by Ella James
When Julia opened her eyes, she was lying under layers of quilts in a rustic iron bed in the center of a room she’d never seen. Cayne sat in a rocking chair within reach.
“Welcome awake,” he said.
Julia tried to swallow, but her throat was blocked by what felt like a giant ball of bubble gum. “Water,” she rasped.
Cayne disappeared through a swinging door and returned with a bottle. Julia gulped it down, sighed, and glanced around the room. It was all shiny cedar, with fans hanging from exposed rafters, Native American art, a real-looking bearskin rug, and a pink stone door that led to a roomy porch. Through a big window beside that door, Julia saw a rectangular hot tub, and beyond it, trees with leaves in Crayola hues. She was in a cabin.
“Pretty.” Her mood lifted an inch, but fell a foot when she saw Cayne’s face. His expression was guarded.
His memory. It had returned, Julia remembered. She remembered how his silence had hurt her, and also what it felt like to fly.
“Thanks again for flying me last night,” she said.
He nodded; his expression was detached, like mentally he wasn’t even there with her. “How soon can you be ready?”
“Ready for what?” she asked.
“To leave.”
“Where are we going?”
He looked at her like she was stupid. “Washington.”
“Because—”
“Rosa is never wrong.”
Was, Julia thought, stricken by a swift stab of guilt. She wrapped her arms around herself. The warm cabin air seemed to press down on them.
Julia twisted in the bed sheets. She felt no closer to the truth. “Why is this happening—any of it?”
“That’s the question we need answered.”
“By who?”
“Your kind.”
Julia frowned. “My kind?”
“The other Stained.” He said it like he was pronouncing a death sentence.
Julia tried to hold his eyes, terrified of what she’d find in them but needing to know. Her heart ached when Cayne glanced at his lap.
“Okay,” she said after a minute. “Why don’t you tell me what’s new.”
“New?”
“What you remembered.”
“What I remembered?”
Julia sighed loudly. “What happened to make things all awkward and unhappy? Did you remember anything, do anything while I slept.”
Cayne pointed to a small stack of People magazines on the bedside table. “Caught up on my reading.” He lifted a brow. “Lindsay Lohan. Crazy.”
“What about your memories? I feel like…something’s changed.”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he said quickly.
“Okaaay.” Julia stared him down, but he actually looked serious. “Okay,” she said slowly. “Are you like, nervous? Don’t be nervous. We know each other, remember?”
Cayne shook his head.
“What?” She frowned.
“I told you, I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Not at all?”
“No.”
“Why?”
His nostrils flared, but he didn’t answer. Julia was eerily reminded of the first time they met. Except this was worse.
“I just don’t get it.”
“Don’t try to.”
“Um, how am I even supposed to do that?”
“Just do it.”
“But that’s ridiculous.” Cayne was her new best friend. Her only friend. Her only...anything. If something was wrong, Julia had to know. “You can’t tell me anything?”
He scowled at her, and Julia had a thought that made her stomach hit her toes. “Did you remember something about me? Something bad?”
What if he’d remembered something terrible, like...well, any number of terrible things. Maybe the Stained were really the bad guys, or maybe they all died by the time they were thirty, or maybe one of them killed Cayne’s parents, or maybe—
“We’ve only know each other a few weeks.”
“That’s not what I mean!” The way he said it made it sound like just weeks. As in, big deal, a few weeks. Like it could have been a few days for all he cared. “Is it about me?”
He shook his head, and Julia had another thought. “Samyaza.”
“What?”
“You remembered why he tried to kill you, right?”
“I remember a lot of things,” Cayne growled. “I don’t want to share them with you.” His whole body shuddered as he drew a deep breath. He stood so fast that Julia gulped. He was trembling from head to foot, his face was red, and for the very first time ever Julia was actually a little bit afraid of him.
He stared at her, his face stricken, and Julia felt things shift. Like there was something toxic inside him that had seeped into her. Both marred, they could no longer connect.
She tried to reach out to him with her eyes.
“What?” The word was like a slap.
“I don’t know….”
“Right.” Cayne’s lip curled. “You don’t.”
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Julia watched him cross the cabin’s lawn and disappear around a copse of pines; she was caught somewhere between shock and panic. Shock because she didn’t recognize him. Panic because she wasn’t sure if she ever would again.
She banished that last thought and took a hot shower. She dressed, fixed her hair, and surveyed the room. It was messy. Good. Something to do.
Julia packed their things and spent the next hour cleaning the cabin. She tried not to think of Cayne (AKA, Mr. Hyde), but that was about as successful as her campaign to rid the room of that sweat-and-blood smell.
When the place was spotless, she returned the bucket of cleaning supplies to its corner spot in the teensy laundry room and sat cross-legged on the bed. She turned on the television. She applied some make-up she’d found in the owners’ drawer. She tried to watch the news.
She hated how still the room felt.
Julia wandered into the kitchen and ran her hands along the counters. She rifled through cabinets and drawers. The silverware and utensils were stainless steel, and she could see her reflection in them. All eyes.
She went back into the bedroom. Ran her feet along the bearskin rug and glanced out the window. Her knees almost buckled.
Cayne was in the hot tub on the porch. His arms were propped on the sides, and his face was lifted to the sky. Steam uncoiled around him. He was perfectly still, but his wet clothes floated in the artificial current. Julia watched his pulse move under the smooth skin of his neck.
God, he was beautiful.
She ached to be near him.
He lay there for a long time, and Julia watched. She imagined a hundred ugly pasts, and eventually had to force herself back into the kitchen.
She was boiling water for chamomile tea when the door squeaked open. She moved into the bedroom, a moth pulled to a flame.
Cayne stood by a bookshelf, clutching a cordless phone, water pooling on the glossy boards beneath his feet. With his clothes stuck to him, he looked big and thick and scary. “You have a seat on a train,” he said flatly. “Amtrak. From Los Angeles.”
YOU have a seat. Singular. Second person.
“W—” her voice cracked. “What are you going to do?”
He stared at her blankly.
“Aren’t you coming with me?”
Cayne eyed her like something dirty. “Of course.”
“You are?”
“Is that a problem?”
She shook her head.
*
Julia and Cayne were doing things the hard way. He had told her, in no uncertain terms, that there were to be no more “tricks.” If they wanted to be absolutely sure they avoided detection and minimize Samyaza’s ability to ‘trace’ Cayne via the link created when he’d been stabbed by the Nephilim king’s blood dagger, he wasn’t going to be able to use his wings, or his charm, or even his dagger.
So they took a bus back to L.A., w
here they were to board an Amtrak for an old-fashioned train trip.
On top of the general weirdness of riding in a small space with lots of strangers, the Utah-to-Cally trek was long and strained. Cayne was still a stranger, and Julia felt way too edgy around him. When she tried to talk to him, he was stern and cold, a different person—one she wasn’t even sure she liked.
She gave up when they reached the California border and slept the rest of the way.
When Cayne woke her, with a nudge from his elbow, Julia wasn’t even able to enjoy the scenery, and by the time they were deposited at Union Station—a large, white building on Alameda Street that looked kind of like a Spanish church (it had a clock tower instead of a steeple)—she was having kittens. Dozens of them.
It had been three hours since she and Cayne last spoke. No, not since they last chatted, since they last spoke a word to each other. The whole thing was totally insane. They were like B.F.F., and then Cayne’s memories came back, and…nothing. The boy goes quiet.
And he wasn’t just quiet. It was like he was shutting down. Julia didn’t know when it had happened, but between the time she woke up and their arrival at the train station, it seemed like someone had pulled his power cord from the wall.
Union Station had shiny marble floors, leather chairs, vaulted ceilings, and people. People everywhere. They milled in groups of threes and fours, lounged on couches and in tall-backed chairs, read newspapers in corners, talked on cell phones, played with iPads.
Cayne marched through the crowd like a man on death row. Julia could feel the tension cascading off him. On the bus he’d strained to make sure they didn’t touch, and even now, as they passed through the station, he stayed a few steps ahead, keeping a calculated distance between them as he cut a path through the sea of noisy tourists.
They sat in foldout chairs by the boarding platform. An old man and woman sat next to them and held bony hands. Julia felt sick.
She needed to stop thinking emotionally. She needed to reason out what to do. How to get him comfortable again. Or was it that? Maybe he wasn’t weirded out and uncomfortable in his skin. Maybe he simply no longer liked Julia.
It didn’t help that they’d only had enough money for one ticket, so she was boarding the Amtrak alone. Cayne planned to drop in from the train’s top, through the emergency exit hatch she was supposed to unlock. But she had no way to know if he really would.
When the intercom called her number, she followed him on putty legs.
After her bags were checked and a uniformed lady smiled her on, she looked at him. She tried to memorize every angle of his face. She wished he would smile. He just nodded. She tried to supply the smile, but failed.
When she got to their tiny room, Julia pulled a leather chair under the hatch and unlocked it. Then she turned off the lights, sat on the bottom bunk-cot, and said tongue twisters. The train left the station on time, and the city began to zoom by.
Cayne dropped in a few minutes later. He glanced at her—not long enough to notice the dumb relief on her face—and turned a circle. His bulky frame was boxed in by a sliding rubber door, a school bus-style window, a tiny bathroom, and two bunk-cots.
Julia waved to the tiny leather chair behind him, and Cayne slouched down, rubbing a grease stain on his cheek. She stretched out on the bottom cot. They both looked out the window.
Predictably, he didn’t speak, and she was too nervous to break the silence.
She played the crossword puzzle in the complimentary newspaper, but it didn’t help. She tried to read the TIME magazine she’d swiped from the cabin, but that didn’t help either.
She told herself that she could wait it out. He had just gotten his memories, after all. It made sense that he’d be withdrawn. In a couple of days, things would go back to normal. She’d be patient.
Or try to.
The night was punctuated by her few strained attempts to fill the silence. A woman screamed something about “Mr. Happy,” and Julia asked if Cayne had heard it. He nodded. At one point the train seemed to wobble, and she asked him if he felt it. He shook his head.
Later, when she told him there was hamburger steak in the dining car, he glared at her, and Julia retreated to the halls before she said something she’d regret.
She had trouble with brooding people. First, she really, really wanted to look at said brooder’s aura. This was a special case, so Julia might have been willing to chunk any ethical complaints, but of course Cayne was Cayne. He would know if she took a peek. (She’d tried it just after he’d gotten his memories back, and she’d been pretty sure he noticed before she got a chance to see anything.)
Then there was all the pouting. Brooders had the whole Ooh, You Can’t Touch Me, I’m Brooding thing going.
Sympathy was also a problem. Julia just couldn’t watch anyone stew without wanting to heal them. Especially someone like Cayne, who was so much more than just anyone.
Of course in this situation, she also had herself to worry about, and she didn’t think it was unreasonable to do so. The only person that knew she existed and didn’t want to kill her was doing his best to ignore her.
After a large portion of hamburger steak and another hour reading about The New Russia (which didn’t seem so new as far as she was concerned), Julia hung her head off the top bunk and said, “You can get on the bottom if you want. I’m going to sleep here.”
Cayne turned to her with half-hearted irritation. “I know.”
Julia’s blood rushed to her head. She flopped on her back and said, “Okay.”
She tried to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come. Her thoughts raced, flowing into the future, stretching back in time in a nauseating flurry of fear and disbelief. Her dreams, when at last they came, were nightmares. The kind of you-are-all-alone ones that really filled her with fright. And after such a long time feeling safe.
Chapter Thirty
Julia woke up, and then she threw up.
She stumbled over Cayne in her dash to the bathroom—he had, at some point, moved to the floor beside the cot—and managed to yank the plastic lid open before she got sick.
She spent a full five minutes recovering from the shock. Usually she had an iron stomach. Other than by the road outside of Salt Lake City, Julia hadn’t hugged the porcelain bowl since the West Tennessee Fair in seventh grade.
She refused to consider what had made her stomach so upset today; instead, she brushed her teeth three times and took an extra hot shower. When she emerged from the bathroom, still warm and damp, Cayne was sitting in the child-sized leather chair by the window. He looked tired and unhappy in the blue glow of early a.m.
“Good morning,” she said, as if everything was normal.
He nodded without smiling. He was looking at her in that searching way of his, and Julia, embarrassed, wasn’t in the mood.
“Sleep well?” she asked as sarcastically as she could.
He raised his right eyebrow.
She dropped onto the bottom bunk and stared up at the bed above her, forcing her eyes not to wander to the floor, where, after a moment, Cayne asked, “Are you okay?”
She glared at him as her cheeks pinked. “Fine.”
“Are you sure?” She couldn’t tell if the intensity in his voice was true concern or obligation.
Julia sighed. “What exactly do you want?”
He shrugged. “To check.”
“Consider me checked.”
He crossed his arms and turned back to the window. He was radiating doom and gloom, and suddenly Julia just couldn’t handle it. She had tricked herself into thinking that a new day would bring an old Cayne; she was beginning to think that Cayne was never coming back.
She’d been foolish to get so comfortable in the first place. To assume that he would like her. That he would continue liking her. Hadn’t she learned that never happened? Given enough time, she could ruin any good thing.
“Why didn’t you just leave me in Memphis,” she said to the back of his head. �
�Why are you even with me now?”
He turned to her, his handsome face carefully vacant. “I can’t leave you alone.”
“Yes you can.” He shook his head, and her heart broke a little. He wanted to leave her. “Then why not call one of your friends to babysit me? What about that bartender in Utah. Andrew, right?”
“André.”
“Whatever. I'm sure he’s got a busy flight schedule, but maybe he could take a few days off.”
“Maybe that would be best.”
Julia’s blood froze, then boiled. “Do they have Nephilim shrinks?” she asked flatly.
He looked at her blankly, and Julia twirled her finger around her ear. “Psychologists. Head doctors. For people who’re crazy, Cayne. Messed up.”
There was a pause, and then, “Okay.”
“Ever thought of going to one?”
“No.”
“See, the thing is—” She sounded shrill; she lowered her voice. “The thing is, it isn’t normal for people to act the way you’re acting. So hot and cold.”
Cayne seemed hypnotized by the window. “I don’t understand the way you’re acting.”
Julia laughed. It was bitter, and the sound of it made her hurt worse. “Why am I acting this way?” The shrillness was back. “Well, let’s see. My parents get killed by this evil half-demon guy, and I find myself a nice little warehouse to chill in. And then you drop by, and you invite me to join your quest to kill the guy that tried to kill me. And I, having nothing better to do, join. Have I gotten it right so far?”
He didn’t reply, so she continued. “Killing this guy turns out to be harder than I thought, and along the way I find out that there are a whole bunch of people, just like me, getting killed. And the shit gets crazier. But no matter how bad it got, you were always there. We helped each other. I thought we were friends. I thought...”
Julia couldn’t say what she thought, and Cayne didn’t ask. “Things were as good as they could be. I mean, maybe you secretly disliked me, but you keep that secret pretty well. Then the other night you get your memory back, and suddenly it’s like none of this stuff ever happened. You act like a different person.”
“I am a different person.”
“A person who doesn’t like to be with me.”
“Julia, I don’t like being around anyone.”
“You don’t like being around anyone.” She smacked her head. “Okay. Wow. And here I thought this whole you not talking to me thing was just me. But it’s anyone. Doesn’t matter who I was. I could be anyone.”
