Blood Magik- A Cold Day In Hell

by Corwyn Matthew

  After his oil-like flux condensed her brew, she let loose his arm and he humbly stepped away. His undead blood was essential to her spell and would pave a path for her sovereignty to be recognized in the coming of a new Hell.

  The church where Imala and her demonic son dwelled, dabbling in amoral wizardry, sat near the entrance to one of the country’s largest veterans’ cemeteries, rooted just east of the inner-city of Los Angeles. On the surface, the chapel was as wholesome and pure as any: well-kept and valued by the community. But beneath the surface, beneath the cement and floorboards that sustained the “good people’s” place of worship, lay an old and unkempt cellar, previously fermenting in anonymity for a century before Imala used her black sorcery to step it up to par.

  This ironic posting of her place of meddle had unexpectedly brought about a devious influence over the cemetery’s grounds. Unlike what one might think, assuming holy ground may hamper her authority, misguided faiths and the false worships of random visitors only served to strengthen her position of power and feed the evil already poisoning this place of discontent and ill sorrows. This place where non-believers would come and curse the ideals of the Lord under their infuriated breaths, and/or pretend to pay their respects, but really only play the part to get their grievances over with and more immediately carry out the day with their empty and skeptical lives. Anyone who stepped foot here to mourn or otherwise left feeling wrong somehow, sickened by the evil secretly fermenting on the church’s grounds…

  Imala continued her incantation, fist clenched over the stirring cauldron, and spoke with a powerful resonance against the coming storm—

  “Hell, hear me! The demonic and the damned! Pledge yourselves to my blood and be raised from the pits of Abaddon! Neglect my offer…and be eternally imprisoned, trapped in the cold shadow of a coward King…”

  Sermonizing her backwards declaration insulted the atmosphere, and the night outside the church erupted in a frenzy, mimicking the toy storm brewing in the soup above her altar. She held out her other arm and carved another swath in her skin: two, sharp, S-like bolts known in pagan ritual as the Satanic “S”, representing the “Destroyer” in mythology, and worn selfishly to claim power over others.

  The burgeoning dish of blood spilt over the rim of the caldron and poured from Imala’s arms at an exponential rate. There was ten times as much fluid manifesting in this pool of wickedness as to what could actually be coming from her veins. It crawled onto the cement floor with a mind of its own, encroaching on where Smoke and Tessura stood nearby.

  “Take me as your Queen…and reign on Earth in the coming of the New Hell! Rise from Lucifer’s cage and embrace the strength destiny has promised me! Help me take this planet as our own…and rediscover the pleasures of life that many of you never deserved, but that I offer freely for nothing more than allegiance.”

  Imala lifted the caldron as an offering over her head. She held it high while it spilled onto the floor, gushing over her hands, racing down her forearms, and dripping off the tips of her elbows. Barefoot in a restless gown the color of murder, a cyclone of unearthly wind danced around her, coiling the pools at her feet in circles and rushing through her hair and dress. And as she continued, she raised the intensity of her incantation to challenge the wind roaring over her hymn.

  “Breathe in the fear of man and drink of his blood and spirit!! Taste the meat of his woman and child and smell the burning of his cities!! Feel the wetness from his tears in the air and howl at his hopelessness and pain!!”

  She pulled the unholy elixir closer to her lips as Smoke and the demon-wolf felt the urge to step away. The swell of wind spinning about her excited the blood from the floor and formed a circle encompassing Imala at its eye. It rose along with the force of the wind with an agenda of its own. It grew sneering expressions, whispered unformed words, and even crawled with shapes of reaching hands and claws, stretching toward her, grasping at her body for her mortal soul.

  But before she’d allow the eager blood-demons to have what they craved, she whispered her last words as a human with her lips teasing the edge of the bowl.

  “The blood of the dead… The sacrifice of the living… A hundred souls paid in full…” She closed her eyes in prayer. “Life is frail and trivial… Murder is pivotal… Death is absolute and power eternal… Let my sacrifice tonight…prove me worthy of my destiny.”

  With the last of her twisted words pledged, she tilted the caldron to drink fiendishly from its rim. Her eyes filled with a dark, crimson gleam and a black vortex in the middle that drilled into the depths of her soul.

  The veins in her face and neck under her skin swelled as she swallowed, the serum’s influence spreading across her body until her entire blue circulatory system grew visible through her flesh. She couldn’t swallow more than four or five times before she lost control of her hands and dropped the cursed wine from her grasp. It fell unnaturally slow as her knees gave out and her body convulsed, buckling alongside it, both crashing against the coarse concrete without control.

  Smoke stood watch through the streaks of whisking blood-creatures encircling Imala’s shuddering body, but through his dead eyes could only make out the color red and the gray tinges of shadows filling in the darker portions of the scene. He couldn’t see the color of her flesh being drained of its plush signs of life as her limbs and spine contorted and thrashed where she lay. It seemed she was conscious enough to be aware of her torment, but incapable of doing anything to ease the pain.

  The bones in her body snapped and splintered as her seizure progressed. Her dark brown, almost black hair was the first, most majestic change as it lit itself ablaze and turned to a deep, foreboding shade of claret. She may’ve tried to scream, but her throat denied her efforts, suffocating her, robbing the life from her lungs one breath at a time.

  Her fingers were the next to change, stretching outward six inches apiece, gouging at the concrete below and sharpening to a point. Her arms and legs then followed, elongating from the hems of her dress as the winds tore the cloth from her frame and left her paled skin and scarred body exposed. She had pagan symbols carved on almost every inch of her flesh that lit up with a scarlet shine when meeting the open air. And as her body continued to extend, reaching a length of seven feet or more, her ribs cracked out of her skin, thickening like a cage around her midsection. They encompassed her torso as if they were fingers made of giant bone and gripped the sides of her body to shield her vital organs.

  She looked to be instinctively clinging to her last breath, not only suffocating, but expiring in pain as she turned over and clinched to a fetal cringe. Her back was exposed now to her son, and the sight of his mother’s enlarged spine protruding from her frame was a humbling one. Her new form, if she would survive the change, was a marvelous vision of power and malevolence to be admired by all who’d be damned enough to see.

  Next, the claret in her hair bled into her skin and every inch of her flesh became a sheathe of crimson, resembling how Smoke thought the Devil may appear but more beautiful – even the demon Tessura looked impressed by her master’s manifestation. She watched curiously as Imala’s body trembled against the change, eventually becoming still…and ultimately giving in to the inevitable.

  And in an instant, everything stopped.

  Her body no longer convulsed or struggled to breathe. The circle of blood-mist that swirled around her metamorphosis ceased its ravaging and clawing and calmed to a tranquil breeze.

  The woman once known as Imala was hardly recognizable in the now lifeless body of a she-demon. A reddened monstrosity lay where a woman once had, and Smoke and Tessura both stood by, not knowing what to expect from the corpse of their priestess next.

  Mist serenely danced around her. A minute passed before anything else occurred. Then another.

  Soon, tiny sparks of cardinal static crackled around the body of the devil at their feet. Electric currents like spiders’ legs
crawled across her, humming and zapping when contacting her skin. The circling blood-breeze again picked up its pace, and thick pulses of sadistic energy jolted out of the commotion, stabbing at Imala’s still lifeless corpse.

  Tessura growled, uncomfortable with the growing shards of lightning igniting so close, but could do little else but posture and snarl while waiting for an outcome.

  Electric impulses from the blood-mists formed a web of crackling strands stimulating every possible nerve-ending under Imala’s skin. Her body flinched at the prodding spikes and convulsed rapidly as the mesh of static levitated her from the floor. The radiating shine from the sadistic light show in front of the two creatures, Smoke and Tessura, shone so brightly at its peak they both turned their heads to shield their eyes…

  Imala’s she-devilish figure stretched its limbs wide as a burning ember grew visible in her belly. She shook spastically in midair while the radiant orb ascended past her ogress heart, shocking it into a rapid rhythm and rekindling some sort of new life into the world. The glow then squeezed its way through her throat and erupted as a wail and a geyser of blood, jetting through the ceiling of the cellar. It broke past the floor of the chapel, out the roof, and into the commanding storm above with a promise of demonic disease.

  The low, dark clouds hungrily absorbed the blood and puissance expelled from Imala’s curse. The sky groaned and the ground quaked while the poisoned magik boiled and spread its influence throughout the storm…

  After falling loose from the web suspending her lengthy body, the creature that was once the human witch and malevolent mother of an undead abomination opened her eyes and breathed in new life from the air. She watched as the vaporous trail of blood-energy that plowed through the ceiling slithered out of the church and into the night sky.

  Exhaling slowly, she took her first breath in stride, feeling out her newly powerful lungs and chest. She only had to merely think to rise and without moving a muscle, her body elevated elegantly into a dominant standing position, her arms palms-up and her sleek chin held high.

  Humbled by the commanding appearance of her newborn goddess, Tessura melted her form into that of a wolf and took her place at Imala’s feet. Smoke, also in awe of his mother’s new frame, took one carefully measured step closer.

  Imala gazed down, towering almost a foot taller than the height of her son, and smiled viciously. Her thick, burgundy hair reached past the lower curve of her back, and her crimson skin still glowed with the symbols that’d been scribed into her human skin.

  The dress she’d worn was nothing more than ash on the floor, but there was no shame in her nudity. Her body looked like a vessel of war, without a single weakness exposed or soft spot that might need coveting. Her breasts had a protective layer of thick skin covering their tips that gripped their shape like a red spider’s legs. If she still had any sort of genitalia between her thighs, their openings were only evident if she wished them to be, and completely sealed off if not. Legs like any woman’s but unlawfully strong, they bore dark scarlet, tribal-like patterns in her flesh that coiled down her thighs and teased her calves.

  Smoke opened his mouth to speak, but was halted by the sight of two bones rupturing the skin of her forehead, growing from her skull like horns on a mythological beast. They harnessed the color of bone at first, then the crimson of her skin grew from their bottoms and covered them to their points that hardened into solid black. Their texture was more like cement than skeleton, and Imala appeared to enjoy the sensation of their emergence, her mouth slightly opened and black eyes fastened, fluttering under the thick skin of her eyelids.

  When she reopened them, she seemed to have forgotten her son even existed until he spoke, and she peered down when he took a step closer; Tessura loyally standing guard beside her, growling protectively from her feet.

  “Mother…” He wasn’t afraid. He knew no fear. But he wasn’t exactly sure where his place was in her world. “What…do you want me to do?”

  Imala reached her arm out toward her son, palm up and fingers partially cupped as if holding something encaged between her vicious, blade-like nails, and a whisk of blood-mist amassed from the air around her hand into its middle. The mist compacted and grew the face of her ex – Smoke’s father – and Smoke found that a savage grin peeled back his lips in reply.

  When Imala spoke, her words ricocheted through his skull like the thoughts were his own, but in her voice, and her enthusiasm for the wicked things to come filled him with an eagerness that tingled.

  “Say hello to your father for me.” She smiled iniquitously, proudly flashing demon-like teeth. “Bring me his eyes.” Then she added, “But keep him alive.”

  “And, my brother?” Smoke still had a yearning inside: one that wouldn’t subside until he faced his older sibling and walked away victorious.

  Imala smirked before she spoke, knowing something of the future she didn’t feel the need to explain.

  “Your brother…will be joining us soon.” She then looked to her demon-wolf lying at her feet, and Tessura’s yellow eyes met with hers. “The girl,” she barked.

  Tessura needed no clarification as to what her master wanted, but from what she remembered, Alex was protected by a charm. By using her telepathy, she projected that image into Imala’s mind. Imala seemed to weigh it in her thoughts, as if probing the future for an answer to her wolf’s unease, then saw that Alex no longer had the intrepid trinket.

  “She doesn’t have it. Go. Find her.” She smiled distantly. “…Invite my darling niece home for dinner.”

  2

  (Twenty minutes before the storm)

  “Here! Stop right fucking here! Let me out.” Marty barked obnoxiously at his Uber driver, spitting as he talked, clutching a two-thirds emptied fifth of Jim Beam in his large and drunken hands.

  He promised the driver he’d throw him an extra courteous tip if he let him drink while he drove. The man agreed, but probably as much for the money as to not upset this enormously bulky and boozed up monster jam-packed in his back seat. The trip out to the Veteran’s Remembrance Cemetery was about a twenty-minute drive from Tara’s place and he felt only half as drunk as he’d need to be to face Jean-Claude’s freshly planted grave.

  “Twenty-seven dollars, my man. Cash or…”

  “Here.” Marty tossed a hundred-dollar bill crumpled up into a ball at the driver then stumbled from the car.

  “You need change?”

  He was already on his way, gracelessly hulking away from the car, but the man felt it a professional courtesy to ask.

  “…fuggoff…” the drunkard mumbled after stepping onto the short-cut grass that chased the horizon in the dark.

  Rows of tombstones stretched for over a hundred acres in front of him. Eighty-five thousand buried former soldiers populated the grounds making up one of the largest communities of corpses in the nation. Luckily, Marty scouted the area early in the afternoon so he knew where his most respected antagonist was laid to rest.

  It’d be a near ten-minute walk to get past the upright markers of the northern half to the more subtle, flat ledgers that covered the southern side where Le’Duprie was buried. Time enough, he figured, to nearly finish the bottle he started. He’d save two drinks for when he’d reach the grave: One for himself for when he’d toast to Le’Duprie’s career, and one for Jean-Claude that he’d pour into the soil blanketing his place of respite.

  The night sky was ominous. The few stars bright enough to shine through the city lights were snuffed out systematically by a rolling layer of dark. The cemetery was a beautiful and peaceful place, but if Marty were in the right mind to notice, he’d realize there was something suspicious polluting the air this night.

  He trudged through the memorial grounds with a purpose, like he was a soldier himself, marching in a steady but not so straight line toward his destination. His vision tunneled in front of him so his surroundings to eithe
r side were a blur of shadows and trees, and an echo of distant thunder growled more dominantly the closer he came to Le’Duprie’s grave.

  He lifted the bottle in his hand in mid-step and angrily poured another drink down his throat. His stomach churned and clinched, revolted by the taste, but he forced his throat to swallow the swell of warm, stiff liquor anyway. Bright slivers of red lighting stood out over the thunder and sparked white flashes of memories that splashed in his mind. The sound of the wind picking up mimicked that of the crowd in his head, and when the lightning would knife through the sky, his fists would bash into Jean-Claude’s broken face, blood spraying the ice to the opposite side of each blow.

  Marty, trying to drown the guilt-twisted images from his conscience, forcibly tilted back the whiskey and chugged down a solid, four more shots from the middle of the bottle. In his thoughts, he saw through the eyes of his teammates as the refs pulled his crazed self off the fallen, former soldier, his fists still swinging in a blind rage. And over the commotion on the ice, a little girl’s face stood pale and frightened behind the glass, shocked by the actions of this violent beast in a Priest’s jersey. The girl looked as Alex had at that age, and the girl’s lanky, older brother with dark, distinguished features, resembling a younger version of Marty, stood beside her, cheering on the carnage in a blood-drunken craze…

  The thought of the scared girl in the crowd stirred in his gut, and a tear fled his eye while he again swigged as much liquor as he could handle in a gulp. His stomach would have screamed if it could. But instead, it protested the only way it knew how, and the bile in his bowels burned, rising in an outcry against their grave mistreatment.

  Dizziness then overwhelmed him.

  He dropped to his knees and leaned forward with his hands gripping the grass, bracing himself against what was coming. His quivering guts heaved once before anything made its way out of his mouth. Again, his stomach squeezed in on itself, but this time a fountain of yellowish vomit pushed its way up and out his insides. He gagged and spit before another contraction forced whatever fluid was left in his gullet out and onto the ground. He hadn’t eaten since before he left the hospital – at least a day or so ago – so the process was relatively quick. There were no chunks of chewed up food stuck in his esophagus, just streams of stomach acid and liquor dripping off his lips and the tip of his nose. Bile singed the inside of his nostrils with a rancid taste, but it didn’t take him long to wipe his mouth, regain his breath, and pick himself back up from the cemetery lawn.