I gripped her handle and spread my feet. That’s all I had time for. She did the rest.
Mephos lunged, bloodless fingers curved into hooks. The pretense of humanity drained from his body, thinning him out, bending him into the predator I’d always known he was. His eyes emptied. His teeth sharpened. It was better this way. I could think of him as a monster. I’d killed a monster before. What was one more?
His springing body ate the last of the distance between us, and I swung. The young woman who’d sacrificed everything for the love of her savior, the devoted nun who’d done everything that was asked of her, took the reins. She turned in the burning blackness of her memories. She dipped through the dread of soul-shattering secrets, and she sang a song of devastation. The white blade wailed as it whipped toward the ceiling. My eyes lost the blur of movement, but I caught the arch of blood that followed.
The White Lady’s satisfaction sizzled through my brain. She spun me around to land another cleaving blow, but Mephos crashed into me, pinning me to the wall face first.
“No!” A hysterical female voice sliced through the chapel behind me. My breath rang off the stone wall to which I was pinned. Mephos’s breath brushed my cheek.
“What?” His question was a small thing lost in a crowd of more important matters. His weight slipped from my back. I took a shaking breath and turned. Mephos stared at me, uncomprehending. I stared back in confusion, and then my gaze dropped.
His arm. It was gone.
The vampire looked down at the misplaced limb on the floor. He groped his side. A look of disbelief settled on his face. A slow blink later that disbelief bled to loathing. The creature wearing Mephos’s skin opened its abhorrent eyes. Mephos’s copper irises caught fire. The ember bright glow burned with new awareness.
“I’ll rip you limb from limb,” a bestial voice rumbled up from Mephos’s chest.
“No,” Bertrand shouted. “Do not kill her. Remember the prophecy.”
If you kill her, she will be unstoppable.
Prim’s words floated back to me from a blood-spattered graveyard. Happier times.
Mephos reached for me with his single hand, but the gleaming white sword had already moved its tip to the vampire’s throat.
“Do you want to lose your head too?” I’d meant the question to sound calm and threatening, but my quavering voice ruined the effect. I wasn’t sure who to fear more, the angry vampire or the vengeful ghost.
Something reckless glinted in the vampire’s eyes. I lifted my leg, planted my foot, and kicked him hard. Mephos windmilled through the air as he struggled to balance himself with only one arm. His teenaged body stumbled backward. Bertrand caught him. I looked from the stunned knight to the apoplectic redhead. Bertrand’s eyes iced over. Cold light leaked from beneath his blond lashes. His skin lost its opaqueness. He’d lied to me. He was a vampire too.
“What have you done?” Celene croaked with an unfamiliar voice. The aqua oceans of her eyes boiled sulfur bright. She had the same possessed look as Mephos and Bertrand. It was as if something else inhabited her skin, and it had, only in that moment, found events interesting enough to draw it to the surface.
The alien entities peered at me through the dim light.
“Is she the Queen of Captive Souls?” Celene rasped.
“She is a child.” Bertrand’s broken voice scraped.
“She will pay for this.” Mephos lunged forward, but Celene gripped him by his wounded shoulder. His body jerked back.
“You will do as I say,” Celene hissed. The otherworldly voices grated in my ears.
“Summon the Sisters,” she ordered, and Mephos shrugged out of her grip. With eyes on me, he stepped over his severed arm and walked slowly from the room.
I had the dizzying sense that I’d misread the dynamic between my hosts. I’d thought Mephos was running the show and Celene was his vampiric eye candy. The look of domination in her eyes told me I was very wrong.
“Bertrand?” I shifted nervously from foot to foot. “Remember your promise.” The knight had sworn to protect me. He’d given me his word as a Templar. Something told me that part of Bertrand had left the building.
I’d given my word too. If I helped the spirit of the young nun escape, she would act as my weapon. If we had to hack our way down the mountain, that’s what we’d do. The village in the distance would have to be our destination. I could release the White Lady in the delta and find help at the nearest farmhouse.
I took a step toward the doorway that led back into the hall. Glowing eyes followed me, but the vampires didn’t move. Vapor floated from the ectoplasmic sword as I waved it in front of me in a menacing manner. I took another step and then I heard it. A hissing hemorrhaged into the throne room from the direction of the open door. My blood ran cold as the nun’s spirit shrieked inside my head.
Mephos reentered the room, but he wasn’t alone. A line of bent, white bodies flooded through the doorway, and the entity that was wrapped around my arm spasmed with terror. I’d felt that kind of mind-numbing fright before. I’d suffered through it every time The Shadow made an appearance. The Shadow had been my own personal demon, visiting me whenever I lingered in the hypnagogic or hypnopompic states. I’d have done anything, risked anything to slip its grasp.
Even though it had disappeared after I’d closed the Seventh Gate, the fear The Shadow inspired in me was still fresh, and I had the white streaks in my hair to prove it. I felt the same horror lancing out psychically from the ghost in my hand. She jabbered and keened in antiquated French. I tried to calm her, but when an entity was triggered by the source of its haunting there was no reasoning with it. The electromagnetic imprint of her mind sparked and quaked and misfired through my brain. I gripped my temple as the sword uncoiled from my arm.
I shuffled to the center of the space as the string of nuns seeped into the room. There was a sinister symmetry to their formation. They moved like a hive mind. Not a foot broke their unison as they coiled around me, a devout centipede with heads bowed and hands clasped.
“No, no, no,” I whispered desperately as the edge of my sword softened. The icy steel wavered, then wafted toward the barrel ceiling above us. I gripped the evaporating handle and begged. “Please.”
Please don’t leave me.
I forced my will into the shredding wisps of the specter’s fleeing essence, but it was too little too late. I’d never have enough power to control a White Lady. I reached an empty hand toward the shadows above me. Our bargain was broken.
Mephos sliced through the circle and came to a stop before me. I tried desperately not to look at the bloody stump of his shoulder. How had I gotten myself into this situation? But, then again, if God was the author of my life, what had He gotten me into, and why? Why? If He had a plan for me, if I am supposed to fight in that vast, glowing battle that rages somewhere between heaven and hell, why not equip me for it? Why leave me at the mercy of fucks like Mephos and Celene? Ghosts I can handle. Maniacal vampires? Not in my skill set.
With one swift grasp and a violent tug, Mephos reached his remaining hand out and ripped the dress from my body. The gleam in his eyes said the next one would rip my skin from my bones, and then I would be as bare as he wished.
I wrapped my arms around my suddenly naked body and stared in disbelief at the sequins sparkling to the floor. My skin stung with the brutal force of my denuding. I wasn’t sure what to process first, the feel of my bare breasts pressed against my raised forearms, or the fact that he’d just ruined Celene’s dress. Neither were the headline in that moment, but my brain couldn’t fathom the severity of the situation. On a scale of mildly endangered to royally screwed, I was somewhere beyond that. I gaped at the twinkling stars of gold and silver settling in the cracks of the stone floor. They’d never get all of those sequins out of the crevices. If they killed me where I stood, there would always be a small glittering reminder of me, the little dead girl that almost cut their heads off.
“If our lifestyle is not to your
liking—” Mephos leaned in close. “—maybe you would be more comfortable in the domicile of Our Sisters of Immaculate Pain.” His mouth frothed as the words dropped from his lips. Suddenly, I understood what Les Soeurs de la Douleur Immaculee had meant. It wasn’t exactly a phrase I’d seen on a French quiz in high school. Dread soaked through my thin attempt to trivialize the moment. White-cloaked bodies slithered toward me on bound feet. The promise of torment sparkled in their gimlet eyes. My guts liquified.
“Thank you for your services,” Mephos rasped.
I turned my horrified gaze to Bertrand, but he was already moving away. I stared at the back of his golden head as he stepped toward the door. Was he walking away? Was he leaving me to this? I shook my head as he collapsed his brutish frame to fit back through the doorway. Maybe he’d reached the limit of his rebellion. Maybe he believed there was nothing more he could do for me. Or maybe he just didn’t care. Was it self-preservation pulling him from the room to another part of the cloister, where he could pretend that an innocent woman wasn’t being tortured? Or maybe it was just plain old cowardice galvanized by years of turning away.
“You’ll rot!” I called to him as the Sisters fastened a metal collar around my neck. Their clammy hands produced a chain and attached it to the band around my throat. They checked the lock, then yanked me from my feet. “You’ll rot, like your armor. One day.” I trembled with the certainty of it. One fine day, he would rot from the inside out.
Chapter Forty
You can take the boy out of the Old Testament, but you can’t take the Old Testament out of the boy.
Melisande
I counted until I couldn’t remember the order in which numbers flowed. Then I whispered them to myself, gathering them together in nonsequential little constellations where I could protect them.
In the red moments, when I felt myself unraveling, I shouted the numbers randomly just to prove I still had a mind. I still knew things like numbers.
“Forty-three. Seventy-one. Sixteen.” Three more things they hadn’t taken from me. And then I’d faint.
Cold water splashed my face, and I opened my eyes to see another dawn had found me still belted to the metal table, lost in the bowels of a crumbling keep. Straps stretched across my chest, my waist, my legs. My spasming arms were free and hanging because it didn’t matter anymore. I couldn’t lift them on my own. I was completely dependent on the Sisters. As it turned out, they were good at mending human flesh, but they were also good at rending it.
The only thing I could do for myself was breathe, and from the rate of the spinning, I could tell I’d done precious little of that while I was unconscious. My heart struggled in my chest to the ragged beat of another man’s curse. I still couldn’t hear Rasmus’s thoughts, but I could tell when he was near. The Sisters left the door open so anyone could enjoy my torture. My heart hammered against my ribs when he passed by the doorway to the chamber. It quivered and limped back to its sluggish thudding as he drifted down the hall.
Now I knew how Rasmus felt, and that was a horrible thing. Worse than the pain they inflicted on every inch of my body was the change in perspective. Maybe death was not a bad thing. The vile contemplation crept through my half-formed thoughts.
Shadows danced like devils in the fledgling light, threading their blood-tipped fingers through the ether. I blinked, and they shifted into human shapes, white-cloaked and twisted by their own self-mutilation. Their faces swam close. Their lidless eyes studied me, and then they turned to their labors, selecting the most efficient tools to deliver the purest pain.
I lost my numbers. They were all I’d had left.
Now, there was nothing left, but screams.
****
I woke to the sound of my heart struggling in my chest. It fluttered, then spasmed, and took a wobbling beat. Was it grappling with the shock of so much pain, or was the crumbling man back? I couldn’t remember his name.
I pried my heavy eyelids open, and there he was, standing beside me. His innocuous gaze said he wasn’t there to harm me. I guessed he wasn’t there to help me either.
“You have more work to do,” he stated in a matter-of-fact tone. I tried to laugh, but I didn’t have the strength. “I can’t take her to Hotan this way. Clean her up and put her in the Baths.” The room filled with hissing, and the moment slid away.
****
I floated in a warm, tingling place. There were other bodies near me. They floated too. We were boats on a calm and welcoming sea. I was happy there. At peace. It was nice to be by myself and yet not alone. Maybe God had come for me at last, and cast me into his eternal ocean to float, and drift, and forget. It was wonderful until someone reeled me in.
This time I woke on hard stone. The metal table was gone, and I was clothed in a worn, white nightgown. I blinked at the darkness. Pale moonlight passed through a narrow window high on the cell wall. Iron bars closed off the small alcove in which I lay. I sat up, and my head swam. Several barred-off enclosures lined the thick stone walls like a set from a pirate movie. I half expected to see skeletons chained to the walls with rats scurrying through their bones.
Sluggish soul streams drifted through the stone walls of my domicile. I lifted a weak hand to the nearest remnant, but I didn’t have the strength to make contact. The best I got was a quiet muttering, like the fuzzy EVPs that Seth sifted through and discarded after a ghost-hunting expedition. At least, I had my memory back.
I thought about how GTI’s investigations had changed after the two-part release of our presentation on the Cedar Grove Cemetery. Our audio and video evidence had been closely scrutinized and declared genuine by the National Society for Paranormal Research. That, and the underground reports that our team had somehow played a part in the freak weather phenomenon which had shredded the midtown portion of Portsmouth, Virginia, had garnered a lot of attention.
I wondered how different our lives would be had we not chosen to investigate that night. What if we had chosen another location to film in? We would never have run into Edwardia. Would I have still met Grayford some other way? Would he have arranged a chance encounter, and would I have been drawn to him the way I had been during our dire experiences together?
Another question spun to life in my mind. What would have happened if I’d not been there to help close the Hell Gate? Would the world have been overrun by demonic forces? The thought chased a chill up my spine.
For that matter, what would have happened if I hadn’t helped restore the Star Clan’s gate? Would the Magdalenians have found a way to help the vampires lock it down? Would it continue to falter until the magic finally broke? I tried to picture the brutish creatures that belonged to the behavior I’d seen in the pool. It was one thing to be possessed by evil. It was quite another to meet it face to face.
Wood scraped along stone as the door on the far side of the dungeon opened. Rasmus appeared wrapped in a muslin loincloth and nothing else. His condition was not far from the skeletons I’d just pictured. I still couldn’t comprehend the forces that held him together. He kept the connection between our minds closed. For that I was thankful, but we were spliced together in other ways. I could feel his stammering heart inside my own. When he was near, my nerves danced with his tension. If I survived this experience, I hoped our strange acquaintance would be over too.
“Your health has improved.” He ran eyes over my battered body. I looked down to see that angry pink lines had replaced the gashes the Sisters had opened in tidy rows along my arms and legs. The dark purple contusions on my hands and feet were swapped for pale greenish bruises. I ran trembling hands over my face. The swelling had gone down around my eyes and mouth and the bridge of my nose felt straight again.
A sob escaped my dry lips.
“What happened?” Tears burned my eyes.
“The Baths. They are healing springs that flow to this part of the mountain. The Sisters maintain them. It is crucial to their particular brand of worship.”
I crossed my arms over my
body at the mention of the Sisters and their unique ministrations.
“Why?” I choked on the question. “Why do they…inflict such pain?”
“The Sisterhood believes it was Jesus’s suffering that cleansed him and prepared him to sit at the right hand of God. They maintain that it is only through pain that one can reach the level of purity necessary to be welcomed into heaven.”
The horror of his words settled over me, loosening my muscles.
“You have to get me out of here.”
Rasmus stared at me.
“I do not have the key.”
As much as I hated the idea of joining with him again, it was my best way out.
“Translocate me.”
“No.”
“Please!”
“I will take you to Hotan, when the time is right.” His yellowed eyes glowed with calculation.
“They may be able to fix the damage they do to my body, but the damage they do to my mind—” My breath caught. “—might not be fixable.” My body quaked with ragged sobs. I’d worked so hard for the mental health I had. The idea of losing it all here on this forsaken mountain surrounded by fiends was too much to bear.
“You have to save me.” I breathed between hysterical hiccups.
Rasmus turned his head as if weighing something critical.
“Save yourself,” he said finally. His tone wasn’t vicious, rather it sounded almost instructional. “It’s okay to hide a blade down deep,” he whispered, and I pressed my palms into my temples as the connection between our minds opened. I fell into the depths of his thoughts as he rummaged through my head. “That edge is yours alone. Polish it. Sharpen it. Keep it bright.” He wasn’t talking about the White Lady manifestation. He was referring to something else inside me that he could see, but I could not.
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