The Deadly Kiss

Chapter two

By twenty‑one, Seraphine had stopped pretending it was a coincidence.

People still came to the house like they were doing something shameful. They hovered on the step in their work coats and Sunday dresses, eyes fixed on the peeling paint by her shoulder instead of on her face. But they came, and they always came for the same thing. A father whose lungs were drowning him. A grandmother whose heart faltered and clawed itself back, again and again. A woman in her forties whose body had been fighting so long that the fight itself had become a kind of cruelty.

“It is time,” they would murmur, and Seraphine would feel that old cold loop settle around her neck, the one that had followed her out of childhood and never quite let go.

She had made rules for herself. She would not go unless the dying one, if they were still lucid, asked her in their own words. She would only answer calls after sundown, when the edges of things were already softened. She would stay no longer than a few minutes after the last breath. On paper, they were nothing. In practice, they were the small rails she gripped to keep from seeing herself as an instrument someone set down when they were finished.

The town had its own rules, louder and less honest.

Arguments cracked through kitchen walls about when to “send for the girl.” Some wanted her early, before the nights of gasping and moaning and desperate hands. Others insisted you waited until the end, until you were sure there would be no miracle, until love had squeezed every last hope out and left only exhaustion. No one called her an executioner. They said mercy. They said peace. They said, “Seraphine can help,” in the same hushed tone they used for illnesses and infidelities.

She grew accustomed to it, and that was the most unsettling part.

There was the retired schoolteacher who smiled up at her and whispered, “You always were my best student,” and thanked her with a dry, papery kiss to the cheek before closing her eyes. There was the old miner whose courage shattered at the last moment, his fingers digging into the bedsheets as he begged her to wait, while his daughter gripped Seraphine’s wrist and forced it closer, tears of fury in her eyes. There was the town priest, silver at the temples now, who used to press bread into her palm when she was small; these days he hovered in the doorway while she worked, his lips moving around prayers, gaze fixed anywhere but on her hands.

After each visit, she walked home with the taste of endings at the back of her throat.

She learned how to live in the town without quite touching it. At the bakery, she waited out the morning rush, then stepped forward alone to buy a loaf, feeling the way the woman’s eyes flicked to her lips and away again. At the grocer’s, conversations dipped when she passed, then rose in forced, bright tones, as if everyone needed to prove how alive and busy they were. Children glanced up at her with the curious, unfiltered interest only the young had, until their parents drew them close and murmured, “Don’t stare.”

Her friends refused to rewrite her the way the town had.

They were twenty‑one and restless, with calluses from real work and cheap perfume dabbed on wrists. They pulled her into a booth at the bar after shifts, shoved an ale into her hand, complained about supervisors and long hours and the price of rent. They worked in shops, on farms, at the mill. One was apprenticed to a seamstress, another helped her father run deliveries in and out of the neighboring city. Their talk ran on wages, on who was hiring, on what it would take to finally get out.

Then, once the first drink had softened everyone’s shoulders, the other subjects slipped in.

They talked about the bartender who flirted for tips, about the mechanic with the lazy smile who always had someone different slipping out of his flat at sunrise, about the woman from the post office who had finally left her boring fiancé for the baker’s daughter. They joked about bad kisses and good mistakes. They compared notes on hands at the small of the back, on breath against the ear, on the warm weight of another body falling asleep beside you instead of away.

Seraphine listened, laughing when they did, making faces at the right outrageous details. On the surface she fit, another twenty‑one year old with a drink in her hand and work in the morning. Underneath, the distance ached. She knew the weight of bodies, but only as they left. She knew the sound of someone’s last exhale better than she knew the sound of anyone whispering her name because they wanted her and only her.

Sometimes, when the night ran late and the bar emptied out, one of her friends would catch her staring off at nothing.

“You need to get out of here,” Mara said one Thursday, tipping the last of her beer back. “All of us, actually. I am sick of seeing the same faces every night.” She nudged Seraphine’s boot with her own. “There is a club in Lydale, you know. Actual music, not Old Henrik’s broken jukebox. People who do not know your whole life story.”

“Lydale is an hour away,” Lina groaned, but there was a spark in her eyes. “And they charge a cover.”

“We will split the fuel,” Mara said. “I can borrow my brother’s truck. We go Saturday. We dress up. We dance until our feet hurt. No one asks us about work or rent or funerals.” Her smile turned sharp and bright. “Come on. We are twenty‑one, not eighty.”

Three sets of eyes landed on Seraphine.

They were not asking her to ease anyone out of the world. They were asking her to come into it with them, for one night, loud and messy and ordinary. She felt something in her chest twist, something small and stubborn that still wanted to be just a girl in a borrowed dress, anonymous in a crowd, maybe bumped by a stranger’s shoulder and smiled at like she was a possibility, not an ending.

“Saturday,” she heard herself say. “Lydale.”

Mara whooped and slapped the table. Lina started immediately plotting what they would wear. The talk shifted to music and drinks and who might be there, a whole map of hypothetical touches and glances.

Seraphine sat back, letting their excitement wash over her. Outside, the town settled into its usual nighttime quiet, house lights blinking out one by one. Somewhere, someone was probably fighting to stay. Sooner or later, they would send for her. They always did.

For now, though, the only thing anyone wanted from her was to show up on Saturday and pretend she belonged in a room where people reached for each other because they wanted to live.

She held that thought like a fragile thing and did not look too closely at how alone it made her feel.

Two days passed like they always did in that town, quiet on the surface, something coiled underneath.

On the first day after the bar, Seraphine worked a late shift and came home smelling like oil and metal. She scrubbed her hands, changed into an old shirt, and sat at the table with the cheap calendar where Mara had scrawled in thick pen: Lydale. Saturday. Underlined three times. Every time her eyes snagged on it, something light twisted in her chest, half hope, half the certainty that the world did not usually let her have uncomplicated things.

On the second day, the sky stayed a flat gray. She did small, ordinary chores, the kind that usually calmed her. Sheets off the bed. Laundry in the basket. Sweep the grit from the kitchen floor. Her phone lay face‑down on the table, a black, harmless shape.

It started ringing just as she shook out the last pillowcase.

The sound was wrong from the first note. Too loud, too shrill, drilling straight into the back of her skull. Seraphine dropped the pillow, grabbed for the phone, fumbled it, nearly sent it spinning across the floor. The screen flashed Mara’s name.

She answered on the second ring. “Mara?”

All she could hear at first was air. A rush of it, jagged and uneven, like the phone was pressed against a storm.

Then Mara’s voice came through, cracked and raw. “Seraphine.”

“There was… there was a truck.” Mara’s words tangled with tears. “Some i***t ran the light by the old mill, he was going too fast, he did not even slow down, and we…” She gulped, the sound tearing. “We were in Natalie’s car, and it hit on her side, and I am fine, I am fine, but she is not, Sare, she is not.”

The room seemed to tilt, all its edges sliding away. Seraphine put a hand on the table, hard enough that her knuckles went white.

“The hospital,” Mara choked. Behind her, Seraphine could hear the layered noises she knew too well from waiting rooms. Beeping. Voices kept low and tight. A child crying somewhere far off. “They took her straight back. They said… they said internal something, I do not know, they keep using words and then stopping when they see me. Her parents are on their way, I called them, but you need to come. Please. Please.”

Seraphine did not remember hanging up.

One moment she was in her kitchen with the phone still hot in her hand, the next she was dragging on her boots with fingers that would not quite obey her, snatching her keys from the hook, slamming the door so hard the frame rattled. The drive to the hospital was a blur of red lights she barely saw and turns taken too fast. Her body knew the route; she had walked it enough times, following behind stretchers, walking ahead of quiet, ruined families.

By the time she pushed through the sliding doors, her lungs burned and her world had narrowed to fluorescent light and the squeak of her own shoes on linoleum.

Mara was in the first row of plastic chairs, hunched forward, elbows on her knees, both hands wrapped around her own head like she was trying to hold it together by force. There was a purple bruise blooming on her cheekbone and dried blood at the edge of her hairline, but her eyes were clear and wild when she saw Seraphine.

“She is in there,” Mara said, pointing with a shaking hand toward a closed curtain down the hall. “The doctor came out and he said…” Her voice broke open on the memory. “He said she is not going to make it. That they can slow it but they cannot stop it, that she is bleeding inside where they cannot fix it.”

Seraphine’s heart slammed against her ribs so hard it hurt.

“She is still awake?” The words stuck in her throat. “She knows?”

Mara nodded, a sharp, miserable jerk. “She keeps asking for you.” Her face twisted. “I did not know how to say it to you on the phone. I did not know how to say, you have to come say goodbye to our friend.”

The hallway smelled like antiseptic and old fear. Somewhere, monitors kept up their patient, merciless beeping. It should have felt familiar. It did, in all the worst ways.

Every death she had ever been called to walked with her, a line of ghosts at her back, as she made herself move down the hall.

The curtain around Natalie’s bed was half‑drawn. Voices leaked through the gap, low and frayed. A woman’s sob. A man murmuring something that kept breaking. The steady, pitiless beep of a monitor.

Mara stopped a few steps away. “Her parents got here,” she said, voice rough. “They let them in. They said I could not… I did not want to go in without you.”

Seraphine swallowed. Her mouth tasted like metal. “You stay,” she said quietly. “If they make you leave, you fight them.”

Mara nodded, jaw clenched so tight it trembled.

Seraphine slipped past the curtain.

The room was too bright. Hospitals were always too bright, as if light could bully back what was happening inside people’s bodies. Natalie lay on the bed, small under the tangle of sheets and wires, her dark hair stuck damply to her forehead. There was a line of dried blood by her ear, and a bruise that spilled purple down her neck like a handprint.

Her parents stood one on each side of the bed.

Her father’s shoulders, which Seraphine had grown up seeing broad and sure as he carried crates into his shop, were hunched in on themselves, his big hands useless at his sides. Her mother clutched the bed rail with both hands, knuckles bloodless, eyes swollen and raw.

They all turned when Seraphine stepped in.

For a heartbeat, no one spoke. Seraphine felt the weight of their gaze like heat against her skin. She had been in rooms like this so many times, but never with one of her own.

Then Natalie’s face changed. The pain lines around her eyes shifted into something like relief.

“You came,” she whispered. Her voice was thin, a thread half worn through. “I kept… I kept saying you would come.”

Seraphine forced air into her lungs. “Of course I came.”

She moved closer, to the empty patch of bed by Natalie’s hip, careful not to jostle any tubes. Up close, she could hear the wet rattle under every breath, see the way Natalie’s chest rose too fast, like each inhale was being fought for.

“The doctor talked to us,” her mother said suddenly, words tumbling out as if they had been building pressure. “He says she is bleeding inside where they cannot… where they cannot reach it in time. They say she is strong, she is young, but it is…” Her voice shattered. She pressed her lips together, shaking her head, as if she could refuse the sentence.

Her father scrubbed at his face. “He said they can give her something for the pain. That she will get… tired.” He could not quite say the rest.

Natalie’s eyes moved from them back to Seraphine. There was a terrible clarity in them, a knowledge that made her look far older than twenty‑one.

“It hurts,” she said, soft, as if confessing something shameful. “It hurts so much, Sare. Every time I breathe, it feels like something is tearing. They keep telling me to hold on, but for what. So I can hurt longer.”

Seraphine’s throat closed. She reached for Natalie’s hand on instinct, fingers wrapping around her friend’s, feeling how cold they already were.

“I love you,” Natalie said.

The words hit Seraphine like a physical thing. They were not the careless, laughing kind they tossed across bar tables, not the exaggerated declarations after a shared joke. This was bare, bone‑deep, no time left for anything but the truth.

“I love you,” Seraphine whispered back, because anything less would have been a lie. “You ridiculous girl. With your terrible driving and your worse singing.”

Natalie’s mouth twitched in something that might have been a smile. The movement cost her. Her eyes squeezed shut on a wave of pain, her hand clutching at Seraphine’s like a drowning person.

When she opened them again, there was nothing left in them but plea.

“Please,” she breathed. “You know what I am asking.”

A silence fell over the room, so heavy it felt like a weight on Seraphine’s chest.

Natalie’s parents both turned to look at her, really look, as if only in that moment remembering who exactly they had called. The father’s eyes were red‑rimmed, his face ravaged, but there was something like understanding there too, something that made Seraphine want to look away.

“You do not have to,” he started, voice hoarse.

Natalie dragged in a breath that sounded like it scraped. “Dad.” Her fingers tightened weakly on Seraphine’s. “Please do not make her pretend she is not who she is. Not now.”

Her mother let out a sound that was almost a wail. She reached across the bed, grabbing at Natalie’s arm, as if she could anchor her there by touch alone.

“Baby, no,” she cried. “They are going to keep helping you, they are going to give you more medicine, they said they will not let you hurt.”

Natalie turned her head, slowly, the effort visible in every tiny movement, until her gaze landed on her mother.

“They say that because they have to,” she whispered. “They say that because they do not know what else to do with someone who is dying too slow.” Her eyes slid back to Seraphine. “She knows. She has seen it.”

Seraphine felt the room closing in. The machines, the white walls, the neat labels on every tray, all of it blurred at the edges. All that stayed sharp was Natalie’s face and the pulse fluttering frantic and thin under the skin of her wrist.

“Please,” Natalie said again, and the word broke in the middle. “Please, Sare. It hurts. I am so scared. I do not want to drown in my own blood. I do not want to spend my last hours listening to them pretend I might walk out of here.”

A sob tore out of her mother. She pressed her forehead to Natalie’s arm, shoulders shaking. The father made a raw, wordless sound, like something had been torn from his chest.

“I love you,” Natalie gasped, the words coming faster now, as if she felt time shortening around her. “I love you. You and Mara and your stupid club plans and your stupid small town. I wanted to live all of it with you, I did. But that is not what I get. What I get is this. So please do not make me stay in it longer than I have to.”

Her eyes shone with tears, but there was something fierce behind them, too, a last scrap of will.

“I am asking you,” she said, each syllable deliberate. “Please. Do it. For me.”

Seraphine’s stomach twisted so hard she thought she might be sick. Every rule she had made for herself, every quiet line drawn in blood and silence, rose up like a chorus in her head. She only did this when no one was looking. She only did this when the world had looked away first. She did not do this in bright rooms with witnesses and monitors and the sound of a mother’s sobs. She did this at dusk, and never has she intentionally taken someone she loves.

Natalie’s mother lifted her head. Her face was blotched, eyes swollen near shut, but she reached across the bed, fingers trembling, and grabbed for Seraphine’s wrist.

“Please,” she whispered. “She is my baby. I do not know how to watch her like this.” Her grip tightened, desperate. “I do not hate you. Do you hear me. I do not hate you.” But Serphine hated herself she hated what she is. She took life. Curse by a kiss. The world has played its cruel jokes on her forever now. Why couldn’t she heal with a kiss. Why must she be built to drown in her life. Suffacated by the idea that love wasn’t meant to be.

The words cracked on the last syllable. She said them again, as if repetition could make them a shield around them all.

“I do not hate you, Seraphine. I do not. I do not. I am supposed to, maybe, I am supposed to be angry at you for what you are, but I cannot, not if you can stop this. Not if you can take this away from her.”

She was crying so hard now that the words came out in pieces, but she kept going, like a prayer.

“I do not hate you. I do not hate you. I will never hate you.”

Her husband stepped closer, one big hand landing on Seraphine’s shoulder. It felt like a blessing and a sentence at once.

“She asked you,” he said quietly, voice sanded down to the barest thing. “We knew what that meant. I will not lie and say I am not terrified, but I cannot stand here and ask you to turn your back on her either. Whatever you decide in this room, we will carry it with you. You hear me. We will not pretend we did not ask.”

Natalie’s eyes found hers again, cloudy and sharp all at once.

“I know you,” she whispered. “You are going to be so much more than what you are right now. You are not a curse. You will never be a curse.”

Seraphine however only seen herself as a curse. She sees no blessing in anything she was given.

Something eased in her face after she said it, like a knot finally loosening. Her hand was still caught in Seraphine’s, fingers cooling.

Very carefully, as if the air itself might shatter, Seraphine bent over her. She pressed her lips to Natalie’s damp forehead, tasting salt and hospital plastic and something unbearably human.

“Okay,” she breathed against her skin. “Okay, Nat.”

Seraphine stayed bent over her for a moment too long, like if she did not move then none of this could finish happening. The smell of antiseptic and copper lodged in the back of her throat, that horrible bright hospital light burning every edge too clear.

It should not surprise her anymore, this moment, and yet it did, every time.

The pattern uncoiled in her mind like a slow, patient snake. People got close, and the world took them, and somehow it was always her in the room at the end. Her love did not feel like protection. It felt like contagion.

For a flicker of a second she saw herself from very far away, a woman that grief circled like a hungry thing, always coming back to check if there was anything left to take. Maybe this was what she was meant for, to walk people to the door and watch them vanish through it.

Her forehead was still resting against Natalie’s when she realized she was shaking. She pulled back just enough to see her face, blurred through her own tears.

“I love you so much, Natalie,” she whispered, the words catching as they left her.

The sound goes first.

One moment there is the thin, frantic beeping at her shoulder, the next it skews high and wild, a long sharp tone knifing through the room. Someone is shouting in the hall. A nurse appears, then another, blue and white and efficient, hands moving to silence the alarm, to check pupils, to call a code that Seraphine cannot seem to understand.