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“What is it?” I asked, staring from them to Jules. Who was still flexing his hands—his pink and healthy and obviously perfectly fine hands.
“My God,” Fred whispered.
“What?” I asked again, starting to worry. “It worked. He’s back to normal—”
“Normal?” Marco asked fiercely. “You call that normal?”
I looked at Jules, who finally looked up. His eyes were a little different as they met mine, bluer maybe. And his skin looked different, too, almost . . . sun kissed. If anything, he looked better than before.
“Yes?” I said, growing more confused by the second. “What do you call it?”
Jules gripped my hand again, and this time, his was . . . different, weaker, warmer. And I could swear I felt a pulse in the wrist he held against mine. And there were fine freckles, which a moment before, had been glamoured away. And—
No. No, it couldn’t be, I thought, staring at him in disbelief.
“Human,” Jules said hoarsely.
Chapter Twenty-six
I went back to bed.
Not because I wanted to. But the room had started to telescope around me when I tried to get up, and Marco had put his foot down. And then threatened to drag me if I didn’t go by myself.
I’d managed to avoid being carted off like a sack of potatoes, but only just. And now the ceiling of my bedroom seemed to be pulsing in and out, even with me flat on my back. It was kind of trippy, but it was also disturbing.
But not as much as what had just happened to Jules.
Oh God, what had I done?
It was a stupid question. I knew what I’d done. I’d stripped Jules of his master status, destroyed his position in the family, which was pretty much everything to a vampire, and reduced him to a servant at best, prey at worst.
I hadn’t just ruined his life; I’d destroyed his death.
And okay. He’d just finished saying how much he longed for a do-over, but that was Jules. He should have been an actor, because he was a drama queen and everybody knew it. And he’d been facing a situation where even a normal human life had probably looked pretty damned good by comparison. But tomorrow? The next day? The day he looked at his beautiful, unchanging face in the mirror and saw the first wrinkle?
I tried to tell myself that it would be okay. Once the ceiling stopped waving around, I’d figure everything out. I’d sit down and take his hands in mine and . . . and do the opposite of whatever I’d just done.
Except that I didn’t know what I’d just done.
It seemed like he should be just a slightly younger version of a vampire. But I hadn’t been trying to shave off a little time; I’d been trying to lift a curse. And some people considered vampirism to fall under that category. So maybe my power, which frequently had a mind of its own, had misunderstood.
And decided to lift all the curses.
That would explain the imagery of the book, which had been so different from the less-than-creative calendar flip my brain usually showed me when I time-shifted. But a calendar wouldn’t be appropriate if I was regressing Jules through his life rather than just through time. So it got clever and came up with a biography instead.
Okay, I could go with that.
But that still didn’t explain how I’d done it.
Or how to fix it.
I put an arm over my face, trying to block out the room, trying to block out everything. But it didn’t help. I still saw Jules’ panicked face—his human face. Because whatever the reason, he was free of the disease that caused vampirism.
So if I aged him, wouldn’t he age as a human? And what if I got another of those crazy power surges, like the one that had regressed him eighty years in a couple of seconds? He didn’t have immortality on his side anymore. He could end up an old man.
Hell, he could end up dead.
Like me, when Mircea found out.
