True: An Elixir Novel (11 page)

“Oh no,” Clea says. She jumps between Nico and me as if she could hide him with her body. “Rayna, it’s not what you think.”

“Really? What are you doing? You told me he was dead!”

“I know I did, and I wasn’t lying—”

“He’s right in front of me, Clea!”

She’s still standing in front of him, like she’s guarding him. Clea’s the one who needs guarding. I’m pacing in front of her like a pitbull waiting for the right moment to spring, and I’m ready to draw blood.

“I
knew
he was alive. That’s why I came over. I
knew
it! But stupid me, I thought you
didn’t
know. I thought you made a mistake and you’d be so happy to help me find him once you knew he was alive because you’re my
best . . . freaking . . . friend!
What are you doing, Clea?”

I attack her as I scream. I grab her arms and
shake her, digging my nails into her flesh. It feels good, but it’s not enough until I swing back and land the perfect slap right across her face.

“Stop it!” Nico cries.

“Oh, you’re going to take her side? I
hate
you! I’ve been a mess for days! I haven’t left my bed! What kind of crazy assholes come up with
death
to cover up cheating? Your mother is having a
funeral
for you!”

“My mother? You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You told me you loved me! I’m wearing your stupid-ass ring.” I tug it toward him, brandishing it in front of me. “ ‘One Day,’ you said. Were you two already together? Or is that what it meant, ‘
One day
I’ll be screwing your best friend’?”

Nico just stands there, his arms crossed, his face cold and stormy. I can’t believe it. It’s like he doesn’t even care I’m here.

“You’re out of control,” he says matter-of-factly.

“
I’m
out of control? You said you wanted to
marry
me!” I lunge for him, but Clea jumps in front of me, pushing me back.

“Stop!” she says. “You don’t understand!”

“Get off me!” Clea has her hands on my shoulders, so I reach out and grab a fistful of her blond hair. I tug until a clump rips free in my hands, and I laugh when Clea screams and drops to the floor.

“Get away from her!” Nico growls to me.

“Stop defending her!”

Without Clea in my way, I storm to Nico and beat on him again and again and again. I know I’m not hurting him—he’s a tank—but I just want to have some effect on him, make him say or do
something
, even acknowledge what he did. But all he does is stand there and say in a voice as cold as ice, “Cut it out.”

“No! I won’t! You lied to me!”

“Stop it!”

“No!”

“I said
STOP IT!
”

Searing pain as he catches my fists in his hands and squeezes, hard. My fingernails pierce into my palms and my bones feel like they’re crushed. I look up at Nico, and there’s nothing but blank darkness in his eyes.

His eyes.

His brown eyes?

The pain is unbearable, and I collapse to the
ground, but he doesn’t stop squeezing. The world is getting fuzzy, but I see Clea stagger upright and hurl herself at Nico. She grabs his arm and screams, “Sage! Stop it! Let go of her!
Sage!
”

Sage . . . Sage is inside Nico’s body. . . . But how . . . ?

Darkness.

CLEA

“Rayna . . . Rayna?”

She’s unconscious on the ground, and I can’t believe Sage did this to her. I don’t even know if
he
believes it, or remembers it, or even knows he did it. He plopped down on the bed when Rayna collapsed, and he’s still there, staring into nothingness.

“Rayna, please be okay. . . . Rayna?”

Her eyes flutter open, and she winces. “My hands . . .”

“Can you move them? Are they broken? Try to open and close your fist.”

Slowly, she brings her fingers in and out. I can see the bloody crescents where her nails dug into her palm, but the bones aren’t broken.

“You called him Sage,” she says.

I nod.

“How?”

I start to tell her everything, picking up from when Nico, Ben, and I left her, but she’s distracted. She keeps darting her eyes to Sage, and every time it’s the same: She looks over, lights up with hope for the briefest of seconds despite herself, then remembers all over again that it’s not him and sniffs away the tears. Sage is oblivious. I’m not even sure he’s back to himself. At the risk of setting him off again, I sit next to him on the bed.

“Sage, maybe now would be a good time to rest.”

“Yeah . . . yeah, I think it would.”

He lies across the bed, but I stop him with, “I was thinking maybe in the spare bedroom. Alone.”

I say it gently, and grit my teeth for the snap, but it doesn’t happen. He just stops himself halfway to
the pillow and changes direction, rising to his feet. He bends down to kiss me good night, but I give my head the smallest shake and he backs away with a sheepish half smile. “Good night,” he says. “I’m—I—”

Is he going to apologize? Does he realize there’s a reason to apologize?

“Good night,” he says again after a long, deep sigh. He waves as he heads out of the room. Rayna watches him go, her eyes soaking in every movement and gesture.

“It’s so weird,” she says solemnly. “It’s him, but it’s not him at all. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you found his long-lost twin.”

“I’m glad you see it too,” I admit. “Sometimes I think I want to see Sage so badly that I worry I’m projecting.”

“You think you can project a whole new pair of eyes?”

“You noticed?”

A cloud drops over Rayna’s face. “Yes, Clea, I noticed that the man I love has completely different-colored eyes from the last time I saw him. Is that so bizarre to you? Do you really think you’re the only person in the world who would notice something like that?”

“Of course not.”

“I think you do. I think you believe no one but you and Sage can truly love each other in a life-altering way.”

“That’s not true.”

I say it, but in a way she’s right. Not about Sage and me being the only ones to have an all-encompassing love, but maybe about assuming her connection with Nico wasn’t as deep and meaningful as she said it was. I’ve known her since birth. She met her first “love of her life” when she was three years old—a blond boy named Alexander in our class at preschool. Even then she swore it was forever, and huffed and tossed her mop of red curls whenever anyone belittled it as “puppy love.” For Rayna, falling in love is like breathing—she can’t live without it.

Did it seem like she was particularly connected with Nico? Sure. But the two of them had only been together about a month. And yes, a month was a pretty good run for Rayna, but Owen, her junior-year boyfriend, had lasted
six
months. She was so sure she’d end up with Jackson, her longest-term boyfriend after that, she dragged him to an astrologist to figure out the most auspicious post-high-school wedding date.
That was two weeks before she stormed into my room freaking out because Jackson liked to rub his stocking feet together when he studied, and the
shush-shush
noise was making her rip her hair out and she
refused
to be bald by eighteen.

Were Rayna and Nico really soulmates? If he’d lived, would they have stayed together forever?

I don’t know. And the truth is, it doesn’t matter. Rayna believes it, and if I’m really her friend, that should be all I need.

“Life isn’t all about Clea Raymond,” she mutters. “The rest of us aren’t extras here to fill in your life story.”

“I never said you were.”

“You didn’t have to. It’s how you live.”

“It’s not! Rayna, it killed me when you wouldn’t talk to me, and not just because of the massive lie it left between us. That was awful, but worse was you not being in my life. We say the men we love are our soulmates, and maybe they are, but if anyone in this world is part of my soul, it’s you. You’re more than my best friend. You’re my sister. You’re more than my sister, even. You’re a part of me, and I’m so sorry if I’ve ever made you think you’re anything less.”

Rayna doesn’t say anything to me for a while, but then she smiles.

“That was good,” she says. “Where’d you read that?”

“Shut. Up.”

“
Cosmo
? It was
Cosmo
, wasn’t it?”

“Rayna!”

“Okay, just hug me and get all the drama over with. I’ve been crying for a whole week. If I have to cry any more, I’ll get massively dehydrated and have to go on IV fluids and my mom will go apeshit, and you know none of us want that.”

She’s waving her hands over her eyes to stop the tears, and I laugh and cry and throw my arms around her. I only pull out of the hug halfway, though—I keep my hands on her shoulders and my forehead against hers.

“One more thing,” I say. “I’m
not
glad it was Nico who died and not Sage. That’s not a choice I would ever make.”

“I know,” she says. “I knew it even when I said it, really. But thanks.”

We sit there, head to head for another moment, then pull apart. Rayna takes a deep breath. “Keep telling me the story.”

I do what she asks. I tell her how Ben led us to where Sage was being held; how Nico had the chance to kill Sage and end the curse plaguing his family and the rest of Cursed Vengeance, the other descendants of the original Elixir of Life thieves; how he hesitated just long enough for Ben to tackle him away from Sage; and how Nico landed on the dagger that took his life. I tell her another CV member didn’t hesitate—she grabbed the dagger at the last possible second and plunged it into Sage’s heart, ripping out his soul. She drained him of Elixir and wanted to drink it herself, but didn’t get the chance before an otherworldly earthquake shook the Elixir out of her grip and sent it back into the ground. My voice chokes as I tell her how it felt to see Sage’s body, dead on the altar. How I held him in the middle of the warscape, surrounded by the dead and injured, and how I thought I might die right there with him.

“That’s horrible,” Rayna says, and I know she means it, but the truth is, this story ends better for me than for her. That’s what I tell her next: how the impossible happened. Nico rose from the ground, a dead man who lifted his shirt and healed right in front of us . . . but with a new soul inside.

“It was what Magda, the old woman we met in Shibuya, had said could happen,” I tell her. “A soul transfer. A homeless soul finding refuge in a body whose soul had just recently moved on.”

“Moved on,” Rayna intones it like a prayer. “Is that really what happened? Is he somewhere better?”

I want to say yes, but I’m not going to lie. “I wish I knew. I’d like to think so, but I’m not really good with the heaven/hell/God/afterlife thing. I’m just not sure.”

“Seriously? You’re still a skeptic?
You?
What do you need, a burning bush? Maybe a pair of tablets falling down from your ceiling?”

“I’m not completely dense,” I retort. “I get that there’s
something
. There’s a soul. It moves on, or it doesn’t move on, or it comes back. I just don’t know what’s behind it all, if anything. Maybe there isn’t. Maybe it’s all just random. Maybe moving on is like everything you ever wanted coming true. Or maybe it’s just . . . ending.”

“Thanks. That makes me feel much better about Nico.”

“I’m sorry. I swear I’m not trying to make it worse. I’m just being honest.”

“I know,” Rayna says, “and I’m not mad at you.
You don’t have to believe. I do. If Nico did move on, he moved on somewhere better, where I can meet him one day and we’ll be together again.”

I don’t know that I buy that. Sounds to me like a tragic waste—a life spent looking forward to something that won’t happen until after you die. I don’t say that, though. I go on and explain that Sage is mortal now, and I tell her about his new problems: the nausea, the exhaustion, the memory loss. I can’t bring myself to tell her about him throwing me into the wall; it’s too awful. Finally I tell her about Ben’s ominous diagnosis.

“Which is what’s happening now,” she says. “Madness and violence.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t know Sage that well, but I never pegged him as a crush-your-hands kind of guy. You must be terrified.”

“We’ll find a way to get him better. I’m sure of it.”

“It’s okay to be terrified,” she says. “It doesn’t make you weak or anything. And even if it did, there are worse things than weak.”

Tears spring to my eyes. I had no idea I was holding so much in until Rayna sliced right through it. “I missed you so much,” I say.

“I missed you, too.” Then she yawns, and she laughs when she can barely pry her eyes back open. “Oh my gosh, I think I’m talking in my sleep. I should go back home.”

“Don’t. Stay over. We’ll sleep on the couches.” The gray living room couches were always our favorite place for slumber parties, because they’re as wide as full-size beds but even cushier, and they offer the added bonus of letting us fall asleep to bad TV. I loan Rayna something to sleep in, and I check on Sage before I go downstairs. He’s asleep in the spare room. I make sure the house alarm is set before Rayna and I go to bed. I might not need to keep Sage a secret from Rayna anymore, but I don’t want him to slip out and wander again.

I don’t have to worry. Rayna and I wake up long before Sage. By the time he comes down, she and I are in the kitchen, and Rayna’s scrounging deep in the pantry for something to eat. With a smolderingly sexy smile, Sage covers the distance to me in a heartbeat and gives me a kiss I feel in my toes. I push him away, very gently. I give him a meaningful stare, then glance toward Rayna.

She’s frozen at the door to the pantry, and looks like she’s going to throw up.

Sage clears his throat uncomfortably and steps
away from me. “Oh, um . . . Rayna. I . . .” He blows through his lips and leans heavily on the counter, completely at a loss. “Clea?”

“She knows. She saw you last night.”

“No, she didn’t.”

I glance at Rayna, who raises an eyebrow.