Juliet Immortal

breath and begins his tale, words swift and sure. “Thousands of years ago, a group of ancients sought a way to escape the cycle of life and death. They were mystics of great power, and devised a spell that would grant their souls eternal life in the realms running parallel to the earth’s reality, that would make them gods with worshippers bound to them by their magic. But the spell called for balance. For light and dark, good and evil.
    “One half of the ancients took the power of goodness as the energy that would maintain their souls throughout the ages. The other half chose the evil of man as their fuel. They spilled each other’s blood to work the spell, gambling their mortal lives in the quest for eternity. The magic worked, but not exactly as they’d thought.”
    He pauses, licking a bit of wine from his fingers with a strange smile.
    “As the ages passed, the dark ones thrived on human wickedness. After a time, they were no longer consigned to their alternate realm, but lived forever on earth, poisoning humanity, bloating themselves on the evil they helped create, turning against the Ambassadors. For centuries, the light suffered, losing power, until they were forced to share their converts with death itself, to send them to the mist when they weren’t needed. You are one of those souls, trapped betweenlife and death, never to be blessed with either. We are both slaves, forced into the worship of gods not of our choosing.”
    I cross my arms, shivering though the barn is warm and dry. Romeo looks on expectantly, as if waiting for my thanks for his outpouring. “So the Ambassadors are … vampires? Who feed on goodness? That’s what you want me to believe?”
    “You
must
believe,” he says. “They use the good deeds of their converts to fuel their own eternity in their golden kingdom, never telling those converts that the evil they fight is one the Ambassadors helped create. Or that there is a way out of their service.”
    I shake my head. I don’t want to believe him—god, I don’t—but a part of me does. A part of me
believes
. Nurse’s own words confirm every one of Romeo’s. I have been forbidden to kill Romeo because murder “feeds the Mercenary cause.”
Feeds
. Maybe literally
feeds
these magicians sustained by evil instead of good.
    Anger and sadness and the familiar sting of betrayal surge inside me. Still, a voice within urges me to remember that Romeo is a liar out to help no one but himself. He requires my cooperation for this spell. That’s the only reason he’s bothering with this talk. Otherwise, he’d simply take what he wants, the way he always has.
    “But their magic can’t last forever. They can only hold their converts for so long,” Romeo continues. “When the initial magic fades, they must either renew their converts’ vows … or let the others take us.”
    “The others?” The air suddenly feels colder.
    “You’ve seen them,” he whispers. “I know you have.”
    I could lie. I could continue to deny everything, but I don’tsee what purpose it would serve. And Romeo is genuinely frightened. This man who has lived amid violence and death for centuries is spooked, and I need to know why.
    “I’ve seen them. You and … myself,” I say. “But how is that possible? Our bodies have been dead for—”
    “They aren’t our true forms,” he says. “They are the specters of our souls, come to take us both to that hell you’ve been wishing for me.”
    “Hell,” I repeat. The notion doesn’t ring true. “If there is such a place—and you’ve insisted numerous times that there is not—why would I be taken there? What have I done that—”
    “You’ve stepped outside the natural order, become a tiny dot of space-time cancer the universe must destroy in order to balance the cosmic equation.”
    “The universe as in … god?”
    Romeo sighs. “The universe as in
the universe
, the primal forces of creation. Call it god if you must, but it is a nameless, mindless thing. It doesn’t care about good or bad. All it cares about is balance and order. What the Ambassadors and Mercenaries have done violates that order, but it is we who will pay the price. If the specters—”
    “But what are the specters? If the universe is mindless, then who controls them? Why do they—”
    “They are parts of ourselves, left over from what we would have been, influenced by what we’ve become, but compelled by primal forces beyond human understanding,” he