Because You Love To Hate Me

by Ameriie

  So maybe I should rephrase that first line. I love Julian Powell.

  My favorite things about “Julian Breaks Every Rule”:

  •How straightforward Julian is. He never lies to you about what he’s done or what he’s thinking, which made him feel like a way more reliable narrator than you typically get with psychopaths. But it also begged the question of whether he was telling the truth, which caused me to have a bit of a crisis. WHAT IF HE WAS LYING THE WHOLE TIME? I got very into it, not gonna lie.

  •The constant foreshadowing really helped build suspense in the story because no matter how much information it seems like Julian is giving away, you really don’t know the ending until you get there. Upon reading the story a second, third, and fourth time, I learned a lot about what was actually going on.

  •Julian is very much a typical psychopath, but he has some pretty clear differences as well. Normal psychopaths (obviously) don’t have powers that allow them to kill people with their minds, but Julian does—or does he? Are those deaths just coincidences? Whatever the case, the intent behind his actions mirrors that of a regular psychopathic murderer. He believes somebody deserves to die, and it happens. As for Julian’s ability to get away with anything: it’s a pretty well-known fact that psychopaths are master manipulators and can essentially talk their way out of anything (seriously, have you seen Dexter?). So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that Julian can get away with murder (literally or figuratively) and break any rule as well.

  •To me, Julian felt like a normal teenager. Who hasn’t in a fit of rage wished someone dead? But for average teens, it doesn’t actually happen (at least, I hope not). And just like any other guy his age, he faces awkwardness around girls, jerks from school, and the stresses of hosting a party.

  •Julian’s inner voice remained very lighthearted throughout the story, which was a great contrast to his sinister thoughts and behavior. He also didn’t stick to any moral code like Dexter does, which dehumanized Julian a bit and made him more frightening. Despite all this, I was completely on his side the entire time. This is a slightly terrifying thought when you’re reading about a psychopathic killer (!!!), but I often find myself rooting for the villains.

  •Speaking of Julian being a stone-cold killa, the ending of this story knocked my socks off. Here I was, thinking Julian would remain a quasi-telepathic murderer until the end of his days, but nay! This is the day when he plans to take control at last and kill the hated Steven Kemple with his own two hands. I didn’t see that coming, and it had me itching to flip to the next page to find out what happened, but THERE WAS NO MORE. Touché, Mr. Smith. Touché.

  Although this story left me with plenty of questions, it also provided me with a lot of ideas and theories. Does Julian actually go through with killing Steven? We’ll never know! How far can he push his power of manipulation? To the moon, perhaps! The openness of the ending hurt my soul (just a little bit), but it was the perfect note on which to end the story. Strange, suspenseful, and definitely psychopathic, Julian Powell is a teen psycho extraordinaire.

  INDIGO AND SHADE

  BY APRIL GENEVIEVE TUCHOLKE

  I didn’t believe the Beast was back. Not at first. No one did.

  The redheaded Bellerose twins claimed they saw it roaring in the moonlight at the edge of the Hush Woods. They said it was ten feet long with six-inch teeth and it seemed to “worship the night” . . . whatever the hell that meant. They said they took off running and barely escaped with their lives.

  I just laughed in their faces.

  I was sure they’d seen a bear or wolf or something else furry and large and got so scared, the cowards, that their reason and common sense shut down and their craven, sixteen-year-old brains conjured up a monster.

  People in the Rocky Mountains had been trying to kill the Beast since the Colorado gold rush. It would appear, slaughter a few kids, and then vanish again. On and on and on for the last hundred and fifty years. It had all happened before, and it would all happen again. Unless I could stop it.

  I’d been waiting for the Beast to return to our woods since I first learned how to use a bow. I practiced archery, hour after hour, while other kids did stupid, unheroic things like kick balls and fall off skateboards and take piano lessons.

  I was ready. I was born for this. It would be stopped, right here, right now, by me.

  Three nights after the Bellerose twins said they saw the creature, three nights after I laughed them off and called them cowards . . .

  I saw the Beast for the first time.

  I was night-hunting in the Hush Woods. I felt my skin prickle, instinct, basic and primal. I froze in my tracks and looked up . . . and there it was, crouching over a fresh kill, teeth ripping into a deer, bones crunching, blood spraying.

  There isn’t a cowardly bone in my body. I didn’t run like the twins. I sucked in my breath, slipped lithely and shadowy behind a tall pine tree, and watched the creature that had killed so many people, the creature that had loomed so large in my imagination since I was a little kid.

  The Beast was lupine in shape, broad nose, short ears, angular limbs, soft-looking fur. But there was something sentient about it, too. Sentient and savvy. It seemed . . .

  Aware.

  The animal tore off the deer’s hind leg in one hard jerk, held it in its mouth, and sniffed the air. It turned and looked at me—straight at me.

  I’d watched a lot of animals in the woods. Killed them, too. I knew them, knew their emotions. I’d stared into their eyes and seen surprise, and hunger, and fear, and indifference. But I’d never seen anything like the Beast’s. Its eyes were sad, lonely, angry, proud. Human.

  I should have nocked my arrow. I should have shot it, whoosh, slice, fur parting, skin tearing, muscles ripping.

  This was my moment.

  Instead, I called out, “Who are you?”

  The Beast flinched at the sound of my voice, gaze still locked with mine. We both watched each other for one second, two, three . . .

  And then it bolted through the trees, deer leg tucked between its jaws.

  I didn’t tell a soul. I was Brahm Valois, after all, heir to the Valois fortune and not some idiot redheaded twin. I couldn’t tell people I’d seen the Beast bloodily eating a deer in a cursed patch of Colorado woods . . . and then had let it go.

  People were counting on me.

  They were expecting me to do what no one else had ever done.

  Kill the Beast.

  I dreamed about it, every night since then. But in my dreams the Beast didn’t run away. It just tilted its head back and howled.

  Someday I would put an arrow through its heart. I think it had known. I think it had seen this in my eyes. I held its fate in my hands, and it had run away.

  Valois is a rich ski resort town in Colorado. It’s also my last name. That’s right, my ancestor founded this town. My great-great-great-grandfather pissed off a French lord a hundred and fifty years ago—they hunted down Jean George Valois and threw him off a cliff. But he lived. The Valois men are survivors. He booked passage on a ship to America and then followed the gold rush up into the Rocky Mountains. My family has never lacked ambition—when Jean George’s claim dried up, he paved roads and built hotels and saloons and churches. Then, when he was in his nineties, he built the first ski resort in the Rockies. The wealthy followed.

  I have fourteen cousins and three brothers, and I’m the oldest male. And I could have ended up one of those spineless, sniveling, special-snowflake trust fund kids, but my dad is Brahm Valois the First and he didn’t raise spoiled pansy boys. I’ve camped in freezing temps, in ten-foot snow. I killed my first buck when I was five and then helped skin it afterward. I spent my summers at hard-core wilderness survival camps, where I was dropped in the woods alone for a week with nothing but the clothes on my back and a hunting knife. I spend my days in five-star restaurants with pretentious one-word names, but I have also eaten squirrel, and possum, and jackrabbit, and swamp rat. I have nibbled on frog leg
s roasted over a spit in the wild . . . as well as fried in panko and served with lemon, grass-fed butter, and frites at the downtown Fourchette restaurant.

  I saved our town from a forest fire two years ago. Me and my younger brothers—Jean George, Philippe, and Luc—were in the front lines, battling the flames day and night, no sleep. We turned the tide. We saved our town and Broken Bridge—the other rich ski resort twenty miles over. We rescued half the county from the burning inferno.

  We were heroes.

  Me and my brothers owned Valois, ran Valois, saved Valois . . . and my life could have gone on like this forever and forever for all I cared. Once I killed the Beast I’d have everything I wanted from life and could just coast on a wave of glory and self-fulfillment until the end.

  That was how it was supposed to go, anyway. And then I met Indigo.

  The first time I saw Indigo Beau she was sitting smack in the middle of the Hush Woods, not half a mile from where I saw the Beast a few weeks before.

  I was half naked, stripped to my waist, wearing nothing but my muscled abs and my designer jeans and my recurve bow. I liked to slay creatures the way my French ancestors used to in their dark, black forests hundreds of years ago. Just me and sky and trees and arrows.

  Indigo gasped when she saw me. Of course she did.

  I have gorgeous blond hair, thick and glossy—it curls up at the ends like little twists of sunshine. I have sea-green eyes and healthy, glowing skin. I’d been running and hunting and fighting since I was a kid, and I looked like a god—tight waist, long legs, big pecs, boom, boom, boom.

  Indigo was nestled into a pile of green ferns and a slanting stretch of sunshine. She had thick brown hair that draped halfway down her back, and she wore a yellow dress with a long blue scarf folded around her neck. She had a book in her lap, sky-blue cover with a red moon in the center.

  I stared at her, rooted to the spot, hunter and prey.

  There was something unnerving about her. I noticed it straight off. The way she sat in those ferns, pliant and nimble but also tense . . . I thought maybe she was a dancer. I’d been to NYC and seen ballet—the Valois boys were cultured, even if we did live on a mountain. There was something of those sinewy ballerinas about her.

  “Bonjour, ma belle,” I said finally, in my sexiest, French-iest voice.

  Her gaze lingered over me, and I let it. I was used to this kind of attention. I rolled my neck and then my shoulders, like I was sore from hunting primevally with my bow in the savage wilderness. She stood up and raised her face to mine. Her eyes were a light, pearly blue, and they were sparkly and bright . . . but with something deep in them, too, deep and melancholic. She had a sweet, heart-shaped face and high-arched eyebrows and plump lips. She was gorgeous. I’d dated prettier, but not often.

  I smiled at her, my thousand-watt Valois grin, but her body stayed tense and strained, as if I were an unpredictable wild creature that might attack at any moment, rather than a glorious specimen of refined masculinity. Her eyes kept shifting to my bow, like it made her uneasy, like she could see the ghosts of all the animals I’d slain, lining up behind me.

  All right, then, time to get civilized.

  “Hello there, stranger. I’m Brahm Valois the Second . . . Valois, like the town.”

  She stood up and put her palm in mine. She shook firm and quick, and then pulled her hand away and went back to clutching her book. She still hadn’t said a word.

  She looked at my bow again.

  I narrowed my eyes. “I hope you aren’t one of those tree-hugging vegan types. Because I’m a hunter and proud of it.”

  “I’m not.”

  “Not what?”

  “A tree-hugging vegan.”

  “Good.” I relaxed and flashed her another Valois smile. “Is that a romance?” I nodded my chin at her little novel.

  She shook her head, and her long dark hair swished side to side.

  “What, then? A book of spells? Are you reading about herbs and potions and boiling cauldrons? Because a girl would only hide in the woods to read a really dirty romance or some New Age Wiccan piece-of-trash spell book.”

  She laughed.

  She had a nice laugh. A lot of girls don’t. A lot of the girls I’d been with had laughs that were feeble or fake or forced. But hers . . . it was genuine. Genuine and fierce as a Rocky Mountain winter snowstorm that dumped three feet of snow in twenty-four hours.

  “I’m Indigo Beau,” she said, and her voice was genuine and fierce, too.

  She sat back down in her patch of ferns, and I plopped to the ground next to her, dropping my bow and arrows off to the side. I held out my hand, and she gave me the book. It had a vague title—The Lone Hunt. I flipped through it, expecting to find a steamy sex scene or an illustration of smug-looking women standing on a hill in the middle of a thunderstorm, chanting a spell about sisterhood. But it was a nonfiction book about wolves—their habits, descriptions of their dens, pack dynamics.

  I handed the book back to her. “Why are you reading about wolves?”

  She shrugged, shoulders nestling into her blue scarf. “I’m interested.”

  “So . . . you in town for a while? Let me guess—your dad is a minor celebrity, like a professional golfer, and your family came here to rub elbows with the rich.”

  She just smiled, her chubby lips tilting up in a pretty way.

  “I figured. That’s why you don’t know about these woods. Me and my brothers are the only people around here brave enough to walk through them.” I pointed at a big, dead oak two dozen yards in front of us, its grey branches spreading out into the sky. “A hundred odd years ago they hanged three women from that tree, and now no one will go near this spot. They call it Hush Witch Glen.”

  This wasn’t the whole story. People thought the woods were haunted, sure, but they didn’t go in them because of the Beast. I didn’t want to scare her, though. Not yet.

  Indigo glanced around, as if searching for ghosts, blue eyes moving from shadow to shadow. The wind picked up suddenly and burst through the trees, shaking all the leaves at once. It was early October and the rustling was loud and crisp.

  “I always get goose bumps when the wind does that,” she said. “It swoops up out of nowhere, almost as if it’s listening in on our conversation and wants us to know.”

  Indigo ran her hand down her arm. She did have goose bumps—I could see them.

  “Yeah, the Hush Woods are an eerie place—people are right to stay away.” The wind swooped in again as I said this.

  Indigo pointed at my forearm, and now I had goose bumps, too. I never get goose bumps. When that coyote pack was hunting near my tent in Oregon and howling in my ears all night long? I was calm as the night sky. When I stumbled upon a baby grizzly outside Banff, Canada, and had to scrabble thirty feet up a tree to get away from its mother? My heart barely skipped a beat.

  Indigo tilted her head, and her cheeks fell into a ray of dying sun. Her hair almost touched the ground, and it was straight and natural and soft-looking. I watched her for a second, kind of awed by her beauty.

  She batted her eyes at the sunlight, shaded her face with her hand, and looked at me again. “Did they really hang three women here?”

  “Yes. My great-great-great-grandfather Jean George hushed it up, which is why this part of the Rockies is called the Hush Woods. But it happened. Ask anyone.”

  “Why were they hanged?”

  Indigo hadn’t said much so far and I was doing all the talking, and that was fine by me. I really didn’t want to ruin the nice, quiet moment by talking about the Beast, but dodging her questions was just going to make her more curious in the end. That’s how girls work.

  I hooked an elbow around one bent knee and ran a hand through my golden curls. “It was during the Colorado gold rush. A group of good-time gals from the saloons formed a league promoting the rights of women. They wanted to vote and own property and get equal treatment. They held rallies and fund-raisers and tried to get laws passed, but behind their
backs everyone called them the Valois Coven.”

  The sun was dipping down, and it was getting chilly. I didn’t want to shiver in front of this new girl, but I was half naked and it was taking some concentration to appear indifferent to the cold every time an autumn Hush breeze blew down my spine.

  “Go on,” she said, blue eyes sparkling. “What happened next?”

  She was really interested in what I was saying. Of course she was.

  “Well, fighting for women’s rights in a gold rush town made of ninety percent men is not going to end well. And it didn’t. The good-time women in Broken Bridge joined the coven—I mean, the league—and their numbers grew. And then a boy went missing. He was only fourteen, son of the mayor. They found the kid’s body in the woods a few days later, and it looked like it had been chewed on, and not by the usual critters like coyotes and wolves and cougars, but something else. Something more . . . delicate, and precise. Something had crushed his lungs and ripped out his damn heart.”

  Indigo flinched.

  “Another boy went missing, and then a girl. Finally, Jean George Valois had the three leaders of the coven arrested. He called in a corrupt priest to officially declare them ‘Night Witches.’ The whole town came out. They threw rocks at the women until they fell to their knees. And then they strung them up and watched them hang for sorcery and murder. Mob mentality. It’s a terrible thing.”

  Indigo nodded, eyes big, too moved by my gripping story to talk, no doubt. I am a natural-born storyteller—one of the many talents that run in my family.

  “Of course, hanging the lead witches didn’t stop the bodies from turning up in this forest. There were two more after the first batch. But J. G. Valois kept it out of the papers by shooting the only journalist in the Rockies reckless enough to investigate.”

  Indigo flinched again.

  Did I feel a twinge then? A minuscule twinge of regret? Maybe. But I was proud of being a Valois. So what if my ancestor hanged some innocent women a long time ago to keep the peace? Who didn’t have skeletons in the family closet?