They’re the first words I’ve spoken directly to him in weeks.
“There should be plastic grocery bags in the back seat,” Julian says.
I turn, grab them, hold them in my lap, and wait for the heaves to start. They don’t. I feel like a ghost, like I’m gliding alongside this car at ninety miles an hour. If I didn’t have the evidence of what I witnessed still drying on my palms, I could almost convince myself that tonight wasn’t real, that I just watched an excessively realisticmovie or woke up from a particularly twisted nightmare. Most bizarre, my ex-boyfriend might have taken part in the killings—if he hadn’t opted to kidnap me instead.
“Where are we going?” I ask. I don’t expect a real answer, and Julian doesn’t surprise me with one.
“Somewhere far away,” he says. “Do you have your phone?”
Somehow I do. I’d been wearing my clutch across my body when Julian swept me up, and it hangs off my back. I pull it out.
Julian snatches it out of my hands, lowers his window, and throws it out onto the highway.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” I shout, watching as my eight-hundred-dollar iPhone gets crushed under the wheels of a semi.
“Leila wants to kill you,” Julian says plainly. “She’s wanted to kill you for weeks now, but after today, after what yousaw…I think it will be especially difficult to dissuade her.” He looks away from the road for just long enough to affix me with a hard stare. “There’s a possibility she’s had your phone bugged. We shouldn’t take any chances with it.”
It’s the first time I’ve gotten to look at him,reallylook at him, since I realized what he is. He has bags under his eyes, and he’s missed a spot shaving his chin. I assumed I would be able to see the supernatural in him, like I’d just been ignoring it all this time. But I was wrong. This is still the Julian I know: absurdly good-looking, yes, but so very human all the same.
“When the hell would she get a chance to steal my phone to bug it?” I snap. “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard—”
“You’re not surprised that she wants to kill you,” he observes. Then, more urgently, “You’re not asking about Rose.” His eyes leave the road to turn, wide, to mine. “Youknow.”
The pressure that builds up in my head feels explosive.
“That you’re a life-sucking dream demon?” I hiss. “Of course I fucking know. What’s yourplan, Julian? To lock me up in a tower until your succubus sister decides to give up on the hunt?”
Julian doesn’t respond, just weaves around a driver who is crawling along in the sixties in the fast lane. The longer his silence stretches, the more apparent it becomes that I might have actually hit the nail on the head.
“You’re joking.” I’m sans coat, sans phone, and, apparently, sans the rest of my life. “You’rekidding me.”
“I didn’t know you would be there tonight,” he says in hushed tones. “This is exactly what I was trying to avoid, Sean.”
“Avoid?” I point to my hair, the silver-white curls that I’m getting accustomed to but still occasionally shock me when I catch my reflection in a mirror. “Did you start feeling that way before or after you snatched up my life?”
Julian’s body sags with abject misery.
“Look, Sean. You have to understand. I didn’t mean to…” He fumbles on his words, tries again. “I thought, maybe, we got away with it when we—”
My laughter cuts him off.
“Oh my god. You think I’m an idiot,” I accuse between snickers that pulse out of me in waves, my body’s twisted interpretation of the depths of betrayal and hurt that I’ve been tamping down for weeks. “Youdidn’t mean to? Be honest. That’s why we’re here right now. That’s why Brandon is in a fucking hospital bed. Because you fully intended for me to end up in the room next to him, so that you could keep on gallivanting around this Earth for who knows how much longer. That was the plan, right, you greedy piece of shit—”
“No. Never,” Julian pleads, shaking his head. “Please, Sean, I never—”
“But you did!” The tears that I thought I would never find again come flowing down my cheeks now, and I can’t stop laughing, because what kind of monster amI? I have escaped sure death when many others were less fortunate, and the thing that makes me cry is the realization that my ex might have sought me out to take advantage of me. “So how much time did you end up taking, huh? Two years? Three?”
“I don’t know.” Julian grips the steering wheel tight, and he stares, unblinking, at the road. “I wasn’t supposed to take any. It was an accident.”
“An accident that cost me years off my life,” I spit. Important moments that I might no longer be there for. Sophie graduating college. Caring for my ailing parents. All those milestones that I’d assumed I would make, potentially cut short to feed this man’s—thisthing’s—centuries-long avarice.
Julian’s contrition is already turning to irritation.
“Yes, well,” he growls, “at least you’ll be living to see tomorrow. You can thank me for that.”
I ball my hands into fists. My nails bite into my skin.
“I wish I’d never met you. I wish you’d left me alone.”