100 Yellow Doors

december 3rd, 2019, 8:24 p.m.

    Iman hesitated, but picked up the book from where it rested beside Beck on the duvet. The book's jacket was gone, her fingers gritting against maroon buckram and gold lettering. Turning it over in her hands, she read, "The Catcher in the Rye."

    Beck laughed, but it was not the laugh she had grown to love. It was bitter, choked of its usual enthusiasm: a tourniquet strapped before a wound.

    When she felt the first cool, tender tear kiss the skin on the back of her hand, she looked up and Beck was weeping.

    The book thudded upon the rug. She didn't have the right words to say, and even if she ever had, they were locked away at that moment at the sight of Beck's face: a tense wrinkle of skin between his eyebrows, his blind eyes squeezed shut, mouth open in a perpetual gasp.

    Iman wiped his tears away, silent even as a rage-tinted sorrow welled up strong in her chest. Her father had always insisted she wasn't cursed, but now, holding Beck as everything he'd built up crumbled away from him again, she wasn't so sure.

    She made him eat a bowl of microwave mac and cheese (the only edible thing left in their pantry, really) and drink a glass of water, trying to pretend it wasn't hurting her to see him like this, a shell of himself, always giving the right advice—she remembered him telling her, please don't hate me when I beg you to eat something—but unable to follow it himself.

    When she was sure he was okay, or at least as okay as he could be at the moment, she stepped out into the hall, pulled up the newest contact on her phone, and hit call without a beat of hesitation.

    "Have you changed your mind?" asked Fritz immediately. Iman was standing with her back to the bedroom door, watching the sun set beneath the trees in vibrant shades of pink and purple and yellow—a sight Beck would never see again, she thought, before shoving the idea from her head. In her ear, Fritz went on: "I haven't turned many people before, but I can promise you this: Beck wouldn't make a bad vampire."

    Iman smirked to herself. "No, Fritz. Thanks again, but I think we're okay."

    A loud staticky sound, like he was letting out a particularly theatrical sigh. "Fine. Why are you calling me, then?"

    "I need you to do me a favor," said Iman. She walked to the living room, easing herself down onto the couch.

    "Anything."

    "Well, two favors."

    "Okay?"

    "One, I need you to come here and keep an eye on Beck while I'm gone. He needs someone right now to watch him and make sure he doesn't hurt himself."

    "Fair," agreed Fritz, clicking his teeth, "but where are you going?"

    "That's the second favor," said Iman. She closed her eyes. "Can you tell me where Jules is?"

Julien was drunk.

    He couldn't remember the last time he'd been drunk, or what it felt like, so he at least thought he was drunk. It was something about the noxious cocktail of pure alcohol and blood and blood containing high amounts of pure alcohol that put a slant in his walk and stars in his vision; he was stumbling home from Club Sanguine, half-conscious, the residue of his latest meal still sticky on his shirt.

    Sera hadn't wanted him to go home at all. Stay the night with me, won't you? Stay here. But even in his strangely detached state, Julien knew that the longer he stayed away from the townhouse, the easier it became to forget why he had ever left it in the first place. He had already given up so much; he refused to give up the entirety of himself.