I was staring at an empty bottle of rum—someone had left three-fourths of it in the dressing room—when Jacob rapped at the door.
“We need to talk,” he said. It was the voice he used when I was in shit and he had to be the manager of the year and change my diapers.
“Go away,” I said. Then I thought better of it. “Actually, can you bring Tricky in here?”
There was a pause. “Tricky gave me something to give to you. I don’t know what it is. It’s wrapped up in tinfoil.”
Bingo. I got up and opened the door, smiling lazily. Jacob leered at me.
“Such a trollop,” he said before he quickly shoved me back inside the room and squeezed in through the door, slamming it shut behind him so hard the walls shook.
I raised my brows, suddenly uneasy. “What the hell is wrong with you? Where’s the tinfoil?” I asked, noticing his hands were empty.
He marched right over to me and grabbed me by the shirt collar then spun me around until the back of my head hit the wall. “Fuck, Jacob,” I grimaced as the room spun.
“Fuck you,” he grunted. “Fuck you for being you.” He shoved into me once more, his face as red as his hair and sweat beading at his temples, before removing his hands and walking to the opposite side of the room, his fists closing and unclosing at his sides.
I watched him pace back and forth like a caged animal. I was sobering up fast, unsure of what he was going to say or what he was going to do next. So I shut my mouth, smoothed out the collar of my shirt, and waited.
Jacob stopped in the middle of the room, gaudy checkered-suit-back to me, and stared at a framed picture on the wall, one of the Nice waterfront.
“Did you know I lived in France a really long time ago?” he asked, voice dry but pleasant. Calm. It was unsettling.
“No,” I said slowly. “You speak shit French for someone who did, though.”
“My French is perfect, you wanker. I just choose not to speak it. I worked in a manor, just north of here, outside the town of Grasse. I was the butler to a wealthy family who owned one of the perfumeries. They grew a lot of lavender. Had a lot of money. They also had a young daughter, Yvette, who was beautiful, smart…they wanted her to marry rich, marry well.”
This was starting to sound like a Jane Austen novel. “Uh, when was this?”
“Last century,” he said matter-of-factly.
I blinked. “Right. But Max said that you don’t remember all your lives.”
He still didn’t turn around to face me but clasped his hands behind his back. “He was oversimplifying. He’s not been around as long as I have. You often do, just not all of them and not all of it. But you remember the important ones. I remembered this job because I failed.” He paused, his head turning slightly so I could see his profile. “I failed Yvette because I thought I was all she needed. I was her guide at the time, you see. She was being plagued by visions, visits from the other realm. Slowly, carefully, I revealed who I was and how I could help her. I taught her how to use the Thin Veil, how to communicate, and sometimes, how to help the dead who were lost. But in those visits to the Veil, and every time she opened herself up to another realm, there were spirits—and worse, demons—that would come over. They tormented her. They made her feel insane. And I was all she had.”
He sighed and looked to the ground. “Except there was a boy. Her friend. He was lowly, to her family anyway, and worked on the farm picking the flowers for pressing. Jacques. But they were close—she loved him, even though she had to hide it from her family, and he loved her. Still, she never confided in him what she’d been going through. I told her not to. I thought I was protecting her, that Jacques wouldn’t understand, that he wouldn’t be there for her at any rate. I was her Jacob. It was my job to help her through—no one else’s.”
He slowly turned around to face me, and I saw a vulnerability in his hardened, pockmarked face that I hadn’t seen before. “She killed herself one morning. Drowned herself like Ophelia in the creek outside the property. She told me she was going to do it, too, I just didn’t realize how serious she was. She said she was sick of being alone through this. Even though I was there with her, I wasn’t like her. I wasn’t mortal. And most of all, she did not love me. She loved Jacques. And she slowly went mad without him there to shield her from it. The ghosts, the madness, this impossible life she’d been living. Had I just told her to confide in him, to involve him, maybe she wouldn’t have died. Maybe just knowing that she wasn’t suffering alone would have been enough to save her. Her ghost haunted me for a very long time…decades, even, through many lives. Just reminding me of the time I failed.”
Walking over to me, he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a flask. He unscrewed the cap and took a long swig before handing it to me. I took it gingerly, afraid to partake. He nodded at it. “It’s one-hundred-year-old scotch,” he said. “Have some.”
I did. Nothing tasted smoother.
He took it back from me and took another shot, wiping his mouth with the edge of his sleeve. “Sage, I don’t want to fail with Dawn. I don’t want her to think she’s alone in this.”
“She has Max…and you. And she has me.”
“No,” he said with a sad shake of his head. “She doesn’t have you. You’re somewhere else, as you always are. You’re trying to take the easy way out again, trying to escape. You did it when you were in Hybrid. You did it in Hybrid A.D. And you’re doing it now. Whenever life throws you a curveball, you run and you hide and—though you may be standing here right now, though you were standing on that bloody stage playing your music that at that moment meant nothing to you—you’re numb to living.”