by David Risen
She squints and slips her hand into the pocket, and then she brings out Rider’s black Maglite.
She gives him an angry look. “That’s what I said, a torch.”
She clicks it on and lights the clothes folded on the shelves before her.
“Hayden and Alora aren’t who they appear,” she explains. “They were a part of a faction of angels put here at the dawn of creation to oversee the development of mankind – babysitters.”
Rider frowns. “What are they doing here?”
“Their group became corrupt over time. They started passing themselves off as Gods, taking mortal women to their beds, and pitting men against one another for their own amusement.”
Rider takes a step toward her. “Why did the sisters put them here?”
“They’re dangerous and apathetic to the plight of man. According to the Sister’s lore, you threw most of them in hell back in ancient times.”
Rider gives her a look of disbelief. “Me?”
She shakes her head.
Rider nods. “So, what happened between you and Hayden?”
She sighs as she checks the stitching on a black dress she finds in the stack.
“Like all pseudo gods, Hayden is a walking erection. He put the moves on me and Alora, his mate, found out. I fled.”
Rider stuffs his hands in his jeans pockets. “And who are you?”
She faces him as she unbuttons the quarter-size buttons on the breast of his jacket.
Rider looks away respectfully as she strips it off, and wiggles out of the skirt portion of her yellow dress.
“My name in this life is Cassandra. At one time, I was a member of the sisterhood.”
Rider scratches his head. “Hayden called you the mother of man. What is that?”
She looks at him. She’s wearing a strapless black dress now, and looks as though she’s ready for a night on the town. She’s much more attractive than the perfect Dena Rider encountered in the magically induced dreams.
Rider’s own attraction to her embarrasses him and he looks away from her.
“That title is fake. I let them believe that because they would all be after me if they knew the truth.”
Rider’s eyes narrow with interest. “And that is?”
She shakes her head and turns away from him, and then she heads for a rack of shoes.
“We don’t have time for me to explain everything. We have to leave here and return to the warding before they find us.”
“I haven’t seen anything here that scares me.”
She gives him a knowing look. “Then you haven’t been here long. The spirits are dangerous to even you in numbers greater than five or six. There are three factions inside the city a spirit must join if he wishes to survive. Hayden’s faction is mostly maleficent Celestial spirits. Another faction, led by the former foreman of the mines – a man by the name of Eric Foster – who died when the mine collapsed on his head is a group of vengeful spirits – some who came from the mines and some that the sisters locked away here. Then there’s my group – former sisters they locked away. All of us are at war with one another.”
Cassandra finds a pair of brown leather boots that look like lace-up, ankle length high-tops. She slides them on her bare feet, ties them, and stands.
“We should go before any of them find us.”
Rider turns for the door, but he gasps and stops in place as he spots the man looking in through the shop window.
His skin is blue, and rot surrounds his lips. The left side of his face is caved in leaving an eyeless socket and a mass of mangled meat.
“Too late,” he says.
“We should find a back way out of here,” Cassandra said.
Rider rolls his eyes, opens the door, and steps out into the cold night beyond.
Deformed people surround the clothing store clogging Main Street.
A woman wearing a bloodstained dress with her throat slit.
A man with his left hand shredded into hamburger meat.
A man with a flattened face.
A woman whose head flops around on her neck as if her spine is broken.
Rider smirks.
“Is this black Friday?”
A man with the top of his skull missing exposing the gray matter beneath pushes himself to the front of the crowd.
“Who are you?” he demands.
Rider’s smirk broadens.
“Just passin through. Are you writin a book?”
The man with the convertible head glowers at him. “The woman in that store is wanted for numerous crimes against my people. Turn her over and we’ll leave you in peace.”
Rider leans toward the crowd – all traces of amusement gone from his face. He feels the abysmal spike snake around his right hand again. His eyes begin to burn.
An exasperated gasp passes through the crowd.
“And if I tell you to go fuck yourself?”
A look of concern fills the man’s eyes.
“Who are you? You have the powers of one of Hayden’s people.”
Rider sneers. “Hayden-shmaden. What’s your story? Barber get a little too excited?”
The man looks like Rider punched him in the stomach. Rider feels that the man is not accustomed to anyone bowing up on him.
“My name is John Eric Foster. I was the foreman of the Skitts Mountain Mines until they caved in murdering me and several of my co-workers. Who are you?”
Rider nods. “My name is Blake Rider. My friends call me Rider. You can call me Father Fury.”
Another gasp cycles through the crowd.
Eric Foster surveys his people and then points his eyes back at Rider this time with a plea on his face.
“That woman is a Harlot! Countless numbers of my friends here have died several times over due to her plots.”
Rider’s eyes narrow shrewdly.
“And I’m sure they did nothing to deserve it, right?”
Eric sighs with frustration.
“We are the keepers of the peace here, despite outward appearances. Before the witches closed this city, we contracted with them to keep the dangerous spirits inside here from destroying one another. The woman you have in there is public enemy number one.”
Rider gives him a look of disbelief.
“You don’t have a problem with The Sisters of Divinity locking you up in here?”
He bunches his lips. “Some of us, in the past were guilty of bad things. This is how we atone. If this seal breaks, the evil inside this city is unleashed on the world of the living. That harlot in there seeks to escape!”
Rider nods. “The Sisters of Divinity are not your friends.”
Eric slices his hand through the air like a knife.
“Turn her over, or we’ll take her by force.”
Rider grins. “Good, I’ve been itchin for a good fight.”
Rider leaps off the porch into the crowd and spears the first spirit he sees with the abysmal spike.
The woman with one arm shrieks and then explodes into black smoke.
He spins the abysmal spike around in a broad circle and takes out half a dozen other vengeful spirits.
He looks back in time to see the mob storming the clothing store.
Cassandra smiles as the vengeful spirits, spearheaded by Eric foster, storm the shadowy chamber that was once the only clothing store in Skitts Mountain, Tennessee.
“Hello, Eric. Miss me?”
She winks at him.
He glares.
“You’re a whore. You’ll always be a whore. You played all of us against one another in the guise of bringing peace, and now we’re worse than before!”
Cassandra is not afraid. In fact, she feels only peace as she looks upon the hideous, defiled spirits surrounding her.
“You’re looking quite tasty, Eric. In fact, the main course is already on display,” she says nodding at his open skull.
Eric’s blue lips curve in a baleful smile. “Get her!”
Clammy, dead hands grasp her wris
ts and ankles and rip her from the floor. Then they haul her toward the open door like a piece of quarry tied to a stick.
As her captors drag her down the stars she peers through the crowds of vengeful spirits and spies Father Fury fighting – overwhelmed – beating off the vengeful spirits so quickly that she can scarcely see his hands move.
“Help,” she cries.
Father Fury straightens up and looks at her, but this is not the same man who rescued her from Hayden. His eyes glow red, his expression is far darker, and power boils off him.
Cassandra looks over her left shoulder at Eric who seems to be leading her entourage of captors between the courthouse and the Hotel toward the mill village area where the vengeful spirits reside.
“You’re going to regret this,” she growls.
Eric looks over his shoulder at her and smirks.
A cold, dead hand clasps Rider’s shoulder.
He spins around sweeping the Abysmal spike as he turns.
Five more spirits turn to black smoke.
Then, they all back away from him as if afraid creating a path.
Twenty feet away from him, concealed by the shadows of the night, a figure that he can only scarcely see stands motionless like a statue.
Her eyes glow a feral yellow.
Rider assumes a swordsman’s stance.
“What the fuck are you waiting for?”
The figure steps into the moonlight.
She wears gray sweat pants with Nikes and no shirt. Her chest looks as though something has clawed its way out of it. Her dark hair with blond highlights whips about in the air as if suspended in water.
Dena?
“Hello Nick,” she says evenly.
Rider shakes his head.
“How did you get here?”
She drifts toward him. “The sisters captured my soul in here when they performed the ritual that they used to stop you.”
Rider stands up straight.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
Dena looks down at the ground. “I didn’t have the greatest life in the world. I wasn’t rich. I didn’t have anyone who loved me. No children of my own.”
She points her glowing feral eyes back at him.
“But I could have been happy. You took all of that away.”
Rider shakes his head. “I loved you, and I never would have hurt you on purpose.”
She glared at him, and as she did, her eyes glowed ever brighter.
“You didn’t love me. You just wanted to screw me, and you did.”
Rider shakes his head slowly. “It wasn’t like that.”
“Wasn’t it? The sisters nailed me to the gate between you and your path, and you tore right through it as if I wasn’t even there.”
Rider turns his palms up. “We released you! We couldn’t have known that they would find you so fast.”
She slices her hand through the air. A force like gale rips Rider from his feet, hurls him through the air and pins him on the ground.
“Dena?” he cries.
She hovers over him and looks down at her work, grinning with furious satisfaction.
“My name is not Dena. It never was. My name was Delilah Powers.”
Rider blinks. “Delilah, this isn’t what it looks like.”
Her lips curve into a rueful sneer. “It’s exactly what it looks like.”
“I didn’t want any of this,” he pleads. “If you had only given yourself over to the idea of really being my wife, none of this would have happened.”
She smiles hatefully. “In death, we’ve become cannibals, and I’m going to enjoy tearing you apart with my teeth.”
Cassandra looks past her feet.
The vengeful spirits had carried her between the courthouse and the old hotel, and her new acquaintance is beyond her view.
She cranes her head over her shoulder.
Eric is paying attention to the broken road ahead that leads down toward the old brick warehouses where the vengeful spirits reside.
Hate fills Cassandra.
She snatches her wrists from the hands of her captors and flings them to her sides. A flash of green light briefly turns night into day.
The vengeful spirits fall to their knees at once bowing on the ground with their arms before them as if worshiping.
Cassandra hovers in the air with her eyes glowing green so brightly that the light pierces the darkness.
She floats backwards and hovers over Eric.
“So, this is the self-proclaimed keeper of the balance inside this spirit prison?”
Eric looks up to her with a contrite expression.
Cassandra laughs humorlessly. It’s a hard, brittle laugh.
“So virtuous are you that you can’t even move in my presence! Why do you suppose that is, Mr. Balance-keeper?”
He looks down to the ground and mumbles something.
Cassandra cups her hand over her ear. “I beg your pardon? I didn’t quite get that.”
“I still have a century and a half of penance left.”
Cassandra straightens herself. “Ah.”
She looks around at all the other spirits bowing in the dirt.
“You knew that I was originally a part of Hayden’s clan, so you had to know that I was somehow special, and therefore more powerful than you.”
She turns back to face Eric. “So why did you think you could just cart me out and haul me off?”
Eric smirks. “We’re spirits. You can’t kill us.”
Cassandra smiles. “No, but what I can do will be far worse than death. You see, I can eat spirits. Once I do, you won’t die. You’ll be a part of my visage until the end of time. The entire time, you’ll be very aware of your own suffering and captivity.”
Eric glares at her. “I’m not afraid of you.”
Cassandra’s eyes narrow. “Then allow me to impart a bit of history. Many hundreds of thousands of years ago, lived a man whose spiritual name was simply ‘Father of all.’ He served as exactly that for hundreds of rounds of creation.
“He was my first mortal father, but over the cycles, he became jaded and then bitter. He moved his hand against his own creator, The Great Spirit, and this caused a very short war in which The Great Spirit handily put him down.
“When our spiritual father and maker of all of us, The Great Spirit asked him why, the Father of All simply said that he needed time.”
“The Great Spirit stripped him of his body, reformed him into an aberration, and renamed him Time. Then he cast him into mortality, chose a new first man who he simply named ‘First Light, or Light of the morning.’ The fool wondered several cycles of mortality as the adversary of mortals, until he became angry enough to try his hand against The Great Spirit once again.
“He summoned all of his children who were still loyal, and he betrayed them.”
She looks down at Eric. “Care to guess what he did?”
Eric didn’t look at her.
“He ate them all. Only the few who didn’t show to the meeting escaped.
“He met The Great Spirit in the spirit world and attacked him, and of course the Great Spirit put him down easily once again. All the children who supported ‘Time’ were released and had to suffer penance for their actions, and Time himself served a very long penance that extends even into today.
“Hayden told me that story, and of course, I had to try it out. I found the results delicious and empowering.”
Eric looks at her. “Is there a point somewhere in all of this?”
Cassandra sneers at him and eyes the woman to his left. “This woman is your wife, is she not?”
Eric says nothing.
Cassandra opens her mouth and inhales. The woman beside Eric shrieks in horror. She turns to smoke that Cassandra sucks into her mouth.
Clammy, dead hands cover Rider – tugging at his clothes – ripping.
Rider clinches his eyes kicking at his attackers. He feels something powerful gathering inside him.
“Delilah, don’t make
me hurt you.”
A cold laugh sounds just over his head.
He opens his eyes to find her face inches away from him.
“Too late,” she says.
She opens her mouth and chomps after his face. Rider turns his head just in time to avoid losing the tip of his nose.
He screams.
A blast of scorching heat surges from his body.
When he opens his eyes, he finds himself staring up at a golden sky. He climbs from the ground and peers across the mounds of emerald green grass at Delilah who crouches on her knees with her face in her hands.
She wears the same black dress that she wore back in Darien the day that she was supposed to mate with him for the first time.
Her hair is once again a lustrous brown with blond highlights.
“I don’t blame you,” Rider says.
She looks up. Her face is puffy and her feral eyes are red.
“I do,” she says. “I trusted that awful group of women, and became one of them. I even blamed you for what happened to me.”
Rider shakes his head. “You couldn’t have known. And you were in a situation that gave you no other choice, but to do the wrong thing.”
She buries her face in her hands once again.
“I’m so sorry for everything they’ve done to you. For everything I’ve done.”
Rider steps over to her and extends his hand.
She looks up, and stares at him for a moment, and then the look of fear in her eyes softens into a look of kindness. She takes his hand and stands.
“I’m going to take all of this away from you. You won’t remember any of it, and I’ll see to it that you get another chance at being a good person.”
Her eyes flicker with a complicated barrage of emotion.
“Why would you help me after what I’ve done?”
Rider hugs her and she dissolves in his arms.
The sky turns black once more. Rider finds himself standing in the middle of what was once Main Street of Skitts Mountain, Tennessee. The vengeful spirits that surrounded him are all a memory. Just the sad, empty buildings remain.
Rider turns back for the clothing store where he retrieves his black, leather coat, and then he slowly ambles in the direction that the spirits hauled Cassandra.