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.
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the
alchemy
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forever
an
INCARNATION
novel
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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
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.