Chapter 27
Twenty-Seven
MARIS
Ithought about running for town to get help. I stood there on the side of the house with the wastebasket in my shaking hands for a second before I pulled out my phone and hit the light to get a better look at the bandage in the trash bin.
There wasn’t a drop of blood on it.
“I spent a lot of years studying the body to know when one is in trouble and trust me, I’m fine. Let’s go home.”
Holy fucking shit when Julian asked for the tape…when he said that to me, he was already healed.
“He was pretending.” I look back at the house and then back at the waste basket. What the fuck do I do? I drop down into a squat, clutching the damn trash basket to my chest like a deranged hoarder and take in a deep breath to try and calm myself down.
If I go to town, what the hell am I going to tell them? I think the new hot doctor that you all saw take a knife for me is a monster? I don’t think he’s human? There’s something seriously supernatural about him because he doesn’t bleed?
“No, he bled,” I remind myself. It’s true.
“She stabbed him. I saw it.” His shirt is stained through with blood, ripped and cut where the knife sank in.
Jesus Christ, she stabbed him more than once didn’t she?
That’s the only way his shirt would be cut the way it is.
I didn’t realize it. I don’t think anyone did.
“Practically a paper cut.”
That’s what Julian called the wound Aria gave him.
“He was lying, you idiot.” I lean forward, forehead to my knees and try to breathe.
It’s hard. I have to put the waste basket down on the grass beside me and get on my hands and knees so I don’t throw up.
Julian bled, the proof is on his shirt, but it was only an instant if he was healed by the time he taped himself.
I take in a deep breath and let it out. Maybe he bled for a minute at the most?
That’s all the time that really passed between Aria’s drunken stabbing and the EMT showing up.
“What the fuck is going on?” I whisper. I don’t know what to do.
Yes, Julian is miraculously healed, but he saved me.
If he hadn’t stepped in, I’d be in the hospital.
I wasn’t fast enough to react when she lunged at me.
Multiple stab wounds might even have put me in the ground.
And it’s not the first time he saved you, my idiot brain reminds me.
I lift a shaking hand and touch my face.
He fixed me. Healed me. Whatever he did to me wasn’t normal, I knew that somewhere deep down but now seeing him completely healed, I understand it.
How did he heal me? Did he change me?
I rock back on my heels with a ragged breath and look up at the stars. A gust of wind blows my hair in my face and my vision blurs from the cold air. The stars overhead lose shape, the pinpricks of light get swallowed up by each other until I can’t make sense of the sky.
“What is he?” I ask the heavens like the stars might answer back. Nothing comes though, it’s just the sound of the wind in my ears and the night. Even if there was some celestial being capable of answering me, they wouldn’t. I know that. I’m cursed.
I’m a killer.
If anyone would answer me, they’re not in the heavens. Then how is Julian here when he seems like an angel? I don’t even mean it in the metaphorical way either. He’s completely healed. He could be an angel, couldn’t he?
I put a hand down on the ground beside me and dig my fingers into the dewey grass.
I’m half tempted to ask my question again but this time to the earth.
I know my place. If there was any cosmic intervention coming on my behalf it would come from below.
I’ve become every bit the monster Vesper Point has made me out to be.
Maybe that’s because they’re all monsters too.
How could they turn on me the way they had when that fucking man had come into my home?
He’d destroyed my only connection to home, to family.
He tried to take that away from me. He deserved exactly what happened to him.
And maybe I wouldn’t be like this if everyone hadn’t abandoned me.
They were all too happy to see me fall off the pedestal this stupid town had put me on and me like an idiot, I stayed.
I stayed because I had nowhere to go, is the lie I told myself.
There were plenty of options for me to leave town after everything.
The truth is, I was too scared to leave. Too terrified of who I really was and leaving would mean finding out so I stayed like a coward and now here I fucking am, on the ground wondering if the first person to treat me kindly is a goddamned angel. I have to be losing my damn mind.
I shove myself up off the ground, grab the waste basket and stride over to the trash cans to dump the bandages.
I’m not going to town to tell them about Julian.
The only difference between me and them is that I know what I am while they’re still denying it.
Pretending to be good people when beneath the surface this town is rotten to the roots.
If I let them know Julian isn’t normal they’d come for him.
Even if he was an angel they would still try and rip him apart, inch by inch, bone by bone, until there’s nothing left.
It’s what they’ve been doing to me for two years.
Fuck that. Fuck them.
I turn to look at the house. Warm golden light pours out from the windows and onto the lawn.
It looks safe and welcoming, warm, a place to rest from the world.
My instincts tell me I’m wrong and that Julian isn’t an angel but I won’t let them do that to Julian even so.
Not even if going back inside means he kills me.
Maybe that would make him an angel? If anything were coming to kill me, it would be an avenging angel like Michael, right?
Maybe that’s what he’s here for and he feels bad about it and that’s why he’s been saving me while he looks for a humane way to dispose of the dirty, murdering human.
I let out a deep sigh and head to the back door. I make it up the steps before my body betrays me, it's like my mind finally caught up with the rest of me and I stop moving. I just freeze with my hand on the doorknob.
The urge to run returns with a vengeance.
I could make decent time, even in these fucking heels, but where the fuck would I even be running?
To the monsters in town? The ones that have shredded me to pieces over the past two years like I’m their own personal hobby?
No. I turn the doorknob and take a shaking step inside.
I’d rather deal with the maybe monster, possible angel inside.
He’s been better to me than any of them.
I’m sure he’d even kill me quickly if I asked.
It would be over before I even knew it was happening.
And now here I am. With Julian on his knees in front of me, and I don’t understand any of it.
“Are you going to kill me?”
It took me less than ten minutes to ask the question that had been rattling inside of me. I almost didn’t ask it because, you know what they say, never ask a question you’re not ready to have answered but I couldn’t stop myself. I needed to know.
“Kill you? If I had to damn the world to save you, to even be with you for this one night, I would happily do it.” Julian is on his knees in front of me.
How it happened, I don’t know. It just sort of did.
One second I thought he was about to rip my throat out after he told the Chinese place that we were dating, and then he was just there.
Pretty and on his knees like I’m something worth reverence and not the damaged fucked up woman that I am.
Maybe to him I am. The look in his eyes is so pure, the need there, I’ve never seen anything like it.
It pulls me in so hard that I can’t stop myself from touching him.
I have a hand on his chest, another in his hair.
When I move my hand, Julian’s head goes with it.
I’m completely in control of him why is he doing this with me?
“I would never harm you. My life is yours, do you understand me? I do not live without you. I would not live if you willed it that way. I am yours and fuck this world if you are not mine.” He grabs the sides of my seat and pulls me closer, my knees dig into his chest and the wooden chair creaks from how hard he’s holding it.
“We’re mates, Maris.”
Mates? Oh my fucking god. What the hell is this man talking about?
“I-I don’t know what you’re talking about. Mates?”
“Soulmates.”
I jerk my hands away from him like he’s on fire and shake my head. “No, that’s not possible.”
He smiles at me like he hasn’t just told me we’re fucking soul mates. “It is. Everything and every part of my life has brought me here, to you. We are meant for each other. It’s fated.”
“Fate doesn’t know shit,” I tell him and push at his chest. “Fate is wrong.”
“It’s not. It’s never wrong.”
I push again and try to get away. I dig my feet into the floor and push but I don’t move. “Fate is wrong. Fate took my parents from me. It killed them on an empty road and dragged them out to sea. It took everyone from me and left me here alone. Fuck fate.”
Julian lets go of the chair and I shove myself back so hard that I nearly fall back out of my chair. I might have too but Julian grabs the chair and steadies it. The chair is balanced at an odd angle, on its two back legs, with me clinging to the arms for dear life.
“Maris…I’m so sorry.” Julian stands and rights the chair. The second that it’s back on the ground I bolt to the opposite end of the kitchen.
“What are you?”
“You’re right. Fuck fate. It’s never wrong but it is cruel. I should have been here sooner.”