for the macabre shush to filter into my awareness. The sounds of the other patients and night staff fading away to nothing. Tiredly rolling my head to the side, my eyes are drawn to the doorway. A figure is leaning against it. Tall and slender, I recognize the male form, without a doubt. One I thought never to set sight on again.
Rafe.
He hasn’t changed a bit in the last twelve months, since I saw him last. Dressed from head to toe in black, his handsome face is solemn, his odd eyes intense with an unholy light. Clipped to his belt, I can see the furry shark keyring I bought him, dangling at his hip. Has he kept it all this time? The gift I gave him at the aquarium on that rainy day in November.
He’s something terrible and beautiful all wrapped up in one. One sweep of his gaze, and he takes me all in. The tubes and wires. Cheeks once rosy, healthy, they’re now hollow and sunken. Beneath the thinness of my pale paper-white skin, the blue veins are visible.
Moving gracefully to my nightstand, he slips a white rose, the bud stilled closed, into a small glass vase. It reminds me of the ones he’d given me at his house in Paris. It all seems so distant in my memory now. After packing my things, I’d taken the first available flight home, abandoning my plans to tour Europe, in fear he’d find me. I hadn’t wasted the months when I fled. It ignited an awakening inside me for more. Grabbing life with both hands, I lived each day to the fullest, after escaping his clutches. That was until I became sick a month ago.
“Don’t be frightened, Samantha.” His voice is a deep soothing murmur. It washes over me, spreading like a numbing sedative, easing my pain.
I know what he is.
Death in one of its disguises.
A necromancer.
Something from myths and fairy tales. I’ve felt him with me in my heart, an icy splinter buried deep. His presence has been like a ghost at my side. He marked me. I know I should have died that night he tasted my soul. Yet for some reason, he let me go. I’ve sensed him, somehow, calling me. A tortured whisper in the dead of night, seeping into my dreams.
Tears sting my eyes, my hand reaching feebly for the alarm button just out of reach. “Did you do this to me?”
“No. It was already there when we met in Paris. You just didn’t know it yet. Your inner light drew me, but the seed of death was stronger. I recognized it instantly, something my kind is gifted with,” Rafe confesses as he curiously inspects the IV bag filled with fluid that’s being pumped into my veins through a needle in my wrist.
“Please don’t hurt me, Rafe.” Tears squeeze free from the corners of my eyes, tumbling down my cheeks to drip off my chin.
Sadness shadows his attractive face. “You would rather I give you a comfortable delusion than a cruel truth? Besides, you, out of everyone, should not fear me.”
My heart hammers in my fragile chest. How can I feel so much pain, and yet be so in love with this monster who’s causing it? And I do. My soul has ached once more for his touch. Call it perverse. A curse. I’ve loved him every second we’ve been apart even knowing what he is. That he wanted to steal my life and turn me into one of his macabre dead toys.
“There are plenty of ways to die, Samantha. Would you prefer it to be with pleasure or pain? This moment has always been inevitable just as autumn changes to winter. I let you run from me, but now I think you’re ready. It’s a year to the day since you fled from Paris. The day of the dead is once more upon us.”
I recall the pleasure of his deadly kiss. The feel of him claiming me in his lover’s embrace. Why slip away at a painfully slow crawl when this man offers me peace and freedom from my mortal shackles now?
“Kiss me,” I beg, finally desperate for what he proposes. I’m so tired of the agony. The waiting. Let death have me now on my own terms. My throat is thick with emotions warring to be felt. Fear, sadness, the ache of what will never be.
Coiling down into a chair by the mattress, Rafe leans toward me, a long calloused finger caressing my