The Exorcism of Faeries (Morbid Realities, #1)

by J.L. Vampa

That was when Atta saw it. The blossom sprouting from his lungs. Not a phantom or a trick of the lamplight. Not even a seedling-looking thing one could pass off as an abnormal growth of some sort. No, it was a macabre bloom of foreign flora that had taken root in the man’s lung, and flowered.

“Sweet nightmares, you freak.”

Outside, the campus was bustling with students, a hint of the approaching autumn on the wind, stirring the leaves that would soon lose their chlorophyll and show the world how beautiful it is to die.

“Please don’t make me smack you in your stupid mouth.”

He spent entirely too long contemplating if Ariatne Morrow and her knowledge of the macabre and botanical was going to help him or royally fuck him over.

Emmy rolled her eyes and sat up on the bed. “I didn’t say slutty or that you have to fuck him. It has very little to do with who the man is, anyway. It’s about her, the woman in the scenario. When a woman feels sexy, she feels confident and in control. It puts a spell on men. It has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with power. It’s just another tool in a woman’s arsenal.” She laid back, resting on her elbows. “You clearly have the brains. Make people see you.”

Professor Sonder Murdoch was the cliff-jump that terrified, the majestic wolf that captivated, the risk you knew might kill you, yet you couldn’t pass it up.

Murdoch began writing on the board, his handwriting the sloppy mix of tight cursive and adolescence that indicated either a certain level of genius or psychopathy.

“It’s my understanding that you won’t have any classes at all if this partnership doesn’t work out, so keep up.”

“‘Fuckable in a scholarly way

“Sometimes fear cleanses the soul, Atta. It reminds us to look at the important things we took for granted while at peace.”

“Secret societies like to dabble in the arcane and ominous.”

“I need this in a real cup. It’s part of the reason I come here, they serve drinks in real cups.”

“Where did you get the samples you had taped in your research?” A little moth took flight in her abdomen, an aftershock of a migraine sprouting in her skull. “A friend gave them to me.”

Sonder chuckled. Low. Deep. Velvety. Atta froze. Oh fuck. She knew with absolute certainty where she’d heard that toe-curling laugh before.

If Sonder Murdoch was the dark lord, her soul was begging to be burned to ash.

She had the most peculiar feeling, looking in his eyes across the room, as if she was becoming the heroine of a Gothic novel.

Two lovers in one grave to feed the grove.”

He didn’t even turn off the car when he pulled up to the stately brick and column place housing a common-faced demon.

The Murdochs and their lamps.

A flitting faerie, a trooping creature of the Fae, sitting in the middle of an alcohol shelf next to a bottle of Absinthe—The Green Faerie.

“We are their puppets or else we’re their bones.”

“How I thought I was destined to be alone, but it turns out I was starving all these years, waiting for you?”

Loved each other countless times in countless other lives, other realities.

Humans in the crucible’,”

“Humans are the soil.”

“I’m shaking in my trousers.”

Liar, Liar, trapped in briar, sliced by thorns and thrown in the fire.

Digging into the recesses of her brain, all she could come up with was a fractured piece of a poem, old and splintered as weathered bones. . . . carved out eyes and teeth of thorns . . . fingers of fronds and bones of branches . . . curse of the felled Haunt of the Hawthorn

Tick, flick, tick. . .