unfixed, green and brown and a deep shade of gray blue. Unnerving and not nearly as compelling as, say, eyes that were a deep golden color, the gold of buried treasure, of my amulet itself.

“How do
you
know him?” he countered, like a second grader.

“His father killed my family and burned our castle down,” I said evenly. “My mother killed his brother and then caused the death of his father, a couple brothers, and seven of their men. Your turn.”

Surprise flickered in his eyes, and he looked at me more deeply. I gazed steadily back at him. Inside, my breathing had quickened and my heart had sped up, as it always did when I even got close to the memories of my family. But I’d wanted to shock Joshua; I’d wanted to strip this situation down to the bone and put it into perspective.

“Reyn and I have been on… opposite sides of quite a few battles,” Joshua said slowly. “I was a mercenary, and so was he.”

Oh, a mercenary. A soldier for hire. There’s a surprise.

“Wait—hold the phone. Let me get this straight,” I said.
“You guys were fighting for
money
, fighting battles
not even your own
, and you were on opposite sides, so now,
however much later
this is, you’re going to be assholes to each other? These weren’t even your wars, defending your own families or whatever. You were there for
money
. But you’re right, and he’s totally wrong? And vice versa?”

Joshua regarded me stonily.

“Oh my God, you’re such morons.” I rubbed my eyes and pushed my growing-out bangs off my face. “Such freaking idiots. Just quit talking to me. My God.” I shook my head and focused on my book again, the words swimming across the page as I blinked angrily.

Joshua shifted in his chair, got another book, and spent minutes watching me, which I could feel like a caterpillar on my skin, but I spared him not a glance. Instead I wrote down some spells of protection that used crystals and made a list of crystals that I hoped we had in the storeroom.

I found a long section about moonstone, which I regarded as “my” stone. It had been my mother’s stone, too—perhaps our family’s stone for centuries. Another thing I would never know. As I read about different rituals using moonstones, River’s words about having a larger project came back to me. I hadn’t come up with anything. I could barely clothe and feed myself, much less take on anything bigger. In the old days, I’d been all about getting ahead, piling up the coinage. Most enterprises I’d attempted had been successful:
my lace shop, in Napoli. My decades as a thief. My oil-baron shenanigans in Texas. But the last real “project” I’d had was a hundred and fifty years ago, in California, during the gold rush.

If you weren’t alive during the gold rush, I don’t think you could really understand what it was like. It truly was a fever, sweeping around the world. I was in France when the newspapers started to be full of stories about the rivers of gold in California. Followed quickly by reports about California becoming part of the United States. Coincidentally.

Well, I was up for an adventure, so I took a ship to New York, then a train as far west as I could go, then joined one of those picturesque wagon trains you’ve heard about, and headed to California.

Once we left from Ohio, the journey took four months. Out of fifty-two wagons, there were three women, and I was the only unmarried one. But I’d had money enough to buy some sturdy horses, a well-made wagon with a canvas roof, and a bunch of practical supplies. Such as a large German shepherd and a whole bunch of guns.

By the end of the trip, there were fifteen wagons left. More than thirty people had died. We’d passed uncountable numbers of discarded belongings; dead horses, oxen, and cows; broken wagons; human remains that there was no time to bury. When we reached Sacramento, I weighed about ninety pounds, had long since given up bathing, and
my three dresses were essentially rags. But my cargo was intact, my horses were alive, and my dog, Heinz, had proven his weight in—ha ha—gold.