Chapter Twenty-Nine
Twenty-Nine
I am back in the Ulrich Art Corridor again, except this time I’m alone.
I stand in front of Rose’s egg, and every crack against the shell rings like a gunshot.
When it finally shatters and the imp hobbles out, its eyes are intelligent.
They fix on me, wet and wide with what seems like hope.
I understand, implicitly, that what it desires is acceptance.
It holds out a gnarled hand for me to take.
I reach for it back.
The instant we touch, I’m struck by a feeling like an electric shock: hot, piercing, then painful beyond measure. I reach for my side; my fingers come away sticky.
Eric stands behind me. He looks the same as he did when we first met years ago, but he’s somehow less handsome than I remember.
I wonder, deliriously, if his nose has always been slightly off-center, if the hazel eyes I’d once found enchanting had always been so lacking in light and dimension.
He drives the knife deeper, and I gasp against the spike of pain.
When I look back up again, he’s gone, and Leila stands in his place.
When she smiles, her teeth are stained with blood.
“Found you,” she sings.
A hand encloses mine, then and yanks me backward, and I fall into a firm chest. Instantly the howling in my ears quiets, and the pain eases. The air shifts, no longer clinical and cold but warm and laden with lavender.
“Shhh,” Julian whispers, squeezing me close. “You’re okay. I got you, okay? No one will ever hurt you again as long as I’m here.”
I wake up sobbing and alone. Outside the wind is howling: a blizzard blowing through. I push aside my tear-stained pillow, and my hand jumps to my side, but there is no wound and no pain.
It was only a dream, although I’m not sure if this was one of my own making or a warning projected to me. What I do know, without a doubt, is that Julian pulled me out of it.
I don’t think. I tear off my bonnet, whip the sheets off, and step out into the cool air. Ritika is sleeping in the room upstairs, but Julian took the master, and I plod across the cottage, through the living room, and knock on his door.
As expected, he’s awake.
“Sean?” he calls out.
I shove open his bedroom door as he rolls to turn on his bedside lamp. I know I must be a sight, tear tracks staining my cheeks, one strap of my nightgown hanging off my shoulder.
Julian, on the other hand, is a marvel. He always has been, even now, with exhaustion weighing his features.
I’ve seen the signs of what he wants with me.
The grays that have begun to speckle his temples again, the subtle chiseling of his already sculptural features.
They’d disappeared after our first night together, but in just a few short months, they’re back.
They make him so much more beautiful, and I’m tired of pretending not to notice.
I walk purposefully to him and sit down on his bed close to him. His hands curl into fists around his blankets, and I wonder if he’s resisting the urge to hold me as he did in my dream.
“I have more questions,” I tell him. “And I want the truth, Jules. Will you give that to me? Please?”
It’s the first time I’ve called him that since he left me, and he leans toward me, giving me his undivided attention.
“Yes, of course,” he whispers. “Always.”
I take a deep breath, willing myself not to falter.
“I dreamt of you, the day you left.” I hold his gaze, not wanting to miss even the smallest tell. “Were you really there? Or did I just make you up?”
In the dim bedroom light, his eyes shine.
“I was there,” he says.
His confirmation makes my chest tight.
“Everything you said,” I manage, fighting for air. “Did you mean it?”
I’m trembling. Julian swallows, and then he’s cradling my face with a hand. Aside from when he hauled me out of the Corridor, it’s the first time we’ve touched in weeks, and I almost startle at his warmth.
“Every word,” he whispers.
I clasp his wrist. His hand is dry, newly calloused, and large, and I can feel his pulse pounding under my fingers. It’s racing, and it gives me a thrill that I make this ancient man who has seen the world, watched empires rise and fall, nervous.
“What did you say, then?” I ask.
Julian tips my face up. An errant tear has crawled down my cheek and settles on the inner corner of my mouth, and he wipes it away with a caress of his thumb. In the dim room, his eyes should be dark, but they glint like obsidian shards. He looks, in this moment, like the magic he is.
“I’ve lived at least half a millennia,” he begins.
“And what I know is this: people are fundamentally the same across time, regardless of where and when they exist. They want the same things: to dominate, to amass wealth, to have indiscriminate sexual access. And to those ends, they fight, they kill one another, they adopt nonsensical ideologies and then disavow them a generation later, and they learn nothing from their forefathers’ mistakes.
I found them tiresome most of the time.”
It’s not the answer I sought, but I hang on to every word, fascinated. I am speaking, I realize, to a living, breathing fragment of history. Whose continued existence defies all reason.
“The interesting things,” he continues, “those take time.
Technological advancements, the birth and fostering of genius—that is multigenerational work.
And for so long, I wished I could rush through time.
Just get to the good parts, the things that last. Good music.
Compelling art. Radio. Land lines, then cellular phones.
Internet. Trains, then airplanes. All of it, a different sort of magic, and incredible to behold.
“And yet, I was so rarely intrigued. Even less often inspired. I used to wonder, well, what is the point of still living, of amassing wealth that always regenerates, having the same conversations day in and day out. But the interesting bits, the discovery, kept me going. I could invest in the right people and spur it along, use those few brilliant minds to help create a world worth living in. And death? Well I, like many, find it terrifying. And, like many, was willing to deny the humanity of others to my own ends.” He inhales, closes his eyes.
“And then Alphonse met Mary, and I met Claire.”
The other woman’s name makes my heart stammer.
“She was special too,” I say.
“She was,” Julian confirms. “I…didn’t really understand love before her.
I of course had lovers, but in the grand scheme of things, they were so short-lived, and their devotion to me was so unquestioning that we could never be on anything close to equal footing.
And besides, my intentions weren’t altogether pure.
” He gives a small, bashful grimace, as if pursuing his past lovers to feed off their lifespan was an embarrassing past lapse in judgment.
“But Claire was like you, I think. So stable in her personhood that I couldn’t shake it.
So unrelentingly compassionate. She believed, with real conviction, that people were fundamentally good, just in need, just hurting from undressed wounds.
I’d lived much too long to agree, but traversing the world with her perspective made it kinder, gentler, softer.
“I would have lived a life with her,” he confesses.
“It seemed like fate, that Alphonse, one of the few people on this Earth who could understand me, could find the same thing at the same time. It felt like this…revelation. That the thing we’d missed for so long, that so many of those we’d looked down on could attain so easily, was this overpowering love we could have for another being.
We discovered more about ourselves in those few short years than we had in the hundreds that preceded them.
That our hearts could be mortal, even if we weren’t quite.
And so we both decided that this was it.
He’d grow old with Mary. I’d grow old with Claire.
We would die, and it would be our most beautiful life yet.
” He takes a breath, like what he wants to say next might cost him.
“And then I lost her.”
His voice cracks, his grief a wound split open.
I roll my lips into my mouth, fighting back tears as I see them form in Julian’s eyes.
“What happened?” I ask.
Julian swallows, trails a hand down my arm, and twines our fingers together.
“I was attacked,” he says. “It was by a group of men who lived close to her place. Her neighbors. Claire gave some of their kids free music lessons, but I looked like I had money, and they thought I’d be an easy target.
I got shot. Drained one of them on reflex to survive, took care of two others, but one of them got away and got backup.
But they’d seen what I was capable of, saw what I was. So they went after my girl instead.”
I suck in a horrified breath.
“I should’ve gone straight to her afterward,” Julian continues.
“But I panicked. I’d taken so much that I looked like a teenager.
And then there were the bodies; I had to figure out what to do with them.
And all while I was trying to figure out how to save myself, they were…
” He shakes his head, turning away from me.
“I was lost for a long time after that. You couldn’t convince me that any other human on Earth was worth a singular damn.
Claire was so good. Kindhearted. She’d helped some of those guys, fed their kids during her lessons. And still. The things they did to her…”
The tears spill out, drip down my cheeks.
“Jules, I’m so sorry,” I start, but Julian shakes his head. He is looking down at me like I am made of gold, like he has journeyed a thousand miles to find me, and when he drops his forehead to mine, our tears comingle.
“I didn’t think it was possible for me to feel that way again,” he says. “No. I knew it wasn’t possible. But then I found you. Impossible Sean Sullivan. Utterly resistant to my charms. Stubborn, self-righteous—”
I snort. “Oh yes, you sound like you really like me—”