100 Yellow Doors

august 20th, 2019, 2:03 a.m.

In his mind, there was a voice.

It was smooth, like nectar dripping from a petal, like a cool rush of wind on a snowy night, like a whisper under someone's breath. It was talking to him but it felt more like it was prodding at him, like it dangled a needle above his skin and it would soon pierce through. It would make him bleed, if he let it. He would bleed, if it wanted him to.

Julien, it said. That is not the name I gave you.

It's not?

It is the name I gave my son, and you are not my son.

Listen—

I do not listen to the devil, it screamed now. I do not! Leave me. Leave me and never come back, devil.

But—

Devil. Devil. Devil.

The needle probed, and probed again.

And he bled.

Julien awoke in a cold sweat. The bed sheets clung to his clammy skin, his dark hair lank against his forehead, hanging in his eyes. He listened for the voice, that voice that was so near yet so far, so familiar yet so foreign—only it was gone. All he heard was the whir of the ceiling fan above his head, the distant sounds of cars humming along the streets somewhere below him.

He sat up, mopped his mouth. He felt flushed, alive, still high off the feed. How long had it been since he'd done that? Fed from a living, breathing, person, not an animal snatched from a tree? He couldn't remember. He wasn't sure it mattered. All that mattered was that he never did it again.

Julien didn't recognize the room he was in. It was small, consisting mostly of the queen-size bed he now occupied and the desk not far to the left of it. Throwing the gray comforter back, Julien got to his feet, padding across the carpet. The desk was littered with binders, papers, and textbooks, and a whiteboard calendar hung above it, midterm dates already marked. Julien's attention zipped to the cork board beside the calendar. It was covered in pictures printed on shiny photo paper; Iman smiled back at him from in front of Big Ben, or from the middle of a massive concert crowd, her arm tossed around a friend's shoulder, or from an outdoor cafe, Beck's arms around her waist. Everywhere, she smiled, her brown eyes crinkled at the edges. She was such a happy little thing. Julien couldn't recall if he'd ever been so carefree.

"Not stealing my jewelry, are you?"

Julien didn't jolt, because he'd known she was there. He'd heard her footsteps as they came down the hall, heard her heart pounding, alive, in her chest, smelled her blood from several feet away. He was a predator; it was natural, now. What he didn't like about being a predator was that everything was potential prey—even his closest friends.

Julien turned. "This is your room, isn't it?"

Iman eased the door shut behind her, leaning her weight back against it. She was still in the pair of black jeans and shimmery blouse she had worn to dinner, silver earrings dangling from her ears. Her aliveness was something palpable, oozing from her skin like an irresistible aura. Had she always been that way, Julien wondered? Or was everything particularly assaulting at the moment?

Iman nodded. "You couldn't tell?"

Julien pushed a breath out through his teeth, which were finally dull now that his hunger had been satisfied. "No. Well, yeah, I just—sorry. I didn't mean to kick you out of your own place. I just kind of passed out."