Stacey Jay - Juliet Immortal

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Text copyright 2011 by Stacey Jay

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Delacorte Press, an imprint of Random House Childrens Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Delacorte Press is a registered trademark and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Jay, Stacey.
Juliet immortal / Stacey Jay. 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: For seven hundred years the souls of Romeo and Juliet have repeatedly inhabited the bodies of newly deceased people to battle to the death as sworn enemies, until they meet for the last time as two Southern California high school students.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89893-8
[1. Characters in literatureFiction.
2. LoveFiction. 3. Good and evilFiction. 4. RevengeFiction.
5. SupernaturalFiction. 6. California, SouthernFiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.J344Ju 2011
[Fic]dc22
2010049563

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v3.1

For Julie Linker,

who always believed in Juliet

S HE WILL FIGHT FOR LIGHT, AND HE FOR DARK ,

B ATTLING THROUGH THE AGES FOR LOVES SWEET SPARK .

W HEREVER TWO SOULS ADORE TRULY, YOU WILL FIND THEM, LO ,

T HE BRAVE J ULIET AND THE WICKED R OMEO .

M EDIEVAL I TALIAN BALLAD, AUTHOR UNKNOWN

V ERONA , I TALY , 1304

T onight, he could have come through the doorthe castello is quiet, even the servants asleep in their beds, and Nurse would have let him inbut he chooses the window, climbing through the tangle of night flowers, carrying petals in on his clothes.

He stumbles on a loose stone and falls to the floor, grinning as I rush to meet him.

He is a romantic, a dreamer, and never afraid to play the fool. He is fearless and reckless and brave and I love him for it. Desperately. Love for him steals my breath away, makes me feel I am dying and being reborn every time I look into his eyes or run trembling fingers through his brown curls.

I love him for the way he sprawls on the freshly scrubbed stones, strong legs flexing beneath his hose, as if there is no cause for worry, as if we have not broken every rule and do not face banishment from the only homes we have ever known. I love him for the way he finds my hand, presses it to his smooth cheek, inhaling as if my skin smells sweeter than the petals clinging to his coat. I love him for the way he whispers my name, Julieta prayer for deliverance, a promise of pleasure, a vow that all this sweet everything he is to me will be forever.

Forever and always.

Despite our parents, and our prince, and the blood spilled in the plaza. Despite the fact that we have little money and fewer friends and our once-shining futures are clouded and dim.

Tell me that tomorrow will never come. He pulls me to the floor beside him, cradling me on his lap, hand curling over my hip in a way it has not before. Heat flares from the tips of his fingers, spreading through me, reminding me I will soon be his wife in every way. Every touch is sanctified. Everything we will do tonight is meant to be, a celebration of the vows we have made and the love that consumes us.

I drop my lips to his. Joy bleeds from his mouth to mine and I sigh the lie into the fire of him. It will never come.

Tell me that I will always be here in this room. Alone with you. And that you will always be the most beautiful girl in the world. His hands are at the ties on the back of my dress, slow and patient, slipping each ribbon through its loop with a deliberate flick of his fingers.

No urgent, shame-filled fumbling in the dark for us. He is steady and sure, and every candle shines bright, the better to see the tenderness in his eyes, to be more certain with every passing moment that this is no youthful mistake. This is love. Real. Magnificent. Eternal.

Always, I whisper, so full of adoration the emotion borders on worship. A part of me feels that to love so is sacrilege, but I do not care. There is nothing in the world but Romeo. For the rest of my life, he is the god at whose feet I will kneel.

His cheek presses to mine, his warm breath in my ear making mine come faster. Juliet you are

I am his goddess. I can feel it in the way he shudders as my fingers come to the buttons of his cotehardie and pluck them from their holes, one by one, revealing the thin linen of the shirt beneath.

You are everything, he says, eyes shining. Everything.

And I know that I am. I am his moon, and his brightly shining star. I am his life, his heart. I am all that and the answer to every unspoken question, the comfort for every hurt, the companion who will walk beside him from now until the end of our lives, reveling in the bliss of each simple chore done in his name, overflowing with beauty because I am blessed to spend my life with my love.

My love, my love, my love. I could hear the words a thousand times and never grow tired of them. Not ever.

Forever, I whisper into the hot skin at his neck, sighing as the last tie holding my dress to my body falls away.

S OLVANG , C ALIFORNIA , P RESENT D AY

D ying is easy. Its coming back that hurts like hell.

Oh I press my hands to my forehead, where hot, tacky liquid pours from a cut above my eyebrow.

There is a lot of blood this time. Blood on my hands, smeared onto the dashboard, dripping through my fingers onto my jeans, leaving black spots I can see in the dim moonlight shining through the cars glass sunroof. Its messy, frightening, but, amazingly, the accident hasnt killed her. Killed me.

Me, now. Her, sometime again soon, depending on how long it takes to ensure the safety of the soul mates Ive been sent to protect. Or how long it takes Romeo to convince one lover to sacrifice the other for the boon of eternal life.

It might not be long. He excels at his work.

Either way, Ariel Dragland will wear this shell again. Until then shell wait in the realm where Ive spent most of my eternity, in the mists of forgetting, that place outside of time where the gray stretches on forever.

Ive been assured by my contact in the Ambassadors of Light that there are worse places, realms of torment where the boy who bartered our love for immortality will suffer someday. Nurse never uses the word hell, but I like to imagine that Romeo will number among hells inhabitants. Of course, she never mentions heaven, either, or whether I might go there when my work is finished if it is ever finished.

There are a lot of things Nurse sees fit not to mention. Including the exact workings of the magic that pulls me from the mist again and again, now more than thirty times in seven centuries. All I know is life comes suddenly. One moment Im numb and bodiless, the next Im slipping into anothers skin, anothers lifethe ultimate, dreadful disguise.

I shiver as the memory of Ariels last moments sweeps through me. I watch her snatch the wheel from the drivers hands before a deadly turn in the road and pull hard to the right, hoping the dive into the ravine will kill them bothher and the boy who hurt her. My eyes flick to the drivers seat. The boyDylanslumps forward, the downward tilt of the car making his limp body curl around the wheel. He is still, not a puff of breath escaping his parted lips.