I mean for it to hurt, and it thrills me when he flinches. It feels like the last claim to power I have left.
Julian doesn’t speak for a moment. When he does, it is in a whisper that sounds like he’s breaking.
“You and me both.”
Julian drives through much of the night. He stops to get gas, takes my order at a quiet roadside fast food restaurant, but otherwise isbehind the wheel uninterrupted for the next seven hours straight. I don’t have a coat, and so he lends me his, shoving a too-big winter hat over my head before I leave the car to go to the bathroom, becauseeveryone will remember the young-looking Black woman with white hair if they’re asked. He doesn’t use a GPS and refuses to tell me where we’re going, but he doesn’t prevent me from looking outside, so I know from the road signs that we’re headed south.
I consider running. I think if I tried he wouldn’t give chase. But as much as I don’t want to admit it, the thought of straying from Julian’s side terrifies me. At Ulrich Corridor, I’d walked amongst multiple guests and never once thought that one would have a knife, a gun, but now every person I pass is a potential threat that I know I can’t face on my own. When I go into bathrooms alone, I imagine Leila materializing in the mirror behind me as I wash my hands. If there be monsters afoot, at least I have one as an ally.
Sometime around three in the morning, we stop at a Holiday Inn Express, and I realize that sleep is something he needs and doesn’t just pretend to do. I make a list of his other needs too. Supernatural creature or not, he too requires food for sustenance and water for thirst. When we check into our hotel room and he goes to the bathroom, I can hear the trickle of him peeing and realize that was never an act either.
“What?” he says wearily when he emerges from the bathroom, freshly showered and fully dressed in a black T-shirt and gray sweatpants from the gym bag he keeps in his back seat, because apparently his physique is earned, not just magically bestowed.
“What do you mean, what?” I ask.
Julian sighs. He asked for one room with two beds, and I’m both relieved by his lack of presumption and annoyed, though I currently lack the capacity to properly investigate why.
“You’ve been watching me like a hawk all night,” he says.
“Oh, you know, you’re sort of the most dangerous entity in a five-hundred-mile radius, so…” When he doesn’t laugh, I hug my knees to my chest. My skin still feels hot from my forty-minute scalding shower, and my palms are raw from scrubbing. “You’re an incubus, right? I’m just trying to figure out how you…work.”
A muscle in Julian’s jaw twitches. He sits across from me on his bed and rests his elbows on his knees to regard me.
“An incubus,” he says, turning the word over in his mouth like it’s alien to him. His blink is slow and sensual, a subtle seduction. Then he shrugs. “Well, if the shoe fits.”
His eyes tick to my neck, and I wonder, for one delirious second, if I’ve gotten it wrong and he’s a vampire instead.
“It does, right?” I say, hesitantly. “I mean. There’s the dreams thing. And. You know.”
Julian’s lip curls into the closest thing I’ve seen to a smile on him tonight.
“I know what?” he teases.
My cheeks warm. “Your…prowess,” I manage. My gaze drops down to the space between his legs. Damned gray sweatpants. “Also, you’re immortal.”
Julian’s smile drops.
“I’m not,” he says. “Immortal, I mean.”
My eyebrows screw up in confusion. The recurring character in the paintingsishim. I’ve burned countless hours poring over the photographs I took at his gallery to know that.
“But the paintings, at your gallery—” I start.
Something like admiration crosses his face.
“You’ve seen the private collection, then.” He raises his eyebrows, impressed. “I had that exhibit closed. How did you get in?”
Under better, easier circumstances, I might have told him about poor, sweet Matt the art historian. Instead I stare back until he sighs.
“The paintings do depict me, yes, and were made over the course of many years, yes,” he admits. “But I can age, and I can die. Unassisted, I will.”
It takes me a minute to understand what he means: Rose, flat-chested and thin-limbed, standing over the aged, jaundiced corpse of the man whose life she had just taken.
“You steal it,” I whisper. Chills wrack my body, and I draw the hotel robe—the only thing I have to wear—tighter around myself. In order to be sitting here in front of me now, Julian has expedited the demise of countless people. He might not have ordered the shooting, but he’s a killer too, and if the paintings are any indication, his death toll is certainly higher than the one in Ulrich Art Corridor.
“I’ve never referred to it asstealing, but yes,” he says.
I tilt my head up to face the aged popcorn ceiling. I feel disembodied, the turbulent rage I’d burned through yesterday puttering out and giving way to nihilistic detachment. It doesn’t matter what I say next, because nothing matters anyway, because soon enough I will be nothing. Just like Harold. Just like the man who lies bloated on the Ulrich gallery floor.