Blood Magik- A Cold Day In Hell

by Corwyn Matthew

  Marty’s voice trembled toward the end of his sentence, so he took a breath and a soothing hit to collect his thoughts before going on. Tara got the feeling she really didn’t want to hear the rest, but knew he had to finish for his sake. He continued after a few seconds of wrestling his composure.

  “I followed him…into the street, and before I could hit him again…he…” His voice trembled even more now, despite the time he took with his words. “He… he got hit… He…”

  She finally looked up, offering the support he needed. Marty took another deep breath to quell the turmoil in his chest before going on.

  “He got hit…by a car. It…uh… It pretty much killed him instantly.” He took a drag, exhaling sharply. “The kid driving the car was goin’ way too fast…and when he…when he hit him…” A tear escaped his eye and Tara wiped it from his cheek. “…he flew straight up in the air…at least ten feet before he came back down and bounced off the asphalt in front of Alex and the other kids.”

  It was obvious he hadn’t told this to many people. She wished him opening up to her wasn’t the result of such a fucked up situation.

  He was regaining control of his voice now, continuing his account of the past, calmly and sympathetically.

  “It didn’t even look like a person. It was like seeing a doll get hit by a freight train. His body twisted in all different directions in the air and when he finally stopped skidding across the ground – probably fifty feet away – he just looked like somethin’ you’d see dead, washed up on shore. It was like every bone in his body was broken, and he was lying contorted in a way that was so fucked up I’ve never been able to get the image out of my head.”

  Tara wanted to tell him it wasn’t his fault, but she wasn’t even sure if she believed that. She knew she would blame herself if she was in his position, so she just stayed quiet and let him finish.

  “Alex wasn’t screaming anymore. She was so shocked she couldn’t even move. I panicked and needed to get the hell out of there, so I grabbed her arm and practically dragged her the rest of the way home.” He took his gaze away from the ceiling and finally met Tara’s eyes with his. “She wouldn’t even look at me for over a week. She was terrified of me. It almost hurt more to know she was scarred of me than the guilt I felt for knockin’ that kid into the street.”

  She decided – after aching, internal deliberation – that it was time she chimed in, hoping an interruption would help relieve some pressure.

  “When did she start talking to you again?” Her voice was weak from her stomach being knotted up with the emotion that poured from his words.

  “Her birthday was ten days later, and I’d already tried everything I could think of and nothing worked. So, I decided to give her the one thing I knew would make her feel better.”

  He reached over to the nightstand that supported his whisky and picked up the amulet Alex gave him the night before. He held it by its chain and draped it over his fist in front of her eyes. She reached up and touched its ridges where cryptic writing etched unknown words into its surface. The dark green jewel in the middle caught what little daylight was left in the room and sparkled beautifully in a captivating display.

  “It’s pretty.” She felt at ease just from the touch of its metallic form.

  “It was my mother’s. I was planning on waiting to give it to her until she got older, but it was my last hope to make up for what I put her through. She smiled for the first time in over a week that day, and it was the most perfect thing I’d ever seen.” Tara smiled tenderly at the thought. “My mother told me it’d protect us from darkness. From what I remember of her, she was real spiritual in her beliefs.”

  “What was her name?”

  Marty just stared for a moment at the glistening stone inside the charm and his mother’s name just rolled off the end of his tongue.

  “Aiyana…” he answered, and the light against the medallion danced across its surface to the syllables. “Her name was Aiyana.”

  4

  Alex stepped through the gate of her apartment complex in a daze, working through a jumble of scenarios in her mind concerning her hot-headed bear of an older brother’s immediate future. Worries of him being banned from the league and sent into a downward-character-tumble toward a washed up never-had-been barged in on her thoughts, and she repeatedly had to shake them from her mind literally with a shiver and a side-to-side wriggle of her head. She reached up to her chest as she instinctively would to fiddle with the chain on the necklace she wore, but felt vulnerable the instant her fingers touched nothing but skin. She let her hand linger for a moment, taking the time to imagine the feel of the charm in its absence, and ran her index finger over her skin in a circular motion that would’ve outlined its shape. Then a voice, like a breath on a breeze, whispered her name, and another chill crept over her spine when she realized the voice she heard was that of her mother’s…

  “Alex…”

  She looked around with sharp eyes. She wasn’t especially freaked out by it – she had other priorities on her mind that demanded she kept her cool – but wondered whether she’d actually heard it or if her mind just wandered wayward at the lack of the amulet around her neck and caused an old memory to surface. She let the whisper go for the time being, knowing that if it was significant enough, it would reveal its meaning in time.

  It was twilight, and the complex’s adolescent residences ran aimlessly around the inside of the gated yard. She skimmed through the group of seven or eight kids with a cordial smile as she continued down the cement path to the front of the building. None seemed bothered to notice her, aside from a young girl who was standing oddly still behind the group of scrambling children. She eerily watched Alex walk past with hollow and chilling eyes. Alex recognized the little Hispanic girl as a neighbor’s niece, but didn’t recognize her empty, listless stare.

  Alex wasn’t one to be easily shaken, so she quickly decided not to let it get to her. She continued toward the building’s entrance, on a mission to get her brother’s life back, but stopped dead in her tracks when she heard her mother’s voice again – this time as a sharper, more tangible whisper that froze her in her path—

  “Alex!”

  She whipped her head around and lost her breath as all eight children stood motionless, staring back at her with empty, inhuman eyes. The aura of the evening around her distorted, and a fiery cloud moved in to cover the city while dim sunlight bled through the muck in the sky that bathed the streets with a hellish haze.

  She tried her hand at addressing them, attempting to regain control of her escalating heart, but couldn’t be sure if her voice had actually made it from her throat and off her lips.

  “What…what’s wrong?”

  There were no answers from what seemed like soulless husks of empty little humans, and it frightened her to hold their stare, but she did her best to maintain control. She squatted down near the closest little girl in a pink dress, swallowed her tension, and reached deep inside to dig up the nicest tone of voice she could squeeze past her unease.

  “Hey, honey…are…are you okay?”

  She reached out for the girl’s dirty-blond hair and delicately ran her fingers between the strands, brushing it to the side of her face. The little girl didn’t speak or budge, and as Alex pulled her hand away, a handful of the girl’s hair came with it…

  Her eyes widened as the strands melted into a demonic sludge that oozed from her fingers. She backed away, fleeing from the child as if she was contagious, and the rest stepped forward in unison with her retreating steps.

  “What…what do you want?” She peddled backward as she spoke while the children gained on her frightened shuffle.

  Their collective eyes ominously darkened until they spilled-over with thick, black tears, their hair and eyes then melting from their heads and dripping down their chubby cheeks and off their chins.

  Alex s
topped, thinking rationally to herself that this couldn’t be real, and she looked around at her surroundings, realizing she was somehow caught in a dream.

  She’d had extremely powerful dreams in the past that bordered on premonitions, and the aura of this moment felt similar to being stuck in one of those insightfully freakish figments. She learned of her mother’s murder through a series of this type of imagery, but hadn’t been bothered by one since she’d solved that trifling riddle in her late teens.

  “What do you want?” She asked more sternly this time, less fearful and more inquisitive.

  The children all still stood motionless, black sap pouring down shirts and dresses and over tubby bellies… Then, in some enigmatic moment of revelation, they lifted their right arms, pointing behind her toward the entrance of her building.

  She watched them gesture in unison like puppets attached to a string and turned to see what drew their concern. But nothing behind her made itself known but a vacant walkway to her complex.

  “I don’t understand…”

  She turned back to face the ghostly gaggle of little creeps and her heart jumped from her chest when the dead face of an eerily familiar stranger appeared standing just inches away.

  He smiled sinisterly under his straggly goatee and hooded brow, towering over her with a disgustingly tattered scar around his neck that looked as if his head had been ripped off his shoulders and glued back together by way of some dark, esoteric magic.

  Shocked by his grotesque proximity, she gasped and jumped back in retreat. This man she didn’t know – but felt as if she should – reached out with otherworldly speed. He clutched her neck in his grip and squeezed before she could even think to flinch. She couldn’t scream or even breathe, and gagged on her own collapsing esophagus under the strain of his coarse fingers wrapped around her throat like a snake constricting its meal.

  He chuckled quietly while pulling her in, sickly stretching his tongue out from his mouth to lick her disgusted expression from chin to eye. His breath was an aroma of pain, and the humming of his raspy voice rattled her insides as deep as her bones.

  She tried to gain control of her thoughts, telling herself that he couldn’t really hurt her here. But the taste of his breath and the roughness of his dry tongue against her skin was so disturbing that she couldn’t focus past the sickening feeling his presence flooded her stomach with.

  He chuckled again as she choked on the constricting frame of her throat, and he smelled her neck and flesh with an insane vigor, like a starving creature savoring the scent of its meal. He marginally bit her cheek, just hard enough to break the skin, and sent shivers through her body before putting his dry lips to her ear to speak.

  “Mmmm-mm-mm!” He taunted her with his deep tone and dead breath against her lobes. “Sup, lil’ cousin?” His choice of greeting froze her soul, not knowing what to make of his words. “You taste like……family.” Her apparent fear and shock fed Smoke’s ego a bellyful of triumph and he rabidly laughed, then whispered in a rough, intimidating tone, “I want you to tell your brother somethin’ for me.” He paused, if only to create tension and to relish in the sound of her speeding pulse. “Tell him…his little brother says………

  “…Die…”

  He savored the flavor of fear in her eyes and opened his mouth wide, pulling her head back by her hair. He dug his teeth into her neck and ripped her tongue from the base of her throat; it hanging from his mouth as he shook his head like a dog tangling with piece of steak.

  The tearing pain of her tendons being snapped and her skin torn from her meat threatened her very sanity. Her eyes rolled upward and her vision obscured into gritty after-tones of a reality that was hardly recognizable, transforming her delusion into a scene from a new-age horror film.

  Smoke savagely chewed on her soft tissue while maniacally snickering at her eyes trying to make sense of her death, his blood-red orbs reflecting her terrified confusion, the sight of herself dying doubling her fear…

  Then the adrenaline in her blood that fueled her panic spiked her senses like a shot to the heart and she awoke gasping for life and air…

  Slowly, her senses returned to her, as if she’d been in so deep she’d have to be depressurized before surfacing into the waking world.

  The first thing she noticed while her ceiling came into focus was that she wasn’t in her room, but in the middle of her apartment, laid out on her sofa. The second thing was that she was being cradled. Her head was in someone’s lap – a woman’s lap – but…she lived alone…

  She wanted to squirm and writhe, kick and claw, but was still too groggy for her body to move the way she told it to. Then she realized she wasn’t in any danger as the woman’s fingers brushed through her hair – and her smell…her smell was so…familiar…

  “…Mom…?”

  The image of her mother gradually came into focus in front of her to paint her a picture of serenity – she was smiling, but had a distraught look concealed behind loving eyes. Her hair was wavy and dark. She looked a lot like Alex did but slightly older (she was in her late twenties when she died, and her spirit reflected that in its apparition). Bronze skin and in a hospital gown, she looked just like the woman Alex had seen as a child. It’d never occurred to her before, but she always appeared to her this way; as she did on her last minutes on Earth.

  Did that mean her spirit was immutably trapped in that moment? Unable to get past the hours after she’d given birth?

  “Hi, baby.”

  Her voice was the sweetest thing she’d heard since she was a child. It immediately brought a tear to her eye. Aiyana wiped at the drop with her thumb but it passed through her hand. Alex could “feel” her mother’s touch, but apparently her tears could not.

  “Mom…” She had so much she wanted to say but couldn’t decide on any words.

  Her mother hushed her gently.

  “Shhhhhh…” She smiled. “I know, baby.” A tear escaped from her eye as well, but vanished as soon as it fell from her chin. “I love you too.”

  Alex eventually found enough composure to sit up and look her mother in the eyes. Aiyana never let her hand fall away from her daughter’s cheek as she repositioned herself on the sofa.

  “We need to talk.”

  Her mother’s voice carried a sadness that Alex was fretful of. She knew whatever she wanted to talk about likely had something to do with the man in her dreams claiming to be Marty’s younger brother.

  So she listened as Aiyana laid out some of the most shocking, unbearable, and unbelievable news she’d never imagined she’d hear. The dreadful warnings of the coming of the end of the world, the demise of her loving and cherished older brother, and the awing insight to who her true father really was. The days to come would be more frightening than she thought she could endure, but it seemed there was no stopping what the future would bring. And no matter how hard she’d reject it, she’d undeniably be right at its center, fighting for the likes of the endangered souls of every person left on Earth.

  Blood Storm

  The Veteran's Remembrance Cemetery; Now:

  “With the blood of my blood’s murdered lives screaming through the veins under my skin – an entire lineage of human lambs bred to be sacrificed in exchange for sovereignty – the price of 100 blood-souls will be met, and a spell cast five centuries passed finally made absolute.”

  Imala spoke her words in a tongue unheard of by man, and its ritualistic nuance upset the sky above the church where her altar set its unholy semblance. The language she spoke was jumbled, like her words were clear in her mind but warped and mangled as soon as they touched air. If the average person were to listen closely, it would be apparent she was speaking English under the misconstrued sounds her tongue had rearranged, but it sounded befuddled or backward, somehow; deranged and unnatural. But the manner of the language spoken wasn’t what was important (its obscurity a side e
ffect of her words echoing through another realm). The blood and the pledge of the woman doing the speaking is what won the attention of an audience in Hell.

  Her words told of a tale over five hundred years in the making: a tale of ancient hunger with an insatiable resolve. Imala’s soul was that of a woman’s whose quest for power extended beyond the natural limitations of time, stretching over centuries with enduring patience to be rewarded here on this plane. The lineage and “blood-souls” she spoke of were that of her own line’s, all tethered to her past by way of destiny and ancient magics. Murder after murder led to coverups and well-practiced lies, leaving a trail of death and deceit twenty-five generations and a hundred bodies long, all building to an endgame here on this night.

  Smoke watched his newfound mother through undead eyes as she sliced open an ancient pagan symbol on her forearm. He stood by not as family, but as minion, while she drained her life’s fluid into a large clay bowl sitting atop the same table his revolting existence was given its twisted grace.

  The blood pouring from the cuts in her arm dribbled over older scars like scriptures on her skin. It boiled and churned in the clay caldron revealing small bone carvings resting maliciously under a ruby stew. But the blood’s surface decided against reflecting its surroundings, and instead conjured a vision of a rolling, red-clouded thunderstorm; miniature lightning bolts igniting a blood tempest within.

  Imala clinched her fist to pump the life from her veins, and Tessura snarled at the sounds of the storm rising outside. Smoke stood by, enticed by the power his own bloodline revealed, and basked in its mystic lunacy, inspired by the premonition thickening the air.

  “Your hand.” Imala reached for her son’s wrist and he stepped closer, eager to play his part.

  She took his forearm with authority and sliced it open, releasing cursed, black syrup from his veins into the tiny storm rousing inside the bowl. He flinched not from the pain of the cut, but from that of his flesh burning at his mother’s enchanted touch.