The Forever Girl

by Immortal Ink Publishing, LLC

  “Stay calm.” He touched his palm to my face. “What you did last night—jumping in front of me—I would never have wanted you to do that. I’m glad you’re okay.”

  Something wasn’t right. We didn’t have time for platitudes. I tried to break into his thoughts, but he blocked my attempts. I felt each beat of my heart, hard and distinct, slamming against my chest.

  I put up one finger to silence him and tapped into my clairaudience. Pain muddled my ability. After a few tries, I barely managed to discern the attacker was female. Thalia? But I’d been searching for her all night. “Why is she still here?”

  He gazed toward the hallway. A bruise yellowed his forehead, already fading, and pink scratch lines puffed beneath his left cheekbone. His injuries would be gone soon, leaving behind only the scars of his childhood.

  “I didn’t know what else to do,” he whispered.

  I hopped from bed. Pain shot from my shoulder to my elbow, but I forced myself forward, gritting my teeth as I stormed to the basement door.

  Charles darted ahead, grabbing my uninjured arm as I reached for the door handle. “Wait, Sophia. Let’s talk first.”

  “Move. Now.”

  He let go, and I opened the door and started down the stairs. When I saw my attacker, my heart thudded with a strange pressure, shock coursing through my body. My eyes were lying to me. This had to be some horrible mistake.

  Ivory, now chained in our basement, couldn’t have been our attacker.

  She kept her gaze down, the fringe of her lashes casting shadows onto her cheeks. Blood splattered to the floor in front of her. More crusted beneath one ear and clotted her hair against her scalp. Chains weighed against the bubbling flesh of her wrists.

  I turned toward Charles, dread sinking deeper into my stomach, my gaze pleading for him to correct my assumptions.

  “I didn’t know what else to do,” he said, his voice full of apology.

  Adrenaline wore off and pain took over, but this pain came more from the tightening around my heart than the wound on my shoulder. What was happening?

  Ivory’s hoarse, tear-smothered voice broke the silence. “Sophia?”

  “No,” I said sharply. I wasn’t doing this. I couldn’t talk to her.

  I ran back upstairs to the kitchen, to the one place I sat every morning until the nightmares of my slumber disappeared. Recently, my nightmares had all been of my ancestor, the ghost of her dead body hanging from the gallows, but this nightmare was far worse.

  This nightmare was real.

  As my trembling hand drew a chair from the table, the chair legs rattled against the linoleum. Charles crossed the floor and filled a kettle with water.

  I gazed at my hands, not really seeing them. “I heard her.”

  “Of course.” His soft voice soothed the edge of my anxiety.

  “But that would mean … she is….” The pain had been too severe for me to tap into my ability. I’d assumed our attacker had been Cruor, but that couldn’t be the case. “What is she?”

  “You already know,” Charles said, pouring me a cup of chamomile tea. “She’s an earth elemental.”

  “I sure as hell didn’t know.” My words sounded accusatory, and part of me wondered if they should. How could she be Cruor? I blew out a deep breath. “Why would I know that?”

  “After that night at Club Flesh—” He set my tea on the table and stared out the window. I followed his gaze, but the yard was empty, the trees bare. “She didn’t tell you?” He shook his head. “She said she would tell you everything. You said she told you everything.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant,” I said. “She told me about the Cruor. Not that she was one.”

  Had I been too absorbed in my relationship with Charles to notice what was going on around me? I thought back to all the conversations Charles and I had. None of them had been about her. All of our talks had been about the people I feared, not the people I trusted.

  Charles turned toward me. “Haven’t you ever ‘heard’ her before?”

  I rubbed slow circles over my temples, trying to think. “Not to my knowledge. I haven’t seen her in months, since before I understood my ability.” I shook my head. “Are you certain?”

  Charles nodded.

  “Then she’s a dual-breed, like you.”

  “Not like me, no,” he said. “She’s protected herself from the sun through Ankou magic.”

  “Can they do that?”

  He shrugged. “It appears so.”

  I stared at the rings of the wooden kitchen table, trying to make sense of everything. “Why didn’t she tell me?”

  “I trusted she had.” Charles tucked his hands deep into his pockets and gave me a look that told me he had more to say, but didn’t want to say it. And since he didn’t seem sure he wanted to say it, I wasn’t sure I wanted to hear.

  “What about her aura?” I asked. “You would’ve noticed something off about her, right?”

  “Aura-reading is more complicated than that.”

  “Is it?” I asked, eyes brimming with tears and heart overflowing with hurt and skepticism.

  Charles swallowed. “You know things are different for me. I am not a pure Strigoi—I cannot use my abilities with the same strength. And I hardly have the training. Auras are complicated. Red might mean life-force, raw passion, or anger. Orange might mean sensuality or lacking reason. Green, healing or envy.”

  “She was all of those?”

  “Mostly red, though always a bit muted. The Ankou magic may have affected her aura.” His eyes searched mine. “Now do you understand?”

  I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes. I needed to reign in my emotions if I was going to make sense of all this.

  “I’m sorry, Charles. I just don’t get it. Why was she trying to attack you? What do we do now?” I stood to pace the kitchen but a dizzy spell hit and rooted me at a standstill. Ivory’s name echoed in my thoughts, and I sunk back into the kitchen chair. “Can’t you remove her memory of us—use influence or something?”

  Charles knelt beside me and grabbed my shoulders. I knew he wanted me to look at him, both by reading the thoughts in his mind and also from the way his head dipped slightly to bring his face closer to mine.

  I couldn’t look.

  “That can’t be done to an earth elemental,” he said.

  “We need to think about this.” I pushed him away. “I need to think about this.”

  My gaze lingered apologetically on his, then I headed for the place I always went when feeling my darkest: the bathroom.

  I closed the door behind me and took a long look in the mirror. The woman staring back couldn’t be me. She was a husk of her former self—a lost child or a silhouette of who she might have been. Sobs fought to break through my anger. I splashed cool water on my face and tried to steady my breathing. Leaning back against the wall, I slid to the bathroom floor.

  Did Ivory think killing Charles would protect me from his world? If she would just forget about me, Charles and I could be together without worrying about her trying anything like this again. There had to be a way to make her forget.

  Paloma came to mind. She’d said I could come to her with anything. ‘Anything’ included what? Certainly not blood-sucking creatures of the night. I hadn’t even told her about the voices. Would it be wrong to subject her to the knowledge of this world, especially given how the Cruor dealt with people who found out about them?

  Suddenly I was in the bedroom, phone in hand, the memory of walking there like a dream. My fingers dialed the numbers and the receiver rang in my ears. I willed myself to hang up, but my body would not comply.

  Paloma’s voice came over the line. “Sophia?”

  Had I said it was me? “Yes,” I managed.

  “Sophia, is everything all right?”

  “There’s a problem,” I said. “With Ivory.”

  I could almost hear her frown through the phone. “I was worried this might happen. I’ll come straight over.”

 
; The line went dead.

  {chapter twenty-two}

  THE CHILL OF WINTER leaked through the cracked bedroom window. The backyard fence rotted near the bottom, decaying from the moisture of dirtied snow, and I felt a clammy chill on my skin. Darkness would be a relief from what the day had revealed.

  Something crinkled and shuffled outside the door. A clock ticked. All these things overpowered my senses, and yet they didn’t really matter.

  I was still sitting on the bed, phone in hand, when Charles brought Paloma into the room. She smelled like roses and fabric softener, not incense and hot ceramic. The hem of her long flowing skirt flickered against the burnt yellow light of the room. I felt drugged.

  Charles returned the phone to its cradle and draped a blanket over my shoulders. I’d been shivering, but not from cold.

  Paloma kneeled down and cradled my face in her hands. Her eyes looked more tired than usual, her usually vibrant skin faded and grayish. “Charles told me what happened.”

  “Ivory is a … she’s a….”

  “I know.”

  “You knew?” Everyone had known but me? Somewhere beneath my barriers, hurt and anger threatened to surface.

  “It’s my job to know.” She lowered her hands to her lap, and for the first time ever, I noticed her fingernails. She’d always seemed so put together, so light and worry-free. But her fingernails were so horribly bitten—a lifetime of worry showing from the habit—that scabs formed where her nails had been chewed to the quick.

  I pulled the blanket tighter around me, shielding the torn, bloodstained fabric at the shoulder of my waffle-knit sweater. “You run Sparrow’s Grotto, in Cripple Creek. I go there all the time, and that is your job.”

  Paloma trapped her bottom lip with her teeth and cast Charles a pained, watery gaze.

  Charles wrapped his arm around me. “Paloma called on her way over. She’s a generational witch, like you. She works to make sure things like this don’t happen.”

  Not very good at her job then, is she?

  My friends weren’t my friends. My mentor was more than a mentor. This wasn’t the town I’d grown up in, and this house—this house that had once been a library—was nothing more than an empty shell, the walls with little purpose beyond hiding a truth I’d have rather not known.

  For a moment, I thought of the world outside, going on without me, a world where elementals did not exist because people didn’t know about them.

  My brow tensed, and I turned toward Charles. “Paloma knew about me, too?”

  He offered a weak shrug—of course he wouldn’t know. I shouldn’t have directed my question toward him with Paloma standing right there. Talk about rude. I gave Paloma an apologetic look, imploring her with my gaze.

  She shook her head. “I wasn’t sure. And even if I’d known, there would’ve been no way for me to tell you. A witch must come to the realization on her own. I did my best to guide you in that direction. The rest was up to you.”

  “Ivory is a witch, too?”

  “She was intended as a spirit elemental as well,” Paloma said, “which means she would’ve been pure when she was chosen. Something must have happened, maybe around the time she was turned. Many of her powers are obsolete now. But because she was one of the original witches chosen by the Universe, there was no discovery for her to make. She’s always known. There was no place for me in her life to act as a mentor.”

  The room slowly came back into focus: Paloma, with her heavily beaded earrings; Charles, in his jeans and black t-shirt; me, clueless as ever.

  “Okay,” I said quietly. “I think I understand.”

  “Yes,” Paloma said. “But now we must take action to protect you from her—” Her worried gaze flickered to mine. “—though I fear you won’t like what needs to be done.”

  * * *

  PALOMA INSISTED I eat first, get my energy up, before we talk. Now a bowl of jasmine rice, barely touched, sat on the table.

  She had the answers all right, but I sure as hell didn’t like them. She wanted me to erase Ivory’s memories. I hadn’t been bothered by the idea of Charles or Adrian wiping them, but now the whole idea suddenly seemed like stealing—like a complete abandonment of my faith.

  Like a mistake I’d made once before and desperately didn’t want to make again.

  I shook my head. “It’s black magic.”

  And by that, I meant the bad kind. Not the kind most Wiccans knew as the yin to the yang of White Magic. This kind of magic wouldn’t bring balance. No, this kind of magic was the kind sometimes referred to as Hostile Magic.

  “There’s no other way,” Paloma said. “Only a spirit elemental can extract memories from the Cruor. Your gift will help you. Think this over if you must, but this is what needs to be done. If you don’t erase her memories of you, she may seek out you or Charles again. I’m sorry.” She stroked her hand up and down my back before leaving me alone in the room.

  I rested my head in my hands, staring unseeingly at the wooden floor beneath my feet. I’d expected Charles to do the dirty work. My heart sank at the thought: I’d been treating him like his humanity was less valuable than my own. What did that say about me?

  Should I follow my faith or my heart? My intentions were pure, which counted for something, right? Killing Ivory would be far worse than stealing her memories, and the only other option wasn’t an option at all—we couldn’t walk away. If I didn’t do as Paloma suggested, Ivory would find us and attack again. There’d be no hiding from someone who knew me so well.

  The sound of a chair dragging against the kitchen’s linoleum floor ripped me from my introspection. Charles entered the room and sat beside me on the couch. He was silent at first. Then: “Do you need anything?”

  “You wouldn’t like it.”

  He swiveled his head toward me, his gaze blank and the whites of his eyes road-mapped with red. “This isn’t about me.”

  “My shoulder is killing me. Wouldn’t your blood…?”

  His mouth sagged, more of a slacking of his features than a frown, but he gave a resolute nod. When Adrian had given me his blood all those months ago, it’d only been because neither Charles nor Ivory had been ready to tell me about their own true natures. If I was going to have a bond with anyone, though, I wanted that person to be Charles. Waiting for Adrian to arrive and assist us was simply not an option, and I sensed the side effect of experiencing someone’s memories would feel somehow less invasive with Charles than it had with Adrian.

  Charles swept hair from my face and grazed my forehead with his lips. He pulled away and tore into his wrist to make a fresh wound from which blood flowed freely. He held his wrist to my mouth, and my stomach churned as the first drops rolled onto my tongue, but I sucked from the wound anyway, drinking until my stomach settled. Charles’ blood wasn’t cold like Adrian’s, but it was just as thick and metallic and sweet.

  His emotions rushed through me—anger, devotion, fear, concern. Soon, distinguishing his feelings from my own was nearly impossible. Perhaps my experience with Charles would be different. Would I be burdened with his emotional turmoil, instead of the images of his past? I peered up at him, still drinking, but his expression was blank.

  When the high of drinking the blood kicked in, I released his arm. The pain slowly subsided, replaced with a faint, healing tingle. I removed the gauze wrap and bandage, grimacing as the wound healed.

  I lifted my gaze to him, wiping my mouth with the sleeve of my sweater. “Are you okay?”

  The look of concern in his eyes challenged his smile. “You stopped before it hurt. What about you?”

  “I still need time to think.”

  Paloma joined us in the living room, setting a book in my lap: Ignisvisum. The literal translation in Latin would have been ‘Fire Vision’, but the subtitle read Scrying with Fire. Paloma had already told me the details, but reading the pages solidified this living nightmare.

  How was I supposed to concentrate long enough to write my own ritual? The ignisvis
um itself wasn’t wrong, but using it as a method to steal memories was.

  The text swam around the pages. I wrote things down, crossed them out, and started over. On my tenth or eleventh attempt, something clicked. The words flew to the page.

  Paloma stared out the window, looking over her shoulder every few minutes. Charles stood and took a meaningless trip outside. He wanted to clear his head, too. I dropped my connection with his thoughts and tried to focus on my own.

  The decision wasn’t impossible. What choice did I have? Performing black magic was our only hope. Even then, I wasn’t sure the technique would work.

  Charles returned as I was finishing my notes. I closed my notebook and stood.

  “I have to do this.” The steely edge of my voice felt strange on my tongue.

  He sighed, shutting the front door quietly. “I didn’t want to pressure you.”

  Paloma turned to me, took both my hands, and gave them a gentle squeeze. A sad smile crossed her face.

  Night had fallen. Charles placed a call to Adrian, telling him everything and asking him to come over as soon as possible. We’d need him to relocate Ivory after the ritual, back to where she lived before she came to Colorado. Maybe if she were back in Boston, without any memories of me, she’d have no reason to return. But wouldn’t she be confused? Would she think she’d gone crazy? I pushed aside the creeping guilt and centered my attention on my only option.

  Paloma set up a small altar in the basement while I stood staring at Ivory, my arms crossed. She sat on the floor, chained to the wall and leaning back. Her gaze never left the ground, never rose to mine, but blood streaked down her cheeks from her eyes.

  “How could you?” I barely choked the words past the thickness in my throat.

  “You don’t understand,” Ivory whispered.

  “Then explain it to me.”

  Ivory opened her mouth, but then it fell shut, and she shook her head. “I—I can’t.”