2:33 p.m.

He was cursed.

When Julien arrived at his townhouse to find the welcome mat slightly askew and his senses buzzing with the constant message of danger, danger, danger, that seemed the only logical conclusion. Either he or the house was cursed. How else would it get broken into twice in the same week?

Julien abandoned his caution. He was not in the mood for caution. He was in the mood for carelessness, which was a perilous thing, and only became more so when he stepped into his living room to find Seraphine Kozlov there.

She was lounging on his couch, leaned languorously over its arm, her feet drawn up underneath her. She was beautiful as ever, her eyes shimmery even in the shadows, her lips pressed together in a quiet, natural pout. She knew he was there; Julien knew it. Yet she said nothing, only sat stroking Ringo with her red manicured nails.

Ringo mewled softly and nuzzled his head against Sera's knee. She chuckled, raking a side of her Hollywood-curled hair behind her ear. "You kept the cat."

Julien rested a hand against his kitchen island, suddenly wishing for Fritz. When he'd shown up, all Julien had wanted was for him to disappear again. Now that he was back in Baltimore and Sera was here, however, he would do anything to summon Fritz back, his loyal buffer.

There was no resisting Sera, after all. There never was.

"Yes, I kept the cat."

Sera looked up at him with a smirk. The expression shot a dart through Julien's begrudging heart. "I was almost positive you'd devour it, too."

Julien's gaze skirted away from hers, fixing on a grease stain on the oven instead. "I have—control."

Silence.

Julien looked up. The couch was empty save for Ringo.

He barely had time to whirl before Sera was upon him, framing his face with her hands, scrutinizing his eyes as if she were medically assessing them. "You fed," she gasped, her mouth turning up into a brilliant, half-dimpled smile. Another dart, sharp and painful, to remind him he could still feel. "Not on—you didn't. A human? But what happened, Juju? You said you couldn't, but you did. What happened?"

Julien slapped her hands away, staggering away from her. He expected hurt on her face, but found only pride. "I—"

"Did you get desperate?"

Yes. Terribly. "No," Julien said.

Sera's eyes shot heavenwards, as if only something divine could give her the strength to deal with him. "I know you, Juju—"

"You don't. Stop calling me that."

Sera rolled her eyes again. "Fine, Julien. I know you. I know when you're lying. It's okay that you were desperate. We both knew that's what was going to happen. Fritz knew that's what was going to happen. What else is a hungry vampire supposed to do but feed?"

Julien sank down onto the nearest barstool, hanging his head. It didn't matter. It didn't matter what Sera or Iman or anyone else said about what happened last night, because it was not ever going to happen again. He had seen himself at his most helpless, at his most starved, and he was not going back. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter.

"You liked it," said Sera, her voice suddenly low, sultry. "Didn't you, Julien?"

Julien studied the granite beneath him with a new intensity. He remembered the moment his fangs had pierced Beck's skin, how the flesh had felt as it broke beneath his teeth, the relief that had flooded him as the blood flooded his mouth. He had not stormed out of that bathroom because he was angry at Beck or Iman. He had stormed out because he was angry at himself.

Angry at himself for enjoying it.

"Of course you liked it."

Julien shook his head. "I didn't."

"The kill's thrilling, Julien. It's the best part of being us."

"I didn't kill anyone."

"But you could have—"

"Shit, Sera!" Julien roared, jumping to his feet. Again, it seemed only he had any emotion to display. Sera's face was entirely blank below her wispy bangs; he was talking to a brick wall. "What's it going to take for you to fucking get it? Not all of us take pride in the taking of other people's lives. Not all of us parade around like we're better than humans solely because we're not human. Not all of us are okay with being monsters!"

"Does it matter if you're okay with it? That's what you are," Sera snapped back. Though her voice was level, there was fire in her eyes that hadn't been there a second ago. Julien hated it, but he was afraid of that fire. "When you're around all your human friends, that time traveling chick and her boy toy, all you can hear is their heartbeats. All you can smell is their blood. All you can think about is how easy it would be to tear them apart. Why do you think that is, Julien? Do you think it's because you're meant to be friends with them, or something ridiculous like that?"

"I would never," Julien said, clawing at his shirt. He felt the words as he said them, like a tuning fork struck against a bone, reverberating within his body. He felt them with more depth than he had felt anything else. "I would never hurt Iman."

"One of these days you're going to realize it's not about what you would or wouldn't do," Sera said, a light chuckle on the end of the sentence. She took Julien's hand, working her fingers over his knuckles. "Your body wants what it wants. Either you exhaust yourself fighting it, or you"—she shrugged then, grinning at him—"give in."

She was inches away, but he wanted her closer. He wanted a night so far away that he could remember but bits and pieces of it: a Paris landscape, Sera's body in his hands, the glint of chandelier light in a champagne glass. Sera was the moon, pale and glorious and celestial, and he was but an earthly sea, moving at her whim. It didn't matter how far he got from her. She would always drag him back.

"Seraphine," he said. He didn't finish the word before she kissed him.

Her kisses were not the warm, furious kisses of life, but the frigid, distant kisses of death. Her lips moved over his, empty chest to empty chest. Julien wrapped his arms around her, pulling her in by her waist, and let himself sink below the ice.

She pulled away. When she smiled, two fangs glittered over her lips. "Jule," she said. "Come with me."

He had so many questions. Where to? For how long? Just us? In the end, however, he acknowledged none of them.

"Okay," he said. The word tasted like a mistake. "Okay."

Iman drove to the nearest public library, parked her car in the frontmost parking spot where she could clearly be seen from the door, and sat there. She switched the air conditioning off, then on again when the hot air began to seep in. She flipped through radio channels. Britney Spears, no. Bruno Mars, not quite. Cigarettes after Sex—soothing enough.

She was going to sit here until she forgot about lunch with her sisters, or until Beck got off his shift and walked outside. Whichever came first.

Beck came first. A flurry of movement towards the entrance caught Iman's eye, and she looked up, noticing Beck at the exact moment he noticed her. His eyes went round beneath his glasses for a moment, a question—or several—salient in his expression as he peered through the windshield. His mouth formed her name, eyebrows furrowing.

She rolled the window down, letting in the hot air again. It smelled like asphalt, like car exhaust. When Beck leaned through the window, however, all she could smell was him: ink, yellowing pages, sawdust. Everything real and everything fiction.

"Iman?" he asked, pulling at the collar of his T-shirt, which said in plain block text, The book was better. "What are you doing here?"

She kept her eyes and her hands on the steering wheel. "I'm not in the mood right now, Beck. Can you get in the car and listen to me, please?"

"But my—"

"Please get in the car."

There was a long breath of silence before the passenger door clicked open and shut. Beck started to put his seatbelt on, reconsidered, and slid it back again. He sniffed, sniffed once more, then turned to Iman. "Why does it smell like something died in here?"

"Probably"—Iman rummaged around in her glove compartment until she recovered the sandwich bag—"because of this."

Beck jolted back against the door, nearly toppling the collection of assorted chapsticks that had grown over time in the door compartment. "Jesus Christ, Im. What the hell is that? Is that a squirrel corpse? And why does it look like someone vacuumed its insides out?"

Iman set the bag back in the glove compartment and pressed it shut, lifting her eyes to Beck's. He was staring at her still, clearly disturbed. "That's what I'm trying to figure out, Beck," she said, her eyes falling to the massive bandage on the inside of his wrist. Her fingers reached out to graze it; Beck let her, gnawing at his lip. "So Julien doesn't have to do this again."

Iman watched as Beck's fingers entwined in hers, gentle palm against gentle palm. She met his gaze as he asked her, "Would it make you stop worrying so much?"

Iman dipped her head, nodding.

A smile crept across Beck's face, slow and genuine. His fingers danced across her cheek, combing one side of her curls behind her ear. "Okay," he said, his voice as quiet as the summer wind that blew about outside. "What do you need from me?"

Iman returned to the steering wheel as Beck's hand fell away from her face. She could've done it alone, she knew. But she didn't want to anymore. "I need a lab," she told him. "I need a lab and I need someone who knows how to use one."

They went for coffee.

It was exactly the opposite of what Julien was expecting. He was expecting somewhere exciting, somewhere lawless, somewhere dark where no one could see or judge you. Yes, it a weekday at near three in the afternoon in a city that wasn't known for its wild parties. Julien just hadn't thought Sera would be the type to pay attention to any of that.

He watched her as she took an indolent sip of coffee, a dollop of milk foam lingering on her upper lip. She moved to swipe it away, but Julien moved before she could. His thumb slid along her mouth, and he froze, not knowing where the thought had come from. He stared at the foam caught on his thumb, then at Sera, then at the foam again.

Sera only laughed. "Do you remember what we did, that first night in Paris?"

The first night. The first night he ever met her. The first night of the rest of his eternal life. It had looked awfully similar to this, here, now. "We went for coffee," he said without enthusiasm. "Are you trying to make my whole life one big metaphor or something, Sera?"

Her gaze flitted down towards her coffee cup. "No. You'd have to have lived your whole life for that."

Julien said nothing. For a moment it was the babble of human voices, the hiss of the steaming wand behind the counter, and nothing else. Julien said nothing, Julien felt nothing, Julien was nothing.

"It's hard. I know," Sera said, like she knew anything, like she knew anything at all. She had the luxury of a functioning memory. A concrete past. A life before the unlife. Like she knew anything at all about being unknown. "You wonder all the time about who you were before. Were you a good person, a bad one? Did you have family, a lover? Maybe even kids? Who did you leave behind? Rather—who left you behind?"

They were all questions Julien had asked before, on lonely nights when Iman or Fritz or Sera was nowhere near and he had nothing and no one else upon which to focus his thoughts. Most of those nights ended in drunken or drug-induced stupors. He would do anything to numb his brain, if only for a minute. If it would save him from searching, so be it.

Julien dragged his spoon from his own coffee—an americano with three sugars, no milk—and dropped it with a small plink upon the table. "Mostly I want to know who made me."

"Oh?" Sera said, her eyebrows risen. "And why is that?"

"So I can chop their fucking head off."

"Julien," Sera scolded. She cast an exaggerated look around the room, gesturing meekly towards a whining baby in a stroller, seemingly dragged along to his mother's social hour with all of her equally motherly friends. "There are children present."

"I just don't think I asked for this," he said, ignoring Sera, ignoring the baby. "I really don't."

A jolt shot through Julien as Sera's fingers brushed his. He looked up into her eyes and lost himself for a moment, drifting along, her willing captive. "Can I tell you something, Jule?"

He hesitated, but nodded.

"Killing your maker won't do anything but make you more bitter than you were before," she said, letting him go. "You think standing in a pool of their blood will make you feel better, but it won't. You'll just feel sick. You'll just feel...like...a beast."

Only, Julien was not afraid of feeling like a beast. He had too many times before for it to mean much anymore. Was that not what Sera had just told him? That he was a monster, a predator, designed to kill? What did it matter if his heart froze over if it had already stopped beating long before?

"Sera?"

She raised her eyebrows, a silent acknowledgment.

"Do you ever have...dreams?"

She laughed again, quietly. "I'd imagine anyone who sleeps has dreams at some point or another."

"Not dreams, per se," Julien said. "But dreams that feel...real?"

"Lucid dreams?"

Julien shook his head, finally uttering the words he had not wanted to say: "Dreams that feel like memories."

Sera lifted her coffee cup to her lips, set it down again, and studied him. Studied him, studied him, studied him, her eyes like cobalt sea glass as she did. Few things could make Julien squirm after being alive for so long, but he squirmed then.

Finally, Sera said, her voice smooth as honey pooling in a spoon, "Memories and dreams are two very different things, Julien. Be careful that you're not mistaking one for the other."

He had known Sera for nearly a century. He had loved Sera for slightly less than that. All this was to say that he knew. He knew she was lying. It was in the little things: the way she stirred her coffee, the way her lips moved, the way her posture corrected itself, little by little. She was putting on a show. She was always putting on a show.

There was rage in him. Alive and sudden and destructive, like the flame on the end of a freshly struck match.

He shoved his americano towards her, getting sharply to his feet. "I'm tired of playing this tug-of-war with you. Why do you think I went to San Diego in the first place? Why do you think I left France?"

Sera opened her mouth, and shut it again. It was the closest thing to surprise that Julien had gotten from her since the night he slammed her apartment door and walked out and didn't look back.

"I left to get away from you, Sera," he said, hissing the words, the rage filling in this throat now, like bile. "You think you have me wrapped around your finger, but you don't. Stay the hell away from me."

Even as he pivoted, even as he walked away for what was likely the thousandth time, he knew Sera was not the reason they always ended up meeting again.

It was him, always him.

He could never stay away from Seraphine Kozlov, and in the end, he knew that's what was going to kill him.