Juliet Immortal

the nurse.” Gemma pulls me out into the hall, tossing her final words over her shoulder. “Back in fifteen!”
    Her expression hardens as she hustles me down the hall, glancing right and left, rushing past the entrances to the other classrooms toward the exit at the south end of building four. I have to hurry to keep up with her, work not to stumble when I turn to check the door to Mrs. Thurman’s class, making sure the specters aren’t following me.
    “Thank you,” I finally manage, knowing I have to say something to explain my behavior, to thank Gemma for coming to the rescue. She lied for me and—for whatever reason— I’m grateful. “I don’t know what happened, I was just—”
    “Shhh, don’t talk,” she whispers. “Not yet.”
    My racing heart drops into my stomach, and the place where Gemma’s hand still rests on my shoulder begins to burn. I turn to look at her and catch the flash of something familiar behind her eyes, something … ancient. “Where are we going?”
    “I told you,” she says, her voice deeper, different. “I’m taking you to see the Nurse.”

TWENTY-ONE
    T wenty minutes until places.” Mr. Stark rushes through the backstage area, lifting every prop box, as if he’ll find Gemma hiding under one of them, dressed and ready to go on.
    But Gemma isn’t under the boxes. She isn’t at home, she wasn’t here for the last dress rehearsal, and she’s not here now. Gemma is missing. Her parents are terrified, there’s a rumor circulating among the cast that she’s been taken by Nancy’s murderer, and I’m petrified that the gossip may actually be true.
    What to do now? What?
What?
It’s impossible to think past the fear swelling inside me, tap-tapping a crazy-making rhythm on my bones.
    “Okay, Ariel. Looks like you’re going on tonight and tomorrow night,” Mr. Stark warns as he passes by where I huddle by the backstage door. “You were great at the last dress this afternoon. You’ll be fine. You ready?”
    I glance down at my black T-shirt and jeans. I’m in my Sharks costume. “Ready.”
    No, I’m not ready. And I won’t be fine. No one will. Gemma isn’t here. For all I know she’s dead, and Nurse’s soul has been banished to the mist, never to return.
    The original Mercenaries are killing the high Ambassadors. They’ve grown so powerful they no longer require the balance of light and dark to sustain their eternity. It’s become so dangerous for the high Ambassadors that they’re forced to hide when they venture from the safety of their realm—their lives and the lives of the bodies they borrow demand it.
    And so they hide. Often in the last place the Mercenaries think to look.
    The rosy glow of a soul mate’s heart hides the golden light of an Ambassador aura, offering protection while allowing the Ambassador to look after a soul in need at the same time. Nurse has been inside Gemma from the beginning, sharing the body of the soul mate I was sent to protect, swimming below her conscious mind, spying on me as I work through my final shift.
    I bury my face in my hands, going back to this morning, searching every word Nurse spoke for some clue to where she—and Gemma—might be now.…
    “They killed Nancy last night.” Gemma—Nurse—says as soon as we’re hidden in the bathroom at the end of the hall, wrinkling our noses against the ammonia mixing with the rainwater dripping into the stalls. We are in the last stall, the onewith the steel bar and more room to try
not
to breathe. “They knew I’d come to observe your final mission. I can only assume they thought I was borrowing Nancy’s body. To Mercenary eyes, the aura of a high Ambassador is golden. There are humans whose auras are the same, as a result of their good hearts. Nancy was one.”
    I shake my head, sickened by the knowledge that I had anything to do with that poor woman’s death—even indirectly—and sickened to learn that Romeo was telling the truth about the high Ambassadors’ auras. What other truths has he told? I want to know, but a part of me fears knowledge as much as I crave it.
    What if the things Nurse tells me destroy the last of my hope? For humanity? For myself? For a future with Ben?
    She crosses her arms and pins me with a long look. “And now they will know they haven’t found me. They will look harder, Romeo and his maker.”
    His
maker
. So there
is
someone watching him. Someone kidnapping for him, killing for him, trying to make sure he succeeds at