Inside her bedroom, pink and purple lights hung along her walls and mapped her ceiling, casting all in a pearly, pastel glow not unlike her own. Bohemian-style pillows piled a queen-sized bed.
Gently, I laid her on the busy yellow-and-blue paisley quilt comforter.
Helena murmured, lids fluttering, her fingers curling into the fabric of my cloak, signs that told me she remained awake. Yet another surprise.
Though I extracted my arms from her, relinquishing her to the mattress, she clung to me, hands slipping to grip the collar of my robes, tendrils of her soul constricting around the dark limbs of mine.
Her essence spiked mine with more of that summer burn, thawing and searing me, like I’d frozen to death eons ago and forgotten what it was like to step into warm waters.
Fuck, she felt good—like a tropical breeze laced with pure morphine.
Heaven, if it existed, wasn’t a realm I ever planned on experiencing, but damn if this didn’t come close.
Helena.
Desperate to end this before I gave in and forked my spirit over to hers, I rasped her name with my soul, which I loosened from hers—tentatively. My hope was that she’d show me mercy, that hers would follow suit and loosen in turn. It did the opposite, tightening and tugging on mine, the true devourer.
Her spirit proved strong, and something akin to a gasp escaped me as I caught and braced myself above her with skeletal hands asshe clung to me with both body and spirit, our souls entangled in a way that threatened to unravel me. Then that yellow essence of hers began to heat and temper mine, bringing a fever infused with her emotions: hope, sadness, fondness, and, yes, fear.
That fear, though, it wasn’t the kind sheshouldhave been entertaining—the one surrounding the dark unknown. Instead, as I read her spirit’s inherent nakedness with mine, unwilling to rip free of her, I identified a trepidation that fascinated me and scalded me with its potency. One surrounding her last wishes.
Sometimes, when I took souls, they echoed with their final desires—always unfulfilled.
Normally, time was out when they entered my grips.
That was not the case with Helena.
Her last wishes floated through me like gentle echoes. A day with her best friend. A visit with her parents. Strawberry shortcake.
And a kiss… withme.
The fear I’d picked up on, unfathomably, it surrounded not her death, or the thought that she wouldn’t get any of her wishes, but my reaction to them. Her last one.
She feared my rejection.
She had no way of knowing that, if I was ever granted a final wish, I’d want the same.From her.
So I did the last thing I should have done and I surrendered when, despite that inconceivable fear, one of her hands released its hold on my collar to enter the darkness of my hood. Her palm, warm, found the cheek I did not possess while, with her other hand—still fastened tight around my collar—she drew me down to her.
Like the pull of death itself, I couldn’t have denied her even if I’d wanted to.
Still, nothing could have prepared me, either.
In kissing me, pressing her soft lips to the bare bones of my teeth, she detonated my soul, ruining it—and me—for all the rest of time. And I let her. Welcomed the complete annihilation of the being Ihad been up until this point. A compromise to what I wanted to do in return—which was to retake my human form and kiss her back, show her just how sweet death could taste.
I’d already sworn to myself I wouldn’t dare.
The repercussions fromthiskiss, the knowledge that there would never be another, would haunt me enough through eternity.
My now-trembling soul thudded in the simultaneously cruel and benevolent grips of hers, mimicking a phantom heartbeat, like her touch had the opposite power of mine—to restore life to the ravaged rather than to sweep up after the desolation of death.
No entity in either heavenorhell could ever have destroyed me more thoroughly.
After this latest forbidden action, themostforbidden of all I’d taken or allowed up to this point, I couldn’t see her again. Not until it was time. Or dare to do more… I would.
So I reciprocated this unearned affection, this humbling last wish, by kissing her back with my soul instead, sending nearly the whole of my essence rushing into her, my freezing spirit scouring her suddenly scorching one, enwrapping it, braiding with it, piercing it, entangling with it, clenching it tight.
With this invasion, the softest and most enticing murmur of pleasure escaped my librarian.
