Chapter Thirty-Three
Thirty-Three
I’m dressed, my shard and only saving grace tucked securely into my sleeve.
The outfit I will be dying in is not exactly to my tastes: a lavender athleisure set and cream fleece that would better suit Leila.
But it’s comfortable and flattering and as I look at myself in the mirror, I think, I am too damn fine to die, and earn myself a laugh.
Robbie is waiting outside the door for me.
Without our audience, he returns to the taciturn, menacing presence he was when we first met, not the friendly Southern gentleman that Winona and Sophie know.
I make Onix stay behind, and he whines and fusses at the door but eventually obeys.
Robbie escorts me out to the back porch, and I only exhale when I realize that neither Winona nor Sophie is awake. The air outside is crisp and cool.
Last night, the darkness was so dense that I didn’t realize that we are nestled in the mountains. The cabin sits on a crag of rock that juts out over the forest, looking over rolling hills. When I tilt my head to the sky, it’s the violet blue of dawn, the moon still luminescent and high.
A woman I don’t recognize is waiting for us on the picnic bench: petite, with deep, dark brown hair. She turns around and gives me a sweet smile.
“Do you like it?” Leila asks, standing.
I stare at her, unsure of what to say. The Leila I know has always been “girl next door” pretty. Gorgeous, sure, but accessible. The kind of woman who blushes and simpers when you called her beautiful, as if it’s her first time hearing it.
This Leila, however, is someone else. I’ve always considered her a white woman, but her newly dark eyebrows and hair emphasize her olive undertones, turn her green eyes mesmerizingly bright, and make her much harder to place.
Intellectually, I understand that her features themselves haven’t changed, but the woman standing in front of me could walk past me in a crowd and I would be none the wiser.
Julian had done this in the beginning, I realize. His eyes shifting color. His skin tone darkening and lightening ever so slightly, as if trying to decide what version of him I would like best.
“You look like one of the Hadid sisters,” I say. It’s only half a compliment.
“A useful aesthetic,” she says plainly. “I’m going to go for someone older and richer next time, who wants to spend his twilight years with the ‘exotic bombshell’ of his dreams instead of another all-American girl next door.
But life is definitely easier when I’m blond, you know?
It’s hard to let that go.” She stuffs her hands in her pockets and surveys me like she expects me to empathize.
When I don’t, she shrugs, sits, and taps the seat next to her.
I’m surprised by how easily my body carries me to her side.
Dread has deadened my fear, and I tilt my head up to absorb my surroundings: the treetops, stripped bare by wind and chill, the morning calls of birds overdue for the migrations farther south.
I know Julian can’t hear me, but I whisper to him anyway: Dawn is pretty here.
I had a good dinner last night. Leila actually looks good as a brunette.
“You’re able to manipulate your appearance so that you can fit in more places.” It’s why they all seem so racially ambiguous, even if in different ways.
Leila throws her head back to laugh.
“You’re quick, Sean,” she says. “And, like, impossible to influence. It used to get on my nerves so bad, how Julian couldn’t just get you to heel.
But now I definitely see why he couldn’t leave you alone.
It’s refreshing.” She steeples her fingers, investigating me like she might a bug under a microscope.
“Why do you think you’re so resistant to him?
Speaking from experience, it’s definitely not because you’re book smart. ”
“I’ve had to fight for the right to my reality,” I answer cryptically, and Leila grins with all her teeth like I’ve just given her the correct answer.
“You know, I think you’re under the impression that I’m going to kill you because you found out about us,” she says. “But that’s not it. I actually trust that you won’t expose us. You love Julian too much to endanger him. And you’re more loyal than most.”
A breeze blows by and leaches heat from my bones.
“Then…why?” I whisper. Why do I have to die?
“Because if I let you live, I lose my brother,” Leila continues. She props her chin on the heel of her hand. “You’ve noticed, haven’t you. That Julian ages faster than you when he’s not feeding.”
I shudder. First at her choice of words—feed, so much more visceral than Julian’s transfer. But also because I have noticed. Smatterings of grays. Subtle shifts in his facial structure.
Leila puts a hand over mine and it takes everything in me not to flinch away.
“You’ll outlive him,” she says. “There’s not a clear math to it, but he’ll have thirty-five, maybe forty years if he chooses this.
No time at all, by our standards. From my perspective, you might as well be planning to drive a knife into his heart tomorrow.
” She watches me, a soft smile playing at her lips, and adds, “Have you ever lost someone you loved to suicide, Sean?”
I sputter, still processing the information I’ve received.
“N-no,” I say.
Leila nods sagely.
“Then you won’t understand,” she says. “Losing Alphonse was the worst kind of grief. I kept wondering: Why didn’t he think we were enough?
What could I have done to make him choose differently?
Our lifestyles mean that we move around a lot, me even more than the others, and so we’d spent maybe the last century apart—but I’d sent letters, made phone calls.
Maybe I should have visited more. Reminded him that he had us as family, so he didn’t have to go chasing connection elsewhere.
But by the time I’d realized it, he was already gone. ”
Her eyes are glassy with tears, and for a brief moment, I feel something close to sympathy for her.
“I don’t want you to lose Julian too,” I say slowly. “But it isn’t suicide, it’s a different life. And it’s his choice. We should let him make it.”
Leila’s eyes flash.
“It’s a stupid choice,” she hisses. “That’s why he needs me. To remind him to be proud of what he is.”
Her features don’t change, but something shifts, turns the quiet terror I feel in her presence loud. A god, Julian had said Leila thought herself. But a wretched one, broken, always on the run.
“It’s easy for Julian to forget that he’s not human,” Leila continues.
“He lives among you, and quite easily. He’s a man, after all, and a handsome, rich one at that; practically as close to a god as he can get.
Except for when he feeds—and he does so sparingly, like it’s wrong to do, as if it’s wrong for a lion to hunt—he can pretend he’s one of you.
He can even”—she shudders—“convince himself that he loves you.
“But Rose and I were born in these bodies—as receptacles for violence. And so we can’t forget.
We survive, and to do so we can’t shy from what we are.
And that is different from you. Better than you.
The men who aim to take from us, who pursue us to drain us of our beauty, our labor, who want to lord over us, hurt us, kill us…
they become dust at our feet, just because we will it.
You saw what they tried to do to Rose, at her show.
Saw what she can do to them. How can you pretend that we’re the same? ”
She’s leaning in close. For as much as she may disavow humans, she shares our anatomy, and I can see the subtle flutter of her carotid artery exactly where it should be, and imagine the pliancy of her flesh.
Behind us, Robbie shifts on the porch, arms crossed around an apron that probably conceals a gun, and my racing heart sinks.
If I attack her now, I won’t be able to warn Winona and Sophie.
“Brandon didn’t try to hurt you though, did he?” I ask, almost scared to hear the answer.
“He was a forty-year-old man who left his wife and kid for a twenty-two-year-old girl who worked under him,” she says drolly. “Are you trying to suggest he was somehow different from the rest?”
“Well, wasn’t that your fault?” I mutter. “Supernatural allure and all.”
Leila gives me a wry look, the intensity I felt earlier dissipating.
“Oh honey, don’t give me that much credit.
I barely had to do anything. That one came easy.
” She stands, and I immediately despair.
“I’m glad we got to spend a little time together.
And I know it was a small effort, but I really do want to give you a good exit.
Your favorite people, eating your favorite meal.
And now this glorious sunrise. A befitting end for a woman of your stature, I think. ”
I huff out my laughter.
“My stature, huh?” I say, dragging myself to my feet. “What, so I’m not quite as inconsequential as the other people you murder?”
“Not even close. I always thought it was cool, seeing you in the cath lab,” Leila says.
“Most of my life, women couldn’t do much to make a way for themselves without a man, no matter where you lived.
And here you are, a Black woman in America, not even a full generation after Jim Crow, working as an interventional cardiologist and living independently with no husband in sight.
” She gestures for me to follow, then walks me to the edge of the cliff, Robbie’s heavy footfalls crunching behind us.
“It’s admirable, really. I thought about doing it myself, at some point. ”
My curiosity feels morbid, but I indulge it anyway, because why the hell not.
“Why didn’t you?” I ask.
Leila shrugs, twirling her hair into a ponytail.