39. Julian
Julian
Ihaven’t slept. Not tonight, and not for the better part of a week.
Every time I close my eyes, the darkness behind my lids paint a flawless picture of my damnation: the bloodstained stone of the cellar altar, and the slow, ear piercing drag of ceremonial steel being sharpened for the kill.
I’ve had years—decades, to find a way out.
I’ve scoured dusty, forbidden archives, whispered to shadowed men in back alleys, and begged the very universe for a loophole, a trade, a mercy.
I failed.
I led the person I love most in this world right into the middle of a spiderweb, and now I have to stand by and watch the spider sink its teeth in.
I stepped out of the shower, the scalding water doing nothing to wash away the aching exhaustion or the bitter taste of guilt.
I dressed slowly, my hands shaking so badly I nearly tore the buttons off my shirt.
Today is her birthday. The day she becomes a woman in the eyes of the law, and a “vessel” in the eyes of the ancient blood soaked texts Cain worships.
I walked into her room before hours before the sun rose. I’d spent the night transforming her bedroom into a chaotic shrine. It was a pathetic attempt to give her a lifetime of birthdays in a single morning, to compress eighty years of joy into a few hours before the shadows claimed her.
Over a hundred presents suffocated the space around her bed, the thick silk ribbons tied like delicate nooses. Dozens of bouquets, lined every flat surface, their scent so cloying it felt like breathing in a botanical garden. Hundreds of balloons hovered near the ceiling like colourful orbs.
As she began to stir, I sat on the edge of the mattress. I reached out, my fingers trembling as I brushed the hair from her face. Her eyes opened slowly, blinking against the soft, artificial glow of the lamps.
“Happy birthday, Junebug,” I whispered, leaning down to kiss her forehead. My skin felt like ice against the warmth of her life.
“Thank you,” she mumbled, a small, sleepy smile touching her lips. Then, she sat up and froze. “Oh my god… Julian? What is all this?”
“You deserve it,” I said, my voice thick with a knot of grief I couldn’t swallow. “You deserve more than I could ever offer you. More than this world has to give.”
I watched her for the next two hours. She opened jewellery that cost more than the house she grew up in, and books she’d mentioned once when we were children.
By ten o’clock, the floor was a graveyard of torn paper and discarded silk.
“I’m starving,” June said, her voice light. We went down to the kitchen, and I moved through the motions of breakfast with robotic precision. I set a plate of pancakes and bacon in front of her, but as I sat down, the silence of the Manor seemed to grow teeth.
“Where’s Cain?” she asked suddenly, her fork pausing halfway to her mouth.
The name hit the room like a cold draft. I gripped my own fork until the metal bit into my palm. “I don’t know,” I lied. I knew exactly where he was—overseeing the final inscriptions in the cellar. “But he’ll be joining us later, for the birthday dinner he has planned.”
June didn’t smile. Instead, she let out a long, heavy sigh that seemed to rattle the very air. She slumped slightly, her gaze dropping to her plate.
“What’s wrong, June?” I asked, the lump in my throat feeling like a stone.
“Nothing,” she whispered, then looked up at me with eyes that were suddenly sad. “It’s just… the dinner. The formality. Cain watching me like I’m a specimen under a microscope. I just wish… I wish it could just be us. For once. Just you and me.”
My heart did a violent somersault in my chest I couldn’t ignore.. I looked at her, really looked at her, and the high pitched screaming of my conscience finally went quiet, replaced by a cold, hard clarity.
Cain would kill me for what I was about to do.
The Ritual would demand my life as a forfeit for my failure.
But as I looked at her, I realised I would rather live one mortal, beautiful day with her, and die at sunset, than spend a thousand years with nothing but her memory.
If he kills us both for it, so be it. At least we’ll be together, even if it’s only in death.
“What if it was?” I asked.
June blinked, her eyes going wide. “What?”
“What if we skipped the dinner?” I leaned across the table, taking her hand. My pulse was a frantic hammer. “What if we just… left? I have an idea. There’s a cabin at the lake. It’s quiet, it’s pretty, and there isn’t a single shadow of a person for as far as the eye can see. Just us, June.”
She stared at me, her pupils glazing over with a spark of genuine, electric excitement that lit up her face for the first time in weeks. She nodded frantically, her grip on my hand tightening. “Could we? Really?”
“Yes,” I growled, the word a vow and a declaration of war.
I stood up, pulling her with me, and leaned in to kiss her with a ferocity that tasted of a final goodbye to my old life.
“You have one hour. Go upstairs. Pack a small bag. Just enough for a night or two. If you see Cain in the hallway, don’t say a word.
Don’t even look at him. Just get back to your room and wait for me. ”
“An hour?” she breathed, already moving towards the door.
“One hour, Go.”
I watched her sprint up the stairs, her footsteps light with a tragic, beautiful hope. I stood in the kitchen, my internal monologue a screaming vortex of panic. I was committing treason. I was stealing the lamb from the altar.
I looked at my hands, they were still shaking, but for the first time, it wasn’t from fear. It was from the terrifying rush of finally choosing her. I wouldn’t let him hurt her. I couldn’t.
I turned to the back door, heading for the garage. I had sixty minutes to change the ending of a story written all those years ago.
My heart was a drum in the hollow of my chest, every beat echoing against my ribs like a warning. I had the bags stuffed with the fragments of a life she was trying to steal back and I was entering the main foyer when all oxygen seemed to vanish from the room.
June was halfway down the grand staircase. She was wearing my denim jacket over one of the silk dresses she’d opened earlier, her hair still damp and curling against her back.
Then, the library door groaned open.
Cain stepped into the hall. He stopped dead in the centre of the foyer, his gaze sliding from the bags in my hands to June’s terrified face, then back to me.
“Going somewhere?” he asked.
The silence was thick enough to choke on. I felt my ‘Saint’ mask slide into place, the one I’d worn since we were kids to hide the fact that I wanted to tear this family to pieces. I shifted the weight of the bags, my grip steady even as my insides were screaming.
“June wants to get out of the house,” I said, the lie rolling off my tongue with a smoothness that made my skin crawl. “It’s her birthday. I figured she’s spent enough time staring at these walls. We’re going to the theatre in town.”
Cain’s eyes narrowed, his head tilting a fraction of an inch. He looked at June, his stare so invasive I wanted to put my body between them and never move again. “The theatre? Today?”
“It’s her birthday, Cain,” I countered, my voice hardening. “She wants to see a movie, She can.”
“What movie?” Cain asked, taking a slow, predatory step closer to us.
My mind raced.
"The Lost Boys,” I blurted out. “It just premiered. Everyone’s talking about it. It’s supposed to be a vampire flick.”
Cain paused. A flicker of something that might have been a smirk, or a sneer, touched his lips.
"The Lost Boys,” he repeated, the irony of the title hanging in the air like a noose.
“Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. How… thematic. A fantasy that never quite loses its lustre for the mortal mind, does it?”
He looked at his gold watch, then back at me. I could see him calculating. He didn’t think I’d run. He couldn’t imagine I was that brave—or that stupid. In his mind, I was already broken to his will.
“Fine,” Cain said, stepping aside with a mocking flourish of his hand. “Go. Enjoy your fictions. But remember, Julian… the table is set for eight o’clock. Do not be late.”
I threw the bags into the back of my Camaro, the heavy metal door slamming with a finality that made June flinch. I didn’t let out a breath until I had the engine turned over, the dual exhaust rumbling a violent, beautiful sound of defiance.
I jammed the car into gear, the tires screaming as they bit into the gravel of the long, winding driveway.
We passed through the iron gates, the stone gargoyles watching us with their blind, mossy eyes.
I pushed the car faster, the Manor shrinking in the rearview mirror until it was nothing more than a shrinking dot on the horizon.
The air in the car was dead and deafening until we hit the highway.
Beside me, June let out a wet, choked gasp, the sound of her finally breaking under the weight of it all.
And heaven help me, it was the trigger. The twisted absurdity of the afternoon finally caught up to me, and a manic laugh spilled out of my chest along with her.
It was an infatuating, hysterical sound, the kind of laughter that comes from a man who has just walked through a minefield and realised he still has his legs.
"The Lost Boys?” June gasped, her hands flying to her face as she started to giggle through her tears. “Julian, you’re an idiot… They stopped playing that movie weeks ago.”
“It was the first thing I could think of!” I shouted, the adrenaline finally hitting my system like a freight train.
I reached over, grabbing her hand and lacing my fingers with hers.
I was shaking, my palms slick with cold sweat against the steering wheel.
The Camaro roared, the speedometer climbing as the wind whipped through the open windows, smelling of pine and freedom.