Nocticadia

by Keri Lake

When I’d asked why she wore it all the time, she’d told me that the dead never harmed those who carried something that belonged to them.

A wiser man would’ve kicked her out of his class and avoided the inevitable headache that was sure to follow. I’d certainly never professed to be the wisest.

“The wealthy possess an insatiable appetite for the rare and priceless. They stare because you’re the only thing worth staring at.”

She was the warmth of the sun on a cold and rotting corpse. The first breath after a lifetime of death.

“Jealousy is a callow schoolboy’s emotion that ends in hard feelings and bloody noses. What I feel for you, Miss Vespertine, would destroy lives.”

took hold and climbed from my belly to my throat. “If you’re planning to kill him, know that I’ll kill you first,” I blurted before I could stop myself. Feral eyes lifted to mine, and he slowly lowered his arm. His lips twitched as if to smile. “Where I’m from, that’s called foreplay.” “Where I’m from, it’s a promise.”

“I have lived a lifetime in death–a cold existence in an endless void. Never feeling. Never knowing the warmth of touch. Every unfulfilling breath a suffocating reminder of how hollow I’d become. It wasn’t until you came along and cast the first ray of light that I felt a pulse of life. A pull that I couldn’t resist.” He thumbed the seam of my pressed lips. “Don’t ever hesitate to touch me, Lilia. You’re the only one who can. It was you who dragged my heart from this insensate slumber. And it’s you for whom it beats now.” Sighing, he stroked his hand down my hair, brows pulled tight. “It’s a fucking wreckage, though. Scarred and caged by ravaged bones. But it belongs only to you.”

For so long, I struggled to accept and give love. I’d become jaded. Stingy. Untrusting. And because I so rarely relinquished a piece of myself to others, it hurt worse when it was stolen away–the times when the world reached its greedy hand into my life and tore away the pieces of what I loved most. I’d come to learn that at the heart of life was suffering, and pain was an inevitable consequence of love. A slow gnawing ache that began the moment we dared to admit what it was. The shadow behind every adoring glance. The anguish that punctuated those fleeting moments of peace. Love was also a sickness. An incurable disease. The kind that crawled inside the muscles and bones, and persisted long after death.