by J. C. Diem
Cursing foully, the warlock kicked at the dog, but Zeus dodged out of the way. He lifted his hands to cast a spell and I mentally shouted at my guardian to run. Locked in place, I watched them from the corner of my eye.
Obeying me this time, Zeus dashed past Malachi just as another witch was entering the room. He crashed into her, knocking her into the door. My order for him to run was so strong that he didn’t take the opportunity to bite her. Instead, he fled down the stairs before she could react to his presence.
I couldn’t see her face, but I figured it was probably Talitha. “What was that dog doing in here?” she snarled and my hunch was proven to be correct.
“Our pretty little intruder brought a pet with her,” Malachi drawled. Now that we had company, he’d thankfully postponed his intention of becoming better acquainted with me.
“We need to get out of here,” his sister said and marched into view. Talitha didn’t seem surprised to see me and sneered at my frozen state. “You really shouldn’t have come back to town. Now that I have you, you’ll tell me everything I want to know about who you are and where your friends are hiding.”
Malachi grinned then reached up to unhook the grisly skeleton from the pentagram. “I want some time alone with her before you torture her,” he said. “They’re always so messy afterwards. You know I like them to be clean. To start with anyway.”
Talitha gave a derisive snort. “I am well aware of your perversions, brother dear,” she said dryly.
“I know you are, sister dear,” he replied then shocked me by grabbing her by the back of the neck and pulling her in for a lengthy kiss. I wanted to close my eyes and block out the sight, but unfortunately I couldn’t control any particle of my body. I was looking right at the tiny skeleton and the pair that were locked in perverted passion.
Yet another horrid realization hit me and my stomach flopped over once more. Malachi wasn’t just the boy ghost’s uncle, he was also his father. The incestuous parents had killed their ill begotten son and had used his body to form their evil talisman.
Breaking apart at last, the siblings turned nearly identical stares on me. “Jeremiah just performed his sacrifice a few nights ago. I’ll have to wait for at least two more nights before I can repeat the ritual,” Talitha said. “We need to take her somewhere secure where her friends can’t find her. I’ll wring their whereabouts from her soon enough.”
“We’ll take her to the farm. She won’t be able to escape from the pit and they’ll never be able to find her there,” Malachi smirked.
I felt Reece’s alarm when he realized that something was wrong. He’d chased after Jeremiah, but the warlock had realized that it had been a ruse. He was heading back towards town. Did you find the talisman?
Yes, but Malachi caught me before I could destroy it. He cast a spell on me and I can’t move. I couldn’t hide my panic and I didn’t even try.
I had a sense of double vision when he looked through my eyes and saw that I was utterly helpless. What are they going to do with you?
Before I could answer him, Malachi’s face came into view. “Sleep,” he commanded and darkness descended.
₪₪₪
Chapter Thirty-Two
I woke an unknown length of time later. Instant panic filled me, but I wasn’t even sure why I was afraid. My mind was strangely foggy and I was having trouble concentrating. A nagging voice in the back of my head was shouting that something was wrong. It was telling me that I had to wake up.
Forcing my eyes open, I saw that I was lying on the ground. Dirt, dead leaves, sticks and round, smooth rocks had been my mattress for however long I’d been asleep. It was dark, musty and lightless.
I was lying on my stomach and my hands and feet were bound. To make it harder for me to escape, my feet and hands had been hogtied together. They’d been secured with the same plastic ties that cops used to subdue their captives.
My legs had been bent backwards for so long that I’d lost all feeling in them. My hands were numb as well and my shoulders were aching. I must have been in this position for at least several hours.
Groggy and lethargic, I couldn’t remember how I’d ended up in this prison or who had captured me. I was on the verge of falling asleep again when a mind touched mine. Alarm at the invasion wakened me slightly.
My fright faded a little when I realized Reece was trying to contact me. I struggled to open the bond enough to allow his message to get through. He didn’t use words, but instead sent me a frantic image of the full moon. My fright returned, much stronger this time. I was in an enclosed room and couldn’t see the sky, but I could feel twilight nearing. The moon would rise in another couple of hours and then I would turn.
Feeling more awake by the second, I sent back the message that I was aware of the danger. I sent a picture of me being tied up and Reece growled in fury. He didn’t know where I was and he couldn’t help me to escape.
Remembering that Malachi had cast a spell that had put me to sleep, I figured it was also masking my location from the rest of the team. Even the bond wasn’t going to be able to help me now. While I could feel Reece in my head, I had no idea where he was.
My eyes focused on one of the rocks and I frowned when I saw two holes that looked a lot like eye sockets. Looking around as best I could, I realized it wasn’t a rock at all. It was a skull. The sticks weren’t sticks, they were bones. I was alone and trapped in an underground grave. I was lying on the remains of men and women who had died to keep the dark coven young.
Refusing to give in to my horror and despair, I tried to pull my wrists apart and felt the plastic flexi ties stretching. Malachi still didn’t realize what he’d captured. The plastic cut into my skin, but it parted and my hands and feet became free.
Rolling over onto my back, I waited for the feeling to return to my hands before I broke the bindings on my ankles. If I’d been human, I’d have lain there helplessly trussed, waiting to become the next sacrifice. I was probably only awake at all because I was a shifter. The spell had worn off sooner than it was supposed to.
Thankful for being a monster for a change, I rose and dusted myself off. It was impossible not to stand on bones. They were everywhere. The pit was around four meters square. I was surrounded by dirt walls and floor, but the ceiling was made of wood.
If this pit was the same as the one in the park, then the wood above me should actually be a trapdoor. Listening carefully, I couldn’t hear anyone moving about up above. Throwing caution aside, I bent my knees then leaped upwards. My fists punched through the wood and I grabbed hold of the edge of the hole I’d just made.
Fresh air and a few leaves wafted in through the opening. A few more punches knocked enough of the wood away for me to climb to safety. Brushing leaves and dirt out of my hair, I checked my pockets and discovered that my cell phone, weapon and ammo were missing. I turned in a circle and saw only trees. A narrow path caught my eye and so did Malachi’s scent. His scent led me to the path and I followed it at a run through the woods.
I stopped at the edge of a clearing when I spied a farm house across a field. It was large, rustic and old. It appeared that extra rooms had been added to it over the decades. Smoke trailed listlessly from one of three chimneys. The lights were off and I couldn’t hear anyone moving around inside.
A building to the left of the house had been converted from a barn into a double garage. The doors were open and it was empty. The scent of gasoline and oil was fresh enough to indicate that a car had been inside within the past twenty-four hours.
I needed to find a phone so I could call Mark. I hoped mine was inside the house, because his number was stored on it. I couldn’t remember it off the top of my head. If my phone was inside, it was either switched off or broken. Otherwise Mark would have tracked me using the GPS chip inside the device.
Something nudged the edge of my senses and it wasn’t Reece this time. Tuning into the other mind, I realized it was Zeus. I felt his joy when he felt me in his mind. He’d tried to
follow the witches when they’d kidnapped me and had lost my scent when their car had left town. He’d followed his instincts and was closing in on the farmhouse.
Hearing a car approaching, he flattened himself down on the side of the road. A brief sniff as it drove past told him that Malachi was behind the wheel. The warlock was no doubt returning to have some special time alone with me.
He’d made a terrible mistake bringing both me and the talisman to the same location. I could feel its power emanating from the farmhouse. With luck, there would be a phone inside. If so, then I could kill two metaphorical birds with one stone; destroy the source of his power and call for help.
I calculated that I had a few minutes left before the warlock would arrive and sprinted over to the building. The door splintered down the middle when I kicked it. Two more kicks broke it down and I strode into a large, square living room.
The floor was made of plain wooden boards. The room was devoid of furniture, which made it seem bigger than it really was. Just like in Talitha’s apartment, paintings hung on the walls. A glance told me that they’d been created by the same artist. These were much worse and far more disquieting.
Instead of wearing robes, the coven members were naked. In each painting, they were paired together and were performing sex acts that boggled and disturbed my young mind. In others, they were torturing their sacrifices in inventive ways before stealing their life forces.
The coven had grown weary over time. They no longer bothered to play with their sacrifices now. Their rituals had become stale and boring. An unnaturally long life possibly wasn’t quite as wonderful as they’d expected. They’d only been alive for a couple of hundred years. How jaded and cynical would they be in five hundred years? Or in a thousand? If I had my way, they wouldn’t need to worry about it at all, because they’d shortly be dead.
Apart from the paintings, the only other item in the living room was a wooden altar. The talisman had been placed on it so that the skeleton dangled over the edge. It was positioned so it was looking down at the floor. The empty eye sockets seemed to be staring at the inverted pentagram that had been painted in the center of the room. This time, the goat skull lay in the middle of the diagram. An ancient evil seemed to fill the house, waiting for the opportunity to escape.
From the faded smears of long dried blood and a thick coating of dust on the floor, it seemed that the coven hadn’t used this place to hold their sacrifices for a very long time. It was chilly and Malachi must have set the fire before he’d left. Coals still smoldered in the fireplace on the far side of the room. An old book sat on the mantelpiece. It was as dusty as the floor.
Like Dawson’s Retreat, the farmhouse must have been outside the sphere of the coven’s influence. I guessed that it was somewhere on the outskirts of Bradbury. If so, I might still have time to reach the others and find somewhere safe to be imprisoned before the moon rose.
Now that I’d found the talisman again, I had no idea how to destroy it. At that thought, the little boy appeared and pointed at the fireplace. “You want me to burn it?” I asked and he nodded solemnly. “Will this hurt you?” He shook his head and smiled. It was so pure and innocent that my heart ached for him.
I didn’t have the time to treat his remains with reverence. Zeus was running for all he was worth in the wake of Malachi’s car. He warned me that the warlock had almost reached the farmhouse. I could hear the car approaching now and knew I was out of time.
Snatching up the bundle of bones, I tossed it into the fireplace. Sparks flew, but the bones didn’t catch on fire. A few pieces of charred wood were nestled in the ashes, but they wouldn’t be enough to cause a blaze. I needed something flammable to fuel the fire with.
The book on the mantelpiece caught my eye again. Judging by the cracked black leather and title that was written in another language, it was probably a spell book. Without thinking about the possible consequences, I grabbed it. Ripping out a few pages, I screwed them into a ball and threw them on the coals.
Blue flames exploded to life, blinding me with their brightness. I lifted a hand to shield my face and backed away a few feet. The bones caught as if they were also made of paper. A car door slammed outside and Malachi let out a howl of pain and rage.
“Screw it,” I muttered and threw the rest of the spell book onto the blaze. This time, I staggered back from the flames. A blast of power was expelled as the talisman was destroyed.
Malachi staggered into the doorway with an expression of abject horror as he saw the talisman burning. “What have you done?” he whispered.
“What have I done?” I retorted. “What have you and your sick, twisted brothers and sisters done?” As I spoke, ghosts began to appear. His eyes widened and I knew he could see them. Fear replaced his anger. “You’ve killed hundreds of innocent men and women to keep yourselves young.” The spirits of the people he’d slain moved in to surround him. He backed away then halted when Zeus growled to warn him that his retreat had just been cut off.
Lifting his hands, Malachi tried to cast a spell. I tensed, expecting pain, but nothing happened. “Your power is gone,” I realized out loud. “You can’t cast any more spells.”
His handsome face twisted into a rictus of loathing and hatred. He reached into his jacket and pulled out my gun. “I don’t need a spell to kill you. I’ll use your own gun to do the trick. Then I’ll carve your flesh from your bones and turn your skeleton into a new talisman!”
He started towards me, grinning with evil pleasure. The young male ghost who had written the message on my bathroom mirror appeared in front of me, shielding me from harm. Malachi stumbled to a halt. “You don’t have the power to hurt me. You’re just a pitiful, useless dead thing.”
He couldn’t have been more wrong about that. The spirits moved in to surround him as he backed out through the door and into the yard. Malachi’s fear returned when they began to change. Their fingers lengthened into claws and their flesh withered and melted away to expose their bones. Their eyes grew milky and their hair turned long and scraggly. Their clothes turned into tattered black shrouds that billowed around their skeletal bodies.
I followed them to the doorway, staying at what I hoped was a safe distance. I watched on in horrified fascination as the spirits changed from benign beings into murderous wraiths. With hollow moans and howls of rage, they launched themselves at the warlock. This time, they didn’t pass through him as they had with Katrina. Their bodies were corporeal and they were solid enough to rend him to pieces.
Malachi’s shrieks of agony seemed to go on for a long time. He was finally silenced when a clawed hand swiped his head from his shoulders. It thumped to the ground and lay beside the rest of his mangled body parts.
Slowly returning to normal, the spirits turned to me. I couldn’t hear them now, but their gratitude came through loud and clear. The young man who had helped me so often gave me a salute of thanks. I returned it and he slowly faded away until he disappeared entirely. I had a feeling he wouldn’t be back this time. Hopefully, they were all finally going to a better place.
Zeus barked in warning, breaking me from my melancholic mood. I sensed a hostile creature approaching and a cold finger seemed to touch the back of my neck. I knew who it was even before my mother stepped out from the trees and into the open.
She crooked a finger, beckoning me to her. My feet automatically obeyed. Katrina might only be a lackey to a master vampire, but she had bitten me more than once and I was forced to do her bidding. I only managed to take a few steps before pain snapped me out of her spell. Zeus leaned against my leg and whined apologetically for nipping my calf.
“Why do you continue to resist me, Alexis?” Katrina called and began walking towards me. Now that I wasn’t looking at her, it was easier to ignore her mesmerizing influence. “You know how much I want us to be a family again.”
The moon wasn’t scheduled to rise for another hour yet, but my wolf surged inside me. This hadn’t happened before. It frightened me
that my alter ego was so aware of what was happening to me. The wolf was eager to come forward and to take control. She sensed the vampire and knew that she was our mortal enemy. Her plan was to rend my mother apart. If I allowed that to happen, I would die along with Katrina. No servant could survive if they killed their creator. While I wasn’t a fully-fledged vampire yet, I didn’t want to risk it.
I knew that if I met my mother’s eyes, she’d ensnare me in her clutches again. If she fed from me one more time, the vampirism that she’d infected me with would take over. Then the taint would spread to every part of my body. I’d become a soulless creature who craved blood instead of flesh.
“Come to me, my darling,” she crooned. A traitorous part of me wanted to obey her.
Spying shiny metal among the bloody ruins of the warlock’s clothing, I bent to snatch up my gun. I searched his pockets and found my cell phone and his car keys. Avoiding looking in the vampire’s direction, I sprinted to the car. Zeus leaped inside when I opened the door and I slid in after him.
Shrieking in rage that I was defying her, Katrina streaked across the yard with shocking speed as I started the car. I engaged the lock an instant before she hit my door. The car rocked at the impact. She pulled the door handle hard enough to snap it off as I put my foot down and took off.
Refusing to let go, she held on as the car fishtailed, willing me to look at her. In sheer desperation, I powered the window down. Pressing my gun against the cold, unmoving chest of the creature that had birthed me, I fired four rapid shots.
Blown backwards, Katrina hit the road and tumbled for several yards. Barely hurt, she sprang to her feet and stared after me with a malevolence that I could feel. Instead of chasing me, she melted into the trees.