Nocticadia

by Keri Lake

He’d shown up about four years ago and stuck around like an ugly mole on my ass–the kind with a cancerous core.

The guy was a creep sundae with a rotten, moldy cherry.

I could’ve just signed my soul away to the guy and I didn’t care, so long as the class stopped looking at me like the fly who shat on their birthday cake.

Cat groaned, snapping her book shut and setting it aside. “I knew it was a bad idea inviting an outsider. For fucks sake, she probably reads vampire smut.”

What does vampire smut have to do with this??

He didn’t flinch beneath the accusation. “Don’t fuck with me, Miss Vespertine. You want to play hardball? Know that mine are made of steel.” “That sounds painful.”

Apparently, Jesus didn’t like spies, and that was fine with me.

And above that, on the wall hung a plaque with the Latin phrase: Mortui vivos docent. I recognized it from a forensics class I’d taken two semesters ago. The dead teach the living.

“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.”