“And what are you?” snapped Stacey. “You’re nothing but monsters who—”
“Who pay a tithe to hell,” finished Carrie. “Yes, we do. And why? Because appeasement is the only thing that prevents the legions of hell from waging war on all the realms of the living. In this pathetic world of yours, and across all the worlds.” She leaned close, and Stacey could smell a rotting-meat stink on her breath. “That’s the truth that Rhymer won’t tell you. He delights in the songs sung about him and the tall tales you humans tell, but his freedom is bought at what cost? He paints us as evil, tries to make us out to be the villains. But it was his own escape that nearly brought down all the infinite worlds. His arrogance is his greatest crime.”
“He saved my life!”
“Your life?” spat Carrie. “What is your life compared to a billion billion lives? To a trillion worlds? The tithe to hell is so small a price to pay, you should drop to your knees and thank all of the gods of all the worlds that you were chosen as the true savior of the universe. You—you pathetic bitch. We ‘monsters’ killed your girlfriend, but we chose you to be the sacrifice that would save everyone. She’s dead. A waste. Am I supposed to mourn for you? To feel sorry for you?”
Dazed and confused beyond speech, Stacey could find no will left to fight as Carrie dragged her outside, leading her to the Bentley. One of the bodyguards opened the rear door. Cold hands reached out, dragged her into the back.
“Here is the tithe,” said the skinwalker in Carrie. “Try not to let her tears of self-pity drown you.”
There were only two seats in the back, with a paneled elbow rest and divider between them. The other seat was occupied by a heavy older man with salt-and-pepper hair and jowls. His eyes were blue, but watery, almost colorless. She knew she’d seen him before, in the news somewhere. An MP maybe.
Kingdoms, never kings.
The two men in the front seat turned around to look at her. They were both important-looking older men.
“This is the tithe?” asked the driver with an imperious sniff. “How far we have fallen.”
“Please,” Stacey pleaded. “Just let me go.”
Carrie, still lingering in the doorway, said, “I tried to explain the truth to her, but she’s too stupid to listen.”
“It’s always the same with those the Rhymer tries to save,” said the other person in the front seat, an iron-haired man with a military bearing. A general, perhaps. “Some whimpering, simpering bitch who thinks that Prince Charming will protect her from the Big Bad Wolf.” He made a disgusted sound.
“Please, please . . . this doesn’t make sense,” pleaded Stacey. “Why would Rhymer do this?”
“Why would he try to save you?” asked the fat statesman in the backseat with her.
They all laughed. Short, bitter laughs that were entirely without humor.
“We have a word for it,” said the driver. “Actually there’s a word for it in every language throughout all the universes, but they all mean the same thing. It describes people like Rhymer.”
“Tell me,” she begged. “I have to understand.”
“Why . . . he’s a terrorist, my dear,” said the military man. “I thought that was obvious to anyone. He wants to start a war with hell.”
“It wouldn’t be a war,” said Carrie coldly. “Without the tithe . . . it would be fire and slaughter forever.”
They all looked at Stacey as she wept.
“That’s who Thomas the Rhymer is,” said the driver.
Carrie’s mouth wore her vicious, secret little smile as she slammed the door.
9
They left Marfield, turned away from the direction she and Rhymer had come, and headed somewhere else. Stacey sat in stunned silence, staring out at the road for signs. The next listed Balnuaran of Clava. She knew that site and where she was if those burial cairns were only twenty kilometers up the road. They passed the Nairn viaduct, and shortly after that they turned onto the narrow paved road past Balnuaran. A dozen or more tourists milled around between the three cairns in the crisp autumn weather, a few of them in medieval or Druid costumes; but the car rolled on past. To the left lay a farmhouse and outbuildings, and a large brown field full of baled wheels of hay or grass. Another farmhouse went by on the right. A sign read MILTON OF CLAVA, directly after which the road banked left at an acute angle. Instead of turning, the Bentley pulled off to the right, effectively blocking a narrow footpath between low wire fences. It seemed to lead straight into the afternoon sun.
The fat statesman remained where he was until her door had been opened and she’d been led out. Then he came around the nose of the Bentley and stepped in behind her to propel her along the path. The two black-suited men remained with the car, no doubt to keep anyone else from coming along after them.
Stacey knew that she could run. That she should run.
But her legs wouldn’t deviate from the path.
What if it was all true? What if her life was the price that could save so many?
Everyone she ever knew. Everyone in the world.
In . . . all the worlds, if that part was true.
Could she actually run away from that, as Rhymer obviously had? Could she be so selfish? So murderously self-centered?
And yet . . .
Why had Carrie smiled that last little smile?
Who was telling the truth?
What was the truth?
Was there any? Or was this all a two-sided game with no good guys, only bad ones? And her life as the only piece on the board.
Help me, she prayed, mouthing the words but not speaking them. Help me.
But she had no idea to whom her plea was directed.
God—if there was a God—seemed to allow this madness. Did that mean that He was complicit in so much misery?
Of course He is, she thought, scolding herself. People died in pain and misery every minute of every day. All she had to do was google the statistics of rape, child abuse, murder, genocide to know that any god of this world did not care about suffering, pain, and death, or it was part of His indescribable plan.
Was there a point to suffering? Or was it some kind of fucking entertainment?
These thoughts slowed her feet, and the fat statesman gave her arm a sharp jerk.
“Come along, you cow,” he growled.
People were already gathered ahead to the right, half a dozen in a rectangular space where an open gate led onto a path between an eight-foot-tall standing stone that seemed to mark the site and a smaller clump of boulders. On the gradual downhill slope beyond it lay a bowl-like depression in the ground next to the piled rubble of what might once have been a cairn like those back up the road at Balnuaran. A little farther on, but separated by fences, lay more stones and boulders and artificial depressions in the ground. At the low end of the fenced space stood a line of high shrubs and beyond that a stretch of woodland. She glimpsed the glisten of a stream on its far side.
Because the previous event had occurred late at night, Stacey anticipated that nothing would happen here until after dark. Instead, the six people already there spread out into a circle around the central depression—a runnel surrounding a small mound, like a miniature of a Bronze Age hill fort. No one said a word. The clarity and stillness of the afternoon, the matter-of-fact way they all took their places, made it surreal to her. Entranced, she had escaped from this fate last night. Now, fully aware, she might as well have been entranced again. She couldn’t stop it.
“Over here,” said the statesman, taking her arm again. He waddled down into the runnel and then up onto the mound. A cold wind blew across the field.
As he spoke, some of the gathered people snickered.
That seemed strange to Stacey. Even now, even with all this.
No . . . because of all this.
If she was a necessary sacrifice, then why laugh at her? If her death meant that worlds would be safe, shouldn’t these people—these skinwalkers—be weeping for her? Honoring her?
It’s w
hat she would have done.
But their laughs were like Carrie’s secret smile. Wrong and out of place.
The fat statesman pushed her to a spot and then stopped her. “You will take off your clothes and pass naked through the doorway.”
“Why?” she demanded.
“Only a pure sacrifice will do. Clothes are impure. Plastics, metal . . . no. You will be reborn into the fire as naked as you were born into the blood of this world.”
The smiles around her grew brighter. Several of them licked their grinning lips and wrung their hands.
Stacey frowned. “N-no . . .”
“Do it,” said the fat man, “or we will do it for you, and we won’t be gentle.”
She made no move to obey. Instead she looked into his eyes. “Why are you doing this?”
“We told you . . .”
“No. Why this? Why do I need to be naked? I stopped fighting you, so why are you treating me like this? Why are you being so mean?”
His only answer was a lascivious chuckle. Then he reached into the inside breast pocket of his suit coat and drew out a black stone about the size and shape of a large box cutter. It had been polished to a high gloss and sharpened along one side to a wicked razor edge. Like the stone Rhymer had, it was covered with all sorts of markings and symbols. But Rhymer’s wasn’t knifelike, and Stacey thought of primitive knives or adzes from prehistoric sites. She was sure she’d seen such a tool in a museum display somewhere, but now it was here, not on display, and they were going to kill her with it.
“No,” she begged.
“Oh yes,” he said. “You are a cow, but you are a comely cow. Let us see the flesh that will burn. Let us delight in the breasts that will suckle monsters and the loins that will spawn the horrors of hell.”
He darted out a hand and caught her blouse. Stacey cried out in disgust and pulled away, but the man’s grip was strong and buttons flew and cloth tore.
She staggered back, her blouse torn open, her bra and bare midriff exposed to their sight. The eyes of every person in the circle burned with delight at what they saw.
“Tear the rest off,” yelled one of the women.
“Let us see the whore,” cried a hulking man.
“Cut her!” yelled the others. “Let us see the wine of her heart. Cut her . . . cut her!”
They all began to chant for the fat man to strip her. To use his knife to cut her clothes. To slash her face and breasts and limbs. They hopped up and down, punching the air with their fists, eyes ablaze, passion causing red poppies to bloom in their cheeks.
Laughing with them, the fat man advanced on her, one hand clutching as he reached for her, the other slicing the air with awful promise.
Suddenly, it was as if a cold, clean hand reached out of the darkness of her mind and slapped Stacey across the face.
A coven after all.
Just that.
All around her, hearts beating for the love of darkness.
And everything was lies.
She actually staggered back from him as if struck.
But as her foot came down it landed firmly and she crouched, fists clenched, teeth bared, deep understanding catching fire in her mind.
This was the truth. This carnal madness of the moment tore away the cobwebs in her mind.
“You bastards,” she said. “You lied to me.”
They heard her words and for a moment they stared blankly at her, and then they erupted into huge, coarse laughter that scared the birds from the trees.
“This is all a game to you, you sick fuckers.”
The woman who had yelled gave a few seconds of ironic applause. “And the trained monkey squeezes out a real thought.”
Everyone laughed at that.
Stacey spat in her face, but the woman wiped it from her skin and licked her fingers.
“So . . . all of that about Rhymer, that was—what? A joke?”
“Oh, no,” insisted the fat man, “it’s not a joke.”
Stacey hesitated. “But—”
“It’s more delicious this way,” he explained. “The last turn of the knife, so to speak. The ugly truth, the final betrayal, the realization that you came willingly when you really should have tried to run away and find your fabled savior. So nice. Like whipped cream.” He leaned close. “Oh . . . how they scream when they hear that.”
The gathered skinwalkers cackled like crows.
Stacey wheeled around, looking for a line of escape, but the people closed ranks around her.
“And how it must turn the knife even harder in Rhymer,” said the fat man. “To know that those he fails to save die either hating and damning him or calling for his help, and he is always too late.”
“Too late!” chanted the crowd.
“Year after year, century after century, too late.” The fat man squeezed his crotch as a wave of erotic joy flushed through him. “His pain is so delicious. So . . . very delicious.”
“You are monsters,” said Stacey softly. “Everything Rhymer said—all of it—was true. You are a coven of monsters.”
“Monsters, monsters, monsters,” they chanted, laughing and fondling themselves.
The fat man guffawed and held his trembling belly as he laughed. “I wish you had seen it, girl,” he said. “When he realized that we were already in that town. When he saw that we were already in the restaurant. He turned as white as a sheet and ran—actually ran—from there. Your hero. Failed once again. The last we saw of him was his back as he ran for his life, leaving you, my dear, to . . . us.”
And with that he lunged at her with the stone. For all his bulk, the man was terrifyingly fast. Stacey flung herself backward but the edge of the sacred stone drew a red line across the tops of both breasts. Beads of red blood bulged from the cuts and then spilled down, following the curves of her breasts, staining her torn blouse, falling onto the ground.
The crowd cheered wildly.
“Cut her again!” screeched a reed-thin man dressed in a postman’s uniform.
The fat man laughed and raised his stone. Stacey tried to back away, but the crowd was a solid ring and they forced her toward him.
“Cut her! Cut her!”
Stacey realized that this was it, that she was going to die. Even with all that had happened since last night she’d never quite accepted the absolute reality of her death. Or its absolute imminence.
The stone knife slashed through the air, inches away, and she saw strands of her hair flutter in the breeze. The fat man was circling her, closing the distance with each pass. Cut after cut whistled through the air and she felt lines of molten heat erupt along her back and arms. Blood ran like rivers.
“Cut her! Cut her!”
The chant filled the air.
The fat man grinned like a ghoul as he closed in. Behind him the air began to shimmer with green fairy lights.
“Cut her! Cut her!”
Stacey braced herself, shifting her weight to the balls of her feet, ready to run, ready to spring. Ready to fight. Ready to do anything but let him butcher her without at least crippling the bastard. She was determined to take his eyes with her. If she had to die, then fuck it. Let them pay for it.
“Cut her! Cut her!”
Stacey timed herself to his next swing, and then she ducked low and snatched up a rock, rose, pivoted, and hurled it with all her strength.
It struck the fat man on the shoulder as he was raising his weapon and then ricocheted off and struck the postman in the mouth. He staggered back, spitting teeth.
The crowd laughed at that, too.
With a sinking heart she realized that they were used to their victims struggling. Worse, they enjoyed it.
The wall of green light intensified, blocking out part of the circle of skinwalkers. Its presence cut down on the amount of maneuvering room she had. She was barely able to stay away from the killer as it was, but as the wall strengthened and grew, Stacey knew that sooner or later she would fall beneath the knife or be forced through that doorway.<
br />
The fat statesman slashed at her again, and she dodged, but as she did so she realized that he could have cut her. She stumbled away, confused. Surely he wasn’t showing her mercy . . .
As he stalked her, the fat man began speaking some words and phrases in a language she didn’t know, which sounded like a made-up form of Latin. With each word the shimmering light flared and grew.
He must have seen the look of realization in her eyes. He said, “That’s right, we won’t kill you here. But we will lap your blood.” His tongue waggled obscenely.
She was a tithe to hell. Not a blood sacrifice. She was going into the green light alive, not into the ground dead.
The light bathed the whole clearing, painting the faces of everyone there in shades of sickness and unreality. It was like looking at a pack of madmen through night-vision goggles. All green and black and shades of gray.
The fat man raised the blade high over his head.
He opened his mouth to say something else. Perhaps another phrase in that weird language. Maybe another taunt.
Whatever it was, though, would never be spoken.
Not in this world.
Something whipped past Stacey’s ear and for a split second she thought it was a wasp. It hummed, high and sharp.
Then she stared with slack-jawed shock at the thing sticking out from between the fat man’s teeth. Long and slender, with brown feathers quivering at the end.
An arrow.
The fat man took a slow, wandering sideways step and turned away from Stacey, revealing the barbed spear point standing out from the back of his skull, slick with blood and strands of gore.
The fat man clutched at Stacey, but his body began to shudder violently. His chest bulged outward—she could hear the wet, muffled sound of his ribs and sternum snapping, then the skin stretched and stretched until it burst open in a spray of blood. Something leaped through the bone-broken doorway, a humped and gnarled figure no larger than a child. It landed on two misshapen legs and stared around with eyes that glowed with real inner heat. Its skin looked like a map of veins and musculature, like some grotesque subject of dissection in a medical school. But it was alive and filled with hate. Intelligence burned in those hot eyes.
Dark Duets Page 18
