Sacrifice (28 page)

“That a boy,” she said, removing his glasses, and then drawing a tongue across his lips. “Move with me, yes. You’ve got it. You’ve got it,” she squeaked, her own passion drawing his out. His hips bucked against her as he gave in to what felt natural, and she held his ass hard, not letting him slip away.

“Oh my God,” Ted groaned, spit drooling from his lip. “Ohhhh…”

Ariana smiled, and for a second, a look of sad tenderness crossed her cheeks. But then she brought her hand up from the floor.

“Ahhhhh…” Ted said, his orgasm changing tone to a moan of pain. When Ariana’s hand came away from his neck, the blood spilled in a fountain across her breasts. “Ahhghh,” Ted gurgled, and rolled off of her clutching the new lips of ragged flesh in his neck.

Ariana stood, and traced a finger through the blood on her chest, making a curlicue of crimson that looped around the pucker of her belly and back up to shellac the point of her left nipple with nature’s precious milk. She pointed at the boy and nodded at Jeremy.

“Let him ride our sacrifice for a bit,” she said. “Blood to blood, as it were.”

The boy kicked as Jeremy picked him off the floor, but already his strength was gone, and his breath came in gasps. He screamed in short, sharp bursts. Jeremy ignored it, and positioned the boy between his sister’s legs, though the kid’s face only reached her neck. Ted’s blood quickly painted Cindy’s shoulder, and she shook and bucked, trying to move him off of her, but to no avail. The boy’s eyes fluttered, even as Ariana raised the book from the floor and read:

“And the sister shall lie with the brother
and the mother shall lie with the son
and the father shall rut with his girls
and their children shall feast on them all.”

Cindy’s tears ran almost as heavy as her brother’s blood, but all that could be heard through the gag of cotton were faint yelps and squeals. Jeremy held the boy’s face up by a hank of hair, and brought Ted’s slack lips down to touch Cindy’s, before he threw the boy to the ground.

“Can you feel it?” Ariana asked.

“What?”

“They’re here,” she said. “They’re listening. Waiting.”

On the floor, Joe could make out the faint outline of a child standing near the dais. The boy’s eyes were glowing. And he smiled.

“Alex,” Joe hissed. “Wake up, please.”

“Place the blade here,” Ariana said, pointing at a spot between her own breasts. “Not too hard, but enough to break the skin. The blood of our sacrifices must mingle with our own.”

Jeremy traced the razor down Ariana’s perfect body, cleaving her skin from chest to pubes. Ariana shivered as the blade bit at the top of her sex.

“Now you,” she said, and opened a crimson line from Jeremy’s neck to the tip of his penis.

“Ow,” he complained, and she pulled him close. “Blood brothers of the darkest kind,” she proclaimed. Then she pulled him to the ground where she’d just entertained, and slaughtered, Ted. “I’ll make it up to you now though,” she whispered.

The blood served well as lubricant for his quick entry.

As the murderers fucked, Joe worked to shimmy his body across the floor, drawing closer to where Alex lay, still unmoving. There was blood on the ground near her head now. With every move of his muscles, his head shot through with pain. He could see that her chest still moved, but for how long?

“Malachai,” he whispered.

Not an impressive start,
the demon taunted.

“How bad is Alex? Can you wake her?”

I’ve been trying to talk to her, but she’s not responding. She’s still there, but gone deep.

“Keep trying,” Joe said. “Can you set Cindy free?”

I can’t make the ropes fall off, no. I can’t force either of them to release her either…they’re too committed to what they’re doing to sway their wills, and there is a Curburide here, even now, guarding them.

“That’s who made Alex scream,” Joe said.

Yes. And more are coming. With every deception and twist of her blade. They are responding to her Calling.

“Great.” Joe shifted his butt slowly on the floor, inching closer to Alex. Across the room, Jeremy grunted like a pig as Ariana encouraged him with wet, erotic slaps.

Joe levered his body so that he fell to the ground on his side, staring inches away from the side of Alex’s face. The skin was purpling already. A heavy drip of blood crossed her cheek like a vampire tear.

“Alex,” Joe whispered. He blew into her ear but the blank expression on her face didn’t change. “Alex, I’m so sorry. Please wake up. We need you.”

“And I need you to stow it,” Jeremy said. A rough hand grabbed Joe by the hair, and yanked him back up from the ground. The bigger man pulled Joe’s face up to meet his, and grinned. Blood was smeared like a kid’s watercolor painting across the hair and white skin of his chest. His engorged penis glistened with blood as it bobbed against his thigh when Jeremy shook Joe against the wall. There was even blood smeared across his balding scalp and ruddy cheeks.

“Stay away from her,” Jeremy warned. “Or we’ll have you join in the fun by dicing her up, one piece at a time.”

Jeremy cracked Joe’s head against the wall, and a stab of white-hot pain shot through Joe’s skull as one of the blue geode like crystals that made up the wall penetrated the flesh.

“Fuck!” Joe cried, but then the stars behind his eyes took over, and Jeremy threw him like a rag doll to the ground. For awhile, nothing was very clear.

Saturday, Midnight

When Joe’s head finally cleared, the room was alive with ghosts. Skeletal bodies danced in the low gleam of candles that had been lit to surround the sacrificial pedestal. Old hags massaged long, dangling, naked dugs with bony, sharp-nailed fingers, and spectral men stroked and groaned as their erections spewed bloody sperm to wet the rocky ground. A couple dozen of the ghastly spirits walked and fornicated with each other around the perimeter of the dais.

Ariana, still nude and painted in drying blood, read something unintelligible from the book, as Jeremy ground his naked body atop Cindy. Her gag had been removed, and her screams rebounded and echoed through the chamber. But she couldn’t get away from her torturer. Ariana had wound a strand of silver wire around Cindy’s porcelain neck, and bound the other half around Jeremy’s. Likewise, Cindy’s bonds had been released so that her wrists could be bound to Jeremy’s. Their ankles were similarly connected. He rode her as both captor and willing prisoner. They were truly the unified beast with two backs; neither could escape the other.

Joe saw several new slashes across Cindy’s ribs and thighs, and a cut even crossed the bridge of her nose to end just below the eye…She cried tears of crimson that Jeremy lapped up, as wire about their necks dragged him tighter and tighter to union with his victim.

“The twentieth cut
Is the deepest cut
Yet it hurts the least,” Ariana read.

She set the book down and moved from behind the dais to reach into her bag. She was so spackled in gore that blood hung from her like raindrops, beads of it ready to fall from even the thinnest hair of her sex as she bent over.

She returned to the dais with a long, curved silver knife. Then she whispered something in Jeremy’s ear, and the man grinned, and sped up his pace. As his pale, hairy ass rose and fell like an obscene jackhammer and Cindy’s screams turned hoarse, Ariana spoke another passage, from memory, as she raised the blade.

“And the bitch shall slay the dog
as the dog ruts in heat
she will lap up his life in ecstasy
and paint her pleasure with his pain.”

She brought the blade down hard, two-handed. Jeremy screamed as it penetrated his ribs from behind.

“You missed,” he cried, pulling against his bonds, but only succeeded in rolling both himself and Cindy to the very edge of the dais. He couldn’t reach the knife.

“No,” Ariana said. “I didn’t.”

She bent down and picked up the abandoned razors, and began to carve amid the dark pelt of hair on Jeremy’s back.

S

A

C

R

I

He screamed and thrashed as she drew the knife cruelly across him, but he could not reach her as she finished the word.

F

I

C

E

“Come to me, Curburide,” Ariana called, and bent to lick the blood from the word carved in living flesh.

Jeremy was coughing up blood on Cindy’s face, but she didn’t seem to care. The girl had ceased to make any noise at all.

“The twentieth cut only knicks the skin but releases a taste of the original sin,” Ariana read.

With a wire cutter she then clipped the wires that held Cindy and Jeremy together. The man was now shuddering in horrible-looking spasms. He gasped loudly for breath, his eyes rolling back in his head until only the whites showed.

With a shove, Ariana rolled him over until he fell from the dais with a gagging scream to the floor. She reached a hand out to touch the new wound just below the nipple of Cindy’s left breast and smiled. “The twentieth cut,” she whispered.

The room was suddenly thick with shadows, and Ariana stood back and observed. The spectral Curburide crowded the room, waiting for the final stroke that would make them whole. Pleasure washed over Ariana in waves so powerful, she almost collapsed from the intensity. Ghostly, wicked children and ghastly lecherous old men slipped back and forth between her legs, licking and touching with unflinching, seductive attention. Women with breasts ripe and full as Vegas hookers inserted translucent fingers in her ass and bit and fingered her nipples. Their eyes glittered hellish bright and hard as diamonds. None of these creatures had substance, yet. And still they gave Ariana more pleasure than any human man or woman had ever given her. What would they give her when she set them all free?

Joe rolled himself end over end again across the room until he came face-to-face with Alex. His vision was hazy, obscured on one side by a black spot, and his head felt fiery and broken. Every blink of his eyes made him want to scream. But all he could think about was Alex, lying there unconscious now for…an hour? Two? It seemed like a day. Joe cried, as he lifted his head and bent over her, arms still behind his back, to kiss those bloody silent lips. They felt soft, and sticky. But still warm. As the spirits danced and cried out in guttural orgasms throughout the room, Joe leaned in to touch her lips in the most chaste kiss he’d ever given.

“I love you,” he whispered. A tear dropped from his face to mingle with the blood on hers. It slipped down her cheek, a consummation of defeat.

Her eyes fluttered open, and her lips parted in a low moan.

“It hurts,” she whispered. The white of her right eye was drowning in red, the pupil dilated black and wide. “How long was I out?”

“It’s almost over,” Joe said. “She’s killed the boy, and her thug.”

Alex groaned, and a bloody tear slipped from her eye.

“Can’t see you very well,” she said. “Blurry.”

“I know, baby,” he said. “He got you good.”

“But I can see the opening. It’s getting wider right now.”

Joe followed her gaze, and saw the black ridge separating the electric blue crystals from each other. It stretched across the ceiling of the room, centering above the dais. A dark glow like black light emanated from its center, and as he watched, more and more ghostly, ghastly figures slipped from its nadir to join the thickening spectral crowd. The noise of twisted laughter commingled with deadly, unnatural sex grew louder every second.

“Can you draw on them?” Joe asked. “Can you loosen my rope so I can undo yours?”

Alex closed her eyes. A shiver passed over her body. When she opened them again, she whispered, “Joe, I’m scared.”

“I’m with you,” he said.

She closed her eyes again, and from somewhere nearby, a shriek of anger erupted.

A ghostly arm suddenly pointed in Alex’s face as she opened her eyes. The creature grasped Alex’s neck, but with a smile, the girl stared hard at the spirit, and it melted away.

“What was that?” Joe said.

“I stole something,” Alex grinned. But her grin faded quickly, as a blade of pain passed through her head. “Try your wrists,” she whispered. “Hurry, before any others realize I’ve drawn on their power.”

He pulled hard against the rope, and the strands seemed to slip off like silk, as if they’d never been tied.

“That’s it!” he said, and went to work to undo his legs. Every time he bent and pulled at the knots, his head lanced with white-hot pain, but he forced himself to finish, and then, making sure that Ariana wasn’t watching, he went to work on Alex.

“That’s it,” he said in a moment, lying next to her.

“That’s great,” Alex said. “There’s just one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“I can’t move.”

Ariana was losing her grip. The Curburide were so entranced by her Calling that they’d not stopped with reaching inside her and pulling her G-strings to orgasm over and over again. She was so weak from pleasure, that she had fallen, knife still in hand, to her knees on the far side of the dais. Her breath came in heaving gasps, the orgasms coming as intense as childbirth labor. The air ripened with the smell of her, as she came again and again until her thighs glistened with sticky wetness.

A child approached her, eyes glowing green. The boy reached out chubby arms, and fastened them around her neck like a human toddler. But when she brought him close, he cuddled into her neck. And then bit her.

“Shit!” she screamed, and jumped away. She put a hand to her neck, and it came away wet. Bloody. The child still stood, unmoving, at the foot of the dais. “Bloody kisses,” it grinned, showing its too-white teeth. “Set us free.”

She nodded. It had only been a reminder of what she was here to do.

She raised the knife over Cindy’s breast, and chanted the words of the 21st cut.

“Bittersweet and honey rage
Innocent and filthy sage
Under blade and under tow
To Curburide your life I throw.”

“What do you mean you can’t move?” Joe said.

“Nothing works,” Alex cried. “I can’t feel my feet. Or my arms. I can barely see. What did he do to me?”

“Hit you too hard in the head, baby,” Joe said, and kissed her again. “Can you use your power to draw from the ghosts and stop her somehow?”

“I need help,” Alex whispered.

“Shall I lift you?”

“No,” she said. “I need Malachai.”

“No,” Joe said. “Too dangerous.”

“It’s the only way now, Joe. I need his help.”

Joe closed his eyes. He’d once forbidden Malachai to speak to Cindy, for fear the demon would possess and use her again. The last thing he wanted was for Malachai to use Alex like a puppet. He had his suspicions that Malachai had caused Alex to kill her parents so that he could drag her into this gambit. Not that she didn’t have reason, but the way the murders had happened, and only after the demon had taken possession of her…

Joe’s thoughts stopped cold when he saw the blade. Ariana held it poised over Cindy’s naked breast, and was mumbling some words of ritual. He could barely see her through the cloud of demons in the room.

“No!” he screamed, and jumped up, intending to jump across the dais and stop Ariana.

Instead, a half dozen wretched, rectal faces turned from their masturbating and fornicating celebration at the ring of the dais and shoved in unison at him. Rather than moving forward, Joe suddenly found himself being thrown forcibly back. He landed again in a heap at the wall, head screaming in pain.

“It’s the only way,” Alex yelled above the spectral screams and grunts of the Curburide orgy. “They are about to become flesh all around us. And if they do, we are lost anyway!”

“Malachai,” Joe whispered, hating himself as he said the words. “Can you take possession of Alex, and help her stop this?”

If that is your wish,
the demon said.
Though I do not desire it.

“Help her stop them!”

Something warm and familiar slipped from Joe’s brain, and in a second, Alex was climbing up from the floor.

You will need to direct the power,
Malachai told her.

Alex nodded, ignoring the drops of blood that fell to the ground as she shook her hair. She walked through the demons without pause. They turned fearsome eyes and razor-nailed fingers to stop her just as they had Joe, but her very glare made them melt and wither.

Alex reached over the body of Cindy to grab the wrist of Ariana. Cindy’s eyes had lolled back in her head as if she were already dead. Alex wasn’t sure, but she guessed the girl still had to be alive, or the Curburide would have accepted the sacrifice as complete and the doorway would be open fully.

“Stop,” Alex demanded.

Ariana laughed. “Girl, you can’t stop this now. It’s gone too far.”

With that, the child Curburide who had stabbed at Alex earlier leapt atop Cindy’s body and stared into Alex’s eyes with its burning orbs. It laughed, a horrible sound of endless despair and malice. A dozen spirits grabbed onto his tiny arms, and they came at Alex in a phalanx, throwing her backwards before she could recover. As the younger witch stumbled, Ariana laughed and screamed, “With the twenty-first cut, I call thee, call thee, Curburide!”

Her blade punctured the soft flesh of Cindy’s once beautiful left breast, and the girl shuddered once, twice on the dais. But her eyes never fully focused. With a final twitch, and a slight wheeze, she was gone.

Above them, the gap in the ceiling screeched with screams of death and ecstasy, and all around Alex, the transparent figures began to take full form. The child Curburide hopped up and down on the bloody belly and crotch of Cindy, and laughed as his body suddenly became opaque.

“Nooooo!” Alex screamed. “Malachai, I command you, close the door.”

She lifted her hands, and pulled with all of her might at whatever spiritual energy was in the room. She could feel it slip up her arms like a bolt of electricity; it tickled the balls of her feet like firecrackers.

Ariana leapt around the dais to attack Alex, but Joe had recovered enough to stand, and he was there to guard her back. He grabbed one of the razors from the floor and lashed out as Ariana came around to stab at Alex with the sacrificial blade.

The razor caught Ariana in the side, and her eyes widened in ultimate surprise. She buckled, and fell to the floor, but never took her eyes off of Joe. Her brow wrinkled in pain, and shock. How could this happen now? Now as they were at the final hour? she thought.

Joe didn’t think at all, he just kicked her as hard as he could in the ribs, and she screamed the most horrifying sound he had ever heard a human being make, her voice cycling from an eardrum-piercing shriek to a gurgling wheeze. She rolled over and pointed the knife at Joe, but he pounced on her, holding her down with the weight of his body and wrestling her wrist until he pinned it to the ground above her head.

She gasped beneath him, unable to breathe, and he held the razor to her throat.

Behind him, Alex was chanting in a foreign tongue. Her voice seemed deeper than usual, and her head wavered in the air as if it were raised on a neck of jelly.

“
Dubrois ten et nu des
Curburide,” she called.

“What are you doing?” he yelled. Above them, the ceiling looked like a maelstrom. The black door had turned to a shimmering oval of red and silver and black threads, all twining around and around in a whirl pool of ghostly faces and hands and legs.

We’re closing the gate,
Malachai said.
Drawing on Alex’s natural power.

“Et nei renebras de farulte fasta nelti vie!”
she said. Then Alex stood on the dais itself, and raised her arms to the ceiling. Half-formed Curburide were ripping at her with their hands, but she could not be budged. Whether it was Malachai’s protection or her natural power with spirits, Joe didn’t know. But the creatures seemed to grow faint as they reached for her. Then their legs left the ground and they were sucked upwards stretching like angry taffy, into the whirl pool of dark light and ghostly limbs. Around them the blue crystals flickered and shuddered with power as Alex screamed the words of another tongue.

Lift the Caller to the dais with us,
Malachai said in Joe’s mind.

Joe didn’t question the command; he dragged Ariana to her feet. Her face was purple, and she gagged and gasped for air. He didn’t think he’d kicked her
that
hard, but maybe one of her ribs had punctured a lung. Joe didn’t feel guilty about it.

Grabbing her around her blood-slicked waist, he hoisted Ariana up to stand between Cindy’s legs, and then held the knife to her belly to keep her there. “Stand still,” he commanded.

Around them the room blurred in a cyclone of white and gray. The Curburide were still trying to climb out of the hole between the worlds and into the cave; long fingers slipped out of the black beyond and scrabbled on this side of the divide for purchase. They gripped and slipped on the ice blue crystals above, but quickly their tenuous holds were broken, and trails of gray slime were left on the crystals as they were sucked back to wherever they were from. The spirits who had urged Ariana on were falling upwards now, as Alex intoned a spell and used their own power to send them skyward.

“Alve, nix etui re,”
she cried. Joe could see the sleeves of her shirt shaking in the psychic wind. She broke her concentration for just a moment, and her eyes met his.

“I love you, Joe,” Alex said.

And then she said the last words Joe heard her say in that room:

“Ecsto ferni blatan
Curburide
palo no gon no. Neech!”

Alex reached her arms around Ariana and pulled the other woman close to her, in a strange hug between nemeses. Suddenly they were both rising in the air, spinning round and round as the waves of spirits and black otherworldly ether swirled in the room faster and faster to drain like a pool of water through a narrow hole.

The air filled with a hellish shriek and a sound that oscillated from the deep bass howl of a dying behemoth to an ear-piercing siren, and then with a vacuum howl and sucking, sloppy snap, the black crack of the door between worlds was gone, blue crystals of the strange room’s ceiling seamlessly back in its place.

Gone also were Alex and Ariana. And as Joe called futilely, both in his mind and aloud, he realized that Malachai had been sucked into the void with them.

Joe slumped back against the dais, Cindy’s dead hand hanging in the space above his shoulder. After a moment, he began to cry.

He waited there for a long time without moving. The silence of the room was palpable. Then Joe Kieran stood up, and looked at the blood-spattered face of Cindy, a girl he’d once saved from a demon. A girl that he had not saved from a murderess.

He stepped past the naked, bloody bodies of the boy, and the man, and picked up the book that Ariana had read from, where it lay bent and open on the ground.
The Book of the Curburide,
its cover read.

As he was starting to walk towards the exit, he saw fingers gripping the wall across the room. His heart leapt for a moment, thinking that Alex had only been thrown to the side, not sucked into the maelstrom. He ran to the alcove where Broderick Terrel had written and left his journal about the Calling of Malachai, and their defeat of the Curburide 100 years before.

“Alex,” Joe called, and shined his flash into the small room. But the face he saw there wasn’t hers. The light uncovered the silver hair and squinting, blinking eyes of Chief Harry Swartzky. The man was lying prone on the floor, his bound hands gripping at the wall to pull himself forward.

“Holy shit,” Joe whispered, and bent to pull off the chief’s gag. Then he began to untie the man’s bindings. “You’ve been back here all this time?”

A tear slid from the chief’s weary eyes as he looked out at the bodies and blood in the crystal room. He nodded.

“Yeah,” he said in a voice lower than a train rumble. “And I couldn’t do a thing to save ’em.”

Joe stared at Cindy hanging limp half-off the dais, looking for the last time at the empty eyes of the girl he’d once loved. Her beautiful blonde hair was matted and tangled with gore, and her body sliced and broken in every possible place. He had to look away from the bloody hamburger they had made of that once-velvet place between her thighs that he’d kissed again and again. And when he did, he was forced to see the betrayed, frozen scowl on the face of her traitorous brother Ted, limbs akimbo on the cave floor, not so far from the carved back of the brawny man who’d been Ariana’s helper. Blood from the letters she had carved deep in his back, SACRIFICE, had run from the corners of the S and the A and the C and all the rest in thin, dying rivers down his ribs to pool around him on the rock.

“I know,” Joe said, and put his arm around the injured police chief, to help the older man limp towards the exit.

“This time, I couldn’t either.”