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  Praise for

  But Not Forever

  2017 Rossetti Book Awards Shortlist in Young Adult Fiction

  “Doppelgangers separated by twelve decades exchange places in this deftly intertwined fish-out-of-water tale from debut author Jan Von Schleh. Magical and fast-moving, But Not Forever challenges social conventions, celebrates friendship, and demonstrates the resilience of love with an unflinching compassion which is sure to delight.”

  —Mindy Tarquini, award-winning author of The Infinite Now

  and Hindsight

  “Lush, poignant, enchanting. Sonnet and Emma, and their intertwining stories, grabbed me from the start and wouldn’t let me go.”

  —Julia Inserro, author of Nonni’s Moon

  "But Not Forever is a magical time-traveling adventure that captivates readers from the start. Von Schleh’s sparkling prose sets the stage for the thrilling, intertwining journeys of Sonnet and Emma. Doppelgangers born into separate worlds, both are forced to face family dysfunction and reexamine societal conventions. Love and heartache cross over generations while universe forces and unbreakable family ties are clearly at work in this page-turning tale.”

  —Heather Cumiskey, award-winning author of

  I Like You Like This

  Copyright © 2018 Jan Von Schleh

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

  Published by SparkPress, a BookSparks imprint,

  A division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC

  Tempe, Arizona, USA, 85281

  www.gosparkpress.com

  Published 2018

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 978-1-943006-58-8 (pbk)

  ISBN: 978-1-943006-59-5 (e-bk)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018932730

  Book design by Stacey Aaronson

  All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For Kahlil, Nikolai, and Akio

  My three reasons for everything

  What’s past is prologue.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Sonnet

  2015

  The six of us stood before the mansion, dazed by what we had stumbled on, out of breath after chasing each other around the dark, tangled forest. I pushed past my sister and slid up close to Rapp as he leaned, panting, against a tree.

  I pretended not to notice him, pretended not to see the shaggy, dark hair falling into eyes the color of the green ferns we had trampled on our way up the hill, or the long drip of pine sap worming down his tan leg. A beat-up messenger bag was slung over his shoulder, settling on his hip, a bulky thing between us. His finger looped through the leather strap, fiddling with the buckle, forcing a metal noise as if he was drumming out a song. What was inside that khaki bag? Would it solve the mystery of him?

  Clicking, clicking, a rat-ta-tat-tat. Rapp stared straight ahead and watched as bits of August sunlight tunneled through branches onto the ancient structure, riveted on this long-dead, rich man’s house, emerging out of the early morning fog.

  My brother, sister, and two cousins chattered around us, their words like helium-filled balloons, floating away from the quiet of Rapp and me. I was so close I could see his chest move in a slow, steady beat, the soft air dancing against me, our bare arms almost touching. He was breathing normally now, breathing in the same mountain air as me, and for some strange reason that thrilled me, made butterflies flitter around my heart. I gave him another sidelong stare and caught his scent, warm and soapy. . . .

  Dear god. I was acting like a wild animal in heat. A stalker. I squeezed my eyes shut. This place was doing crazy things to my head.

  As if someone was slowly turning up the volume, my family’s jabbering became a heated conversation. And heated conversation turned into an intense debate. The metal tapping stopped, and an invisible sword descended from the sky, slicing through the thick, sweet air between us.

  Although neither of us had moved, Rapp and I were separated as suddenly as we had come together, and the four others in our escaping-the-adults fan club came tumbling back into view.

  I sucked air as if I had been holding my breath—either in pain or in bliss, I wasn’t quite sure which—and stepped away, still there, still standing on a forested hill above a ghost town called Monte Cristo.

  In a place we probably weren’t meant to be.

  NOT creeped out in the least, my twin brother, Evan, and cousin Lia, talked up the merits of busting into the mansion as a really great history lesson, while my sister, Jules, and older cousin Niki shook their heads. Evan and Lia were always up for a little adventure, and just their wanting something triggered the opposite response from Niki and Jules who thought, being a year older, they were the authorities on pretty much everything.

  I let them hash it out. At ages fifteen and sixteen, were any of us really up on the pluses and minuses of trespassing in an ancient, abandoned house?

  “And, anyway,” Evan said, with his please-can-we-just-do-it grin, “There’s a reason why we just happened to find this old wreck of a place.”

  “Serendipity, with a capital S . . . right?” said Lia. On-board with Evan’s breaking-in plan, she cast around her best smile.

  Niki’s feet were planted rock-solid on a carpet of crispy pine needles, arms folded tight across her shirt. “What’s with you two? There’re probably ghosts flying around in there, biting and scratching. This house is trouble with a capital T. I vote no.”

  “Ghosts don’t bite and scratch. That’s stupid, Niki,” said Lia.

  “They told us to stay away from mine shafts and old shacks,” said my sister, her voice rising with each syllable. She joined up tight to Niki, her typical spot, no daylight between them. “I vote no, too.”

  “C’mon, Jules—no? This is clearly not a shack. It’s a casa grande. Practically a palace.” Evan turned to Rapp and me. “Step out from the shadows. Time to cast your ballots.”

  “I’m in,” said Rapp, snapping out of his daze. He swung to me. “Sonnet?”

  My cheeks scorched. Before I could open my mouth, an ink-colored crow, big and agitated, opened its beak and cawed insults from the shadows of the roof. Jules jumped, her perfect hair nipping at her face as she spun to me. “You’re just standing there, Sonnet. Saying nothing.”

  “I’m weighing our options.” I surveyed the mysterious patch of land around us, buying time. Named after the fictitious Count of Monte Cristo, who had plundered someone else’s treasure and used it to unleash horrible revenge, this Monte Cristo was a deserted gold-mining town in the Cascade Mountains. And, here, preserved inside a ring of towering evergreens, sat a Victorian-era house that seemed to have been waiting, biding its time, just for us.

  Except for the wind rustling through the trees and the occasional plop of pinecones falling around us, it was as quiet as the moon. I would have been happy just digging around outside. There were probably all sorts of lost artifacts hiding under the forest rot. But five sets of eyes were glued on me for the final tally. I turned off my brain and got off my usual place, straddling a decision. I took the plunge. “I’m in, too.” I wasn’t going to let anyone consider me a terrified ghost-believer.

  Four against two. Trouble with a capital T had won.

  We winners left Niki and Jules, with their dagger eyes, sitting on a mossy log, pretending not to care. Hauling away a snarl of withered blackberry vines
that, like a locked gate, kept us from reaching our goal, we made our way up the stairs to the crumbling porch. A turret loomed over our heads, and loose gingerbread trim rocked in the blustery air. Rusty nails had disintegrated, bleeding coppery-red streaks down weather-beaten boards covering the windows. Evan yanked one off and threw it behind him. He pressed his face to the glass.

  Sudden pops of splintering wood shot out from underneath his feet as the plank he was standing on cracked apart. Our leader fell backwards. Whirling his arms like a madman at the blackened doorknocker that stretched out its hand-and-ball toward his descending chest, he caught it and leaped. The old front door creaked open and swung into the house with Evan hanging on. With a thud, he landed on the grimy floor.

  Niki and Jules, as shocked as we were, stomped up the stairs after the rest of us. We jumped over the spot where the rotten wood had caved in and ran howling through the dark opening after Evan.

  My brother rolled off the floor, clawing cobwebs off his face and out of his buzz-cut. “See? Unlocked. It was meant to be. The door opened itself for us.” He laughed and brushed off his shorts, gesturing his head toward a lonely piano in the corner of a vast, empty room.

  I crunched over mouse droppings to the baby grand, feeling lucky to have chosen my red Converse high-tops over sandals earlier that morning. The cold air shifted, whispering, rumbling. Was that thunder? I glanced around to the door. Everyone had scattered. The piano and a jolt of déja vu tugged at me. Children’s laughter and piano tinkling echoed around in my head . . . I couldn’t quite catch it. I flipped up the fall-board, reaching forward to tap at a key.

  Squeaking footsteps exploded my heart into my throat. The cover fell from my hand and—crack!—banged down over the ebony and ivory. “Geez, Lia, you scared me—”

  “Just trying to find you.”

  Shrieks of laughter bounced around the ceiling as running feet skidded above us. Dust powdered our heads. I shuddered away the fear. “So, it turns out those two goddesses are just kids like the rest of us. Well, I just hope they don’t get bitten by a ghost.”

  “Niki and Jules are so ridiculous,” said Lia, laughing. “It’s good they have each other.”

  I laughed with her, glad my cousin, my best friend, had found me.

  Dusty shafts of light seeped in between window boards and lit our way to a hallway and another big room where a tarnished spike of metal pointed like a falling spear from the middle of the ceiling. “It’s the old dining room in here. I thought Monte Cristo was just shacks, you know, for the gold miners. Rich people lived in this ghost town, too.” I rubbed greasy dirt off fireplace tiles with the sleeve of my sweatshirt. Dull glaze turned to peacock feathers and, suddenly, a dazzling, blue bird. “Look, Lia. So many forgotten things.”

  “Hidden gems. I wonder what’s in here.” Lia attacked a drawer in the built-in cabinet. It grated and stuck and finally budged free. “A candle. Another forgotten thing.”

  “A candle and a piano—left behind. Like a message from the dead.”

  “Yeah, like a hologram, beamed in from heaven.” Lia waved the petrified stick of yellow wax around in the old air. “Isn’t this the weirdest place? What’s a fancy city house doing in the forest?”

  “It probably wasn’t a forest back in the day. It would have been logged and cleared when they built the place. Now it’s just trees again. Like, full circle.”

  “Logged and cleared, huh? Whatever. You’re the expert.” Lia tossed the candle back in the drawer. “I don’t want to take anything out of here. A spirit might follow me home and haunt me for the rest of my life. That’s what happens, you know. I’ve seen stuff like that on TV. Real people getting haunted right out of their homes ’cause they piss off the ghosts.”

  “Let’s go find everyone and get outta here, then. We don’t want to make the ghosts mad.”

  Lia smiled. “Let’s go find Rapp, isn’t that what you mean?”

  Rapp. His name whizzed against my ears, hurtled through my core and nicked my heart. The butterflies were back—what was wrong with me? I had just met him last night at my birthday party—the McKay Twins’ Fifteenth Birthday Bash.

  Instalove, that silly thing I’d always avoided, that drama I repeatedly accused my sister of, seemed to have infected me. “He’s running around up there with Niki and Jules. Obviously, he wants to be with the goddesses.”

  “I’ll bet he’s crushing on you, not them,” said Lia. “He was ogling you at your birthday party last night when you weren’t looking, and then he stared at you over his bread pudding at the diner this morning. Seriously. I watched him.”

  I sighed. “I doubt it.”

  “Keep your nerve, Sonnet. You just need to talk about stuff that’s interesting to the male animal. Like Niki and Jules do. Like, you know, sports. Or like that antique T-shirt he ripped off his uncle because he’s into old rock and blues.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because I asked him.”

  Even Lia had a relationship with him.

  We shuffled through the house, whorls of black billowing at our ankles, back to the entry where the front door was still wide open to a cloud-covered sun. Thunder rumbled, again. It had started to rain, and the sudden dampness made me sneeze. “Ugh, my allergies,” I sniffed. “Maybe I’ll go back down to the river and pan for gold with the adults. This day is boring and . . . absurd.”

  “C’mon, you don’t mean that,” Lia pleaded.

  No, I didn’t mean it. The grand staircase wound around to the next level where the dark opening at the top gaped at us like open jaws—and he was up there. I grabbed Lia’s hand. We tiptoed up the creaking stairs. On the second floor landing we heard muted laughter above us. “There must be a third floor,” I said, thinking of my mom’s favorite old-time British shows. “The maid’s quarters—”

  “Shhh.” Lia yanked on my sleeve. “Someone’s coming.”

  Rapp whipped around a corner, stumbling into us. He put his finger to his lips and motioned, towing me along with his big hand around my skinny wrist. He whispered, “They want to scare you. Evan’s hatching a diabolical plan.” He opened a door along the hallway and pushed us in.

  I pressed up against a wall. Strips of brown-stained wallpaper curled down to the floor and lay in moldy piles at my feet. The charred corner fireplace still had chunks of old petrified wood from its last smoky fire.

  “This is my favorite room so far.” Rapp strode past us over his earlier footprints toward the boarded-up windows. “Come look. The view would have been epic.” He banged and rattled on a window until it opened, knocking loose boards to the ground below. Outside, the storm had moved in and surrounded us with a vengeance. A piece of the house’s dangling gingerbread trim blew past. “Yowza! Look at that!” He stuck his head out and closed his eyes, letting raindrops sprinkle across his face

  I moved to Rapp’s side. Tree branches loomed in my face, their shiny wet needles swishing at me. The hard splattering of rain hit the dirt below and sent the smell of damp earth back up. I narrowed my eyes and peered out and up at the sky through the tops of the trees. Dark clouds had bumped white ones out of their way and were quickly filling in the blue. Thunder boomed. I looked over my shoulder, but Lia wasn’t in the room. I had missed her leaving.

  “Something wrong?” Rapp asked, pulling his head back in and shaking the wetness away.

  “I don’t know, I just feel . . . weird. Maybe we should go.”

  Rapp looked at his phone. “Really? It’s not even twelve. We still have an hour.”

  My mind scrambled for something interesting to say. But interesting failed me. The strap of his messenger bag crossed over the front of an old black T-shirt, ballooning letters blasting a tweet from the seventies—Heart! Live at the Paramount! His uncle’s T-shirt, according to Lia, ’cause he was into old rock and blues, also according to Lia. Except for the fact that he was a year ahead of me in school and was staying with his uncle for some unknown reason, I knew nothing about him.

>   Another crack of thunder and a flash of lightning lit up the room. Rain began to pelt the windows, and a few random raindrops hit me in the face. Rapp closed the window. We heard Niki and Jules running and laughing through the crack under the door. I hoped they kept going. I didn’t need my sister in here, sprinkling her golden gorgeousness all over Rapp. I raked my fingers through the dusty, red hair falling past my shoulders. Jules would win the beauty contest. She always did.

  “Niki and Jules stick together like superglue, don’t they?” Rapp said.

  “You could say they’re as bad as me and Lia.”

  “Cousins and best friends. Times two. That’s convenient.”

  “Convenient when we come back home every summer. Sad the rest of the year.”

  “I’d take your life any day over mine, Sonnet.”

  Once again, a perfect comeback escaped me. The wind yowled and shifted, and rain hammered at the windowpanes. Another streak of lightning lit us up, standing close and facing each other. Rapp took my hand and turned my new birthday ring to the faint light. “Beautiful,” he whispered. His smell, that warm soapy smell, paralyzed me once again.

  I would give anything to have him kiss me. I stared at his hand holding mine.

  After a moment, he let me go. “If you’re not too scared, go hide in the closet. I’ll tell them I don’t know where you went,” he said.

  “No, thanks.” I managed to smile. He thought I was a scaredy-cat.

  “Come on.”

  I really didn’t want to. My head told me I wanted to stay right there, right next to him. I teetered back and forth for a minute and then crossed the room. For once I wouldn’t overthink it. It was just a closet. The rusty hinges squealed as the door opened onto shimmery air. “Do you see that?”

  “Do I see what?”

  “Like little shiny bubbles.”

  “No.” He grinned. “You’re crazy.”

  I put my head inside and wrinkled my nose. “It smells like death in here. Hide with me.” I turned around to face him. An angry gust of wind banged the window back open. It whistled past his head, blowing his hair into his face. With that gust, the closet door slammed shut, dragging me with it.