by Dani René
“I…”
Taking the seat beside me, he gently cups my face with his hands, urging me to look at him. “Tonight….stay…please. Be with me.”
“Rafe.” His name is a breathy whisper of acceptance. I want this man. This intense artist. The touch of his artistry and fervor in my memories to recall when we are apart. This little slice of happiness of my time in Paris has brought.
I try to kiss him, but he shies away, his lips finding my throat instead.
“You’re the one I’ve been waiting for. My heart has waited to love someone like you for so long.” His presence slides over me, velvety soft, seductive, as the flowers around us. “I want you, Samantha. My love isn’t gentle. It’s cruel, selfish, and demanding. It’s the way of my kind. A dangerous combination when it comes to one as delicate as you.” Sparks of gold, from the candles around us, are reflected in his heavy-lidded eyes. Skeletal theme of his make-up making him look dangerous and baneful.
His kiss grazes to my jaw, causing my mouth to tremble. Tugging the front of my dress down my arms, the stretch lace of my bra goes with it. My bare breasts spill over the top into wicked masculine fingers. Shaping my nipples, he teases them into hard, needy peaks.
Moaning in pleasure, I find the hem of his shirt. My hands greedily caress the sharp muscled planes of his abs. I’m lost in a swirl of lust. Aching inside for his ultimate possession.
Rafe’s lips discover the sensitive hollow of my throat. We tumble onto the cushions, him laying on top of me, the fullness of his arousal hard against my belly through his trousers.
Hand brushing over the narrowness of my hip, it curves around to cup the softness of my bottom. Thoughts vanish, and only sensations remain. Dipping his head, he takes one beaded nipple into his hot and hungry mouth. Teeth graze my sensitive flesh as he sucks and licks. Tangling my fingers in his silky hair, I keep him prisoner there.
“You set this old soul alight. Bring new life to the emptiness,” Rafe mutters, his voice oddly thick against the curve of my breast.
I’m wet and frantic. A wild thrumming beating within me to feel his cock. As if sensing my desire, Rafe’s hand trails and up my skirt to touch my dampness.
Arching into the touch as his finger dips between my nether lips, a mewl escapes my throat.
Rearing up, the hardness of his hips burrows between the softness of my thighs as he pushes up the hem of my dress to the tops of my thighs.
I gasp as my panties are torn from my body. Again, I try to bring my mouth to his, but he avoids the kiss, unbuckling his belt and shucking his trouser and underwear down. Rafe’s cock is hard and long as it bobs free between us. Moving over me, he enters my body in one single powerful thrust.
My helpless cry of pleasure rings out in the intimate confines of his studio. It’s not the gentle coupling I’ve been expecting. There’s something animalistic, primal in the way he takes me. Dark and enthralling.
Whimpering, moaning, I cling tightly to his shoulders. It’s as if he’s possessed. He claims me, pounding into me until it borders on the point of pain. Rafe’s lips finally crash down on mine. Electric, delicious, liquid lightening. It’s a full on open-mouthed kiss, our tongues duelling for dominance.
I’m drowning in the taste of him. It’s as if he’s pulling the breath from my lungs with each seducing thrust of his tongue. Sipping on my soul like it’s the coca cola and rum in my cup. A wave of weakness hits me.
“No.” Hands on his muscular chest, I push him off me, scrambling from beneath him. Butt hitting the wooden floor, I scoot backward, grabbing my bag where it’s been discarded in our carnal frenzy. What’s left of my panties are a torn wisp of silk between.
The delicate budded petals of the white rose are now stained red. It almost looks as if there are drops of crimson blood, glossy and fresh in the candlelight.
Rafe is still kneeling on the couch. Curly hair messy around his slim cheekbones, the eyes that stare back at me though the loose strands are glowing and otherworldly. A vacuum sucking in all the light and warmth arounds us. Moving slowly, he pulls up his trousers, covering himself and buttoning them up. “Why do you deny me?”
Hand pressed to my trembling lips, I can still feel the iciness of his. When he rises elegantly to his stand, panic explodes inside me. On shaking legs, I scurry to my feet and hurry to the stairs. Down the steps, I rush along the corridor and into the club.
It’s then the deafening ominous silence registers. Glancing around, I see the people eerily still. Rock-like mannequins. They’re waxen flesh white in the subdued light.
“Rosa di sanguine. Rosa di sanguine. Rosa di sanguine.” They begin to chant. Beside the table, Micah raises the beer in his hand in a silent salute. He carries the same menacing aura throbbing around Rafe.
A numbness creeps into my brain as I stand transfixed in a black well of horror. None of this is natural. Some inner instinct screams inside me to run. This isn’t right.
“What…what are they? What are you?” I stammer. Backing up, my spine meets a hard chest. Jerking around, I find Rafe behind me. Scampering into the center of the room, I keep distance between us as he bars my way.
“Samantha,” Rafe says my name as if enjoying the sound of it on his tongue. Hand outstretched in yearning, he silently bids me to take it.
The thought of touching him now makes my skin crawl. “Keep away from me.”
Broad shoulders slumping, the shimmer in his blue, green eyes dull with resignation. “These are my creations. Created by my touch. Once as mortal as you now, they belong to me.” With a wave of Rafe’s hand, they begin to dance. A deathly waltz. Puppets on his string, their eyes vacant of life, as they move seamlessly through the steps. “I want you to join us.”
This isn’t real. It can’t be real. A bad dream. It all must be a nightmare. My body starts to shake, the tremors quaking through me making my every muscle twitch and jerk. “J...join you?”
“As my bride.” His voice is threaded with longing.
My stomach rocks back and forth with nausea and terror. “You want to make me into one of those things?”
Rafe’s handsome expression is grave. “They’re reanimated by my power but not truly alive. No one to date has retained their will or spark but you…I think you’re the one.”
My head moves from side to side in building denial. No. No. The paralyzing fear that’s enveloped me snaps, sending my feet moving. Without a backward glance, I take off as if the Devil himself is at my heels, and maybe he is.
“Grab her,” Micah shouts.
Pushing past the dancing corpses, they’re skin is chilled and smooth to the touch. It only serves to send my mind over the edge of hysteria. I won’t be one of them. Never. Never.
“Samantha, come back!”
Rafe’s bellow chases me through the room to the French doors, my bag slapping into my hip where it hangs off my shoulder. It echoes after me as I hit the door and thrust it open into the darkened garden. The biting winter air engulfs me, but I barely feel it, my coat forgotten. Dashing over the grass, I spy another metal gate open and dash for freedom. Legs aching, heart threatening to burst through my chest, I run and run and run through the narrow roads, until I find myself near the Arc de Triomphe. I’m blinded to the people wandering the boulevards. Panic rides me to the verge of insanity. Tears roll down my face to drip down my chin.
Arms waving wildly, I run headlong into the traffic. Horns blare loudly. Headlights swerve as vehicles barely miss me. When I see a taxi, I scramble into the rear, rattling off the name of my hotel, choking on a sob through ragged breaths.
The driver flicks me a worried look in the rear-view mirror, setting the car in motion.
Rafe is a monster.
Huddled in the corner, my cheek pressed against the cold glass of the window, I stare sightlessly out into the dark. Rafe standing among his creatures is blazoned into my memory. His eyes ablaze and his expression fierce. The dead had danced for him. Bowed for him. Marionettes on his invisible string.
Arms wrapped around myself, I rub, trying to rid myself of the ice his touch has left on my skin.
I’m safe. I’m safe. The words play on repeat in my head but give me no comfort. I won’t be out of danger until I pack my things and fly home across the ocean as soon as humanly possible.
Epilogue
One Year Later
Staring at the ceiling, I listen to the quiet voices of the hospital staff outside my door. I should be sleeping, but the pain tonight is too great. My parents have come and gone. Their fake cheerful smiles can’t hide the hopelessness in their eyes. I’m beyond the false hope the doctors promise now.
I’m lost and alone. Beyond the help of modern medicine and everyone knows it. The rare blood disease the doctors can’t explain has ravaged my body and taken its toll. Sucked me dry of my youth, strength, and vitality. Slowly but surely, it’s taken pieces of me, bit by bit.
It takes a moment 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 cheek in a tender gesture, which makes me sigh. It’s warm to the coolness of my skin. Brings a spark of something I’ve only ever experienced with him. I know instantly no one else on earth would have ever made me experience that electric feeling.
I smell the minty scent on his breath as his mouth covers mine. It’s soft, gentle. As if he’s reacquainting himself with their feel and texture. Memories of Paris flood into my mind. Walking in the rain. His strong hand in mine. The feel of his muscled body as we’d hugged each other in the catacombs.
Rafe deepens this kiss, and I open my mouth in invitation. A wave of intoxicating pleasure makes my head swim when his tongue seeks mine. My body loosens, the fear and anxiety melting away. He kisses me passionately, as if he’s drowning, and I’m the oxygen he needs to survive.
Hand fluttering up weakly, I tangle it in the silky strands of his dark hair, holding him to me.
Death isn’t kind.
It snuffs life out as easily as blowing out a candle. I savor my last taste of living with this creature, who’s so intimately entwined with it.
His first sip of my dimming life force coaxes a moan from me. There’s no pain. No icy coldness. All I feel is a spreading bliss that encompasses my dying spirit. He doesn’t cause me any agony like I half except. Nothing like what my life has provided.
The room around us falls away. I’ve never been so lost before, and I suddenly wish I could bring him closer. Nothing has ever felt like this. It’s suddenly a bridge to all my emotions. I let Rafe have them all. My misery and hopelessness, desolation and despair. He drinks deeply, greedily, stealing my soul from its brittle human housing. The kiss goes on and on. I don’t fight against it. I give him it willingly. When our mouths finally part, I shakily draw in air.
“It’s time to come home to Paris, rosa di sanguine. My blood rose. The skulls knew what you were that day in the catacombs, and now I’ve claimed you,” he whispers reverently against the shell of my ear. When he draws back and I look into his perfect unusual eyes, my heart flutters.
Home.
Home to him.
All this time and Rafe has been waiting for me. It’s then I see what my fear had blinded me from seeing when I’d fled from him all those months ago in his gaze.
Possessiveness and hope blazing in his extraordinary eyes. Rafe’s lips move soundlessly. The world begins to ebb away, and then I feel it. Cold fingertips tracing the blurry edges of my soul. As gentle as a spiderweb, it brushes away my fear, cocooning it in an unnatural frigid fire. My spirit is at a crossroads. Hovering between this world and the next.
Framing my face with his large hands, Rafe gives me the sweetest of smiles. “Death isn’t the end. It’s only the beginning for you and me.”
A wheeze forces its way from my chest. Darkness rises around me, icy and still. Out of the corner of my eye, I see the rose. Sitting in its vase, it’s now in full bloom, its once pearl white petals now as crimson as a precious ruby.
Blood red.
As my last living breathe escapes, I smile at its beauty.
The End for now
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Part IV
Red & the Wolf
Dani René
"Little Red Riding Hood" is a European fairy tale about a young girl and a Big Bad Wolf. Its origins can be traced back to the 10th century to several European folk tales, including one from Italy called The False Grandmother. The best known version was written by Charles Perrault.
The story has been changed considerably in various retellings and subjected to numerous modern adaptations and readings. Other names for the story are: "Little Red Ridinghood", "Little Red Cap" or simply "Red Riding Hood". It is number 333 in the Aarne–Thompson classification system for folktales.
Chapter One
Scarlett
Classical music drifts from the dining room as I make my way down the stairs. My parents must have guests over because I hear glasses clinking together, and my mother’s laughter at something someone said. Whenever we have guests, it’s always like this, she puts on a show in front of them, but by the time they leave, she and Dad are at each other’s throats.
The moment my sneaker hits the expensive, Italian tiles, her voice rings out to me, “Scarlett, come in here for a moment, darling.” The fake tone of her voice has me rolling my eyes. My twenty-first birthday is coming up, and I told her I wanted to spend my summer with Gran before I flew to New York to start my internship.
At first, she was against it, and I thought she’d forbid me from leaving, but after a talk with Dad, they both agreed it would be best that I was with my grandmother for a month. Strangely, seeing them agree on something was refreshing, and I didn’t question it.