Page 49 of Scent Of Obsession
Loss. Destruction.
I needed to put a stop to it. I had to kill it before she destroyed me.
I was right—she’d be the end of me.
She was my number XVI.
Iwas unable to sleep.
During the two-hour drive home, I felt empowered at the remembrance of being enfolded in Radcliff’s dark aura. The night had been magical. He thought I hadn’t noticed the growing lust in his eyes, but the way our flesh demanded salvation was impossible to ignore. I had never let any man touch me that way. I had never experienced that bolt of pleasure piercing through my core. And most unlikely, I was making him feel; he was awakening the dormant part of me. We were like opposite atoms balancing each other.
So, naturally, when I arrived at the manor, I traded my satin dress for my chemistry blouse and my sexual urges by the obsession of my mind. It kept me awake through the night, and at 2 a.m. precisely, petals became a precious oil. I had extracted the Devil’s Corpse.
I rubbed my eyes and stretched my body on the chair of the lab. In the dead of the night, I peered through the window at the weeping woods, hearing the high-pitched cries of the huddled trees. The full moon was out, bathing their gruesome branches in a silver-blue light.
In this chaotic landscape, the greenhouse light constantly flickered on and off, as if a ghost was playing with the switch.
“What’s all this?” I rose up from my seat and turned on the flashlight on my phone.
I exited the lab and arrived in the middle of the garden, my hair and my blouse swaying in the freezing air. And yet, I didn’t feel the cold. A whisper pierced the howling wind, awakening all the spirits of the forest.
“Lily… Come to me,”the voice called out, like a siren causing shipwrecks.
The light of the greenhouse flickered on and off, gaining speed. I walked barefoot on the grass with the impossibility to detach my gaze from it. In each of my steps, I seemed to uproot the grass that clung to me as if to hold me back. I was so magnetized that I didn’t dare to even blink, my eyes wide open on the one thing that had the power to erase the rest of the world at this instant.
“Closer…”
The Devil’s Corpse was calling me.
My mind didn’t have a mind of her own, obeying a stronger force commanding me to step closer. The light remained on, and a violent draught snapped the door of the greenhouse open. The moonlight illuminated the Devil’s Corpse in a royal midnight-blue light. She occupied all the places in the greenhouse, the other flowers bowing to her in reverence.
I stretched my arm out in front of me, wanting to touch her.
“Lily…”
Thunderstorms groaned in the sky. The air filled with witchcraft and skeletons awakening from their graves.
The Devil’s Corpse was alive, and she was monstruous. She displayed her vines—they were like the tentacles of a kraken wanting to grab hold of me. I froze, spellbound by the spectacle. The ravenous plant opened her trap and closed it to the rhythm of the angry sky. The draught was unstoppable, and it tore the door apart. The door flew away in the direction of the cliffs and from afar seemed to take the shape of a raven.
“Let me show you,”the plant demanded.
Under her enchantment and drugged by her smell, I inched closer and closer, ignoring the wrath of the weather around me. Her vines surrounded me like a rope and tightened around me. She lifted me, her petals grazing my skin softly as I arrived in her embrace.
“Flowers take root in hell.”
In an instant, images captured my mind in a flash.
Roots sunk into the earth.
Unstoppable, they opened the ground violently, forming rifts.
They continued until the pit of hell, where flames and skulls surrounded an empty throne.
“You have to choose. It’s time.”
The Devil’s Corpse opened her trap and engulfed me inside of her, her thorny teeth closing after me. She captured me, and I fell into the endless dark.
My heart leaped.
