Tempt the Stars

by Karen Chance

  “You think I would deliberately endanger—”

  “I think you have endangered—”

  I stopped listening. I wasn’t interested in hearing a bunch of people debate my education or lack thereof. Again. I wasn’t interested in hearing them talk at all.

  I was interested in Jules.

  “Can you remove the hex or not?” I demanded.

  The little witch had been glaring at Jonas. Now she turned the glare on me. For a second, before her eyes softened. “Yes, yes. Well, probably,” she hedged. “But it’s hardly worth the effort—”

  “Not worth the effort?” I stared at her.

  The room grew suddenly quiet.

  “She didn’t mean it like that,” Jasmine said, looking at me with pity in her beautiful eyes.

  “Then how exactly did she mean it?”

  “You must understand, the spell has already done most of the damage that it was designed to do. Removing it now will prevent more, yes, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “But it cannot reverse that which has already been done,” she told me softly. “I am sorry, lady. I do not know of anything that can.”

  Chapter Twenty-five

  I don’t know what happened then. I wasn’t hearing them anymore. I was hearing Jules. I took care of you. Take care of me.

  I knelt on the floor beside him.

  The face was bad, but the body wasn’t any better. He had been wearing a nice blue cotton button-down, starched and preppy like the man himself. Now it was almost like it was wearing him, with the fabric all tangled up in the too-smooth skin of his chest. It was as if his body had folded over on itself, like dough in a mixer, and taken pieces of the cotton with it. The area on his shoulders was still mostly intact, mostly normal. But the hands . . .

  His beautiful hands were all but gone, just two lumps poking up from what had been his stomach, with a few ridges where knuckles had once been. I covered them with my own anyway. Somehow I didn’t mind anymore, didn’t find them alien or horrifying or gross. They were just part of him, part of Jules. That was enough.

  I closed my eyes, mainly to shut out the ring of staring faces. And as soon as I did, that feeling of connection strengthened. Maybe it was just my imagination working overtime, but I could swear I felt it: his anger, his confusion, his almost desperate desire to move, to gasp for air he didn’t need, to see—

  But mostly, I felt his fear.

  It was cold, overwhelming, debilitating, almost as much as what was happening to his body. The spell was cruel; it didn’t bother to trap the mind. Maybe Augustine hadn’t thought it necessary. After all, a human or fey would be dead by now.

  But Jules was neither of those things.

  And so he was left to drive himself mad on an endless loop of speculation: what if there was no way to reverse this? What if he was trapped like this forever? Hope gone, looks gone, just this piteous and pitied thing, unable to move, to speak, to do anything but scream into a darkness that would never end, and never answer back—

  My hands tightened over his, and the torrent suddenly stopped. And then increased, a hundredfold, a wall of babbling, half-mad terror hitting me all at once. I gasped, and opened my eyes to find myself bent over him, sick and dizzy and quietly sobbing, my tears splashing down onto the ruined chest . . .

  And changing.

  Like a drop of rain falling into a lake, the eddies rippled outward, disturbing the flawless flow of the skin, revealing small blemishes in the instant they passed over: a hair, a freckle, a scar. I let go of his hands in surprise, and the skin retained the imprint of my hands for a second. And it, too, looked different, with the knuckles clearly visible in the instant before that eerie nonflesh washed over them again, erasing them as smoothly as footprints in the tide.

  It was so quick it made me wonder if I’d imagined it. But no. I scowled at the too-perfect flesh, because I had seen it, if only for an instant. I had seen Jules, inside the body bag his flesh was busy crafting for him.

  And somehow I had to find a way to get him out.

  I vaguely registered Marco pulling everyone back to the lounge—the witches, the Circle, everyone except for the vampires. This wasn’t for outsiders, if they couldn’t help. This was about family.

  Someone dimmed the lights; I don’t know why. Maybe to give the gawkers less to stare at; maybe because it just felt like the right thing to do. And vampire eyes didn’t need the light. Mine didn’t, either, with a diffuse beam leaking through from the lounge, illuminating Jules like a spotlight.

  It was enough. It was more than enough. I pressed my hands against him, both of them, palms flat and fingers outstretched, gripping hard enough to make indentations in his skin.

  And then I swiped down, revealing pink nipples, hard abs, a concave stomach, and the brief indentation of a naval. It looked like a plasterer had taken a trowel to a wall, scraping away the surface to reveal what lay beneath. And what lay beneath was Jules.

  He was still in there, somewhere.

  But a second later, the healthy skin had been washed away, replaced by the pale, poreless perfection I had already come to hate.

  Someone put a hand on my shoulder, but I shrugged it off. And tried again, but it was the same. Wherever my hands rested, and for a small space around them, the skin looked normal, and the body was whole, straight, perfect. But as soon as I took them away, or tried to move onto another spot, it was as if whatever magic was there simply vanished.

  And I didn’t know how to make it stay.

  “No,” I said, helplessly. “No!”

  “Cassie. Come away.”

  I looked up to see Marco staring at me, dark eyes troubled. “Come away? I’m trying to help him!”

  “I know. But there’s nothing you can do. We . . . we’ll call someone—”

  “Who?” I demanded. “We already tried Augustine, and if the maker and a senior war mage can’t remove it, do you really think—”

  “What I think is that you’re exhausting yourself for nothing. You need—”

  “Nothing?” I stared at him. “Don’t you see it?”

  “Don’t I see what?”

  I looked back down, at where my balled fists were resting on the pink and perfect skin of Jules’ stomach. It looked like some kind of modern art installation, where a white painted mannequin is punched only to reveal part of a living person beneath. Only Marco didn’t see that person. Marco, I realized blankly, didn’t see anything.

  I blinked at him, confused. I’d thought maybe I’d inherited some of Roger’s skill, that maybe that was why . . . but was I imagining things? Was this necromancy or just wishful thinking? Or something else entirely?

  “Come on, girl,” he told me gently. “You’ve got raccoon eyes. You need rest—”

  No! Let her try!

  God, Marco must be right; I must be tired, I thought, rubbing my eyes. Because that had sounded like Jules. A lot like, I realized, as the voice came again.

  Please, Cassie, please! Oh God, you can’t—don’t leave me like this! I can’t bear it. I can’t! I can’t! I—

  I was hallucinating; I had to be.

  You can hear me? He sounded almost as shocked as I was. You heard that?

  “I—no. No.”

  “Don’t lie!” And suddenly, the tiny sound at the back of my mind that I might have been imagining was a full-blown voice, and there was no question this time. It was Jules. And he was talking a mile a minute. “Nobody could hear me! I’ve been trapped in here, screaming and screaming, but there’s only been silence and—oh God. Oh, Cassie, oh God!”

  “This isn’t possible,” I told him numbly. I wasn’t a vampire; I couldn’t mind-speak. Well, with anyone but Billy Joe, and even he had to be in residence. When he was outside my body, I had to talk to him like anyone else.

  “Well, you’re doing it!”
Jules said frantically. “And I can’t—I haven’t been able to talk to anybody. I’ve been calling and calling, but nobody answered. I didn’t even try you; I don’t know why. I guess I didn’t think you could do it—”

  “I can’t do it.”

  “Then what do you call this?”

  I had no idea.

  “What’s going on?” Marco demanded. “Who are you talking to?”

  I hadn’t realized that I’d closed my eyes again, but I opened them to see him frowning from a crouch beside me, his bulk blocking out half the room.

  “Jules. Can’t you hear him?”

  “No.” Marco didn’t look happy about that, and neither was I, because I’d learned the hard way that anything in magic I didn’t understand could and probably would come back to bite me. But there were more important things right now. Only I still didn’t know what I could—

  And suddenly, it was all there, laid out in front of me. Instead of the dim living room, and the ring of glowing, vampire eyes, I saw something like an old book. Not grimoire-old, but a flashy paperback, like one from the thirties, with a lurid cover and boldface type. I didn’t get a chance to read the title, because a wind came up, and the pages started ruffling. The book opened.

  It was about Jules.

  Days like sentences, months like paragraphs, years like pages flipping in the wind, going back, back, back through Jules’ whole life. Like an autobiography written in flesh.

  “What—how are you—” Jules choked.

  “I’m . . . not sure.” But when I put out a hand, and stopped a page, suddenly I wasn’t seeing the book anymore. I was seeing him.

  I saw a boy on a farm where no rain fell, but where billowing sheets of sand swept over the landscape, burying the farmhouse up to the windows. I saw him bundled into an old jalopy by his parents, along with half a dozen siblings like little stair steps, with the mother’s belly already rounded with the next. I saw them flee their ruined home for a brighter future in a promised land. Which only led to a life of backbreaking labor when they could get it, hunger, scorn, and constant motion.

  “But I had a talent,” Jules said softly.

  “Your face.”

  I saw it change as he grew, a random ordering of genetics that took his mother’s thin features and his father’s florid ones and crafted exquisite perfection. Enough to make people stop and stare at the ragged little boy with the angelic features. And suddenly, they all wanted to help.

  Money, a place to spend the night, work for the father, new clothes . . . The family received assistance again and again from people who thought they were being charitable, but who were really just charmed by a boy learning to use his greatest talent. It took him far—

  “A little too far,” Jules said quietly.

  He wasn’t exaggerating. Hollywood, parties, drinking binges, the pages flipped, and Jules changed. His father’s floridity started to show up around the edges as the big roles, the meaty ones, the ones that would make his name and fortune, went elsewhere. Until the day he ended up on a ledge, looking down. And wondering how to fall to ensure that his perfect face survived the jump.

  “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 surefooted 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—