The Discarded

Alone Chapter 14 - 2

Taking her hand back, she watched him for a long minute. "You sure you're not doing it for a certain blonde?"

Cesare smiled, unwilling to answer a question they'd only fight about. It wasn't that he didn't know gods existed. The school had proven beyond a shadow of doubt that something existed out there.

No, it was simply that he didn't need them. Friends, and enemies, those that needed to live, and bastards better left dead made sense to him. Things that lived beyond this world in some other place outside reality, could never understand what it was like to be him. This world that bled him dry, the moon that called to his soul, and the rotting flesh of his body was good enough. He didn't need anything else.

They finished the rest of the games in silence. Picking up his duffel on his way to the door, he stilled when he heard the scrape of her chair. "The last time you left here, a group of psychopaths hunted you down and carved you like a Yule pig. I think I'll walk you back this time."

A flash of anger spread through him, a thing of twisting shame that curdled his stomach. He'd done fine without her. They'd fucked him up, but he'd walked away while they'd been carried.

Knowing brown eyes bled the anger away, leaving only shame. Maybe, just maybe, she was using this as an excuse to spend time with him. Was it so bad she wanted to walk him back to the dorm? He spent his weeks looking forward to being with her, and the days always seemed to blast by in a blur of work.

Looking away, he cinched the duffel tight to his body. "Thanks." The word was quiet and twisted with emotion, dark and gleaming like wet muscle, it warped the air with its passing. Longing, guilt, shame, and a cutting crawling need marbled the word like veins.

Turning away from him with color climbing her cheeks, she pulled the door open. With disgusted caws, the ravens roused themselves. They were used to going back to their roost in her apartment, not tramping about campus after a hard day of insulting Cesare.

The moonlight shone down from a cloudless sky, silver shadows dancing across the earth. Reality blurred under its mystic eye, trees warping into capering monsters reaching greedily for soft flesh. Hungry eyes flashed in the blackest of shadows, seen out of the corner of the eye and never seen again.

There was a beauty in the darkness that the sunlit world could never have. Velvet soft shadows caressed the two scarred souls that walked with only the night between them. Quiet and still, the moon offered sanctuary for the lost and broken. It was the reason the shattered and hurt craved the dark, only in its silken embrace did their demons loosen their claws.

Cast off and thrown away, beaten, raped, and abused, they ached for the touch of her silver fingers. Healing was beyond her fey love, she offered only illusions and sweet lies. The moon only ever promised the night, her illusions lasted only as long as sable folds clothed the land. For a time, the forgotten could lose themselves in the illusion they were whole, good, better than the maimed, crippled thing the sun showed them to be.

Skeletal hands stretched out above them; moon beams mangled between branches, casting spider web shadows across the trail. Darker than sin, the ravens rustled through the branches, flowing from tree to tree, feathers dusting the night with their sound. Wicked ebony pits of cruelty flashed when eyes caught the holy light of Luna.

The day had been hot but with darkness holding the land, a cool breeze brushed aside the heat of the day, leaving it just right for a late-night walk. "I like the world like this." His quiet words were barely a whisper.

Avoiding her eyes, Cesare watched the small shadows of winged malice dart through the trees. "Hidden, close, and dark, without the burning eye of the sun. The cold of night and the silver shine of the moon. It's cleaner, safer than the day."