Juliet Immortal

paints, curling into my ear, spinning dreams I want to come true
.
    They don’t
.
    It’s a joke
.
    We’re kissing—slow, perfect kisses that make my heart race—when the text comes, asking if he’s taken the Freak’s virginity yet. He tries to hide the phone, but I see it. I start to cry, even though I’m not sad. I’m angry
, so angry.
He offers me fifty dollars—a piece of the bet—if I let him have what he’s come for. I explode. I try to run from the car, but he grabs my hand, squeezing as he pulls back onto the road, telling me to “chill the hell out,” promising to take me to a better place
.
    But there is no better place. I know that by now. There are only mirrors reflecting disappointment, shattering it in a million different directions, filling the world until there is no way out. It will always be this way. Always, even when I finally leave the house on El Camino Road
.
    The road, the road is … impossible. I won’t let him drive it a second longer. I won’t let him steer through the hole in the mountain down to the beach, where the cold, dark ocean waits like a nightmare creeping. I won’t let him
.
    Not now. Not ever again
.
    * * *
    My eyes fly open, my body humming with adrenaline, drowning in the fear and anger and hopelessness Ariel felt as the car burst through the guardrail and flew over the edge into the ravine.
    They fell so fast—distance consumed by time in one awful gulp. She barely had time to scream before the car made impact and her head smashed against the passenger’s window, hard enough to burst the skin at her temple and knock her unconscious, but not hard enough to kill.
    Despite the damage, she will live … eventually. Whether she likes it or not.
    “You will. You’ll see,” I say aloud, though I know she can’t hear me.
    I’ll do something to improve her life before she returns to it, make it bearable, if not beautiful. The Ambassadors encourage their converts to spread love and light, but even if they didn’t, I couldn’t have resisted Ariel. She’s just so … sad. I want to help her, keep her safe from the darkness, from the Mercenaries who prey on people like her.
    Especially
one
Mercenary, the one who does his best to make my borrowed lives as miserable as he made the original.
    Somewhere out there, in the cool spring night,
he
is finding a body too, summoned by the same energy that pulled me from the mist. In some long-forgotten cemetery, Romeo is seeking a corpse old enough not to be recognized in this small town, finding a place his soul can hide. The Mercenaries of the Apocalypse live inside the dead, restoring rotted flesh to its former glory so long as they lurk within.
    For a moment, I wonder what Romeo will look like thistime, then decide it doesn’t matter. Old or young, fat or thin, black, white, or green—the enemy is always the enemy.
    “Unhh, awww.” The groan comes from beside me, from the boy who was driving the car.
    I wrinkle my nose, disappointment that he’s alive leaving a bad taste in my mouth. As an Ambassador of Light I’m supposed to be above such feelings. But I am not, never have been—not when I was a living girl, and not as an immortal warrior for love.
    Love
. Sometimes the thought of it leaves a bad taste in my mouth too.
    Still, it’s for the best. It will be easier to avoid police scrutiny if we both emerge from this car alive. And though I might feel the world would be a safer place without Dylan, Ambassadors aren’t allowed to kill human beings … or anything else. Murder feeds the cause of the Mercenaries. I am forbidden to take a life, even the one I have every justification to end.
    “But it is never
right
to do
wrong
,” I whisper, even as I silently wish Dylan a few broken bones or—at the very least—a generous helping of pain. I might be forbidden my revenge, but at least Ariel can have a bit of hers.
    “Unh …” Dylan moans again, drawing my attention to his face—his full lips, dark eyelashes, and brown hair that waves softly over his forehead. The hair is matted to his skin on one side and a nasty bruise is forming on his cheekbone, but there’s no denying he’s beautiful. And a very bad man in the making.
    There’s something cruel in the set of his features—even when he’s unconscious—but I can’t fault Ariel for not seeing beyond the appealing facade. It doesn’t seem like that long agothat I was the same way—young and naïve and ready to believe in pretty boys and