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“Are you feeling well?”
“Eh?” Jillian Littner looked up from over the edge of her teacup, her eyes wide in that expression she held whenever she was called out of a daydream, or from deep thoughtfulness. She blinked, then looked down at her tea with a rueful expression. “Oh, I can still taste it! I’m fine. I was just… thinking.”
It was unusually careless of him. He hadn’t meant to make her think about her fading senses, although any discomfort over that idea was very unlike him–yet was becoming like him. He did not like to think about that.
Caesar watched the young woman across the table as she took another, purposeful sip, as if to emphasize her words with the sheer normality of it.
I’m fine.
She was not fine.
Humans lied. Despite her innocent face, Jillian lied, and had lied to him , lied about something as major as the true wish behind her contract. She was as twisted as any other human that dealt with devils, obsessed with an idol that she was only now beginning to realize existed only in her mind. Her price was fair, if heavy and cruel–that was what should be expected when asking for the power of an Eternal Devil.
Caesar knew all this, and yet, seeing the girl sitting before him in her pure white garb, giving him a quick smile that didn’t reach her furrowed brows without setting her teacup down, none of it felt true.
He could tell she thought he was looking away as he lifted his own teacup. She couldn’t see his eyes from under the frayed hood. Her face did interesting things when she thought he wasn’t watching her. Right now, she’d moved her lips slightly in an almost frown, the wrinkles between her eyebrows deepening as her eyes stared through the tablecloth, heavy with thoughts he couldn’t see. Other than her unfocused eyes, this was very similar to a face she wore fairly often, mainly if Mayor Burrows or Inspector Jino was around. She’d even worn it around him at first, after the one she’d worn when they had first met–where she bit her lip and averted her eyes from him, rubbing her arms as if cold–had begun to fade in his presence. He thought it was perhaps of unhappiness or even annoyance at first, but as he suspected was the case now, it seemed to be one of deep thoughtfulness, possibly tinted by regret.
She took another small sip, covering the not-quite frown for a moment. He watched, looking as always for some clue, something that would make Jillian understandable and predictable and like every other human he’d known. Even after experiencing thousands of human contractors asking for the same power that she had, with the same reasons and expectations, Jillian was difficult for him to read.
She should have been exactly the same, but she wasn’t , and he couldn’t place why .
He knew she was lying to him, but was beginning to think that, unlike most humans he had dealt with who lied with intention , to manipulate, with a goal in mind to trick their target into giving up, that she wasn’t truly aware of it. As she made decisions with a pointed eyebrows and a tightly held jaw and took steps without faltering in public, but crumpled into herself when she thought she was alone, he had begun to suspect that she was lying to herself as well.
She genuinely believed that she was telling the truth; and did not understand that the vulnerable movements where she curled up in an armchair in the dark and hugged her legs to herself, were manifestations of doubt gnawing at her. If that were so, it would mean that Jillian, as most humans claimed but few humans abided by, valued the truth as a major, inviolable virtue, one she believed she was holding true to, yet on a subconscious level, knew that she was not. This idea that she was a liar who felt it, but did not recognize it, gave her a new, unexpected depth that felt a bit as if the floor underneath him had suddenly cracked, and that he needed to be wary of where he placed his next step.
Jillian was in a world she should have never known, one where death was decreed by a simple, pointed nod from a cruel man, where a young girl was torn to pieces by a devil that now walked beside her, where another devil demanded that she give up everything that made her exist to protect a man she despised. She should have lived and died an ordinary life, the type that Caesar would never have thought about for even a fraction of a millisecond in another million years alive.
He knew one thing for certain as she finally set her teacup down, and her graceful fingers that so often danced across piano keys reached for one of the thin biscuits on the nearby blue porcelain tray. But he wondered when , exactly, she had stopped being afraid of him.
She chewed on the cookie with a softened expression–she had made up her mind to speak and free the thought that had been pushing her eyebrows and mouth into sharp angles. “Um, Caesar, do devils have birthdays?”
It wasn’t what he’d expected, but he didn’t know what he had expected, if anything. He took a moment before answering as he placed his teacup back in the saucer. Unlike Jillian, it did not make a sound, despite the links of his chains sliding against each other with an annoying noise to make up for it. It was a movement he had made over a billion times before whereas she, in her brief existence of fifteen or so years, had surely only done it a handful of thousands. He mused, considering the question, before finally answering, “If we do, I do not remember it.”
“Hmm.” She took her teacup in both hands again and had another sip. Her expression had slipped back into the thoughtful one, but this time, without annoyance, without doubt; she’d made up her mind on something he wasn’t sure of. He waited for her to express it, she finally did, settling the cup back in a soft clink. “That’s a little sad… so you’ve never experienced a birthday party?’
“I have not.” Like her lie, he didn’t understand the meaning behind the questions. He clarified, unsure why, “A year passes for me faster than a blink of an eye for you. It does not seem necessary to celebrate myself, certainly not repeatedly or so often.”
Logic did not seem to change her opinion.
“So you’ve never celebrated?” She seemed bewildered by the concept, her eyes wide as he nodded. “Ah, that’s really sad! You should, at least once–”
She cut herself off, her brow furrowing back into the late night armchair expression, darkness falling over her face like the blanket he’d tucked around her as she slept in it without understanding why he’d bothered. “Sorry… I guess I’m being childish.”
“You are young,” he replied, lifting his cup again, “and I do not mind that.”
Unexpectedly, her face lightened again, the way it had–in a much more subdued manner–as she’d snuggled into that blanket, falling into a deeper sleep as he silently watched her, unable to place his thoughts in a pattern that made sense. “Then–can I give you one?”
“A party?” he queried after a small sip, “or a birthday?”
“Um, both, I guess.” Her cheeks were pink, and she wasn’t looking at him again with the small lip bite that said she hoped he wasn’t looking at her, either. “I mean, they should go together, right? You need one to have the other.”
She paused, her face falling as she looked back at him, then even further away, her grip on the cup tightening. The shy pink was moving to an embarrassed red. “Ah, is this overstepping…”
“I do not mind,” he replied, surprising himself in both that he didn’t, and that he had told her so. “Did you have a date in mind?”
Her eyes lit up again, although her cheeks remained the darker pink. “Um, let me think…”
She tapped a finger on her lip as she looked up, thoughts he imagined he could almost see running through her large eyes before she looked back at him with a bold smile. “Ah, March 15–that’s the historical figure Julius Caesar’s birthday. Would that maybe work?”
“Twas not his birthday,” he answered calmly, taking another sip. “It was the day of his assassination.” He remembered it, although he had been contracted to a farmer, rather than a senator, at that time.
The red blossomed on her cheeks again. “Oh! I–I’m sorry, that’s so inappropriate–I guess I should’ve paid more attention in class…”
“The Ides of March is now known as an inauspicious day of misfortune and dread,” he mused aloud, watching from under his hood as Jillian’s face fell further, as if sinking into the red that colored it. “It seems appropriate for a devil, such as myself, as we are usually the causes of such things rather than fearful of them.”
Her face lifted more than he’d expected to, her brow still bent with worry, but the smile underneath was warm and genuine and the red was fading like a memory. “Then I’ll definitely celebrate with you then. I can make a cake and–”
She stopped abruptly. Everything on her face disappeared as if it had been wiped away, leaving an empty place that gave him no clues to what was happening behind it.
In a much quieter voice, she finished her sentence in a different way than she’d started it. “–If I’m still… around, that is.”
He knew there wasn’t a way he could respond to that. Of course he would fulfill his contract, and Jillian would be at his side until her body broke entirely alongside his restraints and left her as an empty shell, unable to feel or interact with the world let alone celebrate or bake cakes, completing the contract with the full payment for it. It was what had been decided.
Before he knew her, he had decided.
He took another sip of tea with a calm he did not feel, and the meandering, unusual thought he had already denied before came back.
He could take her. He could take her into his space, letting her shell of a body remain behind like the sleeping princess of fairy tales, as empty as a corpse. The faded ghost of her soul could wander beside him in that space, asking him questions about each portrait, saying things he found strange and unusual, unlike any contractor he had had before because she was unlike any contractor he had had before. He could keep her there until she chose to fade away and become another memory, living on only as a portrait until he forgot her name, then his, then everything.
It would not work. He did not know why he even indulged such thoughts.
He shifted. “Jillian, would you like more tea?”
“Ah–oh, yes, please,” she said, the small, polite smile attempting to cover her face and failing. “Thank you.”
As he poured, and she thought he was not looking at her, the polite smile changed, morphed into one of an expression he fully could not understand.
It would not work.
But still, he wondered as her lips lifted again in thanks and she held her teacup again in both hands, as if it could warm her, what if it could?