The Serpentine Butterfly
Celestra Forever After 3
Addison Moore
Contents
Copyright
Books by Addison Moore
Epigraph
Prologue
1. The Jackal of All Trades
Life in Stages
2. Beauty For Ashes
Come to Me
3. Fruit of the Rose
United We fall
4. The Ultimate Reception, the Ultimate Deception
Home Sweet Home
The Jackass in Me
5. Dominion Rising
Foolish Games
It Goes On
6. Enter the Dragon
The Beast Within
Sleeping Beauty
7. The Big News
The Fixer
Kill Club
8. On a Butterfly’s Wing and a Prayer
Deep Sorrow
Dead Man’s Party
9. Blood Roses and Broken Promises
Hell’s Wedding Bells
Back to Tenebrous
10. Sweet Child of Mine
House of Cards
Gene Pool is the Devil’s Tool
11. Forever October
The Heartbreak of Revelation
Right Place Right Time
12. Babies Breath
Love Grows
Happy For You
13. The Sickle Rises
Losing Battle
Those Long Zombie Nights
14. Avenging Angels
Fate on a Platter
Show of Prowess
15. The Greatest Sacrifice
A Binding, Blinding Kind of Love
So it Begins
The Way We Were
The Skyla is Falling
A Note from the Author
Books by Addison Moore
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Edited by Paige Maroney Smith
Cover Design: Gaffey Media
Copyright © 2016 by Addison Moore
http://addisonmoorewrites.blogspot.com/
This novel is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to peoples either living or deceased is purely coincidental. Names, places, and characters are figments of the author’s imagination. The author holds all rights to this work. It is illegal to reproduce this novel without written expressed consent from the author herself.
All Rights Reserved.
This ebook is for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this ebook with another person, please purchase any additional copies for each reader. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return it and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Copyright © 2016 by Addison Moore
ISBN: 978-1-62430-034-9
Books by Addison Moore
Parnormal Romance
(Celestra Book World in Order)
Ethereal (Celestra Series Book 1)
Tremble (Celestra Series Book 2)
Burn (Celestra Series Book 3)
Wicked (Celestra Series Book 4)
Vex (Celestra Series Book 5)
Expel (Celestra Series Book 6)
Toxic Part One (Celestra Series Book 7)
Toxic Part Two (Celestra Series Book 7.5)
Elysian (Celestra Series Book 8)
Perfect Love (A Celestra Novella)
Ephemeral (The Countenance Trilogy 1)
Evanescent (The Countenance Trilogy 2)
Entropy (The Countenance Trilogy 3)
Ethereal Knights (Celestra Knights)
Season of the Witch (A Celestra Companion)
Celestra Forever After (Celestra Forever After 1)
The Dragon and the Rose (Celestra Forever After 2)
The Serpentine Butterfly (Celestra Forever After 3)
Crown of Ashes (Celestra Forever After 4) Soon!
Romance
3:AM Kisses (3:AM Kisses 1)
Winter Kisses (3:AM Kisses 2)
Sugar Kisses (3:AM Kisses 3)
Whiskey Kisses (3:AM Kisses 4)
Rock Candy Kisses (3:AM Kisses 5)
Velvet Kisses (3:AM Kisses 6)
Wild Kisses (3:AM Kisses 7)
Country Kisses (3:AM Kisses 8)
Burning Through Gravity (Burning Through Gravity 1)
A Thousand Starry Nights (Burning Through Gravity 2)
Fire in an Amber Sky (Burning Through Gravity 3)
Beautiful Oblivion (Beautiful Oblivion 1)
Beautiful Illusions (Beautiful Oblivion 2)
Beautiful Elixir (Beautiful Oblivion 3)
The Solitude of Passion
Someone to Love (Someone to Love 1)
Someone Like You (Someone to Love 2)
Someone For Me (Someone to Love 3)
Young Adult Romance
Melt With You (A Totally ’80s Romance 1)
Tainted Love (A Totally ’80s Romance 2)
Hold Me Now (A Totally ’80s Romance 3)
For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in the heavenly places.
—Ephesians 6:12 (NKJV)
Prologue
SKYLA
Long ago in Eden, the serpent ushered in the fall. The serpent—a devious foe who clothes himself in light— is sharp and handsome, so cunningly clever you can hardly resist his magnificent charm. His sole desire is to consume, devour all that is good in one swift bite. The serpent longs to herald a new era, a season of agony, a season of sorrow. The serpent is my lover. The serpent owns my heart. He is my most nearest, dearest enemy.
Time was an opiate we were consumed to inhale right down to our bones. We evaded death, begged for mercy, but it dug its necrotic talons into our mortal flesh and took what it wanted. Now, forever gone are those years of yearning, where the dry forests of our hearts burned like tinder. Gone are those heated sentimental days. The war of our youth had evaporated before our eyes. And now, a new war wages, a beautiful war. Perhaps it was an esoteric war all along.
Change. It comes to everyone with the passage of ages and stages, the details as irrelevant as dust or smoke, the curling of a fire that snaps and roars until finally it is blown out in the night like death. It is an ironic constant embedded in our lives from the cradle to the grave. It is inevitable, necessary, and inescapable at best. One thing is for certain in this fearful journey—change will come in abundance. After all, destiny is most interested in its revisions, its daily mutations of what we thought we knew.
Change has infiltrated my world, struck me down, brought me to my knees once again. Destiny arrived with first her scourge, then her blessing. She bestowed on me a crown of beauty for ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, a garment of praise in exchange for a spirit of debilitating despair.
Destiny is molding me, scolding me, loving me all at once. A transformation is taking place—a heart-wrenching, agonizing metamorphosis.
In nature, it is the butterfly that perhaps undergoes the greatest transformation. And so it was in my life, my mother’s planting of her egg, the feasting off my father’s love, the transition to a life without him—one on foreign soil which brought me the knowledge of who I am, who I have been all along. Then, finally, the painful stretching, the expanding, the unfolding of my very being as I struggle to break free from the vellum sheath of restriction I’ve lived in for so long.
Change has come, wielding all of its power, all of its threats, its knife-sharp convictions—its cowardice skirting around the corners.
I am here, and I am ready. No longer am I a little girl, cloistered and naïve. A new season of my life is emerging. I will burst through the chrysalis of my existence, and unfurl the glory and the majesty of my beautiful, beautiful wings.
Change has come into my life—and I am anticipating all that it will bring.
I am ready.
Long ago in Eden, the serpent ushered in the fall—but destiny offered up a way out of it.
Redemption is coming.
It is already on its way.
1
The Jackal of All Trades
SKYLA
Fate wove her fingers through the tapestry of our lives and skewed the design just enough to make me hate it. The sky blackens. The clouds boil. Paragon twists and writhes, her branches arch with the violent wind, even the dusty crags are groaning. A pang of numbness spreads throughout my body like a disease, like a betrayal, like death. Waves crash over the thick cap of hair lying silently on the rocks below as Gage stares vacantly up at the heavens—up at me for every grievance and disappointment I have ever caused him. After all, it was me who drove him to the cliff’s edge. It must have been. I was his lousy wife, his lousy bedmate, his lousy leader who never really understood who he was at the core—who knew nothing of the battle waging in his heart that drove him to the brink of oblivion, then ungraciously tipped him over the edge.
Howling screams shrill from my lungs as a pair of strong arms wraps themselves around me.
“Get to him now!” Logan roars to Marshall.
The ocean swells over my beloved’s body as his arms ebb toward the shore. There’s a knot in my throat, a building dread that spells out the impossible. I refuse to believe it. My husband, the beautiful, beautiful man that God himself destined for me could never leave this planet. I couldn’t bear it. I wouldn’t.
“I love you,” I push the words out in a whisper as Marshall somehow appears down below by his side and pulls Gage out of the water. He glances up at the cliff that Logan is determined to keep me from leaping from as if he were affirming the worst news possible. A crowd has gathered at the base as the howl of an ambulance pierces my incessant sobbing.
“Let’s go.” Logan does his best to pry me from the ledge, but that horrible scream eviscerates from my throat on a loop. My hands extend below, begging for Gage to latch on as if that is ever a possibility. It can’t end like this. I won’t let it.
The roars, the howls—frightening shrieks expel from my throat as Logan whisks us into his truck. We follow the flashing lights of the ambulance all the way to the hospital, and I jump out just as the EMTs open the back.
“Sorry, ma’am, you’ll have to wait out here.” A young man with arms the size of logs tries to curb me from the scene.
“That’s my husband.” The words grunt out of me, as I break through the stronghold, easy as wet paper, my hands shaking his ragged limbs. “Gage!” My voice vibrates through the tiny interior, but my precious husband doesn’t move. His eyes lie open, staring to the ceiling, his limbs rubbery and cold, motionless. I touch my lips to his and pump in a lungful of air. “Come on, baby,” I pant over him as I push in breath after breath.
Voices murmur from behind; hands fish for my body as they try to pull me away. Logan tries to reason with the men in charge, tries to reason with me.
“Why isn’t anybody helping him?” I choke the words out through tears. Gage continues to ignore me with his marble pale skin, his lips blue as the sea that took him from me. “Please.” My body convulses over his, washing him with the tears of my desperation. “Don’t leave me!” My voice curdles in a childlike manner. “Gage!” I touch my lips to his cold flesh and writhe in agony over death’s cruel victory. “I can’t let you go.” Tears burn down my cheeks in hot fiery tracks. He’s so beautiful, with his hair slicked, black as midnight, his eyes still glowing the way only his can.
My fingers grip over his shoulders, dig in, nail to bone, and in a fit of aching frustration, in a fit of fury, I shake the shit out of him.
“Wake the hell up!” My voice alone has the power to rouse the dead, but Gage isn’t budging.
Strong arms manage to pluck me off his body. My fingernails rip his iced flesh one last time before I’m suctioned back into the light of day, back into a world without my lover.
They never take Gage out of the ambulance.
They drive him straight to the morgue instead.
Lights. So many lights hit me at once. I’m disoriented, dizzy, floating as Logan leads me down the corridor of the Paragon mortuary, owned by none other than Gage’s father—the one who raised him.
“Barron!” I give him a violent shake as he rises to greet us. “They’re bringing him. Do something.”
“What’s this about?” A bell rings in the back, and he nods. “Just a moment. Looks as if I’ve got a customer.” He gives a slight wink, stalking off before Logan and I dare tell him the horrible truth. Our legs carry us to the back. The walls revolve around us as if we’re in a dream, and we find ourselves next to Barron once again where a garage door rolls up in the rear of the room he unceremoniously refers to as “the kitchen.” It’s the area where the body prep takes place, and today the body will belong to—
“Barron”—Logan says it loud and stern, causing his older brother, uncle, whichever they feel like referring to themselves at the moment to lurch—“it’s Gage. You’re going to find Gage on the other end of that wall.”
The door recedes like a scroll, like a story that had reached its completion and would be no more in this earthen realm. I run out into the open just as they’re wheeling him in, a white sheet resting over his form, thin as gossamer.
“Don’t do that!” I whip the sheet off with a marked aggression. “He can’t breathe!” The men gurgle out the brunt of their dismay with me, but I can’t make sense of the English language anymore. I can’t make sense of the endless howling escaping from my throat. I can’t make sense of this version of my husband who refuses to look at me, who refuses to wrap his loving arms around my body. I can’t bear this inhuman pain.
“If Gage has died, then I want to die, too,” I pant over his sculpted face, his eyes still looking through me into the invisible face of God. “You hear that, Mother?” I scream so loud my skull begs to shatter from the effort.
Time passes. Gage is laid out in the stainless tub in the middle of Barron’s chop shop. Emma runs in with her hands flailing, her hair escaping her signature bun as she literally unspools before us. And in a moment of solidarity like never before, the two of us weep over him like a pair of injured doves. This is madness, a special brand of hell I never want a piece of. Death is a bastard that doesn’t mind knifing your heart out and feeding it to you for dessert. I know this intimately from losing Logan—from the tragic time of my father. But Gage—something about this feels far more grievous, nefarious in every sense of the word.
Logan yells into his phone. People show up; warm bodies fill the space around us as I sit holding Gage’s hand on one side, as does Emma on the other. Liam, Giselle, Ellis, Ezrina, Nev, and Marshall all seem to explode into the room at once.
“Marshall.” I grip the lapel of his jacket and pull him down to me, hard. I stand on my tiptoes and land my nose to his, my heavy panting landing directly over his mouth. “Do something,” I grit the words through my teeth with a tremor in my voice, a threat lying just beneath that. “Wake him the fuck up—and don’t you dare tell me a thing about language. Make this better. I swear to you, I will do whatever the hell you wish. Please”—my eyes close with desperation—“just please.”
Marshall turns his cheek to me, and from a side-glance he bears a striking resemblance to Logan. “I’m sorry, Ms. Messenger. I’m afraid your beloved’s predicament is out of my jurisdiction.”
“Predicame
nt?” I whisper, trying to decode his words.
I leap to Ezrina and grip her shoulders, pressing in, bruising her Chloe-inspired flesh, and not even the idea of it brings me an ounce of pleasure. Instead, I resist the urge to shake her like a rag doll. Chloe. She’s all I see now when I stare at Ezrina. I know that evil has long since vacated the premises, but that black halo Chloe wore like a badge of wicked courage, the venom she bore—they’re still floating around on the surface.
“Ezrina.” I close my eyes a moment, reducing my voice to a whisper. “You must—you absolutely must heal Gage.”
“Skyla,” she hums my name, sweet and low, like a honey-drenched lullaby. “You do realize he’s not ill, child. I can no more heal him than I can wake him. I’m sorry, Skyla. He’s gone.”
“No.” It pumps from me with a dull whimper.
A pair of warm arms pulls me in. Logan wraps himself around me, tight and safe, like the very wings of God.
“We need to fix this.” I twist, burying my face in the warmth of his chest. “We need to make him better. We need to find a way, and we need to fix this shit.” I repeat the words on a loop until a sharp gasp comes from Emma. “What is it?” I dash over and take up Gage’s hand once again, but Emma isn’t focused on her beautiful baby boy. Not an eye is on my precious husband. They’re all transfixed on the doorway. I spin slowly on my heels, my stomach clenching because I already know. I can feel the heated evil, the heart of darkness thickening the air with his monstrosity. They say death owns the night we know as life, but today it feels as if this wicked Fem owns us all.
Demetri. There he is, in all his tall, dark Fem glory, his black cape dusting off his shoulders like elongated feathers. He shares the same midnight hair, the same high cheekbones as his son, and for the first time ever, I see the family resemblance between my gorgeous husband and the demon haunting the door.
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