Why did he care?
The girl obviously hated him.
For what he’d done.
So did Ronna, for a time. Over the decades she’d come to understand the rage he’d felt, his sorrow beyond bitterness. His life stolen, and the men that’d taken it deserved retribution, suffering. But the cost was too high. He realized that now. A decision was made without his consent. To be brought back as some kind of southern golem. Stitched together with parts of corpses, sown together. Hideous. Mangled. Denied any kind of normal life. Denied reunion with the family he’d left in North Carolina. Denied everything he once was. He made quick work of the men that’d murdered him, cursed, as he was, to spend all the remaining eons of the world under the sour soil, locked together in the dark…forever, alive, but not, with only each other in that pine box to keep company.
What then?
What was he to do?
Be their protector? Become their Delta Golem?
No. He didn’t want that life. Yet, his hatred remained a fire that could not be extinguished. And in his pitiful sorrow, the old bone faced liar Samedi whispered in his ear. The trickster caught John weeping one night in the greenwoods. Weeping for what he’d done. For what he’d become. For what he’d lost. Weeping at the reflection of his deformed birth, for his undeserved sentence as some blighted leviathan, murdered brutally with axes and hate and brought back by the whim of some voodoo priestess and her ilk. Sown without any care for appearance. Arms not his own. Legs not his own. Muscle, meat, and brawn molded like clay to his own form. And in those lonesome dark woods, he’d been convinced the balance of life and death must be settled.
Life is precious.
But so is death.
Death is to be celebrated.
And they betrayed that trust with nature.
Creating me when I should not be.
John Turner had cast a tall shadow over the Blanche House. How many had fallen by his hands? Torn asunder, ripped from limb to limb and severed head? He could see each face as vividly as the day the crime had been committed. Moans and pleas and beggars prayer, even summons to Samedi himself, who he heard laughing in the dark.
How did he stop the bloodshed?
How did he end his rage?
It was Ronna, naturally. She was the last, and pregnant with child. He couldn’t, not for lack of want. He couldn’t sever the bond they shared. John knew then as he knew now, if she died he would be utterly alone in the world. Forever.
Screams rattled the window. And the howl of some guttural feral beast. The rougarou was loose in there, flaying the living, many by the sound of things and the blood splattering on the glass. Luna was in danger. In there with the wolf when she ought to be at home.
Home?
What, in the cabin? In Ronna’s cabin?
Is that it then? Is that why I came? The girl is all I have left, as close to family as someone like me could ever have. So it’s true, then. Does compassion remain inside this old heart? Perhaps. Or maybe it’s just greed. She is mine, after all. She ought to return with me, to remain in the cabin as a distant companion, as Ronna was.
Will she come willingly?
If I save her, what choice will she have?
John Turner smiled in the gloom. He hadn’t smiled in years. From a passerby, if that fat guard ever decided to walk the grounds, perhaps it’d look more like some villainous smirk, only because of his scars, his facial disfigurement. Those who knew him, who could see past the pale black wounds, would say it was an expression of joy. For him, he knew the smile was an answer to his loneliness. His kin had all died. He had been an only child. And even in 1964, his once beloved parents had been aged, his father was far from siring another life into the world. For ages now they had been dead. They were all dead. His mortal family and those who consummated the supernatural. The witch’s child was slain. Now Ronna was the last of that bygone bloodline. But there was still hope. Beyond, through the window, was someone he could not bear to loose. His last living connection to the world. Someone to replace what he lost with the passing of the old woman.
Kneeling, John gathered all his unnatural strength.
In a gust, he hurled himself toward the window.
Chapter 36
The Massacre at Baelo University
Luna
The sound of wailing was deafening. Gnashing and pitched shrieks. Moans, deep grinding like stone. Miserable weeping, like frightened children. Shouting. Pleading. And above all the horrible sounds, the wolf who walked like a man howled and snarled, slashing with scarlet claws. Peeling flesh from bone, ripping muscle and cords. Severing limbs and mangling expressions of horrifying terror. Dingy black robes soaked with blood lay limp in dark pools on the floor. The walls with velvet tapestry and once expensive paintings now glistened with crimson splatter in the dancing flicker of firelight. In their distress, the doors were barred by the cluster of those who fled seeking escape. Luna watched it all with dread and sorrow. Knowing she was the one who started the massacre. But what choice had there been? Between releasing the beast she loved and watching the world consumed by an infestation of these Things, watching from behind a curtain, behind the bulbous red ancient kaleidoscoped eyes of the Queen. No. No. She couldn’t release such a miserable blight upon the world. She would rather die, rather they all die.
It was better this way.
It was better.
Still bound, Luna used her feet to push her chair back towards the wall, on the other side of the fireplace and away from the carnage. Shutting her eyes as the saltire cross collapsed to the floor, splintering wood. Blocking out the shuddering sounds from the slain. Against the wall, she watched. Flinching as she caught sight of the woman with long grey hair being spilt open, spilling her guts upon the altar. Those hideously familiar yellow eyes blurred across the spacious room, devouring gleefully. The very same devilish eyes she’d spied at night in her grandfather’s old batting cage in what felt like a lifetime ago. She’d never seen the wolf in the open before. And she hoped this would be the last. For when the beast was done with these easy pickens, as her Memaw was fond of saying, the devil would certainly come for her.
The wolf slashed.
And ripped.
And mauled.
The robed people wailed.
And sobbed.
And cried.
The tall man was backing away from the tabernacle, cradling the infant worm. The creature screamed and screeched, wiggling as if to escape somewhere, but there was nowhere for the ruined progeny to go. Corpses of robes now piled near the door. And the wolf pranced around from body to body, shredding meat and lapping the gore. Those fulvous eyes narrowed on the tall man with the bear-skinned mask, narrowed with a foul serendipitous grin. Brandishing its canines with a deep nasty growl. It crept. One bipedal paw after the other, hunched, talons scrapping the backs of expired cultists. Dark brown fur heaving with each horrifying breath. Watching. Never taking its gaze away. Slowly it came toward him, reminding Luna of those nature Discovery shows she used to watch with her grandfather. But this wasn’t just stalking, the wolf was playing. Teasing. Taunting the tall man. Balefully enjoying the moment.
“No. No. Back away. You can’t have Her. You can’t.” The tall was shouting, holding one hand out and with the other cradling the spawn. Body trembling shamefully. Large moose teeth baring and chattering.
Bobby continued to stalk, inching closer and closer. Drool glistening and soaking into its matted fur.
Two robes appeared behind the wolf, launching themselves at its muscled legs. Bobby howled and fell backwards. The two robes screeched. Keeping the beast from their Queen. Their hoods pulled back, familiar faces Luna had glimpsed before.
Are these Bobby’s friends? No. They’re…different.
The face of Johnathan and Jake kneaded like dough, bubbling and stretching and molting, revealing the ugly Thing inside. Casting off their humanity for what secrets lay hidden underneath. Again, that strange quote from Cronenberg’s The Fly
came to Luna, the part about insect politics shuddering down her spine like molten ice. She watched, mouth agape in horror as their skin peeled away looking eerily like rubber. Where teeth had been, large brown-green mandibles snapped at the fallen wolf.
Jake lashed out with what had once been a human arm, now grotesquely elongated, bone thin with brittle black hairs covering like patchwork.
Bobby howled, arching his back. Blood spraying in the air.
Johnathan was on him. Snapping at his snout, clicking and hissing.
The wolf battered the insect away with one claw, and with the other dug into the anthropod’s thorax, ripping it open with a jerk. Green muck spilled in a syrup onto the crimson slick floor. Johnathan screeched and hissed and whipped its massive insectoid head, antennae twitching and spasming.
Luna watched, fixated on the spectacle. Accepting perhaps her own end would be coming soon enough, why attempt to free herself? There was nowhere to go. So she watched. She watched as these otherworldly invertebrates clashed with the rougarou. What had dressed itself in Johnathan’s skin lay crumpled on the floor. Silent and still. Its viridescent innards bubbling with the red sheen of the slain cultist strung about the spacious room. Jake and Bobby circled each other. Jake with half his human face and the other an exposed bulbous compound eye and mandibles clicking together, its mouthpart full of black bristled hair and wet viscous and God knows what else, looking eerily like flesh gears rolling and chattering. His human skin hung loose, dropping unnaturally low as if melting.
Bobby growled. Waiting.
Jake screeched and swung. Its impossibly long, thin twig-like arm lashed at Bobby’s abdomen. Aiming to take a chuck of meat, or more.
The wolf seized Jake’s deformed arm. With its agape jaw, Bobby chomped. The hollow bone crunched and broke, severing and falling to the floor. Gore gushed from the wound. Jake screeched and thrashed. Clicking wildly. Crying, if one could call such a nightmarish sound a cry.
Ignoring the danger, inspired by wild curiosity, Luna pressed herself into the insects mind. Below the surface, below the pain, there was no understandable feeling. No remorse. No compassion. No regret. Only a glimmer of something that could be compared to longing, the creature thought of its own world, a world void of external light, dependent solely on its own sand-like bioluminescence. A world of swarming multitudes slithering over each other, dying, and being reborn into countless generations of its own brood. This crustacean, who wore Jake like a mask, was severed between his own world and this blue dimensional speak of dust caught on a cosmic rift. There was no human emotion. But there was an awareness of what it lost. Immortality through bloodline. Its genetic contribution, forever amputated from the rest of the horde. It would never spawn. It would never taste of home again.
The wolf snarled, like a rumbled engine.
Luna snapped back.
And watched.
Bobby drove a talon claw into the insect, punching inside its abdomen, ripping back out green mucous and dark purple noddle entrails. With the claw, the wolf took hold of Jake’s mandible, and pulled, taking with it one of the pinchers and root like abductor muscles.
Jake stumbled backwards. Keeping what it would, holding its wet jade guts with its still remaining human looking hand. The arthropod stumbled and clicked, weakly. Its disjointed legs shacking horribly. One unblinking large insectoid eye and the other human and wild looking, disbelieving almost of its own demise. Spasming. Twitching. It fell. And was still.
The rougarou kicked the broken Thing. The deformed body slid across the gore slicked floor, coming to a rest beside a pile of bloodied robed worshipers. Arching its back and lifting its snout into the air, Bobby howled. Its victorious call vibrating the walls and window. The doleful cry sounded, dare she think, satisfied as it longed upon the dozens of mauled corpses of parishioners belonging to this doomed Nashirimah cult.
The wolf was enjoying itself.
Was there nothing of Bobby left?
Is there no assurance of where the man stops and the wolf begins or perhaps where the wolf ends and the man begins? Could he possibly control the devil inside? One day, perhaps he could. But, Luna supposed she would never know. Pressing herself as far against the wall as she could, bracing for the inevitable. She grimaced as the Bobby started to prance her way.
All were dead.
And with the tall man’s escape during the battle with the insects, she was all that remained for the wolf to quench its bloodlust.
The wolf came to her. Slowly. Taking its miserable time.
The rougarou stood in front of her. Growling low and thunderous.
“Bobby…”
The wolf raised a large fur covered arm. Claw outstretched.
“It’s okay.”
The yellow-eyed devil snarled.
“I love you.”
As the wolf readied to take Luna’s throat, the large high window shattered. Winter winds and ice and a mountainous black shadow flew through the broken shards of glass.
The shadow shook the fragments from his thick wool trench coat. His gaze never leaving the wolf or Luna.
“John?” Luna croaked. Fully anticipating death; never expecting salivation, salvation, god help her, from such a miserable monster as John Turner.
The wolf turned, equally as surprised. Its yellow eyes wide. Heaving hot breaths of smoke.
John stepped toward it, crunching glass.
Bobby in-turn moved toward him. Neither whispering a word, they walked sideways, sizing each other, anticipating each other. Moving until John had placed himself in front of Luna.
The wolf, seemingly unsettled to have been robbed his prize, leapt. His speed was uncanny. Nails screeched toward John’s throat.
John knocked back the wolf with his large arm, Bobby’s attack missing his jugular and instead dug and scraped his chest, ripping the grey nameless shirt he wore underneath. The fabric ripped and hung loose. Black blood bubbled out the three claw wounds, smelling sweet like rum.
Regaining its footing, the rougarou leapt, merciless again, landing with its hunched legs on John’s chest, piercing his coat and darkened flesh with his nails. Bobby gritted his canine fangs. Slashing with both arms and claws. He snarled gleefully with hellish hunger. Biting, again and again. Taking bits of fabric and flesh into its jaws.
John staggered against the sudden weight of the beast. Allowing the blows, feeling the pain, something he seemed to have forgotten through the decades. Waiting the wolf to tire. Keeping the wolf’s sharp teeth from his face. In the midst, he began laughing.
Laughing.
John was laughing.
Luna watched. Shocked into silence by the sight. The impossibility of the night. So many bizarre occurrences. Too many. Her brain felt hot and dizzy. Light headed, she wondered why John was laughing, being mauled, and stiches coming loose.
John laughed and seized Bobby by the throat. Squeezing, he pulled the scrabbling wolf from his wounded chest and held him high in the air, allowing the panicked beast to dangle and kick and struggle against his strength.
“I know who I am now,” John said to Bobby, pulling him closer so the wolf could hear.
The wolf growled low, with one claw pulling on John’s wrist, and the other lashing, cutting into the monster’s thick coat.
“I am Lanmò.”
John tightened his grip.
The wolf yelped.
“I am death.”
“No!” Luna shook all over. The world flooded back to her, cracking like a whip. Regardless of the impossibility of what was happening, how and why she had set Bobby loose upon these people, for the better good, the better good, and John, her genealogical curse, her family’s curse, now solely her responsibility, her burden, she knew now, he would always be there, in the shadows, watching her. And now Bobby was under his heel. John was squeezing the life from him. Despite it all, she would not, could not bear to see him die.
“No,” Luna yelled again.
John hesitated. Glancing back toward
her, glaring with black marble eyes. “Why?” he asked. There was no anger in his voice, only curiosity. Perhaps he expected her reaction.
“Why?” he asked again.
“Because…because I love him.” Luna fought back the tears. Her eyes burned.
John squeezed again on Bobby’s throat.
The wolf yelped again, struggling, but weakly.
“Please,” Luna begged. Weeping now, sobbing with the weight of the evening. The pity she felt for the slain. The pity she felt for herself. For forcing Bobby to change. To murder these people. Regardless of their motives, they were all still human, they had families and loved ones who will never know the truth of what happened here this night. They had people. In such sorrow, the truth revelation was revealed in herself. Bobby was her person. Her only person. And perhaps she was his as well. Through the wolf, Bobby had done many terrible things, but none of that mattered, nothing matters between you and your people, your loved ones. It would never matter to her what Bobby had done or would do, without him the world would be a dark, dark place. A place not worth living for.
John was smiling, or smirking, she couldn’t quite tell. His expression was as if he’d won some great debate, some trap. Maybe she walked into it. His game. Seeing the giant here tonight made it plain as day of his intentions.
“And what if I don’t? He’ll kill, girl. You do realize?”
“Yes, he could very well hurt many people. I don’t care. I don’t want him to die.”
“If I do this for you, you must do something for me in return.”
“What?”
“You must come back.”
“Back?”
“To the cabin.”
“In Mississippi?”
“Yes. The Delta.”
“Why?”
“To live.”
And there it was. The very thing Luna assumed. The monster had returned to claim her, and she him. With the passing of Ronna, the responsibility was entirely hers now. There was no walking away. If she did, the fiend would snap Bobby’s neck, and even then, he would still follow her, she would never be alone, putting anyone she may come across at risk of his wrath.
Conceiving (Subdue Book 3) Page 24