Juliet Immortal

second chance at true love that you shouldn’t let go to waste.” He tosses the knife he pulled from my stomach in the air, letting it spin once, twice, before catching the hilt in his hand. “I promise, it’s much more fun to play when you’re on the winning side. Just cut this boy a little here, a little there, enough to prove your lethal intent. Then you’ll take your vows to us, and she …” He turns to look over his shoulder, gesturing vaguely into the darkness before turning back around. “Well, she’s out there. I can feel her.”
    I stare into the night, remembering Nurse’s shared memory of waiting in the darkness, watching, hoping. Is she out there hoping now? Why didn’t she show up at the theater and stop this before it started?
    “She likes to wait until we’re gone,” Jason says. “But she’ll come take care of this boy. She’ll administer the vows and transform him into a vessel of light.”
    I sob, unable to keep the sound from bursting from my lips.I can see it now, this new life he describes, a second eternity stretching out before me, but this time it will be Ben I fight. Ben on the other side of the divide, bright and beautiful and unreachable. Ben, who will only know that I hurt him, betrayed him, that I didn’t love him the way I swore I did. This monster will never allow me to tell him the truth.
    Maybe I won’t even want to. Maybe by the time I see Ben again, however many years from this moment, in whatever corpse I’m inhabiting, I will have become so twisted by the darkness that I won’t remember what it feels like to love. I’ll be like Romeo, wicked and hollow, the love I feel for Ben dead inside me.
    Life is precious—
his
life especially—but there are worse things to lose.
    I turn back to Ben, brush his hair away from his ruined face, a part of me wishing he was conscious so I could say good-bye, the other part glad that he’s beyond feeling pain. I lean my lips down to his ear, and the Ben smell of him drifts into my nose, making my heart break all over again. “I love you.”
    “I assume that means your answer is no.” I turn to see that Jason has moved closer. His smile is lower on his face, his knife higher in the air. “You know what that means.”
    I know. It means he’ll kill us both. Slowly. Torturously. See how long we’ll last before we break,
if
we break. If or when. I don’t know which it will be, but I know I’ll hold tight to the love I feel for Ben, to the light in my darkness.
    I don’t answer Jason’s question, just stare into his empty eyes, wondering which are more vacant—Romeo’s because he has so little brain, or this monster’s because he has no soul.None at all, not even the ghost of a memory of what it is like to love, to be mortal and gloriously, horribly vulnerable.
    I suppose that’s why he doesn’t expect it.
    I don’t expect it either, but when it happens I’m not surprised. Romeo is as wrong as he’s ever been—as he’s
always
been—but I heard the truth in the words he whispered onstage. He truly thought he was helping me by shoving that knife in my gut, just as he thinks he’s helping me when he lifts the gun tucked into the front of his pants and fires it twice.
    Once into the center of Ben’s forehead. Once into the center of mine.

TWENTY-THREE
    T here is a moment of unbelievable pressure as the bullet pushes through bone, and then I’m floating, falling backward in slow motion, eyes sliding closed. Dimly, I’m aware that I’ve fallen on top of Ben. His knee is pressed into my back, the softness of his belly cradles my head, and I’m glad. It’s good to touch him, to know he’s close, though he lies so terribly still. But even the fear that he’s already dead doesn’t upset me the way it should. The moment is surreal, something happening onstage that I watch from a distance.
    There is no pain, only the feeling of drifting inside my body and a strange, determined detachment.
    I can imagine what I should be feeling as I listen to Jasonscream at Romeo and then the air goes quiet—quiet like the tomb, quiet like the mist, quiet like the end of the world.
    I can remember the panic that should prick at my skin as the headlights illuminating the night fade to black and it begins to rain, cool drops that sting my face and slip between my parted lips. And then the sounds come, a soft sigh in the night, a hushed whisper to
“Come, now,”
and I know I should be afraid. My old body is coming. I can hear