She shrugged. ‘I’ll take her face. It’s pretty, and I don’t mind wearing plainer clothes for a while. Besides, I don’t mind Cliff staring at me.’ She smiled gently. ‘The three of us are best friends, aren’t we? This is the kind of thing we do for each other.’
‘Norah…’ My voice broke, and so did a part of me. I’d known this would be painful, but this… this was more than I could bear. More than I could inflict on them.
‘What,Blake? I’ll do it.’ Seeing the fierceness in her eyes, I swallowed all my arguments.
Ashton was looking from one of us to the other, bemused. ‘Are you sure? She’s not a redhead. Definitely not your type.’
She snorted and pushed the hair back from her forehead. ‘If you want to talk tradition, you broke your own a long time ago,Arthur.’
She was right, although I knew he wouldn’t like to be reminded of it. We had all found ways of making the bodies our own. I gave each of them the same scar, the one I’d got falling out of a tree in my first lifetime. Norah sought out women with the same fox-red hair as her own. And Ashton had always chosen someone with the same or a very similar name to the one he was born with. At least, until the day Heaven left. Something in his eyes told me he was thinking of her too. That he couldn’t lose another of us.
He threw back his head with a groan. ‘Okay, fine,’ he said resignedly, getting to his feet. ‘I’ll talk to Henry. If that’s what it takes to get you back, then I’ll do what I can.’
I pushed out a smile, although guilt tugged heavily at the corners of my mouth. ‘Thanks.’
Ashton waved a hand and stalked out before either of us could say a word. These days he never lingered in a situation once it started to feel too intimate, but I had never been more grateful for it than in that moment. One more question and I would have cracked and told him everything. It was true: being good at lying didn’t mean I liked it. And with them–the peopleI was supposed to be completely open with–it was even harder. I felt wretched and relieved at the same time.
The minute the door swung shut behind him, I exhaled. ‘Norah,’ I began again, but I couldn’t find the words. Although perhaps I didn’t need to, because no one knew me better than she did. Norah knew my ugliest secrets and my loftiest thoughts, and she always understood me–maybe even the things I couldn’t explain.
‘It’s okay.’ She came towards me, resting a hand on my cheek. ‘We love you, Cliff. And you love us.’
I grasped her fingers tightly. ‘You’re not going to ask, are you?’
‘Like I said: we know each other too well for that.’
Instead of answering, I stood up and pulled her into a hug. I shut my eyes and rested my head against hers. Funny: she’d been using the same perfume for decades, but it smelt different on every body.
‘I’m tired too. It’s all right,’ she whispered, pressing a kiss to my collarbone. The tattoo pulsed, but at that moment I felt more powerfully than ever before that this fleck of ink wasn’t what connected me to Norah. It was so much more. It ran so much deeper.
Maybe Norah sensed what I was planning, or she was taking a chance because she trusted me. Either way, it didn’t change the fact that I was going to betray her.
We had lived our lives together from the beginning. Here in Cambridge, nearly forty years ago, Heaven’s death had changed things in a way that could never be undone. It had taught us that even eternity was not untouchable. And here it would come to an end, once and for all: our lives, our friendship, our us.
I couldn’t help thinking of the words Heaven always used to say:eternity is poised upon this moment. And I knew:this is the one that’s going to bring it down.
Chapter29
Mabel
The next two weeks felt like a sort of trance. I spent most of my free time with Cliff. He went out of his way every morning to walk me to the faculty building, kept me company between seminars, picked me up from the library in the evenings. He said he wanted to spend time with me, but we both knew it was more than that: he wanted to make sure Ashton didn’t run out of patience and take matters into his own hands. For the same reason, I spent most of my nights at his place. I slept beside him, with him. For the first time, I felt like I truly understood why they called it sleeping with each other. It wasn’t just about the sex, it was about the before and after. The sense that you were sharing something beyond the physical. When I fell asleep in his arms, I felt like our minds were interweaving. As if, although it was unconscious, although it went unremembered, we even shared our dreams. Whatever this thing was between us, it was bigger and more powerful and more beautiful than anything I’d felt with a man before. In the presence of his soul, I felt my own soul coming to rest, and somehow… coming home.
Nobody noticed I was spending the majority of my free time away from college. Davie was still in a coma, and Zoe had gone back to her parents’ house the day after my confrontation with Ashton. She still wasn’t feeling any better and the college had insisted she take a leave of absence. I’d told her I thought it was a good idea–Cliff had promised me she’d recover quickly once Ashton was no longer feeding on her soul. That thought was the only thing that let me relax even slightly as the date of the emergency ceremony loomed.
It felt like we were on a chessboard. Cliff and I on one side, the rest of the Starlings on the other. Although we were the only ones aware we were playing, I still felt like we were at a disadvantage, because on a fundamental level, we didn’t know the rules. We had a plan, but it relied largely on improvisation. The only real move we had was to get me into the same room as the artefact. Everything that happened after that depended on me.
As much as I liked taking matters into my own hands, I couldn’t stop them shaking when I thought about that. Like right now. I clasped them uneasily over my stomach to keep them still.
Cliff noticed anyway. With a glance up and down the empty street, he interlocked his fingers with mine. ‘The car will be here any minute.’
‘I know, that’s why I’m nervous,’ I muttered, looking around. It was early twilight, and Cambridge lay before us in shades of grey and blue, only the evening sky shot through with soft violet.
Cliff had told me the council moved the location of the ceremony every time, making it harder for anyone who might be planning to disrupt it. This one would take place somewhere near Cambridge, because Victor’s body–Jess’s body–was already too damaged to withstand a long journey, but the exact location had not been shared with Victor or Norah. All we knew was that I’d be picked up in about ten minutes.
‘There’s something else.’ Cliff stepped in front of me, shielding me from the street. ‘They’ll notice if your soul is untouched. I have to take some energy from you or they’ll get suspicious.’
I swallowed, my carotid pulsing dully. ‘Okay.’
‘Just a bit, I promise.’ Softly he cradled my face, letting two fingers slip down to the artery in my throat. I’d realised by now that made it easier for them to reach the soul.
