Sacrifice (20 page)

Alex woke up before Joe. She felt a twinge of panic at first, when she realized there was an arm locked around her, but then the memory of last night came back, and she relaxed, tracing the dark hair on the slumbering arm with her fingers.

He had stayed with her all night. He really did care. Unlike that asshole at school who stood her up. For a moment, her heart felt full, and she pressed herself against the heat of him, relishing the closeness.

But then the memory of the ghosts intervened. This was not the time to get all girly. She knew that Malachai had guided Joe to her so that Joe could take her to wherever it was they needed to go to fight the Curburide. For
her
to fight the Curburide, she corrected herself. And to do that, she needed to learn a lot more about them, about her abilities…everything. Without delay.
It may already be too late,
she thought.

Easing Joe’s arm over her head, Alex slipped out of his protection and the bed, and closed the door of the bathroom quietly behind her.

After brushing her teeth and taking care of other business, she poked her head back out into the room. Joe was still sleeping.

Alex pulled on her jeans, and slipped her feet into her sneakers. She pocketed the room key, and let herself out into the hallway. She knew he would kill her for this, but she also knew that she alone could get away with what she planned. For once, youth—and being a girl—were on her side. She was smiling as she stepped on to the elevator and pressed the button for the second floor.

There were voices in the breeze. Moaning, sybaritic voices. “Ohhhh, mmmm,” sighed one, with a tone thick as melted caramel. “Yes, like that,” came a male answer, along with the slap of leather on skin. Someone choked, a rasping, coughing, wet gurgle.

“In the mouth,” the woman insisted, and the gravelly answer came instantly. “Yes, just like that,” he said. Again came the slap of skin and a cry of pain. But with the pain, a moan of excitement. “Deeper,” she insisted. Something howled then in agony, followed by the rapid squealing barks of the woman, “oh-oh-oh.” She was orgasming to the sounds of pain.

Joe felt his penis rise with the lure of whatever hellish ecstasy they were indulging in. He tiptoed through the dark hallway towards the sounds of sex. He didn’t know where he was, or why he was naked. He didn’t care. The lure of the voyeur was too much, and he throttled the head of his cock to relieve the strain of its need. The tip was wet, and he prayed that there would be something for him when he found the source of the voices. Someone for him.

“Now-now-now,” the man barked and then howled himself, a low, guttural release of pleasure. The voice came from just beyond a closed door at the end of the hall.

Joe took his hand off himself, and twisted the knob slowly. It opened without protest, and he peered into a darkened bedroom. A woman’s dresser with a tall mirror was just to the right of the door. And in front of the dresser, a rumpled pile of tangled sheets and a royal blue comforter hung half on and half off the edge of a king-size bed.

In the center of the bed lay a spread-eagle, blood-streaked woman. She was thin, bone-thin. The slats of her ribs showed through her pale skin, and her breasts barely poked out from the flat slope of a chest striped angry red with the marks of a strap. The nipples on those breasts were thick and engorged, blood-filled brown mushrooms that thirsted for biting and kissing. From the ugly weal that striped across her belly and left breast, oozing a tiny glisten of crimson, clearly she, and her breasts, enjoyed abuse. Her nipples looked bigger than the mound of her breasts, Joe thought.

She hadn’t noticed the newcomer to the room yet. Her attention was on her partner, a broad-shouldered man kneeling next to her on the bed, his hair and naked ass facing Joe. The man’s left hand held the black rubber handle of a whip.

“In the mouth,” she begged again, and the hand lifted and fell, bringing the crack of the leather again across her unprotected skin. It caught her across the chin and right tit and her entire body convulsed at the sting.

“Ahhhhooow.”

Joe felt his erection turn to steel at the perversity of her begging to be whipped in the mouth. He reached down absently to stroke himself when the man on the bed shifted position, moaning and throwing his head back as he moved to show the woman his cock.

But it wasn’t a cock that Joe saw when the man turned.

It was a head.

The man held a woman’s head by a knotted curl of dark hair. He slipped his long, glistening penis in and out of the dead mouth. One open green eye stared sightlessly at Joe, and he felt his own erection wither as the man on the bed reached down to cradle the head by its bloody stump of neck as he pressed himself faster and faster between its unprotesting teeth.

“Yeah-yeah-yeah!” he growled. “This bitch always did give the best head.”

It was then that Joe finally noticed the gutted body on the floor next to the bed. It had to be the woman’s, though there was too much blood to be sure. Its chest and crotch had been sawn open and scraped clean of internal organs. But they weren’t missing. They were arranged in a bloody halo around the place where the head would have been, if the man on the bed hadn’t been fucking it.

“Damn,” the man sighed, and dropped the decapitated woman’s head on the bed next to the bloody woman. A thread of creamy handsoap-thick drool leaked from the side of the dead woman’s lips to pool on the bedsheets. The live woman stroked the hair of the dead head as if it were a kitten by her side, and stuck her tongue out until the man bent to kiss her.

“I have nothing to compare it to, but let’s see just how good she still is,” the woman said. Joe’s eyes widened as she wound her fingers into its hair, lifted the head with both hands from next to her thigh, and positioned it between her thighs.

“You broke her in,” the woman said, groaning slightly as she ground the dead face against her pubic bone. “She’s…good…and…wet.”

“Well, bloody, anyway,” the man said bending to bite on a mushroom nipple.

“Yessss,” she moaned, and then suddenly sat up. She turned to stare at Joe. That’s when he saw that her eye sockets were pits of shriveled black flesh. Empty. “Seen enough yet, pervert? This is what we’ll do to your girlfriend when they come through.”

That’s when it registered to Joe that the frozen eyes in the broken head had been green.

Joe jumped, and opened his eyes. Light was streaming through the windows to light the room, and he realized that he was in the bed in the hotel. It was morning. The slaughterhouse room disappeared, and he took a deep breath to clear the images from his head. Then he remembered falling asleep the night before, his guilty groin rubbing against Alex, and he rolled over, looking for her. The sheets next to him were empty. And cold.
Maybe she’s in the shower,
he reasoned. That idea satisfied him for a second, until he saw that the bathroom door was open, and the light off.

“Ah, shit,” he complained, and levered himself with a groan out of bed. “What now?”

You might want to get dressed.
The demon’s mental voice sounded concerned, none of the usual taunt in its manner.
Alex needs you. Now.

Alex raised her hand to knock on the door of room 255. Before her knuckles connected with the wood, someone screamed inside.

“Oh shit.” She gulped, but raised her hand to knock again. Now she could hear laughter from within. Refusing to let her resolve down, she forced herself to continue with the plan. But when she touched the door, a static shock jolted her back a step. She was still staring at her tingling hand when the door opened and a middle-aged man in a T-shirt and sweatpants looked out at her. There was still a splat of shaving foam on the side of his cheek. “Can I help you?” he asked.

Alex forced herself back into character, dropping her hand to her side. “I hope so,” she said, offering a lopsided grin. “I stayed in this room a few days ago, and when I got home, I realized that I’d lost my charm bracelet. I think it fell behind the dresser. Would you mind if I took a look? The hotel said they didn’t have it in lost and found.”

The man thought about it a moment. He opened his mouth to say something, but then thought better of it and shrugged. “I guess that’d be okay.”

She walked past him into a room very much like the one she and Joe had slept in last night. By the time she had reached the center of the room, she was shivering.

“You really keep it cold in here, huh?” she asked.

He looked at the thermostat on the wall by the door. “It’s sixty-eight,” he said. “Not so cold.”

“Hrumph, must be me,” she said, rubbing her arms to warm away the goose bumps. She made a show of bending over to peer behind the dresser. With an audible grunt, she got down on her knees, and peered closer around her at the floor. The neutral beige carpet was older, worn. Behind her, just beneath the lip of the bed, she saw a dark stain. Blood? she wondered.

“See it?” the man asked, still waiting by the door. He’d retrieved a towel from the bathroom and wiped his face with it.

“Naw,” she said, and turned on her hands and knees to crawl to the foot of the bed. “Maybe it’s under here.”

“Careful,” he warned. “Never know what might jump out to bite you from under a hotel bed.”

“I’m not worried,” she laughed, and poked her head between the mattress and the floor. Something twitched in the darkness and she pulled her face back. But it surged forward in a flash, and something frozen grabbed her wrist.

“You should be worried,” cackled an ancient voice. The gnarled face of an old crone shot out from the shadows to press against her own. Its rheumy eyes were streaked with threads of red, and its hand wielded a rusted straight razor, the kind they used in old-time barbershops.

Alex shrieked and fell back, and the man hurried over.

“What happened?” he asked, voice filled with concern. “I was only kidding.”

Alex put her hand to her heart and looked at the empty space beneath the bed again. Something shivered in the dark air, but the hag was gone as fast as she’d come. “Thought I saw a rat,” she lied.

“Jesus I hope not,” the man said, and held out a hand to help her up. Alex accepted. As she straightened and brushed off her jeans, someone laughed behind her. Goose bumps again raised on her skin as the room temperature dropped and a cold wind tickled the hair on the back of her neck. It felt like a freezer door had opened. She turned around to look at the empty corner of the room, and saw the reason.

The crone was there. Behind her, a ragged tear stitched back and forth across the 90-degree angle where the walls joined. The tear shimmered and quivered as she watched, and a black-gloved hand suddenly pushed through one section of the thin divide. Another hand followed, this one naked and ugly, its knuckles surrounded by a crooked forest of purple veins. Both hands reached out from the silver-black fissure that stretched nearly to the ceiling, and held the shoulders of the hag.

“We’ve been waiting for you,” the crone grinned. Her teeth were yellowed and sharp, and, as she laughed, Alex could see the black scars of her gums.

“Come closer,” the wrinkled hag said, and the two bodiless hands both curled their fingers at her, urging her forward.

Without thinking about it, Alex took a step towards the wall. And then another.

“What are you looking at?” the man asked her, a puzzled look on his face. The girl was moving in slow motion, it seemed, towards a bare corner of the room. But she didn’t answer.

“That’s it,” the creature smiled, its lips curving in a purpled sneer. “Come to mama, that’s it. We need you, oh yes. Nobody needs you like us.”

Alex felt the fear drain away from her bones. Joe had made her feel warm, loved, last night. But now, as the chill fumed through the crack behind the hag and swirled out into the room, lassoing her and dragging her forward, Alex felt a call in her heart that she couldn’t deny. Within the cold, there was a heat that she thirsted for. With each word from the old woman, she could almost taste it. She felt terribly tired too; her muscles wanted to relax. She could barely stand anymore. But she had to touch that feeling…

“One more step, my sweet, one more step. You know your mama loves you, don’t you?”

Alex held out a hand to the woman as her eyelids closed of their own accord. She couldn’t keep them open anymore. In her mind, she could still see a snow-covered cottage just ahead, with smoke swirling from the chimney and a warm light of hearth and food beaming from within.

“Your mama loves your bones, yes,” the crone cackled and reached out to embrace the girl, who felt her very life pulled from her by the hungry flicker of cold.

Alex fell forward towards the wall, and the man grabbed her beneath the arms to keep her upright. But as he pulled her up, the girl clumsily swatted him back.

“Don’t touch me, I’m going home,” Alex mumbled dumbly, and turned back towards the wall and the old woman and the cottage that smelled of frozen blood and boiling stew.

Joe pushed through the doors of the elevator as soon as they opened on the 2nd floor, and frantically looked for the signs on the wall noting how the rooms were numbered.

“200-288” read one, with an arrow pointing left.

“255, right Malachai?” he breathed, but didn’t wait for a response.

Better hurry,
the demon whispered.

Joe ran down the hotel hallway, the tangled design of the mauve and royal blue carpeting passing beneath his feet in a dizzying blur. He counted the numbers as he went, “201, 209, 213…”

Finally he got to 255 and stopped. He raised his hand to knock, but saw that the door hadn’t closed all the way. “No time for polite,” he said, and pushed it open. For a split second, he couldn’t understand what he saw.

A man stood next to the bed in the middle of the room watching Alex, his jaw dropped wide. The girl had stepped into the corner of the room next to the dresser, and reached out to touch the wall…only her arm passed right through it.

Joe shot into the room and saw that most of Alex’s right arm was…gone. Before he could take another step, her face leaned into the strangely shimmering wall and started to pass through as well.

“Alex!” he yelled, and shot forward. He pushed past the man, and grabbed for Alex’s left hand. Her whole upper torso was submerged in the wall now. She looked the reverse of a deer head mounted on a bar wall…only it was her body sticking out without a head, not the other way around.

Joe pulled her arm with all his strength, but only an inch of Alex reappeared in the room.

“Help me,” he cried. “Pull her back.” The other man reached forward and grabbed her by the belt. “Pull!” Joe shouted, and together, they struggled to pull the girl back.

“aaaaahaaaaAAAHAHHHH,” they cried in unison, straining against an inhuman force to bring her back to the hotel room, to the plane on which she belonged.

Alex screamed. A piercing, horrible cry of agony, as, with a silent pop, she plunged backwards into room 255 and tumbled on top of the two sweating, straining men. Joe hit his head on the bed frame, and saw stars.

For a minute, all that could be heard in the room was the rasp of heavy breathing, as they all tried to come to grips with what had just happened. Then Alex shook her head, as if to clear away cobwebs, and pushed herself off of Joe’s stomach. She sat up, and Joe saw the tears streaming down her face. She looked absolutely lost; wounded to the core.

“Mama,” she cried. Her eyes were still someplace else.