by Marie Hall
Howler’s Night Blurb:
The Priest was back. Her home was safe. And Pandora had even managed to secure a powerful ally in the Zombie Queen. But in one fell swoop none of it mattered. She’s been abducted by a secret organization known only as the Triad, and they’re conducting experiments, treating her like a lab rat: cutting her open, dissecting her, and keeping her hostage. And she’s slowly going mad. Her demons are asleep, and no one knows where to find her. She’s completely isolated, and the Triad mean to break her. But for what purpose? And to what end?
Desperate to get back to her life and the people she loves Pandora manages a miraculous escape... Or has she? All she knows is she's woken up in the woods, alone and terrified and with no memories of who she really is.
Only one thought keeps hammering away at her. The prophecy. A legend, that states Pandora is the key to unlocking Armageddon. The truth of who she is, of what the Triad has made her become, has been sealed in her memory banks. And if she can just remember, she knows she can stop whatever they've got planned.
And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him...
Howler’s Night
Copyright 2014 Marie Hall
Cover Art by Damonza
Formatted by Author’s HQ
www.MarieHallWrites.blogspot.com
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This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the publisher, Marie Hall, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in the context of reviews.
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Unauthorized or restricted use in relation to this publication may result in civil proceedings and/or criminal prosecution.
The author and illustrator have asserted their respective rights under the Copyright Designs and Patent Acts 1988 (as amended) to be identified as the author of this book and illustrator of the artwork.
Published in 2014 by Marie Hall, Honolulu, Hawaii, United States of America
Table of Contents
Act I
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Act II
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Act III
Red Rain, Book 4
Forbidden
About Marie Hall
Marie Hall Books
Sneak Peek: Forbidden
Act I
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing…
~Edgar Allen Poe
Chapter 1
Pandora
Glass shattered and an explosion rocked the world around me. I was thrown into the air, Asher ripped from my arms. Light flashed and chaos—God, it reigned.
Screams, so many screams. Something sharp bit into my skin, and I felt the hot warmth of blood flowing from my cheek. I must have fallen off the bed—into a lamp? I blinked because my brain literally felt like scrambled eggs.
And then a shadow covered me. But it didn’t belong to my priest. Claws sliced through my shoulder blades.
“We’ve found her!”
Someone released a blood-curdling scream, and I was shocked to realize that someone was me. The claws gripped tighter, and I convulsed because the pain was unbelievable. My demons were silent, almost whimpering within me.
I was so freaking disoriented, my ears ringing and my eyes blinking, looking at the world and unable to believe what I was seeing.
Somehow there was a giant gaping hole through Kemen’s trailer, and I’d been blasted through it. My cheek wasn’t pressed into a lamp like I’d thought, but a sharp stick. The bookshelf I’d so lovingly set up was now crushing my left leg, and when I tried to wiggle my foot, I realized with a howl that it was broken.
“Pandora!” Asher screamed, and I saw his shadow racing to me, but something was very wrong with him.
His arm hung useless by his side, and I realized in horror that it was attached by only a thread of skin. His left cheek was blown open, exposing the red meat of muscle underneath. I shook my head.
This wasn’t real. None of this was happening. I’d just been in bed with Asher and we were going to make love—it was finally happening. And then it wasn’t, and now I didn’t know what was happening.
Claws tore into my shoulders before tossing me over a hard, impossibly thick shoulder covered in a coarse jacket.
Whimpering, tears sliding from the corners of my eyes, I could do nothing but hold on as the creature ran through the swamp with me draped over its back. Every time its feet pounded the wet ground I was jostled, slamming into it’s hard-as- concrete muscles. Groaning, I shoved at the back, trying to yank the jacket off, only to realize it wasn’t a jacket but amber-hued fur.
“Oh God,” I sobbed and reached out for Asher, who was now on the ground, having been tackled by two more giant beasts of fur and muscle.
And that’s the last thing I remembered before a fist rammed into my skull, crushing it on impact.
~*~
The green blinking lights were the first thing I noticed when I opened my eyes. The next was a horrible metallic buzzing, as if from a dying florescent lamp. The third…
The third thing was the worst. A scream of horror stuck in my throat. Not because I was strapped down on a gurney, or even because I had a ball gag fastened to my mouth. But because I was naked, and I was open.
From my chest cavity to the bottom of my stomach, I’d been cracked open like a watermelon.
Help! Oh my, God! Help!
Tears rained down my cheeks, because I could only say the words in my head. No one would be coming for me. No knight to rescue me. I was alone and lost, tucked away only God knew where.
“Good, she’s awake. Now the testing may commence.” A disembodied voice spoke over loud speakers hard wired into the room. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, but it didn’t matter.
Nothing mattered except stopping them from doing whatever they were about to do to me.
I shook my head and tried to fight my restraints, kicked my feet and lashed out with my arms. But the moment I moved, an electric shock pierced my chest, as if someone had inserted a cattle prod directly into my heart.
I bucked, writhing from the agony of it. My eyes grew larger when I saw my heart. The actual, beating organ. It was exposed, just like the rest of me, and wires hung from every inch of it.
Something started beeping, and then hard, painful hands shoved me down onto the cold metal table, and a light so bright it was like the sun was turned directly i
n my face.
I couldn’t see anymore. I whimpered. I moaned, trying to plead, to beg them to stop. But they couldn’t make sense of my words, and what would it have mattered if they had? I knew these were the kinds of people who would never stop.
The last thing I remembered was my priest. He’d been holding me and we were going to….
I screamed when they took a knife to me. Screamed until my throat went raw, and still I went on.
I should have passed out. Why wasn’t I passing out?
“Pass me the clippers,” a male voice said.
The sound was so methodical, so normal, as if he were doing nothing more than cleaning his nails or eating lunch.
“If you’re worried, demon, that we mean you harm,” that same male voice whispered to me as casually as could be, “then, you’d be right.”
Then something sharp, metal, and as hot as a Hell furnace sank into my gut. The pain ate me alive, fractured my soul, and my demons were gone. I was empty. So empty. So cold.
I was nothing.
And finally, finally the blessed darkness took me.
~*~
I came to I had no idea how much later. There were no windows to tell time by. Two shifters were dragging me down a long, gray hall. I’d counted the number of rooms in this cold, dank hellhole the first night I’d woken up from my drug-laced stupor. Thirty eight-by-eight barred cells, fifteen on either side. Some empty, but most containing one naked person, huddled in on themselves lying on the cold, cement floor.
Men, women, and kids, humans and freaks. We were all there.
The echoes of their footsteps throbbed like the shrill ringing of a jackhammer in my sensitive skull. I hissed with each step, the stitches in my body pulling and tugging, oozing blood.
I whimpered painfully.
My guards must have heard me, because their fingers dug in deeper. One snorted at my intake of breath, and I knew he liked the sound of my pain. I clenched my molars, determined not to give him the satisfaction of hearing it anymore.
A terrified pair of moss green eyes looked at me through a cell door. They belonged to a black girl with a shaved head. She looked young, maybe seventeen. She held the bars with fingers whose nails had been worn down to the bloody quicks. Her gaze was hollow and vacant.
But I didn’t get a chance to study her further. A fist connected with my temple, and I passed out again.
~*~
Time blended, became fluid. I could have been there three days or three years, I didn’t know. My cell was always dark; the only light I ever saw came from above when I was on the table. When they were cutting me open, studying me.
The doctor always talked to me, asked me weird questions.
What is the color of a raindrop?
Blue.
Soothing touch on my brow.
What are the numbers of pi?
Who cares.
Soothing touch on my brow.
Did Cleopatra really take that many lovers?
Yes.
Soothing touch on my brow.
Who is the Gray Man?
I don’t know.
Fire pouring through my veins. Screaming until my throat bled.
Did I know of a death priest named Asher?
No.
Pulses of lightening zapping straight into my heart. Jerking and shaking with seizures.
What did I think when I saw Wrath?
Hate.
Being ripped apart from the inside out. Blacking out from the infinite pain.
Waking up in my cell, naked, bloody, and broken.
Ya-el, Ya-el, Ya-el. My name chanted at me all day and night, funneled through the speakers hidden in my room.
Food was shoved through the bars. Congealed meat and moldy rice. I pushed it away.
Crawling to the edge of my bed, too weak to lie on top of the cot, I curled into myself and scratched at the cement with a bloody nail. Nothing but lines and squiggles. I was alone. There were no voices inside me, only darkness, only pain.
As the days passed and the questions were repeated, my answers began to change.
What is the color of a raindrop?
Blue?
Nothing.
What are the numbers of pi?
Infinite.
Nothing.
Did Cleopatra really take that many lovers?
I don’t know.
Nothing.
Who is the Gray Man?
Nooo.
Fire.
Who is Asher?
Nobody.
Lightening.
What did I think when I saw Wrath?
Dangerous.
No pain.
Ya-el. Ya-el. Ya-el.
Everyone was evil. They were all after me. I was a demon. I was bad. I should die. But I wasn’t ready to die. I loved him.
More time passed. I started to grow cold. I was forgetting things. I was covered in scars. The world was so dark.
What is the color of a raindrop?
Red.
Soft caress.
What are the numbers of pi?
3.14159…
He made me stop and gave me a smile. I liked that smile. It was the first one I’d seen in forever.
Who is the Gray Man?
My tongue locked. I would die from this pain, I was so weak. I could hardly remember who this Gray Man was, but I knew I had to protect him. I said nothing.
When it was over, blood poured from my nose and mouth.
Who is Asher?
I looked at him, and he knew I would say nothing. His eyes turned dark, displeased, and I knew what was coming. I wanted it, wanted this to be over. And as the shifters slashed at me with their claws, I cried and remembered him. My dark lover. The beat of my heart. He would understand and accept my sacrifice. I would never give him up.
Never.
I could barely breathe when the beating stopped.
My eyes were swollen; I couldn’t see. There wasn’t a part of me that didn’t hurt. I was an exposed nerve, a throbbing wound.
“What did you think when you saw Wrath?”
“Beauty.”
I was broken.
When they took me back to my room, I prayed for death. The green-eyed woman looked at me. They’d moved her cell. She was right across from me now.
Half her face had been melted off recently. Too bad, she’d once been so pretty.
I laughed when I glanced down at myself. I was Frankenstein’s bride. I was scars and grooves. I wrapped my arms around myself and laughed and cried, cried and laughed.
“Under. Your. Bed.” Her voice was scratchy, but it snapped me out of the insanity.
I wanted to ask her what she was talking about, but she crawled away and hid in shadow.
I debated whether I had the strength to move. But I guess I did, because I slid forward. The blood seeping from my scrapes helped, but by the time I made it to the bed, my arms were trembling, my hands shaking.
I laid with my face pressed against the floor, staring beneath the bed, and saw a small leather-bound book. It might have taken five minutes or five hours—I couldn’t tell—but eventually I worked the book over to me.
When I flipped it open, it was empty. Nothing but blank pages.
Except for the last one.
No one ever escapes. Not you. Not me. No one. I’ve spelled the book so that when it’s time it will arrive at the side of the one who needs it most. This is your goodbye.
~Hannah
I guess there was nothing else to say.
Chapter 2
Asher
It had been eleven months, three weeks, six days, and twenty hours since I’d seen Pandora last. Except when I closed my eyes. Then I saw her every night, and it was always the same: she was reaching out to me with a look of terror in her eyes, and I was stuck. Unable to move and screaming at her until my throat was so raw it bled, but the nightmare always ended the same.
The monsters took her from me. I am a death priest, a being of such awesome power
that with one breath I can bring life or death. And what was happening was all so foreign I didn’t know how to handle it.
All I remembered was my arm hanging by just a string of tendon. And then a choir of roars from the carnival as the Nephilim raced from their trailers with wide eyes, coming at me because it must have been me. I was the interloper, the death priest whose sole mission in life was to bring the demons down.
I’d been tagged by Bubba, and then Cash, each of them with eyes glowing and licking their lips, the taste of their desire to end me so tangible in the air that I knew I would have no choice but to fight to the death.
To hell with preserving their pathetic lives. The only reason I’d let them live was Pandora; she was the only thing that meant anything to me.
But she wasn’t there, and the madness, the old hate, came surging back, and I would have killed them all. Would have leveled the lot of them, but Luc had grabbed me, and there’d been a look in his eyes.
One I could scarcely describe.
The look had been full of wrath, of fury, but buried deep inside was the anguish of what we’d lost.
I wasn’t exactly sure how to classify what he and Pandora had, and while a part of me hated it, for a second I’d been thankful to see it, to see the spark of his humanity, because it reminded me of Pandora’s.
That look had brought me down off the ledge. That look had also quelled his people.
Luc had vowed vengeance, and at first I’d believed him. Stupid, I know. But I’d just known we’d find her and bring her back, and that anyone involved in taking her from us would pay.
But with each day that passed, the madness flirted with me, growing stronger and stronger, until I was pacing back and forth in our trailer looking for some clue, for something I might have missed nearly a year ago. I knew the odds of finding anything at this point weren’t good, but I was desperate.