26
Tristan
“You can speak Latin?”
Demi is sitting in the middle of the living room floor, her bare legs crisscrossed, muttering in Latin under her breath.
I’d moved the furniture around in the formal sitting room as Demi took a shower to wash away the grave mud.
My grave. When she was ready, she came downstairs wearing an oversized vintage t-shirt — Stevie Nicks tonight— and her arms were full of supplies.
I watched her with longing as she set up a makeshift altar on the floor, spreading a square of blue velvet and sitting on it to arrange her supplies.
Every time I see her, I swear to all the gods she gets more beautiful.
Her hair is wet, hanging long and loose over her shoulders, so fragrant with the scent of her shampoo that it perfumes the entire first floor. Her skin is clean and bare, glowing in the flickering candlelight. Her eyes are bluer than the sea and twice as dangerous. I could drown in them.
“I’ve been studying,” she says.
“Studying Latin? In the twenty-four hours since you decided to do this spell?”
Smirking, she holds her phone up. “I know you’re an old guy, so technology might be lost on you. But we have this thing called Google Translate now—”
“I know about Google Translate,” I grumble .
Demi mocks me with an eyebrow raise. “Color me impressed.”
I cross my arms and lean back against the mantle, giving her my best “grumpy old guy” scowl, but try as I might, I know I can’t keep the amusement from my face.
Still, she acquiesces. Softens her wit into sweetness, just for me.
“I’ve been trying to memorize the pronunciation. I don’t want to say something wrong and send us both to the afterlife.”
That’s when I see it. Demi is nervous . I see it in the way she keeps running the pad of her thumb down each one of her long fingernails on the opposite hand, in the way she keeps rolling her shoulders as she sits on the floor.
She takes a breath, deeper than her usual, and blows it out slowly between pursed, sinfully kissable lips.
I move across the living room in two short strides and crouch in front of her, across the altar. Her eyes catch mine, and I hold them.
“Demi, if you’re not sure about this, we don’t have to do it.”
And I mean it. I can’t think of anything I want more than to be alive again, for this spell to work.
But not at the expense of Demi’s safety, or even her comfort.
I’d rather spend eternity watching her and her future descendants grow old in this house than to risk her, no matter how painful that would be.
She reaches for me to hold my hand, but her fingers pass through mine, and she freezes, staring at the place where we should be touching but aren’t.
In the silence that blooms around us, Demi’s expression changes.
The worry melts into a sadness I wish I could soothe away.
The sorrow doesn’t last long. That, too, dissolves into something else.
She sits up a little straighter, her jaw tenses, and when her gaze returns to mine, all I can see in her eyes is fierce determination.
“I have an opportunity to keep you, Tristan. I’m not giving up,” she says.
Something warm and all-consuming expands in my chest. Something that unbalances and anchors me all at once.
You must really like me, she’d said.
More than like, I’d replied.
More than like.
I try to speak and stumble instead. So, I clear my throat and try again. “Keep me?”
“Yes. Keep you.”
“Does that mean I get to keep you, too?” I ask.
Her eyes glitter. “That’s the plan, handsome.”
That feeling inside me? The warm expanse? It overflows.
“You’d better get started on that spell,” I say.
“Right now? Why’s that?”
“Because I’ve waited long enough to kiss you.”
Demi’s eyes dip to my lips, and she licks hers in response. The yearning in me for her fucking whimpers.
“Let’s do this,” she says.
Leaning forward, she lights the candles: two black, two red, one white. Demi pulls a small stone bowl toward her and begins to open the glass jars she’s placed around her.
“What do you need me to do?” I ask.
“Just sit there and look pretty. This shouldn’t take very long. In theory.”
So, I do as she says, and with rapt attention, I watch as she begins to mix ingredients like she’s done this a million times.
First, Demi empties a container of dark berries—blackthorns, the one whose tree protested their pilfering by cutting Demi’s wrist— into the mortar.
She uses a stone pestle to mash the berries into a dark, juicy paste.
Checks the spell book, then moves on to the next ingredients.
A sprig of rosemary, rubbed warm between her palms, is then dropped into the bowl on top of the muddled berries, and a sprinkle of coarse sea salt over that.
A little salt remains on Demi’s index finger.
She opens her mouth and taps her finger on her tongue three times, then swallows the salt.
I try not to fixate on the vision of her finger in her mouth, or the working of her throat as she swallows.
She opens a jar full of clear, clean water and trickles it over the mixture in the bowl. When she opens up her final jar, I catch the scent of earth, and a violent tremor crashes into me. If I had a body, I’d be shaking. The feeling catches me off guard, makes me dizzy, and I stumble back.
“Shit, what is that?” I ask.
“Are you okay?”
There’s concern on her face as she looks at me, but her hands continue the work of pouring the contents of the jar into the bowl. Another wave of that earthquake feeling rolls through me. I have to close my eyes against the vertigo. I’ve never felt anything like this.
“Demi, what’s in that jar?”
“Dirt. From your grave,” she says carefully. “Are you okay?”
“You don’t feel that?” I ask, opening my eyes .
She’s grinding the spell ingredients together in the mortar, but her attention is on me. Demi shakes her head. “I don’t feel anything.”
“You must be doing something right, in that case. I’ve never felt anything like that before.”
“Let’s hope you’re right about that.”
The dizzy feeling subsides, but a strange buzzing inside me persists, like a low-wattage electric current that sets my teeth on edge.
“We’re halfway there,” Demi says. “I just have to light the ingredients in this bowl, and speak the incantation.”
“Will the ingredients even light? It’s just dirt and berries.”
“And water,” she says with a shrug. With expert hands, she lights a match and sets it to the muck in the bowl.
It ignites immediately in a bright crackling flame.
Our eyes meet over its flickering.
This might actually work.
Demi’s eyes have gone wide; her chest rises and falls with quick, anticipatory breaths. She looks surprised and excited; she looks nervous and full of wonder. She looks like a goddess lit by a flame that scientifically should not be burning.
“You ready?” she asks, and I swear her voice has dipped an octave. It crackles like the fire in her hands.
I don’t know if I’m ready.
I don’t want to hope for this to work, but I can’t help it. I don’t think I’m ready for the aftermath if it doesn’t. And I don’t know what will happen if it does.
But all that comes out of my mouth is an eager, “Yes. ”
Beautiful, lilting Latin begins to roll off her tongue, accented as if she’s been speaking it for her whole life.
Demi reads from the spell book; her voice is clear and deep, and so gorgeous that I never want her to stop reading, ever.
She holds the flaming bowl in her hands, and I briefly wonder if the heat of the fire will burn her.
And then it happens.
The feeling from before, when Demi opened the jar of grave dirt, hits me again, but tenfold.
The world shifts on its axis, and I feel like I’m upside down, inside out.
I’m empty and far too full. I feel like I’m falling from a great height, my stomach in my throat.
I feel like I’m drowning, lungs full of salt water, unable to breathe.
It feels vaguely like death, except I’m already dead, so how could I be dying again? Like dying in reverse. Like everything hurts, even though I don’t have a body. Like I’m trapped in ice. Like I’m on fire.
Something is wrong. The spell isn’t working. I know with a sudden and panicked certainty that the spell isn’t bringing me back to life. No. It can’t be. It’s killing me. It’s sending ?me.
I need to tell her. I need to tell Demi what’s happening. Tell her to stop. I need to tell her to put the bowl down because it’s going to burn her fingers, it’s going to hurt her.
But most of all, I need to tell her I love her because I know this will be my only chance. I can feel it. I’m leaving the mortal coil, and I’ll never be able to hold her in my arms, never be able to kiss her.
I’m about to disappear. I’m going to leave Demi behind, and she will never know that I’m in love with her .
I open my mouth to tell her, to scream it out loud, but no sound comes out.
Instead, everything fades away.
Fades to black.
I’m gone.