Sacrifice (17 page)

Ariana moaned and scratched at his back, and the bed rocked with his efforts. Blood mixed with the sweat of their lust, and soon they slid in a pink sheen of desire that lubricated their movement like oil. Ariana reached up and gripped something from the bed beside them. And then she slipped it around his neck. A strand of meaty, slippery intestine. She pulled it back and forth like a noose, drawing him near and then letting him back off. She lost herself in the abomination, and shrieked in an ascending o-o-o-O-O-Oh of orgasm.

He kissed her iron-tinged lips and sighed. Something invisible rushed across the skin of his ass, and Jeremy looked up into the shadows of the room which seemed to shift and pulse with unnatural movement.

“Curburide,” he whispered. “I love you.”

“If we drive all afternoon, we should hit Salt Lake City for dinner,” Joe announced as they pulled onto I-80 West.

Alex reached into her backpack.

“And we’re not going to listen to Blink-182 the whole time.”

Her face fell.

“Okay, once,” he relented.

She grinned and flipped the case open to extract the CD. “What are we going to do when we get there?”

“Good question,” Joe nodded. “I have no fuckin’ idea. Malachai?”

Yes, master.

“You want to tell us what the hell we’re doing?”

You’re going back to the beginning.

Joe shook his head and rolled his eyes at Alex. “Can you hear him?”

She nodded.

“Why, Malachai? What will we find there? And how do we even find the beginning?”

And you were a reporter once?

“This is maddening,” Joe shrugged. “I should know better than to expect help from a demon.”

Alex said nothing.

“I guess when we get there tomorrow, we should dig up some old newspapers and try to track down the hotel where the first murder took place. Maybe you’ll be able to feel or see something there with your second sight. I don’t know.”

On the stereo, the guitars crashed in a manic three-chord punk-rap fest. Joe focused on the thin line of the endless horizon and Alex settled back and closed her eyes. Lunch had settled heavy in her stomach, and she felt like dozing. In her ear, Malachai whispered only to her:
Don’t waste this time, child. Practice your control. You’re going to need it.

The afternoon slipped by in a blur of geometric fields of grain and long barren flows of rocky earth dotted with dying patches of scrub grass. Alex was quiet, and Joe replaced her punk CD with an old ambient techno Delerium disc long before they passed Green River. Occasionally he snuck looks at her, but she didn’t seem in the mood to talk. If she wasn’t dozing, she was staring vacantly out the passenger window.

He let her be. He couldn’t imagine the horrible images that must be still fresh in her mind, haunting her. It had only been a couple days since she’d axe murdered her parents, for God’s sake. And this was really the first extended time she’d had to think about it. First she’d had to gather her things and run, then she’d hooked up with him and was nervous about being abandoned, or caught. But now…it seemed they were really beyond the law, with nothing but time on their hands. She had time to think. Time to ache.

“You okay?” he said at one point, and she jumped.

“Huh?” Her eyes looked wild, caught.

“I asked if you were okay.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Just thinking.”

“Wanna talk?”

She shook her head and looked back out the window. He let it be for now. The kid needed to come to terms with what she’d done. With what she
was.

“Oh my God, I feel sick,” Jeremy whispered. Ariana stirred next to him. Her eyes flickered open in the gray light of dawn.

Jeremy looked around the shadowed room. Pieces of his wife and her lover were all around them. On the floor, on the bed with them. He grimaced as he moved a leg and felt something cold and sticky. Heavy.

“I’m gonna throw up, I think.”

Ariana ran a bloodstained hand through his hair. “I know baby,” she whispered. “The first time is hard. It’ll pass.”

Jeremy pulled away from her and lurched out of the bed towards the bathroom. His left foot touched something wet and cool, and then he slipped as his right foot came down on something that squished. A heart? Entrails? He fell to his knees, and found himself staring at the open eyes of his wife’s lover. The severed tip of the man’s own penis was still lodged in his pale lips, a gruesome lollipop.

“Oh God, what have we done?” Jeremy gasped again, and ran headlong into the master bath. His painful, wracking coughs filled the house for several minutes.

Ariana lay in bed listening, and let him get it out. She stretched, and moved herself, as the bruises from Jeremy’s rampage in the hotel Sunday night made themselves felt even more than yesterday. She caught her breath as she yawned; her chest felt like a knife was lodged in her side.

Damn. What if a rib was cracked? She couldn’t exactly check in to a hospital right now. She ran her hands over her chest and winced at the tender spots. Then a horrible thought struck her. What if last night’s sacrifice hadn’t even counted?
The Book of the Curburide
never specified that the murders should be on a Sunday, or a week apart. That was her little touch. It seemed to add a more ritual element to the murder. The book only demanded that the sacrifices be made in connection with sexual advance, and that they occur in a string of different cities. Each city a link in the chain she forged. The chain that, when complete, would flog the genitals of all mankind.

Still, Ariana worried about breaking her own chain of similarity. She had missed her Sunday night deadline, and then when she had killed, she had fucked the victim first. In her previous sacrifices, she had never fucked the victim before killing him; mainly because she thought that the closeness would make her lose her resolve. But what if it tainted the Calling?

She replayed the scene in her mind, and remembered clearly chanting the prayer, as Jeremy kept watch over the wounded couple, and then dragging the man to her circle and slitting his throat. It should have counted. It followed the loose guidelines of the book, and she had taken not one, but two sacrifices this time. She was in the right locale, and had taken her sexually charged victim ruthlessly. She had then emptied his body of its organs as well as its life and arranged them in the ceremonial way, heart to kidneys, a clockwise testament of death. An ordered celebration of entropy. She hadn’t been the one to do the woman, but Jeremy had followed her direction for the ritual exactly. Two sacrifices, in the same place, should strengthen the Calling, no?

She
had
felt the hands of the Curburide reach out to her last night, as she had after the other killings, and they seemed stronger than ever. She thought they had influenced Jeremy, given him the strength to complete the atrocity. She smiled at the memory of Jeremy’s sacrilegious sex with her. God, he’d been an animal! Face speckled with the blood of his wife, eyes burning with the fire of the kill and the still-potent rage at his cuckolding. The pain from the beating he’d given her had been, temporarily, overshadowed by his biting and kissing and fast, furious fucking.

Water was running in the bathroom now. Ariana shook away her doubts about the sacrifices. She had nearly completed the cycle. San Francisco, Phoenix, Austin, New Orleans, Tallahassee. Just one last stop.

Terrel.

Joe pulled a
Salt Lake Tribune
from the metal box, while Alex grabbed the city’s tabloid
Weekly.
Tucking it under his arm, he led her into a Greek diner, and in moments they were settled in a cracked red vinyl booth. The formica tabletop was yellowed and spiderwebbed with age. They pored over the sticky, plastic-coated menu that seemed to have more food choices than a grocery store. The place looked as if it had been in business without an update since long before Jerry Lee Lewis thought about “Great Balls of Fire” or taking his second cousin to the backseat. The metal backsplash behind the grill was painted in thick coats of yellow, orange and black baked grease, and the speckle-patterned floor tile, while clean, had clearly seen de cades of traffic; its surface was dull and uneven. Joe guessed it once had been mainly white, but not in a generation or two.

“Take your order?” the waitress said, slopping two glasses of water on the table. She looked old, overweight and terminally bored.

“Patty melt,” Joe shrugged. Alex ordered a gyro.

“You’re gonna brush your teeth after you eat that, right?” he asked.

“You don’t like the smell of onions?”

“In a frying pan maybe. Not in my car!”

She smiled, and flipped open the
Weekly.
Joe began scanning the
Tribune.
They were looking for anything to do with murders; Alex’s or the serial killer’s.

Alex leafed quickly through the
Weekly
, frowning slightly as she turned the pages. Then her face lit up.

“If we stick around town, we can see a Blink-182 cover band tomorrow night.”

“Nixed.”

“Spoilsport,” she said, and flipped back to the beginning of the paper to scan more closely.

“Got it,” he said presently.

On page 15, the paper detailed the latest killing by the woman they’d dubbed “The Sunday Slasher.” She had now killed on four successive Sundays in four widely separated cities.

New Orleans Police Chief Douglas Chandler reported that there is little doubt that Sunday’s brutal murder in the Sheraton is the work of a serial killer; the latest in a murder spree that stretches cross country from here to San Francisco.

“We cannot release full details,” Chandler said. “The victim’s throat, like the other Sunday Slasher killings, was cut by a razor blade. We know that this is not a copycat murder, however, because other details of the scene, which I can’t release to you, match those first three murders in San Francisco, Phoenix and Austin.”

The first murder—or at least the first one connected to the Sunday Slasher—occurred overnight on October 17 in the Marriott Hotel, in downtown San Francisco. A maid discovered the dismembered body of Ted Slater, a 34-year-old computer salesman, on Monday morning. According to the victim’s friends, Slater had last been seen the night before at the Cat Club.

On the night of October 24, exactly one week later, the second murder occurred, this time at a Ramada Inn in Phoenix. A maid found the body of Jack Sketz, 33, bound and dismembered during her cleaning rounds late in the morning of October 25. Sketz had reportedly been at a Phoenix club called The Nile the night before. Police reports indicated that there was evidence that the crime had been committed by a woman, and was sexually related.

The third murder, and the one which confirmed for authorities that this was indeed the work of a serial killer, and again, pointed to a female perpetrator, occurred on Halloween night, October 31, in Austin, Texas. The body of Ryan Nelson, 27, an insurance agent, was found in the Marriott near the capitol the following morning by the maid. Authorities estimated that he had been killed sometime between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m., but, just as in the other cases, occupants of the adjoining rooms in the hotel reported no disturbances or odd noises.

“We’ve seen several patterns at work in these crimes,” Chandler said. “We believe, based in part on the sexual element of the crimes, as well as other evidence, that the killer is female. Aside from the specific nature of the murder method, obviously, they’ve all occurred on Sunday nights. And they’ve been successive Sundays. What concerns us the most, however, is that each murder has been several hundred miles away from the last, which makes it difficult for us to set a trap. We do know that she has, so far, been headed almost due east after each event.”

“She’s on her way somewhere,” Joe said, after reading the clip to Alex.

“Yeah, but where?”

The waitress slid a plate of fat golden fries and a thick charred burger across the table to Joe, and slapped down a platter of pungent gyro meat, onions and a side plate of pitas in front of Alex.

“Getcha anything else?” she asked, already looking down

the aisle to the next table.

“Sunday Slasher?” Joe smiled.

The waitress looked at him crossly, then shook her head, clearly confused. “You want ketchup?”

He grinned. “No thanks.”

The waitress moved to the next table, but not without looking back over her shoulder at them twice more.

“Think you spooked her,” Alex said.

“I think we need to get to San Francisco and find us some real spooks.”

They pulled into The Night’s Inn, a cheap one-story motel off the interstate just outside of Salt Lake City around 8 p.m.

“I’m not hot about the idea of heading through mountains in the middle of the night,” Joe said.

Alex stifled a yawn. “Fine with me. I haven’t slept in a bed in, like, a week. Literally.”

“God, I’d forgotten about that. It actually has been a week, hasn’t it?” Joe whistled. “Holding up pretty good.”

“Well,” she corrected. “I’m holding up pretty well.”

“Ah, now the runaway’s an English major?”

She gave him a queen’s dismissive wave. “Just book us a room, driver.”

“Of course, your majesty.” He stepped out of the car and bowed as he went.

Alex followed him. “I need to stretch my legs,” she announced. “And see if they’ve got a pop machine.”

The motel office was tiny; just a foyer with a desk, a phone and a filing cabinet. A tiny TV sat on one side of the desk, and the balding clerk looked annoyed that he had to pull his glance away from a noisy rerun of
The Untouchables
.

“Help ya?”

Joe nodded. “Need a room for one night for my daughter and me.”

Alex kicked him in the shin. He ignored her.

“You got one with twin beds?”

The clerk stared at the two of them over the rim of his glasses for a moment. In a seedy little “just outside of town” joint like this, he probably heard the daughter line all the time, but rarely got a request for separate beds.

“Cash or credit?”

“Credit,” Joe said, and dropped a Visa on the counter.

The man palmed it, swiveled his chair and pulled off a set of keys from a hook on the wall behind. It looked as though the
VACANCY
sign out front hadn’t lied; most of the hooks had occupants. He passed the keys, attached to a large green plastic number 9 across the counter to Joe, along with a half sheet of paper.

“Fill this out,” he said. “License?”

Joe handed over his driver’s license and filled out the form as the clerk ran a copy of his plastic.

“Room’s right down there,” he pointed left of the office door. “Phone’s free if it’s local. Dial zero if you need something.”

Alex elbowed him as soon as they stepped outside.

“Daughter, my ass! No way you look old enough to be my father. You’re what, twenty-five?”

“Twenty-eight,” he shrugged.

“Oooh, you had me at age ten, huh?”

“And without your makeup, the first time I saw you, I thought you were fourteen or fifteen.”

That earned him another punch.

“Look, I can’t afford to get us separate rooms if we’re going to be traveling awhile, and some places are weird about who they give rooms to, so, for the duration, you’re my daughter.”

“Green shag,” Joe announced as he flipped the light switch. “Wow. I haven’t seen green shag since…”

“Since you saw bedspreads with deer on them?” Alex plopped herself down on the bed nearest the door. She pretended to pet the large 12-point buck that adorned its center.

“Pretty much.”

Joe kicked off his shoes and threw a suitcase on his bed. She yawned again and laid back. “Oh my God, am I going to sleep. I don’t even care if this room is full of cockroaches.”

He looked at the matted green yarn between his feet. “Thanks for bringing that up.”

She popped up then and grabbed her backpack. “First dibs on the shower.” The words were barely out of her mouth before the door to the tiny bathroom shut behind her.

“I’m going snack hunting then,” he called, and palmed the keys.

The sound of the highway offered a steady whoosh of background noise, as Joe took a walk around the almost abandoned motel. Only one other car was in the lot, parked three doors down from #9. He went the opposite direction, away from the front office. There hadn’t been a vending machine there, and he had a sudden craving for a bag of Fritos. But when he reached the end of the long building and walked around towards the back, there was no snack machine to be found.

Joe leaned back against the brick face of the building and sighed. “What the hell am I doing?”

He looked out over the open scrubland, which dead-ended into an embankment that led up to the highway. The stars were out, and somehow the rush of the cars in the distance made him feel even more lonely than when he’d been truly removed from civilization, when they’d been camped up in the Rockies.

What
was
he doing? He’d run away from Chicago, and now he’d run away from Cindy. And somehow, Malachai had him on the trail of…what? A serial killer? With a fledgling witch in tow? What did the demon expect of him? Was he supposed to simply be a bodyguard? Was he supposed to actually do something to stop these “Curburide”? Was this all a wild-goose chase to amuse the spirit and ultimately land him in jail for harboring a runaway? Would he be implicated in the murders she’d committed, however justified they may have been?

“Cool night, eh?”

Joe jumped at the voice.

A match flicked in the darkness just to his left, illuminating the craggy face of an old man. A priest, by the look of him. The cigarette glowed to life and the man took a deep pull before releasing a cloud of smoke into the night air. Joe thought it looked incongruous with the black shirt and white collar. But why couldn’t a priest hold onto that particular vice? he asked himself. After all, they certainly indulged in worse ones on occasion.

“Yeah,” Joe finally answered. “Didn’t hear you come up.”

The older man nodded, a tuft of thick white hair bobbing in the light wind. “Move like the spirit, sink like the stone,” he said. “Only the quiet will find their way home.”

What the hell? Joe thought, but didn’t answer.

“She’ll need your help,” the priest said after a moment.

“Who?”

“Your girl. She can’t do this alone.”

Joe smiled. The guy must think he’d gotten her pregnant. The priest’s eyes reflected the ember of the cigarette. The old man was staring hard at him.

“Look, you don’t understand,” he said. “It’s not like that. She’s my daughter, and we’re on our way…”

The priest laughed. “To grandmother’s house?”

Joe took a deep breath and looked away. He didn’t want to lie to a priest, but he wasn’t about to try to explain why they were here or where they were going.

“Remember what I said,” the priest whispered. He blew a puff of smoke past Joe’s ear.

“They’re coming.”

Joe’s eyes shot wider and he turned to face the priest. But the priest was gone.

His cigarette lay abandoned on the sidewalk, a tight curl of tobacco smoke unraveling from it to slip away in the night air. Joe ground out the ember with his shoe, and soon the only evidence of the priest’s passage was dissipating quickly under the empty sky.

In a moment, it too was gone.

Alex was already in bed when Joe let himself back into the room. His heart was still beating hard. He’d called for Malachai after the apparition, but the demon had told him nothing. “I told you, more than I are watching this unravel,” was all the stubborn creature would say.

Joe brushed his teeth, pulled on a pair of shorts and slipped into the bed. Alex’s eyes were closed when he turned out the light.

“You asleep?” he whispered.

“Not quite,” came the blurry reply.

“Can I ask you something?”

“Mmmm-hmm.”

“Have you seen any ghosts since you’ve been with me?”

“Some,” she admitted. “If I don’t talk to them though, they don’t usually bother with me. In fact, I barely even notice them anymore unless I really make an effort to. It’s like, they’re there the same as air, ya know? Do you ever think about seeing air?”

“Makes sense.”

“Why. Did you see a ghost?”

Joe was silent. Was the priest a ghost? Had the man in Ogalala been a spectre? “How would I know?”

Alex laughed. “You could see through them, silly.”

“All of them? Didn’t you ever meet a ghost who, what’s the word…”

“Manifested?”

“Yeah. Haven’t you ever met a ghost who manifested so strongly he appeared solid?”

“A couple. Not often. Usually only ones that I talked to a lot. Like, our friendship gave them power or substance or something. Genna was like that. Sometimes I forgot she was dead.”

“Could she lift something physical?”

“I don’t remember her ever trying. But, when I was tied up in the basement, and I called on her and some of my other friends for help…they lifted my bread and water to me. It took all their effort though, I think.”

“Mmmm.”

“What’s up, Joe?”

“I just saw a priest outside smoking.”

“Yeah, so? Jesus never said, ‘Thou shalt not smoke’!”

“He told me ‘they’re coming,’ like that guy at the diner. Then it was like he disappeared into thin air.”

“You saw him disappear?”

“Not exactly. He was right behind me, and then when I turned around, he was gone.”

“So he walks fast.”

“No way,” Joe insisted. “No way he could have gotten out of sight that fast. He said something, I turned around, and he was gone.”