by Ramy Vance
I’d shifted into thousands of illusions in my time and never been that cool.
A pair of fingers snapped near my ear. “Isa,” Aimee hissed. “You’re up.”
My eyes shot from Aimee to the professor, who stood with the tufts of his remaining hair blowing under the vent, one hand on his hip. “Ms. Ramirez?”
Merda. That was me. Part of that encantado thing: you get really, really hyperfocused on whatever you’re fantasizing about—sort of like a human with ADHD.
“Coming.” I tucked my amulet into my sweater and swept my report and USB drive off my desk. I was ready for this.
I made for the front of the classroom, and when I knelt in front of the computer, I struggled to fit the USB into the slot. I must have practiced a hundred times, but I was sweating through my sweater by the time it finally clicked in.
I sprang up to find twenty sets of half-lidded eyes staring back at me. If you think imitating humans for hundreds of years during your immortal life would prepare you for a 10-minute presentation in front of a classroom of mostly human college freshmen, you’d be wrong.
Very wrong.
I closed my eyes, took a deep breath as I indicated for our professor to dim the lights.
He stepped toward the door, made to close it on any late arrivals. But a hand caught the door just before it closed, and a set of extra-long nails tapped the wood.
Every pair of eyes turned to see who’d dared to arrive late. This professor was known to dress-down any students who thought they could barrel into his class after it had already started.
But this wasn’t a student.
The door creaked slowly open to reveal an elderly woman in a long, black dress. She hadn’t even worn a jacket; definitely not Canadian winter-wear. Her white hair had been left uncut and straggled almost to her hips. It framed a lined, unhappy face.
No—unhappy wasn’t the right word. I’d spent so long studying faces and recreating them that I knew exactly how to read a person’s face, especially if they were old.
This woman bore the face of a life lived bitterly. Frown lines framed her mouth, which pursed almost into lipless nonexistence. Two deep grooves sat between her eyebrows, what I’d often heard called “elevens.”
Elevens were a sign of worry, of pain, of anxiety. And they had the side effect of permanently marring a face.
Even now, her eyebrows drew together as she surveyed the classroom. Emerald eyes, the whites bloodshot and yellowing, started at the back and swept over every face until she arrived at mine.
The scorn in those eyes practically leveled me. I set one hand on the rail along the bottom of the whiteboard.
“Can I help you?” the professor asked.
Her green eyes narrowed on me, studying my features. And the more I looked, the more they seemed familiar. But that couldn’t be—I remembered every person I’d ever met. I was the Other equivalent of a “super recognizer,” which meant I could remember anyone’s face after seeing it once. Except I was beyond that. I had tens of thousands of faces in my memory.
And I didn’t recognize this one.
But those eyes … there was something about them.
The old woman didn’t even acknowledge that the professor had spoken. She came toward me in a smooth motion, the hem of her dress kissing the ground almost as though she floated.
When she stopped, I had backed up against the whiteboard—I was going to have red marker residue all over my back after this—as she leaned toward me … and sniffed.
I lifted a finger. “Uh, excuse me.”
The woman’s hand came out, touched a tendril of my hair. She brought it to her nose and took one long, deep inhale. “É você?”
Had she just addressed me in Portuguese? If I’d heard her correctly, she had said, “Is it you?”
Even if she did speak my language, I really doubted I wanted to be the person she was looking for. I removed my hair from her grasp, and she allowed it to slide from between her fingertips. “Desculpe,” I said, “nunca nos conhecemos.” Which translated to, “Sorry—we’ve never met.”
Her eyes widened with recognition, like she’d seen someone she never expected to see again. I knew that look. Heck, I’d been responsible for that look before.
By now, the professor had stepped up behind the old woman and set both hands on her shoulders. She looked absolutely frail next to him, and his hands appeared enormous. “All right, let’s figure out where you’re supposed to be.”
The woman’s eyes hung on me, but she allowed herself to be turned toward the door. She flashed one last look around the classroom, her eyes darting toward me as she and the professor stepped outside.
"Isabella, we’ll continue with your presentation in a minute,” he said as the door swept shut behind him.
And as it clapped to, the whole class broke into nervous laughter. It was like they’d seen one of those guys in a hotdog suit come running through the lecture room and dash out the other side.
Except for me. My heart was beating like a bird in a cage.
Chapter 2
The morning chill hadn’t lifted, and Aimee and I walked slowly toward the dining hall.
“So,” she began, “that was unusual.”
“Understatement of the century.” And I would know; I had been around for five centuries.
Even as we passed down the sidewalk packed with students going to and from classes, my eyes searched for that woman. Those green eyes were haunting me.
“Do you know her?” Aimee asked.
“How would I know her?”
“She sounded … South American.”
“That’s kind of generalizing, Aimee. It’s a big continent.”
She shrugged. “Okay, whatever. You and she spoke in Portuguese, didn’t you?”
I exhaled through my nose. “Yes.” That woman had clearly been a native speaker. And she actually sounded like she might have been from Brazil.
“Maybe you knew her ... you know, before.”
And by before, she meant when I was an immortal. Back before I had to burn time to shapeshift, and when years flowed through my fingers as simply as water over my dorsal fin.
Well, those rare times I actually took on my true form.
“I’ve never seen her face before,” I said slowly. “But those eyes …”
Aimee cast a curious look at me as she opened the door to the dining hall, and a wave of delicious hot air flowed over the both of us. Ahh, the wonders of modern heating. There were a few things I truly appreciated as a Brazilian in Canada, and this was in the top three.
Ahead of us, the morning crowd had assembled, most tables full of dull-eyed students in pajamas with bowls of sugar—what they called “cereal”—set before them. It was a miracle humans in the developed world lived as long as they did, given their day-to-day eating habits.
“The eyes? What do you mean?” Aimee asked.
“They were like … ” But I trailed off as my gut cinched. It had been seventy years, and I still couldn’t even think about him without a physical reaction. And I really didn’t want to talk about what had happened seventy years ago in the middle of the dining hall. So I just offered a faint smile. “They were like emeralds.”
“I thought she was going to turn you into a pillar of salt with the way she was looking at you,” Aimee said as we crossed to the tray dispenser. “Hey, isn’t that—?”
We had caught sight of him at the same time, and I froze with the tray to my chest like a breastplate.
Justin Truly, and he was staring straight back at us over a giant pile of whipped cream. There might have been a waffle under there somewhere, too.
“Yes,” I whispered. “Is he looking at us or out the window?”
“I’d say he’s looking at you, Isa.”
I spun around, slamming my tray onto the rails. “No way. He’s definitely looking at the pretty Montreal sky.”
Aimee glanced outside. “The sky looks like a white coat that got trampled on by dirty boots.
You should talk to him—he’s alone.”
“True.” I thought about what she was suggesting, then I thought about who was suggesting it. “Wait a minute, aren’t you Kat’s friend? Why would you betray her like that?”
"We met a couple times. She was a little too aggressive for us to be friends. Not like you and me," Aimee said. "Kat's nice, but all's fair in love and war."
I grabbed an apple, set it on my tray. “I can’t. He’s with her.”
She shrugged. “So? Doesn’t mean he’s a nun.”
“Men can’t be nuns.”
She sighed. “It was a joke, Isa. Sometimes I think I should hang out with humans more often.”
“Who would do your biology homework for you?” I flashed her a grin.
“Oh, that’s it.” She set both hands on my shoulders and turning me toward Justin. “Go figure out what genus and species he is, future biologist.”
I yelped as she pushed me in his direction. “Hey, I haven’t finished getting my food!”
Aimee grabbed a plate of salmon, set it on my tray. “Got you covered, fam.”
Salmon was my absolute favorite. My gaze softened on Aimee; she really did know me.
I sighed, turned back to Justin. He had dug into his mountain of whipped cream, and even with his terrible dietary choices and downcast eyes, I still couldn’t help but find him dreamy.
I wanted to approach, but I felt frozen to the spot. How would Katrina walk over to him? Probably with a confident step and two arms slid tight around his waist, considering she hadn’t been around for weeks.
And how would he react if he saw her? Those blue eyes would light up as I’d seen them do when she stepped out of our English class and he’d be waiting for her. His eyebrows would lift for a half-second—which signaled attraction and excitement among Homo sapiens—and he would stand, enfold her in his arms.
What if he could see her again? When the thought entered my mind, my hand flew to my chest, searching out my amulet. I pulled it from beneath my sweater, rubbed at the gem. I had seen Katrina often enough that I would only have to burn two months of my life to shift into her likeness.
A few months of life for a few hours of bliss? Sounded like a fair trade to me. We encantados really, really prized love, lust and everything in between.
I started toward the bathroom. I heard Aimee calling my name, but I didn’t respond, heading straight for the single-stalled handicap bathroom. I needed the privacy, and it would only take me about ten minutes to change, so I wasn’t that bad.
Just a little bad.
As I stepped into the bathroom, I shut the door and locked it. When I turned, my redheaded visage stared back at me.
“Stop judging me,” I said. The face who stared back had actually been a young woman I’d seen in traveling in Rio, shortly before I’d flown to Montreal. And she had looked so…glamorous, so glorious. I’d thought, there’s the perfect person for me to be.
There’s the person who’ll change everything.
But soon after I’d arrived at McGill, all that gloriousness had fallen away. Now she only looked pallid and judgmental under the fluorescent light. That look reminded me of how he had stared at me, all those decades ago.
I closed my eyes, gripping my amulet. I envisioned Katrina Darling: the brown-blonde hair, her heart of a face, the green eyes. And as I did, a tremor of power passed through me.
Magic. It had been so long, just a taste of it felt immense.
After a moment, it surged in me, filling my body like carbonate. First it slipped into my bones, cracking them with painful abruptness. I had to be shorter. I had to be finer-boned. Even my facial structure had to change.
I gritted through it all, my eyes firmly shut. Back before the gods left—when I could use magic as freely as I could breathe air—I hadn’t thought anything of shifting into a new form. Now I could feel the hours rolling off the end of my life. The whole process had become a little scary.
But, how does the saying go? Fashion hurts.
Shutter flashes of Katrina Darling passed through my mind: the back of her perfectly groomed head in English class, the sight of her walking through campus, how she smiled, how she frowned, how she contemplated.
Then came the muscles. They refitted themselves to my new frame, reshaping slender and lithe. The vocal cords adjusted to create the cadences of her speech.
I hadn’t expected everything to shrink so much. Katrina Darling was even smaller than my old form, which wasn’t very large to begin with. For some reason, I’d always thought she was … bigger than that. And I wasn’t referring to adipose tissue. Her presence in class, when she spoke, had always made her seem larger than the body she occupied.
And I realized, mid-shift, that she didn’t necessarily see herself as limited by her size. She was who she was.
When I opened my eyes in the handicapped stall, I flinched. There she was, watching me. It was almost as though Katrina Darling had snuck in while I was shifting and was staring me down.
When I lived in Brazil, we encantados had always called ourselves artists. We even had a test by which we judged our shapeshifting: if we saw our own reflection and felt, for a heart-stopping moment, that we had been found out by the person we were imitating, we had succeeded. We had made a person come to life.
I had passed that test many times, but today, I had captured Katrina Darling more acutely than perhaps any shift I’d attempted before. The hair, the face, everything.
Maybe it was the knowledge of my own impermanence, that I was sacrificing two months of my life to create this portrait of a woman. Or maybe it was the inspiration. The hair, the face, everything.
I ticked some fake dust off the shoulder of my sweater—which was a little big on me now—and grinned.
The door handle jostled, and a knock followed.
“Be just a minute,” I called, and jerked my head around to survey the empty stall. It was like she had spoken over my shoulder.
When I opened the door, a young woman in a wheelchair idled a few feet off. She offered me a slant-eyed look, surveying my perfectly able body.
My first instinct was to apologize, but I suppressed it. Would Katrina apologize? She didn’t ever seem sorry for anything. But it was right to be sorry for taking up the handicapped bathroom when I didn’t legitimately need it.
Something the campus therapist for Others had suggested during our last session came to mind. Instead of apologizing, thank people. But what should I thank her for?
Anxiety—the familiar teeter-totter between my old personality and this new one I still wore like a costume—swelled in me like a fist gripping my heart. Maybe this had been a mistake, becoming Katrina. My assertiveness was melting before I’d even left the bathroom.
I hovered for a few seconds in front of the door until she began rolling her chair forward. “Are you done?” she said. “I really have to go.”
I blinked hard, stepped aside. “Yes, I’m done. Thank you for being patient with me.”
I didn’t know if that was what Katrina would have said, but it was what felt right in the moment. It felt right for me.
She glanced up at me for a second, and the ghost of a smile touched her lips. “I like your bag,” she said, and then she rolled past me into the bathroom.
I grinned after her. Score one for the Dolce Gabbana bag. That sounded like something she might say.
When I walked back into the dining hall, no one seemed to notice at first. After all, I just looked like your typical (super cute) college freshman. It wasn’t until I’d crossed in amongst the tables that I spotted Aimee, sitting alone with two trays. One was mine, the salmon now cold on the plate. I felt a pang of guilt, but I’d apologize to her later for skipping out.
As I passed her, she lifted her eyes, paused with a big spoonful of pudding in her mouth. “Ka-sriba?”
I pretended I hadn’t heard her. Instead, I beelined for the table where Justin sat. He’d managed to plow through about half of that pile of whipped cream
, and I smirked as I leaned against the table, one hand set flat on its surface.
“That’s sweet, lover.” I reached down, swept up a fingerful and set it between my lips. “You got a double portion for me.”
↔
In my years as an encantado, I’ve experienced a lot of adoring gazes. Men and women alike have looked at me like I’m their goddess, the heroine of their own personal fairy tale.
And for a time, I was. Always for a time. I could inspire that adoration within a few days, and I could even make it last weeks or months. But the illusion always faded, the lust rarely passing into something deeper, truer. It might have had something to do with showing them my real form, or it might have been an inevitability.
Despite it all, the thrill of that adoring gaze never became less potent.
But that wasn’t the look Justin gave me when his eyes rose to my face. I registered shock in his raised eyebrows and open mouth. Then a dash of confusion, the eyebrows pulling together to form those elevens I mentioned earlier.
“Kat?”
“In the flesh.” I tilted my head with a smile.
For a half-second, his eyes softened into wrought affection, and he stood, came around the table and pulled me into his arms. “What are you doing here? Where have you been?”
I melted into his tight embrace, ran my hands along the hard muscle of his torso and back. GoneGods be true, the muscles. And the warmth—he was impossibly warm, like a furnace.
When he kissed the top of my head and smelled my hair, it felt better than I’d ever imagined, and I had imagined it being pretty awesome. Definitely worth the burnt time.
“Good to see you, too,” I murmured into his chest.