The Keepers' Evil

Twenty-Four: Our interests will never be aligned

Song- Mystery of love: Sufjan Stevens

"Our interests will never be aligned."

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"You are infuriating, Sallow." I mumbled with a loud tut that rattled the sleek spines of literature between the dust-ridden shelves of the dark library. Sebastian rested his weight on one of the desks that lined the edges of the bookshelves, slouching with his arms crossed as he watched me intently, an adoration in his eyes at the rather mundane task of placing my borrowed books back into the slots that they belonged to.

I couldn't help but allow my lips to squeeze a delicate smirk onto my lips as I shook my head at the boy who couldn't rope his tie properly, who left me and Ominis rather suspiciously in the middle of the night with a look I hadn't been able to shake out of my mind, but who loved me fiercely enough to commit the acts that others considered injustice.

"I am truly sorry, Maddie. I can't remember what it was, but something spooked me. I was half asleep." I chuckled a little under my breath, because it didn't really matter why he had left both Ominis and I, what mattered was that Sebastian had a habit of leaving. It was in his nature; he had left me after he had killed Solomon and all I wanted was to help, he had left Ominis too, maybe even leaving Anne long before then.

It wasn't even leaving, it was running away.

"Huh, I didn't take Sebastian Sallow as a sleepwalker." I teased rather seriously, feeling a rather playful jump behind my smile with the knowledge that it was toying with Sebastian inside. What we tended to forget, Ominis and I, was that Sebastian had muddled our lives so severely that we forgot what it was like to put him at the end of our taunts and tease. Sebastian deserved to feel a little sting to his inner shadow occasionally.

Ominis.

It has been four days since Ominis had hurried away from me, four days since he had left me in the Great Hall and he had never returned to me. Ominis wasn't mine to have, he wasn't mine to fix, but sometimes it felt like it when he hid the kind soul that he was and replaced it with a boy I wasn't sure I knew. Ominis had a side to him that reminded me of Sebastian; a side of him that was cruel and ran away.

"Don't start with me. Is Ominis still ignoring you?" Sebastian knew that my expression would drop at the sound of his name, and he wasn't surprised when my eyes sought the floorboards beneath us for a comfort away from the glare of his eyes or the flare that Ominis' name lit inside my chest. It felt like a surge of a flame firing through my bones, like someone had lit a firework inside of my body and expected the pieces to just fall back together as usual. It hurt.

I pressed the final book from my small stack in my arms into the snug open space for it to slot inside. It fit slowly, and my eyes spent a little too long scanning the title as my fingers struggled to let go so that I didn't have to answer Sebastian's question. The dark forces: a guide to self-protection by Quentin Trimble, fitting. It often felt like Sebastian was the one dark force I had to learn how to protect myself from, but he was also the darkest force with the lightest heart. Sebastian wasn't a shadow, he didn't want to be, but he was a product of the environment he had been forced into, and that wasn't his fault.

"Yes," I huffed, blinking away the pearls of salty tears. Ominis was the only one that could invoke such a curse inside of me. I hadn't felt so harmed by another being, not even when Sebastian left me. Maybe it was because Ominis represented such purity, such an angelic clearness in a life and a name so hauntingly foggy, that when he chose to leave me, it felt like too much of a betrayal.