“And that sent you on a mission to hunt down all immortals?” I said.
“You were all the same.” The priest dragged the tip of the knife down to Henley’s collarbone. “All of you thought you were more intelligent than you were. All seven of you sought to understand me. All of you tried to talk your way out. But at the last, it all ends the same way.” His green eyes glowed. “I provide you with a last kindness—a choice in death. Death by arsenic. Or by the blade.” He swept his knife up Henley’s throat in one motion.
My heart leaped at that quick movement, but he hadn’t pressed down. A thin red scratch marked Henley’s throat. I had to remain calm.
“Arsenic?” I asked.
With his free hand, the priest drew a black pouch from inside his robes.
“I always gave each Miss Hatfield the choice of a more honest death. The last Miss Hatfield didn’t take it and chose to run instead. A coward’s death.” The priest tossed the pouch onto the bed. “Go on.”
I leaned over to the center of the bed to take the pouch in my hands. Soft black velvet. I recognized the pouch from the lake. When I opened it, I saw there were exactly two white tablets left.
I could do this. I had a plan . . . though I didn’t know for certain if it would work or leave me dead.
“Wondrous pills. Minimal discomfort,” the priest said. “Or a swifter death by blade. Have you made your decision?”
“Yes, I have.” I couldn’t look at Henley’s eyes.
“And what have you decided?”
“Arsenic.”
I took a pill in my hand and tossed the pouch back onto the center of the bed.
“Then let me die too,” Henley said.
Both the priest and I looked at him.
No, Henley. You weren’t supposed to say that.
“How gallant of you,” the priest said. “Saves me from fretting about how to dispose of you afterward.” He cut the cords that tied Henley to the chair.
“Give me a pill,” Henley said.
I closed my eyes. This couldn’t be happening. It was the wrong time to be stupidly gallant. Henley was actually going to kill himself.
The priest handed him the pouch. Henley picked out the remaining pill.
I tried to make eye contact with him. I tried to convey that I had a plan and that he wasn’t supposed to kill himself, but there was no change in his eyes as he watched me.
Damn it, Henley.
“Well, on with it,” the priest said.
Our eyes were locked as we both put the pills to our lips.
I stuck mine in my mouth first. I tucked it under my tongue and prayed it wouldn’t dissolve too quickly.
Henley took his tablet. Oh God.
I felt the warmth drain from my face. I felt nauseated and lurched forward, retching, but there was nothing in my stomach to come up.
I could see Henley go white, but I couldn’t keep my eyes on him.
I felt faint and crumpled to the floor. I managed to make a pillow with my hands to cushion my head from the fall, but a side of my head still hit the ground. I didn’t even feel the pain.
As soon as I was blocked from sight by the bed, I spat out the pill and quickly stuck it under the bed.
“Rebecca!”
Through the haze and my slit eyes, I could see Henley had rushed to my side. He made to bend over me, but collapsed instead.
I dug my finger into Henley’s mouth, looking to pull the pill out. We only had a few seconds until the priest came over to check that we were dying. Henley pushed my hand away and pointed quickly under the bed.
In the middle of the floor, under the bed, were two white pills.
I was so relieved. I closed my eyes but felt like vomiting. Maybe the arsenic got to me, or maybe it was because I hit my head. Slipping. Losing my grip on everything. Scared. I don’t remember anything after that.
When I came to, the priest was standing over us. He reached down and felt the side of Henley’s neck. I realized he was checking for a pulse.
Fear shot through me. If it was too strong, the priest would just run him through with the knife. If Henley’s pulse was too weak . . . or nonexistent . . . he might already be dead. Maybe we had both had the pills in our mouths for too long.
The priest wouldn’t desecrate a body without needing to—which was why I had come up with this plan in the first place—but nothing would stop him from stabbing us if he thought we weren’t dead.
After what felt like an eternity, the priest stood. He seemed satisfied. He started to mutter.
“. . . Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done. On earth as it is in heaven . . .”
It was the Lord’s Prayer.
“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.”
I couldn’t see the priest’s face as he prayed over us, but I suspected it would be showing strange compassion.
His voice was strong till the end. “For thine is the kingdom, the power, and the glory. For ever and ever. Amen.”
I waited for the priest to check my pulse, but he must have done it already while I was unconscious. Instead he walked over to the other side of the room again, while muttering.
“Arsenic prolongs death, but death it does bring. It’s only a matter of time before they’re returned to the earth.”
I opened my eyes fully and looked at Henley. His glazed eyes stared back at me. Maybe he was actually—
He blinked.
Thank God.
Henley made to say something, but I gave a minute shake of my head, signaling him to not make a sound. I pointed under the bed, toward the other side, to indicate where the priest had gone.
We heard slight shuffling sounds from the other side of the room.
I couldn’t imagine what the priest might be doing. It sounded like he had moved the chair Henley had been tied to.
I glanced at Henley. He had silently risen to a crouch, just barely peeking over the side of the bed.
I knew it wasn’t a good idea, but I joined him, trying to see what the priest was doing. That was the only way we could stay one step ahead of him.
The priest had moved the chair in front of the room’s one window. It was small and circular, barely big enough to see out of. But the priest was sitting facing away from the window. Light shone down on him from behind.
He sat in the chair, holding the knife in both hands. He was still. All he did was look at it.
The priest turned the knife, and it caught the light from the window, throwing sharp streaks across the room. He seemed to be playing with the knife, waiting for something to happen.
The priest sighed, as if he had to do something tedious. He stood up with the knife still in his hands, pointing toward himself. And plunged it into himself.
My hand involuntarily shot out, and Henley caught it in his own.
The priest stood there, looking down at the knife still in his chest. He staggered, sitting back down on the chair. There was so much blood. His robes couldn’t soak all of it up, and it dripped down the chair. His eyes were wide, as if in amazement at all the blood. As if he was in shock that he had done this to himself. But his lips were fixed into a smile.
Then I understood. His was the last death.
The priest hadn’t argued when I’d told him we were the same. We were both immortals—and in his eyes, both aberrations in God’s plan. He had killed all the Miss Hatfields before me. He thought he had killed me too. His last duty had been to kill himself, to purge the world of the unnatural.
Henley started to stand.
I placed a hand on his shoulder. “No.”
The right thing to do was to let him have his peace. He was already dying. There was no sense or compassion in showing him his death had borne no meaning.
TWENTY-THREE
THE PRIEST GULPED his last breath and let it out in a last sigh. His body slumped forward, and his duty was finished. He disintegrated, and I
watched his ashes softly cover the chair he had been sitting in.
Henley stood, unable to tear his eyes away from where the priest had sat. He helped me up.
“A-are you all right?”
He knew I wasn’t all right. He knew we both weren’t all right and wouldn’t be for a while, but as the realization of what had happened sank in, all we could do was fall back on our usual questions and habits.
That was why I told him, “I’m okay.”
“Good. Good. I-I’m fine. Very fine.”
He had forgotten to let go of my hand, and I felt his tremors through his fingers.
We stood still for a moment, before I pulled him toward the trapdoor in the floor. We couldn’t stay in that room.
As we walked down the stairs I saw Alma was lying there, waiting for us by the foot of the stairs.
She had probably heard our voices in the attic and wanted to come up, but the first step had been too high for her short legs. She had probably been there the entire time.
“You were waiting for us, weren’t you? You knew we’d come back.” When I crouched down to pet her, I realized the floor was wet.
I put my hand on her head, and she raised her eyes to look at me. Her eyes were tired. The light was going. There was gray in her fur again.
“I-I don’t understand.”
Henley put his hand on my own.
Alma wheezed as she drew herself up onto her paws and slowly dragged herself away.
“No. No, she was immortal. She can’t have aged. And so suddenly. She looks like she did before she drank from the lake. It’s as if she was never immortal . . .”
I saw the backpack by the foot of the stairs. I had left it open when I put it down, and the small vial—the one Richard had given to me—was out and crushed on the floor. The wetness on the floor was from that. Alma must have worried it out of the backpack and broken it. But why was she old again? It wasn’t possible.
Richard had said the liquid in the vial was useless. He had said it was almost like water. It didn’t do anything when consumed. It couldn’t be poison.
“Richard was searching for immortality,” Henley said. “Is it possible . . .”
That he found mortality instead?
“He found a cure for immortality,” Henley said. “Alma returned to the way she was before.”
The water was fast seeping through the floor cracks.
“We need to make a decision right now,” I said.
Henley understood exactly what I meant.
I took out the flask with the water from the Fountain of Youth, and looked at Henley.
“Whichever decision we make, we won’t be able to undo it,” he said.
Endless time with the man I loved or one meaningful life with him instead. Living in the world or being above it all.
I was human. I wanted to feel and go through everything human. I didn’t want a cheapened experience.
We both understood how important this decision was, and yet we were calm as we took our fingers and dipped them in the spilled water. We brought it to our lips. We were sure.
EPILOGUE
HENLEY AND I kept the brownstone and lived in it for the rest of our days. Very little of our past lives remained, save for the sun-faded mark where the clock once hung in the kitchen. As the decades went by, we started forgetting details of the existences we had once led.
But occasionally, on rare days, one of the older neighbors—the woman walking her Chihuahua or the anthropology professor two doors down—would mention to me that there used to be a beautiful woman who lived in our house. They would tell me that she had lived alone and kept mostly to herself. She had seemed nice enough but always too distant.
“You look so much like her,” they would say.
“Such a shame she was so alone,” I would say.
And they would tell me I was fortunate that I couldn’t imagine such a lonely life.
Our conversation would end with that. They would help me up the steps of my house, kiss me on the cheek, and go back to their house. I would wave, and they would wave.
I would come home to Henley, who would be waiting by the fire in the parlor.
“Rebecca?”
My footsteps made the wood floors creak in familiar ways.
“Yes?”
A gust of wind came in through the door with me. It knocked down one of the cards that lined the mantel.
“I was thinking minestrone soup for dinner tonight. Would that be all right?”
He knew I would eat anything for dinner, but he asked every day.
“That would be wonderful.” I walked to the mantel and picked up the card on the floor. It had fallen open, and the messy handwritten words seemed to fall out onto the floor.
Thank you so much for the mixer. It will make a great addition to our new kitchen. (I can’t believe we’ve finally found a place to settle down!) I will have to make you brownies as soon as we unpack and officially move in, after the honeymoon. I’m so glad both of you were able to make it to the wedding!
I didn’t know why I was reading the card when I already had it memorized by heart. It was the first thank-you card I had ever received, after all.
Closing the card, I set it up on its place on the mantel.
Alanna and Peter Santelli-Newton was embossed on the front in silver script.
“Now come sit by me so I can take in what a beautiful sight you are.”
Henley always wheeled his chair into the parlor, next to the armchair that was my seat. Since he invariably complained of the cold, I would put a blanket around his legs and pull thick socks on his feet before sitting down next to him. He hadn’t worn shoes in years.
I would sit next to him by the fire, and he would tell me my eyes hadn’t changed. I missed Henley’s blue eyes, but I could feel them on me, past Richard’s hazel ones. Henley saw me through them.
As the years went by, the world grew gradually darker for me. We didn’t leave the house much, and Margot came in to carry groceries and help us with food.
“Granny?”
“I’m in here, Margot. The parlor,” I said.
She sounded so mature, coming home from college. She almost sounded like her mother.
“I bet your mother’s pleased to have you back for the summer,” I said.
“You know Mom. She likes keeping me close. She calls every other day when I’m in California.”
I had called every other day for the first year when her mother started college too.
“I brought some apples and strawberries from the farmers’ market,” she said.
“Strawberry season already?”
I extended my hand, and Margot was there to meet me. I felt a few strawberries drop into my cupped hand. Their seeds gently scratched my palm.
“They’re plump and a beautiful red, Gran.”
“Is that so?”
She took them from me. “Let me wash them first.”
Margot’s footsteps were soft as she exited the room.
“She’s looking more like you every day,” Henley said.
As the world grew dark, I saw Henley more clearly. He was young again. His blue eyes shone. He had this way he pushed his dark hair back when it flopped into his eyes. And also the way he would roll his eyes, but then extend his hand to me a moment later.
I felt Henley’s hand cradle my own. It was the same thing he did every day, but somehow it felt warmer—more comforting. His thumb stroked the back of my hand once, before the world fell away. It wasn’t the visual world that fell away—no, that had gone long before—but my tangible senses and the connecting emotions. They dissipated into nothing. The last thing to go was the feeling of Henley’s hand on my own.
Was this death? If so, death felt like traveling in time. I felt the world slip away and welcomed the stillness. It shrouded me in silence and held me.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I WOULD LIKE to thank Maggie Hanbury and Robin Straus. You are every author’s dream agents. A huge thank-yo
u to my editor, Kelsey Horton, not only for supplying many books on my to-read list, but for her actual editing.
Thank you to Jill Amack, Jon Howard, and the Epic Reads Impulse team at HarperCollins for all their hard work on this book. There’s only so much an author can do alone.
Rhean, I don’t know where I would be without your guidance. You have taught me so much over the years.
Katie, your life advice is the reason I’ve survived these last nineteen years. Mark, I still believe socks with sandals are an abomination. Christian, there is no one with whom I would rather girl talk.
To my parents—so many thank-yous have already been said, but I know it’ll never come close to being enough. In my opinion, so far, so good on the parenting. But then again, I might be a bit biased.
BACK ADS
DISCOVER
your next favorite read
MEET
new authors to love
WIN
free books
SHARE
infographics, playlists, quizzes, and more
WATCH
the latest videos
TUNE IN
to Tea Time with Team Epic Reads
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Photo by Bobby Quillard
ANNA CALTABIANO was born in British colonial Hong Kong to a Japanese mother and Italian-American father. She is a high school student in Palo Alto, California, as well as a frequent contributor to various publications, including The Huffington Post and The Guardian. Her first novel, All That Is Red, was published when Anna was just fifteen years old. You can find Anna online at www.annacaltabiano.com and on Facebook and Twitter (@caltabiano_anna).
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
BOOKS BY ANNA CALTABIANO
The Seventh Miss Hatfield
The Time of the Clockmaker
The Day Before Forever
COPYRIGHT
THE DAY BEFORE FOREVER. Copyright © 2016 by Anna Caltabiano. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
The Day Before Forever Page 31