The 13th (22 page)

The night wind whispered warnings to Chief Maitlin. He ignored them as he sat on the porch of his daughter’s empty house and argued with himself about the best course of action. Could he trust her abductors to keep their word and leave Stacy out of this, so long as
he
stayed out of it? And how could he allow so many other people to suffer in exchange for his daughter’s life? Wasn’t it his job to protect them all, not just his daughter?

After acting like a wooden Indian on Stacy’s peeling wood porch for hours, Maitlin finally stood up, joints creaking and moaning at the long inactivity.

He shambled toward the cruiser like a zombie, still unsure about his plan. But once the keys were turned and the engine dragged the car slowly down the street, the chief felt the pall of desperation upon him even more than before. Castle Point appeared deserted as his cruiser slid slowly down its subdivision and then business streets. There were no long-hairs leaning against the outside wall of the Clam Shack on this, a perfect summer night. There were no dog walkers patrolling the sidewalks near Main, pooper-scoopers in hand. Normally the Canine Fecal Ballet was a prime activity at this point in the evening, just before bed.

In his heart, Maitlin had known all along that the new proprietors of Castle House were tapping into the same demonic cult veins that had slathered the house in blood two decades before. He’d had a pretty good idea of what the reports of disappearing women over the past six months meant. What he hadn’t known was how much of the town Dr. Rockford had recruited. The last time this had happened, Maitlin guessed that a couple dozen townsfolk had been lured into the blood-drenched rituals of the Castle House basement.

But this time, he feared that it was even more. After he watched an empty potato chip bag roll and skate across the empty asphalt of Main, Chief took a deep breath and closed his eyes. When he reopened them, the bag had disappeared into the weeds at the side of the road. And Chief Maitlin gunned the engine of the cruiser and flipped a U dangerously close to it. In seconds he was doing sixty down the hairpin curves of the 190. After an Innovative Industries van
passed him going the opposite direction, Chief killed the lights and began to slow down.

The entrance to Castle House lay just ahead.

The entrance to hell.

“It’s working,” Amelia hissed in his ear. “Can you feel it?” She waved her hand in the air around them, where shadows seemed to coil and writhe like heat pockets.

Rockford nodded, spilling a lopsided grin spattered with gore as he looked up from the latest sacrifice. He found it difficult to focus anymore on his partner, despite the fact that she was dressed only in blood he had spilled. It was difficult to focus on anything now but the blood. So much blood. So much more needed. The voices were loud now. Insistent.

The air around them smelled of slaughter. Tasted of flesh. Moved like water. Whispered like dirty lovers.

“Yes,” he said, as he drew a knife across the belly of Elisabeth, an Italian woman they had held captive for the past six months. Rockford had impregnated Elisabeth and then kept her quiet in the fog of drugs, allowing her consciousness to swim to the surface only rarely in the past weeks and months. Still, she had grown to know, with the depth of feeling that only a mother can know, that she was pregnant. In those brief periods of lucidity, Elisabeth had loved and feared for her baby. She had rubbed her abdomen
and whispered to it over and over in her locked room until Amelia had rendered her comatose again, “Don’t worry, little one, I’ll protect you.”

But Elisabeth’s world had mostly been a blur of shape and color with no meaning until this morning, when she had woken from the bad dreams to find ragged stitches across her abdomen. Then she had screamed herself hoarse.

Rockford and Amelia had let her go on and screech her lungs out, because for this part of the ceremony, she had to be at least somewhat conscious. The old hotel had been awash in spine-twisting cries today as Rockford and Amelia made their way through the rooms on the second floor, freeing child after child from unripened wombs.

So as Rockford cut into the stitches he had put in just hours before, Elisabeth wailed with rare cognizance.

“Where is my baby?” she cried. “What have you done to my baby?”

Amelia knelt at Elisabeth’s side and pressed both hands against the woman’s waist. She leaned in to kiss the mother, who responded by spitting. Amelia wiped the white foam from the blood on her naked chest and flicked it to the floor with her palm.

“Your baby is in a better place,” she whispered.

“I want to see my baby,” Elisabeth demanded.

Amelia looked at Rockford, and the whites of her teeth showed through the blood on her face. She looked vampiric. “Shall I?”

He nodded.

Amelia stepped away, but Rockford didn’t stop tracing his knife across the thin flesh of the woman. “Would you like to hold her?” he asked.

“It’s a girl?” Elisabeth gasped.

He nodded. “Yes, though she won’t live for long outside of the incubator.”

Amelia returned then, and held a tiny red-blotched baby to the mother’s chest. The infant twisted in her hands and let out a thin wail. “Here she is,” the nurse said.

Elisabeth couldn’t hold the child with her arms tied up, but she tried to curl her body to the babe with a mother’s protective hug. Its body twisted between her breasts. “Put her back,” Elisabeth begged. “She needs to be in the incubator.”

Amelia shook her head.

“She would have joined you quickly anyway. Now…”

Rockford touched the edge of a long silver blade to the infant’s back. The tiny baby began to cry, its face against her mother’s heart.

“Now…she will go
with
you.”

The basement of Castle House suddenly trembled with the gut-wrenching force of a mother’s scream that, just as suddenly as it began, was silenced.

The light from the open door blinded her for a moment, despite the fact that the room beyond it was lit only by candles. Brenda squinted and remained mute as a brawny man dragged in the body of a naked man. Seconds later, he was followed by a bony guy lugging an equally bare woman. The men dumped the two bodies unceremoniously on the ground and slammed the door behind them, apparently never noticing the fact that there was a girl in the back of the small room chained to the wall.

After a moment had passed and she was sure the
men weren’t coming back, Brenda called out to the newcomers on the floor in front of her in a loud whisper.

“Who’s there?”

The room remained silent. But their bodies were so close to her feet, she could hear the slight intake of their breathing.

“Getting crowded in here,” she said to nobody in particular. Around her the air stirred. Hands seemed to slip in close to cup her breasts, as if someone had snuck up on her from behind. It felt as if the intruder had just come from a long, cold bath. Something brushed the hair on her arm in an icy caress and her skin goose-bumped.

“Get OFF!” Brenda yelled at the air. “I may be naked and tied to a wall…but that doesn’t mean I’m easy!”

She laughed, a little, at her own attempt at bravado, but the quiet of the room after her words died only made her insides clench harder. And they didn’t have any impact on the being in the room. The persistent cold hand slid up the inside of her thigh and Brenda shook and struggled to clench her legs together. But it was no use. When Rockford and Amelia had tied her up, they had left her spread-eagle; unable to touch her knees together. Now the invisible fingers capitalized on that, and gripped the tender flesh of her thighs without gentleness.

“Ow,” she complained as the fingers squeezed her, and then she screamed out as an icy finger poked and pushed its cold way inside her.

“Get OFF!”

Brenda squeezed with every internal muscle she could control to expel the thing, but it slipped inside her like a steel spike, gouging up and in and sliding within. Its touch was hideous…She could feel the black ice spread through her groin and belly
like some kind of bitter, nether anesthetic. It hurt and numbed her at the same time.

“What the fuck,” Brenda moaned, and closed her eyes, as the world began to spin. She had been conscious now for the longest she’d been in weeks…and suddenly she felt unable to hold her eyes open any longer, despite the prodding at her insides by the cold prong, or the fact that two people had just been unceremoniously dumped naked and unconscious at her feet.

“I feel like I’m going to puke,” she whispered. Inside, the coldness spread and spread until it overcame even her nauseated stomach, and then she shook her head and struggled to stay conscious…but the fingers reached her heart. And with one lone tear trailing down her cheek, beside the dirty pink lock of hair, Brenda—or that spark that thought of itself as Brenda—left the room.

“I didn’t dump them here.”

“Yeah, well don’t look at me.”

“Doesn’t matter. Get her down. It’s time.”

Hands felt along her sides, and through a haze of fog Brenda struggled to open her eyes. The fingers on her wrists and ankles were not cold, as the last touches she’d felt had been. This was different. She recognized those voices.

A hand slapped her cheek and her eyes fluttered open instinctually.

“Wake up, baby girl,” the male voice said. And as that granite chin swam into focus, Brenda’s stomach sank.

“Dr. Rockford,” she whispered.

“At your service,” he said, and then she was in his arms, as Amelia cut loose the final bonds. She tried to kick away from him, but her legs wouldn’t answer. Instead, there was a strange heat in her calves,
and then behind her thighs…and then the pins and needles hit. She toppled and Rockford easily caught her, slipping a hand to cup her buttocks. Brenda could feel the hard, moving bone that could only be his penis pressing against her belly as he shifted and supported her. His arms pulled her to him and his lips touched her forehead before he lifted her by the ass to stare into his eyes.

“It’s you,” he breathed, his lips centimeters from her own. She could taste the blood on his breath.

“After all this…it’s you.”

“C’mon,” Amelia said, running a cool hand up Brenda’s bare back. “Let’s not lose the momentum. We have three more, and the hour is nearly done.”

Rockford nodded at the nurse, and then bent his head to capture Brenda’s lips in his. Her eyes widened and she tried to block him out, but his tongue was thick and forced its way to the back of her throat before she could stop it.

When he drew back, she stifled a gag and spit his taste back at him.

Rockford only laughed. “Is that any way for the mother of Ba’al to behave?”

Amelia answered for her. “Get used to it,” she said. “Ba’al and Astarte may spit all over you, and you better like it.”

“You promised they’d do more than spit on us,” he laughed.

“Oh, they will.” Amelia grinned, rubbing blood-slick tits against his arm. “I just don’t know that you’ll be able to keep up.”

David woke up with a boulder on his brain.

Okay, maybe it was a brick.

Okay, maybe just an ice pick that had somehow slipped inside his ear canal, pierced through the flesh and burrowed around in his brain until there was a big bloody hole in the middle of his skull filled with blood and…pain.

Skip it. Maybe there was no boulder at all. Just a bloody hole in the middle of his brain.

“Damn,” he moaned to nobody. Only someone answered.

“Seems like…every time I have a nightmare anymore, there you are,” a female voice whispered.

David tried to sit up, but the pain intervened. “I never asked for a female cop to be my torturer.”

“Torture you?” Christy asked, slowly propping herself up on an elbow. “You should be so lucky.”

“Are you okay?” he asked, while gingerly exploring his scalp to find the steel pick that
had
to be protruding from it somewhere.

“Yeah,” the cop said quietly. “What about you? I wasn’t the one moaning like a dog in a bear trap.”

“Been better,” he admitted, pulling warm, wet fingers away from his scalp. “But I seem to be alive.” He sat up, feeling the room spin just a bit even in the cloak of complete darkness. “Wow.”

“What?”

“Drunk and clobbered seem to share a few things in common,” he explained. Then he saw the faint sliver of light in the wall and began to crawl toward it.

“Like what?” Christy’s voice whispered.

“Like the room spinning?”

There was quiet for a moment, and David’s fingers found the gap in the wall where the faintest light crept through. They followed it along until the gap suddenly took a ninety-degree upturn. A door. Then from behind him, Christy gasped. “When the room spins for you, does it hold on to you too?”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

Christy yelled. “Back off, asshole. These hands are licensed in five states.”

David pulled his hands away from the crack in the wall. “Christy, what’s the matter?”

“Some asshole’s trying to feel me up.”

David turned around and crawled back from the door and in just four turns of the knee had collided with Christy’s foot. He pressed forward until he straddled her body on the floor on all fours.

“Nobody’s here,” he whispered.

“Someone was.” Her hands reached up to hold his shoulders and he leaned in to listen.

“His hands were…”

“What?” he whispered. His voice still sounded loud in the black room.

“His hands were inside me.”

“Lucky hands,” David answered, instantly regretting it.

“Pig. I knew I should never have told you.”

David pulled back from her and crawled past. In three pulls of his legs, his shoulder met the wall. He turned right and repeated the action and in just a couple movements, had found a wall again. He repeated it again and found himself back at the crack near the floor.

“Look,” he finally answered. “There’s nobody in here. It’s you and me. And I wasn’t feeling you up.”

Behind him Christy answered, but in a way he would have never expected.

She moaned. And not in pain.

She moaned like a woman in orgasm, with a tongue stuck way up her…

“Oh, yeah,” she told the dark room.

“Is this a lost scene from
When Harry Met Sally
?” David asked. “I’d just like to point out once again that there’s nobody in the room but you and me.” His voice quavered, just a little. And he crawled from the door back to her feet. His hands found her ankles in the dark, and he could feel her trembling as she gasped and groaned.

“There’s nobody here but us,” he said again.

“Oh, fuck!” the cop in front of him screamed, her legs tensing and pressing against his grip.

He crawled over her until he could feel her panting breaths on his lips. “There’s nobody here,” he whispered.

“Oh yes there is,” she gasped, her voice mounting the scale in hitching moans of increasing volume. “He’s here and he’s inside me…”

David considered the proximity of his penis, currently dangling somewhere about an inch or two above her crotch and found that normally easily erected appendage suddenly squeamish.

He slapped her gently on the side of the face. “There is nobody here but you and me,” he insisted.

“Oh yes,” she said. “Oh yes there is.”

David moaned himself then, and collapsed on top of her, both in frustration and in response to a sudden stimulus.

Something cold had just slipped between his legs. Something cold had just touched his…