Chapter Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Seven
I’ve often wondered about the first person to find a dinosaur fossil.
When they discovered the giant stony jaws, the teeth as long as their arms, how did it change their concept of what could be possible on Earth?
How did it feel to be caught in the midst of a paradigm shift, to realize that the world you thought you understood contained secrets beyond your imagination quite literally beneath its surface?
It must have been similar to how I feel now: deeply unsettled, disturbed even, but fascinated too.
Because if dinosaurs and incubi exist, why can’t dragons, chimeras, minotaurs, magic?
“Can you control minds?” I ask Julian an hour into the day’s drive.
This leg of the journey is less silent and solemn than the first, mostly because Julian has put on Afrobeats. It’s almost amusing to think that an ancient being listens to Rema, but Julian mumbles along to every word.
At my question, he cuts off the volume but doesn’t take his eyes off the road.
“It’s not quite that simple,” he says. I wait for him to explain, and he sighs. “We cultivate devotion. We make people…” He searches for the word. “Suggestible.”
I shudder, thinking of how suggestible a person has to become to willingly murder a room full of people at another’s request. It reminds me of cult leaders, capable of convincing droves of people to give their lives in service of them. I say as much, and Julian shrugs one shoulder.
“Honestly? Yes,” he says. “It is like that. And some people are more susceptible than others.”
I remember Melody at the conference after-party. All Julian’d had to do was touch her, and she’d folded to his command.
“What about the weird addiction thing,” I say. “I felt sick every time we were apart. How does that one work? Do you have poison in your skin or something?”
This makes him snort.
“What am I, a frog?” he says. “No poison. Not as far as I know. Besides, the dependence goes both ways. When we have regular contact with someone, time apart affects us too.”
A revelation lands on me like an anvil.
“Is that why you were so sick?” I ask. “The night we first…”
A new kind of image crosses my mind, this time of Julian on his knees, his eyes fixed determinedly on mine as his tongue delved deep into the space between my legs.
My thighs clench, and I inhale, shocked by how much the memory still titillates even under these circumstances.
Julian goes silent for a moment, and I wonder if he’s thinking of that night too.
“Yes.” He inhales deep, exhales slow. “That’s why I was sick too.”
There’s something more that he wants to say. I can see it, stuck on the tip of his tongue, a confession that he considers sharing and then swallows down.
“Why get close to people then?” I ask. “If you get sick too. It seems like you’d benefit most from being more promiscuous, no?”
“Yes, well, that was the strategy for a bit,” he confesses, and I realize that while I’ve long assumed that Julian had a body count a mile long, the reminder that he’s also had five hundred years to build it and a life-extending incentive makes me feel squeamish.
Legions have felt what I’ve felt with him.
To me, sleeping with him was monumental, life-changing, but for him I was as routine as a decent lunch.
I’m still grappling with this realization when Julian adds, “But the transfer is much more efficient when there’s some level of intimacy. ”
“Transfer?” I ask, trying to keep my tone even and curious.
“It’s what we call it,” Julian says. “The process.”
I laugh, dropping my head backward against the rest. Process. Transfer. Unassisted. Such passive terms for such violence.
“What a sanitized way to refer to draining years off someone’s life,” I mutter. “Okay. So what about the intimacy. Is it physical? Emotional?”
I don’t turn to look at Julian’s expression, but I imagine he looks glum.
“Both,” Julian supplies. “We need…consent, in a way. The other person has to give of themselves willingly.”
Give yourself to me, he used to tell me in my dreams. Say that you’re mine.
“But they don’t know what they’re consenting to,” I argue. “They don’t know what you’re taking.”
“And that’s the thing,” Julian counters. “Most of the time, they’re too enamored with us to care.”
I swivel to look at him, horrified. “That’s fucked,” I tell Julian.
Julian sucks in his cheeks in something like frustration but doesn’t look away from the road.
“You think I don’t know that?” he says coolly.
“You think I’ve lived this long and haven’t questioned the morality of my extended existence?
” When I don’t answer, he continues. “We all deal with it in our own ways. It’s been a very long time since I’ve killed anyone outright.
I take in small increments, and I tell myself that I do the same damage as a year of smoking cigarettes or a month inhaling polluted air.
That I give it back to the world with my money and my service.
I don’t do strong attachments, though it would feel better if I did.
Rose? She knows this world has never fully punished violent men, so she seeks them out, keeps them under control until they reach late middle age.
Whatever life they have left, she transfers, and she considers it a mercy—like putting down a vicious animal. ”
It’s twisted, but I have to confess that I can see their logic. Armed with similar abilities, I can’t say with any certainty that I wouldn’t have tried to justify evading my own demise.
“And Leila?” I ask. “The one who wants to kill me?” The one, Rose had said, who considers herself a god?
Julian doesn’t turn from the road.
“Leila doesn’t concern herself as much with such things,” he says.
“What about Alphonse?” I ask. “What happened to him?”
A muscle in Julian’s jaw twitches.
“You already know what happened to Alphonse.”
He turns up the music, as good a conversation ender as any.
Petulantly, I slouch in my seat and stare out the window.
The road is curveless, the terrain flat, cornfields hidden under a blanket of fresh snow.
It feels endless. I cross my arms and watch this world that is so unlike the one I know whip past me, and think of Brandon, who fell victim to the least human of Julian’s kind.
We don’t speak again for a long time. Julian’s playlists are legendarily erratic, and so I’m not surprised when the genre shifts to classical piano, and my fingers thrum against the door, muscle memory playing along with the track.
I fidget like a child: lower the car’s sun visor, snap open the glove compartment.
Something within catches my eye. It’s small, postcard sized, and I can see Julian’s looping cursive at the bottom.
I squint into the darkness, make out the words: Do you, Sean Sullivan, want to be my, Julian Conrad’s, girlfriend?
Blood rushes to my face, and I slam it shut.
To my relief, Julian doesn’t give any indication that he’s noticed my discovery.
His focus remains locked on the road, and I take note of the five o’clock shadow that has emerged on his face.
He often shaved at my apartment before leaving to meet his clients.
After he left me, I’d kept his accoutrements in their assigned drawer, unable to throw them out: the straight razor he favored but never returned for, the whetstone he used to sharpen it, his brush, his aftershave.
I used to lean against the bathroom door and watch him work, seduced by how easily his deft hands handled the blade.
Praying he’d use them to handle me instead.
“Is that how it worked with me?”
The question bursts from me before I can stop it, but it gets his attention.
“What do you mean?” he asks gently.
“Was this all just”—my voice is more raw than I’d like, feeble—“suggestion?”
Julian closes his eyes on his inhale. When he finally responds, his voice sounds waterlogged with sorrow.
“Be honest with yourself, Sean,” he says. “When has anyone ever been able to tell you what to do?”
Several hours later, I startle awake to the crunch of gravel under our tires; we are in the middle of the woods, heading up an unpaved road.
I’d tried to stay up to keep some idea of where we were, but last night’s sleep had been less than restful, and after two hundred miles of flat cornfields and barnyards, I must have dozed off.
“Are we there?” I ask.
“Soon,” Julian says. We bounce up a hill, then pull into a clearing.
There’s another car waiting for us. It’s a silver SUV, totally unremarkable except for its tinted windows. We haven’t finished parking before both the driver and front passenger car doors open, and two people in black hop out.
I freeze in trepidation as they approach, not even daring to breathe. It occurs to me that I’m alone with three people in an unknown location in the middle of the woods, and I’ve come here somewhat voluntarily, like the women in the beginning of every true crime documentary.
“Trust me,” Julian says softly. “Please.”
He doesn’t know the enormity of what he asks, because then he wouldn’t ask it.
Doesn’t know how stupid I feel, that the only two men I have developed strong feelings for have both put my life at risk.
That I seem to have a thing for monsters, even if they are of different varieties.
That even now, when I face him like this, I have to fight back the urge to smooth the tortured crease between his brows.
There’s a simultaneous tap at our windows, and I swing to mine to find a face smiling down at me.
A familiar one, though I’ve never seen it smile.
“Ritika?” I say, stunned. Julian unlocks the doors with a click, then steps out on his side. I swallow a gulp of air, then do the same.
“Long time no see,” Ritika says when I step out. “You’ve had quite the last few days.”
“That’s an understatement,” I say a little awkwardly. I turn questioningly to the other stranger, a reedy young man who has Ritika’s nose and thick eyebrows.