romeo remeemed

chapter 21

juliet

“ My nurse is going to make Romeo an Ambassador,” I say again, knowing my fate depends on whether or not the friar believes this lie I’m not entirely sure is a lie. I did see something in my dreams. I saw Romeo bathed in golden light, filling with Ambassador magic. “She’s going to steal him from the Mercenaries.” “Impossible.” But I hear him stop walking away. He stops, and I tremble. If he leaves, I will die in this hole. But not until I suffer for another day or two before dehydration claims my life. “How do you know about the Ambassadors?” “Does it matter? I know, and I had a vision of what Nurse is planning.” “Only the high Ambassadors have true visions of the future,” he says. “And you are not one of those, girl. You have been touched by magic, but—” “My nurse is able to reach me. In my dreams.” I would swear I heard Nurse’s voice while I was sleeping, echoing through the skies of my nightmares. “She showed me what will come to pass.” “And why would she do that?” “To punish me.” Maybe it’s true. Maybe it’s not, but there’s enough doubt in my mind to make it sound like I’m stating a fact. “She wants me to suffer. That’s why she sent me here.” “You came to the tomb in the back of a cart. I witnessed it with my—” “No, not here. Not the tomb. This time. I was in the future. I was an Ambassador. For more than seven hundred years.” I can feel the change in the air as I speak. He’s intrigued, finally wondering if I might be worth fishing from his trap. “Romeo and I did live on to become enemies. For centuries. And then you captured me and he defied you. He tried to spare me from torture, but he failed, and somehow my nurse sent me here.” “You’re lying,” he says, but his certainty is slipping. “You said I was a bad liar. You should know I’m not lying now.” I pray my mix of fact and fiction is working to my advantage. “Nurse sent me here to die for refusing to renew my Ambassador vows, but I would rather live. I will kill for you, swear my allegiance, whatever it takes to survive to make her pay for giving Romeo a place in her world when he deserves nothing but pain.” “Hm.” It’s almost a laugh, but it’s not. I don’t know what to make of it, so I remain silent, waiting until he speaks again. “If what you’ve said is true,” he says, his voice becoming clearer as he moves closer, “if your vision is sound and you are from the future, then Romeo is beyond our reach, safe in another time. Mercenary magic is bound by time and place. I’d thought it was the same for the Ambassadors, but … that’s neither here nor there.” He grunts as he leans down to whisper through the notch in the stone. “The sad truth is that I can’t send you into the future to fetch Romeo with your knife. So … what have you left to offer me? As sacrifice?” “My father.” I ignore the lump that rises in my throat. “He isn’t as dear to me as Romeo was, but I love him.” “Your father,” he repeats, unimpressed. “I haven’t seen him in centuries. I want his arms around me more than anything else in the world.” The lump in my throat grows, becomes a fist that feels as though it will cut off the air to my lungs. “But I will rip him apart,” I choke. “If you will let me out.” He’s quiet for what feels like forever. In the silence I have time to seriously consider my words. I am trapped in the dark in my own filth, with thirst and hunger and terror wrecking my mind. Would I kill to be free? Would I violate my belief that no good can come from murder? Any murder? Even the murder of the friar, a man who has done nothing but spread evil across the earth for hundreds of years? No. I can’t. Ben was right. Killing won’t make anything better; it will only make me worse. But lies … I am at peace with lies. And I will tell as many of them as I must to escape this hell. “You would like to become a Mercenary,” the friar says, his tone flat, emotionless, unreadable. “No, I wouldn’t. But I will, if it’s the only way to have my revenge.” He hums beneath his breath. “You would do that? You would fight the Ambassador that Romeo will become?” I nod in the darkness, ball my hands into fists, and whisper, “Yes.” “Very well,” he says after a moment. “I suppose your father will serve our purpose.” I flinch as the rough scrape of stone on stone fills the air, vibrating the walls of what would have been my deathbed. The gray light of the tomb pricks at my eyes, the slightly less stale air of the mausoleum wafts over my face, and my weakened blood rushes with relief. Even the arms of the monster reaching in to pluck me from the darkness are better than the long, torturous death that awaited me. And I will escape these arms. I will find a way. “Are you ready?” The friar’s fingers dig into the bruised flesh at my hip. I try to pull away, but my knees buckle and I’m forced to lean my weight against him. I’m not strong enough to stand on my own. But I will be. Soon. He has to revive me—I couldn’t kill a gnat in my current state, let alone my father—and when he does, I will run, hide. “I’m ready.” I turn my face toward the stairs leading up to the churchyard, desperate for a breath of truly fresh air. “Then I hope that everything you’ve said is true,” the friar says with a sharp thrust of his arm. Fire ignites in my belly and spreads with a ruthless intensity. My hands fly to my middle to feel the sticky heat of my own blood spilling through my fingers. I have a split second to realize what he’s done, and then I’m falling. I crumple to a heap of stinking skirts at his feet, the last of my hope burned away by the time I hit the floor. He knew I was lying. He wins. Again. Always. Forever. He kneels beside me. I close my eyes against his vile face. “If she sent you here, she will come for you,” he says. “Your nurse isn’t cruel. She’ll be wanting to give you another chance. But when she arrives, she will discover you dead and me waiting. Then I will find out if time is as easily traversed as you think, my child.” I open my eyes, wanting to tell him he’s wrong, that Nurse doesn’t care what happens to me now that I’m no longer one of her slaves, but he’s already gone, moving swiftly through the mausoleum and up the stairs, out into the night. Or the morning. I don’t know which, and now I never will. I watch him go, watch his feet step out of sight, as I struggle to breathe past the agony spreading through my core. This is it. After all the centuries, after all the struggle and sacrifice and lessons learned, and now—She comes from the shadows on the far side of the tomb, emerging from behind the most ancient of my family’s sarcophagi, shuffling across the space between us with a quick glance over her shoulder to where the friar disappeared. Her cloak is pulled tight around her gray hair, and her face is paler than I remember, but I recognize the old woman immediately. “Nurse,” I gasp. “My sweet girl.” Her work-roughened hands find my face, brush the hair from my eyes. “There isn’t much time,” she whispers. “You must renew your vows. Let me save your soul a second time, Juliet.” Not Nurse. The Ambassador inhabiting Nurse. She’s been here the entire time, watching the friar torment me the way she watched Romeo trick me the first time I was pulled from my tomb. “No.” I bat her hand away with blood-slick fingers. “Sending me here hasn’t changed my decision.” Her lips part in surprise. “I didn’t send you here. I swear I didn’t.” I don’t respond. She’s as much of a liar as Friar Lawrence. “I think perhaps the universe itself sent you, certainly a power greater than any Mercenary or Ambassador.” She leans close, brushing her lips across my forehead, making me shudder with disgust. “You are meant to walk this path, Juliet. You are meant to be something greater than a mortal girl living one mortal life. I am so happy I found you.” “How?” I lick my lips, fighting to speak past the pain twisting through my gut. “How did you find me?” “After you left Ariel’s body, the fabric of reality was altered. The places where you and Romeo touched the future and the past changed. I’m able to see the possibilities of our planet, keep track of time and space as it is altered by man’s decisions and by supernatural influence. There was a dramatic change in all versions of the world shortly after your final shift. It wasn’t difficult to see what caused those changes and, from there, to realize what I had to do to bring you back to your true place.” “So it’s true. You’ve made Romeo an Ambassador.” “You saw.…” She sighs. “I didn’t mean to reveal that to you. I meant only to send comforting thoughts while you slept.” She looks away, over her shoulder, as if checking to see if the friar is creeping back down the stairs, but I can feel her hiding from me. “But no. I haven’t. I’ve only given him a chance.” “Why?” She turns back, a strange glint in her eye. “Don’t you think people deserve a second chance?” “Not him.” She smiles. “I agree, but your fate and his are intertwined. I had to remove Romeo from the equation in order for your destiny to be fulfilled. If I hadn’t put him on a path to existing outside of time, you would never have become one of us again.” “I will never be.… Never.” “Juliet. Please …” Nurse takes my hand, casts a sad look down to where the blood soaks my dress. “You’re dying.” “I was dying before,” I whisper, finding it harder to speak. “And then I woke up here. I’ll see where I wake up the next time.” “There won’t—” She casts another nervous glance toward the entrance to the tomb. “It’s different now. There won’t be a next time.” I close my eyes, wishing she would go away, wishing the friar would come back and give her something real to worry about. “Look at me!” She jostles my shoulder, sending a sharp stab of pain flashing through my stomach and into my spine. “I did this.” “I thought … You said …” “I didn’t send you here, but I changed things when I put Romeo on a different path.” She cups my chin and leans close, until I can feel her breath on my lips. “You were sent here to have another chance at life, and if I hadn’t interfered, you would have found it. You would have found a man to love and made a family. You would have died when you were sixty-three of an infection in the blood. I saw it all, the tragically short human life you would have lived if I hadn’t taken action.” I shake my head. What is she saying? If that … “Then … why …” “In order for you to live that life, Romeo was also brought back and given happiness,” she says. “A long life with a woman he loved. A child. Five grandchildren. Twenty great-grandchildren, twelve of which he lived to see brought into this world. In that possible future he was nearly a hundred when he died peacefully. In his sleep.” Her lip curls. “You clearly think an eternity of service to the Ambassadors is too good a fate for the likes of him. Can you imagine the alternative? All the blessings he would have reaped if I hadn’t stepped in? While you died without a chance to change the world for the better?” Her laughter is one of the harshest sounds I’ve ever heard. “I couldn’t allow that to happen.” “So you … took my happiness away?” My eyes sting, but I’m too empty to cry. “To prevent Romeo from finding his?” “No, my darling.” She strokes my hair like I’m a favorite pet. I wonder if that’s all I ever was to her. A pet. If I’d been anything more, she wouldn’t have played with my heart the way she has. “I haven’t taken anything away. I’ve given you a chance for so much more. Any girl can get married and have children. Not any girl can change the course of history, save the world, further the cause of love and light through the ages. You are special.” An impossible tear slips down my cheek. “No.” “Juliet, some of us are called to serve a higher cause.” “There is no higher cause than love.” My flagging heartbeat thuds in my ears. “After all your centuries defending it, you’d think you … of all people.” I turn away from her, rolling my head weakly on the hard ground. “But you aren’t a person.” “No. Not anymore.” She pulls her hand from my forehead. “But I have a heart. I won’t let Romeo become an Ambassador. I’ve found someone to eliminate him,” she says. “For you.” “You’ve never done … anything … for me.” I’m panting, barely able to form words. The end is close. I can feel it in the electricity that flashes through my brain, causing parts of what make me Juliet to explode. Stars going out, burning, dying. She sighs. “But my self-interest is also in the best interest of the world. Can you say the same? Juliet … I’d hoped for so much more.” She grows still, as still as the graves that surround us, some of them empty and awaiting their charges, some of them with bellies full of the dead. I knew some of those bones, loved some of them. Tybalt and Grandmother and my baby cousin Louisa, who died before she was three. Perhaps I’ll see them when I open my eyes in the world beyond. I could let go now. I can feel how easy it would be. But for some reason I can’t stop thinking about this other life that Nurse said I could have had if she hadn’t interfered, this happiness with a husband and babies and another fifty years of human life. It’s hard to imagine loving anyone but Ben, but … Ben. If only I could have held him one last time … My lids flutter and I see his face, and my fear slips away. He is with me. He will always be with me. “You just need more time.” Nurse pulls me from my peace with a firm hand on my side. First there is pain—sharp enough to make me gasp—but then her power pulses across my skin and the pain abates. I take my first deep breath in many long minutes, but before I can wonder at what she’s done, she’s lifting me in the air, carrying me the few steps to the tomb, and laying me inside. Inside. Back inside the tomb. No. No! “No,” I choke out. I would scream it if I could, but I’m not strong enough to scream or fight. I’m not even strong enough to lift my hands in protest as the stone slides slowly back into place. “I will return for you,” she whispers through the hole where the friar poured the water. “In a few hours. No more. I will put an end to my business with Romeo and come straight here. I will have a new body, but you will know me. As you always have.” “The friar … He …” “He won’t hurt you,” she says. “He’s using you as bait, but I am the one stringing this line. I will keep us both safe, and finally be rid of him. You’ll see. We will live on, Juliet, and our next seven hundred years will be different. You will have great power. We will win this world back from the Mercenaries and bring peace to humanity. Together, I believe we can.” And then she is gone. Outside, I hear a muffled thu-thump as the body she left behind crumples to the hard ground. Nurse is an old woman, with pain in her back and legs. Without supernatural magic coursing through her, she would suffer from a fall like that. But she doesn’t make a sound. “Nurse,” I call as loudly as I dare. “Nurse!” She doesn’t answer. There is only silence outside, no breath, no stirring on the floor of the tomb. I suspect Nurse was dead before the Ambassador used her body to come to me. Only Mercenaries are supposed to inhabit the dead. Ambassadors are supposed to be above such desecration. Ambassadors aren’t supposed to steal lives or play judge, jury, and executioner. Ambassadors aren’t supposed to plot murders, or bury people alive. If this is what the “good” side has come to, I fear not only for myself and Romeo—wherever he is—but for the world.