Juliet Immortal

the boy I love would be heaven. But I’m not a normal girl. And my one shot at becoming something close to one is slipping through my fingers. Ben is slipping through my fingers.
    I turn and wrap my arms around his waist, press my cheek to his chest, close my eyes, and hold on tight.

INTERMEZZO TWO

Romeo
    B lood, blood everywhere but not a drop to drink. It spills from the old woman’s puckered throat, gushes down the filthy dress he’s kept her in these two days, pooling on the floor, the last of her human warmth stolen away by stone. He’s chosen a tomb as the location for the ritual to slay the high Ambassador, a mausoleum not far from town.
    For nostalgic reasons. For a Gothic flourish. For laughs.
    He isn’t laughing now.
    He yanks her hair, pulling her head back, making the slash below her chin gape wider. It grins at me, a wink between friends. There is no magic here, no golden light spilling into the darkness, no mournful wail as an ancient is cast out of paradise.The woman from the bakery wasn’t lying when she said she didn’t know what we were talking about, that she’d never heard of the Ambassadors of Light. Despite the golden glow that filled her aura in life, Nancy isn’t the woman he’s looking for.
    He was
wrong, wrong, wrong
, after he’d been so
sure, sure, sure
.
    Hee. Hee. Hee
.
    “Is that a smile, Romeo?” he asks, voice as cold as the knife he still clutches in his red hand. “I can’t imagine why you’d be smiling.”
    “I can’t either.” Some hard kernel of deeply buried sanity urges me to stitch up the grin ripping across my cheeks. But I don’t. I smile wider, letting the infection spread.
    She doesn’t love me. She loves another. She blushes like a rose in bloom, though I ripped her up from the roots long ago. She is
my
soul mate. She should never burn for anyone but me. It makes me want to kill her. Kill him. Kill everyone in this town, anyone who has ever born witness to their new love, their heated glances and lingering sighs.
    But beneath the lust for blood, beneath the hate, beneath the fear and the anger, there is something else. For a moment, that one shining moment this morning when I thought the glow around Juliet’s heart was for me, I felt … happiness. No, more than happiness. I felt … 
hope
, the spark of something pure, flashing like lightning through dry air, setting things crackling inside me.
    “Well …” He heaves a great sigh and tosses the knife to the floor, where it lands with a dull clank. “This is most unfortunate.”
    “Most unfortunate,” I echo, easing back a step as the blood at my feet spreads. For the first time in a very long time, I don’twant to touch that red mess, don’t want to smear my fingers with death.
    “I suppose
she’s
out there somewhere, hiding from me, helping Juliet find her way.”
    “I think not.” I shake my head. “Her nurse hasn’t made contact. Juliet is frightened and alone. If she were receiving aid, I would see it in her eyes. She has no secrets from me.”
    “You’re a fool.” He shoves the woman’s chair with his foot as he walks past, knocking the corpse to the ground, making that new thing inside me cringe. She is dead. And I am … not pleased.
    “The Ambassadors have secrets you can’t even imagine, and now Juliet knows our secrets as well. Doesn’t she?”
    I open my eyes wide, feigning innocence as I have so many times before. “I wouldn’t think so.”
    “Oh? You haven’t been telling secrets outside of school?”
    “Of course not. I’ve told her nothing.”
    “You’ve told her everything.” He reaches into my coat pocket, wiping blood on the fabric, pulling out the cell phone tucked away there. “I put a listening device in the back. Two days ago. I heard everything you said in the theater.” He smiles, eyes narrowing with pleasure at the fear no doubt dancing in mine. “Technology is its own magic, isn’t it?”
    “Yes. It is.” I nod, and the skeletal remains of my smile clatter to the floor.
    He
knows
. He knows I’ve only pretended to do his work while pursuing my own agenda. He knows I have knowledge far beyond what any lower Mercenary should possess. He knows I’ve lied and cheated and stolen sacred spells from the hands of their caretakers.
    Their
dead
caretakers.
    He must know that, as well. There’s only one way I could have gotten my hands on the ancient spells. He must know that I am the one who killed the two Mercenary guardians, severed