The Exorcism of Faeries (Morbid Realities, #1)

by J.L. Vampa

Sonder stared at her, her hair blowing in the wind and making her look like an apparition. A dark faerie queen. Jesus Christ. He was falling in love with her.

He stood from his chair so quickly that his coffee cup fell to the floor and shattered. “What is it? Are you hurt?”

he knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that he would sacrifice anything, everything for her.

“Are you even listening to me?” he finally heard her say sharply. She popped a cube of cheese in her mouth. “Are you drunk?” “Only on you.” The words were out before he could stop them. She pouted, her brows furrowed with skepticism. “Go to bed, Murdoch.”

There is no failure here today, no matter the outcome. Understood?” “Yes, Professor Murdoch,” she droned in her most irreverent tone. “You might want to watch that smart mouth, Miss Morrow.”

Heat licked up her neck, despite that it was hardly the appropriate time for such things. “Or what?”

Retrieving the sandwich-making supplies, she pondered how peculiar it is that something transcendent, something unparalleled, can take place and yet humans still walk, breathe, move, live the same. Things like hunger and exhaustion should cease to exist in the face of the sublime, the tragic. And yet, there they are. It felt blasphemous.

It dawned on Atta then that he had chosen the name Achilles very carefully. It was artful, brilliant, and so fitting of the hierarchy and relationship between the two, wasn’t it? Agamemnon and Achilles. And a slap in the face. Things were beginning to make a lot more sense.

Atta watched his face. This man she hadn’t quite realised she’d fallen so hard for. “One time?” “One time.” “Am I a ‘one time’?” He looked wounded, his face dropping. “Atta. . .” “I’m sorry.” She waved a hand. “This is juvenile. I’m just tired.” Sonder took her wine glass and set it down on the table, kneeling in front of her for the second time that night. “Should I tell you then that I can’t stop thinking about you? That I haven’t thought of another woman since the first moment I saw you outside Achilles House with a corpse you’d cut open yourself?” He took her chin in his fingers. “Or how I have never thought of a woman the way I think of you?” He kissed her gently on the lips. “How I thought I was destined to be alone, but it turns out I was starving all these years, waiting for you?”

When they were spent and she lay curled in his lap, this beautiful window into another world, he lifted her chin with his fingers and gently kissed her lips. She looked up at him with those eyes he adored and his heart squeezed. “Do you know that I’m in love with you?” She smiled, the sleepy, blissful smile he knew was his. “I thought that might be the case, yeah.”

I want to drown in this love, darling, he’d told her one morning when she apologised for hogging the bed.

“You, a stór, are everything that is right with the

world. My world. With all the worlds. And don’t you dare apologise for it.”

Atta sighed and relaxed her cheek against his chest. “You know I’m in love with you too, right?” she said quietly, drawing small symbols on his abdomen. Wards, she realised drunkenly. Sonder kissed the top of her head. “I hoped so.”