“Mircea talked you down,” I said, seeing Mircea walking along the ledge, looking exactly the same except for a twenties-era suit with too short lapels. He was as sure-footed as if he were strolling down a street, despite the fact that they were twelve stories up.
“Not exactly,” Jules confessed. “I was too drunk to see reason, and he tired of talking to a potential asset that seemed determined to destroy himself.”
“What did he do?”
Jules laughed, a bright sound that seemed more than strange in the circumstances. “He threw me off.”
And he had. The next instant, I saw him pick Jules up by the shirtfront and casually drop him over the side, all with a faint smirk on his face. And then use vampire speed to catch him before he hit the ground.
Just.
“He’d heard that a lot of the people who commit suicide regret it halfway down,” Jules told me, with a catch in his voice. “He wanted to find out if it was true.”
“Was it?”
Jules choked on a laugh. “I wet myself. And then I sobered up, and asked him how he did that. And he offered me a new sort of contract. An immortal one.”
“But you don’t sound happy.” And he didn’t. Bitter, with a side of world-weary and maybe an edge of hysteria thrown in there for good measure. But definitely not happy.
“Some days—” His voice broke, and he paused before continuing, stronger. “Some days, I wish Mircea had missed.”
“What? Why?”
“Think about it, Cassie!” he said fiercely. “Eternity when you’re a screwup is a very long time! I thought I would eventually get good at this, learn to be the suave, überconfident vampire, start to feel comfortable—but it never happened. I just learned new ways to be a failure. Mircea’s vampires are either diplomats or soldiers, and I’m neither.”
I didn’t bother to point out that there were other jobs. Jules wasn’t the type to be happy doing the laundry. He was talking about prestige positions, and yeah, that about summed it up.
“You could always ask for a transfer,” I said instead. “Go to a different house—”
“And do what? Look good?” Jules laughed again, and this time, it was humorless. “A face like mine may make you a fortune in the human world, if you go about it right. But you know what it means in the vampire? When any third-rate glamourie can give you the same result?”
“You’re more than just your looks, Jules.”
“Am I? How many thespian vampires do you know? Or performers of any kind?”
“Vamps have . . . hobbies,” I offered, a little lamely, but it was true. They did a variety of things in their spare time. Paint, sculpt, sing . . . I used to know one who took weird photos of people’s worst features, a sort of beauty pageant in reverse.
“But not as a profession,” Jules insisted. “Not as a way to leave a mark, to count. There are people who are good at this life, who take to it naturally, and then there’s the rest of us. But there’s no way to know which you’ll be before you get in, and once you do, there’s only one way out.”
And yeah. The kind of contract vampires were offered didn’t have an expiration date. It was something all those eager applicants often forgot.
“I’m sorry,” I told him, and meant it.
“Don’t be. Just promise—if this doesn’t work— promise me you’ll end it.”
“Jules—”
“Or have Marco do it. I don’t care, I just—I can’t live like this. You understand? I can’t—”
“Jules!” I said, sharply, because the hysteria was creeping back, big-time.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he said, sounding a little calmer. “But I want your word.”
“Listen to me,” I said, striving for calm, because I wasn’t doing so great myself. “I won’t promise you—”
“Cassie—”
“No, listen!” I said, my voice shaking slightly. “I’m being straight with you, okay? No bullshit.” Not this time; not ever again. Not with people I cared about.
What a way to learn a lesson.
“Okay.”
“And I won’t tell you that this is going to work. I’m not a witch; I can’t undo a hex their way—”
“And it wouldn’t help, even if you could.”
Apparently, those missing ears still worked just fine. And yeah. That must have been fun, lying helpless, and listening to everybody sound his death knell.
“No,” I confessed. “But I can try to take you back to before the damned thing was laid in the first place. Basically, I’m going to put you in a time bubble—”
Jules made a choking sound. “Spare me the details.”
Yeah. I probably wouldn’t want them in his place, either. He’d been through enough tonight already, but I couldn’t leave well enough alone because he wasn’t well enough. And he wasn’t going to be if I didn’t manage this.
And we both knew it.
I nodded, licked my lips, and tried to concentrate.
It was just as well that Jules hadn’t wanted details, because he wouldn’t have liked them anyway. Not only because I hadn’t done something exactly like this before, but because I wasn’t the best at precision timing. It was why I hardly ever got away with anything when I shifted. Agnes had been able to come back to her body at virtually the second she left it, so nobody ever knew she’d even been gone unless she chose to tell them. But she’d had either a gift or a heck of a lot more practice, because I usually missed by a mile. Fortunately, there was no chance of that the way I felt. I’d woken up tired and was fast approaching exhaustion, and I hadn’t even done anything ye—
A bubble sprang up around Jules, small but perfectly formed.
I blinked at it, surprised, since I’d half expected to fail. But it was real. The light from the lounge shone off it in a swirl of iridescent colors. It looked like a soap bubble—and about as stable. I needed to hurry.
I concentrated on the mental biography Jules had shown me.
It was thick. Not only had Jules had a long life; he’d had a busy one. Luckily, we weren’t covering a lot of time here, and I didn’t need to worry about all those pages and pages. Just a few words back, maybe even a couple of letters ought to be—
The wind I’d felt before picked up again, fluttering the pages, and it was a lot stronger this time. I made a mental grasp for them, but they slipped through my fingers as if they were oiled. One, two, three pages back, and finally I managed to grab one, trying to tamp down my power enough to stop the gale without killing it— and the bubble—completely.
And it must have worked, because I heard a collective gasp. And glanced at Jules. And did a double take.
It looked like his face had been submerged in a vat of pale paint, and was now being raised up again. Eyes, nose, mouth were all becoming visible, as the slick, too-flawless surface sloughed away on every side. Pores emerged again, and eyebrows, and lashes and—
And I could barely breathe.
Because it was working.
His chest was harder to look at, doing strange things to my brain as it writhed and churned in a way flesh was never designed to. But the same process was happening there, with random bits of material coming together into a shirt once more. Like the body underneath, which was starting to look like a man again, and like the hands . .
I’d barely had the thought when Jules’ beautiful, graceful hands rose up from his stomach like two birds, still encased by the bubble, but no longer trapped.
Like the pages of the book, I realized. They suddenly fluttered out of my grasp, as if they had a mind of their own. A gust of that strange wind caught them, and they fell in a single, rippling cascade, decades passing like seconds.