Read The Alchemy of Forever Online

Authors: Avery Williams

Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #General

The Alchemy of Forever

I
pick up a stack of photos of Kailey
and her friends. Kailey’s eyes stare out at me, shining with life.

I regard my new body in the mirror. This is the first time in centuries I’ve been a sixteen-year-old girl.

There’s no tangible difference between the face in the mirror and the face in the photos, nothing I could point out to prove that everything has changed. And yet I don’t think I look like that smiling girl in the pictures.

“What do I do now?” I ask the stranger in the mirror. “Do I keep being you?”

 

Her first love made her immortal. . . .

Her second might get her killed.

After spending six hundred years on Earth, Seraphina Ames has seen it all. Eternal life provides her with the world’s riches, but at a very high price: innocent lives. Centuries ago her boyfriend, Cyrus, discovered a method of alchemy that allows them to take the bodies of other humans by jumping from one vessel to the next, ending the human’s life in the process. No longer able to bear the guilt of what she’s done, Sera escapes from Cyrus and vows to never kill again.

Then sixteen-year-old Kailey Morgan gets into a horrific car accident right in front of her, and Sera accidentally takes over her body while trying to save her. For the first time, Sera finds herself enjoying the life of the person she’s inhabiting—and falling for the human boy who lives next door. But Cyrus will stop at nothing until she’s his again, and every moment she stays, she’s putting herself and the people she’s grown to care for in great danger. Will Sera have to give up the one thing that’s eluded her for centuries: true love?

 

Born the day after Halloween in Los Angeles,
avery williams
has since lived in five different states due to her father’s job as a radio disc jockey (though she sometimes claims her parents were in the circus). Now she makes her home in Oakland, California, with her husband and two dastardly kittens. She enjoys riding her bicycle around town and working on her hundred-year-old house. She is also a poet.

alloyentertainment.com
Jacket design by Elizabeth H. Clark
Jacket photo copyright © 2012 by Luc Coiffait

 

Simon & Schuster • New York

 

Watch videos, get extras, and read exclusives at

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the
alchemy
of
forever

 

an
INCARNATION
novel

 

 

An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division
1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020
www.SimonandSchuster.com
This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real
people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places,
and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance
to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2012 by Alloy Entertainment

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part
in any form.

is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

The Simon & Schuster Speakers Bureau can bring authors to your live
event. For more information or to book an event, contact the Simon &
Schuster Speakers Bureau at 1-866-248-3049 or visit our website at
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.

 

Produced by Alloy Entertainment
151 West 26th Street, New York, NY 10001

Book design by Liz Drezner

The text of this book was set in Janson.

CIP data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 978-1-4424-4316-7

ISBN 978-1-4424-4318-1 (eBook)

 

for conor

 

He ne’er is crown’d

 

With immortality, who fears to follow

 

Where airy voices lead. 

 

—John Keats

Contents
 

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

prologue
 

london, 1349

 

I feel as though I’ve been waiting for the masquerade ball for my entire life. At fourteen, I am eligible for marriage and finally old enough to attend. The torchlight flickers on the sandstone facade of Lord Suffit’s palace on the Thames, and the roses woven into my hair are heady and sweet. I remember to push my mask up over my face before I walk through the great arched doorway.

I catch sight of myself in a mirror.

I wear a high-waisted white gown—punctuated with golden threads on the seams—that flows over my body like water. The sleeves are fitted at the tops of my arms and flare out at my elbows like wings. The mask is golden and shaped like a butterfly, dotted with crystals and glass beads. It points back from my face toward the silver net that holds my hair in a thick bun at the crown of my head.

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