by Hart, Stella
In order to reach the kitchens, I had to pass by the long hall which led to the Great Room, where the Joinings were held. By now, this week’s ritual had begun, and I could hear faint moans and grunts of pleasure coming from behind the large double doors at the end of the hall.
I crept a little closer, wondering what it would be like to be in there. I also wondered how the ritual would be different once I was married. Would I love my husband and want him to punish me for all my sins as we made love in there? Or would I end up like Elena, who seemed to dislike her husband and the things he did to her?
A memory suddenly flashed in my mind. An old one. It was the day of New Eden’s establishment, before the carnage broke out. Elena had told me in all her childish naïveté that I would marry a boy I met that very day.
A small smile played on my lips as I remembered the boy. Mason. He was nice. Nice-looking, too. Probably one of the most attractive boys I’d ever seen.
My stomach began to twist and ache as it occurred to me with a pang of sadness that Mason would’ve perished along with his family in the flames of the Great Reckoning. They weren’t religious, but I still liked them. Especially Mason. He’d promised me he would come and visit me when I was eighteen so we could be friends.
I sighed. That would never happen now. I would never see the man he would’ve become, and I would never know what might’ve happened between us as adults.
A scream ripped through the enormous doors of the Great Room, followed by a long, shuddering masculine groan. I jumped with fright and scurried away toward the kitchens. I wasn’t supposed to eavesdrop on the Joining rituals.
I stopped a moment later. The ache in my abdomen had intensified, spreading down to my lower belly, and I grimaced and doubled over, clutching at my stomach. The chocolate cake seemed to have disagreed with my system. Perhaps that was my punishment for eating it.
I headed for a toilet and carefully lit a candle before hiking up my dress and pulling down my underwear. Something strange immediately caught my eye, and I let out a gasp. It wasn’t the cake that had caused the cramps. It was this. Little red spots on the white cotton of my underwear.
Blood.
I chewed on my bottom lip, flooded with a mixture of trepidation and excitement. It was happening. I was no longer a girl.
I had finally become a woman.
4
Mason
September 12th, 2010
New York City
“Mr. Ashwood?”
I glanced up at Vlada, my secretary. “Yeah?”
“You asked me to remind you about today’s meetings when I got in. The first is at two with Barnett, and the next is a dinner meeting with the Gallaghers starting at six-thirty at the fusion place on West 51st.”
“Cool. Got it.” I took my legs off my desk and sat up straight in my chair. I’d just finished my coffee, so it was probably time for me to at least pretend to get some work done.
Vlada held out a brown paper bag. “Oh, and before I forget, here you go, boss.”
She dumped the bag on my desk, then winked and sashayed out of the room, silky black hair swinging from side to side as she went. I could see two guys out on the floor staring at her ass before casting envious gazes toward my door.
Before coming to work for me, Vlada was a model, so everyone always assumed we were fucking. I couldn’t be bothered to deny the rumors, but they had no basis in reality whatsoever. I wasn’t in the habit of hiring women I wanted to fuck, because I’d seen a fair few friends screw themselves over that way. My secretary was hot, but not my type in the slightest. She was good at her job and we got along well. That was all I asked for.
I tore the bag open to find the sweet doughy treats within. Leaning back in my chair again, I sank my teeth into a warm beignet. Vlada picked these up for me every morning from some little bakery in whatever hipster neighborhood she lived in. They were passable. Nowhere near as good as the proper ones from New Orleans, but they were a nice reminder all the same.
As much as I’d hated visiting Louisiana as a child, I had to admit it kinda grew on me in the end. My mom was born and raised in the state, so I’d practically spent half my childhood there thanks to her dragging me along on vacations at every opportunity. Now my parents had retired down there after building their lucrative New York property financing company from the ground up over the last thirty years.
They wanted to keep it in the family, so I ran it in the city along with my three siblings, James, Ella and Andrew. The golden children. They were all slightly older than me and vastly more mature; I could admit that. While I’d been fucking around as a teenager and getting myself expelled from school after school, they’d been learning to play piano and volunteering for charities.
I got there eventually, though. When I went to college (after getting in by the skin of my teeth) I discovered I actually enjoyed commerce studies. I wound up here after graduation, and surprisingly, I didn’t fuck it all up like my siblings probably expected.
Sure, I had lazy days, but overall it was a pretty decent gig. I enjoyed it for the most part, and it meant I would actually earn the multi-million dollar trust fund my parents set up for me and my siblings many years ago. That was more than I could say for a lot of the other lazy-ass rich kids I went to school with.
As I chewed the last bite of the beignet and licked the powdered sugar off my fingers, I checked my emails. Nothing particularly interesting. Just the regular crap. To make it interesting, I had a little game I played with myself where I would try to see how much ridiculous corporate bullshit I could fit into one email before the recipient got suspicious.
I typed something to a nearby real estate firm about ‘touching base’ and ‘synergizing’, and then I reached into the brown bag and pulled out another beignet. Vlada always bought me three, because one was never enough for breakfast.
A faint smile crossed my face as I remembered the first time I‘d ever truly appreciated the little sweets. It was a sweltering summer day in Vermilion Parish at some old plantation property my parents had dragged me to. They said they wanted to visit an old business associate, but holy shit… things got fucking weird when we arrived.
Apparently the dude they knew had turned into some sort of doomsday preacher in the years since they last saw him. I guess at the time, the millennium was approaching and a lot of people were freaking out about that kind of shit, thanks to the media stirring up concerns over the Y2K bug and the supposed end of the world. The country folk in Vermilion were no different in their worries.
This so-called prophet guy, Jacob Chastain, had spent a few years working them all up into a lather over the idea of an apocalypse, and they’d been enraptured by his words from the second he ‘confirmed’ their worst fear: the end was nigh.
That was what my parents had gathered from the short time they spent there chatting to Chastain’s congregation. I’d barely listened because I was so fucking bored, not to mention the fact I was sweating my ass off and my stomach was growling like mad. Then that cute little girl came up and saved me from my hunger and boredom. Jolie with the green eyes. The prophet’s daughter.
I still thought about that kid from time to time. Not in a weird way, like I was attracted to her or anything. Fuck no. I mean, sure, I promised her I’d go back for her when she was eighteen, but that was just some dumb shit I said to make her feel better because she obviously had a little crush on me. I figured she’d forget all about it within a few days, as kids tended to do.
When I thought about her, I simply hoped she was okay, given what happened not long after my parents and I left the Chastain ranch that day. It was all kinds of fucked up.
With a frown, I typed ‘New Eden Ranch’ into Google. That was the new name of the place. I liked to search for it online occasionally, just to see if there was any new information about what happened down there.
The first thing that came up was a news article from August last year. Ten years on and still no leads in church terrorist atta
ck.
A bunch of armed men had shown up at the spiritual retreat that hot afternoon. They knocked out Jacob Chastain, and then they shot and killed around seventy women and teenagers in the very same white marquee I’d stood in with my parents only moments before. Fucking horrifying shit. The stuff of nightmares.
Aside from Chastain, the men of the church had allegedly been inside the mansion having some sort of prayer meeting, which saved them from the shooting. They said the younger kids were all playing way down the back of the property, so they’d fortunately avoided the attack as well.
Everyone else was killed. By the time the cops finally got out there, the gunmen were all gone, and the front of the property was littered with bodies.
The lengthy response time from the police had been criticized by many over the years, but apparently they’d been busy helping out with some huge fire caused by an arsonist in the nearby town of Amiens while the ranch shooting was occurring, so it took a while for them to realize what was happening out there.
To this day, no one knew who carried out the attack, or why. The cops never found anything solid to go on. Jacob Chastain had received a few threats from people in nearby communities who didn’t like his teachings, but none of the people who sent those threats were ever considered to be credible suspects.
I thought about the whole thing from time to time, wondering what would’ve happened if my parents and I stayed longer that day. We might’ve been caught up in the carnage ourselves. The thought made my stomach curdle.
I scrolled down on the search results page. Another article quickly caught my attention. Welcome to New Eden… Or Perhaps Not-So-Welcome: Survivors of shocking Louisiana church massacre form uber-private settlement to cope with tragedy.
This was fucking weird.
After the attack, the church members had obviously been traumatized, but their response had been a little over the top, in my opinion. They’d decided to cut themselves off from the rest of society and live together in some sort of commune out on the Chastain ranch. The kids were all home-schooled out there, the men worked the ranch to produce food or goods to sell or trade, and they generally shunned the rest of the world. Apparently, the church Elders still had semi-regular dealings with outside society, but the other members mostly kept to themselves.
That wasn’t the weird part, though.
The truly weird thing was the way they treated the girls and women of the church. From what I’d heard, the female members weren’t allowed to have any contact with the outside world whatsoever, and visitors to the ranch very rarely saw them. I guess they had to stay inside to cook, clean and raise babies or whatever, but still, it was strange that no one ever really saw them. On top of that, those who were lucky enough to catch a glimpse of the girls and women had been warned by the men that they weren’t allowed to speak to them.
Ever.
Aside from that, a lot of the stuff I knew about the Path of the Covenant cult stemmed from rumors, because the group didn’t accept visitors very often. A few anthropologists had been allowed to visit and study the place for short periods, however, and the government had also sent the odd investigator in to make sure the cult wasn’t doing anything illegal. The reports always came back saying the same thing: the people were happy and healthy, and their taxes were always paid. But we all knew what the fucking government was like. As long as they got money, they didn’t really give a flying fuck.
A couple of men had left the commune over the years, and they didn’t have a bad word to say about the place. Most people took this to mean everything out there was fine, but to be honest, it had always struck me as a bit odd how silent these ex-members were. People wanted to know what went on out there at the compound, so the men who left had been offered a shit-ton of cash to give interviews about it, but instead of taking it, they’d simply stated that there was nothing to tell and faded into obscurity. Every single one of them.
I closed the web browser with a sigh and returned to my boring emails. Then I paused, my fingers hovering over the keyboard. Oh, shit. I just had the best fucking idea.
If such a place as hell existed, I was definitely going straight there when I died.
A slow grin spread over my face as I picked up my phone and called my best friend from college, Thad.
“What’s up?” he said. He sounded a little drunk, even though it was barely nine in the morning.
“It’s me. I wanna run something by you.”
“This better not be another job offer. You know I’m happy doing sweet fuck-all.”
I rolled my eyes. As much as I loved the guy, Thad was one of those aforementioned lazy-ass rich kids with a trust fund big enough to make the Sultan of Brunei cry. He only got into college because his parents were alumni members who donated a million bucks to build them a new library. Now he spent his days drinking and screwing aspiring actresses and models. I wasn’t much better, but at least I had a job.
“Hey, if you ever decide to start acting like a regular twenty-seven-year-old, you know you can give me a call. There’s always a shitty mailroom position here with your name on it,” I said. “But that’s not why I called. I might have a new lead.”
“Yeah?” I could practically hear his ears pricking up. He knew exactly what I was talking about despite my vague wording.
We’d had a sort of friendly rivalry going on since our college days. It began when I bet Thad a thousand bucks he couldn’t score with some annoying chick in one of our classes who always went on and on about how she planned on staying a virgin until marriage. I wasn’t entirely serious about the bet; I was just being an idiotic nineteen-year-old. But Thad took it seriously and actually managed to sleep with her. Multiple times.
After that, it slowly evolved into a twisted game. We’d try and score with supposedly-unavailable women, and if and when we succeeded, we’d win that round. The more unattainable the woman was, the better. The bets kept going up in value, too.
We both knew it was fucking juvenile, and the women would probably kill us if they found out, but we were hooked. It was the thrill of the hunt. We always wanted to one-up each other, too, so as long as we were single and there were unattainable women out there, we’d keep the game going.
I lost the last round. Terribly. Thad had told me about some prissy actress he wanted, and I had it on good authority she was secretly married, hated Thad, and wouldn’t touch him with a ten foot pole even if she was single. I was so sure she would never go for him that I bet him two hundred and fifty grand along with the upstate lake house I’d been painstakingly renovating whenever I had time off.
He fucked her within a week.
I didn’t care about the money, but I wanted that fucking lake house back.
“You remember how I told you about that weird cult place I went to when I was a kid?”
“Refresh my memory.” Thad yawned.
“Louisiana. Doomsday preacher and his church. My parents and I were there the day it got attacked, only an hour or so before all the shit went down.”
“Oh, yeah. Crazy shit. So what about it?”
“You know how they live now, right?”
“Yup.”
“So then you know they won’t let outsiders near their women.”
Thad groaned. “Oh, fuck no, man. You can’t be serious. You’re gonna try and bang some Amish chick?”
“They aren’t Amish, dumbass.”
“Eh, whatever.”
“Just think about it. These women are about as unattainable as it gets.”
“I know, but it’s not gonna happen. Those people are extremist freaks. I’ve heard they get up to some crazy dark shit out there,” he said.
“Heard from who?”
“Vlada. She studied a sociology course while she was modeling. She told me she did some sort of assignment on sequestered religious groups in the South.”
I frowned. “She did? How the hell do you know that?”
Even I didn’t know that, and I worked with the damn
woman nearly every day.
Thad cleared his throat. “Uh…”
I groaned. “Oh, for fuck’s sake. You’ve been screwing my secretary?”
I could practically see the sheepish grin curling up his lips. “Sorry.”
I rolled my eyes. “Just tell me what she told you about them. The more info I have on these people, the better.”
“Ask her yourself. I have to go in a minute. But seriously, drop this stupid idea of yours. Even you can’t make it happen.”
“We’ll see. How does a million dollars sound?”
He was silent for a moment. “You’re that sure you can pull this shit off?”
“Yep. And I want my lake house back. That’s part of the deal too.”
He snickered. “Fine. You’re on. And just to be extra nice, I won’t give you a time limit on this one. You can take as long as you want to try and screw one of these chicks. But let me tell you, man. You won’t get it done.”
“Like I said: we’ll see.”
I ended the call and buzzed Vlada. She arrived a moment later, eyebrows raised. “What can I do for you?” she asked.
I pointed to a chair across from my desk. “Come in and sit down. Shut the door behind you.”
Her brows dipped in a frown. “Is everything okay?”
“Yeah. I was just talking to Thad Klein.”
Vlada’s eyes widened. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Ashwood. Please don’t fire me. I just—”
I waved a hand at her. “I don’t care that you slept with him. I want to talk to you about something else.”
She sat down quietly with her hands folded across her lap, waiting for me to go on.
“Thad said you studied cults and similar stuff at college.”
