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Chapter Twenty-One: Lady of Snakes

Author: M.E. Roselli
last update Last Updated: 2024-12-10 03:01:07

Helaine

If I’d thought Cardinal Street was a sketchy place in the daylight, it was so much worse after dark.

The yellow glow of the old street-lamps cast the worst of the shadows here, poorly illuminating macabre works of art that made walking down the road feel like starring in a production of Dante’s Inferno.

I’d have given anything to be back in my apartment with Evan, to be back on the floor, paint on our bodies, his hands on my skin . . . before that photograph changed things.

The atmosphere was different now as we walked this street. There was a desolation, a quiet fear hanging in the air that refused to be brushed aside.

No one but us knew why, but it didn’t stop it from permeating their very beings.

A man wept softly, kneeling on the dirty pavement below the painting of the dead dove I’d seen the last time I came to Evan’s apartment. Instead of the beautiful red ribbon that had bound the dove when I saw it before, the dove was wrapped in snakes, its blood dripping down over th
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