The Cursed Kiss of Cordelia Stoker (HalloweenVault2021 Entry)

The Cursed Kiss of Cordelia Stoker

As the stranger broke away, I froze with horror. He was smiling, pale blue eyes glinting with satisfaction. He had no idea what he'd just done.

    No one else at the setting up for the annual Halloween Masque did either. They were laughing at me; finally, someone had stolen a kiss from the 'frigid' Cordelia Stoker. Oh if they only knew.

    I wasn't frigid. I was deadly.

    I waited for what came next: that awful, cold and clammy feeling of Death creeping by me. It always followed after I kissed someone. Always.

    Johnny Locdon had been first when I was nine. One kiss from me on the playground and he'd dropped dead half an hour later the same day.

Unknown heart condition they said. Tragic and unforeseeable. But even at nine, I knew better. I just didn't have the words to explain it.

    That ignorance was how the next one came; Adam Rhodes.

    The crush of my seventh grade summer. We kissed at a pool party. That was the second time in my life I felt it; the cold rush of Death's fingers slipping past me and touching someone I loved.

    That time, I didn't just feel the cold. I saw his soul slip away. A silver wisp out of his mouth.

    Yet I still didn't make the connection. Not until her.

    Jacquline Fray. My best friend from ninth grade until the present. Bold, beautiful and more fiery than her hair. Not my first love, but the realest one I'd ever had.

    She'd died in my arms. Right after our first kiss.

    It took her loss to make me realize it. Since then I'd been careful but now, it didn't matter. This damnable stranger. I looked up, about to tell him off for his lack of boundaries and consent, but the words died in my throat when I saw him.

    This was the same man I'd been seeing in my dreams for a year. He was  even more  gorgeous in person. He was tall and lean, but clearly muscular with a tousled mop of brown hair, a strong jawline and blue eyes pale as ice.

    "Y-you, you," I stammered, at a loss for words as I waited, terrified for the cold I knew was coming.

    "Me," he said with a jaunty smile. "Alaric is the name and Miss Cordelia, it's an honor." He swept into a low bow and grabbed my hand. His skin was warm. Not the usual chill that I'd come to expect from those unlucky enough to receive my kiss.

    The shock of the contact made me move my hand away. This was odd. The cold always came right after the kiss. Always.

    "Alaric King," he clarified and smiled at me. A crooked grin that was charming. "I just transferred here."

    I already knew that. North Hollow never had many new people. As a result, they always stuck out. And guys like Alaric King stood out even more. He could have been a starter on the lacrosse team, been prom king or made the National Honors Society.

But whatever he was or could've been didn't matter now. He'd be dead by tomorrow.

***

Walking into school that morning, I waited for the wailing and whispers to follow saying Alaric King was dead.

They didn't come. Instead, all I heard was jibber-jabber about the Halloween Masquerade tonight at Blakeford Historical Manner. I frowned at that, surely my math wasn't off. As I turned the corner to my locker, there was my answer: Alaric King.

Handsome as ever, smiling and alive.

    "Morning Miss Cordelia," he said with that same crooked grin.