by Хилари Дафф
“It takes a lot,” Sage admitted.
I tore my eyes from the rolling ocean waves and looked again around the room. It was cozy and intimate, and yet somehow not personal. It reminded me of vacation homes my family used to rent when I was little: tiny touches proved that the house belonged to someone else, but they were few and far between. I was so curious —where was Sage in this house? I was dying to snoop around and check it out.
“Do we get a tour?” I asked.
“No tour. We’re here only to get supplies.” He pulled a volume from the highest shelf of one of the bookcases. From the spine it looked like a fairly nondescript hardback, but when Sage set it down, I saw it was actually a small combination safe. He undid the lock and pulled open the cover to reveal a large stack of envelopes, each one labeled with a different name: Franklin Hobart, Brian Yancey, Everett Singer, Larry Steczynski … it was this last one he grabbed and pulled open, emptying its contents into his wallet and pockets.
“Larry Steczynski?” I asked incredulously.
Sage smiled. “You don’t think it suits me?”
“Oh, I think it suits you perfectly. How many aliases do you have?”
“I’m a bit of a collector.”
I placed a hand on his wrist, stopping him as he transferred something into his wallet. “Does Larry Steczynski carry a black AmEx?”
“He might.”
“My mom doesn’t even carry a black AmEx.”
“Apparently your mom doesn’t move in the same circles as Larry Steczynski.”
“Sage,” Ben called from across the room. He had knelt down to gaze closely at a sculpted figurine that sat on an end table, and his voice broke with awe. “This … this is a real Michelangelo, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, yeah it is.”
“But it’s a Michelangelo!”
“Yep.”
“And that painting,” Ben said, nodding to a piece on the wall featuring a sketch of what looked like a somewhat cherubic version of Sage himself. “That’s a real Rubens?”
“It is.”
“It looks like you.”
“Strong genetics in the family line,” Sage explained.
This seemed like a good time to slip out. “Bathroom?” I asked.
Sage pointed across the room to a tiny hall that branched off. The bathroom was there … and so was a closed door, just a little farther down the hall. Sage’s bedroom—it had to be.
I tiptoed down the hall and eased open the door, taking great pains to pull it gently closed behind me.
If Sage did sleep here, it was a tight squeeze. The room was packed full of art and supplies: canvases, easels, paints, charcoals … some were works in progress, others were on display, and every inch of wall space held a framed image. Scanning them, my heart started to race. Almost every image featured one of four women.
Women I knew.
Women I had been in dreams.
They didn’t look like me the way they did when I dreamed about them, but I was absolutely certain who they were.
One woman laughed as she held on to the sides of a rowboat floating on the Tiber—Olivia.
One woman’s long red hair flowed wildly behind her as she raced on her horse—Catherine.
One woman studied her face in the mirror, expertly applying stage makeup—Anneline.
One woman leaned against a piano, singing in the middle of a packed audience—Delia.
There was more. A canvas mounted on the wall—a watercolor of two young men in Renaissance clothing, holding absurd stances. I knew this painting. I’d painted it.
The men were Sage and Giovanni, and I remembered the dream where I’d tried to get them to keep still and pose.
I looked at the bottom right-hand corner of the piece: signed with a single O. Her signature. My signature?
Was it possible? Were my dreams actually … memories? Memories of past lives? I didn’t believe in reincarnation … but what else made sense?
And what about Sage? He looked the same in Olivia’s picture as he did now. It seemed strange that he would be reincarnated looking exactly the same and I wouldn’t be.
I was grateful when laughter from the other room stopped my wild thoughts. Sage and Ben laughing together? Apparently a lot of strange things happened in this house. I had to get back before they realized how long I’d been gone, but I didn’t want to leave. What did all this mean? Could there still be some kind of rational explanation?
Should I ask Sage? He might not like that I’d snooped, but he couldn’t get that angry. He was still basically a stranger—I had every right to try and find out more about him.
I had my hand on the doorknob and was about to leave when a canvas in the corner caught my eye.
It wasn’t framed, and it wasn’t on display. It was on its side, the top canvas in a stack of them, all leaned against the wall. A sheet covered the pile most of the way, but the image of an eye grabbed my attention.
The eye was huge on the page, rendered in a stunning, clear blue. It was beautiful … but hauntingly blank. I couldn’t tear myself away from the image. I didn’t even realize I was walking toward it until I was there, pulling off the sheet.
It was all I could do to stifle a bloodcurdling scream.
Of course the eye was blank. It belonged to Olivia, and she was dead. She was lying on her side, the back of her skull crushed in, and her mouth fixed open in a final scream of terror. Blood pooled all around her; the iris charm she wore was fixed to the floor in a cake of red. The whole canvas drowned in a sea of blood, and while Olivia’s body was the focus, it was only the centerpiece of an abattoir of carnage. Other bodies lay behind Olivia’s, men and women twisted in poses of horror, swords and daggers impaling them to the floor.
Images from my nightmares flashed through my mind, and I winced away from them. I’d lived this scene.
Oh my God, was I looking at a painting of my own death?
Trembling, I reached out to flip to the next painting. Even touching the canvas made my skin crawl.
The next painting was of Anneline … or what had once been Anneline. She was sprawled out in a white bedroom: white curtains billowing in from the open window, white bed linens, white furniture. She was dressed in a flowing white gown. The only color came from her red lips, the long black spread of her hair, the silver of her iris-charm necklace, her unseeing brown eyes … and blood. It poured out of her from countless gashes in her torso, and splashed tiny polka dots over the rest of the snowy white landscape.
There was one more horrible piece of red in the picture.
A single long-stemmed rose, pushed deep into her chest, over her heart.
I felt my gorge rise.
I couldn’t look anymore.
I had to.
I heard voices from the other room—how long had I been in here? Was Sage coming in? What would he do if he saw me with these?
Quickly I flipped through the other canvases: more of the same. Delia’s death pose was pristinely clean, with only a single gaping bullet hole between her eyes.
Catherine’s was terrible; she writhed and screamed as a bonfire of flames engulfed her waiflike body, tied securely to a stake.
The voices were coming closer. I had to get out of here.
Then I noticed something on the wall. A line of nails. Four of them, each with a delicate iris-charm necklace hanging off it.
And a fifth nail.
Empty.
Waiting.
I raced out of the room and locked myself into the bathroom just in time to lean over the toilet and be sick.
Almost instantly there was a pounding on the door.
“Clea? Are you okay?” Sage’s voice rang out. “You’ve been in there forever.”
“I’m sorry,” I croaked. “It’s my stomach. I don’t know why, but—” I felt my gorge rising again, and for the first time ever I was happy someone was going to hear me throw up—it gave me an excuse to stay in here and get it together.
“Ooh, okay. Take your
time,” Sage said.
I listened to his footsteps as he walked away. When I could I got up to run cold water over my face and rinse out my mouth, but I was still breathing heavily and shaking all over.
Oh my God, was Sage going to kill me?
The paintings didn’t necessarily mean that. The ones on the wall were of good times. And hadn’t my therapist told me art was great for people who’d lost someone?
Maybe that helped him deal. And the necklaces … if Sage loved those women, of course he’d keep their most treasured possessions.
Unless he kept them the way serial killers keep souvenirs.
Was Sage a serial killer? Some kind of timeless, ageless serial killer who didn’t choose multiple victims, but instead just one … and killed her—killed me—over and over again?
nine
“CLEA?”
It was Ben’s voice this time.
“Are you okay?”
Was I okay? I honestly had no idea. Was I going crazy? Maybe if I could tell Ben what I had seen, he could help me put everything together in a way that made sense. This was all far more his thing than mine.
My dad. I had to concentrate on my dad. Whatever Sage was, he was my only hope for finding my dad. I needed Sage for that, and if I told Ben what I’d discovered, he’d jump to the worst possible conclusion and do everything in his power to keep Sage and I apart.
I had to keep what I’d seen to myself. I had to act like nothing had changed.
“Clea?”
“I’m fine, Ben!”
I finished up, practiced a smile in the mirror, then emerged.
“Sorry about that,” I said.
“Are you okay?”
“Yep, I’m fine.”
“Did you see that Sage has an original Michelangelo? And a Rubens? And he has an original printing of Paradise Lost.”
Of course he does, I thought. He probably knew all of them personally.
“Wow,” I said instead. “He must spend a fortune on eBay.”
“Right, because who doesn’t buy million-dollar antiquities online?”
“Okay, so maybe not eBay …”
“Clea?” Sage’s voice rang out as Ben and I walked into the main room, and when I looked up I screamed.
Sage was brandishing a knife.
“Clea? Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yes … sorry, I just … that’s a huge knife.”
He laughed. “I heated up a turkey I had in the fridge. I was going to make us sandwiches. Does that work for you?”
A turkey. The knife was for a turkey.
“Yeah, that’s great. Thanks.” I pasted on a smile.
Sage went back to carving the bird, but looked at me like I’d lost my mind. “Maybe we should take you to a doctor.”
“I’m fine. Just a little disoriented from … you know.”
“Right.”
Somehow I managed to keep hold of my sanity for the next fifteen minutes. Sage finished making sandwiches, double-checked to make sure he had all Larry Steczynski’s necessary documents, and put together a small duffel bag of clothes. Every time he looked my way, I couldn’t help but feel that he knew exactly what I’d seen and done. He didn’t like it, and he’d find a way to make me pay.
Once we got out of the house, I felt like I could breathe again. I stuck close to Ben as the three of us made the short, moonlit trek to the garage. No way was I sitting next to Sage. I told Ben to ride shotgun and pretended I still felt a little nauseous so I wouldn’t have to talk.
Had Sage and I been reincarnated again and again over the centuries, only to wind up together each time? In a way it would make sense, except I’d been four different women that I knew of and he’d been … Sage. So that meant he’d what? Been alive for the last five hundred years?
I inwardly rolled my eyes at my own absurdity, then realized that all my other options were just as absurd. There was the incubus theory, but could spirits bleed? I wasn’t as up on these things as Ben, but I thought by definition a “spirit” wasn’t something that could bleed. I’d seen Sage bleed. I’d made Sage bleed. Not that it hurt him any; he healed so quickly.…
In smaller doses it has incredible healing powers. Ben’s voice rang out in my head. I remembered he said that earlier, about … the Elixir of Life.
The crackpot, completely bogus, absolutely insane Elixir of Life.
Did it actually exist? Had Sage had some? Enough to keep him alive, young, and speed-healing for the last five hundred years?
And if so, had he used that time to find one woman, again and again in different incarnations, to love her … or destroy her?
We pulled into a drugstore near the airport so Larry Steczynski could buy me a pair of cheap shoes, and get both Ben and me duffel bags full of whatever we wanted to pass off as luggage. Buying one-way tickets from Rio to New York and traveling without any luggage would definitely raise red flags.
As we shopped, I pushed my suspicions aside so I could act something akin to normal. I was quickly losing sight of what “normal” might be. When we arrived at the airport, Mr. Steczynski munificently used his black AmEx to treat all three of us to first-class seats on the next flight to JFK.
I had barely said two words to Sage since my discovery. I worried that he’d notice I was acting differently. I racked my brain for something natural to say to him, but by the time we got to our gate, all I’d come up with was, “So … how exactly will we get to the house if people are watching and waiting for us?”
the time we got to our gate, all I’d come up with was, “So … how exactly will we get to the house if people are watching and waiting for us?”
“I’m not sure yet.”
“Oh, good.” Ben nodded. “Excellent that we’re following you, then.”
“How about I call Rayna?” I said. “She can pick us up. We’ll duck down in the car so no one can see us when we drive onto the property, she’ll pull right into the garage, and we’ll be in.”
“And if someone’s waiting for us inside?” Ben asked.
“They don’t know for sure we’re coming—why would they risk breaking in?”
“I guess … ,” Ben mused.
“You have a better option?”
He didn’t. Neither did Sage. I borrowed Larry Steczynski’s cell phone to call Rayna. Personally, I never answer the phone if I don’t recognize the number. Rayna doesn’t feel the same way; she sees an unknown caller as a doorway to a possible romance.
“Hello?” she answered seductively.
“Hey, it’s me.”
“Clea! Are you okay? I’ve been phone-stalking you for days. What happened? Where have you been?”
“Sorry, I lost my cell. Everything’s okay.” Wow—that was easily the biggest lie I’d ever told anyone in my life
“How okay?” she asked playfully. “Did you meet someone amazing at Carnival and get swept off your feet?”
I loved that those were the only two options for Rayna: Either something had gone horribly wrong, or I’d gotten wrapped up in a wild, whirlwind romance.
I glanced at Sage. “I did meet someone.…”
“I knew it! I want to know everything.”
“It’s kind of a long story.”
“I’ve got nothing but time. Details!”
“It’s complicated. Here’s the thing, though: Ben and I are in some trouble, and it has to do with my dad.”
“What happened?”
“I’ll tell you everything, but I need a huge favor. I need you to pick us up at JFK in the morning, and I need you to please not say anything about us coming. I know it sounds crazy, but I think there might be people watching the house and waiting for us to show up.”
“Really? I haven’t seen anything.”
“Good. Hopefully I’m wrong. Can you do it?”
“Of course. Be careful.”
“I promise.” I gave her our flight information, and we hung up. I glanced over at Ben and Sage. Whatever camaraderie they’d found over Sage’s
art and literature collection hadn’t lasted. It seemed the reality of Sage coming to Ben’s turf was too much for Ben to take, and they now sat next to each other, facing forward, without acknowledging each other, absolute stones. I imagined the twelve-hour trip ahead of us, me playing buffer between the two of them even as I struggled to deal with my own suspicions about Sage. I was exhausted just thinking about it. I decided to wander the terminal stores, and grinned as I found the perfect thing.
I waited until we were on the plane before I showed off my purchase.
“Cribbage!” I declared, pulling out the board, a deck of cards, and pen and paper, “Ben and I are going to teach you. Then we can all play.”
“What makes you think I don’t know how to play cribbage?” Sage asked.
“You do?” Ben sounded surprised.
“I happen to be an excellent cribbage player,” Sage said.
“Really … because I’m what one might call a cribbage master,” Ben said.
“I bet I’ve been playing longer than you,” Sage said, and I cast my eyes his way. Was he trying to tell us something?
“I highly doubt that,” Ben said, “but I believe we’ll see the proof when I double-skunk you.”
“Clearly you’re both forgetting it’s a three-person game, and I’m ready to destroy you both,” I said.
“Deal ’em,” Ben said.
Being a horse person, my mother was absolutely convinced she could achieve world peace if she just got the right parties together on a long enough ride. I didn’t know about that, but apparently cribbage might do the trick. The three of us were pretty evenly matched, and Ben was impressed enough to ask Sage how he learned to play. Turned out Sage’s parents were historians, he said, so they first taught him the precursor to cribbage, a game called noddy.
“Really?” Ben asked, his professional curiosity piqued. “Your parents were historians? Did they teach?”
“European history. In Europe,” Sage said. “Small college. They taught me a lot.”
Yep, there was the metaphorical gauntlet. I saw the gleam in Ben’s eye as he picked it up. “Interesting,” he said. “So you’d say you know a lot about European history?”
“I would say that. In fact, I believe I just did say that.”
Ben grinned, and immediately set out to expose Sage as an intellectual fraud. He’d ask questions to trip Sage up and test his story, things I had no idea were tests until I heard Sage’s reactions.