One at a time — taking a brief moment to read a snippet of each — she unrolled note after note until she was surrounded by waves of red-streaked white paper. Each rolled note was covered in two alternating handwritings — Colby wrote in black ink and she wrote back in pencil. She and Colby had discussed love and death in Victorian poetry for the last six months, ever since Luci had turned around in English class and scrawled her first note across Colby’s test paper.
Luci had thought her arguments and love poem quotes were slowly wooing Colby.
She’d obviously been wrong.
She folded her hands in her lap and tried to ignore the chilly autumn evening. She tried to be peaceful, to think of nothing at all now. There were no more arguments to make.
The ground of the grave began to shift and move.
Luci didn’t bother screaming. Even though she’d been hoping it was a prank or a joke. And when it wasn’t, and when he was actually dead, she hadn’t known whether to hope his claims were real or pray they weren’t.
Two pale hands appeared in the loose dirt. Hands she’d once wished he’d use more … once wished he’d been more adventurous with his caresses …
Colby, covered in dirt, pulled his upper body free from the grave. His face was tortured, stretched across his cheekbones and jaw as he fought free of his burial site. Then his too-pale skin smoothed into a too-perfect mask of his former self. He opened his eyes, but they weren’t his eyes anymore. They were twin pools of swirling blood.
Utterly rabid, Colby pushed off his hands, launching himself across the edge of the grave toward Luci.
She didn’t flinch.
However, Colby did — right before his teeth closed on the rosary she was wearing around her neck. She’d pulled it out from her collar to make sure he’d see it.
“That my grandmother’s?” Colby asked. His teeth were still a breath from Luci’s tender neck.
“Yes.”
“Logically, that shouldn't work with me. I’m agnostic.”
“I know you say you are.”
Colby grinned at her. Then he backed off and sat on his haunches over top of his grave, as a cat would.
Luci had always been more of a dog person.
“What are you doing here?” her newly-risen-from-the-dead boyfriend asked. “You wanted nothing to do with this, remember? Change your mind? Want to join me?”
“Is it everything you ever wanted?”
“Now? With you here? Yes, yes, yes.”
He flipped backward, landed on his feet, and bowed to Luci. Then he tried a handstand and a cartwheel. His hand landed awkwardly on the neighboring headstone and the corner snapped off under his fingers. He laughed, wrenched the entire plaque from the ground, and cracked in half over his knee.
“Look at me! The strength. The agility. The power!”
“Yes,” she answered. “It’s amazing what you can get off the Internet these days.”
“And you thought it wasn’t real vampire blood … plus, you totally annoyingly sound like my parents.”
“I am quoting them.”
“I hate it when you do that, and don't tell me I sound ‘just so teenage typical’. Look how I’ve reinvented myself! Darwin over God; I’m living proof —”
“Living might not be the best word —”
“No one will ever tell me what to do, ever again!”
“They’re your parents, you know. Telling you what to do is kind of their job.”
“Fuck them! I'm going to suck the last drop of blood from their still-beating hearts!”
Luci sighed.
“Oh, I know you don't like it when I talk like that. Don't worry — I’ll make the actual death part quick. I've got to eat, don't I? Better to slay evildoers.”
Impossibly quickly, he was once again by her side.
Luci flinched. She was unprepared the second time.
“Umm … you smell good,” Colby said, as he gently tugged Luci to her feet.
The paper rolls crumpled beneath their dirty shoes. Luci doubted that Colby had even noticed them. She doubted that such things meant anything to him now.
Colby pressed his lips to her wrist and inhaled deeply. Then he did the same at her elbow … then up her arm … to nuzzle a kiss just beneath her ear.
Luci sighed with a tired sort of ecstasy.
Colby turned his head to hover his lips over her mouth.
She leaned into him, closed her eyes so that she couldn’t see the blood whirling in his, and whispered, “I left you a note. In your breast pocket.”
Delighted — as a child getting a new toy would be — Colby pulled the rolled note from his pocket. As he read, the smile slowly slipped from his face.
’Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.
“What the hell do you mean by that?”
While Colby was reading, Luci had pulled the chef's knife from her bag. Now, as he was still puzzling over her final love note, she swiftly stabbed him in the chest.
He howled, stumbled, and fell to one knee.
“That hurts like fuck!”
He yanked the knife from his chest and threw it away. Blood flooded his white shirt, and trickled out of his mouth.
“You know that won't kill me.”
Colby touched his tongue to the blood on his lips, then bared his now-revealed fangs in a grin.
“I know,” Luci said with another sigh. “But this will.”
She pulled the pink, sparkly pencil — the one with the fluffy pink end — out from her bag. Then, using the hole she’d created with the knife, she stabbed it into Colby’s heart.
✏ ✏ ✏
Luci knew as she stared down at the pile of goo that had been her ever-so-briefly-vampire boyfriend that she should have brought a shovel and matches. Granted, she hadn’t been exactly sure that the outcome would be so messy.
This was why friends and cellphones were so important.
She also knew that it was seriously unlikely she was going to walk away from all of this with only her heart in pieces.
Good thing that no one beat her when it came to executing a plan.
The story continues in Catching Echoes (Reconstructionist 1).
December 29, 2016
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For Michael
poetry cannot express the everything I feel for and with you
Acknowledgements
With thanks to:
My story & line editor
Scott Fitzgerald Gray
My Beta & Proof Readers
Kelly Sarmiento
For their continual encouragement, feedback, & general advice
Heather Doidge-Sidhu - for finding the perfect poetry.
Ita Margalit - for the big pencil finish when I wanted to use an axe.
Darren Barefoot - for passing notes in English Lit 12
Meghan Ciana Doidge is an award-winning writer based out of Salt Spring Island, British Columbia, Canada. She has a penchant for bloody love stories, superheroes, and the supernatural. She also has a thing for chocolate, potatoes, and cashmere yarn.
Novels
After The Virus
Spirit Binder
Time Walker
Cupcakes, Trinkets, and Other Deadly Magic (Dowser 1)
Trinkets, Treasures, and Other Bloody Magic (Dowser 2)
Treasures, Demons, and Other Black Magic (Dowser 3)
I See Me (Oracle 1)
Shadows, Maps, and Other Ancient Magic (Dowser 4)
Maps, Artifacts, and Other Arcane Magic (Dowser 5)
I See You (Oracle 2)
Artifacts, Dragons, and Other Lethal Magic (Dowser 6)
I See Us (Oracle 3)
Catching Echoes (Reconstructionist 1)
Novellas/Shorts
Love Lies Bleeding
The Graveyard Kiss
For recipes, giveaways, news, and glimpses of upcoming stories, please connect with Meghan on her:
/> NEW RELEASE MAILING LIST
Personal blog, www.madebymeghan.ca
Twitter, @mcdoidge
Facebook, Meghan Ciana Doidge
Email, [email protected]
Please also consider leaving an honest review at your point of sale outlet. Thank you!
THE GRAVEYARD KISS
Copyright © 2013 Meghan Ciana Doidge
Published by Old Man in the CrossWalk Productions 2013
Vancouver, BC, Canada
www.oldmaninthecrosswalk.com
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be produced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, objects, and incidents herein are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual things, events, locales, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Library and Archives Canada
Doidge, Meghan Ciana, 1973 —
The Graveyard Kiss/Meghan Ciana Doidge — Kindle Edition
ISBN 978-1-927850-07-7
Cover image & design by Irene Langholm
Used with Permission
The Graveyard Kiss: Reconstructionist 0.5 Page 3