Impossibility of Tomorrow (6 page)

“Did someone just come through here?” I ask.

The girl looks annoyed. “I’m not the hall monitor,” she informs me. The boy just shrugs.

I cock my head. From down the hall, I hear another door slam. The linoleum is slick with tracked-in rain, and I force my steps to be light so my sneakers don’t squeak.

I dart past open classrooms, rows of lockers, and a few lingering students. But the man I saw seems to have vanished into the air. When I reach the end of the hall I find another set of double doors, but throwing my shoulder against them results in nothing more than a thud reverberating through my frame. The doors are firmly locked.

Dejected, I return the way I came. When I come to the staircase, I decide to go up, taking the stairs two at a time and earning myself a puzzled glance from Ms. I’m-Not-the-Hall-Monitor. I couldn’t care less.

I round the corner at the top of the stairs and find yet another hallway, this one deserted and dim. The school must be trying to save money on the electricity bill. The only light comes from a small window at the end of the hall.

I am more cautious now, my heart skittering in my chest. I walk softly, hugging the right side of the hall, eyes flitting around, willing myself not to miss anything. Not to get caught with my guard down. The air smells strangely like mint.

Mint—not vetiver or cedar. I’m not sure what I’m doing
here, whether I’m hoping to find Cyrus or not. I’m not even armed. I’m ridiculously vulnerable.

My neck prickles. I whirl around, suddenly sure someone’s watching me.

In the center of the hallway stands a man, next to a door that I know was closed only moments before.

His police uniform fits snugly, emphasizing his powerful body. “Looking for someone?” he asks, snapping his gum.

Officer Spaulding. The cop who’s investigating Mr. Shaw’s death.

“Nope,” I reply smoothly. “I thought I left a book up here. But then I realized I had it all along. In my backpack.”

“In your backpack,” he repeats with a smile. “Isn’t that funny? You think something’s lost, and it was right in front of you the whole time.”

“Yes,” I agree tentatively. My eyes stray to the gun holstered in his belt.

“Happens all the time in police work. You can’t just look at the evidence once—guaranteed there’s something you’re missing.”

A peal of feminine laughter spills out from the open door to his right. Officer Spaulding follows my gaze and nods. “I’m interviewing students, looking for new evidence in the Shaw case.”

I relax in spite of myself. The reassuring murmur of voices inside the open classroom floats into the hall. “I don’t understand. He was killed by muggers, right? What could you find out here?”

“You never know.” He shrugs. “The police need to be sure.”

“But didn’t the newspaper say there were witnesses?”

He smiles. “Yes, a young man and woman from San Francisco. Not much older than you.”

But I know better. The so-called “witnesses” are Jared and Amelia, Cyrus’s obedient and loyal servants. I remember when Jared stopped a thief from picking Cyrus’s pocket in 1660, aboard the merchant ship taking us to New Amsterdam. When Jared offered with a smug grin to kill the man, Cyrus was delighted. Jared’s been doing Cyrus’s dirty work ever since. As for Amelia, she’s been in love with Cyrus since the day he made her immortal. Not that I care.

“Are they . . . okay?” I press.

He cups his chin. “They’re shaken up, sure. Who wouldn’t be? They asked us to keep their identities anonymous. For some reason they seem to think the killer has friends who could come after them. But they’ve been cooperating fully. Helped our sketch artist with drawings of the suspect.”

Of course. No doubt Amelia and Jared are enjoying this
performance, sending the cops on a wild goose chase for a killer who doesn’t exist.

“Well, I should be going,” I say.

“Take care,” the officer replies. “I didn’t catch your name?”

I’m seized by the urge to lie for some reason, but I know no good can come from that. “Kailey,” I answer, which is its own kind of lie.

“Bye, Kailey,” he replies.

Downstairs, I hurry past the shrine, ignoring my desire to take the note Cyrus left so that I can study it more later. But for all I know, he’s watching the shrine right now. And I can’t afford to make any more mistakes.

I squeeze into the girls’ bathroom and splash cold water on my face, letting the full force of the day’s events wash over me.

Cyrus is alive. My intuition was right. I should feel vindicated, but instead I just feel confused.

I was wrong about Noah and barely avoided making a terrible mistake. This time, I need to be more like Cyrus. I need to be careful, systematic, to rely only on the evidence, regardless of the way my heart might waver in my chest like torn notebook paper in the breeze.

And I need to do it alone.

Jared and Amelia are in San Francisco, playing up
their roles as witnesses, and no doubt keeping the rest of the coven—my best friend Charlotte and sweet, quiet Sébastien—under close watch. I suck in a breath as I remember that when I went to the Golden Gate Bridge this weekend, I was so tempted to go by coven headquarters and see Charlotte. How trapped I would have been.

It’s just me against Cyrus. Kailey’s friends run through my mind. He could be any of them. And whoever he’s become, whoever’s body he’s taken—that person is already dead.

All I can do is rule them out, one by one. Ask them questions to which only they would know the answers. And hope to hell I don’t get caught first.

TEN

The next day after school, Leyla parks her car in front of her favorite thrift store, a place called Aunt Bea’s. She’s apparently on a mission to find outfits that are “more
Mad Men
, less
Punky Brewster
,” as she puts it. This is my chance to prove she’s not Cyrus, though I don’t really suspect she is—he always said he’d never take a female body again. In the hundreds of years I’ve known him, he’s done it only once, and barely lasted two days before he traded the wool merchant’s daughter for a stable boy from a neighboring village. He said he hated how weak her body made him feel.

“But I like your style,” I say as we walk inside. My eyes
are drawn to the vintage posters cluttering the walls, but Leyla turns and starts to expertly flip through the racks of dresses. Her hair is pulled back in two high pigtails, shot through with her trademark magenta streaks. It reminds me of streamers on a kid’s bicycle.

She sighs. “I’m just getting too old for the whole ragamuffin look.”

I have to laugh. I suppose “ragamuffin” is a good description. Today she’s sporting a black hoodie over a yellow lace miniskirt with purple-and-black striped tights. Beat-up cowboy boots complete the outfit. I adore it.

“Aha!” She pulls a vintage Chanel sheath dress from the rack. “Look, it’s only twenty dollars because it’s got a broken zipper. I can totally fix that.”

“It’s nice,” I admit. “But it’s a little . . . stuffy.”

“I know,” she says happily. “I think I’ll wear this to
The Nutcracker
tomorrow night—you know my little sister’s playing Clara, right? Bryan said your whole family’s going.”

I don’t say anything. No one has mentioned this to me; it must have been planned for a while. Since Kailey was still alive.

Leyla is too enamored with the dress to notice my silence. “I’ll have to get, like,
pumps
to go with it,” she muses. “Ladylike shoes.”

If this is Cyrus, he’s a far better actor than I give him credit for.

“Does this have something to do with Bryan?” I ask. I know the two of them went out on Saturday night, and judging from the goofy grin that Bryan hasn’t been able to suppress ever since, I’d say it went well.

“Ha. No. I don’t think the subtleties of fashion are really his thing. You know that girls dress up to impress other girls, right?” She meanders over to a jewelry display and fingers a strand of pearls. “Too much?” she asks. “Too much,” she answers before I can reply.

“Okay, then, what girl inspired this Leyla makeover show?” I trail behind her as she digs through a pile of high heels. I recognize a pair of Dior strappy sandals that I used to own back in New York in the forties.

“Rebecca Sawyer—you know, the new girl with the hot brother? Just moved here from Sonoma? Their family has a winery up there.”

“I met her yesterday. She’s a bit . . . different,” I say cautiously.

“That’s what I like about her,” Leyla replies. “She wears, like,
capelets
. And pencil skirts. And a freaking awesome pink tweed suit. If I saw her on the street, I never would’ve thought she was in high school.”

“But doesn’t that seem, I don’t know, pretentious? Like she’s trying to be someone she’s not?” So far Rebecca and her brother have failed to impress me. Not to mention that they arrived at school the day after Mr. Shaw “died.” I can’t help feeling on edge when they’re around.

Leyla shrugs. “She’s a little awkward, I’ll give you that. But at least she’s being
real
. People who always fit in perfectly and always know just what to say are usually the ones hiding something.”

“Interesting theory.”

“Reverse-reverse-reverse psychology,” she declares, arching an eyebrow. I giggle as she adds a lavender crepe dress to the pile on her arm. “Anyway,” she continues, “I invited Rebecca to go with us to the party on Treasure Island this weekend. You’ll like her, I swear.”

“Treasure Island?” I repeat.

“Oh, that’s right. You weren’t there when Eli was telling us about it. Lots of local bands will be playing.” She eyes a woven pillbox hat on a mannequin’s head, but her arms are too full to reach for it. I laugh at her pouty look and pull the hat down for her.

“Is Eli’s band playing?” I ask, adjusting the hat on top of Leyla’s pigtails.

She catches sight of herself in a mirror and frowns. “Not sure. Madison would know. I don’t really care about
the lineup, anyway. I’m just going for the post-apocalyptic atmosphere.”

Of course she is. Treasure Island lies halfway between Oakland and San Francisco, in the middle of the bay, and has an ironically jolly name for an abandoned military base. It sounds like the kind of place that would have roller coasters and funnel cakes, but it’s actually full of graffiti-ridden barracks and broken glass.

“I’m in,” I say. “And I’m sure I’ll like Rebecca, if you think she’s so cool.”

“If you can’t trust your best friend, who can you trust?” She smiles. “I’m going to go try these on.”

Leyla disappears into the dressing room, and I wander aimlessly around the store, her last question echoing in my mind. Can I trust Leyla? She seems so . . .
Leyla
, but she hasn’t said anything that proves she isn’t Cyrus.

The salesgirl is parked behind the counter, playing with her phone. She must feel me staring, because she looks up. “Can I help you find anything?” she asks.

“Just looking around,” I reply. She shrugs and hits a button on the CD player behind her. The store fills with the sounds of the Clash, trying to figure out if they should stay or if they should go.

Cyrus’s note weighs heavily in my mind as I drift over to a pile of screen-printed T-shirts by the window.
Love never dies.
How wrong he is. My love for Cyrus died ages ago.

When, exactly, I can’t say. I remember the first time I left him, perhaps thirty years after he made me immortal. I had kept in touch with one of the younger servants at my parents’ estate, posing as an old family friend and benefactor who sent money and gifts and who wished to remain anonymous in exchange for regular updates of Lord and Lady Ames. I no longer cared what happened to my father after he threw me out of his house, but my mother was blameless.

Then one day a letter arrived at our home in France telling me that Lady Ames was very ill. I wanted to go to her immediately, but of course Cyrus forbade it. It was too dangerous, he said. Need he remind me that the last time I was in London I was nearly killed? I didn’t care; I couldn’t lose this chance to say good-bye to my mortal life.

So I left. I slipped out when Cyrus was away. But by the time I made it to London, my mother was already dead.

I kept waiting for tears, for sorrow, for some sort of release, but it never came. I felt nothing. Far more painful was returning to Cyrus and finding him utterly broken, gaunt and devastated and hurt. He was certain that he would never see me again, that I had left him alone. He wrapped his arms around me like a drowning man when I walked in, choking with sobs.
I was so alone, Sera. Please don’t ever leave me again.
I held him in my arms, whispered how sorry I was, how much I loved him. And at the time, I meant it.

Being alone is Cyrus’s greatest fear, and he’s always done his best to instill it in the rest of us. I remember him giving the same speech to the other coven members when he made them immortal:
You can never leave. If you do, there’s no guarantee you’ll find us again. What if we took new bodies, new names, a new city? We’ll have disappeared into the world, and you’ll be all alone. There are no others like us.

Only Cyrus had the elixir, the alchemical formula that severs the connection between body and soul, leaving our spirits free to move into new bodies. He wore it around his neck on a silver chain. I knew his father was the one to give him the vial, and he was also the source of the knowledge for making more. Though in truth, Cyrus stole the formula from his father, Johann von Hohenheim, renowned alchemist and scholar.
And killer,
I remember. Johann wanted me dead almost as soon as Cyrus made me an Incarnate. Cyrus took the blue book from his father’s house the night he ran away with me.

Since that night, I have never seen Cyrus without the vial of elixir around his neck. He would never let any of the others touch it. Keeping the elixir from them was his insurance policy.
Even if you had the formula, none of you could ever make the elixir,
he used to remind us.
It requires a skilled alchemist. You could never make new companions.

How could we leave, knowing we would be doomed to walk the earth alone?