Arianna marched down the hallway and stopped at the first door on the right, her mother’s bedroom. The door was shut so she knocked and waited for a response. Ordinarily, if a man had spent the night with her mother, she would not consider opening her bedroom door the next morning for fear of walking in on a scenario that would likely scar her for life. She checked her watch and saw that it was not yet one o’clock. Plenty of time had passed for both her mother and her mother’s guest to sleep off the doozy they’d undoubtedly tied on the night before. She knocked again then turned the doorknob. She peeked inside and saw the foot of the bed. It looked as though the bed had been made so she swung it open all the way.
The entire bed came into view and Arianna gasped then covered her mouth with her hand to stifle the scream that fought to escape her lips. Blood covered nearly every surface of the upper portion of the comforter, sheets and pillows, and a man she’d never met sat, propped up against her mother’s headboard. His eyes were wide with fright and his hands had been positioned in front of him, pressed together impossibly in prayer. An angry maroon arc at the side of his neck, along with the tremendous amount of blood that had saturated the front of his nude body, indicated that his throat had been slit. The scene was beyond macabre. A man had been murdered in her mother’s bed then placed, ghoulishly, to look as though he was praying. Arianna felt the world tilt on its axis, the phantasmagoric image before her too much for her mind to process. She fell to her knees and clutched her belly as the urge to retch overcame her. Her blood roared in her ears and her stomach clenched violently. She gagged and heaved yet nothing came up, just sobs that choked the air from her lungs. She was about to leave, to crawl out of her mother’s bedroom on all fours, when something caught her attention.
On the wall above the murdered man’s head, a piece of paper had been affixed to the wall, stabbed into the plaster with a long blade. Arianna rose to her feet, her legs trembling so hard she doubted they could support her weight. She took a tentative step forward and was surprised that, not only had they held her, they’d also moved. Her body shook so forcefully, she saw the dark curtains of hair on either side of her face quivering as well. Slowly, she made her way to the bed.
Standing near the dead man, her stomach churned and threatened again, the metallic stench of blood filling her nostrils. Her breath came in short, shallow pants, hyperventilation looming on the horizon, as she reached out a trembling hand and pulled at the knife in the wall. The hilt felt cold and slick and she withdrew her hand immediately. She looked down at her hand and saw that it was covered in blood.
Repulsed, she wiped her hand on the bedspread, desperate to clean the man’s blood from her palm. But it seemed to have seeped into her skin. No matter how hard she wiped, the man’s blood remained on her hand. Panic began to mingle with shock and she fought to keep both at bay. She moved back to the knife and quickly yanked the paper from beneath it. She looked at it and saw that the paper was torn but the words were still legible. The note had been scrawled in meticulous handwriting and said:
Dearest Arianna Rose,
I have your mother. If you ever want to see her alive again, you will come to the Soldiers of the Divine Trinity Church at the address listed below. If you contact the police, I will kill your mother. If you bring anyone with you, or alert anyone, I will kill your mother.
I have eyes and ears everywhere, Arianna. You are being watched right now. Do not do anything stupid. If you maintain hope that your mother will survive, you will do exactly as I say.
Yours Truly,
Howard Kane, Jr.
Soldiers of the Divine Trinity Church
102 Heather Road
Corning PA 06806
Arianna’s mouth went dry as she read the words in front of her. Howard Kane had her mother. He held her mother as his hostage. He had been to her trailer and had killed her mother’s lover. Another innocent had died because of her. And now, her mother’s life teetered at the brink of a great precipice from which there was no return. Her mother would die if she did not face Kane.
Her hands continued to shake as she held the note in her hand as a fresh wave of tremors racked her body. But instead of trembling with fear, Arianna began to tremble with ire. Fury seized her, gripping her with an urgency so consuming she could no longer be still. She stuffed the paper into the front pocket of her jeans and fled the room. She dashed down the hallway, pausing only to sling her bag over her shoulder and raced out the front door. She slipped behind the wheel of her mother’s car and turned the spare key her mother had insisted she have in the ignition. The engine groaned to life and she riffled through the glove compartment for a GPS navigation unit her mother had relieved Carl of weeks earlier. When she found it, she frantically punched in the address Kane had left her then stomped on the gas pedal. She sped down the driveway of Shady Pines Trailer Park and on to the main road.
She drove for three hours, blind to traffic, the weather, the world. She traveled with a single purpose: to rescue her mother from Howard Kane. She had not called the police and she had not called upon Desmond, though a part of her had wanted to do both. In her heart, she knew neither the police nor Desmond could help her. She was the Sola, and she would face Kane alone. Left with the irritating female voice of the navigation system and her own tortured thoughts, Arianna arrived at The Soldiers of the Divine Trinity Church a little after four o’clock.
She pulled down a lane lined with stately cedar trees. The limbs of the trees sagged as if bearing the weight of a great secret upon each of their boughs, and lent their appearance the impression of majestic mustached watchmen guarding confidences they’d rather not keep. At the end of the long pathway, an imposing structure loomed. Made of stone and beveled stained glass, the cross at the apex of the steeple looked as though it had punctured the heavens above. Leaden clouds began to weep fat raindrops sporadically. Thunder growled in the distance, threatening at any moment to hemorrhage a downpour.
Arianna pulled her car in front of the Soldiers of the Divine Trinity Church and slid out of her mother’s car. She climbed a small set of concrete steps and paused before a set of wooden doors. She tugged at one of the ornate metal handles and was surprised when it opened silently. She stepped inside and found herself in the vestibule of the building. Faint light spilled from lit candles and cast eerie shadows all around her. She reached out and touched the cool stone of the wall and edged her way around a large vat of holy water in the center of the passage until she reached another set of doors.
The doors opened to the congregational seating area. Rows of pews faced the sanctuary. From where she stood, she saw a man kneeling at the altar. She ran down the center aisle past the pews, up three steps and stopped beside the man.
“Where is my mother?” she demanded.
The man turned his head toward her slowly. He looked like an ordinary man, and she was certain he wasn’t Howard Kane, but something gleamed in his eye, a flicker of something familiar.
“He is waiting for you,” the man replied in a deep voice.
The sound of his voice, the look in his eye, both hit her and an image flashed in her mind. The man kneeling at the altar had worn a long, hooded cloak. He had stood alongside Kane and chanted indecipherable words, and had watched as Lily burned
“He is out in the courtyard,” the rumble of his voice snapped her from her vision. The man gestured with long, thin fingers to the right of the sanctuary.
Arianna rushed in the direction he’d pointed her in and silently vowed to return and find him when she’d finished with Kane. He would pay for what he’d done to Lily. She would make sure of it.
To the left of the altar lay the sacristy. The sacristy was little more than a storage room for books, vestments and an assortment of odd-looking tools. There was a sink, a narrow window and a single door. She reached out and tried the handle without delay and discovered it was unlocked. Though the handle turned, when she pushed against the door itself, it did not budge. Undeterred, she dropped
her shoulder and rammed the weight of her body against it several times until, finally, it gave way. She found herself standing on a small rectangle of concrete before a courtyard. An immense fountain surrounded by ornate statues blocked her view, but beyond the overly elaborate display, something else was happening, a nefarious scene was unfolding. A tingling whisper of awareness inched down her spine and propelled her forward.
She ran around the statues and fountain and she immediately saw a woman’s frightened face. Her mother had been tied to a stake in the middle of the clearing, brush piled beneath her, tears streaming down her cheeks. She cried out to Arianna, “Run baby! Get as far away from these deranged killers as you can!” her mother’s voice was panicked and shrill, unlike Arianna had ever heard it before.
“Shut your mouth, sinner!” a voice boomed and a man stepped from the shadows.
He gripped a torch in both hands and Arianna recognized the charred and puckered flesh of the man’s face, the same burnt face that had haunted her nightmares. Only this time, it was not Lily who burned at his hands. Her mother would be the one who burned.
Fierce tremors shook Arianna’s entire body and her vision became veiled in crimson. Her racing heart slowed and all she could see was Howard Kane. Her scarlet gaze glowed, shining from her eyes, and soaked him in a blood red shroud. She could hear his lifeblood coursing through his veins; smell the coppery scent of it. But she did not feel the need to retch. She did not feel sickened by it. She felt incensed by it. A primal voice inside urged her to kill, kill him where he stood, spill his blood and feast on it. Howard Kane had claimed the lives of countless innocents and the day of reckoning was upon him. Her muscles twitched, eager and aching to channel the energy that stormed inside her. She started to raise her arm, the force of her energy pulsing like an electric current.
“I would think twice about that,” Kane warned confidently and signaled. A man appeared from the direction Kane had just gestured to with an assault rifle in hand. The rifle was equipped with a small, black scope and aimed at Arianna’s mother.
“This is Eli,” Kane spoke. “He is one of more than a dozen men who have your mother in their crosshairs. If you do not lower your arm and calm yourself right now, she will be killed.”
Arianna felt her energy begin to flare despite her effort to control it. Men surrounded her and her mother. She could sense them. And there was no way for her to unarm them simultaneously before one took their kill shot at her mother. She spun, scanning the clearing, looking to the woods beyond it for armed shapes, when a man sprung from her left. The bite of tiny electrodes against the nape of her neck was immediate and followed promptly by a burst of electrical energy that dropped her to her knees. As soon as she felt the cold, wet earth touch her legs, she felt the prick of another set of electrodes hit her back and shoulders. Men rushed her, she could hear the urgent tone of their voices, knew she had been tasered more than once, as her body began to convulse. She tried to scream, to thrash, but her body refused to cooperate. Darkness embraced her, stroking and lulling with silky, sinuous fingers. She strained to shirk it, to evade its elusive allure, but was overtaken.
Chapter 16
Heat warmed Arianna’s face. She blinked and tried to open her eyes, her vision bleary as though she’d slept for far too long. But she hadn’t slept. She’d been unconscious, and not for long. Night had not fallen yet and the brightness of day made her eyes tear. Sporadic rain still fell. She could feel it on her face. A scent infused the air, acrid and foul.
The smell of burning flesh struck her, burning her nasal passages and the back of her throat. She concentrated on seeing more clearly, willing her eyes to focus. When finally the fuzziness lifted, she saw that her mother burned before her, still tied to a stake. The flames had reached her mother’s waist and her body still twitched as she moaned weakly, suffering. But the twitching and moaning faded quickly as the fire swelled suddenly and consumed her head. Arianna watched, frozen, a prisoner in her own personal hell, as the last bit of life drained from Cathy Rose. She watched as her mother’s head lolled to one side, her beautiful face blackened, gone forever.
A sound escaped Arianna from a deep, primitive part of her. The sound tore through the courtyard, her soul crying out. She felt as though a hole had been punched in her chest, a bottomless pit of pain and loss that would never heal. Tears spilled down her cheeks and a lifetime of memories rushed to her mind. In each were she and her mother.
“Why did you do that?” she heard herself ask Kane. “It’s me you want, you monster!” she cried.
Howard materialized beside her, his face gruesome. “I am no monster,” he hissed in her ear. “It is you who are a monster. And that woman,” he pointed to her deceased mother, “that sinful, wretched woman, she birthed you. She raised you, readying you to begin your dark mission.”
“You have no idea what you’re talking about!” she screamed and felt her anger swell. He had murdered her mother and continued to insult her as she dangled lifelessly from a pole.
The grieving hole in her chest began to fill with the purest of rage. The world around her became awash in a crimson glow again.
“Your powers will be of no use to you, Arianna,” Kane said. “Your wrists have been shackled with restraints designed more than two hundred years ago for the sole purpose of containing the Sola, you.”
Kane watched her, apparently waiting for some kind of reaction. But she would not give him the satisfaction, so he continued.
“And I have one more surprise for you before I end your mission before it ever truly began,” he said theatrically.
He signaled to the tree line and Arianna saw a man approaching. He walked slowly and was followed by another, larger man who pointed a gun at his back. As both men drew closer, she gasped in horror and saw that the man with the gun trained on his back was Luke.
“Arianna!” Luke called to her. Tears streaked his dirtied cheeks and panic filled his voice. His eyes were wide with terror as they searched hers for answers.
“Leave him alone!” she yelled. “He has nothing to do with this!”
“I’m sorry, I can’t do that. He helped you kill two of my men, two servants of the Lord. Their deaths cannot go unanswered,” Kane said and withdrew a pistol from his robe. He aimed it inches from Luke’s forehead and Luke began to cry uncontrollably.
“No!” Arianna screamed but the sound of her voice was stifled by the deafening sound of a gunshot. Luke’s body fell to the ground, his once lively silver eyes now vacant.
Howard gestured to the men who lingered in the courtyard and each of them began igniting torches they held. Then, one by one, they threw their torches into the kindling at her feet. The kindling began to burn immediately, the flames growing and expanding. But Arianna did not feel the heat of the flames lapping at her ankles, and she did not feel sadness or grief. A new feeling had overtaken her, surging and coursing through her being. It melted each of her emotions, the ache in her chest, her anger, and her need for vengeance, each seeped from her, until all that remained inside her was pure power. Her entire body began to radiate red light. It shone as if the power within her could no longer be contained by her flesh, pulsing vibrantly, harshly, hissing like fiery snakes from her skin. In that moment, she realized she was no longer Arianna Rose. She was the Sola.
***
Howard Kane stared in shock. He began to feel fear for the first time in over twenty years, since he was a boy being abused. The vision before him, Arianna Rose’s entire body alight in a scarlet halo, could not be happening. She had transformed into the Sola, living and breathing. The fire beneath her had climbed up her body, yet she remained unscathed. He watched in equal parts horror and disbelief as she lifted her glowing arms out to her sides, like a Phoenix defying its death pyre and spreading its wings. The shackles around her wrists snapped then fell to the flames as though they’d been constructed of chintzy material, not iron.
He wanted to run, to flee from the imminent destruction, but his legs
refused to budge from where they stood. Instead, he was forced to witness the Sola raising her arms, flames shooting out in every direction. Each of his men at the perimeter of the circle that had surrounded her was suddenly ablaze. He heard their tortured screams tear through the evening sky. He clapped his hands to his ears, trying futilely to muffle their cries, and saw that the rest of his men staggered from the surrounding woods, their flesh burning. Everyone around him burned. He was the only one who remained. He became confident that God had spared him.
That confidence buoyed him as the Sola stepped toward him. She stopped directly in front of him and glared at him with eyes that blazed with the blood of those who’d martyred themselves. She loomed near him then spoke with a voice so haunting, the hairs on his body rose like quills.
“You are a fool, Howard Kane,” she said and her voice echoed through him. “A fool who believes God is directing him to murder.”
“God guides me to do His work,” he replied
“No!” she shouted silencing him. “You kill because you enjoy it, because you are evil,” she accused.
His insides began to trill, a sudden inexplicable phenomenon. “God has chosen me to hunt witches, to protect mankind,” he said in a trembling voice.
The Sola began to laugh, a mirthless sound that resonated through the courtyard. “No, Howard. You are one of us. God is not drawing you to us. Your own power is.”
Howard’s eyes widened and a breath of awareness raced across his skin. He knew she’d spoken the truth, could feel it deep within him. He was a warlock. He was not going to heaven as a soldier of the Lord. He would burn in hell for eternity alongside the rest of the evil beings he’d already sent there.
Planet Urth Boxed Set Page 41