The Impossibility of Tomorrow Read online

  And I remember, too, the night one trumpet player kept making eyes at me. I was grateful for the dim, smoky room that hid my blush; but Cyrus noticed, of course, and accused me of being unfaithful later that night when we returned to our flat. I’ve never spoken to him! I cried, earning me a slap across the face. You’re lying, Cyrus told me. His apology didn’t come until two weeks later, in the form of a grand piano in our parlor.

  It’s my fault, I thought at the time. Cyrus is sensitive. I should be more careful not to hurt him. I forgave him and gave myself over to the sickness that was our centuries-long relationship.

  Cyrus must have guessed that he’d find me among Eli’s friends, knowing how much I always loved music. When he didn’t, he left Eli’s body and found another, killing yet again in the process. But who?

  Murder ballads, Reed whispers in my mind.

  “Pull over,” I say to Noah when we’re a few blocks from our houses. He does. Up the street I can see the staircase leading to our fountain. Only yesterday we were there in the fading sunset.

  “Please,” he says, when he turns off the car, taking my left hand in his. I put my right to my brow, and I cover my face. “Tell me what’s wrong. Don’t shut me out.”

  If only I could stop time, if only I could keep us here, in the car, by the staircase where we loved each other.

  But I can’t.

  Because I love him, I can’t. I shiver and roll up the window.

  “Noah,” I begin, his name like honey in my mouth. “We need to break up.”

  “What are you talking about?” His eyes are so hurt, so confused. Outside, the wind gusts, shaking the car. Leaves fall on the windshield like pages of a book ripped from their spine.

  “This thing—you and me—it’s not working out.” I tremble but force myself to say my next words. “I don’t love you.”

  He turns away, leaning back in his seat like he needs something solid to prop him up. “I don’t believe you,” he whispers.

  “You should,” I answer.

  He slams his hand against the steering wheel, the sound making me jump. “Stop it, Kailey. Just stop.” His voice cracks, and he finally looks at me, his eyes so sad in the streetlight’s beams that turn them the color of beach glass from another time.

  He reaches for me, pulls me toward him, finds my mouth. I am caught, caught in his warm hands, his hungry lips, his photographer’s eyes, their blue pummeling me like warm Diablo winds at the end of November, ruining groves of eucalyptus and ruining my resolve, as fragile as an old window.

  I tear myself away.

  “You can’t kiss me like that and not love me.” His voice cracks. “You can’t.”

  He’s right. I can’t. I can’t let him touch me again.

  Seraphina, don’t you dare kiss another.

  I’ll kill him myself if you take a lover.

  “You’re wrong,” I breathe. “You don’t mean anything to me.” Cyrus won’t hesitate to kill Noah. I know that. I’ve seen him kill before for much less.

  Noah’s face is pale. “Does this . . . does this have anything to do with Reed? I’m not blind. I see the way he looks at you.” He closes his eyes, waiting for my answer.

  I think of Reed’s face by the fire tonight. Whoever this Seraphina is, she’d better watch out. I briefly consider letting Noah believe I have feelings for Reed. He’d hate me, and he’d stay far away. But then I picture Noah saying something nasty to Reed, with no idea that an evil, ruthless spirit now possesses his body. He’d be in too much danger.

  “No. It has nothing to do with Reed,” I answer, and his jaw clenches.

  “Is there someone else?” He wraps his arms around himself. He’s shaking. I want to touch him, to kiss him back from this abyss, but I can’t.

  I breathe in, breathe out, breathe in, summoning the strength I need. “Not yet,” I say.

  “But you told me earlier that I make you happy. Were you lying when you said that?” His voice is red with pain.

  “Yes,” I say.

  He stares, his mouth trembles. I’ve hurt him. But it’s for his own good. “But I love you,” he says, his voice breaking.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “It’s over.” My words slam into the side of his face. The death blow to our relationship.

  “Get out,” he says, reaching across me to open the door. The wind takes it, ripping it backward so it bounces on the vintage hinges. I see a tear run down his cheek, and I resist the urge to smudge it away with my thumb, to take him in my arms.

  I slam the car door. I run down the street, boots slapping on the pavement, finally alone in the dark. Eli is dead, Noah’s heart is broken, and it’s all my fault. I don’t stop running. At last I start to cry the tears I couldn’t shed in front of him, their salty heat immediately feeling like ice in the cruel November wind.

  TWENTY

  In Kailey’s room, I hunch by the window, feeling minute currents of cold air sighing through the tiny gaps between the sill and the old wooden sash. I think of Kailey’s painting, the one that hangs in Noah’s room, the way she painted herself from behind, watching his window. Right now it is nearly recreated as I stare across the street, past stupidly happy gusts of wind throwing handfuls of leaves around in circles. I can’t tear my gaze away from Noah’s window. But in the painting, his shades glowed a creamy yellow from the light behind them, surrounded by a swarm of Kailey’s magical creatures, fairies coalescing around the eaves. And now it’s just dark.

  I don’t see his car—he must not have come home. I wonder where he went, fully realizing I’ve lost the right to know. I lost it the moment I told him I didn’t love him anymore.

  Ragged tears slide down my face, a sob crumpling my face like something that should be thrown away. Regret blooms inside of me, watered by pain. I want to take it back, to take back the whole damned night, to erase the chain of events that led to this hurt that I’ve caused. For once, knowing I did the right thing doesn’t dull the pain.

  I make my way across the room to Kailey’s dresser. There’s a candle on top of it, sealed with its wax drippings to the large abalone shell it rests in. The surface is coated with dust that I wipe off with my fingers. I find some matches tucked behind a jewelry box and light the candle. The air fills with the scent of roses, the firelight playing across the iridescent surface of the shell.

  I carry it across the room and place it on the windowsill, driven by an urge to warm up the glass, to send some kind of light out into the world.

  It flickers briefly before an unseen tongue of wind snuffs it out.

  And somehow, this is what makes me start to cry again.

  I throw myself on Kailey’s bed and turn over on my back, looking up at the glow-in-the-dark stars that dot her ceiling, her artificial constellations rearranging themselves through the veil of my tears.

  I hurt. I say it aloud, though there’s no one to hear.

  And I’m scared. Scared of what will happen to me if Cyrus finds me. I don’t think he’ll kill me. He’ll do something much, much worse.

  When we lived in Berlin in 1917, he caught our human servant Greta snooping in the library. She had figured out that something was different about us and confronted him. She wanted to become an Incarnate too.

  “Oh, I’ll make you an Incarnate,” Cyrus said. He gave her the elixir—then forced her into the body of a sick, elderly man before locking her up. She was imprisoned for years. Whenever her body began to fail, Cyrus made her take another one, equally as decrepit and ill. And the torture would begin anew.

  I shudder at the memory. It’s too dark in here. I feel my way to the window and retrieve the failed candle, bringing it back to Kailey’s bedside table and relighting it. I sit up in the bed, leaning against the wall with my knees drawn up under my chin, inhaling breath after breath of the candle’s sweet air as I try to calm down.

  It’s Reed. You know it is. Just go to his house, tonight, and kill him, says a voice in my head, the voice that craves certainty, proof, evidence.

>   Except I have none. Nothing except a hunch, a creepy feeling. I was wrong about Noah—I could be wrong again. I don’t know Reed very well at all. No one does.

  That’s exactly why Cyrus picked the new boy. No way for you to figure it out.

  And even if I could figure it out—so what? I deduced that he took Eli’s body, and what did that get me? Too little, too late. I’m always one step behind.

  I smash my fist onto the silk green coverlet, suddenly so overcome with frustration I want to scream.

  I settle on pacing back and forth on the rug in my stocking feet. Kailey’s bedroom has never felt smaller. My eyes play over the paintings that adorn the walls, lingering over the one next to the window. I’ve stared at it several times before: the girl with shaggy black hair, balanced on the roof of a cathedral, a guitar strapped to her back. And the other girl flying in the air above her, wings outstretched, arms reaching.

  Something about it stops me in my tracks.

  I cross the room swiftly for a better look, blinking slowly, trying to understand why this painting feels so important.

  Suddenly, it hits me.

  The night I ran away from the coven, my body on the verge of death. The dive bar in Jack London Square. The girl inside, her feathered earrings. A bright red T-shirt, slipping in and out of view through the fog. Green eyes, shining with pain. Wind whipping her black hair around her face as she faced me on top of the shipping container cranes.

  The girl who watched me take Kailey’s body after the car crash.

  The girl who stole Cyrus’s book after I stupidly left it on top of the crane.

  Taryn.

  My mind reels. The implication is staggering. I clamp my eyes shut, remembering the night Kailey died. Remembering Taryn’s sadness. The way she insisted she was alone in the world, with nothing to live for. The way Kailey’s broken body drove me out of my mind with pain, a whirlwind of blood and gasoline and jasmine perfume clouding my vision. The way Taryn’s tiny frame stood across the road, watching me.

  The only witness to that night’s events wasn’t a random stranger, a lost junkie girl who just happened to be in Jack London Square.

  Taryn knew Kailey and saw me take her body. She’s yet another link to me, another bread crumb in the trail I’ve left behind, leading straight to the Morgans’ door.

  I tried so hard to save Taryn, only to let her friend die in my arms. Suddenly I’m back on the crane, the rain lashing at me, whipping my hair. I’m standing over the river, ready to throw the book in the water, ready to leave it all behind forever—

  Wait. The book. Cyrus’s blue book of alchemy, his most treasured possession aside from me. He even mentioned it in his song tonight. The book he took from his father, Johann, the night we escaped London more than six hundred years ago, that contains the formula for making the Incarnate elixir and who knows what other alchemical knowledge.

  If I can find Taryn, maybe I can get the book back. It’s the one thing that would tempt Cyrus, that might make him do something stupid. The perfect bait.

  After all, there is more than one way to hunt.

  In our first century as Incarnates, Cyrus returned home one day, ashen and shaking, certain that he had seen his father selling scrolls at the market. I know he’s in a new body by now, just like we are, but I recognized the cadence in his voice, the words he used. It was him, I swear it. Seeing as how Johann threatened to kill me the last time I saw him, I put up no argument when Cyrus made us leave.

  Our new home in the Black Forest was isolated, a rough abandoned cottage in a forest that was rumored to be full of werewolves and vampires, witches and ghosts. Of course, Cyrus found this hilarious. But it was the perfect place for us to hide.

  That’s when Cyrus taught me to hunt.

  “There is more than one way to bring down prey, Sera. Strength, stamina, even weapons—these things are not always needed,” he told me, kneeling by my side in the frosty, overcast forest. I watched, rapt, as his fingers expertly twisted the leather cords that would make our snare. “You can kill without a bow, without a knife, and without hounds, as long as you know how to set a trap.”

  When we returned to the snares a few days later, we would find them full of small animals, mostly rabbits.

  I scramble to my feet, fumbling through Kailey’s purse till I find her phone. I don’t really expect to find anything useful—I searched through Kailey’s contacts the first day I was in her body, and I would have remembered if I’d seen a Taryn. But one thing I’ve learned about Kailey is that she was a girl with secrets.

  And there it is, in her contacts. Just one letter. An unassuming T. With a phone number, and an address. It was right there, the whole time. If it had said “Taryn,” I would never have missed it. But I never thought to worry about who T was until now.

  I tap on the number and hit SEND MESSAGE, then pause. I have no idea what to say. No idea what went through Taryn’s mind after she witnessed me, kneeling over Kailey’s broken body, transferring my soul in a dizzying whirl of sparks. From everything I know, Taryn is a drug addict. She was certainly high that night. She can’t know the truth of what she saw.

  Best to keep it simple. hey, how’re things? I type.

  Almost immediately, the phone buzzes with a reply: hey stranger. been a while.

  can we meet? I type back, holding my breath as I hit SEND.

  Wasteland tomorrow?

  I frown. I’m not sure how to parse this response, but I have the sense to flip open Kailey’s laptop and google “Wasteland Oakland.”

  My eyes widen at the first search result: “Jack London Square’s original gothic, steampunk, and industrial dance club.”

  Jack London Square is where Kailey had her car accident. Could she have been going to this venue to meet Taryn? I sit up straighter, clicking on the club’s name. The Wasteland. The poet T. S. Eliot must be spinning in his grave.

  Dark jangling beats erupt from the laptop as the screen fills with a deep shade of purple, and I quickly turn down the volume. THE WASTELAND is displayed at the top of the page in a black typeface, thorns entwined around each letter.

  An intricate motif of rotating gears, skulls, and black roses surround a scroll, which slowly opens to reveal a list of upcoming events. Apparently someone named DJ Mittens will be spinning synthpop darkwave—whatever that is—this evening, and tomorrow night Lady Elektra will be providing industrial cabaret.

  At the bottom of the page is a button bearing a pale blue gothic F, with mysterious instructions underneath: “For photographic evidence of our events, consult the Book of Faces.”

  Clicking on the F brings me to the club’s Facebook page. I chuckle—“Book of Faces,” how impossibly pretentious.

  I click to the photo albums, filled with thumbnails of heavily made-up boys and girls, their thick smears of black eyeliner and wildly colored hair completely incongruous with Facebook’s cheerful blue-and-white background.

  I scan face after face. The screen passes in a blur of fishnet stockings, corsets, top hats, and pierced everything—eyebrows, lips, noses, even cheeks.

  My eyes catch on a group photo with perhaps fifteen people in it, some standing and others kneeling in front. I recognize the two girls in the front center immediately. Taryn’s pale, scarred arm is slung around a blond whose face is turned away from the camera, her loose curls covering the side of her face. But I know her. I know her throat, her chest, her belly, the tanned arms hiding inside her long-sleeved shirt with its plunging neckline, far more revealing than anything I’d expect her to wear.

  Because they are mine, now. My arms, my throat.

  Kailey.

  Puzzle pieces slide into place.

  Kailey and Taryn were most definitely friends. And judging from their body language in the photo—the subtle arch to Kailey’s back, the way she leans into Taryn’s side—they may have been more than friends.

  Heart racing, I compose a reply to Taryn: awesome. see you then.

  I’m going to get ho
ld of that book, and then I’ll use it to bait the snare and lure Cyrus out of hiding.

  TWENTY-ONE

  By the time I leave for The Wasteland the next evening, the mist has given way to a downpour, wind ripping the leaves off the neighborhood trees and water flooding the gutters. I don’t mind, though. The noise makes it easier to sneak out.

  I fake-yawned through dinner until Mrs. Morgan practically ordered me to bed. Bryan raised an eyebrow at me and accused me of trying to get out of doing dishes but let me go without complaint when he saw the dark circles under my eyes, courtesy of the lightest touch of Kailey’s matte black eyeshadow. Once in Kailey’s bedroom, I turned off the lights and waited for the house to go quiet, watching the rain stream against the window and bounce off the asphalt on the street.

  I considered telling Mr. and Mrs. Morgan that I was going out with Leyla, but I’m worried they might stay up waiting for me to come home, and Lady Elektra doesn’t even come on until eleven. I have a feeling that most of the people who go to The Wasteland aren’t exactly worried about breaking curfew. Kailey’s parents would never let me stay out that late even on a Saturday.

  Rain pelts the windshield of the cab I called, and I wonder how the driver is able to see anything through the blur of constant water. Windshield wipers are a joke in this kind of weather.

  I catch sight of myself in the rearview mirror and cringe. I haven’t dressed this way since the coven went through our goth phase in the early eighties. I did my best to approximate the style of the girls I saw in The Wasteland’s photo albums, pairing a low-cut, midriff-baring velvet tank top that I found stuffed in the back of Kailey’s dresser with a short lace skirt. The loosely crocheted tights I’ve got on do little to keep me from feeling naked. I lined my eyes with liquid black and coated my lips with nearly the same shade.

  As the car approaches Jack London Square, I smell the familiar reek of the saltwater estuary and overripe produce from the wholesale markets. We turn a corner and I see a line of dressed-up people huddling against a wall, trying in vain to keep dry. There’s no sign, but I can tell by the corsets and platform boots that we’re in the right place. The club is only a few blocks from where Kailey had her car accident. I’m surer than ever that she was heading here the night she died.