“But then I showed up at the college.” Disrupting the course and opening Pandora’s fucking box.
“It wasn’t all you.” A mild dejection touches his expression. “I was supposed to trust the course, no matter where it led. Selfishly, I made demands.” He traces a finger over the scarred sigil in his pectoral. “I just craved you too badly.”
The blanket slips from my shoulder as Kallum takes my hand in his. The pad of his thumb caresses the scar on my palm. “The design was flawless,” he says. “After you caught your Harbinger, I’d approach you like I should have that first time, and the goddamn planets would align. If they didn’t, then I was prepared to leave this world in a blaze of glory and escape to the next, where maybe—just fucking maybe—I wouldn’t fuck it up that time.”
“Kallum—”
He pushes forward and captures my face between his palms. “But my design wasn’t flawless. It was your design. Always yours. When I saw you in that moment, a goddess of the moon harnessing all your dark fury… Goddamn, you were utterly breathtaking. You delivered your violent retribution and brilliantly scapegoated the murder.”
Yes, I scapegoated it right onto Kallum. But then he evaded the murder charge with a plea of insanity.
A testament to his genius—or the proof of his psychosis.
The twisted irony of accusing the Harbinger of the murder I committed is a paradox that threatens to shatter any rational mind I have left.
“I can’t be a muse,” I say to him, shaking my head against his hold. “Muses aren’t supposed to inspire death.”
He sweeps the tangle of white strands behind my ear affectionately. “Muse, goddess, huntress. From every fracted angle of light to the depth of your darkness, I’m inspired by all of you, Halen St. James.”
I feel the atoms in the room charge. The night Kallum found me, I became his muse, his inspiration for the darkest acts of violence. That truth still remains, just on a longer timeline.
What frightened one man, the dark stirring of my soul, the thread of violence woven just beneath my surface, enraptures another.
His execution of the Harbinger was, in fact, flawless. The design skillful dark artistry, the synchronicity that’s intwined into every intricate facet of us eloquent genius.
Kallum is frenzy. Kallum is mania. Divine madness and sanity cannot coexist in the same mind.
The price is too high.
A self-sacrifice that’s cost him his soundness of mind.
Without a tether, with no counterbalance, he will be lost to his tortured mind, to his abyss. He will eventually be caught.
As his captivating gaze sears into mine, I’m standing on the precipice of the void.
Claw to the surface—or sink further.
My hand trembles as I gingerly touch the crescent sigil I sliced into his flesh, my desire for Kallum and I to have met before my life spiraled. I know he feels what I’m feeling, how badly I wish I could take us back to that moment.
With a heavy exhale, he reaches into his pocket and retrieves a silver ring. The simple band is fashioned similarly to the one he wears—and it’s unmistakable.
The second cufflink.
He slides the band onto my finger and turns my hand over, where he delicately kisses my palm, the place I bled for him, claiming him as mine.
“I had this one made at the same time,” he says, “because you were made for me, sweetness.”
An ache burns in my throat as I first glance at the ring on the hearth, then the one circling my finger. “Double rings,” I say, thinking back to that dark chamber. “A full circle.”
A snake devouring its tail. Consuming us over and over.
“The double ouroboros,” he confirms, his gaze lit with a mix of praise and hope as he laces our fingers together. “The balance of the upper and lower natures, the joining of opposites.”
I focus on the solid feel of his hand, the sureness and comfort of his touch.
“For all the darkness and pain we’ve forged in this life to be together, for all the depravity and suffering, there is another space in time where I walked right up to you, where I held on tight, where we existed in the light, and it was so easy…like breathing, Halen. But because that beauty exists there, we can have it here. It belongs to us. We just had to wade through hell to find it.”
A broken sound forms at the base of my throat as he offers me the desire of my heart.
There is no greater destruction than one of self…no catalyst more powerful to wield in alchemic creation. Destruction isn’t an end, it’s a beginning.
Our beginning.
Some cages, we design for ourselves. This one, I designed for us both. To deny him would be like caging a beautiful moth. He’d break his wings to get to the light. Maybe he already has. But I have the power to repair the damage. I’ve always had the power.
I crawl into Kallum’s lap and wrap myself around him. “I will never let you fall,” I swear to him. Whatever cage is waiting below, I will never let Kallum fall. This omen is mine to prevent.
I kiss him with the passion we’re barely able to contain between us. I make love to him furiously, the only way our souls connect, the most violent, heated parts of us destroying each other before we’re healed with cleansing fire. The alchemy of our dark souls.
There is beauty in the darkest art, genius in the fault, the imperfections. The very substance that makes us bad and violent and wicked, when broken down to our divine state, makes us lovely.
We were designed for each other.
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18
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DARK MATTER
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KALLUM: TWO YEARS LATER
Nietzsche once said: To live is to suffer, to survive is to find meaning in the suffering.
Nietzsche and his great pain. His tortured path to the philosopher’s stone. Not to insult the renowned philosopher (more so than I already have), but fuck survival.
Who wants to merely survive this life?
That’s like settling for being a god.
Let me explain.
Once upon a time, as a bored, egotistical professor of occult sciences, my only suffering was a meaningless existence. A chaoist without a madness of his own.
Then like a strike of lightning, my muse illuminated my dark sky.
My utter, divine inspiration.
My beautiful madness.
While the rausch enraptures us in an artistic outpouring of pure frenetic ecstasy, for those who see through the veil, it can also be an affliction.
The mind is what is sacrificed for our desire.
The frenzy makes us feel as if we’re reaching a higher plane above humanity and becoming godlike. But the gods could never feel as we do, be as passionate as we are. Because they bear no pain.
Our great pain inspires our great art.
Without the capability to descend to the depths of suffering, we are never able to experience the sheer, transformative ecstasy of pleasure.
There are no high and low notes.
Without my muse of heartbreak, I would have never experienced this deep pain, because I was not designed to feel this alone. I would have coasted through this life, unfeeling, unmoved. A callous, reviled rock of mediocrity.
What she brought me was something so ineffable, a love so divine, I would insult it just by trying to describe it.
So while it’s true that to live is to suffer, we also have the ability to ascend to far greater heights than mere survival of this life. Look for the symbols. Follow the course. Seize your madness.
It’s been two years since Halen and I destroyed every article of evidence from the Harbinger’s last scene at our mountain home. Two years since my beautiful muse submitted to her dark flame that binds us together. And not a single day passes where I don’t acknowledge that a single flutter of a wing could’ve deviated our course.
