The Day Before Forever Read online

  DEDICATION

  To the Henleys in our lives

  EPIGRAPH

  Death, only death, can break the lasting chain;

  And here, ev’n then, shall my cold dust remain,

  Here all its frailties, all its flames resign,

  And wait till ’tis no sin to mix with thine.

  —Alexander Pope, Eloisa to Abelard

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ads

  About the Author

  Books by Anna Caltabiano

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  PROLOGUE

  I TURNED THE doorknob, and I was in. There was no lock, and why should there be? They let rooms for harmless travelers. They had no thought that anything could go wrong.

  The first room was painted in opposites—light and dark, but in the night it all looked gray. It was small, almost like a closet by modern standards, but it was a size I was used to.

  I placed one foot in front of the other, careful not to bump into the chairs lined up by the door. I didn’t want to touch anything unnecessary.

  I had thought this through. I had thought everything through—especially during my many sleepless nights. I knew what every move should be, and I knew what every second held for me. Tonight’s plan was completely thought out. All that was left was to execute it.

  I paused at the black table, as I had planned. There were many drawers, but only one with a lock, the bottom one. I opened the top drawer instead.

  There, nestled in the corner, was a set of keys. Predictable. People were all the same. Even time cannot change them that much.

  I used the smallest key on the locked drawer, and it opened for me without so much as a sound.

  Files. Paperwork. There were names that meant nothing to me. And for the first time that night—the first time in a while—I felt apprehensive. How would I know which one was hers? Where she would be? She could easily hide behind a false name, and I wouldn’t be able to pick her out.

  Then there it was, staring back at me. Her name. And another name, equally familiar. But it could not be him since he was not of this time—no matter. It was her that interested me. What arrogance and stupidity to use their own names. It led me straight to them, and now I knew exactly where they were.

  Two white doors met my gaze. Now, which held what I was looking for? Or rather, who I was looking for?

  I chose the left door and was pleased when it opened onto a hallway. There were many doors on either side, but they were not the one I needed.

  I walked to the side, keeping close to the wall so the floors wouldn’t creak under my weight.

  Turning the corner, I saw it. A small, delicate blue flower amid a garden of white.

  Taking a hairpin out of my bag, I set to work on the door.

  I turned the hairpin clockwise in the lock, waiting for it to catch on something.

  Click.

  I looked down at my hand, holding the hairpin. I expected it to be trembling, but it held steady. Good. Now counterclockwise with a little push.

  I wished I could have just broken a window to get in. It would have been so much easier. But much too haphazard. No, I had thought this through and this was the best way. This wasn’t a time for sloppiness.

  A creak sounded in the hallway behind me.

  No.

  I froze. If I could have willed my blood to stop, I would have. I was so close. I had practiced these very motions night after night. No one could stop me. Not now.

  I stood there listening. No more sounds. Whoever it was, he or she was not coming my way. Thank you.

  My hand was still holding the hairpin in the lock. I turned it halfway clockwise. I leaned against the door, and it gently opened.

  Looking over my shoulder, I scanned the hallway behind me. Still empty. Everyone was asleep. It was as if they had made it easy for me. But I wasn’t doing this for the challenge, I reminded myself as I crept in. This was a culmination, of sorts—my last act.

  Best to close the door behind me so no one would think anything was amiss. I slipped the hairpin into my bag. It went with the knife and the small pocket watch I also carried.

  There was no time to waste anymore. This had to be done.

  And then I stopped. For there she was. She was on the bed, fully clothed—not even underneath the covers—as if she had fallen asleep talking. This was too simple.

  This was the first time I was seeing her up close without the mask of darkness. When I had tried to smother her before, it had been too dark to see more than the outline of her face. But now, seeing her, I realized she looked exactly like all the others I had ended.

  This one’s eyelashes pressed into her skin. Deep sleep. She was curled around a man, who was next to her on the bed, as if her little body was trying to shield him from whatever might come through the door. Me.

  I almost laughed. She didn’t have to worry about that. It was her I had come for, after all. But as I moved farther into the room and stood over the bed, I saw his face and my breath stopped. It couldn’t be.

  I now knew why she was curled around this man, trying to shield him. The man’s face was one I remembered well. It was a face I had seen before, centuries ago. He had been sick, dying in fact. Mortal. But if he was here now, that could only mean he was immortal. She had turned him.

  Pain shot through my jaw. I hadn’t noticed I was clenching it that hard. If she had done this to him, she could be doing it to others.

  I scanned the top of the bedside table and quietly opened its drawer. Stationery. Nothing important.

  I opened the closet door. Just a few articles of clothing. A black shift of some sort. A few men’s shirts. Shoes on the floor. Nothing that would hold water. I made sure to put everything back in the right place.

  Next, I checked the adjoining bathroom very carefully. Still nothing.

  I had already searched through the other woman’s house in New York. Just like in this room, she had nothing that resembled a glass or a bottle of liquid.

  But this woman . . . she would have needed the water to turn him. There was no other way to do it.

  She must have used the last she had on him. So perhaps she would go back to acquire more? She had to. To turn more into her kind.

  I had searched in Florida for the original source of the water, but I had failed. The others I had eliminated had refused to tell me the location of their source before their deaths. Perhaps there was another source to which she could lead me?

  I peered at the bed again.

  I could do it in one motion. A twist of her neck. A swift gesture of a knife. Painless . . . almost. But what good would that do if I couldn’t find her water? Instead, I should keep her alive a while longer to find the source.

  I could keep him too. She would confide in him. I could keep a close watch on them. And he might also be useful. She seemed to care about her unnatural creation like she cared about no other thing or person. One might even call it love. Or weakness.

  My eyes fell on a string of plastic beads on the bedside table. My hands found t
hem, and in a familiar way I carefully wrapped the beads around his hands, taking care to clasp them together. He did not stir.

  It was too easy.

  ONE

  “WHAT’S HAPPENING?” I heard Henley say.

  Henley’s—well, Richard’s—eyes went wider than I had ever seen them. I knew a lot of strange things were happening, like the fact that Henley was now somehow inside Richard’s body, which had been lying on a bed in fifteenth-century England just moments before, but nothing could have prepared me for Henley starting to shake uncontrollably.

  Henley clutched first at his throat, then his chest. “I-I can’t breathe.” He took a few stumbling steps toward me. “My chest—”

  In his panic, Henley’s other arm shot out, trying to reach me.

  I grasped his hand. “What’s happening?”

  Henley looked as if he were drowning in air.

  “I—” he began, but it sounded as though his throat closed up, and his weight started to slump toward me.

  “Henley!” I tried to keep him up. His eyes were starting to roll back in his head. “Look at me!” His weight was too much for me to hold up, so I tried to gently lower him down.

  He hit the floor with a muffled thud.

  Henley’s skin was flushed and sweat poured down from his hairline. There was a bit of blood on the corner of his lip, and I realized he had bitten down on his own tongue.

  I used my fingers to slacken his jaw. All his muscles seemed to be clenched, and his body began to jerk on the floor. I felt under the side of his jaw like I had seen doctors on television do, but I couldn’t tell if I was feeling his pulse or my own heart beating erratically.

  “Don’t you dare do this to me,” I said. I tried to open his shirt to feel for his heart, but my fingers were fumbling. His body continued to lurch beneath my touch.

  There. I slipped my hand under his shirt and held him down, while trying to listen for his heart and quiet my breathing for just a minute.

  Henley’s heart was still beating. Thank God.

  Tears prickled my eyes. I didn’t know what was happening, but worse than that, I didn’t know how to stop it.

  “Henley?” I called, as if he were far away and not practically resting his head on my lap. “Henley, dear. Stay with me.”

  All I could do was beg and hope that this was just a fit, that it would soon pass.

  I clasped his hand in my own. I couldn’t lose Henley. I had fought for him. I had even thought I had already lost him once before. I couldn’t lose him like this. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.

  I gripped his hand tighter, as if that was going to do any good.

  We shouldn’t have tried to travel in time after Henley had somehow “fallen into” Richard’s body. I understood that Richard had been dying and Henley was just trying to help, but we—I—should have known it couldn’t end well. Henley was half-immortal (whatever that meant or entailed) due to being the sixth Miss Hatfield’s son, and getting sucked into Richard’s body might have made Henley more mortal than immortal. There was really no way of knowing. But of course traveling in time this far into the future couldn’t end well for him. I should have seen that. It rarely had for me.

  Henley’s fingers twitched in my hand. At first I thought it was the seizure. But I looked down to see Richard’s—Henley’s—eyes staring back at me.

  I shuddered. I forgot Henley was in there.

  “Henley?” I said his name purposely, as if to remind myself who he was. “Are you all right?”

  He made to sit up, but I put a hand on his shoulder. “You shouldn’t get up so quickly.”

  He turned away from me and puked.

  I rubbed his back.

  “All right?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You scared me.” I paused. If a full mortal traveled this far into the future, past his own life span, he wouldn’t exist. He would be essentially killing himself, because he would be dead this far into the future. Maybe his being still alive had to do with Henley being half-immortal? “Do you remember much?”

  “I think I lost consciousness partway through talking to you,” Henley said. “Then it was just waking up on the floor and feeling nauseated. . . . My head hurts too.” He instinctively touched the side of his head, but as soon as he did, his hand recoiled and he groaned. “I’m not a fan of Richard’s haircut either.”

  Henley looked serious, but I couldn’t help a small smile that had crept onto my lips. The quiet smile grew into a giggle I had to hold back as Henley turned his strange hands over, taking in the bizarre sight of being able to control someone else’s hands. This was such a crazy situation.

  A laugh escaped.

  “What?” Henley pouted at me.

  But his sticking his bottom lip out just made me laugh harder.

  “I go into some seizure or shock and you just sit there laughing.” Henley shook his head, but he was smiling too.

  I doubled over. The pinpricks of tears I had been holding back came pouring down my cheeks. Tears of relief. Laughing from relief. Relief all around.

  “Thank God. Thank God you’re all right.”

  “I’m as all right as I could be, with you here by my side.” Henley poked me. It was all so strange—laughing and joking like this, as if he hadn’t almost died a second ago. And not only that—Henley was finally here. In the flesh. Right in front of me. I had waited so long for this that I hadn’t imagined it could ever happen. Maybe this was some sort of nervous response?

  He touched the side of my face so carefully. My cheeks hurt so much from smiling when I felt the warmth of his hand. His touch was so careful, it was as if he were scared he would break me or otherwise shatter this perfect dream we were in.

  I shook my head. It wasn’t perfect. We didn’t have time to be doing this.

  Henley’s laughter quieted as if he had realized the same thing.

  We had used the clock to travel in time, not only to save myself from the effects of staying in one period for too long, but also to run from a killer who seemed to have set his sights on me. Miss Hatfield’s killer, I reminded myself.

  Miss Hatfield—incidentally, Henley’s mother, as I had recently found out—had been my mentor, the only one I could really talk to about being immortal. Sure, she had been the cause of my immortality, as she had been the one who had slipped water from the Fountain of Youth into my lemonade that fateful day, but she had helped me since then. Each Miss Hatfield had created the next Miss Hatfield after her. Why? Was it out of loneliness—the idea of spending an eternity alone? Was it out of a strange feeling of duty? I didn’t know. But the first Miss Hatfield had turned the second, the second Miss Hatfield had turned the third, the third had turned the fourth, and so on . . . until I became the seventh Miss Hatfield. I was determined that this curse would end with me. There would be no eighth Miss Hatfield.

  There were all these rules to abide by as a Miss Hatfield. Sometimes I was convinced the sixth Miss Hatfield had made up half of them. I was taught to be inconspicuous, not to make eye contact with people on the street, and to look “normal” at all costs. There were other skills I had to learn too. Miss Hatfield had taught me how to blend in to a given time period—to talk like they did, wear what they did, look like they did. Miss Hatfield had also taught me how to constantly move in time, using the golden clock she had hung on the wall of her kitchen.

  The clock!

  I frantically looked about. The clock lay glistering on the floor just a step behind me. Another wave of relief.

  After murdering Miss Hatfield—in front of me, no less—the killer had tried to come after me. I remembered the day Miss Hatfield had told me that immortality did not protect against bodily harm or accidents. An immortal can’t die of illness or old age, but a murderer . . . that would do it. Miss Hatfield had said the previous Miss Hatfields had always died in accidents—a ship fire, the Salem witch trials, being locked up in an asylum—shortly after they found and turned their successor. The idea of a mu
rderer on the loose—that made me begin to question everything.

  When the murderer first attacked me we got into a struggle, resulting in the clock’s hands being turned and both of us being sent to 1527—the farthest the clock could move in time, and the exact year the clock had been made. After realizing the clock had yet to be invented, it had been a real feat to get Henry VIII’s court clockmaker to craft it for me.

  I took a step and picked up the clock.

  Of course, it hadn’t even been me who convinced the clockmaker to make the clock in the end. It had been Richard.

  Richard was a number of different things. He was charming, that was for sure. He had a way of making me feel as if I were the only one in the room. He would mutter witty things under his breath during feasts at court. He would look at me and really see me. I loved Richard.

  Richard was also dead.

  He was sick from the start. Consumption, they said. But Richard never told me till the end. He had a faint cough, but I didn’t think much of it. I was an idiot. Not that there was anything I could have done. I tried. In the end I asked Henley for help, and look where that got us—Henley sucked into Richard’s body when Richard died.

  I really should be sadder about this—his entire death, I mean. I did love him. That never changed. I loved him. Yet I felt like I couldn’t really mourn him when Richard was still here.

  “Where are we?” Henley asked.

  I stared into Richard’s eyes.

  We had been in Henry VIII’s court about three minutes ago, and now we were . . . wherever this was.

  I looked around at our surroundings closely for the first time. I had been in such a state of panic, I hadn’t noticed much.

  The floors were smooth stone, cut into perfect squares. Pillars, decorated in lavish gold and a grayish blue, shot straight up, supporting a beautiful painted mural.

  “All those angels looking down at us,” Henley muttered.

  There was an echo as his voice carried in the large room. The ceiling was so high that I felt dizzy from tilting my head up to look at the mural.

  There were ornate crests and Greek-looking scrolls—definitely not Tudor-like—along the edge of the ceiling. The gold seemed to drip down the sides of the walls.