9:56 a.m.

Iman was on the couch, watching the news on silent, when Beck shuffled back into the apartment.

He was in a long, cream-colored coat, his glasses fogged and his lips chapped, carrying his phone and his keys in one hand and a drink carrier in the other. Though Iman was relieved to see him, the second he turned after hanging up the keys and she saw the grim look on his face, she hesitated.

Footage of a recent robbery of a jewelry store flickered across the TV screen, a figure dressed all in black, moving like a mystery through bad, staticky videotape. Iman clicked the TV off, getting to her feet.

Before she could speak, Beck waved her off. "No, sit," he said, his voice unusually spacey, as if his mind were somewhere other than here. He rested next to her, and she took the misto he offered her—the recent encounter with Sera, after all, made Iman forget to drink the one she'd bought for herself.

Iman touched his knee. "Where were you?"

A rueful smile, directed down at where his leg rested upon the couch rather than up at Iman's face. "I'm usually the one asking you that," he said. "How the tables have turned, right?"

"Beck."

He fiddled with his fingers: interlacing them, pulling them apart, interlacing them again. "I went to see Julien."

Iman paused a breath, unsure for a moment why she had expected him to lie. A mindless hand flew to her neck, worrying at her necklace. "You...so he's still here?"

Beck nodded.

"Then why wasn't he—"

"Iman, can I ask you something?" he said, his voice suddenly louder, nearer. He took both her hands, his eyes lifting to meet hers. In the overcast morning, with the gray fog that pressed against the living room windows, the brown irises were a darker, almost-black. There was an urgency within those eyes that Iman had not seen before, and she didn't know what to make of it.

Iman hesitated again. "Sure," she said.

"Well, it's not—I'm asking you to do something—"

"Beck," she sighed, "what is it, already?"

"I need you to forget about Julien, alright?" he said finally, with little breath in between the words, as if he were more focused on getting them out than Iman's understanding of them.

For a moment, Iman stayed there, her hands locked in Beck's, her eyes silently studying his tense expression. Beck was not the jealous type, but this didn't mean he was never jealous at all. She saw it sometimes, in the micro-expressions he made whenever the nickname Jules left her mouth, in the quiet way his attention seemed to slide intentionally elsewhere whenever she told him about that whatever-day that she spent at Julien's San Diego house in whatever-year. Beck was jealous sometimes, she knew, but never like this.

Beck stammered her name, but Iman was already up, tearing her hands from Beck's grasp and fleeing to the kitchen and trying at once to pace away her building anger, press it down and down into the floorboards with every step. She walked towards the fridge, pivoted around, walked towards the hall for a moment. When she returned, Beck was still sitting there, looking lost even in his own home.

When she had made the rounds two-and-a-half times, finally Beck called out: "He isn't safe."

"You say that now?" Iman snapped back, still pacing. She passed the fridge, a sudden jab of rotten egg scent hitting her in the face. "You've known he's a vampire all this time and now you decide to be afraid of him?"

"Immy, it's not like it was before!"

"Why, because now you want to run away?"

"Julien. Julien is not like he was before. That's what I meant by that."

"Before—" Iman tossed her head back, as if searching for divine intervention. She dipped her chin again, raising an eyebrow at Beck. "Before what?"

"He—" Beck stopped.

"He?"

"He's with that Sera girl again, I'm pretty sure. He's drinking human blood regularly; I can tell, since he looks the best I've ever seen him. I think..." Beck scrubbed a hand through his hair, seemingly unsure. "I'm pretty sure he joined Sera's clan, Iman."

Iman scoffed. "You prefaced all of that with I'm pretty sure. You don't know that, Beck. You don't know Jules at all. He's much stronger than Sera, he'd never—"

"Immy, babe. Listen to me, okay?" He was standing now, slowly rising from the couch, his hands twitching somewhat awkwardly at his sides. "I know you love him. I know you just want the best for him—and I get that, I do. But I need you to take a step back and just think for a second. Why else would he cut you off unless he didn't want you to know what he was up to?"

"He didn't cut me off—"

"He disappears for months," Beck went on, as if Iman hadn't interrupted, "no calls, no messages, nothing—and reappears again with a brand on his ribs, looking the healthiest he's been in ages. I don't know what else to tell you, Iman, but it just—ugh. I hate it as much as you do, but there's no other conclusion to draw."

A brand? The word rattled around in Iman's brain for a moment, echoing and echoing like the last verse of a distant song. Her balance threatened to cave; she caught herself against the kitchen island, half-leaning against a barstool. Sera's face floated behind Iman's eyelids, Sera's words still in her ears: Julien knows what he wants. I'm sure he's doing just fine.

And her last hiss, still sizzling in Iman's bloodstream like snake venom:

Maybe he's finally grown tired of you, Miss Patel.

Julien would never—would he?

A hand on her shoulder, gentle yet grounding. "Iman?"

"Forget about him?" she said then, her voice half a croak, like she was about to cry or had just finished crying. "I don't even know how to do that. I wanted him to—I wanted—"

Beck shushed her, said, "I know," even though he didn't know; nobody knew.

Iman wanted badly for Beck to be wrong, for if he was right, it would be like waltzing into an alternate universe, being thrown headfirst into a tumultuous whirlpool and emerging in a world where Julien, her Julien, was never the one she had known at all.

And she was not prepared for a world like that.