Birds of Paradise

  “And I forget everything you’ve done to get me there, beside you?” I asked, watching him approach with something that bordered on fear and toyed with excitement.

  “No,” he said. “You don’t. You use it. Let it fuel you.”

  He approached me. Stood in front of me, but did not touch me.

  “There is no going back. No escape. You know this. There never was any escape for you, except death. You know this too. You’ve toyed with death, had your chance to meet it. You chose not to. Now this is your life. Fighting. Blood. Pain. Anger. Hatred.”

  He stepped forward, only slightly, enough for me to inhale his scent.

  “And us. There’s no escaping that either. You know this. Only death. If you want to be rid of me, you kill me.”

  Something cold and heavy pressed into my hands.

  A gun.

  My fingers wrapped around it, my body relishing the feeling that came with the weapon.

  His hand circled my wrist, moved it up in the space between us so the gun pressed into his chest. My finger flexed on the trigger.

  “If you want out, you do it, kill me,” he invited. “This is the only chance you’ll get. I’m offering you a third choice.”

  His eyes flared with intensity. Honesty. Some kind of acceptance of death. He wasn’t certain of the outcome here, that much was true. I was unpredictable now. I was the one who held his death in my hands, the positions of our first meeting reversed. And I saw it in him right there, that he was taking a risk. That he thought there would be a chance of me pulling that trigger.

  I thought that too as my mind recounted everything between us. The betrayal. The pain. The ugliness.

  “You want me to kill you?” I asked.

  “No, I don’t want to die,” he said. “But if I am to, the only way I’ll meet the grave is if you introduce me to it. Whether it be now or in three decades’ time. I’ve never been certain of the number of heartbeats I’ve got left. I’ve controlled everything around me to make sure I have the advantage, but there’s no certainty in life.”

  My eyes didn’t waver. Neither did my grip on the gun. “It would be easier,” I whispered. “If I pulled this trigger.”

  He nodded. “It would. Likely for both of us.”

  We stayed suspended between the worlds, the one my decision would cement us in.

  Then I stepped back, ejected the magazine and emptied the chamber. The gun fell to the floor.

  “I’m not ready for easy,” I breathed, my body both heavier and lighter with the weight of my decision.

  The decision that would define my life, and the length of it.

  Lukyan didn’t move. Not even an exhale of relief.

  “But I’m not ready to forgive you either,” I said, my voice a blade.

  And I turned my back and walked away.

  19

  My gasp rattled through the room, bouncing off the invisible walls of darkness. I blinked rapidly, my hand at my chest, my hair sticking to my skull because of the sweat pouring off me.

  I was alone.

  I didn’t need to glance at a clock to know it was the deadest of night. Because that was where my nightmares began. After I woke up. At this exact time, every night for the time I’d been sleeping alone.

  The night was my enemy.

  Lukyan was my enemy.

  The night was where terrors were both born and brought into maturity. Without light to chase them away, shadows grew corporal, menacing and inescapable. And every dark thought lurking at the corner of my mind thrived in the shadows, and worries and despair had room to grow and mature. The world seemed on the precipice of end in the darkness, in the middle of the night, with darkness on either side.

  But the sunrise chased most of it away. It didn’t conquer it, merely sent those shadows into corners or banished those ugly thoughts back to that basement of my mind that I only ventured to with the lurk of darkness.

  Why I expected his menace to scuttle off with the upcoming rays of sun these past mornings, kissing the room and making it unremarkable and harmless as it always was, I didn’t know. Something as deep as what lived within him, that was him, was too powerful to be intimidated by such a thing as light. And despite the warm glow in the room and the lack of shadow, the nightmare still remained. Every morning. Every second I ghosted around the house, lost and angry.

  The nightmare was my companion before, but it was my torturer now that I was alone.

  And I found myself wanting it to remain. Needing it to remain. Because I had become so accustomed to my nightmare, so attached to it, I feared it disappearing completely.

  Because he would too.

  I couldn’t wake up another morning watching the sun rise, knowing it would change nothing. A new day was just another yawning emptiness, a ticking clock before the night swallowed me up again.

  “This is crazy,” I hissed, yanking back the covers and jumping onto the ground. It was cold against my bare feet, or maybe that was my feet that were cold against the ground.

  Despite my thin sheen of sweat, I was freezing. From my bones.

  But I didn’t put anything on as I rushed through the shadowed hallways of the sleeping house.

  It wouldn’t work. Layers, scalding showers, exercise. Nothing would get me warm.

  I’d even tried holding my hand to the flame of a candle, more curious than anything. It reddened and blistered but the pain was nothing. I barely noticed it.

  The man with an ice chip for a heart was the only one who would stop me freezing to death with the comfort of my own loneliness.

  I had barely thought of my route as I rushed through the house, a nightmare and a blizzard on my tail, but I didn’t even notice I was going to the dead room instead of his bedroom.

  Logic dictated he’d be sleeping; therefore that would be the first place to look.

  But logic didn’t dictate Lukyan and me.

  Light spilled out from the bottom of the door to his study. My ear throbbed annoyingly, but I was used to it by this point, more pain to add to the collection.

  I followed it, the light, until my hand was flat on the closed door to the dead room. I settled my cheek onto the books encased in the door, inhaling the stale smell, letting it seep into me.

  Then I pushed, tentatively, revealing the room to me.

  Revealing death.

  But the dead were nowhere to be found. Every single frame, every single colorful and beautiful corpse was gone, leaving only faint marks on white walls to show where they once were.

  There was only one dead thing left in the room. And he was sitting in a chair, cradling a glass of vodka.

  His eyes went straight to me.

  I inhaled.

  Then the warmth rushed through me. Its origin was the ice of his stare. It wasn’t logical, but it was Lukyan. The fire came hot and real from me too. My fury. My burning hatred.

  The anger that I wanted him off the face of the earth after what he’d done to me, and the knowledge that I’d drop right off too if that were ever to happen.

  “Where did they all go?” I asked.

  I was looking around at the stark white walls. He was not.

  He was only focused on me. The whole of his intense and concentrated focus. And not like I’d unexpectedly walked into the room in the middle of the night. No, like I’d been there all along.

  “Elizabeth Helen Hades,” he said instead, pushing up from the chair.

  I froze the second his steps betrayed his direction.

  Me.

  Wasn’t that what I wanted? Why else did I come here?

  “Born 31st October, 1987.”

  My breath caught in my chest as he reached me, circled me, enraptured by me just as he was when he was staring at the frames describing the dead things inside them.

  “More commonly known as Halloween,” he continued to speak, stopping his pacing to stand right in front of me.

  His breath was hot on my face, the energy pulsing around him pressing through my skin. But he didn
’t touch me.

  “Originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, where people would dress up, light fires, for the purpose of warding off ghosts.”

  His eyes tore at my soul, flaying it every moment I continued to meet his gaze. I welcomed it. The white-hot pain, the hatred swirling in my chest. For myself, for needing this, wanting him after everything he’d done. For him, for knowing I could go nowhere but here and utilizing that. Utilizing every single one of my weaknesses for his gain.

  “In the eighth century, Pope Gregory the third designated November 1st as a time to honor all saints,” he continued, voice businesslike, a sharp juxtaposition of everything else he was saying, everything else that lay underneath the words. “This nearness to Samhain meant that over the years, All Saints Day incorporated some of the traditions. Which is how All Hallows Eve later came to be known as Halloween. Scottish poet Robert Burns actually helped popularize the word ‘Halloween’ with the poem he wrote in 1785 under the same name.”

  I observed him, the way he spoke with facts, with efficiency. Describing me like I was already dead, he was somehow eulogizing me in life. And instead of feeling like he was pushing me closer to death, I’d never felt more alive.

  “According to Celtic mythology, the veil between the Other, the world beyond, and our word is thinnest during Samhain,” he said. “It makes it easier for the spirits and the souls of the dead to return. Of course, you, Elizabeth Helen Hades, would be born on the day that death colludes with life, tries to grasp it in its embrace. And that’s what you’ve been doing your whole life, all three decades of it—trying to shake off that touch of death that came from the grave on the day of your birth. You were born with more Samhain in you, more death, than any other October child.”

  His hand reached out, toyed with a strand of my hair, marveling at it the way I had marveled at the feathers of the birds once inside these walls.

  “And that’s how you spoke to me, because of your connection with the thing I collected. That I’ve now dispersed.”

  He cupped my cheek lightly, barely even a touch. It bruised instantly, somehow worse than any strike he’d landed previously.

  “You’ve lived your life in pain and suffering, and you know nothing else. But it does not define you.”

  His hands ghosted over the scars on my face, heating them with his attention.

  “You like to read, horror mostly, anything that simultaneously takes you out of the horror of your current reality but also reminds you that horror is the only reality. You know a world’s fantasy is not monsters and evil, but a world that worships perfection and beauty.”

  He trailed his hand along my lips. I wanted to open them to him, to let him inside, to let his words pry open what I’d closed inside me. But I couldn’t. Not yet. This was torture, but it was an imperfect torture that epitomized us. Him, cold, calculating on the surface, the lion. Me, the lamb both shuddering and frozen in his presence. The proverbial story. But we strayed from that because I was the lamb that wanted to be devoured by the lion. And he was the creature that wanted to feast on the lamb’s flesh while keeping it for his own.

  “‘The underground of the city is like what’s underground in people. Beneath the surface—’”

  “It’s boiling with monsters,” my thin rasp finished for him.

  “Guillermo del Toro,” he said. “Your favorite author. Well, one of them, at least. You like him in particular because he’s honest about the ugliness of the world. Among other things.”

  I sucked in a breath, unable to fathom how he knew something I’d never uttered aloud.

  “And that’s you. You don’t become more beautiful with artifice or effort,” he said, brushing at the wayward strands of my violently chopped bob. “What makes everyone else in this world beautiful is what diminishes everything you are. You’ll forgive me for quoting him once more, but I do find myself quite enamored. ‘Perfection is just a concept—an impossibility we use to torture ourselves and that contradicts nature.’” Lukyan devoured me with his gaze, his words both poetry and pain. “You thought my collection in here was an accumulation of perfection. Of beauty. But it was, in the end, what nature itself created: the anomaly, something so far beyond what was considered real and normal that that in itself made it ugly.”

  He waited a beat. Prepared me for something.

  “Your daughter was born on your birthday,” he said, voice softening at the edges. “You held her in your arms on the day the dead came back to claim what was always theirs. What you could’ve never been because your ugly and horror-filled life would not allow for such beauty. There was no room for it.” He still gripped the strand of my hair in his fingers, handling it like it was a fossil, ready to crumble if gripped incorrectly. “Do not misunderstand to think that I’m suggesting you are in any way responsible for this. I’m not. You did not deserve this. But the world gives the most despicable of horrors to the least deserving of them all.”

  He dropped my hair and his thumb ran along my bottom lip roughly, trying to tease it open. I let out a sound at the back of my throat, both from the heart-wrenching pain of his words and because of the shattering agony of his touch.

  “You were born to be something more complex and unique than purely happy,” he said, his eyes fixated on my lips, then snapping back up to my eyes. “Because you are too complex to be able to sustain life like that. You weren’t born brave or strong. But life made you that way anyway, because if you hadn’t turned into that, you wouldn’t be here, in front of me.”

  He stepped forward, his eyes the gates of hell, inviting me in since it was apparent that heaven would never be accessible to me. I didn’t fight as he pressed his body to mine, because I couldn’t. I sank into him as easy as a hot knife might slide through weak flesh.

  “You, Elizabeth, are all I need in my collection. What this room was about. Finding the one thing I could grasp in my hands without sucking the life from it.”

  “You are sucking the life from me,” I whispered, his lips brushing mine.

  “And you suck mine right back, my love,” he rasped.

  Then he kissed me.

  His fingers twined in my hair, gently at first, combing out the knots caused by my midnight battles. Then, as the locks smoothed out to a kind of peace, he clenched his fist and yanked, pulling at the strands he’d taken such care to untangle.

  If there was a single gesture to sum up all that was us, it was that. Lukyan’s hands taking quiet, gentle care of all the things that were tangled and broken in me, merely so he could have a clean slate to break them his way.

  But I was made to be broken. Born to be broken. As Lukyan’s hands ripped at my hair, as his mouth assaulted and alternately worshipped my mouth, I realized the truth to his words.

  It was not by design, by fate, just accident of birth. My life was destined to be miserable. Biology made it so.

  Biology was what killed humanity in me.

  What ruined me.

  Biology was also what made my blood sing, my heart bleed and mince in my chest at the man holding me in his arms, kissing me like he wanted to kill me just so he could bring me back to life.

  We fought each other, clawed at each other in order to strip ourselves down to our skin, in order to feel the life and the death on each other.

  My clothes ripped under his grip, my skin bruised. His flesh opened as my nails scored across it. All this fed into the all-encompassing, all-consuming storm that was our love.

  Our hatred.

  His fingers found my entrance, pressing into me with beautiful brutality. I hissed into his mouth. He slammed me into the wall, my head rapping back into the surface painfully. His fingers distracted me from this probing pain as he worked me toward climax.

  A second before I exploded, his fingers were gone.

  I glared at him. “You fucker,” I hissed.

  He grinned.

  Grinned.

  The first time I’d ever seen such a thing.

  Then he sucked
on the two fingers that had just been inside me, eyes winter fire as he did so. My body pulsated with need watching him. His hard length pressed into me.

  “Lukyan,” I demanded, my hands running through his hair, tugging at the strands forcefully.

  He responded by clutching my hips and lifting me, slamming me back into the wall—harder this time, to show me who was in control.

  I let him, because once my legs were wrapped around him, he was inside me.

  It didn’t matter who thought they had the power at that point.

  The truth was neither of us did.

  “I don’t forgive you,” I said, trailing the broken skin on his chest, picking at the dried blood with my pinky. Blood I’d created. I relished that.

  “I don’t expect forgiveness,” he replied, his voice clear but somehow lazy. Sated. Almost content.

  “I still hate you,” I continued, circling his pecs with my fingertips.

  “I can live with hatred.”

  I glanced up to those iceberg eyes. The ones that had betrayed me, the ones that had created me, destroyed me. “I don’t know how long it will take me to get over this,” I told him honestly.

  His eyes were full. So full that all that—whatever was inside them—leaked out of him and started to fill me up too. “I’m not giving you a limit. Forever is a preference.” His arms tightened around me. Too tight. Tight enough to be painful. But that’s how it would always be with us. Too much to be comfortable, just enough pain to keep us alive.

  I blinked. “You want me to be mad at you forever?”

  “Forever is a perception, not a timeline,” he murmured, his mouth pressing into my hair as he inhaled my scent. “I think you might have to be mad at me forever, hate me forever, one way or another. It’s the only way you’ll survive me.” He brushed his lips against the bruised skin on my shoulder. “It’s the only way I’ll survive you.”

  “We won’t find safety in this, us, will we? No peace in each other?” I whispered.

  “No,” he agreed. “We won’t.”