by Hilary Duff
A moment later the little lark flapped furiously and rose out of the water . . . perfectly healed. It flew away, but Grandfather was too stunned to follow it.
The bird had been dead when it hit the water. How could it have flown away?
Grandfather knew only one answer: the storied Elixir of Life, a potion created by the gods but hidden away when they decided humans were unworthy of its immortal gift. Grandfather didn’t dare drink it, but he also couldn’t leave it behind. He dumped out the last of his water and filled his flask with fluid from the puddle. He was risking dehydration, but Grandfather felt that if the gods saw fit to show him their Elixir, they would certainly see fit to bring him back home alive. Sure enough, he found his group less than an hour later.
Grandfather eagerly shared his discovery, but no one believed him. They laughed at him. They said he was crazy. Grandfather tried to prove otherwise. He’d smash insects with his bare hand then bring them back to life with drops of the fluid. It didn’t help. He went from being a respected member of society to being a village joke.
I was the only one who believed Grandfather. I wanted to know all about the Elixir, but Grandfather was usually too upset to talk about it with me . . . which only intrigued me more. I’d spend ages staring into the small bowl in which Grandfather kept the thick, silvery fluid. Colors and shapes swirled inside it. I imagined its flavor on my tongue—like clear, crisp honey. Once I had the image in my mind, I couldn’t shake it. Grandfather wouldn’t have to know, would he? It would just be a taste. What harm could one taste do?
I held back as long as I could.
Then I drank it—a long swallow that sent shivers through my throat.
It wasn’t honeylike at all. It tasted both fruity and metallic, and made my tongue tingle like I’d sucked on a peppermint leaf too long.
I’d never tasted anything like it. I knew I’d be in trouble, but I couldn’t help it—I drank the rest of the bowl.
“Amelia!” Grandfather screamed. “What are you doing?!”
I dropped the bowl in shock and turned. His face was white and pale, and his voice so high and loud that I burst into tears.
Grandfather pulled me close and I buried my face in his robes. “Oh, Amelia . . . Amelia . . . ,” he said gently, “what are we going to do?”
He held me, rocking gently back and forth, until I stopped crying. He settled me at the table with a cup of water, then called my parents to the room.
“Amelia has ingested the Elixir of Life,” he said. “The entire bowl.”
Mother and Father had seemed dubious about the Elixir before, but now they paled.
“What are we going to do?” Mother asked.
“As I see it, we have two options,” Grandfather said. “We can do nothing, and live normal, mortal lives, eventually leaving Amelia alone; or we can go back to the Elixir’s source and join her in eternal life.”
Only then did I understand the enormity of what I’d done. I imagined myself all alone, forever. I started to cry again.
Mother wrapped her arms around me. Father took my hand.
“We’ll go,” Mother said.
Almost immediately, we started the long trip to Ethiopia, and somehow Grandfather found his way back to the pool of silvery water. He said it was much smaller than when he’d left it, but there was plenty left for the three of them to have a dose as large as mine, if not larger.
Grandfather lowered a cup into the pool, and filled it with Elixir. The liquid looked alive, swirling in dizzying circles.
“You need to understand,” he said to my parents, “I believe in my bones this is the Elixir of Life, and it will keep us alive and healthy for eternity. But there is much I don’t know. There is a chance it could wear off one day. There’s a chance we could react poorly to it. There’s a chance it will work differently in each one of us. I simply don’t know. There is no shame if you don’t wish to drink.”
“I won’t leave Amelia alone in the world,” Mother said. She wrapped her arm around my shoulders and pulled me close. “Not when we can be together.”
Father agreed and held out his hand for the cup.
“One moment,” Grandfather said. “We need to consider something. Eternal life is a rare and dangerous gift. Many would abuse such a privilege, and use their longevity for personal power. If we take this step and join Amelia on this adventure, let us do it the right way. Let us be custodians of the earth, and those people and creatures who cross our path. Let us furnish ourselves with everything we need, but not overindulge. Most important, let us do no harm to another living creature. Are we agreed?”
“We are,” they intoned.
Grandfather didn’t know how much or how little we needed to drink. Mother, Grandfather, and Father drank first, to catch up with me, but we kept refilling the cup and passing it around until we’d emptied the pool.
Afterward Grandfather took a spade from his satchel and dug into the dirt of the now-dry puddle. He wanted to see if the liquid would bubble back up, if it came naturally from the ground.
But the land beneath was arid and sandy. No sign of any fluid. And Grandfather kept digging, deeper and deeper, searching . . . which is how we knew the Elixir was working. Grandfather had never been a strong man, yet he dug into the ground under the beating heat of the sun for an hour and barely broke a sweat. We didn’t know back then that we’d achieved eternal life, but something was very different.
I was remembering all that when Mother’s voice broke into my thoughts. It wasn’t the voice I remembered from back then. It was cold, with an edge that could cut steel.
“I am very disappointed in you, Amelia,” she said. She shook her head and her long chestnut curls swayed side to side.
I could see this, could hear her as if she were right next to me, but she wasn’t. Our real bodies were far away and seemingly lifeless. The woman and girl who faced each other were just psychic projections of our minds.
“I heard the way you spoke to Clea,” Mother said. “You were trying to get her to trust you over the rest of us.”
“I wasn’t,” I lied. “I was only trying to help you, Mommy, just like I told you I would.”
She narrowed her eyes, then smiled and spoke in a low voice, the soft one she’d once used to tell me stories before bed.
“You may have fooled your father and grandfather, but you don’t fool me. I don’t trust you, and I’m watching you.”
Then she was gone.
Hot tears pricked at the back of my eyes, but I ignored them. I had to stay alert and attuned to Mother’s mind. She’d told Clea she’d tell her more. I had to know what she’d say.
three
* * *
ALONE IN MY ROOM, I went to work.
I clicked on the computer and checked my e-mail. There was one from Dr. Prichard, the coworker of my dad’s whom Ben and I had met in Brazil. He was brief and to the point. He said my father had never spoken with him about his great hobby, the Elixir of Life, so there was nothing he could tell me about it.
It was what I expected, but I was covering all my bases. Sage had been taken by the Saviors of Eternal Life. If I wanted to find him, I had to find out everything I could about them, including grilling Dad’s friends and colleagues for any information he might have shared with them. I’d sent out dozens of e-mails, made tons of phone calls, and had all kinds of follow-up conversations. Some people had heard quite a bit about the subject from Dad, and my file on the Saviors was growing every day, though I had nothing concrete to go on. I did, however, get to hear all kinds of stories about my dad; laughing and reminiscing with his friends brought him back to me in a way nothing else had.
It made me sad all over again that he was gone, but it gave me peace, too.
I had a few other e-mails along with Dr. Prichard’s, but I scanned them quickly. I was far more interested in downloading and enlarging my pictures, looking for Sage . . . and maybe Amelia and her family?
I scanned every image, aching for a glimpse of Sag
e’s profile, his silhouette, the sharp angle of his cheek. I bit back panic as I searched. I had no idea if Sage had kept the dagger hidden from the Saviors, but if they had it, they could destroy him any night at midnight without my even knowing. His absence from my pictures would be the sign he was gone forever. No soul . . . no soul connection . . . no pictures.
Hours after I began, I found him. He was far in the background of the shot; I’d had to zoom in to see him. His figure leaned against a distant tree. His body was turned, his brown eyes staring off into the distance. I gazed into them, searching for the soul of the man I loved in the pixilated grain. If I concentrated, if I thought of everything I knew and remembered and felt about Sage and poured it into the image, I could see it.
I reached out to touch the screen . . . and started sobbing.
I’m not someone who falls apart. I didn’t do it when my dad disappeared, I didn’t do it when everything I believed changed around me, I didn’t do it when I lost Sage—at least not for long. I wasn’t raised to be a weak person. Weak people fail, and I couldn’t afford to fail right now . . . not when so much was at stake.
But I missed him so much.
Sage saw the parts of me I didn’t share with anyone . . . the weak parts I scratched and clawed at every day . . . and he loved me anyway. The world felt right when we were together. Our past was epic, but when I was with him, I didn’t think of those times: Sage and Olivia, Sage and Catherine, Sage and Anneline, Sage and Delia. I thought about Sage.
It was the ultimate irony, I knew. In ninth grade, when everyone wrote reports on the romantic significance of Romeo and Juliet, my essay began, “Romeo and Juliet is the story of two unbelievably immature fools. Their story isn’t tragedy; it’s idiocy. If they lived today, they’d win a Darwin Award.”
I went on from there. Romeo and Juliet were all of fourteen, and they knew each other for exactly a minute before they decided they were so in love they couldn’t live without each other. Adding to the idiocy was Romeo, who two seconds before he met Juliet was convinced some girl named Rosalind was his soulmate. Then, when Romeo finds Juliet in her tomb, he’s so overcome by “romantic” despair that he kills himself . . . two seconds before she wakes up!
The moral of Romeo and Juliet, I concluded, was that the romantic notion of true love at first sight was bunk, and those stupid enough to succumb to it were doomed to misery.
Four years after that I met a man on the beach in Rio, and felt immediately that he was the love of my life.
To be fair, I had a little more to back me up than Juliet did. Sage had been mortal once, and engaged to a woman named Olivia—me, in a past life. The two of us had that long courtship that Romeo and Juliet skipped. Sage had that with my other incarnations too: Catherine, Anneline, and Delia. And while I didn’t consciously think of those times, they were part of what made our bond so strong so quickly. Except in dreams and visions, I couldn’t remember my past lives. And from what I saw, I was outwardly very different from each of those earlier versions of me.
But inside we were the same. And Sage knew and loved us all.
When I first met Sage in this life, I fought against what I felt. I didn’t want to be a fool like Juliet. But the truth is, he and I fit. Even in the middle of the worst chaos, he had the power to make me feel safe and protected. Romeo and Juliet may have thought they had been waiting for each other their entire short lives, but I had photographic proof. From the day I was born, my soul was biding time, waiting for Sage to come claim it.
Sage made me complete. He made me happy. He was as much a part of me as my own body.
How could anyone lose that and still exist?
I wasn’t sure I could.
I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
But every day I saw Sage in a picture, I knew he was alive. There was hope for us, but I couldn’t fall apart each time I saw him on the screen. I might be in pain, but I couldn’t let myself feel it, not entirely. I’d drown if I did.
I waited for the sobs to die down, then printed the enlarged picture. I pulled out my overstuffed file where I placed each grainy image. I’d wanted to put them up on my walls so I could feel him surrounding me, but a room wallpapered with Sage would raise questions from my mom I didn’t want to answer. I contented myself with the file of pictures, which I laid out each day in an ever-growing circle on the floor around me.
It was comforting for a moment, but then I had to get back to work.
None of the pictures had featured Amelia or her family. They knew me, but they weren’t tied to me the way Sage was.
The Elixir. I kept going back to it. Every time I thought about the little girl and the old man, especially. It didn’t explain the blinking away, the statue stance of the adults, the speaking inside my head . . . but I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was the Elixir that tied them to Sage.
And if they were involved with the Elixir, my dad might have known about them.
My father’s career was medicine, but his passion was the Elixir of Life. He’d been obsessed with it since before I was born. It would seem like the greatest coincidence in the world, that Grant Raymond would be transfixed by the one myth that would play such a huge role in his daughter’s life, but of course it wasn’t. It was all part of fate, working overtime to bring Sage and me back together.
Thanks to his single-minded pursuit of the Elixir, Dad was the one who found its ancient, long-buried containers. He also found Sage long before I did, and he knew about the groups that were out to get him: the Saviors of Eternal Life and Cursed Vengeance. Dad found out about everything before I did, including the doom that seemed to await me in every life. He disappeared trying to protect me from all of it, and hoping he could stop the cycle before it began again.
Dad hadn’t succeeded in keeping me from Sage, but he had succeeded in gathering an entire downstairs studio full of information about the Elixir of Life, the Saviors of Eternal Life, Cursed Vengeance, and anything else even remotely associated with his obsession. I hadn’t even begun to sift through it all, even though I pored over it every day.
Yet now I went down to my father’s studio with a different goal than usual. I wanted to search for anything he might have known about Amelia and her family, or creatures like them. I spent hours down there but finished with nothing but bleary eyes. It was late; even Mom’s aides had called it a night, and the house was blissfully quiet.
When I got to my room, I found a tray outside the door with a pot of tea and a cup. For just a second I thought about Ben. After we got back from Japan, he’d made trays like this for me. He’d fussed constantly—an urgent, pleading look on his face as he fluffed my pillows, brought me snacks, and kept my favorite movies running on the TV. I knew he meant well, but I couldn’t take it. Every time I replayed those last moments on the beach, I thought about Ben, ignoring what he’d been told, racing onto the beach, getting the Saviors’ attention, giving them a hostage they could trade for Sage. Ben was the reason I’d lost the love of my life . . . again. And this time it could be forever.
Ben’s was the last face I wanted to see, and I finally had to tell him I needed time apart. A clean break. No contact.
Ben tried to quit after that. His actual position was adviser to Alissa Grande, the pseudonym I used as a photojournalist. It wasn’t something he could do if he and I weren’t speaking. Add to that the fact that I had no interest in working or doing anything else until I’d found Sage, and it made even more sense for Ben to go his own way.
Mom was the one who kept him on. Even if I couldn’t use Ben’s services, she could. Ever since Dad’s death, we’d been deluged with requests to turn his work on cardiac disease and surgical procedures over to researchers. Mom had decided it was time to do just that. It wasn’t a choice I’d have made, but it was her call, so I didn’t give her a hard time about it. Mom asked Ben to sift through Dad’s office—a separate room from his studio—sort through his notes and papers, and organize everything until it was ready for donation. I unde
rstood her choice. Ben and my dad had been close, and Mom trusted Ben more than anyone else outside the family . . . but I wish she had just let him go.
With the new job, Ben had been in the house every weekday, just down the hall from my room, but he respected my wishes. I hadn’t seen him until today in the kitchen.
I looked down at the tea tray again. I’d been so sure he was flirting with Suzanne. Was he just trying to make me jealous? Was the tray his way of reaching out?
Then I saw the note. My mom’s handwriting. “Hoped to see you for dinner. Talk to Suzanne—let’s make time tomorrow. Love you!”
I brought the tray inside and set it on my nightstand. I was so tired, I barely had the energy to get undressed. I preferred it that way. Sleep had once been my salvation. I would dream of Sage—memories of the times we’d spent together throughout our history. But since the night I lost him, I didn’t dream. Not of Sage, not of anything. It hurt so much, I could barely take it. I’d stay awake until sleep forced itself on me. I’d wake up empty and devastated . . . but I’d be rested enough to search another day.
In that last second, as I closed my eyes and felt the world recede, I heard a voice.
“Get ready, Clea. . . . It’s time. . . .”
The blackness fell . . . and for the first time in weeks, I dreamed.
Sage.
He was there, right in front of me, sprawled out on a bed. His eyes were closed, and a growth of beard spread over the chiseled bones of his face.
My heart leaped into my throat, and tears welled in my eyes. I raced to him and tried to throw my arms around him . . . but I couldn’t. I couldn’t see my arms as I reached out. I wasn’t even visible to myself. I wasn’t a part of this dream; I was just watching it.
I stepped back to take in my surroundings. The room was . . . flouncy. The white four-poster bed in which Sage lay was bathed in sunlight from a large window flanked by gauzy blue-and-white-flowered drapes. A night table skirted in the same fabric sat by the bed, and on it sat a tall glass of water and a pot of white carnations, my least favorite flower. An upholstered, white wicker chair draped in a baby-blue afghan sat across the room, and a matching armoire filled out the space. The floors were hardwood, the wallpaper a maze of thin green vines bursting with tiny pink flowers, and gold-framed black-and-white pictures of baby animals hung on the walls.