Inspire (The Muse #1)(2)
Author: Cora Carmack

Major perk to being immortal? My body renews itself daily, so I can eat whatever I want, and I’ll wake up tomorrow looking just as I did the day before. The way I’ve always looked. Same goes for cuts and bruises and hair dye and every possible change I could make to my physical appearance. Nothing holds. Nothing lasts beyond the start of a new day. Definitely a complication when you’re trying to live among humans without revealing just how very different you are from them. There’s no disguising who I am, no changing my appearance so people won’t notice my distinct tendency to stay the same age.

As I wait in the express checkout line next to a wall of magazines, my eyes catch on a guy a little older than me (or a little older than I appear anyway) with a girl who must be around five years old. He’s dressed in a white button-up shirt and a loosened tie, with blond hair that looks like he’s run his hands through it one too many times. He’s the complete opposite of the kind of guys I spend all my time with. He’s put together and refined and mature with dark glasses across the bridge of a strong nose. The little girl’s white blonde curls are even more out of control than his, and he’s looking down at her like she’s his whole world.

She tries and fails to sneak a giant candy bar into their cart. He laughs, deep and throaty, and returns the chocolate back to where she found it.

My lips split in a smile, but a dull throb moves through my chest a moment later, eclipsing it. Thousands of years, and I’ve never known what this guy has. I’ve never known what it’s like to love someone, to build a life, to grow older … because loving me is dangerous. I’m the drug.

It may be my purpose to inspire people, but I ruin just as many as I help.

That’s why I don’t get to have what he has. I get short, passion-filled flings. I get excitement and adrenaline and creation. I get a new life and a new home. I get temporary attachments. Again and again, that’s all I ever get.

Touching the lives of mortals, influencing them, inspiring them … that’s the closest I ever come to really living. For a little while anyway. Brushing up against that kind of talent and genius … it’s exhilarating. But the closer my artist and I become, the more involved, the less real it feels to me. They say such beautiful words, create such gorgeous art, and call me their muse without ever having any idea how right they really are. It’s always the artist falling for me. And I shouldn’t be so naïve, not after the life I’ve lived, but just once I’d like to let myself do the same.

My eyes are drawn back to the father/daughter pair. He’s flipping through a sports magazine while the cashier ahead of us calls over a manager to help her with a problem on the register. The little girl looks up at him in awe, the way all little girls seem to do with their fathers. Then she picks up a magazine like him. When she holds it up high, I see that it has a dark-haired woman on the cover, barely covered by the skimpiest swimsuit I’ve ever seen (and I’ve been around a long time), her body posed in a way that is entirely not appropriate for a grocery store magazine rack. My jaw drops open just as she speaks.

“This one,” she says, her small mouth transforming the words into something adorable.

The guy is distracted reading an article, but looks up when she holds the magazine closer to him and says loudly, “I want THIS ONE!”

His face pales, and he snatches the magazine out of her hand, lightning fast. First, her lips form a circle, then the bottom one curls down. Her eyes squinch and her shoulders hunch, and only when her entire appearance has been transformed does she begin to cry.

“Gwennie, don’t.”

“But I want to read a magazine, too.”

“Not that one.”

She opens her small mouth, and the wail she unleashes reverberates around the checkout area. He scrambles to stuff the magazine behind a few issues of Good Housekeeping, but by the time he looks back, little Gwennie has already grabbed another from the same spot she found the first. But she’s still crying.

“I said no, Gwen.” He tries to steal it away again, but this time the little girl is faster. She backpedals, bumping into the older woman still waiting on the cashier and the manager to solve whatever is holding them up.

“It has a pretty girl on it,” she says, sniffling, tears threatening to return at any moment. She holds the magazine up to the older woman behind her in an attempt to gain some allies, no doubt, but the old woman splutters a shocked, nonsense response.

“We’ll get you a different magazine with a pretty girl,” the guy tries.

“But she’s pretty and she’s going swimming. I like swimming, and I never get to do it anymore.”

The magazine is indeed about swimming. Or rather … the best beaches to find sexy, single women. It’s also about fast, easy ways to get your girl hot (direct quote), a definitive list of the world’s best tequilas, and the manliest cars (whatever that means).

The guy kneels in front of his daughter and says, “Please …” But then he just sighs as she darts around him again, and this time she comes to me. But when she stands below me, the magazine falls forgotten by her side. This close, with her eyes impossibly wide, I can see the beautiful mix of blue and green in her irises.

“You’re pretty,” she tells me. “Are you on a magazine?”

“I’m not, no.” I smile at her, and the one she gives me in return is brilliant.

An ache breaks through my chest like the sun through clouds.

History says I have children. Orpheus. Linus. Mygdon. More. But the stories are wrong. They’ve been twisted and mistold over the years.

And the only thing worse than not really having a life is hearing lies about one that can never be true. Like I said … my body renews daily. It doesn’t ever change. Nothing about my existence ever changes. Not because of too much ice cream. Not hair dye. Certainly not something that would take nine months of changes.

I force the smile to stay on my face … because hey, at least that means I can wear the same clothes and shoes for as long as I want. Silver lining, right?

If only I could make myself believe that.

The little girl looks down at her magazine, considers the scantily-clad woman on the front again, and then switches her gaze back to me. With a very serious expression she says, “You should be on a magazine like this. Do you swim?”

The man pops up behind her. He tries to pluck the magazine away, but she pulls it tightly against her chest.

He says, “I’m so sorry.”

My eyes resist leaving the little girl, but when they do, I’m not sorry.