We Were Eternal Once

1. Prologue – Cologne, Present Day

Prologue – Cologne, Present Day

There you are.

I would know you in any crowd. You are the most ruinous of beauty, the most venomous of vipers. Yours is the first face I remember, and the last thought before I sleep. Even now, centuries later, after your love soured and turned to rot in my mouth, I seek you out.

You cannot run from me, just as I cannot forget you.

“It’s amazing what humans can do,” you say, your voice nearly lost on the raw winter wind. The clouds overhead churn, thick with the promise of flurries that will melt before they touch the ground.

You don’t look at me.

That will make it easier to kill you.

“Last time we were here, she was a ruin,” you say. A pale hand extends from your coat, resting on the dark stone structure. It’s delicate, deferent—a touch of affection for a building.

But you’ve always been sentimental about broken things. You like to be the one to fix, to see the potential, to mold and mesh into a design of your favor. If only the world was made in the image of you and your whims and not the silent god the building was built to worship.

“I was never here with you,” I say. I didn’t mean to speak.

I didn’t mean to listen to you, because I know how your words twist and fog the mind.

Even now, centuries removed from your poisonous influence, you are my guiding star.

I am not the stupid girl in the temple, or in the streets of Paris, or any of the other times you destroyed me so you could remake me into something unrecognizable.

I am not her I am no longer her I am me me me me

“Hmm,” you say, your red eyes cast to the city below. Humans scatter in the streets, coats drawn up against the biting evening cold. Even this high up, I can hear their shuttering breaths and mumbled curses. If I focused, I could hear their heartbeats.

But I don’t need a distraction.

Your fingers trace the stone as they used to trace my cheek—slow, comforting. Hush now, you’re safe.

I am no longer on the rooftop of the Dom Cathedral—I am in your arms, I am in Greece, I am in Rome, I am raging, crying, screaming, loving.

I shake my head to clear it. Get out, I will you. As if you were a silly thought or an errant memory, and not written into the very code of my being. As if you are not my maker, my savior, my damnation. My everything.

And in the end, I was nothing to you.

“Melinoe,” you say, and I close my eyes to block out the words.

“That’s not my name,” I say, my voice a tremor. “That is the name you gave me when you stole my life.” I have to get it out, I have to say it. I meant to come and to kill, to end us both at last. I’ve said too much, but I can’t keep it in any longer.

It’s festered in me. I am gangrenous with hatred and truth and secrets, all because of you. Your death will carve it from me and I can heal at last.

I deserve that.

You deserve this.

“Stole?” you ask, and at last you glance at me.

Your profile is exquisite, made all the sharper by the fragment of moon through the clouds.

The aquiline nose, the sharp cheekbones, the straight blonde hair.

My fingers twitch at my side, replaying all the times they’ve journeyed over your face.

I could map you from memory. I could draw you blind and senseless.

I know you more intimately than I know myself.

I did. Long ago. Not now.

I am not Melinoe.

I bite my tongue until copper fills my mouth. I will not let you talk me out of this.

“Ah, I see,” you say, your gaze raking over my body. It does not stop on the wooden stake in my hand, does not fixate on the weapon I don’t bother to hide. Instead you dissect me, cutting through each layer of my clothes, my soul, seeing me as plainly as if I’d confessed my intentions.

You do see, that has always been the problem. You’ve seen what lies beneath, what haunts me, and it became your weapon.

You turn in a flourish, your coat spiraling around you like a great spinning top. Your back rests against the stone pillars of the cathedral, one leg cocked to rest against it.

Your cavalier attitude infuriates me.

“What shall I call you, then? My Giltine? Ankou? Are you a coming of Thanatos? Or are you Hel? A grim reaper?” You say the last of it with a petulant curl of your lip. “No—I think you are Melinoe, climbing out of the river Cocytus.”

“Shut up!” A gust of wind steals my words, carrying them down the cathedral and into the streets of Cologne. No one looks up, unaware of the scene above them. They will go home to their human problems with their human families and never know, never understand, what they walked under.

You push off the wall and take a step toward me.

It takes all my power not to step toward you, not to step away from you. To go to you is to surrender, to step away is to be weak. You’ve never accepted weakness, especially not from me.

“O khara,” you breathe, and I flinch.

“Don’t,” I say, but it’s a whisper. You’ve taken another step, then another, and now you are before me.

“I have missed you,” you whisper. You reach out as though to touch me, fingers ghosting the air around my face. I want to close my eyes and lean into it, to forget the last few centuries, to go back to a place where this was possible.

But my traitorous mind will never let me rest.

The temple floor. Rome. Alexandria. Paris.

I opened my eyes to your lies, I do not intend to close them again, no matter how sweet the sleep would be. You’ll fill my head with dreams once more, and I cannot forgive you for what you’ve done.

I am not her, I am what is left when gods forget their creations.

The stake presses against your sternum. I whittled it myself, the final product of years of practice. The only stake I didn’t sharpen to a nub. All I need to do is push and you’re dead.

You don’t look down at the stake, you look at my face. You try to meet my eyes. “Look at me,” you say.

I study your pointed jaw, the freckle along your lip, the pale iridescence of your stolen blood in your veins. I cannot stare at your lips without remembering where they’ve been, how they made me scream and cry and rage.

“Look at me,” you demand, and I snap my gaze to yours. Your red eyes search mine as if you can find me. I am not there, I am drowning in the red of your irises. I am at the temple, I am on the balcony, I am in the theatre. I am everywhere with you, passing through time in an unhurried arc.

“Goodbye,” I whisper.

The stake trembles in my hand.