Sacrifice (25 page)

“I came because I heard leeches like you were being let out of their bottle,” Alex retorted.

The old woman grinned. “Indeed. And I came because creatures like this”—she reached into the wall and pulled a dark mass of hair out; then she dragged the head it belonged to into the room—“needed to be shown the way. With teeth and claws.”

She bent over the head to clamp those ancient teeth on its neck, and Joe shivered as the head shuddered, blue eyes snapping open to stare hard at him, as if somehow he was the reason it suffered such indignity.

“You’re not going to eat me, are you?” the head asked feebly.

“No,” Alex agreed.

The hag pulled the head out farther, so that she could see the blood dripping from a crosshatch of gashes in his forehead and cheeks.

“Who are you?” Alex asked.

“My name is Jamie Gartside,” he said, his breath coming in wheezing gasps. “I was just staying here in this room on business one night. I heard a noise…thought it was a bat or something at the window. And when I tried to kill it, this…this…thing pulled me out of my room. Now I can’t get back. They’re holding me hostage! And not just me, there’s a kid here, too.”

Jamie reached a hand over the hag’s shoulder and struggled to gain a purchase on the wall.

“Help me come home?” he begged, and the demon cackled. Her laughter was like a motorcycle engine mixed with the hiss of an angry squirrel.

“Tell me where the killer is now,” Alex said, “and I’ll do my best.”

The hag laughed. “You’ll never find her. She’s gone to where no one has ever gone before.”

The man looked up and licked the blood from his lips.

“Bullshit,” he said. A smile crossed his face. “I know where she’s gone,” he said. “I’ve heard them talk.”

The hag spit on the man’s face and her hands began to push Jamie’s head back through the crack. But he struggled against her, grabbing her hair and pushing forward, then gripping her neck with both of his hands and holding on. He struggled to stay partially visible for a few more seconds in this realm. He met Alex’s eyes, and in that moment, he looked completely alive and alert.

“They’re just waiting for her to make that final kill. The kill that will let them come all the way through the doors. The doors like this one. The next time she sacrifices, it will be the one that throws it all open to them. They’ll kill every human being on the planet. Slowly.”

The hag screamed and beat a fist down on his half-visible back. But he didn’t shut up.

“She’s on her way to do it right now.”

“Where?” Alex said. “Where will it happen? When?”

“This weekend,” he gasped, as the hag turned on him and began to shove him back, inch by inch through the glowing gap of crimson light that lit the room.

The warted spirit laughed, and with both hands grabbed onto Jamie’s ears and twisted. She brought a bony knee up to pound his face with, but still he barked his story to them.

“She’ll set them all free this weekend when she kills,” he yelled, and then screamed as the hag thrust two fingers into his eye sockets, pushing his neck and most of his head back through the crack.

Still he didn’t give up.

“She’s there now,” he said. “You have to go there and stop her.”

“Go where?” Alex yelled, frantic.

“To the coast,” he screamed, the last strands of his hair disappearing back into the wall.

“To Terrel.”

Jeremy found a hotel in the center of town, right smack in the middle of Main Street. Terrel was one of those classic Norman Rockwell kind of towns, with fake gas lamps and barrels of flowering plants on every corner, cobblestone sidewalks and kitschy, quaint little stores. A pipe shop was just across the street from the hotel, which, to Jeremy’s eye, looked to have once been a mansion; probably the home of some early shipyard magnate or town elder. Now it was diced up into a bunch of bedrooms for out-of-towners.

He carted their bags past a sitting room with rocking chairs and a small, quiet fire in the hearth, and got a key from the front desk that, he noted, was actually still a
key,
not a plastic swipe card.

Ariana yawned and followed, happy to let him do the registering and carting. When they reached the room, however, she grinned.

“Oh lapdog,” she laughed, hurrying to press her hands against the thick mattress of the four-poster mahogany-framed bed. “We’re going to have some fun here.”

She pulled off her T-shirt, dropped it to the floor, and carefully climbed up onto the royal blue comforter. With a slight gasp of pain from her ribs, she lay back against a tower of pillows and moved her arms up and down on the silky covering. “Mmmm, heavenly,” she moaned, closing her eyes.

“Okay,” he agreed, and tossed their suitcases to the floor. He kicked off his jeans and pulled himself up on the bed with her, kissing her hard on the mouth. “But this time I’m not doing all the work.”

“Oh please,” she laughed, nipping his ear while reaching between his legs to squeeze. “I didn’t hear you complaining back in Tallahassee.”

She pulled his shirt over his head, and then drew him to her breast. He took one rosy nipple between his lips, and didn’t complain anymore in Terrel either.

When Jeremy awoke a little later, Ariana was sitting at the dressing table, her toes pressed against the edge of its dark wooden top. Jeremy’s T-shirt hung loosely over her shoulders, but its end had ridden up to expose the round of her ass against the chair, as well as the close-cropped thatch between her thighs. Jeremy slipped out of bed and was at her shoulder before she stirred from reading the book in her hands. She gave him a raised eyebrow, but said nothing.

“What’s that?” he asked, running his hand along the back of her neck before slipping it inside the front of the shirt.

She brushed him away. “Don’t,” she said. “I’m concentrating.”

He drew a line from the ball of her foot, hanging off into space from the dressing table up the sleek creamy skin of her calf, over the inverted V of her knee and back down her thigh to slip underneath and cup her most satiny skin. “It’s hard to concentrate when you look like this.”

“Then go back to sleep.”

“C’mon, give,” he said, reaching for the book. “What is it?”

She shut it, and handed the book over to him. Jeremy whistled as he turned it over and over in his hands. “This is it, huh?”

She nodded.

“This is what started it all. Damn.” He opened it to a random page, and put his nose to the paper, inhaling deeply. “Even smells old,” he said before closing it, and looking once again at the title, in simple gilt lettering:
THE BOOK OF THE CURBURIDE

He handed it back. “I didn’t know you still had this. Stole it from the old nun, huh?”

Ariana tilted her head to look up at him. “You didn’t think I was going to let them lock this back up behind a bunch of broken-down desks and kneelers did you? Besides, that old nun didn’t have a clue. I gave her back two books to put away…it’s just that one of them wasn’t one that I’d taken out of the room.”

“So what do you need it for now?”

“You want to have ultimate power?” she asked. “Or do you want to accidentally blow up the world?”

“Gimme a break. I haven’t seen any magic out of you yet. I don’t think you’re going to say the wrong words and blow up the freakin’ planet.”

“
I
won’t blow it up,” she agreed. “But if I do the Calling wrong, and the Curburide aren’t bound to me…we’re all dead.”

Jeremy held up his hands in surrender. “But you’ve been doing this over and over, with the stones and the sticks and the words. You’re a pro at this point. You didn’t need the book at my house.”

“The final Calling is different,” she said. “There’s more to it.”

“Got it. Study.” He stepped back and picked his jeans off the floor.

“I’m going to take a walk and see where we might find some dinner. Study. Study.”

Downtown Terrel was not exactly littered with haute cuisine opportunities. Jeremy peered into a diner with plaid curtains, and stopped inside the pipe store to buy a cigar for later. As soon as he’d seen the sign, he’d had a horrible craving for a thick drag of tobacco. Then he stopped in at McColvin’s Tavern, a hole-in-the-wall narrow bar with about 6 stools and three tiny round tables. He pulled up to the bar next to a burly man in a black leather jacket, and ordered a Killian’s from the bartender. She was a slip of a woman, barely five feet tall he guessed. But as soon as he heard the tone of her voice when she pushed the glass at him and said, “Three dollars,” and saw the way she looked at him with those steely blue eyes, he knew that this was a woman who took no shit.

“Thanks Jill,” he said, reading her name tag. “Get busy in here on weekends?” he asked.

“Depends,” she said, and went back to cleaning glasses in the sink at the far end of the bar.

“On?”

“On what you consider busy.”

Jeremy took the hint, and concentrated on his beer. When he finished, he slipped back out without a word. He left a dollar tip, despite the coolness of the service. Given the paucity of potential places to hang out on Main Street, he guessed he’d need to stop back here a couple nights.

Thursday

“So what’s Terrel like?” Alex said. Her feet were bare and she pressed them against the dashboard in what looked like an uncomfortable position to Joe. Then again, every position in this car had become uncomfortable after almost a week of solid driving. He was starting to worry that the engine was going to act up out here in the middle of nowhere. They had driven from Austin to Tallahassee the day before, and now were only about a half hour out of Terrel.

“What’s Okawa, Nebraska, like?”

“Small, dull, endlessly boring.” She said it without hesitation.

“Much like Terrel. Don’t expect this to be like Spring Break. It’s more like…Senior Break.”

“Sounds mah-vel-ous, dahling.” She twisted a curl of black hair between her fingers and stuck her tongue out.

“With behavior like that, I’ll be looking for a babysitter for you,” he pronounced.

“Okay, grandpa,” she said, and pulled out a vial of nail polish from her purse.

“What are you doing?”

“Figured I might as well make my feet pretty for you, for when you kiss them later,” she said, pressing a brush of electric red paint to her big toe.

“Get that on my dashboard, and you’ll be kissing
my
feet later.”

Alex snorted. “I’ll kiss a lot of your things, but none of ’em are on your feet.”

“Promises, promises.”

She winked, but didn’t reply.

Joe turned the key in the lock and pushed the door open. The air inside was stale, and all the window shades pulled. He flipped on the dining room and kitchen lights and led her inside.

“Welcome to the palace. Guess I haven’t been gone long enough for them to kick my stuff to the curb.”

“You just left without paying your rent?” she said, stepping into the small apartment and closing the door behind her.

“I just left. Didn’t know if I was coming back. Didn’t tell anybody. I paid November’s rent though, so we’re good for a couple weeks.”

She walked into the living room and plopped down on the couch. “I feel like I could sleep for a week,” she announced.

“Well, you can sleep for a couple days, I guess.”

“I don’t even know what day it is anymore. It’s like, everything’s running together.”

“It’s Thursday,” he said. “We’ve got basically forty-eight hours to figure out where our Sunday Slasher is hiding out. Sometime after midnight on Saturday night, she’ll be slicing someone here up into hamburger meat.”

“How do we know it will be early Sunday morning again, like the others? I mean…the last one was on a Monday.”

“You’re supposed to be the witch,” he retorted. “I just think…something happened in Tallahassee. If she can, she’ll do it here the same as all the others. She’ll lure her victim to some private place, and sacrifice them to the Curburide. And somehow, according to your pal, this is the one that will open the gates wide for them.”

“So how do we even look for her? We don’t even know if she’s here yet,” Alex said.

She’s here,
Malachai announced for them both to hear.

“Where?” Joe asked. “Help us out here for God’s sake.”

I can’t tell yet,
the spirit responded.
But I can feel the disturbance her presence is causing. The Curburide are pressing hard against the membrane of the world to come through. They know she’s here. They’re waiting.

“Find her,” Joe said.

At that moment, Ariana and Jeremy were walking down the center of Main Street. They’d walked all the way to the edge of town, passing a fortune teller’s house (“Readings By Angelica”) as well as a bakery (“Bread ‘n’ Butter”) and a mom-and-pop bookstore. “If it was any cuter, I’d have to be sick,” she said, pointing out the flower-inscribed awning of the “Baubles and Beads” store.

“Well, we didn’t come here for the scenery,” he said. “What do we need to do today? Are you going to meet the kid?”

“Not yet,” she said. “First we need to find an Internet connection, so I can e-mail him and set things up for Saturday. Then I want to take a ride out to this Terrel’s Peak and see if we can’t find the place where the kid’s sister was possessed. From the way he described it, it should be pretty easy—he said there’s a stairway beneath the wreck of an old light house that leads to some underground caves. He found it himself a couple weeks ago and picked up some old book that was down there.”

“A book of the Curburide?”

“Ha! Hardly. I may have the only copy of that one. No. He found some old light house keeper’s journal. The guy apparently called a demon to try to stop the Curburide from taking over this town a hundred years ago. And that demon is the one that possessed the girl a few weeks ago.”

“So do we need to worry about it trying to stop us now?”

“I don’t think so. The kid said after the possession was exorcised, the man who did it left town…and supposedly took the spirit with him.”

Jeremy kicked a stone off the cobbled sidewalk and watched it skip into the street. “So why do we need a formerly possessed person anyway?”

Ariana shrugged, and then grimaced at the twinge in her ribs. “Beats me. I think it’s because they’ve already been a portal to the spiritual realm or something like that. So they’re kind of a…weak link between us and them.”

“So they need a vehicle to come through?”

She nodded. “And a long, strong Calling from this side. For some reason the sacrifices have to be long distances apart from each other, stretching from one side of the land to the opposite. Sort of like an arrow, I guess.”

“Murder beacons, leading the way to the door?”

“Yeah.” She stopped in front of a storefront. It was framed in white wood and a pink awning. The gold letters on the window pronounced chocoholics r us.

“Want some fudge?”

He pulled open the door, and she darted inside like an eager child, as if they hadn’t just been talking about ritual murder and the calling of a race of demons from some other plane to take over and fuck the earth to death.

Or something like that. Jeremy smiled, and followed her in. He thought about how Sheila had used and abused him, and then about how Ariana was using him. The image of Sheila, lying beneath him on the bed, gutted and very, very dead, didn’t faze him anymore in the slightest. She’d fucked around on him without remorse, and he had killed her with the same consideration. As he stepped behind Ariana at the glass window filled with creamy and mocha confections, he heard the tiny music of her voice calling him a “lapdog.” He guessed, considering how long he’d put up with Sheila, that he actually kind of liked the position, so long as the leash-holder treated him good.

“Taste,” Ariana said, and turned to press a thick hunk of chocolate between his lips.

Ariana treated him very good.