The Eighth

by Wytovich, Stephanie

  Rhea tasted blood. She’d bitten through the skin of her lip.

  Panic ate at her heart as the aftertaste of nicotine made her sick. She didn’t know whether to feel sorry for herself or enraged. Sadness and wrath collided in her head, fist-fighting like adolescent boys telling her to choose.

  “I know I’d be angry with them.”

  “Yeah?” she said, through shaky, unsure breaths.

  “Yes. And I’d do something about it, too.”

  Rhea sat on the ground and put her head in her hands. The tears were hot against her face, burning warm lines through the frostbite that settled there. She once heard that crying was supposed to reduce stress, but it only made her feel worse. Each tear that fell was a drop of pain and each stung worse than the last.

  I have to get out of here.

  Jayme was up and leading Caden away from the fire, and Rhea wasn’t sure she had it in her to find out why. If she saw them together, actually together—God she hoped she wouldn’t—she didn’t know what she would do.

  “What you’d do to them or to yourself?”

  Rhea stood on numb legs. Like a baby deer, she wobbled until she found her footing, and then she eased down the hill back to her car. Snow dripped off naked branches as if the forest cried with her, but the wind cackled, laughing at her like the others surely were.

  Everything and everyone she thought she knew was a lie.

  Movement in her stomach stopped her dead. Acid gurgled and sloshed around nauseously until bile rose up her throat. She tried to push it back, to swallow the acrid taste of deceit, but she wasn’t strong enough to keep it down. Rhea hit the ground and puked what felt like razor blades against her throat. She half wondered if this was what heartbreak tasted like. Sour and vile.

  No. No. No.

  Her body folded in on itself as she continued to purge the pain. The dry heaves were hard and violent, weighing her down and stabbing at ribs that threatened to break through flesh. She gasped for air and choked as she swallowed a whiff of stale breath.

  When she opened her eyes, the world was a blur, spinning like a merry-go-round as she struggled to make it stop. It was too much. Everything—the disloyalty, the lying, the broken friendship—consumed her like a vulture ripping away the stink of death as it ate its prey. Her body screamed as her mind became a private hell of treacherous memories, thoughts that violated her, raped her with reoccurring bouts of abuse.

  Misery knelt next to her, covering her with his arms. Rhea embraced him as she learned how to breathe all over again.

  “Please God, please,” she said. “Just make it go away.”

  Out of the night, a figure reached his hand out to her. Rhea didn’t know if she imagined it, or if what she saw was real, but the simple act of kindness proved enough for her to trust the stranger.

  “Don’t worry,” he said.” I can help you with all of this.”

  Heartsick and out of options, Rhea sat up and took the stranger’s hand.

  Chapter 5

  Paimon grabbed her hand with his mind and smiled. This was almost too easy. The girl was so desperate for affection that she’d turned to a complete stranger for help. But something was different. Something was off. He’d touched hundreds of women before—thousands, maybe—and yet this one…he couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Usually when they submitted to him, it was because they were lost and had already given up. But Rhea wasn’t looking for a way out. She wanted a solution, a way in.

  I wonder what she looks like…

  He laced his fingers in between her own and led her back to the car. She moved slowly, but females normally did when they walked hand in hand with a demon. Like any good poison, sin takes time to work its way through the body, infecting it cell by cell. By the time he got Rhea where he needed her, she’d be pulsing with wickedness.

  The idea of turning this winsome female into a tantric goddess sent him into a fit of arousal. He didn’t always play with his assignments, but he was so seldom handed a virgin on a silver platter. It would be sinful to pass up the opportunity.

  Paimon laughed.

  Now that he was physically attached to her—in a manner of speaking—he could open his eyes without fear of breaking the psychic connection. The world around him came to life as he took in the sights of the earthly garden.

  Humans don’t know what they have.

  The ground pulsed with life—something that never happened in the inferno—and he absorbed the vibrations, drinking them in with a ravenous thirst. Hypnotized by the elements, Paimon pushed himself up and walked the forest floor, touching and committing everything to memory. He listened to the way the leaves crunched under his feet, smelled the aroma of dead pine and oak. He caught snowflakes on his tongue, and watched the ground sparkle as the moonlight bounced off the forest floor. Part of him couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The idea of an enjoyable solstice had become a foreign concept to him; the only winter he knew of now was in The Void, a place even he dared not speak of.

  It was the fear of encasement in ice that made him plan his collections during the spring and summer months when sin was handed out more often than a cool glass of water. But sinning slowed during the winter, and this year had been especially difficult for collecting souls. The idea of being out here in the cold made him nervous, as if they were watching him, taking in his every move. There was something about the snow, while beautiful, it reminded him of bone, of teeth. And now he kept seeing their faces. They were in the woods, sitting in the trees, hiding in the shadows.

  The Seven.

  The keepers of the deadly sins.

  If ever there was something else to fear, something worse than the Devil himself, it was them. He had to remind himself to concentrate, to focus on the reality at hand. There was no way that they’d be here. He wasn’t a threat, and he certainly hadn’t done anything that would make the call.

  Paimon tried to shake their faces from his mind, but stories of The Void filtered through his thoughts. He saw sinners frozen as statues and placed as decorations around the snow-capped mountains as his brothers and sisters were buried alive by ice. There was misery, rape, and torture everywhere he looked, and he could almost hear their screams, taste their agony. Paimon pushed the nightmare from his head and kept walking. He needed to focus on Rhea, on getting her home and where she needed to be. He didn’t have time to deal with monsters, especially ones he couldn’t control, but then she crawled back into his thoughts.

  Damn it, Marissa.

  He touched the scar on his shoulder where she’d bitten him. Centuries later and it still looked fresh as the day it scabbed over and bubbled underneath his skin. She’d tried to stop him—such a foolish girl—but he snapped her neck like a twig without giving it a second thought. No one betrayed him, especially not his wife.

  But that was the rage talking. Paimon told himself that if he could go back, he wouldn’t have done it. He would have found a way to look past finding Marissa with her legs wrapped around the neck of another man while she moaned and cried like a bitch in heat, and just walk out that door.

  Paimon laughed to himself. Even he didn’t believe his own lies, and if he couldn’t convince himself that there was a shred of remorse for his actions, why should God forgive him? Why should God even care?

  His blood boiled at the mere thought of that night. He loved Marissa and always would, but adultery was a sin, a broken commandment. In fact, he was convinced that the only reason she didn’t end up in Hell was because he took her life instead of giving her the chance to play Russian roulette with her own. Part of him hoped that she was in Purgatory, doomed to walk the roads of the afterlife alone, save for her memories and conscience. The other part of him hoped she was in Heaven and that someone, somewhere, was able to forgive her, even if he couldn’t.

  Paimon kicked at the snow. It took him a minute to switch gears in his head and get back to Rhea, and when he did, warmth spread throughout his chest. He couldn’t see her face but her skin felt like velve
t, smooth and soft, as he helped her put the keys in the ignition.

  He struggled to remind himself that all women felt like that in the beginning. Still, he couldn’t deny the obvious arousal she provoked. He wanted to get close to her—needed to—even though interaction beyond the mind was strictly forbidden. Regardless of his past, he couldn’t help but feel pity for her as he watched the scene unfold at the farmhouse from her eyes. Jayme might as well have been Marissa, a seductress fawning after another man, throwing herself at him despite what lives it destroyed in the process. He knew Rhea’s heartbreak, and despite the fact that she was his assignment, he wanted to help her get even before the game played out.

  The only question that plagued him—and perhaps it wouldn’t have been a question if he’d read through her story—was why the Devil was interested in her. What did she have that he could possibly want? In the past, the Devil had sent him after women who were already damned, females who would have been laughed out of Heaven should they have tempted the gates. But this one didn’t have the faintest scent of sin about her. Sure, she could see the color of sins, but Paimon wasn’t sure how that would be desirable to the man who created them.

  So why force damnation if the soul’s sweeter when it happens naturally?

  “Go home,” he said, his hand still in her own. She started the car and Paimon let his mind drift down the contours of her body. Her silhouette, thin and firm, would have excited him if it weren’t for the shaking and tears, not to mention her calf muscles, which were clenched so tight he feared they’d rip if she didn’t release them soon.

  Rhea was a ticking time bomb.

  All he had to do was make sure she didn’t go off until the right moment.

  “Relax,” he said, running his fingers through her hair. “We’ll take care of this. Together.”

  ‡‡‡

  Rhea drove in a fog. She turned corners in haste, passed cars without checking lanes, and not once did she put her lights on. The rattle of the engine was the only song that played other than the quiet sobs that fell out her mouth when she tried to catch her breath. The night may have led her away from the farmhouse, but it was the darkness that brought her back home.

  She pulled into the driveway and stepped out of the car, not even bothering to shut it off, let alone close the door. Black boots slipped and slid across frozen cement as Jack Frost crept inside her mouth.

  The cold should have hurt.

  But it didn’t.

  Rhea couldn’t feel anything.

  Her hands shook as searched for her house key.

  Her three story home, stared her down as wind shook its cracked, red shutters. The siding needed a good wash, but no amount of water would cleanse the house of its filth. The demons that resided inside were ones that she refused to make peace with, and no matter how many times she’d looked them in the eyes, she still refused to believe they were there. Her father. Her mother. The whole place reeked of death, of abandonment, yet there she was, crawling back to it like a scared little girl. But it was all she knew. She’d grown up here, spent twenty-two years breathing in the stale country air and yet she couldn’t hate it because she didn’t know anything else. This small town was her world, and in a place where everyone knows everybody else’s business, Rhea knew it was only a matter of time before word spread and rumors started…again.

  The cursed family.

  The suicide sisters.

  Rhea pulled the garage door up and wiped the dirt off her jeans. Kris wasn’t home—not that she expected her to be—and she smiled at the impending emptiness that greeted her.

  The light switch, hidden behind a collection of her dad’s winter jackets was flipped on, but the garage was pitch-black. Kris had a nasty habit of leaving the lights on. Despite being the older sibling, Kris could barely take care of herself, let alone Rhea, which was probably why she didn’t. Ever since their father’s death, the two of them barely talked. There wasn’t anything left to say.

  Rhea walked over to the gun cabinet, and ran her fingers over her father’s .38 Smith & Wesson. Suicide ran in her family, and she couldn’t help but wonder what it felt like to taste a bullet.

  Even though Rhea couldn’t see it, everyone always said she took after her dad. And when she picked up the gun and slid the barrel under her chin, she started to understand why.

  Chapter 6

  Paimon hadn’t expected Rhea to put the gun to herself. Where did that come from? He shook the allure of the forest from his mind and sat down. The ground no longer felt welcoming, but cold and distant, and the snow lost its glamour as it soaked through his jeans.

  His hands turned into fists as he raced against her hate. Memories attacked him. Regret tried to swallow him. Her finger traced the trigger by the time he broke through her sorrow.

  “You don’t want to do that. Not yet.”

  Her indifference shook him.

  “But I do,” she said. “More than anything.”

  Paimon swallowed hard. He’d never talked someone out of killing themselves before. Saving lives wasn’t exactly what he was known for, yet here he was, scrambling to find the words to get her to drop the gun.

  At least for the moment.

  He selfishly wanted more time with her.

  “None of this is your fault. It’s not you who should die tonight.”

  Ideas and scenarios stormed her mind.

  Paimon whispered encouragements and planted seeds where he could, trying to sway her thoughts in his favor. Asphyxiation. Poison. Torture. Rhea took to them like a seasoned femme fatale, her mind, now a delicious kind of wrong. She took his thoughts and fantasies to places and levels that he hadn’t even considered, and when she stopped and danced around a particular notion, Paimon actually smiled.

  “A gunshot wound to the head. Caden’s body at her feet. “Now there’s an idea.”

  The trees shook and in the faint still of night, another voice whispered to Rhea, “Or you could die with him. Two lovers locked together from the kiss of a bullet. What could be more romantic than that?”

  Rhea tucked the gun into the waistband of her jeans and walked back to the car as her mind exploded in a primal yell, a deep guttural cry that knocked Paimon out of her head. He shuffled to regain his composure, but whatever evil held her now was beyond his power. Walls sprung up around her synapses like a stone fortress that shut him out each time he tried to penetrate her thoughts. What magic is this? Paimon opened his eyes and started to pace. Even if he could regain order, it would be too late. Rhea’s heart controlled this mission now, and like that Capulet wench, he knew Rhea would die for her love. But not before killing him first.

  ‡‡‡

  Paimon stood at the end of Caden’s driveway, panting and sore. His legs ached from the run, and coldness wrapped itself around him like a python squeezing out his last breath. The terrain in this world was vast and full of hills, and while he wasn’t far when he lost access to Rhea’s mind, he wasn’t close either. A couple miles to say the least, but it had been ages since he ran, and he was starting to lose feeling below his knees.

  He slapped at his calves and tried to get the blood flowing, but he was worried. His body had never been compromised in a mission before, but now it felt as if he were walking on two wooden legs that were about to splinter.

  From what he could tell, the house was empty. No lights graced the windows or bathed the porch, and he doubted that Caden’s truck was inside in the two-car garage. No man would take the time to put his truck away when a woman was ripe and waiting in the passenger seat. Paimon limped over to the edge of the woods and sat down against a worn, twisted tree. The bark scraped at his shoulders with long, jagged nails. Night began to fade.

  Dawn was a few short hours away. He could taste it in the air.

  Where is she?

  Paimon scanned the roads, looking for any hint of light, but the swathe of black that painted the night remained solid. Even the stars seemed to have dimmed, casting an eerie haze through the trees t
hat bled out onto the forest floor like smoke.

  Around him, the world silenced. Shadows climbed trees and jumped from branch to branch, watching him while nightmares lurked behind thorn bushes and plotted their escape. A dull hum vibrated in his ears and became louder with each passing second, and for the first time in Paimon’s life as a collector, he felt threatened. Like I’m the one being hunted. There was no doubt in his mind that something lurked out there, waiting. Watching.

  A twig snapped.

  “Who’s there? Name yourself,” he said.

  The humming grew louder.

  Paimon growled as he put his hands to his ears, trying to block out the sound. His head reverberated with the steady buzz of a swarm of bees. He scratched his scalp as if to claw out the source.

  Echoes sang inside of him, turning his head into a soundboard for madness. Paimon got to his knees and bowed his head to the ground, moving back and forth like a man in a prayer.

  Please, I beg of you. Make it stop.

  Every single sound was magnified. The flutter of a bat’s wings, the thump of an opossum’s tail, the scrape of deer’s hooves. Each noise punched at his head, repeating the blow harder than the time before.

  One.

  Two.

  Back and forth.

  The wind whistled past his ears in an octave that brought him to tears. Paimon rose to his feet and thought about bashing his head against the tree, but he feared the sound his skull would make when it connected with the trunk. Paimon bent down and picked up a stick.

  If he couldn’t swat out the sound, he would dig it out.

  Paimon snapped the stick in half, eyeing up the pointed spear he’d created. He tilted his head and brought the stick to his face. Get out of my head, out of my head, out of my head. Teeth clenched, he prepared himself for the inevitable pain as he eased the makeshift tool into his ear, but right as he was about to shovel out the noise, he saw them. Seven pairs of yellow eyes. They connected with his in an intimate gaze before fading back into the night.