Juliet Immortal

their heads, stole their eyes, and spoke the banishing words so the dark magicians could never bring them back to tell who had dared defy the high ones. It has been nearly two centuries since that particular offense, but time is relative. Flexible. Merciless.
    Especially for them.
    “You’ve betrayed your vows, Romeo Montague,” he says, leaning against the wall of the crypt, surveying me with amusement. But I know better than to think I have amused him. He’s simply savoring my impending pain, contemplating all the wretched ways he will punish me. I have tried to overthrow my gods and now I will suffer as only the gods can make a man suffer.
    I shiver as he moves closer, wrapping his hand around the back of my neck. The second his magic-filled flesh touches mine, my skin flares to life. I can feel. Really
feel
for the first time in nearly a millennium. Heat and pressure and the scratch of the clothes I wear and the unbearable softness of his oddly feminine-feeling hand.
    Though I hate him as much as I ever have, though I know the pain is coming, I shiver again. With pleasure. To be touched. To be felt. To be real inside living flesh. This is what Juliet and I could have had. An eternity of these moments. Together. It was worth the risk, worth the crushing agony of failure.
    His fingernails bite into the cords of my neck, digging, gouging, tearing, until my skin bursts and his fingers squirm beneath, leaving agony in their wake. I fall to my knees at his feet, screaming for mercy, screaming for Juliet.
    Again and again and again, her name rips from my lips,howls through my mind.
Juliet!
I know better than to pray, but still something inside me begs the universe for mercy. Let her have someone on her side, someone to save her from the specter that would take her and from the hell that awaits. Someone to save her from me.
    I know what penance the high one will demand, and I know I’ll give him whatever he asks, just to have the feeling taken away, to be consigned once more to my familiar prison. I no longer wish to feel. Not this pain, not the soul ache that reminds me of all I threw away when I believed Mercenary lies, when I believed killing Juliet the first time would send her to dance with the angels.
    Instead, she has become one. Despite her ferocity, despite the bitterness that’s hardened her, she has remained so good, so pure of spirit. I believe I helped in my own way. I haven’t tried to turn her, not really. I haven’t done my best to bring her over to the darkness.
    “You will turn her.” He whispers the words I knew were coming, loosening his hold just enough to banish the worst of the agony and ensure I understand my directions. “Her shifted allegiance will bring us great power. You will turn her or this will be forever. You will know nothing but pain. You will become one of the screaming things that haunt the earth, an immortal lesson to the fools who would follow in your footsteps.”
    “You have no power over me.” Defiance boils beneath my words. “I am at the end of my service. I will not turn her, I will not renew my own vows. You cannot—”
    “You will renew your vows and do as I say, or I will return you to your own flesh.”
    That spark of hope leaps inside me again. My own flesh? Is it possible?
    “But without the spell, without her love, the ravages time and sin have worked upon the specter will remain.” He flashes his too-bright smile. “You will roam the world in that form—rotten and diseased—until your bones turn to dust. And even then, your soul will remain trapped on earth without voice or form, never to reach the mists of forgetting, never to join the ranks of the high ones.”
    He puts his lips against my ear, whispering his next promise directly into my brain. “I know you’ve found seven hundred years without physical feeling to be a great misery. How pleasantly do you think a few
million
years such as that will pass? When you are a phantom and no one can hear you scream?”
    His fingers bite into my skin once more. Pain and more pain—hot and pitiless—and then the smell comes. The smell of Nancy’s death, of her body’s waste clinging to her filthy dress, the smell of her blood on the stones near my feet. I scream and gag, empty stomach heaving. “You wanted your senses returned so badly, Montague. Enjoy them. You’ll miss this when you are one of the spirits of the damned.”
    He shoves my face into the blood on the floor. There will be no escape,