Thirst

A ROSE

"He said what?" Cherry spooned a massive bite of cookie-dough ice cream into her mouth, her braids swaying as she shook her head.

They were sitting on a tartan blanket beneath the sweeping branches of a massive willow tree on the campus quad, enjoying the afternoon sun.

"He called my perspective a 'naive fairytale'!" Juanita grumbled, stabbing her own ice cream with a plastic spoon. "He was so smug about it, Cherry. Like he knows everything about life and I'm just some stupid kid, I've been reading classic literature since I was five, goddamnit. He didn't even use my first name. Just Miss Dawson, like he was a Victorian landlord."

"Oof. The hot ones are always the most exhausting, he is hot right? I'd be more irritated if he looked like he lives under a bridge and still has the nerve to be a jerk."

Juanita grumbled and then scoffed. “He's stupid hot. And I mean he's stupid — with his stupid smirk and eyes and face and ugh,” she stabbed her ice cream. "And a stupid voice too, oh my god. On some ‘Miss Dawson is confusing a fatal obsession with romance’” she mimics in a ridiculous voice and accent making Cherry laugh. "That's how he sounds, by the way."

“Oh I'm so sure." Cherry sighed, wiping her mouth. "What's his name anyway? The brooding literature snob?"

"Maybe that could've been his name, who knows. But I don't actually know his first name," Juanita admitted, realizing she had been too dazed to ask him and then too angry to even care. "The professor called him by his surname. D’Amadeo, I think. Yeah, that's it."

Cherry froze. The plastic spoon slipped from her fingers, landing softly on the grass.

Juanita frowned, noticing the sudden, drastic shift in her bubbly friend. "Cherry? What's wrong?"

Cherry’s face had completely lost its vibrant color. She looked around the quad nervously, her voice dropping into a tense, hushed whisper. "Juanita... are you serious? D’Amadeo?"

"Yeah. Why? Do you know him?"

"No, but everyone who runs in high-society London circles knows that surname," Cherry said, her eyes dead serious. "They are old, old money, Nita. But they are completely dark. A few decades ago, their family property in Berkshire was burned to the ground in some massive, bloody gang war or something. Dozens of people died. The survivors are completely reclusive, borderline underground. The rumor is they run the most ruthless, dangerous criminal syndicates in the city. They are bad news. Like, body-in-a-ditch bad news. Stay away from him, Juanita. Seriously. Don't talk to him, don't even look at him."

A cold spike of unease pierced Juanita’s anger. D’Amadeo. The name now carried a weight that made her chest tighten, sparking a bizarre, fleeting memory of the danger her father always warned her about.

"Promise me you will. Please, Nita?” Cherry said seriously.

"I will. Of course. I hate him even more now.”

"Good.”

A month flew by in a blur of collegiate excitement. Juanita was absolutely loving her new life. She had expanded her circle, making two more friends from her history lectures. She had thrown herself into campus life, joining the Acapella group, the debate team, and an environmental activism club. She felt alive, independent, and free.

And despite Cherry’s warnings and her promise to, avoiding Samil D’Amadeo proved to be impossible.

Samil was always there, like a dark satellite orbiting her world. She could always literally feel him whenever he was around. Like a ghost or shadow lingering.

Their interactions over the next few weeks were short, tense, and loaded with an unspoken friction.

They would pass each other in the library, his dark eyes tracking her movements from the shadows of the stacks. Once, during a debate club meeting held in the courtyard, she looked up to find him standing under the gothic arches, watching her speak with an unreadable, intense expression.

Every time they crossed paths, that magnetic pull tugged at her chest, a dangerous siren song she couldn't silence.

Then came a rainy Tuesday in late September.

The sun was setting early, swallowing London in a dreary, bruised twilight. It drizzled lightly.

Juanita was leaving the library late after a heavy research session. As she walked down the stone steps, she spotted a dark figure hurrying across the quad toward the old, abandoned chapel at the edge of campus.

It was Samil. She had learnt his first name.

But something was wrong. He wasn't walking with his usual fluid, silent grace. He was stumbling. His hand was clamped tightly over his opposite arm, his head bowed as if he were in severe pain.

Impulsive, reckless curiosity overrode every warning her father and Cherry had ever given her. Before she could talk herself out of it, Juanita veered off the path and followed him into the shadows.

She tracked him to the narrow, damp alleyway beside the chapel walls. The darkness here was absolute, shielded from the campus streetlights.

"Samil?" she called out softly, stepping into the alley.

A harsh, ragged gasp echoed from the deepest recess of the stone wall. Juanita stopped dead in her tracks, her amber eyes widening in pure horror.

Samil was leaning heavily against the brickwork, his knees trembling. His black coat was partially torn open, and where his bare wrists and neck seemed to be…burning, his skin was hissing. White, sickening wisps of smoke were rising from his flesh, and the skin was bubbling into angry, raw, blistered burns right before her eyes.

He looked violently ill, his chest heaving as he suffocated in the open air.

"Oh my god!" Juanita cried. She rushed forward, reaching into her bag. "Samil! What's…You're burning! What is happening to you? Do you have an allergy? Let me help you, I have a phone, I can call an ambulance—"

"Stay back!"

Samil’s voice didn't sound human. It was a low, feral snarl that vibrated against the brick walls, laced with pure, agonizing pain. He whipped his head around to face her.

Juanita choked on a gasp, taking a frantic step backward.

His eyes were no longer dark. They were a vivid, glowing, predatory crimson, burning through the shadows of the alley. And she could see …fangs.

He gripped his burning wrist, his teeth bared in agony

as his eyes locked onto her trembling form. Despite the pain ravaging his body, his gaze held a terrifying, lethal sharpness.

"I told you before, Juanita," he hissed, his voice raw, his fangs clicking against his teeth as he physically looked like he was trying to restrain himself. "Stay away from me. Mind your own goddamn business, or the next time you follow me, I won't let you leave."

Before she could even process the horror of what she was seeing and hearing, Samil threw himself into the deepest, pitch-black recess of the chapel cellars, vanishing into the subterranean darkness and leaving Juanita alone in the freezing rain that has begun falling in earnest.

Juanita was frozen in place. Shocked, terrified, Confused.

***

Over the next few weeks, Juanita felt a restlessness she couldn't explain. Not constantly. No.

It was at certain times. Odd times.

Hair at the back of her neck standing, tingling sensation in the pit of her stomach. She couldn't explain it.

And there was a figure she always saw. But maybe it wasn't really there, because she never saw it longer than a split second.

When she looked out the library window, when she walked alone or with Cherry, when she was at the cafe, even when she was alone in her room, she could feel it.

Maybe she was crazy or paranoid or years locked up in her family estate was telling on her, but she felt watched.

Like someone was watching her every move, she felt it like a shadow. It was the strangest thing.

She knew she should tell her father about it, but something stopped her.

She did tell Cherry though.

"...I feel it like the wind, but then I turn and I see something...or at least I think I see something...but it's never there. I don't know..."

Cherry who was stirring a pan of puree, turned to Juanita who was sat on the kitchen counter.

"Huh? What are you going on about, Nita? I don't understand," she looked visibly confused.

"I think someone's watching me, or spying or stalking me."

"Oh? Like a secret admirer," Cherry's face lighted up in excitement and Juanita was a bit concerned that that was a bestfriend's first reaction.

"Cher! This is not a romantic situation."

"Oh."

Juanita sighed in exasperation.

"Okay sorry, sorry, real life is not dark romance, got it," and then Cherry got serious. "You really feel like someone's watching you?"

Juanita nodded and saw something that looked like hesitation in Cherry's features.

Cherry told her not to worry and it probably wasn't anything to worry about other than a creep.

"But what if this person could be a murderer or something? Or a kidnapper or a rapist."

"Have you told your dad?"

"No. Not yet. But I might. I don't want him worrying or paranoid and then make me quit college. I really like my freedom."

Cherry nodded in understanding and held her best friend's hand, giving it a comforting squeeze.

"Okay, here's what, we'll file a complaint in case anything happens and we'll get mace and pepper spray and then no more walking alone at night, okay? Everything will be fine. Don't be scared."

Juanita nodded and hugged Cherry.

She calmed down and then they ate tasty pasta for dinner.

When Juanita got back to her room, she felt something different like it was a thing in the air.

And as her eyes scanned the room, right there on her study desk, was a red rose, thorns all chipped out apart from a single one at the base. It was on top of the open page of the book she was reading.

She shuddered, a shiver running up her spine. She slowly picked up the rose and then looked out the window.

The figure was there.

But this time it didn't vanish the next split second.

It stayed, watching Juanita look.

Her breath hitched in her throat and she moved closer to try and see who it could be, the figure vanished, like it was never there to begin with.