“It’s a sabbat,” Theresa said. Her knuckles went white as she clenched the steering wheel. “Of course this would be the weekend to do it. It’s the only time a pack of outsiders would arrive in a town this small and stay unnoticed.”
Laura touched Theresa’s shoulder. Theresa tensed.
“We’ll save him,” Laura said. “Don’t worry.”
Theresa nodded her head. Tears welled in her eyes and she swiped them away with the back of her hand. “Okay. We will. We have to.”
Short of the old farmhouse, Theresa doused the lights and slowed the SUV to a crawl.
“Everyone’s out back,” Aileen said. “At least they were when I escaped.”
Red flames from the tiki torches backlit the house. Above them, misty white coils swirled up into the darkness to form a shifting, amorphous cone. The tip of the cone swept off in the direction of the fairgrounds.
A wall of disconcerting emotions passed through Laura like a cold front. Confusion. .Terror. Weakness. She planted her head against the seatback like the impact had been physical.
“The children are still here,” she said. “Whatever the witches are doing is draining the life out of them.”
The Explorer rolled to a stop at the end of the driveway. A large wooden X was planted near the roadside. Dalton was tied to it, spread-eagle and inverted. A dried waterfall of blood ran from his groin down the front of his body to his neck. His bloody, tongue-less mouth hung open, as if gaping in shock at his circumstances. If it hadn’t been so gruesome, Laura would have cheered.
“I heard them say they would not kill women,” Theresa said, staring at the dead man. “But now I’m not so sure that still holds.”
“We’ll go in through the woods,” Laura said. “I know the way.”
She directed Theresa to the spot behind the barn where she’d parked the night she eavesdropped on the witches. Red light flickered through the trees from far off. Above the canopy, the misty, white cones trailed off to the west.
Laura tucked the pistol into the back of her waistband. She watched Theresa get out of the van, grab her head and wince in pain.
“Are you all right?”
“Fine,” Theresa said through clenched teeth.
“Doesn’t seem like it,” Laura said. “We can take it from here.”
“I’m getting my son back,” Theresa said.
“Then let’s do it,” Laura said.
She led them through the woods. The closer Laura got to the house, the stronger she felt the presence of children, like some great, growing static charge. They felt trapped and confused. Most of all they felt tired, a bone-weary exhaustion as the sabbat drained the life from them. If this wasn’t ended soon, they would surrender, pull the stopper and let their essence drain away.
“I didn’t know anything about this,” Aileen whispered to Laura. “You must believe me.”
Laura didn’t answer. Maybe the witches had dosed her with a milder form of what they’d given Bo and Caroline. Laura was sure that Dalton had dosed her with something. But it didn’t matter now. All that mattered was stopping the sabbat before it was too late.
They knelt near the edge of the woods. Several torches lit the proceedings in a ruddy glow. The children lay in a circle, like flower petals around the central event. The visiting witches formed an inner circle. At its center stood three witches around the wooden U, with Dustin and a pale girl in white tied to the posts. A vulture with a bright-red beak perched between them.
“Dustin!” Theresa said. She rose to run forward and Aileen dragged her back down. “It’s Dustin!”
“And you won’t save him like that,” Aileen said. “You’d never get to him.”
Laura pressed both palms against her forehead and moaned. “Their pain is so…strong.”
Theresa tore her eyes off her son and looked at Laura. “Does your Triple S always work like this?”
“No, never. It’s subtle. This is a hammer. Even my psychic connection with the Galaxy Farm ghosts wasn’t this overwhelming.”
“I noticed at the day care,” Theresa said, “the kids ignored me, but they all looked to you. They actually looked for you. They anticipated your arrival at the doorway. And you felt them before you entered the building. This spell the witches have them under, I think it tunes them in to your ability better, opens them up for communication.”
“I just get vague feelings. They’re tired and disoriented,” Laura said. “I can’t hear them.”
“Maybe we can get them to hear you,” Aileen said. “In white magic there’s a ritual—”
A scream like shearing steel rent the air above them. The three women instinctively ducked. The vulture launched, made a low pass around the sabbat ring and returned to the crossbeam of the U. It stretched its wings, flapped and refolded them. The torchlight lit its eyes ruby red.
“Is that what you saw in your dream?” Laura asked Theresa.
She concentrated on the bird, then shook her head.
From the center of the circle, the mayor pulled back her hood.
“My God,” Laura said. “You’re right. It’s the mayor!”
Chapter Fifty-Five
“Gathered sisters, we convene to celebrate the offertory marriage of these innocents, to free the avenging angel who will right all wrongs, past, present and future.”
The coven extended its arms towards the center of the circle. The mayor touched the shoulders of Dustin and the pale girl. They didn’t flinch.
“Speak now for these two who are silent. Do you voluntarily join in eternal union?”
“They do,” the coven answered.
“And offer your lives, your souls and your essence to purge the world of evil?”
“They do.”
Theresa’s hands ground leaves into dust in frustration. The mayor turned to face the circle. She raised her hands over her head.
“Great longarex spirit, we gather to free you, that you may roam the earth, both night and day, and purge it of our enemies.”
The circle of witches joined hands and raised them to the night sky. The vulture squawked and fluttered its wings. The bonfire surged. The mayor bent and scooped Dalton’s severed testes from a bowl on the ground. She offered them to the vulture.
“We offer the essence of our prey.”
The vulture’s skin split down its breastbone and exposed gray leather beneath. It reached in with its wings and pulled back the feathered skin. The misshapen head of the longarex snaked out from the neck. It shrugged the vulture skin away like a shed robe. The skin hung across the crossbeam, shapeless as a desiccated carcass. The longarex spread its hairless wings with a flap.
It cocked one eye at the offering in the mayor’s outstretched hands. It smiled. The far tip of one wing swept down, pierced the testes and scooped them from the mayor’s palm. The longarex popped them into its mouth like marshmallows on a stick and then swallowed them whole. The creature rolled its eyes back in ecstasy. A shudder rippled from its feet up and out to the tip of its wings, and the longarex swelled to twice the size of a man. Its wingspan stretched out to the edge of the witches’ circle.
Theresa gripped Laura’s arm. “That’s what I saw in the vision.”
“With the power of the souls of the children delivered,” the mayor said, “go forth and feed.” She pointed to the two children at the uprights. “Your final offering, your protection from the sun, awaits your return.”
The white, wispy fog around the circle rushed towards the longarex. With a great breath, it inhaled the vapors.
“How can this be happening at my home?” Aileen said to herself.
The longarex launched itself into the air like a great pterodactyl. It hovered over the crowd and screeched. Coyotes from atop the hill yelped in fear, like an echo. The torches burst into a brighter, higher flame. The longarex nosed westward and flew off into the darkness.
Chapter Fifty-Six
Sheriff Sam barely noticed the van that passed him as he ran from the Lifeflight ch
opper through the parking lot. The conflagration at the main gate had flamed up out of nowhere.
“Winston!” he yelled into his radio. “Winston, where are you?”
He skidded to a stop at the edge of the searing flames. They were bright red, stoplight red, like no fire he had ever seen, a completely uniform curtain of flame. He made out a backlit lump at the base of the fire where the main gate stood. He ran forward to pull Big Mac from the flames, then stopped as he realized the futility of rescuing half of a dead body. The flames had cauterized his open body cavity into a charred wall, like you could have stood Big Mac upright on the stump. He shielded his face from the heat and backed away.
“Abernathy? Winston?” he called into the radio. Most of his force was in there. Someone had to respond.
“Sheriff, it’s Winston. What’s going on out there?”
“A fire is blocking the entrance. It came out of nowhere.”
“It’s all around us. The whole fairgrounds.”
Sam switched over to the fire department frequency. “Moultrie Fire, this is Sheriff Barnsdale. I need every unit to the fairgrounds now. Now!”
For an interminable few seconds there was no answer. He was about to rekey the mic when the radio crackled at him. “Uh, Sheriff, what’s happening?”
“NOW!” he shouted and switched back to the police frequency. “Winston, grasp a carny truck and start ferrying people out of there. Just blast fast through the flames and out the front gate.”
“Gate’s locked, Sheriff. It’s too hot to get close and unlock it.”
“Locked? Who the hell… Well, then just make the first run empty through the gate. A big enough vehicle will snap it in two. Make it happen.”
“Roger that.”
The sirens of the Moultrie Fire Department spooled up in the distance.
Bentley came running up behind Sam. “We are preflighted and ready to crank. Casualties?”
Sam looked at Big Mac. “One fatality. I don’t see anyone else hurt out here. Inside, no idea.”
“What is this?”
“No idea there either.”
He didn’t have one. The more he watched the strange flames, the stranger they became. They looked too red to be real, and they felt hotter than a magnesium flare, but they did not spread. Tents on the other side of the fence should have burst into flames. The dried grass around the parking lot should have been a blazing low-level sea. But the flames kept their place.
Like a guard, he thought.
A diesel truck roared to life inside the fairgrounds, a big one, by the sound of it.
“Sheriff,” Winston said over the radio. “One of the carnies is going to roll his big rig through the gate and clear us a path.” In the background, the voices of other deputies called to the crowd to stay calm and move to the center of the fairgrounds. “You clear on the other side?”
“Let her rip!”
Sam couldn’t see a thing. The big rig roared like a dinosaur beyond the flames and its horn bellowed a distant warning. The growling engine wound up as the truck gathered speed. The horn blasted one more time, close to the gate.
An explosion rocked the ground. A ball of orange fire mushroomed up from above the tips of the wall of flames. The air filled with screams.
“Winston! Report!”
“Holy shit! It never hit the fence. The whole rig blew up! The wall…it…shit, it reached out. Sent a funnel of fire at the truck and the damn thing went up like a goddamn Roman candle.”
“Jesus Christ,” Bentley whispered.
A squadron of fire trucks barreled into the parking lot.
“Get everyone the hell away from the fences,” Sam said. “We’ll come and get you.”
Sam ran to the passenger door of the first fire truck, one of the town’s two pumper units. Chief Davis sat inside.
“What happened here?”
“Nothing I can explain,” Sam said. “Can you put it out?”
“The fire hasn’t been lit that we can’t put out.”
Sam leapt from the truck and let the chief do his job. The two pumpers set up on either side of the main entrance. In what seemed like seconds, the well-trained crews in bright-yellow gear had fat, flat gray hoses snaking towards the fire. They flinched at the heat, but held their ground, ready.
“Douse it,” the chief called.
Firefighters opened the valves and the hoses plumped like cooking sausages. Hose men braced for the kick and cracked their nozzles. Four torrents of water flew towards the flames.
They never made it. The water dematerialized before it reached the fire. Not a petering out disappearance, the solid stream of water got six feet from the fire and vaporized into steam.
The chief’s jaw dropped. He ran to the men.
“Concentrate that water,” he yelled. “One pinpoint, dead center of the gate.”
The four men angled the streams in. One by one, the streams joined to blast the same point in the ring of fire.
The wall fired back. Four tubes of flame shot back along the precise route of the hose streams. Water vanished before the onslaught and the flames struck the firemen like four burning arrows.
The men did not just catch fire. They erupted into flames from inside their suits. Fire shot out of pant legs and from the sleeves of their heavy coats. Faces turned to balls of flame, displayed through their clear protective masks like glassed-in fireplaces. The chief screamed and spontaneously combusted, exploding into a hundred burning fragments.
Hoses dropped from the firefighters’ burning hands. Flames lit the gray tubes like fuses and sizzled back to the pumper trucks. Firefighters grabbed axes and chopped the burning hoses in two. The flames died at the break.
Sam and Bentley stared in stunned disbelief as firefighters played extinguishers over the charred, still bodies of their compatriots.
“Sheriff?” Winston crackled over the radio. “Is it working?”
Sam closed his eyes and keyed the mic. “Stand by, Winston.”
Chapter Fifty-Seven
With the Chief and four men dead, the remaining firefighters fell behind the pumpers, though after having seen flames that could hunt them down individually, the safety of even that location was dubious.
“There are thousands of people in there,” Sam said. “We have got to get them out.”
A ladder truck sat parked next to the paramedics at the edge of the parking lot.
“We can pull that ladder truck close,” Sam said, “stretch the ladder out over the flames with a rope on the far end.”
“You saw what the flames did to those firefighters,” Bentley said. “Whoever went out on the ladder would be a marshmallow on a stick.”
“Then Lifeflight,” Sam said. “Fire it up and we’ll airlift people out.”
“How? There’s not enough open space to land in there. Even if we could, I couldn’t take more than two or three at a time. It would take forever. On top of it all, there’s the risk of being barbequed while loaded with a few thousand pounds of jet fuel. I’ve done some crazy shit back in my gunship days, but your mission’s suicide.”
A screech came from above and beyond the parking lot, a grating noise like tearing metal. A dark shape flew over and passed the two men, a great shadow with substance. Leathery wings flapped fast as a flag in a hurricane. It banked at the fence and hovered over the center of the fairgrounds. The firelight lit the longarex in red. A chorus of screams filled the air.
“What the hell do you people breed down here?” Bentley said.
The longarex cocked its hairless head. It dived face first, straight down behind the curtain of fire, and then shot back straight up. Clamped in its rear talons hung the body of a man.
The longarex wheeled over to the trees on the edge of the fairgrounds and wedged the body in the top branches. Its head darted at the man’s chest and tore out a chunk of flesh it then swallowed whole. It launched from the tree for another attack.
Sam pulled his gun and took aim with both hands as the longarex
closed on the trapped people. He fired round after round, certain that he hit the creature at the ever-closing range. The bullets had no effect. The longarex looked sideways at Sam, and he swore that it smiled.
From inside the ring rose the sounds of a human stampede. Yelling, screaming, feet pounding the ground. Gunfire erupted from the deputies trapped within. The longarex dipped below the tips of the fence of flame and reappeared with Deputy Abernathy in its grip. His arms were missing. Sam holstered his gun and turned to Bentley.
“Get that helicopter started. We need to take this fight to it.”
Bentley ran back to the Lifeflight bird. Sam’s cell phone rang. It was Theresa.
“Sam, the bat, the wings in my visions. I know what it is.”
“So do I. It’s attacking the fairgrounds. Where did it come from?”
“It’s supernatural, summoned by the witches.”
At this point nothing seemed implausible. “How do I kill it?”
“We’ll work at that on our end,” she said. He didn’t know what that meant. “Daylight will kill it.”
“Daylight’s a long way away,” Sam said. “What else have you got?”
Silence.
“We’ll kill it,” Sam said.
“Be careful.”
He hung up. He wasn’t sure “careful” was going to be part of the plan.
Lifeflight’s anticollision lights flashed red and the helicopter’s jet turbine wailed to life. The onboard medic stood away from the aircraft’s nose, next to his medical supplies. Apparently Bentley knew the medic’s skills would be needed on the ground when this was all over. The rotors began a slow turn.
Sam dashed to his cruiser and popped the trunk. He pulled out two TASERs and put one in each side cargo pocket. He grabbed an assault rifle and a spare magazine, and ran to the helicopter.
The blades were up to full, deafening speed. Sam held his sheriff’s hat flat to his head and ducked against the onrushing wind. He passed the medic, who slapped a headset against Sam’s midsection. Sam grabbed it like a running back and jumped into the helicopter’s open side door. He hooked the headset around the back of his head and tucked his hat between the seats. Bentley turned from the pilot’s seat and pointed to a comm connector hanging from the ceiling.
Dark Vengeance Page 19
