by Abbie Roads
A fist slammed into his temple—or at least it felt like a fist. Xander winced at the tuning-in. Damn.
The door cracked open. All he could see was a too-large-to-be-normal jaundiced eyeball staring out at him, locking on Xander’s scars.
He bears the mark of the Beast. King warned me about him. He is here for the Dragon, but it is too late.
The mark of the Beast. Well, that was a new one. Xander touched the puckered skin on his cheek. He almost admired the originality. Almost.
“Go away. You’re trespassing.” The female voice was deep and thick, mucus snapping around each word. King must confirm the Dragon’s death before the body can be burned and the evil ashes soaked in holy water. “I’ll call the police.”
“You won’t call the police, or you would’ve called them already. Let me in. I won’t ask again.”
“Go away.” King would not permit such a risk to anyone, even one marked by the Beast. The door slammed. A lock snapped into place. A chain rattled.
Was she fearless or stupid or crazy? He leaned toward crazy, considering her thoughts of dragons and kings. He shouldn’t judge. He was short on sanity too.
Abandoning all of his self-control and the last of his logic, he rammed into the door, snapping the lock, busting the chain, and impacting with the heft of her body on the other side. He leaped across the threshold. The stench slammed into him—a physical entity that pushed him back a step.
Cigarette smoke so thick it choked the oxygen and clouded the room. Unwashed flesh so pungent and sour it burned his throat. And infusing it all, the putridly sweet rot of death. His throat kicked open, and he half coughed, half gagged, and barely managed to keep himself from vomiting.
The terrible throbbing in his head stopped, but his eyeballs took up the beat.
The floor was covered in trash. Old milk jugs, wrappers, empty boxes of food, strips of white paper that looked suspiciously like toilet paper. She obviously didn’t understand the function of a garbage can, and the concept of trash day had to be about fifty points above her IQ.
Roach-like, she scuttled to block a darkened hallway. Sweat plastered her few strands of hair to her skull like a greasy comb-over. Her bulbous nose and wide features verged on downright ugly. Stains of various colors and textures trailed down the front of her tank top, over the bulge of her protruding belly. Everything—every single thing—about her disgusted him. Repulsed him. He didn’t want to be in the same trailer with her, and he sure as fuck didn’t want to be in the same room with her.
So why was he here? Why couldn’t he force himself to leave?
She brandished a large pair of scissors and jabbed them at him like a roly-poly ninja. Under a different set of circumstances, he might’ve laughed, but her insanity sucked the humor from the situation.
And there was blood on the blades.
Dread fisted his lungs. “What have you done?” He braced, waiting for the frequency to be reestablished. His head jerked.
On the sixth day, I stabbed my sword into the Dragon’s flesh. “A peasant should not question his queen.” Her tongue slithered from her mouth and stroked over her lips, leaving a slime trail, before slipping back inside.
“I’m not your peasant.” He might be on a visit to Crazyland, but she had moved into town, taken up permanent residence, and joined the Church of Unsound Mind. When in Crazyland, do as the crazy do. He packed his tone with authority. “I am your king, and you will tell me what you’ve done.”
She froze, almost as if Xander had hit the pause button.
You don’t look like King.
Shit. “I had plastic surgery. Changed my entire appearance. That’s why you don’t recognize me.” With the scars on his face, she’d have to be more than crazy to buy that line of bovine excrement; she’d have to be downright dumb.
Her face relaxed into a look of senseless understanding.
“Sire.” She crossed one tree trunk of a leg in front of the other and curtsied. Fucking curtsied like she was some fancy-ass princess.
King is so pretty now. Except for part of his face. “I didn’t know your new face.”
“Show me what you’ve done.”
“I have followed your decree. On the sixth day, I thrust my sword into the Dragon.”
His gut coiled tight. “Show me.”
“It might not be safe for you. I’m not certain the Dragon is dead.”
He used his best I-am-the-king tone. “Show me.”
“But Sire, you cannot risk being in its presence if it still lives.”
“All will be well.” He forced himself not to gag on his next words. “My queen, please, show me.”
She turned and waddled down the short hallway. He followed her to a heavy steel door. The kind of door that wouldn’t be standard issue in a cheap trailer. The kind of door used to keep intruders out. Or to keep something locked inside, something that bled, from the looks of her scissors. An animal? He wanted it to be an animal, but—damn—he knew he was going to find a human on the other side of that steel.
She unlocked the door and stepped aside. “Be careful, Sire.”
Dim silver light from the open doorway slashed across the dark room, illuminating a body in the middle of the floor. The naked female, so devoid of muscle she qualified as a skeleton, had a vile ring of blood surrounding her, seeping from a gash in her side.
His lungs contracted, expelling the air out of him. “What have you done?” he snapped at the Crazy One and realized two seconds too late he’d broken character.
You’re not King. You tricked me.
The woman on the floor needed an ambulance and mostly likely an extended hospital stay—assuming she was even alive. But the Crazy One still had those scissors in her hand. He wouldn’t be helping anyone if she buried them in his spine. He put himself between the woman on the floor and the Crazy One.
“I told you.” A croaky voice came from the shadows and muted planes of space the light didn’t reach. “I told you her protector would come.” Another skeletal body crawled into the light, face ravaged by torment and time, its attention focused on the Crazy One’s scissors.
Something familiar plucked at Xander’s memory, just beyond the reach of consciousness. Damn.
The Crazy One dropped the scissors. She stood, mouth hanging open, her flat slug of a tongue resting on her bottom lip. She backed away, one step at a time. I must finish. I must finish. She turned and ran down the hallway, each footstep reverberating through the floor.
“Take her. Protect her. Heal her. Save her from Queen.” The malnourished figure crawling on the floor spoke again, urgency riding each of her words.
Save her from Queen. Recognition slammed into him, knocking him to his knees.
…and no one other than Queen will ever remember we existed. Queen—not a typical name.
“Fuck me.” A burr gouged into his heart. The woman lying on the floor was the woman. The one inside his head. She wasn’t a figment of a fucked mind. She was naked and emaciated and—oh, Christ—looked like a corpse.
Guilt choked in his throat—a lump too big to swallow, too awful to taste. She’d tried to tell him she was suffering and needed help. What had he done? Buried her words under a gallon of liquor and a barrel of self-pity. All those nights when he’d felt so restless, if he’d just gotten in his truck, would he have driven here? Found her before it was too late?
The woman’s cheekbones jutted so sharply they nearly cut through the skin. Tufts of blond hair grew in patches along her hairline. And yet, superimposed over what his eyes took in, his mind filled in the gaps, added flesh to her cheeks, fullness to her eyes, and pale-blond hair to her head. Somehow, he saw beyond what lay before him to what might have been. She would’ve been beautiful. Radiant in an angelic way words couldn’t adequately describe.
“Oh, God.” He was the worst sort of asshole. Had always bee
n a selfish bastard, owned that about himself, but this—this was a low he’d never be able to crawl out of. He couldn’t just rationalize away his lack of action all this time.
The spot where his heart should be throbbed. His hand shook like someone coming off the sauce as he reached for her, touching her neck, feeling for a pulse, though he knew there was no way she could be alive.
Her skin nearly froze his fingers. Death did that to a person, stole their warmth along with their life. Her eyelids fluttered, stuttered, and opened, locking directly on him, pinning him with her gaze.
Logical thought tumbled out of his head, splashing onto the floor. His body went into suspended animation mode.
She swallowed, wincing as if the action hurt. “Xander?”
Every word in his vocabulary vanished behind a nearly impenetrable wall of shock and disbelief.
“Is it really you?” Her words were barely a breath of sound. “Or am I dreaming?”
He understood what she was saying, he just couldn’t pluck any response out of the emptiness in his mind.
Her face scrunched up, and a soft, dry sob hacked in her throat. “You’re just a dream. Why can’t I just die?”
Seeing her hurting, seeing her pain, finally dissolved his mental paralysis. “Oh, God. I’m here.” He gripped her face in one hand. Her expression relaxed as if his touch eased her. “I’m real. You’re safe.” He swiped his thumb over her chin, felt it tremble at his touch.
Sorrow faded from her eyes, but other emotions filled the void—more emotions than he knew what to do with. He didn’t need to be Freud to see the adoration and the hero worship. “Don’t look at me like that. I’m not the good guy here.” His tone was overflowing with self-loathing and guilt for not finding her years ago. “You know my name, but I don’t know yours.”
“Isleen.” One side of her mouth twitched like she was trying to smile. “You’re real. You’re really real.” The smile faded. “Where’s Gran? You have to save Gran too.”
Her eyes closed, her chest popped up and down in exaggerated breaths too unnatural to be normal. He yanked his cell phone from his pocket.
“Isleen, you stay with me now. You hang on.” He dialed 911, waited for the operator to pick up. Ring-ring. Pause. Ring-ring. Pause. Ring-ring. “Pick the fuck up.” Ring-ring.
“911, what is your—”
“The last road I remember is County Road 95. A trailer in the middle of cornfields. I just found two women being held against their will. They both need an ambulance.”
“Sir, can you tell me…”
The growl of his truck’s engine grabbed Xander’s attention. The Crazy One—he’d forgotten about her—had stolen his truck. This day was full of happy damned surprises. The sound of his truck faded and got further away, but then the direction changed and the roar of pedal-to-the-metal screamed at him. What was she doing? Even as the question flittered through his consciousness, the answer came to him. His truck was about to meet the trailer.
He dropped the phone and grabbed Isleen.
The room exploded.
Chapter 3
King followed the four naked men to the river. Languid anticipation warmed in his guts. Predawn light tinted everything in shades of onyx and silver. The only sound was the whisper of water and the splash of it against his Brothers’ bare bodies, then against his own. Each step was a step away from technology and man-made things, away from his job and ordinary life, and a step toward divinity and the Lord.
The current—surprisingly warm during all the seasons—sucked at his calves, at his thighs, and then at his penis and testicles, stroking his sex organs with a delicate caress. All his Brothers would be aroused by the sensation, it was a natural part of the Ritual of Resurrection. Chosen One had assured them it was simply a biological reaction to being in the presence of the Lord.
When they were all submerged chest-deep, Chosen One pointed to each of the Brothers and directed them into position, their bodies forming the four points of a cross, with Chosen One in the convergence.
Their leader raised his arms parallel to the water and tilted his head back. The Brothers and King did likewise. He stared up through the thick tree branches reaching out over the river and watched as the world changed from muted tones to shimmery gold and orange. And all the while, they remained supplicant to the Lord.
King’s sense of time and place morphed, and the memory of their ritual—performed four times a year on this spot for centuries—coursed through him. A breeze sparked against his skin. The Lord was in the air he took inside his body, in the water licking over his skin.
Chosen One spoke. “Lord, we offer our thanks and praise for your many sacrifices for us. On this day, we acknowledge the death of spring for the resurrection of summer.”
King imagined what it would be like to be on the bank and a witness to the Ritual of Resurrection. To see all five men posed, filled with the spirit. The picture they must present as dawn illuminated the day. He couldn’t breathe from the wonder of it.
“And now…” Chosen One’s words were a cue for the Brothers to lower their arms. “We will all wash away our sins, cast them off into the current, and be reborn to serve you.”
Chosen One gestured for King to move forward. Blood swelled in King’s groin. Moving through the water with such an erection both pained and pleasured him.
His leader’s face no longer reflected that of a kindly grandfather. His features had sharpened and hardened in an almost imperceptible way that portrayed power and knowledge and holiness. Chosen One stepped to the side and placed one palm on King’s forehead, the other in the small of his back, his grip on the two points a reassurance.
“Brother King, do you seek purgation of your sins?” Chosen One’s voice resonated across the river.
King could hardly breathe. “I do.” A wonderful, warm tension pulsed through his organs.
“Brother King, do you seek to be reborn in the Lord’s image with all the powers inherent?”
“I do.” The tension transformed into an expectancy, a yearning—an urge so intense his knees quavered and he fought the desire the pump his hips.
“Brother King, do you seek to fulfill your destiny as the Lord has ordained it?”
“I do.” He groaned the words, nearly lost to the sensations.
“Brother King, do you seek to die so that you may live?”
King nodded, unable to find his tongue or vocal cords amid the myriad of swelling passion, but he needed to speak the words, for saying them aloud made them a prayer. He tried twice before he actually uttered the sound. “I do.”
Chosen One pushed against King’s forehead, tilting his body backward until his neck, then his head met the water. His feet, no longer able to sustain the extreme angle, left the muddy river bottom. Chosen One supported King’s weight with a hand underneath his back, and then he gently submerged King’s face underneath the water. That’s where King remained.
In the beginning, when he’d been a fearful boy of five, King had panicked and fought the sense of not being in control. Four decades later, he’d learned to anticipate the sensations. All of them.
Unable to draw air, his chest began to burn, but he forced himself to stillness. He wanted to draw out the experience, savor it like a sunrise. His lungs throbbed, his heart crashed, and the pain became unbearable. Just when he thought he couldn’t tolerate half a second more, it happened—an endless moment where he felt heaven. Only it wasn’t a place; it was more like a sensation. The closest description he could come up with was that it felt like flying—not in a plane, but as if his body had released his soul and it soared. Oh, how it soared. The experience changed him, made him into a man blessed by the Lord.
His body bucked against the oxygen deprivation, and he slammed back to reality. He thrashed against the hands holding him under, and his penis released a stream of semen. The scorching liquid float
ed over his testicles in an elusive cloud of grace.
Only then did Chosen One lift him from the water.
King gulped in giant lungfuls of air, sucking river water into his mouth and up his nose, tasting and smelling the mud and algae searing his sinuses. In the river, bathed in dawn’s divine light, the only sound was of his body snorting and snarling to find a new equilibrium after his return from death. It was a beautiful resurrection.
Chosen One’s strong hands stayed on King’s body, holding him up until his legs were strong enough to support his weight. Finally, when King calmed, Chosen One stepped away. With one finger, King pressed a nostril closed and blew out the waste in the other one, then repeated the gesture with the other nostril to complete his cleansing and resurrection.
“Thy will be done,” King said, his voice thick, his body weak and shaky. He returned to his position to watch each of his Brothers go through the ritual.
By the time they were finished, dawn was an hour old, and heat and humidity and mosquitoes were an irritant. They waded back to the shore in the same order they’d entered the water. In the silence that followed the profound, they dressed. One by one, each of his Brothers bowed their heads to Chosen One and then left to return to their regular, routine lives. One brother was a lawyer, another a professor, another a doctor, and King was the chaplain for the local hospital.
“Brother King, would you stay a moment more?” His leader’s tone was mild, but King sensed the urgency underneath.
“Certainly.” A small smile of triumph teased his tongue and twitched his lips.
“Brother King, I sense a change. Your resurrection was particularly powerful this morn.”
“It was.” He drew in a breath. “I ordered Queen to kill the Dragon last evening.”
Chosen One’s eyes widened. “Rex!” He lapsed into using King’s birth name and grabbed King’s arms with both of his hands. “You completed your task.” He brought King in for a hug, and King let himself be held by the powerful man who was more than his Chosen One. He was also King’s father.