Tempt the Stars

in here, screaming and screaming, but there’s only been silence and—oh God. Oh, Cassie, oh God!”
    “This isn’t possible,” I told him numbly. I wasn’t a vampire; I couldn’t mind-speak. Well, with anyone but Billy Joe, and even he had to be in residence. When he was outside my body, I had to talk to him like anyone else.
    “Well, you’re doing it!” Jules said frantically. “And I can’t—I haven’t been able to talk to anybody. I’ve been calling and calling, but nobody answered. I didn’t even try you; I don’t know why. I guess I didn’t think you could do it—”
    “I
can’t
do it.”
    “Then what do you call this?”
    I had no idea.
    “What’s going on?” Marco demanded. “Who are you talking to?”
    I hadn’t realized that I’d closed my eyes again, but I opened them to see him frowning from a crouch beside me, his bulk blocking out half the room.
    “Jules. Can’t you hear him?”
    “No.” Marco didn’t look happy about that, and neither was I, because I’d learned the hard way that anything in magic I didn’t understand could and probably would come back to bite me. But there were more important things right now. Only I still didn’t know what I could—
    And suddenly, it was all there, laid out in front of me. Instead of the dim living room, and the ring of glowing, vampire eyes, I saw something like an old book. Not grimoire-old, but a flashy paperback, like one from the thirties, with a lurid cover and boldface type. I didn’t get a chance to read the title, because a wind came up, and the pages started ruffling. The book opened.
    It was about Jules.
    Days like sentences, months like paragraphs, years like pages flipping in the wind, going back, back, back through Jules’ whole life. Like an autobiography written in flesh.
    “What—how are you—” Jules choked.
    “I’m . . . not sure.” But when I put out a hand, and stopped a page, suddenly I wasn’t seeing the book anymore. I was seeing him.
    I saw a boy on a farm where no rain fell, but where billowing sheets of sand swept over the landscape, burying the farmhouse up to the windows. I saw him bundled into an old jalopy by his parents, along with half a dozen siblings like little stair steps, with the mother’s belly already rounded with the next. I saw them flee their ruined home for a brighter future in a promised land. Which only led to a life of backbreaking labor when they could get it, hunger, scorn, and constant motion.
    “But I had a talent,” Jules said softly.
    “Your face.”
    I saw it change as he grew, a random ordering of genetics that took his mother’s thin features and his father’s florid ones and crafted exquisite perfection. Enough to make people stop and stare at the ragged little boy with the angelic features. And suddenly, they all wanted to help.
    Money, a place to spend the night, work for the father, new clothes . . . The family received assistance again and again from people who thought they were being charitable, but who were really just charmed by a boy learning to use his greatest talent. It took him far—
    “A little too far,” Jules said quietly.
    He wasn’t exaggerating. Hollywood, parties, drinking binges, the pages flipped, and Jules changed. His father’s floridity started to show up around the edges as the big roles, the meaty ones, the ones that would make his name and fortune, went elsewhere. Until the day he ended up on a ledge, looking down. And wondering how to fall to ensure that his perfect face survived the jump.
    “Mircea talked you down,” I said, seeing Mircea walking along the ledge, looking exactly the same except for a twenties-era suit with too short lapels. He was as sure-footed as if he were strolling down a street, despite the fact that they were twelve stories up.
    “Not exactly,” Jules confessed. “I was too drunk to see reason, and he tired of talking to a potential asset that seemed determined to destroy himself.”
    “What did he do?”
    Jules laughed, a bright sound that seemed more than strange in the circumstances. “He threw me off.”
    And he had. The next instant, I saw him pick Jules up by the shirtfront and casually drop him over the side, all with a faint smirk on his face. And then use vampire speed to catch him before he hit the ground.
    Just.
    “He’d heard that a lot of the people who commit suicide regret it halfway down,” Jules told me, with a catch in his voice. “He wanted to find out if it was