Page 57 of Flirting with Darkness

Vitarus was beautiful.

All gods were beautiful, and all mortals knew this in theory. But when people say the gods are beautiful, you imagine it as the beauty of a human—perhaps even the beauty of a vampire, ageless and perfect.

No. No, that wasn’t right at all. Vitarus’s beauty was that of a mountain range or lightning storm, the beauty of the sun reflecting off the horizon of a rolling plain, the beauty of a fierce summer storm that kills half the town’s livestock, the tragic beauty of stag’s body rotting and returning to the earth.

Vitarus was beautiful the way death was surely beautiful moments before it took you.

He lowered himself to the ground, though his feet didn’t quite touch, hovering just above the tips of the sparse grass. He was tall and foreboding. His hair and eyes were the ever-shifting gold of sunshine and wheat fields, his skin gleaming bronze. He wore loose trousers of silk and a long, sleeveless robe that looked as if it could be either green or gold with every blink, which he left open, exposing a lean torso covered with the silhouettes of flowers and leaves. His hands and forearms were darker than the rest of him, all the way up to the elbow—they looked different from each other, though I couldn’t place why, not when I was so preoccupied with my own overwhelming fear.

A shimmering white mist surrounded him. Water vapor, I realized, when he ventured closer and the damp of it clung to my skin. The grass rustled, greened, withered beneath his feet.

For a moment, the presence of him paralyzed me.

Then his world-shattering gaze, disinterested and cruel, fell to my sister. Mina cowered like a deer cornered by a wolf, and that sight awoke every wild protective instinct in me.

I didn’t even remember running to the field.

“Go,” I bit out, shoving Mina aside as I fell to my knees before Vitarus. “Go, Mina.”

I didn’t look back long enough to see if she’d listened—where was there to run, anyway?

And I couldn’t, even if I wanted to, when Vitarus’s eyes locked to mine. They were a million colors of the sky and earth, every shade of radiant sun and coarse dirt.

“It wasn’t her,” I said. “She’s innocent. She did nothing to offend you.”

His gaze was so entrancing that it took me too long to remember to bow my head. I lowered my chin, but a firm grip tilted it back up. Vitarus’s skin against mine ripped a gasp from my throat.

A dizzy spell passed over me—a wave of fever, weakness. Death’s breath over my skin, a too-familiar sensation I hadn’t felt quite this strongly in a very long time. My eyes fell to the darkened skin of Vitarus’s forearm, and the nature of his hands, the thing I hadn’t been able to place moments ago, hit me: this hand was decay, his skin mottled and purpling, crawling with insects. The other was dark with the rich hue of soil, roots winding up his muscled forearms like veins, hints of green sprouting at his fingertips.

Decay and abundance. Plague and vitality.

He held my chin tight, not allowing me to look away.

And then, after a long moment, he smiled.

“I remember you. My, how easy it is to forget how time moves for you. Fifteen years. A blink, and yet an age. How quickly you grow and wither.”

His thumb stroked my cheek, and the flush of fever flared. My lashes fluttered, and for a moment I saw my father kneeling in these very fields, just as I kneeled now.

“You were just a pitiful ailing lamb then. Death walking in a little girl,” Vitarus crooned. “And now, look at you. Time is so kind to humans. And so cruel.”

He released some hold on me, the fever falling from the surface of my skin. I let out a ragged breath.

“No one offended you here,” I said.

Vitarus’s smile withered.

“One of my acolytes has been slaughtered. And you… you both stink of my traitorous cousin Nyaxia’s stench.” His eyes lifted beyond me—to the skyline of Adcova. “This whole town reeks of it.”

“They had nothing to do with any of it,” I choked. “They’ve suffered enough. Please.”

I couldn’t think of what to do, so I’d beg.

It was the wrong thing.

“Enough?” Vitarus said, incredulous. “Enough?What is it to sufferenough?The mouse suffers at the fangs of a snake. The snake suffers at the claws of a badger. The badger suffers at the teeth of a wolf. The wolf suffers at the spear of a hunter. There is no such thing asenoughsuffering.”

His words were cold, and yet his tone, somehow, was not. He seemed genuinely perplexed by my statement, as if the idea that suffering could be cruel was foreign to him.

---