by Lily Levi
“Moon,” said Amun, voice echoing against the cavern walls.
“That’s right,” I breathed. “Moon.” I paused at the mouth of the cavernous room and took a long look at the man - the thing, really - who had helped to craft my fate, whatever he thought it might hold. The creatures had taken the Master’s eyes and gorged at his throat. For a moment, I nearly expected him to speak to me, to say one last thing, but he was gone.
“Hell will come for you,” someone whispered from behind me.
I did not turn to see who it was. I didn’t care and it didn’t matter - not anymore.
“I won’t run from hell,” I said and pressed my hand to the hole in my chest. “I’m tired of running. Let hell run from me.”
“Let hell run from us,” said Ambrose. He stepped up beside me and Theron followed.
“From us,” he agreed.
I turned to look out over the carnage and guilt flooded my empty veins. The Master had said that hell would come for me and it had, but they had paid the price, the lesser vampires who had no stake in the throne at all.
Zane hobbled forward from the bodies and Remus helped him to walk. “We’re going with you,” he said gruffly. “Off of this forsaken island.”
Ambrose pressed his hands to my shoulders and shifted me to face him. “The Master was right,” he said.
I shook my head. I didn’t want the Master to be right. Nothing was right. The world had come apart and I didn’t understand any of it.
“The Master was right,” he said again, squeezing my shoulders. “I love you, Serena.”
“Love,” I said, repeating the word. Ambrose.
He shook his head at me. “It’s okay, it’s all right.” He motioned towards the others who had stepped forward. “We’re going to be here and we’re not going to let you fall.” His jaw worked as he searched for the words. “Whatever you are. It doesn’t matter.”
“Ambrose,” I whispered, searching his eyes for an answer I knew I wouldn’t find. “What am I?”
Cain wiped the blood from his face. “You’re the end of the surface of the world, Serena Moon. You’re the end.”
A low wail like that of a forgotten banshee coursed out from the waves outside of the cave. “They’re here,” I said, taking Ambrose’s hand in mine. “Hell is here.”
Ambrose squeezed my hand tightly. “And so are we.”
A Time Forgotten
Italy 1894
Father Catalano moved silently through the shuttered home, a shadow in his own right.
“Domenico,” she wailed from the single bedroom, but Dominico had shut his ears to her cries long ago. He’d loved her once, his Isabella, but she was Isabella no more.
He sat in the dark in the single wooden chair that he had brought to the home himself. She hadn’t had one. She hadn’t had anything at all. She’d been sleeping on the floor in a nest of rags when he’d first come to the place atop the hill. Her father died and they’d taken everything, everything, even the chairs.
He’d given her chairs. He’d given her a trunk for the clothes he bought her. He’d given her a brass bed for them to share in their secret triste. He’d given her his sacred seed to tuck away inside of her belly. He’d put curtains on her windows.
And she had given him her blood without question, letting him taste again that sweet life that he had sworn back to the lusty hell from whence it had come. He had given into more than one temptation; temptations greater than himself.
He’d loved her and God had punished him for it. There was no other explanation and it was what he deserved, to watch his forbidden lover writhe with the dark agony of Lucifer himself.
“Domenico,” she cried again from the back room. She laughed. She cried again through her laughter. “Unlock my door.”
The door was not locked. She could open it if she wished - or rather, the demon could. It wanted him to obey its command. That was all. It was not dangerous, simply hungry for power.
How many long nights should it continue? How many failed exorcisms must he subject them both to? There were others who were more adept with the process, but the risks were unspeakable. Isabella would never tell who had put the child inside of her, but the demon who had taken residence in her warm flesh certainly would. Even if the Devil was not to be believed, the accusation would follow him forever.
It would ruin him and all he had worked to suppress and to gain.
He pushed his unshaven face into his hands and wept quietly for himself. He’d allowed himself to fall from grace in exchange for the pleasures of the earth - and hell, too.
“Heavenly Father,” he plead silently into his hands, but the words he’d once known so well would not follow and his voice, once full of fervor and life, was now hollow.
“Domenico!” she screamed. “Why do you not love me, Domenico?”
He lowered his hands, shuddering at the sound of his own name from her once sweet mouth. Even her voice had changed, husky and deep. She was not Isabella anymore. She was not - she was not.
“Not Isabella,” he said, standing from the single wooden chair. “Not Isabella,” he said, grabbing for the handle of the door. He locked this door from the outside, though there was no stopping the demon from pushing her body through a window and out onto the grassy knoll. “Not Isabella,” he said and moved down into the lonely night, leaving Isabella to howl alone in the home that her father had built.
When he returned the next morning, he found with great relief that Isabella sat dead in the single wooden chair. Her glassy green eyes stared up into the rafters and her hands sat open in her lap. Her once engorged belly was now flat and Father Catalano let himself believe for the smallest moment that her womb had never truly been filled.
But a small cry beneath his feet shattered this heavenly hope and he knelt to remove the floorboards.
He stared at it, still covered in its own birth and dirt from beneath the house. A girl.
He picked her up with a tenderness he almost felt. He would tell Sister Maria to say that she’d found the baby and Isabella both. He was sure she would question him. Her seriousness for her position meant a seriousness for his.
“Domenico.” His name hissed through the hanging morning air.
He looked up from where he knelt, heart thundering with the fear of God and all holy things. He stood slowly, careful not to drop the child who had already fallen asleep against his robes.
Isabella’s dark mouth had opened wide, but her eyes had not moved. She swallowed or something swallowed for her. “Domenico,” she breathed. Her pale lips rounded at the end of his name.
He crossed himself frantically, babe still in his arms. “Unholy demon of sin,” he said with as steady a voice as he could manage. “Leave this place.”
A long laugh swelled up from the center of Isabella’s broken body. “Unholy demon,” she whispered. “Is that not you, oh monster of blood and flesh? Your robes do not disguise you.”
“No,” he said, but it was true. “Be gone, wicked Satan, unforgiven Lucifer.”
Isabella’s dead eyes closed at his words and he was stunned that it had worked.
But then she frowned. “Lucifer,” she said. “I’ve gone against the will of the dark one himself to be here and to deliver unto you a gift of your unmaking.”
Isabella’s body was then quiet for a time, but not long enough for Father Catalano to leave the home without hearing more of what it had to say.
“The moon will rise,” said the demon. “She will wane in the night sky and disappear, dead but not. No, no. She will return, full and bright, a growing scythe in the blackness. And her pale light will wash the world of your bloody sins. She will consume the darkest of you; she will be like you; and so she will consume herself and all the stars about her. Your Master grins even now. He knows. He wants what I want. An end of an age. His time is through. All time is through, but Hell shivers at its own release. Freedom is frightening and all are afraid. Ah, hell’s own child, a traitor to both fathers.”
>
Father Catalano moved steadily for the door.
“Sweet serenity, my child,” the demon whispered. “Sweet, black serenity o’er the earth.”
Also by Lily Levi
UNDEATH (A PARANORMAL VAMPIRE ROMANCE NOVEL)
Jolene Summers was never supposed to be more than a simple study in human resurrection - and Laurence was never supposed to care.
The summer of ‘94 was going to be big. Real big. At least, that’s what Benny promised her. From Willapa Bay to Todos Santos, every town had something to steal and even less to leave behind. The quiet coastal town of Neverpine wasn’t supposed to be any different, but that was before she died.
And she was supposed to stay dead, too.
But now, Jolene’s stuck in a house she doesn’t remember with a man she’s never seen before. She can’t seem to remember a single thing about who she is except that she likes the taste of cigarettes and that there might be someone waiting for her; looking for her.
Still, it’s hard to care about a life and the people in it when it feels like so much less than a dream… and when the strange man by your bedside is nearly all the dream you can handle.
Undeath is a dark, semi-sweet paranormal romance with a HFN ending and a plethora of monsters.
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