by Hilary Duff
It was like Sage was in a girl’s dollhouse. Splayed out on the lacy pillows and flowered comforter that exactly matched the drapes and skirted night table, he couldn’t have possibly looked more out of place. If this was a dream, it was the oddest dream I’d ever had.
And yet . . . it didn’t feel like a dream.
Laughter tinkled beside me, and I turned to see the chestnut-curled woman. Her blue eyes flashed with life, and she wasn’t frozen anymore. She was so vibrant she practically glowed, and she grabbed my hand to pull me close, like we’d been girlfriends all our lives.
“Poor Clea, you look so confused!” she said. “Let me help you. This is not a dream. You’re seeing what’s really happening, right now. No dream, no projection, no fantasy. Sage is here, at this very moment, and thanks to me, you can see him.”
“Sage is . . . here? Where? Where are we?”
“Not telling. And honestly, we’re not here. He is. I am, in a way. But you’re not. I’m gathering the things I see here, and simultaneously taking them to your sleeping mind at home.”
“I don’t understand. . . . How?”
“The mind can do amazing things when you work with it long enough.”
She must have seen that I had no idea what she meant, because she rolled her eyes and flopped back into a chair, twirling one of her curls around her finger. “Okay, sweetheart, I can see your brain is having a hard time with this. Let me be clear. You are right now fast asleep in bed. I am . . . nowhere of concern to you. I do, however, have the power to see what’s happening here, and to bring the images into your mind. The result is that you feel like you’re here, but you’re not. You’re a fly on the wall—unseen and unheard—witnessing what’s happening with your darling Sage at this very moment.”
“But . . . how can you make that happen? What are you?”
“I’m Petra.”
Sage groaned. I knelt by his side and ran my hand over the contours of his face. In my mind I could feel the heat of his body, the stubble of his cheek on my palm. Slowly his eyes opened, and I concentrated every bit of my energy into him.
See me, I urged. See me.
“Clea?” Sage croaked. His voice was rough and scratchy, and he rolled his head on the pillow until his eyes locked with mine. “Clea . . .”
“Yes! Yes, I’m here!” I leaned in, staring into his eyes. Despite what Petra had said, I was here somehow. Sage could tell. The tie between us was strong enough that he could feel my presence. I was certain that even though it was physically impossible, if we both just concentrated hard enough, I wouldn’t be simply a ghost in his presence. He’d pull me through the dream somehow and I’d be here, truly be here, with him. I’d feel his arms around me, and once that happened, everything else would fall into place. . . .
“Shhh,” a woman’s voice cooed as it entered the room. “Don’t strain yourself. You’ve been through so much.”
My view of Sage was blocked by someone who walked right through me. At least she would have had I been there. As it was, I felt nothing, but I was instantly several feet farther back from Sage, watching as the woman set down a small basket, then bent over him. She had a white washcloth in her other hand and dabbed it gently over his cheeks and brow.
The woman looked young. She wore ballet flats and a simple cotton dress that tied in the back to accentuate the curve of her waist. She had no makeup on, and light freckles dotted the graceful curves of her cheeks. There was something so naturally beautiful and innocent about her that I couldn’t stop staring, and when she smiled down at Sage, I felt myself start to smile in return.
I had no doubt she was lethal as poison.
“It’s always the sweet ones, isn’t it?” Petra sighed. “Come sit. This might be a lot to handle.”
She tried to pull me to the chair, but I tugged away and moved closer to the bed. I willed Sage to recognize me again, but his eyes were fixed on the woman’s. They looked wild, though, as if he were struggling to hold on to his own sanity.
“I need to change your dressings again. I’m sorry. . . . It’s going to hurt.”
“Lila . . . ,” Sage said. “I saw Clea. She was here.”
“Your girlfriend,” Lila said, as if even the words pained her. “But there’s no way. They’d know.” She reached under Sage’s arms, pulling him close to her. I wanted to scream.
“Try to sit up,” she said.
Sage obeyed, though it was Lila who pulled him upright.
“I saw her,” Sage insisted, but with less certainty this time. “I thought. . . .”
“You’re so weak. It makes your mind play crazy tricks on you.” Lila hissed in the air as she rolled his gray T-shirt along his back, revealing sheets of gauze soaked through with blood and stuck to Sage’s skin.
I felt nauseous. “What are they doing to you?” I asked, even though I knew he wouldn’t answer.
“It’s worse than I thought,” Lila said. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Closing her eyes against the pain she was about to inflict, she pulled at a corner of the gauze. Sage gritted his teeth and sucked in air as she tore it away in a giant sticky layer of gore. Lila looked like she might cry, but she reached into her basket and pulled out a bottle of water, liquid soap, and some fresh gauze. Sage’s voice wavered as she cleaned the wounds.
“You don’t have to do this,” he said through gritted teeth. “You know it will heal by itself.”
“Eventually,” Lila agreed. “But the more they hurt you, the longer it takes. It goes faster if I help.” She scrubbed at a deep slice, and Sage growled with pain, yanking away from her. Lila looked like she’d been slapped. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just want to make you feel better.”
Sage’s face softened. “You do. You make me feel better . . . and then they do something worse.”
“I know.” Lila put down the gauze and poured water onto a fresh cloth to rinse Sage’s tortured back. As she did, I looked more closely at Sage. I’d been so happy to see him, I hadn’t even realized the changes in his body: the crisscrossing of somewhat-to-nearly-healed scars covering his skin. Even the scruff of his beard was interrupted by scar-shaped slashes where the hair wouldn’t grow.
“They say if you give up on her, they’ll stop. That’s what they tell me.”
“I can’t. Clea is my soulmate.”
“You’ve never loved anyone else?” She couldn’t meet his eyes as she asked. “Not at all?”
“Not like with Clea.”
They were silent for a moment, Lila working on Sage’s back as he thought.
“Lila . . . ,” he said, “have you ever been in love?”
Lila blushed. “Not so much.”
“Then you don’t know. You can’t know what it feels like to meet a person and suddenly know without a doubt that the whole purpose of your life so far—every choice you made, every twist of fate along the way—was just a journey to get you to that person. My life started when I met Clea. Every minute without her is just killing time until we can be together again.”
“That’s beautiful. But . . .”
She let the thought drift away. Sage prodded her.
“What?”
“It’s just . . . I’ve heard the story . . . from you and the others . . . and it’s tragic. Too tragic.”
“Too tragic?”
“I’m sorry. It’s not my place to say. It’s just that . . . if you’re meant to be together . . . why doesn’t it ever work out?”
Sage was silent. Of course he was. My soul had spent four previous lifetimes in love with Sage, and while we’d had moments of happiness beyond anything I’d ever known, without fail we’d ended in tragedy. My tragedy, to be specific. I’ve had the rare privilege of watching my own murder, four times over. I’ve been told a fifth is inevitable.
“I shouldn’t have said anything. I don’t want to upset you. It just seems like whatever holds you together . . . it keeps you both in so much pain. And if I loved someone . . . I wouldn’t want to see them in pain. I�
��d try to stop it . . . even if it meant hurting myself.” She squeezed antiseptic cream into her hand and cringed in sympathy before slathering it over Sage’s wounds.
Without disturbing Lila, Sage, or the bed, Petra flounced down on the bed’s edge with a dramatic sigh. “I think someone has a crush. And you know the whole Florence Nightingale thing—it’s just a matter of time before he succumbs.”
Her voice snapped me to action. I rose and made my way to the night table. I’d start there. If this place existed, there had to be something around that would identify it. But before I was halfway to the table, I felt myself getting sucked away, like a cord was pulling me backward from my center.
“No!” I cried, but it was too late. I opened my eyes in my own room, curled under my covers. The sun’s first light crept through the window, but I leaped out of bed, wide awake. I was energized. Sage was alive, and I knew where he was and who he was with. Every detail of Lila and the room was vivid in my mind, and even though I didn’t yet know how I’d use that to track him down, there had to be a way.
“I don’t know, Clea,” Petra’s voice whispered faintly in my ear. “I thought our girl Lila asked a very good question. If you love someone, shouldn’t you try to stop their pain, even if it hurts you?”
four
* * *
I whisked my consciousness away as Mother left Clea’s room. I felt reasonably safe. If Mother was communicating with Clea, it was unlikely she’d have the energy to notice me.
Unlikely, but not certain. That was the thing with our psychic powers. It was hard to say what we could and couldn’t do. It changed. Something we could easily do one day might be impossible the next. Or something one of us had never been able to do would suddenly be simple. I had a pretty good idea of what I could do at any given moment, but my family’s skills were more mysterious to me. That wasn’t a big deal when we were all on the same side, but now that I was secretly fighting against them . . . it could be a problem.
There were, at least, a few things I could count on, like our relationship with the physical world. Since we were pure consciousness, we didn’t really exist in any specific place. We just kind of . . . were . In a free-floating limbo that none of us liked. It made us feel like ghosts.
To feel more normal, we liked to tie ourselves somewhere specific. It wasn’t hard. We just had to think of a place—like the New York Public Library. If I thought about it, I’d go. And even though I’d be invisible to any mortals around me, I’d be there , anchored to the spot for as long as I wanted to be. I could spend a whole day feeling almost normal, taking books off shelves and flipping through them at my leisure. Granted, I’d be using my psychic energy and not my hands to do that, and unlike most kids, I could move entire racks of books if I concentrated hard enough. But still, I’d have a sense of place, and I liked that. We all did.
Another thing I knew is how the four of us communicated. If we ever wanted to find one another, we only had to concentrate, and we’d go to that person. So if I was in the library and Mother wanted to see me, she’d think of me, then she’d be there with me. If I wasn’t tied to someplace at the time, she’d meet me in that limbo place where we otherwise existed. Being together had that same almost-normal feeling as being in a specific place: We saw, heard, and felt one another as if we were back inside our bodies.
Talking to mortals could make us feel normal too, if we did it in their dreams. That was a skill we all had, though Mother and I were best at it. We could pop into a dreamer’s head and be a real part of their imaginary world. Sometimes I’d do it just for fun, and not even talk to the dreamer. I’d hang out in the background—a child on a swing set at the playground, maybe. I liked blending in.
Mother and I could also do all kinds of tricks in dreams. We could bring dreaming minds together, or take a dreaming mind with us to see something happening in the real world, like what Mother had done with Clea.
My family and I didn’t have to pop into dreams to speak with mortals, but it was definitely the easiest way. The alternative was splashier, I guess, even though it was tougher and kind of awful. If we concentrated very hard, we could astrally project what looked like living versions of ourselves into the mortal world, like when all four of us appeared in front of Clea. It had been mother’s idea. She thought we’d have more impact on Clea if she saw us “in the flesh.”
Mother was right—Clea had seemed very spooked by my family. I couldn’t blame her. The projection was so hard for them and took so much energy that they had to stand stiff as statues. I could move and seem effortlessly human, but doing so felt like swimming through tar. For all of us, being visible was so overwhelming that we usually couldn’t do much else—we couldn’t move things with our minds, or any of the other mental tricks that usually came so easily to us.
I tried not to put a label on what exactly we were. If I thought about it too much, it bothered me. Were we even human at this point? Were we really alive?
It hadn’t always been this way. For years—for millennia after we drank the Elixir, we were regular people. Yes, regular people who never aged or got sick, and who could heal themselves when they got injured, but we never stayed in one place long enough for anyone else to realize. We traveled the whole world. We experienced everything in every city, every small town, every stretch of uncharted territory. We knew eternal life was the greatest gift in the world, and we took full advantage. We did things we never would have dared try without the Elixir: We swam the English Channel, we climbed Mount Everest, we BASE jumped into the Grand Canyon. We sought out the greatest minds of the modern age: We’d had conversations with da Vinci, Shakespeare, Picasso, Einstein. We saw movies, we went to amusement parks, we read and watched TV and raised pets. . . .
We did it all. And we were happy. Blissfully happy. Before everything went wrong, we’d been alive for twenty-five hundred years, and expected to live joyfully for at least twenty-five hundred more.
But everything did go wrong. More horribly than I ever could have imagined.
The sickness hit Mother first. It didn’t seem like a big deal in the beginning. She got clumsier, that’s it. She dropped things a lot, and she’d trip. She made light of it, but I could tell something was seriously wrong.
“Mommy?” I asked. “Are you sick?”
Her eyes looked scared, as if I’d trapped her into revealing a horrible secret, but then she laughed. “We don’t get sick, remember?”
She was right, of course . . . but her clumsiness got worse and worse. Even Father and Grandfather started to worry, though Mother swore it was nothing. She even said she’d prove how fine she was by making the kind of feast she used to prepare back in Greece. She spent a whole day cooking, and wouldn’t let anyone help her or even peek in to see.
The smells were unreal. By the time we sat at the table, all set with our best china, linens, and candles, our mouths were watering so much we weren’t worried about anything except how much longer we’d have to wait before sinking our teeth into the meal. Finally, Mother emerged from the kitchen with a huge platter of roasted pork, crowded with a mix of figs and apples and chickpeas. We burst into applause, and Mother glowed with happiness as she walked the platter to the table.
Then her legs stopped working.
One minute she was walking toward us, that huge smile on her face, and the next she was tumbling to the floor. She screamed, and threw the platter so she could catch herself. Father jumped out of his seat and raced to her. He tried to help her up, but she couldn’t move, just screamed and sobbed.
“What happened?” I cried. “Mommy, are you okay?”
She ignored me. So did Father. He scooped Mother into his arms and carried her to their room. I tried to follow, but he shut the door on me without a word.
I went back to the dining room. The spilled platter had toppled the candles, and the tablecloth was on fire. Grandfather was sitting a foot away from the flames, but he didn’t even notice. He stared straight ahead.
“Grandfa
ther!” I yelled, shaking him. “Do something!”
He didn’t budge. I ran and grabbed the fire extinguisher myself. It took the whole canister to put out the flames. The dining room looked like a war zone.
I cleaned it up by myself. I wanted to check on Mother and make sure she was okay, but I knew she wasn’t.
Could she die? We had the Elixir in our veins. How could she die?
I concentrated on cleaning.
Grandfather didn’t help. He didn’t even acknowledge me. He just sat there, lost in his own thoughts. I wanted to scream at him. Sure, I’d been alive for thousands of years and I knew more than any other seven-year-old in the universe, but I hadn’t ever grown up. I was still a kid, and it wasn’t fair for me to deal with this on my own.
I cleaned until I was so tired I fell asleep on the floor. I hoped things would be better in the morning, but they weren’t. Mother got weaker by the day. She was depressed, too. She kept pushing herself to walk, and when her legs buckled under her—like they always did—she screamed like an infant having a tantrum. She also hurt herself. A lot. She kept trying to walk down the stairs, and she fell every time. She broke her leg and her arm, and got horrible gashes all over her body. It was almost like she was trying to kill herself, but with the Elixir in her, that wasn’t an option. She always healed, and when she did, she’d try walking again and it would start all over.
Father finally got her a wheelchair and convinced her to use it. She powered it with a joystick, but even that became difficult for her as the weakness spread through her arms and hands.
Mother never laughed anymore. I tried to make her feel better. I’d dance for her, or tell jokes, or put on little shows . . . all the things I always did to make her happy, but now they infuriated her. Father said Mother was jealous that I could move and she couldn’t. He said I should spend some time away from her.