NightWind 1st Book: HellWind Trilogy
Page 34
“Sign, my demon,” she ordered.
He stared down at the sharp point of the ancient knife. All he need do was take the dagger and prick his finger, apply the blood to the page, and sign his name.
“Sign or go back,” Lauren stated. “It’s up to you.”
Her husband looked up at her. “What did I do that was so terribly wrong?”
“Did you kill Beth Janacek?” she countered, fusing her gaze with his. When he hesitated, she asked him again, slowly, with each word like heavy stones dropped one by one. “Did you kill Beth Janacek?”
His answer was so soft she barely heard it. “Aye.”
“And the VanLandingham girl?” she pressed.
The answer was softer still. “Aye.”
“And did you let Louvenia Yelverton see you as I saw you this evening?” Her words were cold and as brittle as ice. “Is that what drove her mad?”
He looked away from her. “I could have killed her,” he whispered.
“Yes, you could have,” Lauren snapped. “And for that I suppose I should be thankful.”
Syntian turned his gaze back to her. “I love you,” he said.
She smiled. “I know you do.” Once more she pressed the knife toward him. “Sign.”
The presence beyond her, in the room with its deadly pentagram, seemed to loom even larger into his consciousness. He felt it trying to invade his body, trying to smother him with its fetid breath and freeze him with the ice of its talons.
“What have you conjured, Lauren?’’ he whispered. Overpowering strength of the entity was sapping his warmth and his stamina. He was growing weaker with every passing minute.
Lauren watched him steadily, gauging his reaction to the alien presence. “Either sign the pact between us, Syntian, or be taken back with him to the Abyss. It doesn’t matter either way to me.”
Hearing her say what he had begun to realize only served to hurt him the more. He was in pain: a blinding, throbbing coldness that was drowning him. Every breath he took was an agony of freezing cold air. The heat was being sucked from his body and his vision was growing dimmer.
“He is coming for you, my demon,” Lauren told him. “If you do not sign, he will drag you back to the ooze of the Pit.”
He smelled the stench of it. It was rank, so putrid it made his stomach heave. Stumbling back against the wall, he gasped for clean, unsoiled air, but all around him the smell was seeping into his pores, attacking him, washing over him with vicious fumes of sickness.
“Sign it!” Lauren spat at him. “Now!”
His hand was trembling as he took the athamé and pierced his index finger, cutting deeply into his flesh. Black blood flowed from his wound and fell to the page, turning a dark orange as he reached out to place his mark. The bloody ink flowed onto the parchment and spread out in fibrous tentacles. He signed his name: Cree.
Lauren looked down as he finished and saw that his name was, indeed, at the bottom of the pact. She closed the Book and brought it to her breast, holding it close to her as though it were the babe she would soon be nursing.
“Now,” she said, watching his head come up until he was staring pitifully at her. “Go back to your lair until I call you.”
He knew.
He had known the moment he had seen her at Angeline’s that this was to be his fate.
Not the insipid cold and gagging stench of the Abyss, thank the diabolical gods, but the loneliness and despair of that place from which her cry had roused him. Angeline had not forbidden him to leave that otherworldly place; she had not imprisoned him in that solitude of emptiness, that endless night time to which Lauren was sending him. At least Angeline had allowed him freedom of a sort.
“You won’t ever call me again, will you?” he asked, his voice breaking.
She turned away from him, the Book clutched to her bosom. Entering the conjuring room from whence she had called the lurking presence hovering within, she walked to the center of the pentagram and laid the Book on the floor. She turned to Syntian.
“There are lonely women all over the world, my demon. Women who have known the pain and suffering and heartache that I once knew. Women who deserve happiness and pleasure in their lives.” Stretching out her hand to the unseen power surrounding her, she locked her gaze on Syntian. “And there are a thousand times a thousand more NightWinds beneath the slime of the Pit.”
He understood now.
Her revenge was greater than he could have imagined. He was to be sent back and another would take his place. One of her choosing, who had not killed and maimed and destroyed. One who would do her bidding, and her bidding alone. One she could control.
“Please don’t do this,” he pleaded, bloody tears forming in his dark eyes. “Lauren, please.”
“It may not be forever,” she said, dismissing his whisper of pain. She fused her gaze with his. “Then again, it might. We’ll see.”
“I love you,” he said, his voice breaking with infinite sorrow.
“It doesn’t matter,” she answered.
He stared at her for a long moment, seeing her resolve, recognizing his defeat. “It does to me,” he whispered.
It was his defense and his goodbye. With one last, longing look at her, he bowed his head and was gone.
Lauren Fowler Cree’s heart felt as though it would break, but as the powerful hand of her new consort gripped her own, she knew she had made the wisest decision in sending Syntian away. He was dangerous and he would try to control her, despite the blood oath he had signed.
“I will do your biding, and your biding alone, my lady,” the powerful entity who had joined her spoke.
“Together,” she said, looking up into the face of her lover. “You and I will heal the pain. We will cure the loneliness. We will give pleasure where there has always been hurt. Together, you and I, we will control the NightWinds and bind them to me for all time.”
“Whatever you want,” her consort answered and his lips grazed her temple. “I am yours to command, milady.”
Lauren felt his arms go around her, felt her child leap in her womb, then turned into her lover’s arms and nestled against his chest.
“My demon,” she sighed. “My NightWind.”
His dark eyes glowed and he smiled. His manhood stirred against her belly.
“You didn’t hurt him, did you?” Lauren asked.
“No,” the NightWind answered. “He died quickly and well. It was much less of a challenge to take his place than it was to take Jaborn’s. I am surprised Cree did not realize I had done so.”
Lauren pressed her cheek to her lover’s chest and sighed. Tomorrow would be soon enough to mourn for Ben Hurlbert, the father of her child. The entity whose arms cradled her with tenderness bore Benny’s image and he would take that man’s place in Lauren’s world.
Tonight, there were NightWinds to bring through. NightWinds to sigh gently over the lonely women of the world.
Epilogue
She heard him calling to her, one of thousands who begged each night. One of the Legion of hopeless, lost entities whose souls had been damned, imprisoned in the Abyss. His name meant nothing to her; names never would. It was his pitiful howling, his beseeching heart, his utter loneliness that caught, and held, her attention. She listened closely, her mind reaching out across time and space and millennia. To her, his entreaties were like cool, sweet wine: they tempted her thirst to further knowledge of the NightWind race and filled her inquisitive mind with a multitude of possibilities.
The bright spark in her soul blazed.
His howling had ceased; his desolation, his emptiness called out to her, begged her, beckoned her, needed her. The ache in his heart was a dying ember, filtering down from the heavens, slowly disintegrating as it fell. It whispered in mournful whimpers of surrender to her, granting her powers, promising her all, and its sound struck a chord deep in her woman’s heart.
She turned her gaze heavenward searching amongst all the demonic cries for help, the howls of need, the
whimpers of demonic helplessness and frustration and failure. Her keen intuition traveled swiftly from Pit to Maelstrom, from Abaddon to Hell, from lair to lair. She strained to catch his unique voice just once more. One minute, evaporating essence of his terrible grief. In the strident confusion of howls and groans and lost whimpers, she probed; she explored the nether regions of demonic enslavement which called out to her, searching for that one voice, that one cry which had garnered her attention. In the cacophony drifting down to her, at last she heard his and her powers homed in on his pain.
She smiled.
She had found him.
And he would be hers.
Charlotte Boyett-Compo
CHARLOTTE ‘CHARLEE’ Boyett-Compo is the author of over 30 award-winning speculative fiction novels. Married for 37 years to her high school sweetheart, Tom, she is the mother of two grown sons and the grandmother of two. She is owned and operated by five demanding felines for whom she must have a day job in order to buy catnip and cat litter. Her hobbies include reading, writing, and staying as far away from arithmetic as space will allow.
Yet to Come in the
HellWind Trilogy
DemonWind
BaleWind