Nocticadia

by Keri Lake

It was a silly superstition my mother had told me once. She’d always worn a ring of my grandmother’s strung on a necklace. 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. I didn’t even believe in God, but my mother did, and a part of me felt compelled to keep the rosary for that reason.

“What separates monsters from good men is only a matter of perspective. In your eyes, I’m a sick fuck for what I’ve done to you. But I, on the other hand, see you as a parasite.”

“You think they’re staring at you because you’re poor?” He buried a smirk in his drink and tipped back a long swill that emptied the glass. His jaw flexed with the clenching of his teeth as he swallowed. “The wealthy possess an insatiable appetite for the rare and priceless. They stare because you’re the only thing worth staring at.”

Calling her beautiful was like calling the sun lukewarm. She’d blazed like the hottest part of a flame in that dress. And fuck me, I’d felt the heat.

Whatever the hell was going on with me had shifted into something unrecognizable. Something dark and violent, and at the center of it was a troublesome girl, with her ridiculous berry lips that I wanted to bite, who’d somehow corrupted me. A crafty little shit who’d bulldozed right through my defenses.

His brow winged up, and he strode off in the direction of the exit. “And so the moth befriended the flame.”

“Deep waters terrify me.” “Or perhaps it’s the sea who fears the depths of you, Miss Vespertine.”

“Passions are useless, if we pursue them for others. They become obligations. Undesirable.”

“To answer your question about why I didn’t leave you in the gardens that night, I find you to be an intriguing annoyance.” “I guess that’s appropriate, coming from a man I find to be brilliantly antisocial,” I quipped.

“Under different circumstances …” The pause in his words carried a laborious heartbeat that smothered my own, as I watched the slightest smile play on his lips. A beat of hesitation. “I might’ve pursued you.” A nervous rush of breath escaped me. I gripped the strap of my bookbag in some faulty attempt to hold my composure, and swallowed past the dryness in my throat. “And I might’ve let you.”

“Forgive me. You’re the first thing I’ve felt in a long time.”

Some kisses were said to feel like fireworks. His felt like a slow-drip anesthetic, silently siphoning my senses, until all I could smell, taste, and feel was him. I held his biceps, as he ate the breath from my mouth and ran his palms over my exposed skin. He pulled me closer still, kissing me with such passionate fervor that my knees weakened. I’d never been kissed by a man. Boys, yes. But never a man. Not even Ghostboy, who was technically an adult, held a candle to Professor Bramwell’s skill and mastery. The way he teased with his tongue, and held me as if I were fragile porcelain. It was right then that I realized, I’d never truly been kissed before, at all.

“The dead themselves are harmless. It’s what they leave behind that inspires fear.”

“You’re a sickness inside of me that begs never to be cured. Infecting me with this unshakable craving for things I shouldn’t want.”

“You’re going to destroy me. And I won’t stop you. It feels too fucking good to stop.”

“Every inch of you is something new to explore. A new texture. A new curve. Sensations I’ve been robbed of for so long.” In tiny circles, he painted an inescapable pleasure that left me in a dizzy lust. “Goddamn it, your skin is like fine silk. I could spend hours touching you and never tire of it.”

“And because I’m a selfish prick who has to live with the fact that I cannot have you to myself, I’m going to ruin you so that any boy who comes after me will leave you deeply unsatisfied, and you’ll be left fucking your own fingers, desperate to remember the time you had your professor’s face between your legs.”

Bramwell was right. He’d ruined me. Destroyed me from the inside out, and there wasn’t a chance in hell that I’d ever feel something so raw and thrilling and forbidden again.

“Did you think I’d feel sorry for you? That I’d be gentle? I feel this torture every fucking time you walk into a room.”

“So, I don’t feel sorry for you, Lilia. In fact, it warms my dirty bastard soul to know you ache this way.”

“I don’t give a damn about every other girl. There’s only one who crosses my mind a fuck-ton more than she should. So, I’m going to finish you, Lilia. I’m going to give you the release you’ve been craving, and I won’t touch you again. But this pussy belongs to me. You let any other undeserving prick near it, and I will cut out his tongue and send it to you in a specimen jar.”

“You should probably hate me right now,” he said, his voice stained with remorse. “I probably should. But I don’t.” With a mirthless chuckle, he shook his head. “Here, I thought it was the moth who would succumb to the fire.”

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

And therein hid the tragic reality of just how tempting she’d become—if fucking her meant an eternity in hell, I’d welcome damnation with a goddamn smile.

And I hated myself for that. Hated that I was so hungry for passion, starving for the need to feel so much at once, that I could even fathom letting him slice me open that way like one of his dead corpses, somehow brought back to life by his skilled hands. It was too much and not enough.

“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.”

We were forbidden. Scandalous passion and the ache of longing, wrapped in a blazing fire too powerful to smother.

If Heaven existed, I'd found it in those ancient, dark hallways, under cold misty skies with autumn's wet leaves sticking to the soles of my boots, in the scent of coffee and old books. And him. My moody and devilishly handsome professor.

Over her shoulder, she shot me a smile–one so fucking beautiful, I wanted to frame it. Capture it. Study the alchemy of it. How wonderfully intoxicating one simple expression could be.

I watched in awe as she let the sea seduce her, tickle her into a giggling young girl, dancing, hopping, and tumbling in the waves. It was there that my failures and her worries were swept away, cleansed by the salt and air and the sounds of calm that reverberated off the surrounding rock walls. It was there that I began to wonder if what I felt for Lilia was something more than I cared to admit. I dared not slip into those thoughts, though, because I knew fate and the world didn’t give so freely. It lured us on a siren’s call and pulled us to the inevitable depths of pain that followed. Lilia was a liability. A weakness. The one crack in my armor that threatened to crumble my defenses. I couldn’t afford that. Not when The Rooks were watching so closely, waiting for the news of my latest variant. Yet, the radiance she gave off was fucking addicting. A warmth that reminded me how cold death could be sometimes.

A stabbing pain pierced my chest, and I rolled onto my back, staring up at the birds–ravens–circling overhead. An omen of death. This is it.

“Perhaps the most vindictive torment was having a brief moment of knowing what you felt like.”

“You’re the fever in my veins,” he said through clenched teeth, as he drove into me with furious determination. “An incurable madness I can’t shake.

You’ve infected every part of me, and I can’t stop. I can’t stop this obsession.”

“No. No quiet sounds from you. I want to hear you fucking scream. You’re in the throes of fire now, Little Moth. Show me how much it burns.”

“You are a merciless vision of perfection.”

“You don’t have to be scared. I will never hurt you, Lilia. In fact, I’ll rain hell on anyone who ever hurts you again.” I loved him. Every cell, every fiber of my being couldn’t hide that truth. Even if I wasn’t bold enough to say it or brave enough to risk the universe stealing it away from me, the words were as real as my fears. The words I kept secret like all my other trinkets–safely tucked away.

But wasn’t that the way of happiness? Perhaps the reason there was always a black void on the horizon. Because I was doomed for loneliness.

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t fucking do it, because all I could think about, all that mattered to me, was the girl. The beautiful girl with her autumn hair, and eyes that reminded me of both the sea and the sky. And she was everything. The earth, the sun, the moon. The air I breathed, and the tenacious beat that kept my eroded heart pumping. What I felt for Lilia wasn’t healthy. Beyond simple obsession, it was a sickening possession. Savage and rapacious, bordering on violence.

“There was … the briefest moment … when I was running toward that room. Your screams had silenced. And I thought—“ Lips pressed to a hard line, he flashed me a sullen scowl that tore at my heart. He shook his head, refusing to say it. “That was the first time I truly felt that something could hurt me. That I could be brought to my knees. I don’t ever want to feel that again, Lilia.”

I stroked a hand across his dampened forehead, studying the adoration I refused to see before. The veneration of a powerful man. One the monsters in my head feared the most. It was in that moment, I believed him when he said he belonged to me. Like a vast ocean claimed by a single grain of sand. My dark sea. The mystifying depths that both captivated and terrified me. 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. As much as I wanted to bury the love of my mother, to harden myself so I wouldn’t have to face the crippling truth, I couldn’t. Burrowed deep into the roots, it blossomed from the wounds of my broken heart, tearing through the stitches that burned with memories of those who’d tried to hurt me. Sometimes, the pain was too much to bear. But sometimes it felt good, because it meant that I was capable of feeling ...

I hadn’t come to Dracadia with any notion of falling in love with my professor, or Death, as some had referred to him. Perhaps that was the nature of the world, to take so cruelly, then swoop in and blindside us when we least expected it. There was an implicit truth in the dead teaching the living, though. It was my mother, my refusal to accept her death, to accept what the world had taken from me, that had brought me to Dracadia in the first place. And it was there that I’d faced death head-on. So smitten, I fell in love with him–his abrasive heart and blood-stained hands. The dangerous and erudite professor, with fiery eyes and cold steel flesh. We hid away in shadows, stealing kisses under midnight stars. He taught me passion and courage, and to seize what I wanted by the teeth. And in return, I taught him to feel again.