Juliet Immortal

take the car again?”
    “I’m not sure.” Gemma hasn’t been picking Ariel up every day lately, but Ariel doesn’t know why. “I’ll try to call and ask,” I say, inspired by my small success with Melanie. I might as well contact Ariel’s friend and try to get that relationship back on track. The more put-together Ariel’s life, the more attention I’ll have to devote to my soul mates.
    “Well, if you need to take the car, just go ahead and take it.” She moves to the fridge, pulling out a half-empty bottle of white wine and fetching a plastic cup from the cabinet above. Lady Capulet would have fainted at the idea of sipping wine from anything except the finest glass from Venice. At least Melanie doesn’t seem like an insufferable snob. Ariel could definitely have it worse. “I can get a ride to work with Wendy.”
    “Okay,” I say, strangely touched by her concern for my transportation needs. “Good night, Mom.”
    “Good night, honey.”
    I return her smile before heading out of the kitchen,munching my cheese as I go. It’s disgusting, but at least I won’t starve to death before dawn.
    Straight ahead is a shadowed living room and to my left a narrow hallway. I turn down the hall, find my new room, and shut myself inside. It’s small but bright and welcoming, with pale yellow walls and a white bedspread dripping with ruffles. It looks like a bed a younger girl would sleep in, and isn’t something Ariel picked out.
    Her aesthetic is represented in the artwork filling every free inch of wall space, haunting paintings of fairies sleeping in fall leaves, lonely trees atop epic mountains, young men in dark clothes with sad eyes, and an aging unicorn dying at the edge of a silent pool.
    The last one takes my breath away. I find myself on the other side of the room, running fingers across the animal’s detailed face. When I was a girl, everyone believed in unicorns. They’re mentioned in the Bible, and their existence was taken as fact. Finding out that the creatures are myth was more difficult than I like to admit.
    But the death of magic, of hope, is never easy.
    Ariel has captured that beautifully. The painting makes me ache to pick up a brush. I lived to paint as a girl. Maybe I can steal some time for it while I’m here. At the very least, I have to finish the sets for the school play.
    Thankfully, my talent and Ariel’s seem to match up well. Certain skills—riding a horse, driving a car, performing other day-to-day tasks associated with life in a given era—seem to be physically ingrained and translate easily from one soul to the next. Talents, however, are a different story. A gift for mathematics or science, the ability to play an instrument or sing like an angel, are soul gifts, ones I’ve had difficulty emulating inthe past. It will be nice to share a soul gift with my borrowed body.
    The thought cheers me as I shove the last hunk of cheese into my mouth and step away from the painting, surveying the rest of my new domain. It isn’t nearly as bad as Ariel’s memories have led me to believe. The room is cramped but ordered, with a place for everything and everything in its place. A chest of drawers is wedged in tight against the bed and the opposite wall is filled by an empty easel and a white desk topped with a sleeping computer, a stack of textbooks, and a phone sitting in its cradle.
    I’ll use it to call Gemma, but there’s one call I have to make first.
    Above the desk hangs a mirror. It’s a light, flimsy thing, and covered with animal stickers Ariel pasted there when she was younger, but it will work. I shift the books to the side and lean close to the mirror’s surface, shutting my eyes, doing my best to clear my mind, to visualize the golden light Nurse and the other high Ambassadors inhabit when not on earth. Any moment I will hear her familiar voice. She’s bodiless in her realm, but her voice is always the murmur of the woman who raised me.
    Nurse borrowed that woman’s body for only a few months, but somehow—through some trick of high Ambassador magic—she retained the voice. I suspect she knows I find it comforting, a piece of my past that travels with me through the years. I also suspect that’s why she encourages me to call her Nurse instead of by her true name, though she says it’s because her given name is too difficult for modern people to pronounce.
    “Modern people” referring to the people of the fourteenth century.
    For the hundredth time I