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If reading Shakespeare taught her anything, Cal thinks, it should've been never to fall for someone impossible. It should've been guard your heart at all costs, Calliope, because forbidden love is never, ever worth it.
Only here she is, lying awake, thinking about Juliette. The quiet girl in English class, all neat sweaters and shy smiles. The girl who scooped a bee off her shoulder and asked her to a party in the most awkward way. The girl who kissed her in a kitchen like she was starved for it.
The girl Cal knows is just a facade that hides a monster, so why is she thinking about her at all? Her, like a person, like she's just another teenager. The only way Cal should think of a monster is in terms of the best way to hunt them, the best angle to drive the stake through their heart.
Juliette isn't a sweet girl in a blue sweater. She's a night crawler, walking in daylight. She carries blood pills in her pockets and can't touch silver without burning. She sank her teeth into Cal's neck. Her own veins act like a weapon, her blood paralysing at a touch.
Only Cal can't seem to forget about her. Can't keep her eyes away.
I can hear your heartbeat. It races when you lie.
Cal clenches her fist tight. Tries to remember the pain of fangs in her neck. Tries to remember this isn't a high school romance; this is a hunt, and it only ends one way. Her family doesn't give up. The Guild doesn't give up.
She kills Juliette, or she dies trying, and that's just the way it has to be. Never mind the memory of gentle hands on her shoulder, screw the voice telling her monsters don't care what happens to a bee. Fuck the kiss replaying in her head on a loop, or the way she can never find danger in Juliette's eyes.
Whatever this thing is, it's been doomed since before it started, doomed by a feud centuries long. Two houses, unalike in dignity, killers and the hunters who take them out before they can hurt anyone else. Killers and the killers who kill them, made different by their purpose, their mandate, the fragility of the lives they stand in front of, defending.
(Does humanity really need defending from Juliette?)
That's not a thought Cal will allow herself. Juliette's a vampire. Of course it does.
It doesn't matter what her heart says. She's read enough to know: this is the kind of narrative that spells doom from the start.
Girls don't crush on vampires and come out of it safe and sound. Feuds always kill the people who dare cross the battle lines. Obsession is deadly, and often, so is love.
But Juliette runs. Juliette takes Cal's hand and turns her back on her father and runs, and Cal tries to remember all the stories that told her running dooms you, too, but her head's full of strange dreams and hook-ups in the forest and the smile Jules gives her when she smashes the school door.
She's fallen for the trap, a distant part of her brain recognises. She's a cliché. She's a girl ignoring all the warning signs for the sake of her naïve teenage heart. She's everything she despises in the movies, everything she rolled her eyes at when straight girls did it on TV.
But it doesn't matter. She's already in too deep.
Cal looks every probable doom in the face and ignores every blaring warning sign to chase another moment with Jules, and she knows her past self would hate her for it, but her past self had never felt first love, strong and bold and blazing. The rush of it. The kind of rush Icarus felt before his wings melted, maybe. The rush that drove Romeo and Juliet to their graves. The heartbeat of joy Orpheus felt, a moment before realising he doomed Eurydice forever.
Maybe it's all of those things and maybe it's none. Maybe it's just that Cal loves Juliette. Against all logic, against all reason, against all goddamn common sense, she loves her.
So she brushes off the narrative that dooms them and falls into the moment, arms spread wide, like she's the first person ever to love anyone at all.