Darkly Divine: A Paranormal Enemies to Lovers Romance

by C L Walker

  He took his time, and with each flex of his hips we got closer to release until finally he picked up his pace and I instantly shattered around him and brought him to his release in the same moment.

  “Micah, why am I getting sleepy?” I gasped as I clawed at his back, as he still hadn’t stopped filling the space between my legs.

  “Because it’s done, and now we must leave.”

  “Leave?” I asked. “But I don’t feel like leaving, it feels too–”

  Darkness.

  I woke to the sound of birds chirping and normally I might have said that it was a nice way to wake up, but they were rather aggressive and loud.

  I wondered if I had a hangover, but I didn’t recall drinking.

  I cracked my eyes open and grew even more confused, as there was not a popcorn ceiling above me, rather it was a vaulted ceiling made of large logs.

  How did I get to Micah’s cabin?

  I sat up, grabbed the blanket, and pulled it off me with more strength than necessary so I couldn’t stop my hand in time before it smacked into the wall.

  “Ow!” I cupped it in the other.

  “You’re finally awake,” Micah said from somewhere downstairs.

  I climbed out of bed and thought I was surely dreaming because I felt incredibly light, and it was far too easy to get up.

  I took a step forward, tripped, over corrected myself because it seemed I no longer knew my own body, and went crashing through the banister and right out of the loft to the first floor. I landed on the couch on top of Micah who was sitting sideways across it. My head had landed inches shy of his crotch.

  “You are so lucky you didn’t land any higher,” he said without looking at me.

  I raised myself up on my arms. “Don’t you think you should be calling an ambulance for me instead of bitching about my landing?”

  He still hadn’t met my eyes because he was too busy reading a book.

  “Micah!”

  He rolled his eyes and closed his book slowly and tossed it on the coffee table. “Yes, my love?”

  When his eyes finally met mine, I felt a rush of joy unlike anything I had ever felt before. “Woah.” I closed my eyes so I could concentrate on finding my thoughts again. “I uhm, what am I saying… oh yeah, I just went through a wall pretty much, or half of one.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  I looked down at my body, it was sore but not as much as it should have been, and I searched for blood but there was none. “But I’m fine.”

  “Sky, what do you remember about last night?”

  “Last night?” I asked as I tried and failed to remember. “I don’t know I can’t even think straight, all I can think about is how warm you feel beneath me.”

  Welcome to my world.

  “What do you mean?” I sat up and tried to do so with less strength than before and it worked out a lot better. I stood up on shaky legs and he tucked his in so I could sit back down on the couch.

  “I didn’t say anything,” he said once I was sitting again.

  Shit, I didn’t even consider that this would go both ways. I need to calm down.

  My eyes had been watching him the whole time and his lips hadn’t moved and yet I still heard him talk.

  Shittttt, I shouldn’t have said that!

  “Why can I hear you when you aren’t speaking?” I asked.

  He schooled his features and I physically felt him grow calm and just like that his mind was a blank slate to me.

  “I really don’t know how to say this in a way that won’t send you into a frenzy, but that dream that keeps slipping into your thoughts wasn’t a dream at all.”

  He reached for my hand and once he touched me, I couldn’t think straight again, all I wanted to do was be closer to him. Everything I had felt for him before was intensified in such a way that it threatened to consume me.

  I pulled my hand away and tucked my legs in so that they weren’t near him.

  “What’s happening?” I asked as I began to feel scared.

  He reached for me, but I flinched away, so he let his hand drop. “Sky, your mom–”

  “My mother–” I grabbed my head as pain swelled behind my eyes and the events of the night before came crashing back into my mind.

  “Mother?”

  She looked to me with defeat in her eyes, and my heart began to ache.

  In that moment, for just a second, we were the same.

  So why did things have to end up the way that they had?

  “Why couldn’t you just love me?” I yelled because there wasn’t a good reason to hold back any longer.

  She tipped her head down as she began to cry but when I took a step towards her, her head snapped up and her face was distorted with anger.

  I took a step back out of my room and she followed me slowly.

  “Because,” she snarled, “you killed them.”

  I shook my head as my own tears began to fall.

  “You did, you took everything from me, and it took me a while to realize it but once I did, I asked God every day why he would curse me with such a child!”

  I continued to back through the hallway because I was too scared to turn my back to her. There was something different this time, something fragile about the way she conducted herself as if she could snap at any moment.

  I always knew she blamed me, she had hinted as much on many occasions but to have it put out there so bluntly, hurt.

  “I didn’t know what would happen, otherwise I wouldn’t have thrown a fit over that stupid cake. I was just a little girl!”

  “Lies!” she yelled as my back hit the front door. “And now you think you can leave? I’m not stupid, I know you’ve been counting the days until you can leave me, but I won’t let you.”

  “Please, mommy, you don’t mean that.”

  “I can’t let you go because you don’t deserve a chance at happiness.” Her eyes landed on the empty vodka bottled that sat within her reach. “Not when you took all of mine away.”

  She reached for the bottle and I turned around quickly and tried to open the door, but it was locked. I turned the lock with shaky fingers and felt relief when I heard the click and I stepped back to pull it open.

  I didn’t get it all the way, it was barely cracked, but it was enough because I saw freedom even though I never got to step into it.

  I saw Micah walking towards the trailer, and I wondered why he was coming back… maybe he knew I should have never gone inside alone.

  I smiled because I thought I was safe… Micah would always protect me…

  But it was too late, glass shattered against my skull and I felt myself being tugged backwards. I fell onto the coffee table before I slid to the ground.

  “I told you that you would never get out of here, you’ll rot with me one way or another,” she said, desperation in her voice.

  My vision blurred but it was clear enough just to make out the front door being closed, and once it closed the darkness won and everything faded away.

  Death was freedom in its own way. It wasn’t the type of freedom I had wanted but perhaps it was the one I deserved.

  The pain subsided as Micah pulled me into his lap and wrapped his arms around me. As he held me tightly gradually my vision became clearer as I realized that I was safe.

  I tucked my face into his neck and wrapped my arm around his shoulder to be closer to him. “She killed me, didn’t she?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m dead? This is the afterlife?”

  He ran a hand down the back of my head. “No, you’re still on Earth, you’re just different now.”

  “Different.” I pondered his meaning until another thought struck me and I sat up. “What happened to my mother?”

  He brushed his hair out of his face as his eyes narrowed, he was angry at her. “I left her there because there was so much blood that I knew if I waited for an ambulance you would die.”

  “But I did anyway,” I said, still confused about what that mean
t. “So, you made it to the hospital, and I died there?”

  He frowned. “No, you died in my arms on the way.”

  “And?”

  “And I was in the woods, so I laid you down and I did the only thing I could to save you. I pleaded with my ancestors to change you before your life force slipped away and you moved on.”

  I tried to understand what had happened but the lingering human part of me refused to accept anything he was saying as anything but nonsense.

  I had so many questions and when I met his eyes, they told me everything I needed to know. Living but not human. Rather than be upset about the fact that I was a vampire all I could think about was punishing my mother for what she had done to me.

  My emotions were something else, my anger was more akin to that of a rage that couldn’t be sated.

  In the end she had won, she took the very life she had given me away and I was never going to get it back.

  “I’m seriously freaking dead?” I shouted as I clenched my fists so hard my palms started to bleed.

  She deserves the same fate as me!

  I had nothing but hatred in my heart and I had become blinded by it.

  I closed my eyes and took a deep breath as I let it engulf me.

  “Oh, no… Sky… don’t even think about it, you need to calm down right now.”

  He shook me but I refused to let his touch confuse me, so I pushed the warmth he tried to offer away, and I focused on the only thing that mattered.

  Revenge.

  When I opened my eyes, I saw the same glittery like smoke that had unfurled from Micah coming off my own skin. I held up my hands in front of me to gaze at the delicate, yet fearsome black nails that extended half an inch from my fingers.

  How Lovely.

  Micah laughed nervously. “Well, I’m glad you are taking this change quite well, but you really need to fight off your anger since you aren’t even in control of your own body yet.”

  I stood up and said nothing because his words meant little to me in that moment.

  He stood up beside me and put his hands out as if he were attempting to tame a wild animal. “Sky… you can’t.”

  I gave him a wicked sort of smile. “Oh, but I think I can.”

  He lunged for me, but I knew he was going to try and grab me, so I bent to the floor and pushed myself up with all my strength and jumped right over him and crashed through the front door.

  I took off running through the forest as the sounds of nature threatened to overwhelm me.

  “Focus!” I said to myself, before I slid down a hillside with one hand dragging through the dirt behind me so I wouldn’t fall.

  I laughed as the land flattened, and I took off running once more and barely managed to dodge trees and jump over fallen logs.

  I couldn’t believe how fast I was, I cleared miles of land in minutes and looped around the entire lake before I knew it.

  The speed in which I could run was exhilarating but also terrifying because I felt like I wouldn’t be able to stop. As if I would just keep on going, forever.

  I had no idea what time it was but that didn’t matter to me, all that mattered is that I got to her. I may have been focused on my destination, but I had a natural self-preservation that urged me to make sure no one saw me as anything other than human, so I was still careful.

  I skidded to a stop in the woods behind the trailer park and almost lost my balance, I was going to have to work on being as graceful as Micah was.

  I walked around to the front door slowly and pushed it open to find a pool of blood by the front door.

  Mine.

  She had to have hit me quite hard for so much blood to have spilt and for me to have died minutes later.

  Clearly, she had intended for me to die.

  She had been that desperate.

  She wants me dead! My own mother wants me dead!

  I walked through the blood and the glass that laid in pieces throughout the living room as I listened carefully for any noise in the trailer. When I focused hard enough, I heard her breathing.

  I smiled something predatory as I turned towards her room and pushed the door open so hard it hit the wall and fell off.

  She screamed from where she sat curled up in the corner.

  I stood in the doorway and considered her as her eyes widened in horror at the vampire who stood before her, a vampire that had been her human daughter the day before.

  “Hello, Mother.” I could smell the fear rolling off her body and it made me feel powerful. “I see you weren’t smart enough to run.”

  She whimpered in response as she tucked her knees up to her chest.

  “Oh, that’s right, you had nowhere to go what with Jack being dead and all.”

  “Did you kill him?” she asked, and I got enraged because she had the audacity to use an accusatory tone with me when I was clearly the one with the power.

  I walked towards her slowly and once I was before her, I grabbed the top of her head and tipped it back, so she had to look into the darkness that was my eyes. “No, my boyfriend ripped out Jack’s fucking heart like it was nothing when he had tried to rape me.”

  “He wouldn’t–” she began, but I cut her off when I grabbed her by her throat and slid her up the wall.

  “Yes, he would, and he did because he was a piece of shit just like you.”

  She grabbed onto my wrists and tried to loosen my grip as her feet dangled beneath her desperately searching for the ground. She tried to talk but all that came out was rubbish.

  “You killed me,” I whispered sadly, and I dug my nails into her throat and drew blood.

  “Sky!” Micah said, after he ran in and stopped somewhere behind us. “Don’t do this, you’ll regret it.”

  I eased the pressure just enough so she wouldn’t pass out.

  “But she murdered me.” I began to cry. “My own mother abused me, made me feel like less than human for nearly my whole life, assured that I would feel unworthy of love, and then she murdered me.”

  He walked up behind me and put his hands on my shoulders. “I know, sweetheart, but this isn’t what you wanted, you never wanted to be like her, remember?”

  I searched her eyes and looked for a sign of remorse but there was none, and when I pushed aside my anger and allowed myself to feel I realized something.

  “You let the darkness control you, you were completely blinded by your own sorrow.”

  She didn’t understand what I was talking about, but she didn’t need to because it all made sense to me and I was thankful that I could finally see.

  I finally understood that inside we were no different, but I had a choice, I didn’t have to use the anger I had inside as she had, I didn’t have to hurt others because I was hurt. Everything depends on what part of yourself you decide to embrace, it’s all about your choices in life.

  She chose darkness and although I was a dark being, I could still embrace the light.

  “You’ve always looked at me and seen a monster, haven’t you?” I asked.

  I saw the confirmation in her eyes, and I laughed, as that moment only served to convince her she had been right all along. She didn’t regret that I had died, she only cared that I had come back for her.

  I increased the pressure again as I lowered her feet back to the ground.

  I put my cheek against hers and for a moment I allowed myself to remember what it felt like when she used to hug me.

  “I stand before you with all this power at my fingertips and yes, I have physically become what you thought me to be, but I am still no monster.”

  I looked at her soulless eyes one last time as I eased my grip and allowed her to breathe once more, and she gasped for air desperately just as she had made me do on so many occasions.

  “It’s you,” I said, my voice a harsh whisper. “You are the monster. It’s always been you because you’re weak. You let the darkness control you, consume you until there was nothing left inside. But I won’t do the same, I will control it becaus
e I am strong. I am resilience.”

  Yes, you are.

  I smiled because I finally understood what Micah had seen hidden inside of me all along, strength that went beyond my ability to hide, and that went beyond my ability to survive. I had the strength to stand up for myself and I would never let anyone hurt me like she had again.

  I removed my hand and she dropped to the floor. “I will let you live but I want you to leave this town immediately whether you have the means to or not. If you tell anyone what you heard or saw today, I will know, and I will hunt you down like a fucking pig for the slaughter. I will not be merciful if we meet again. I will bleed you out bit by bit and only then will you understand all the pain you have caused me.”

  She coughed wildly and I enjoyed the bit of pain I had caused her.

  I smiled. Maybe I’m just a little evil…

  “Daddy would hate what you have become, it’s not me he’s looking down at with disapproval.” I turned away and my smile grew when she erupted into sobs and screams.

  Micah grabbed my hand and spun me around towards him. “You did the right thing.”

  “I know,” I whispered softly.

  His brown eyes shined with admiration before he looked behind me. “You heard her, get the fuck out of here.”

  I didn’t look at her, but I heard her scramble across the floor and fall several times as she made her way to the door after grabbing her keys off the broken coffee table.

  When I heard her peel out, I inhaled deeply and when I exhaled, I felt lighter, as I was finally free of her.

  Micah held me closely as he asked, “Are you okay?”

  “No, but I’m going to be.”

  Twenty-eight

  Skylar

  After we grabbed my things out of my room Micah showed me how to start a hellfire, but we found that I was too angry to control it, so he had to make sure it didn’t spread until the fire department showed up that I had called for.

  I explained to the cops that I had come home to find that the trailer was on fire and that my mother was nowhere to be seen.