Carnal Sacrifice (12 page)

With a deep rumble, the altar erupted in blood. Jaden recoiled, expecting his demon face to appear as it always did in the presence of blood. But this time, it did not. The face staring at him in the mirror was his human one.

They were free. Delaney had delivered them from hell and eternity. She had saved her people. He was now able to love her, grow old with her, lead the normal human life he had always longed for.

“My love, my love.” Tears streamed down Delaney’s cheeks. “I can feel you.”

He kissed her, brimming with joy and gratitude. She had given birth to a whole new race of humans. His job was to make sure they were worthy of her.

A terrifying roar filled his ears. Jaden looked up in horror as an avalanche of ice and water crashed over them.

Chapter Eleven

“Delaney!” Jaden shouted. He saw the terror on her face as she reached for him, but the water swept her away. More water rushed through the portal. Even if they’d been able to keep their feet on the ground, the current would have made it impossible for them to stand. It occurred to him that he was mortal now too, a fact that was surely not lost on his mother.

He dodged a bobbing chair and swam toward Delaney. As the candles blinked out, the temple grew darker. The roaring water made it hard to hear. When he reached her, she was shivering with cold and struggling to stay afloat. Jaden grabbed a piece of the canopy that drifted by, a wooden branch. It had enough heft to it to keep Delaney from being sucked under.

“Don’t let go,” he told her, “Unless it gets stuck on something and pulls you under, don’t let go.”

In the gathering darkness, he saw Lucan and Wolf swimming toward Delaney, and he knew they would protect her. He didn’t even need to ask. They held her between them to keep her from freezing to death in the icy water.

Jaden fought his own mortal cold as he set out for the entrance to the temple. He had to find Gillian, if she was still alive, and see if anything could be done to stop this. Anger twisted in his gut. He’d have to set it aside if he wanted to keep his head clear. This wasn’t a grudge match; it was a fight for survival.

The portal was completely underwater now. He held his breath and dove to break through it. But once he pushed through the shimmering blue wall, he was shocked to see that everything was normal and dry on the other side.

“Jaden!” Gillian threw her arms around him, and he breathed a sigh of relief. Her coven crowded around him too, with expressions of worry. “We couldn’t hold it,” she hurriedly explained.

“Can you summon any magics at all?” he asked.

“We can’t even get inside. She is stronger than we are, especially now that we’re mortal.”

“I’m not in the least mortal,” came a familiar voice, a weary one. Jaden turned and saw his mother looking older than he remembered. The magics had cost her. In the light just before sunrise, she was ghostly pale.

“Don’t you own any clothes?” she said in a voice dripping with scorn. She waved her hand, and Jaden found himself wearing a pair of shorts. His shorts, actually, the ones he’d brought with him.

Under his breath, he said to Gillian and the coven, “Find a way inside. You must. Get everyone out of there.”

“You can’t stay here. She’s—”

“A demon,” Val said. “Yes, I know. We’ve already been over that.”

Jaden slipped his hands in his pockets and tried to hide the women with his body. His hands curled into fists when he thought about Delaney. But the best chance any of them had for survival was for him to try to find the one last shred of decency in this demon who now inhabited his mother’s skin.

“You’re planning to kill me,” he said conversationally. “I never imagined it would end like this.”

Val, ever stylish, was dressed as though she’d been on her way to a luncheon at the club. She shrugged. “You never understood me, Jaden.”

“Too much like my father, I guess.”

She shot him a look. “I have no designs on your life, not in particular. But that insufferable bitch you spent all night screwing? I won’t stop until she dies. All I have to do is wait.”

“It’s not going to happen,” Jaden said.

“Really? You’re mortal now. How do you plan on stopping me?”

“If I were you, I’d leave this place as fast as I could.” Jaden took a deep breath. He let his thoughts range out, attempting a mind link with Delaney before remembering that the mind link was no longer possible.

He might not have been able to connect to Delaney, but he knew he could connect to the ghosts of the Inca maidens. He called to them now, showing them that their vessel was in danger of being swept to her death.

“Who are you talking to?” Val severed his communication with a thought. “Why bother? The water inside the temple is rising as we speak. Soon there will be nowhere to go and no air to breathe. And no way for you to get inside and save your whore.”

Jaden felt a strange presence, a familiar warmth. He realized this one presence was actually many, all swirling around him, whispering.

“Won’t you save yourself?” he asked Val, his heart aching for what could never be now.

“You’re a fool. You’re a—”

Her words were lost in an explosion of water. It howled out of the temple with the force of a hurricane. Val was thrown back, arms flailing, while Jaden watched, his throat aching with unshed tears. The water didn’t touch him or the coven. Delaney’s guardian spirits protected them. But Val would be made to pay, and he knew it. Caught in the deluge, she couldn’t get her bearings or do magics to save herself.

The water flung her against a tree and impaled her on one of its branches.

* * *

By the light of the village bonfire, Delaney watched Tica, one of Jaden’s dozen or so preteen admirers, teach him how to use a hand loom. Tica laughed up at him, her white teeth flashing, as he clumsily attempted to work the shuttle.

“Do you know how to do this?” he asked Delaney.

“When I tried, Tica used to tell me ‘
Karun purina pisiqtaq k’oqao’,
which means ‘a lot of work, but not much to eat’.”

Tica took the loom and scampered away to where the other girls huddled, staring at Jaden and giggling. Beyond them, the village women attended the potatoes, which roasted over cooking fires carved into the earth. The smell of the potatoes evoked a pang of wistful longing. Delaney would miss the village when she left in a few months. She would miss a lot of things.

“I wish you’d play something for me,” she said, nodding toward Jaden’s guitar case.

“I’d rather hold you,” he said.

She snuggled against him. It had been hard enough saying good-bye to the women and men who had participated in the sacred ritual. Since the earthquake had knocked out the road, they had to trek down the other side of the mountain in order to get to Cusco. But the fact that Jaden had chosen to stay the last two months of her twenty-seven-month tour was further proof that he loved her.

Amaru had allowed it—indeed, welcomed it—which went to show that all the medical training in the world couldn’t replace an Andean medicine woman’s preternatural intuition. She’d known that Jaden and Delaney had saved the village, even before they’d come stumbling back, half-clothed and in broad, non-vampire daylight. She knew also that the Hungering Ones would no longer disturb the village and said as much to everyone that night as they met to eat and gossip around the bonfire.

Now Jaden was a celebrity here too. Delaney wondered if Amaru knew about the ritual and her own role in it. But if she did, she never let on.

“Look at everything you managed to accomplish here,” Jaden said. “Does it make you happy to think about it?”

“You never saw my crushing defeats,” she replied. “There were plenty of those too, believe me.”

“Let’s take a year off, travel the world, go visit an ashram in India, or a souk in Morocco, or one of the floating markets in Thailand.”

Her heart thrilled at the prospect of exploring all those exotic places with the man she loved. “Then back to Hollywood?”

“Only if we have to. I’m thinking about establishing a more global base. You know, a house here, a house there.”

“And charity missions.”

“Those too.” He kissed the top of her head. “Imagine, charitable trusts founded by an ex-vampire and a temple prostitute.”

“I think ‘goddess’ is the preferred term.”

“You will always be my goddess,” he told her. “Fortunately, I know all the best ways to worship one…”

About the Author

Angelika Helsing is a multi-award winning writer who lives in Calcata, a small medieval village in Italy that sits atop a cliff overlooking the Treja Valley. An artists’ colony that even the locals refer to as
paese di fricchettoni
, or “village of freaks,” Calcata is home to eccentrics, painters, musicians, and writers of all nationalities, in addition to some pretty adorable kitties.

www.angelikahelsing.com

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This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.

Samhain Publishing, Ltd.

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Carnal Sacrifice

Copyright © 2016 by Angelika Helsing

ISBN: 978-1-61923-299-0

Edited by Linda Ingmanson

Cover by Angela Waters

All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

First
Samhain Publishing, Ltd.
electronic publication: January 2016

www.samhainpublishing.com