The Alchemy of Forever (6 page)

The bartender mops the area in front of me and tosses down a napkin. He is skinny, with tattoos snaking up his arms, and eyes that suggest too few hours of sleep. He reminds me vaguely of Jared. “What can I get you?” he asks in a flat tone.

“Glass of red wine, please.”

“I’m going to have to see some ID.”

I look up and meet his eyes. “Is that really necessary?” I hold his gaze for several long seconds. When he holds firm, I sigh and dig out the ID that matches my face: Jennifer Combs, age twenty-two. The bartender studies the ID and for one giddy second I imagine telling him my real age, just to see his reaction. But I hold myself in check. The last thing I need is to draw attention to myself.

The bartender passes the laminated card back to me before pouring my drink. I stick Jennifer Combs—a name Cyrus made up when I took this body—back into my purse. I won’t be needing her anymore.

“Thanks.” I take a long sip of what will be my last drink ever, then sit back and survey the room. The bar is old, with an intricately detailed tin ceiling covered in multiple coats of chipping paint. Booths upholstered with cracked blue vinyl line the walls, and several wooden chairs are strewn haphazardly across the linoleum floor.

In the corner a thin girl with shaggy black hair and feather earrings is locked in a heated conversation with a dark-haired boy. She wears a bright red T-shirt; on her arms are telltale track marks. My stomach sinks.

The girl pushes the boy’s shoulder. “Let me out!” she demands.

“Taryn, please,” he pleads in a low voice, grabbing her arm. “Just calm down.”

Taryn sets her jaw, an angry vein throbbing in her temple. “I mean it, Dan. Let me out.”

The boy sighs heavily, but after a moment he slides over and lets her out. Taryn ducks her head, hiding her face behind her lank hair as she stalks across the bar.

“That girl has a death wish,” the bartender observes, worry lines creasing his forehead.

I watch as Taryn shoves open the door and disappears into the night. “Looks like it,” I say.

The bartender turns to refill someone’s drink, and instantly I am gone, out into the foggy night, my bag in my hand. Standing so quickly makes me dizzy, but my head is clear, and I am suddenly so glad I came inside the bar.

I’ve known a thousand Taryns—the girls who have nothing left to live for, no will to stay alive. I can spot them anywhere, can smell their desperation. I used to prey on them; without the Taryns, I would not have survived all these years. But only one person will die tonight, I vow. And it won’t be her. Saving Taryn will be a small penance for all the lives I’ve taken.

Taryn is just ahead of me, slipping in and out of view in the thick fog. Lights, flashing red and orange, illuminate her thin frame from behind. She is stumbling, off-balance—drunk, at the very least.

Keeping to the shadows, I silently follow her as the streets grow closer to the Oakland estuary. There are no other people around, despite the brand-new condos that loom, unsold, over rotting produce warehouses.

The girl unsteadily approaches one of the steel shipping-container cranes. They look more animal than machine, with four legs and an extension over the water that resembles a head, looking out to sea.

Taryn begins climbing the ladder, slipping as she grabs the rungs before finally making it to the top. She approaches the edge of the crane, high over the murky water. After a beat I follow, the effort nearly unbearable.

The wind is strong at the top. It whips my dark hair around my face and muffles my footsteps. I feel unsteady on my feet, but I am determined to get her down.

“Taryn?” I say softly when I reach the girl. In the past I would have stalked this girl, but now I hope to save her.

She jerks around, her face registering slight surprise. Her cheeks are sunken, but her eyes are wide-set. She was probably pretty at some point.

“What do you want?” Taryn asks, hugging her arms around her torso.

I wait a moment before replying. “Are you going to jump?”

Taryn exhales, her shoulders slumping. “Why do you care?” Tears shine in her green eyes.

I search my heart, wanting to say the right thing. But all that springs to mind are six hundred years of platitudes, so I settle on the same question I asked myself when I decided to let myself die: “Do you have a good reason?”

She turns away from me, and I follow her gaze across the water. The twinkling lights of downtown San Francisco are barely visible through the fog, swirled and smudged like the Milky Way. When I was little, my mother and I used to lie out in the grass behind our house in London and spell my name in the stars, like a celestial connect-the-dots. “
Seraphina” means “angel,”
she would tell me
. Can’t you see it written in the heavens?

“Do you have any family?” I ask, stepping close enough to touch her.

“I don’t have anyone,” she says, the wind lifting her hair behind her.

I reach out for her thin shoulder. I look deep into her green eyes. “Not even the boy at the bar?”

“Especially not him,” Taryn says fiercely.

I nod, understanding. “You won’t find any comfort in death,” I promise her. “It’s a void. It’s nothing. You only want to die if you desire that nothingness. If you don’t want to be alone, that means you’re still alive. There’s hope.”

“Who are you?” she asks. I can barely hear her voice over the wind.

I think back over my unnaturally long life—my childhood in London, swimming in the sea in the south of France, arriving in San Francisco in the 1960s—and scroll through all the names I’ve gone by, starting with Seraphina and ending with Jennifer. I look her in the eye. “I am no one.”

She takes a step away from me, closer to the edge. I look down at the hard, glittery pavement, some forty feet below. The surface glistens with moisture.

“Taryn,” I say urgently. “You can’t fly. The stars aren’t your friends. Climb down. Go back to the bar. Find some people.”

She hesitates, chewing her lip. I see her resolve softening. “I can’t promise I won’t be back here later, though.”

“That’s fine. You decide to live one moment at a time. When it’s time to die, really time, you will know.”

Taryn walks back toward me and I again put my hand on her shoulder. For the first time I see fear in her eyes. Good. Fear indicates a desire to live. “Get down,” I tell her with a little push. And she does, her small hands gripping the ladder, moving slowly, trying not to fall.

I hold my hand to my brow, watching Taryn fade into the foggy night, her red T-shirt slipping away like a heart. When she’s gone, I let out the breath I’ve been holding. I saved a life tonight. Two, if I count Claudia. It doesn’t erase all the lives I’ve taken, all the borrowed time I’ve lived on. But it’s something.

I take a step closer to the edge, retracing Taryn’s footsteps. If I run and jump, I should be able to hit the water. But first, I fish in my bag and pull out Cyrus’s book and a lighter. This knowledge dies with me. The cover is leather, dyed a brilliant shade of blue. It reminds me of Cyrus’s eyes—I have seen them in every shade of blue. Currently, they’re an icy blue, like the snow-covered part of a glacier. But when I first met him, they were this exact shade. The rich color of the morning sky before the sun rises. In one smooth motion, I bang the book against the metal platform beneath my feet, and the lock breaks away.

The pages are thick, smooth vellum. The smell transports me back in time, when I used to sit with my father in his study as he scratched away at his balance sheets. But I realize, my heart sinking, that they won’t burn quickly. My father told me that vellum is made from animal skin—not plant fibers, like modern paper. It’s why the book, at least as old as Cyrus, has lasted.

I run my hand over the surface of the pages. They are a jumble of Latin, Greek, and Old English, plus other languages I don’t recognize, mixed in with astrological and scientific symbols: the output of Cyrus’s alchemy studies. One page has a rough sketch of two people facing each other, a braided cord joining them at the navel. It’s been painstakingly shaded with metallic ink. I know instantly what it is: the silver cord that binds the soul to the body.

I don’t have time to burn it, but I can take it with me into the sea. The water will do its job, eventually, washing all the ink away. Hugging the book to my chest, I squeeze my eyes shut, a few tears escaping their corners as I say my final farewells—to my coven, the Incarnates; to Charlotte; to my mother, whom I never got to say good-bye to the first time. I savor the moment as the wind whistles through the crane like a hymn.

I am ready.

But before I can send myself into the air, I hear the squeal of tires shredding across asphalt and the sound of shattering glass pierces the night like a gunshot. A girl’s terrified voice screams out. I whip around. Only one thing makes these sounds: a car accident—a deadly one.

Taryn.

The ensuing silence yawns around me, a dark formless presence that pushes me toward the ladder. I have to see if it’s Taryn, to see if my penance, my last act on Earth, has failed.

Time is of the essence and my strength is waning by the second, so I throw the book in my bag and leave it on the crane, then begin to climb down. My sneakers slip on the rungs and my breath comes in ragged waves. I stagger toward the deserted streets.

The smell of smoke and acrid burnt rubber assaults my nose, mingling with spilled gasoline. My pulse is rapid, my legs are shaky, and my vision is blurring again. I turn a corner and stumble over a pothole in the slick asphalt. My ankle buckles beneath me.

“Damn,” I mutter. Ahead of me, I see the car. Flames lick through a gap in its hood, casting strange orange shadows on the rusty, rippled loading dock doors. The car is upright, but a spiderweb of cracks on its windshield tells me it flipped at least once before landing here. I smell a coppery wash of blood. Dizzying, overwhelming—it is everywhere.

I grab the door handle, gather what little strength I have left, and yank. It won’t budge, and for a split second I have the sensation that I am not here, that I am dead, a ghost girl trying, laughably, to move objects in the physical world. I close my eyes, picturing the windswept crane, and steel myself for one final tug. Metal scrapes metal and sends a jarring reverberation up my arm the door finally opens.

My breath catches in my throat, relief mingled with horror. It is not Taryn, but a young girl, maybe sixteen, with tangled blond curls and a silver bracelet around her tanned wrist. Blood runs down the side of her face, soaking the embroidered neckline of her white peasant blouse like a bloom of red flowers.

She isn’t dead—a vein still pulses weakly in her neck—but she is close to it. Her right arm and leg appear to be broken, as does her neck, and blood seeps from a wound in her head. Up and down, up and down, her chest rises and falls, her breaths small and pitiful. She coughs, and a ruby drop of blood escapes from the corner of her lips. She takes another breath. And then, with chilling finality, she goes still.

In a fog I hold two fingers to her neck. There is no pulse. A little voice in the back of my head tells me she is beyond help, but I wrap my arms around her waist and pull. I hear a metallic snap as I manage to get her out of the car and lay her down on the street, and I can only hope I haven’t broken something else in her. She’s small, but I am so weak that I nearly black out from the effort. Kneeling, I tilt her head back. I lay my hands over her heart, her blood sticky on my skin, and push down hard, pumping rapidly. Moving to her face, I pinch her nose closed, put my mouth over hers, and blow.

I have every intention of saving her, however unlikely her recovery is, but the second my cold, dying lips touch her warm ones, the sudden urge to take her body overwhelms me, as strong as a riptide.

No!
I tell myself, jerking myself away from her lips and beginning to pump her chest again. But the smell of her jasmine perfume is so heady and I am so light-headed that when I lock my mouth back on hers, instinct takes over. Instead of blowing into her lungs, I hungrily breathe in again and again. Power surges through my veins, a feeling of simultaneous falling and rising up, like a playground swing. After a few minutes I taste something sweet: her life essence.

I try to stop, but it is beyond my control. Tears stream down my face as I draw out her soul, her life force flowing through my mouth, its sweetness expanding, then finally beginning to wane as it makes its way into the ether. A sensation like thousands of static shocks pierces my body, small blue sparks dancing between her forehead and mine. I think of heat lightning, those far-off strikes in the night sky. They are so common in summer, flashes unaccompanied by thunder. I see waves crashing on the beach of a lonely planet, deep in space. Small silvery chimes, the voices of stars singing a hymn. My mother’s face appears in my mind, but she looks different from what I remember. Her skin is smooth, glassy and glittery, celestial dots of light making up her irises. Her dark hair, a mirror image of my own, is made up of the void of space, comets trailing through its ebony tresses. Her mouth opens, but there is no sound when she speaks. It doesn’t matter; I can read her starry lips.
Not yet, Seraphina,
she’s saying.
Not yet.

Purple, then white, the little lights move at ever more dizzying speeds, and I realize with a jolt that I have badly miscalculated. I have never inhabited a body this broken and close to death, and fiery agony shoots up and down my broken limbs, even as I feel them being slowly repaired by my immortal essence. I roll over on the asphalt and see my old body has already turned to dust and is quickly dissipating in the breeze.

The far-off wail of sirens penetrates my consciousness. I need to get out of here before the police show up. And I need to get my bag—it’s got my ID inside, the one with the name Cyrus gave me, as well as the book that can never fall into human hands.