Chapter Twenty-Six #2
“Oh my god. You think I’m an idiot,” I accuse between snickers that pulse out of me in waves, my body’s twisted interpretation of the depths of betrayal and hurt that I’ve been tamping down for weeks.
“You didn’t mean to? Be honest. That’s why we’re here right now.
That’s why Brandon is in a fucking hospital bed.
Because you fully intended for me to end up in the room next to him, so that you could keep on gallivanting around this Earth for who knows how much longer.
That was the plan, right, you greedy piece of shit—”
“No. Never,” Julian pleads, shaking his head. “Please, Sean, I never—”
“But you did!” The tears that I thought I would never find again come flowing down my cheeks now, and I can’t stop laughing, because what kind of monster am I?
I have escaped sure death when many others were less fortunate, and the thing that makes me cry is the realization that my ex might have sought me out to take advantage of me.
“So how much time did you end up taking, huh? Two years? Three?”
“I don’t know.” Julian grips the steering wheel tight, and he stares, unblinking, at the road. “I wasn’t supposed to take any. It was an accident.”
“An accident that cost me years off my life,” I spit. Important moments that I might no longer be there for. Sophie graduating college. Caring for my ailing parents. All those milestones that I’d assumed I would make, potentially cut short to feed this man’s—this thing’s—centuries-long avarice.
Julian’s contrition is already turning to irritation.
“Yes, well,” he growls, “at least you’ll be living to see tomorrow. You can thank me for that.”
I ball my hands into fists. My nails bite into my skin.
“I wish I’d never met you. I wish you’d left me alone.”
I mean for it to hurt, and it thrills me when he flinches. It feels like the last claim to power I have left.
Julian doesn’t speak for a moment. When he does, it is in a whisper that sounds like he’s breaking.
“You and me both.”
Julian drives through much of the night.
He stops to get gas, takes my order at a quiet roadside fast food restaurant, but otherwise is behind the wheel uninterrupted for the next seven hours straight.
I don’t have a coat, and so he lends me his, shoving a too-big winter hat over my head before I leave the car to go to the bathroom, because everyone will remember the young-looking Black woman with white hair if they’re asked.
He doesn’t use a GPS and refuses to tell me where we’re going, but he doesn’t prevent me from looking outside, so I know from the road signs that we’re headed south.
I consider running. I think if I tried he wouldn’t give chase.
But as much as I don’t want to admit it, the thought of straying from Julian’s side terrifies me.
At Ulrich Corridor, I’d walked amongst multiple guests and never once thought that one would have a knife, a gun, but now every person I pass is a potential threat that I know I can’t face on my own.
When I go into bathrooms alone, I imagine Leila materializing in the mirror behind me as I wash my hands.
If there be monsters afoot, at least I have one as an ally.
Sometime around three in the morning, we stop at a Holiday Inn Express, and I realize that sleep is something he needs and doesn’t just pretend to do.
I make a list of his other needs too. Supernatural creature or not, he too requires food for sustenance and water for thirst. When we check into our hotel room and he goes to the bathroom, I can hear the trickle of him peeing and realize that was never an act either.
“What?” he says wearily when he emerges from the bathroom, freshly showered and fully dressed in a black T-shirt and gray sweatpants from the gym bag he keeps in his back seat, because apparently his physique is earned, not just magically bestowed.
“What do you mean, what?” I ask.
Julian sighs. He asked for one room with two beds, and I’m both relieved by his lack of presumption and annoyed, though I currently lack the capacity to properly investigate why.
“You’ve been watching me like a hawk all night,” he says.
“Oh, you know, you’re sort of the most dangerous entity in a five-hundred-mile radius, so…
” When he doesn’t laugh, I hug my knees to my chest. My skin still feels hot from my forty-minute scalding shower, and my palms are raw from scrubbing.
“You’re an incubus, right? I’m just trying to figure out how you… work.”
A muscle in Julian’s jaw twitches. He sits across from me on his bed and rests his elbows on his knees to regard me.
“An incubus,” he says, turning the word over in his mouth like it’s alien to him. His blink is slow and sensual, a subtle seduction. Then he shrugs. “Well, if the shoe fits.”
His eyes tick to my neck, and I wonder, for one delirious second, if I’ve gotten it wrong and he’s a vampire instead.
“It does, right?” I say, hesitantly. “I mean. There’s the dreams thing. And. You know.”
Julian’s lip curls into the closest thing I’ve seen to a smile on him tonight.
“I know what?” he teases.
My cheeks warm. “Your…prowess,” I manage. My gaze drops down to the space between his legs. Damned gray sweatpants. “Also, you’re immortal.”
Julian’s smile drops.
“I’m not,” he says. “Immortal, I mean.”
My eyebrows screw up in confusion. The recurring character in the paintings is him. I’ve burned countless hours poring over the photographs I took at his gallery to know that.
“But the paintings, at your gallery—” I start.
Something like admiration crosses his face.
“You’ve seen the private collection, then.” He raises his eyebrows, impressed. “I had that exhibit closed. How did you get in?”
Under better, easier circumstances, I might have told him about poor, sweet Matt the art historian. Instead I stare back until he sighs.
“The paintings do depict me, yes, and were made over the course of many years, yes,” he admits. “But I can age, and I can die. Unassisted, I will.”
It takes me a minute to understand what he means: Rose, flat-chested and thin-limbed, standing over the aged, jaundiced corpse of the man whose life she had just taken.
“You steal it,” I whisper. Chills wrack my body, and I draw the hotel robe—the only thing I have to wear—tighter around myself.
In order to be sitting here in front of me now, Julian has expedited the demise of countless people.
He might not have ordered the shooting, but he’s a killer too, and if the paintings are any indication, his death toll is certainly higher than the one in Ulrich Art Corridor.
“I’ve never referred to it as stealing, but yes,” he says.
I tilt my head up to face the aged popcorn ceiling.
I feel disembodied, the turbulent rage I’d burned through yesterday puttering out and giving way to nihilistic detachment.
It doesn’t matter what I say next, because nothing matters anyway, because soon enough I will be nothing.
Just like Harold. Just like the man who lies bloated on the Ulrich gallery floor.
“Well,” I mutter. “What else do you call taking what isn’t yours?”
Julian doesn’t respond right away. I hear him shift, the creak of his bed, the gentle pats of his footsteps, first one, then the other.
Despite myself, I think of how easy it would be to reach for him now.
If I put my hand out, it would hit torso, maybe chest, and he would hold it to him, press it against his heart like he once had.
“I meant it when I said it was an accident, with you,” he says raggedly. “If I could take it back. Go back in time and never speak to you at that wedding. Keep you out of this. I would. You have to know that.”
The edge in his voice squeezes me around the middle, and I grit my teeth against the pang of longing that courses through me. Implicit in his pleading is another truth: I would’ve taken from someone else.
“Why do you do it?” I ask. It’s an impossible question, but it’s the first that comes to mind, bypassing the hows and whats and the other metaphysical maybes for the thing that I want to understand about Julian most. The reason he has subjected me to the agony of denying him.
“It’s simple, really,” he says. “I’m afraid of dying, same as most everyone else.”
His answer strikes me still with its simplicity, and its veracity too.
I finally lower my chin to look at him. Kneeling for me, like he is prone to do, his hand over his heart like he’s pledging himself to me.
A part of me wonders if it’s his way of lessening the power differential between us, of average-sized woman and large man, of fragile human and eternal being.
“How long have you been alive, Julian?” I say, my voice shaking. The paintings go back four hundred years, maybe even longer, and the more I stare at him, the larger that number seems to loom. “Is…is Julian even your name?”
“It’s what I’ve been called, or at least something close, for as long as I can remember,” he says truthfully.
“We’re not as different as you think. You don’t remember how you came to be either.
Just one day, you woke up and just…were.
You were a child, with a name not of your choosing, a family, a context.
It’s the same for me. I had no parents, but I did have a family—three others, just as desperate, just as hungry to survive. And so we did.”
Three others.
“Alphonse. Rose.” I swallow. “And Leila.”
Julian nods solemnly.
“And what happened last night,” I say. “Has it happened before?”
Julian doesn’t answer for a long time. When he does, he speaks so softly that I almost don’t hear him over the hum of the hotel mini fridge.
“You live as long as I have, and everything repeats itself eventually,” he says cryptically. He stands, reaches over me, turns off the light. “Try to get some sleep. We have an early morning tomorrow.”