42. Julian #2
“I’m here,” I sobbed, the sound tearing out of my lungs like a physical wound. “I’m right here, sweetheart. I’ve got you. You’re okay. You’re safe now.”
A heaving sob shattered my chest as I buried my face in the crook of her neck.
She still smelled like vanilla and the oil paints I had bought her—a scent that would now haunt every breath I took until I joined her in the dirt.
I pressed my forehead against hers, my tears washing the grime from her now pale skin.
“I was supposed to save you,” I whispered into the silence, my words disappearing into the cold night air. “I was your hero. I was your hero, June…”
I pulled her closer, my grip almost bruising, as if I could physically fuse our bodies back together. As if my heart, still beating in its cowardice, could jump-start the one Cain had stolen.
I rocked her in the blood-stained grass, a demon cradling his dead angel, screaming a name that no longer had a home.
A tidal wave of dark power slammed through my veins, thick and nauseating, knitting every microscopic tear in my skin. I was whole, clean, eternal, and I instantly needed to die.
I scrambled up, blind with self loathing. The instant grief and regret unbearable. The antique dagger, the tool of the betrayal, lay glittering near my feet. I snatched the hilt, the cold metal feeling too light, too insignificant.
I plunged the dagger hard into my own chest, right where her heart should have been. It was meant to be quick, a final, righteous escape from the monstrous truth.
The blade hit bone—but it didn’t pierce. It rebounded with a sickening clink.
I tried again, screaming the name of the woman I’d just watched be killed, driving the point in with all the strength of my newly acquired, terrible power.
The skin broke, a shallow, immediate gash, and then stopped.
I pulled the dagger out, the wound was already closing, the blood vanishing back into my flesh.
I screamed in frustrated agony, throwing the useless dagger into the dark woods.
I dropped to my knees, clawing at my chest with my bare hands.
I dug my fingers into the skin over my sternum, trying to tear my way back to the fragile, mortal state where death was an option, where regret could find finality.
I ripped my bloodied shirt open, leaving long, bloody streaks on my skin, but the tissue healed as quickly as I tore it.
“Julian, stop,” Cain’s voice, equally raw but colder, reached me.
I looked at him—my twin, the architect of this beautiful horror. He was standing over June’s body, his own control equally shattered, his dark eyes wide with shock and success.
I collapsed, my forehead resting on the damp earth next to June’s still hand. The guilt was unbearable. Immortality was not a reward, it was a curse designed to keep me perpetually standing over this scene, never allowed to forget, never allowed the comfort of oblivion.
My body was unbreakable, but my soul was not.
Cain stood over me, wiping a smudge of red from his jaw with the back of his hand. He looked down at me not with guilt, but with a weary, distant annoyance.
“Stop it, Julian,” he hissed, his voice cutting through my sobbing. “Look at yourself. Clawing at the earth like a beast.”
“I’ll find a way,” I wheezed, my fingers bleeding as I tore at the soil. “I’ll find a blade long enough, or a fire hot enough. I won’t stay here with you. I won’t stay here with this.”
Cain let out a short, mocking laugh, a sound devoid of any warmth. “And do what? Spend the next thousand years trying to hang yourself every five minutes? It’s pathetic. Get a grip, brother. What’s done is done. The blood is in you now, it is you.”
The return to the house was a funeral procession with no mourners, only the persistent, sickening thud of my own heart—a heart that beat with a predatory strength that felt like a physically offensive insult to the woman lying cold in the backseat.
Once inside the Manor, the reality of what happened tonight at the cabin started to sink in. The taste wouldn’t leave me. It was on my tongue, behind my teeth, burned into the very fibres of my throat.
June. I stumbled through the parlour, my entire being a howling, bloody mess of guilt and self-loathing.
Cain had carried her inside like a piece of luggage, laying her on the velvet settee.
She looked like a broken, pale doll, her dark hair spilling over the cushions I’d once watched her sleep on.
The life was gone from her eyes, replaced only by a blank, unforgiving reflection of the chandelier above.
Cain moved with a terrifying, cold efficiency. He gathered the ritual tools, wiping the silver ceremonial bowl as if he were cleaning up after a dinner party. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t need to. He had what he wanted, a clean, permanent slate and an eternity of power.
I wanted the oblivion he feared. I wanted to be wherever she was.
I crawled towards the fireplace, my movements jerky and frantic, like an animal trying to chew off its own limb to escape a trap.
I seized the heavy brass poker, its weight familiar and solid in my unblemished hands.
I didn’t hesitate for a second. I brought the blunted, blackened end down with all the immense, desperate strength of the newly immortal, aiming directly for my temple.
I wanted to shatter the skull that held the memory of her.
The blow landed with a sickening, wet crunch. Pain erupted—blinding, nauseating, glorious pain. For a heartbeat, there was a beautiful, dark silence as the room spun into blackness. Finally, I thought, the darkness reaching out to embrace me. Finally, the end of this torment.
But the blackness was a lie.
I woke gasping seconds later, my face pressed against the cold marble of the hearth.
My consciousness dragged me back, screaming, to the vivid, fresh horror of the room.
I felt the bone in my skull shift—a wet, grinding sound that made me retch and then I felt the heat.
It was a prickling, invasive warmth as the flesh fused itself back together.
Within ten seconds, my temple throbbed with only the ghost of a headache.
The skin was smooth. The bone was whole again.
“Stop it, Julian,” Cain’s voice drifted from the shadows, devoid of pity. “You’re only ruining the rug.”
I screamed, a sound of pure agony, and grabbed the poker again.
I drove the sharp end into my throat, over and over, trying to find the artery, trying to bleed out the sacrament he’d forced me to swallow.
But the metal felt like it was hitting stone.
The wounds closed before the blood could even hit the floor.
I was unbreakable. I was a fortress of meat and bone, and I was trapped inside it with the woman I had consumed.
I looked at June one last time before we took her to the garden to bury her perfect, mutilated body in the dark earth, beneath the willow trees next to her Nana. My beautiful, destroyed JuneBug.
I reached up, my fingers shaking so ferociously, I could barely find the clasp, and unhooked the thin silver chain from around my own neck.
It was the cross my grandmother had given me when I was a small boy, a heavy, worn piece of silver she’d told me would keep the shadows at bay.
I had worn it every day of my life, a silent, desperate prayer that I could be something other than a Blackburn.
Now, the prayer was dead.
I leaned over her, my shadow swallowing her pale form, and carefully draped the silver cross around her neck.
I had been forced to steal her life, and in return, I had been cursed with an eternity of remembering. I would remember the way her skin felt under my hands at the cabin, and the way her blood felt in my mouth an hour later.
I sobbed then—not for her death. Her death had been a mercy, a quick, silver exit from the nightmare of this reality. I sobbed for the unending misery ahead of me. This was the true price of the Ritual. My punishment was never death, but the eternal, failed attempt to reach it.
I had spent my life waiting for a chance to protect her, to love her. Now, I faced an eternity of madness, watching the sun rise and set over her grave, forever tasting her heart on my breath.
I am the Saint of the Sorrows, and my church is now a house of ghosts.