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Aradia is lace and butterfly wings. I am stone and gargoyle horns.
She is innocence personified. I am violent love with an unbeating heart.
When I growl, she smiles. And shivers with a fearful thrill.
When I cock my head and stare at her, she tilts her naive little head and stares back with the curiosity of a thousand cats.
If I keep her, I’ll ruin her and damn her soul to haunt me in Purgatory for eternity.
Out of the corner of my eye, Crescendo strides up next to me and lifts a brow, noticing my attention riveted on Aradia. He crooks a smile to one side and changes his tune to Sleep Token’sRain.
I bare my teeth in a silent snarl. The bastard just smiles. Fuck it all if the song is too fitting for the moment, for the damn trance she has on me.
Her tears fall onto the damp moss, already blotted from floral weeping.
Any moment now, little Aria.
After what seems an eternity, she rises. She spins. What the ever-bloody fucking heart of gods-damned Purgatory? She spins a full 360.
And with teary, flushed cheeks and her hand squeezing the life out of mine, Aradia looks me right in the eye and gushes, “Oh, Archer! It’s so beautiful! They’re all sobeautiful!”
“I knew it!” Crescendo yells and starts playing Zedd’sClarity.
I take a swipe at him, but the bastard ducks and wags his finger, blowing me a kiss.
“Hey,” Aradia pouts and lifts her hand, needing to stand on her tiptoes so she may cup my cheek. “You promised to be nice.”
“Did I?”
With how my cock stirs to a restless throb, I’m hardly in the mood to benice.
She pauses, those mesmerizing orbs glassy from her tears. Harps and hearts, she tilts her head and presses her lips into a smile, and I’m relieved when she drops her hand and cups her cheeks. “For me?”
I glance at Crescendo, who simply paces with his hands folded behind him, whistling away to his latest,Rewrite the Starsfrom The Greatest Showman. She gives him a sweet eye roll. He shrugs innocently.
Gods, these two will be the death of me!
For all the bloody Valentines,she’s the same wherever I take her!
In the Cathedral of Curses, she listened to the confessions of the souls and offered them counsel while validating their suffering. Cherub butts and bows, I tossed her over my shoulder before she could start officiating marriage ceremonies!
I thought for certain the Lake of Veiled Tears would be her undoing. All the macabre and spectral reflections in the water peering back at her, twisted and gruesome as punishment for their sins. No, the little darling tried to untie her corset strings so she could wade in.
Like cocks and candy hearts was I going to let her do that!
It was similar in the Wraith Woods, where the apparitions tried to haunt her—black market souls I have never reached since they care more for terrifying others like some traveling freak show.
Aradia chased them instead. Like a strange and crazed little wonder, she played with them, picked up her skirts, andfollowed them deeper through the trees with me bound to her glowing hand the whole time. Poor Crescendo tried to keep up while playing Mozart’sMarriage of Figaro, but the stiff lout fell behind with his stumpy wings.
When she finally stopped to catch her breath, she turned to me and said through gasps, “That was fun! Wasn’t that fun? Oh, don’t look so sullen, Archer. They just wanted someone to play with them. Maybe a tea party next time. Where else can we go?”
I banked everything on the Phantom Bridge. It spans a deep canyon with lovers on each side eternally trying to reach one another. And Aradia—taught them sign language so they could communicate while propositioning ways to form a ghostly human chain.
In the Lunar Veil with its chronic and confusing mist, she collected souls like they were her gods-damned balloons and ordering them to sit around her so she could share stories of her travels. I plucked her up when her voice grew hoarse while the souls cried for her to return.
“Dance with me?” she asks me now as we stand in the middle of the spectral ballroom with the Gala of Ghosts lost in a forever waltz that will never finish. Frozen in time to the echoes of past celebrations.
Crescendo’s music of Billie Eilish’sLovelyinterferes with the haunting melody of the waltz.
