Authors: Angela Alsaleem
When would it be over for them? Soon, she hoped. If for no other reason than to let Libitina rest.
A door seemed to materialize out of the darkness and Libitina stopped, stared, then laughed and clapped her hands, letting Camilla go. An urge to flee back to her bridegroom surged through her, almost unbearable. She stared at the smoky cord and realized that something was different. The green cord. It was gone, gone from the moment the green-eyed witch had been stabbed. She didn’t get to taste her after all. A moment of regret seized Camilla and then she remembered the taste of Rory’s male half, remembered how alive she’d felt while sucking its breath, and no longer cared about Aludra.
“No,” Libitina said behind her.
She turned. Libitina pulled at the door. She pounded her fists against it. The door made a booming sound, deep and solid.
“It won’t open,” she yelled. “We’re stuck.”
Camilla pushed on it. She wrapped her crimson fingers around the edge of the door and yanked. It wouldn’t move. “She opened it before. How did she open it?” Libitina waved her candle around, searching every corner, every edge, feeling and pushing every jutting stone. “There’s got to be a secret way to open it. Something we just don’t see yet. Something.” She kept looking.
A scuffing sound drifted from behind them. Camilla turned around again, forgetting Libitina. Two men wandered into the reach of the candle’s flickering light. Their eyes widened as they took in Camilla’s terrible form, her torn face, bleeding body, crooked spine.
“It’s her,” they said in unison. They huffed and stood taller. Camilla got the impression they were building their courage. “Okay,” one of them said, and they charged.
Libitina screamed as one of the guards grabbed her hair and yanked her away from the door. Pride filled Camilla when her companion swung the lit candle into the robed man’s face, burning him, while plunging the hallway into darkness. He screamed and backed away holding his cheek. The one who grabbed Camilla began to shiver when she turned and faced him, fixing her eyeless face on his. She could see all this in the dark. Libitina walked as one blind, arms splayed before her, fingers stuttering against the stone wall.
“No,” he murmured. “Nononononono.” He shook his head back and forth, not letting go, though his knees went weak. He began to sink to the floor. She caught him. The other man continued screaming and clutching at his burned face.
She lifted the man to his feet and placed her mouth over his. She breathed in, feeling the rush of his life fill her. It didn’t take long to drain him. He hadn’t done anything wrong, had no spirits out for vengeance, and though she felt alive taking his life force, there was something nasty about it too, something foul. She didn’t like the tainted feeling his clean life force had. But she could think of no other way to get rid of these two.
Once the man was drained, he collapsed to the ground, silent, staring, rocking back and forth, alone in his mind for the rest of his life.
She did the same to the second man, stopping his screaming with her kiss. Again, the pollution. Unclean. Fresh, but unclean. Alive, but dead. She wouldn’t do this again, only did it this time to stop them from taking Libitina and herself back to the ritual.
The ritual. She still wanted to feel her other half, still longed for him, felt him getting further and further away from her.
* * *
Something screamed in the distance, making Libitina feel cold all over. She had a moment to realize that
something
was the right word here because it certainly wasn’t
someone.
She shivered, felt close to tears again. The scream sounded painful, sounded angrier than anything she’d ever heard.
“What the hell is that?” she yelled. She tried to hide in the dark, clutching her ears, the extinguished candle still clenched in her hand.
Blinding light hurtled from the darkness but didn’t illuminate the tunnel they were in. The screaming intensified, traveling closer with the light. When Libitina thought she would no longer be able to stand it, it passed beyond them, slammed into the door behind her, knocking it open, warping the metal, and vanishing into the world to wreak unknown havoc.
She touched the door and it slid open on well-oiled, unmelted hinges, whispering to a stop against the rock wall. The cellar in front of her was dark, but less so than the tunnel. She stepped one foot into the room, leaned in, peered around the corner. The staircase she remembered rose to her left, solid, wood. No more stone. She never thought she’d be relieved to see another type of matter. She passed through the doorway and staggered, far more exhausted than she’d realized.
All the days of travel, all the pain she’d gone through in these last moments, everything she’d endured, caught up with her all at once. Too weary to continue. Her thoughts bent toward sleep, focused on it as her new goal. She hoped she could muster enough energy to get out of the manor, gain the protection of the forest surrounding it, and sleep. Even the hard ground would be welcome. Get Camilla out of there and sleep.
She would accomplish that much. She would stop the ritual, stop the spirits from joining the living world. This couldn’t be allowed. For once, she knew in the deepest part of her that, for the first time in her life, she was not fucking up. She was doing the right thing. After all her fuck-ups, after all her years of bad luck, she would finally be redeemed.
“Come on,” she said to Camilla, not bothering to look back before heading up the stairs. The sound of Camilla’s limping footsteps behind her told her that her companion was not far and would remain with her until the end.
* * *
In the dark, Rory came to a dead end. It felt the rock in front of it, above it, to its sides. Nowhere to go. There had to be another way. It turned. There were more lives to feed upon, more spirits to avenge. Too sweet to leave behind. Needed a new body. This one was unclean. Couldn’t shake the dirty, rotting feeling. Felt the maggots in its belly, tore at the flesh, dropped a clump of stinking matter to the cave floor, turned, kept walking.
* * *
Camilla twitched, then turned around, staring intently back the way they had come. “Aludra’s alive,” she whispered. Libitina no longer noticed the reek coming off Camilla, though those empty eyes still unnerved her. She shuddered and turned toward the front door to leave.
But Camilla wasn’t at her side. She was moving toward the stairway they’d just climbed. How could that dead and broken body navigate at all?
“Camilla, we have to leave!” she screamed.
Camilla didn’t turn but continued down the stairs. “Aludra,” she hissed, licking her lips.
“Hey!” Libitina yelled. “We have to go now!” The urgency within her had reached its peak giving her the strength to recall Camilla to their task.
Camilla stopped. Her head rolled back so that she was looking at Libitina upside down. “But she’s still alive.” She gestured down the stairs as if this should be obvious. It was apparent that Camilla thought Libitina simply didn’t understand her role.
The problem was that she did understand. She also knew that if Camilla understood the gravity of their situation, she would forgive Libitina for forcing her onto a different path. They had to get out of the manor now or they would never leave. She knew this in the deepest part of her and had to make Camilla see.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Libitina stood away from the front door, strength she hadn’t known she possessed coming from her depths. And then that voice traveled through her again, used her vocal chords to command. Libitina’s essence had a voice of its own and used it now. “Spirit! I command you. Come to my side.”
Camilla stopped protesting as if she’d been whipped. She climbed the stairs, head hung. The vertebrate in her neck were beginning to poke through her skin.
“We must leave this place, now. There’s no more time.”
With that, Libitina turned and flung open the double doors opposite the bleeding cross.
Bars. Solid bars blocked her in. She grabbed hold of them and shook them back and forth. Nothing. She tried lifting them. Nothing.
“How do we open these?” she muttered.
“There,” Camilla said and pointed to a lever next to the door.
Libitina grunted and ran to the lever. She pulled. It didn’t move. She leaned all her weight on the piece of metal sticking up from the ground, its brass handle glittering in the candlelight. “It won’t move.”
“The window,” Camilla said and headed for the stairs again, toward the dark cellar where they’d originally come into the manor. Libitina followed, but the window was too high for them to reach. She thought if she could get Camilla to stand on her shoulders, they might be able to manage it.
“Get on,” she said as she laced her fingers together and crouched with her legs wide using her hands like a stirrup.
“No. I can’t.” Camilla looked up at the window.
“Yes you can, just go.”
“No. I can’t leave you here. Let’s try the lever upstairs again. I won’t be able to pull myself up anyway.”
Libitina looked around the room. Had the window been this high up when they came in? She didn’t think so. And there was nothing around her to stack to bring them closer to their exit. Frustrated, she stomped her foot and growled. “Fuck!” She ran back up the stairs. The spirits in the depths of the manor were growing louder, their screaming more insistent. Somehow their whispering was more persistent than their screams, as if they whispered right at her shoulder.
Heart pounding, she pushed on the lever again. “Fuck!” she yelled again. “Move, damn you!” She still couldn’t make it budge.
And then she realized what she should have realized from the start. For the first time in her life, she fully believed she had a purpose, like the spirit guide had said, though it wasn’t the purpose he’d meant in sending her here. It was her duty, her destiny to stop the ritual and to make sure Camilla got out of the manor more or less alive. It wasn’t her destiny to live through this. She smiled. Finally she could rest, then. It would all be over.
“Camilla,” she said and motioned for the walking dead woman to come to her. She looked into the torn face and wanted to cry. How had she come to love such a face? To care so much about this monster in front of her?
“Yes,” Camilla said, as if in a daze.
“You have to go.”
“I can’t leave you here.”
“You have to, or everything I’ve done has been for nothing. Go through the bars. I know you can.” She pushed Camilla to the bars, but Camilla resisted.
“But how are you going to get out?”
“That’s just it,” she whispered. “Go. I’ll keep trying to pull the lever, but you have to leave now.”
Camilla nodded. Libitina knew she would obey and smiled. Her job here was done. Camilla’s body turned ethereal and passed through the bars, and then she was outside, in the night. Libitina could feel the wind on her face from the outside, wanted to go sleep in the forest. But she would be sleeping soon enough. And that was all that mattered here.
“Go open the door,” Camilla said to Libitina and pointed to the lever. “Open it. Come with me.”
“Okay. I’ll be right behind you,” she said indicating for Camilla to leave. She ran over to the lever and began pulling again. There might still be a chance. Her mind clamored that there wasn’t but she wasn’t going to give up so easily.
* * *
Hardly able to draw a breath, her muscles feeling like water, Aludra managed to stand behind the High Priestess just as she was bringing the chalice to her lips. Knowing this was the last chance she’d have to end it, knowing if she didn’t act now her strength would give out on her, she did what she meant to do in the first place.
Aludra brought up the dagger and in a movement too quick for anyone to notice until it was too late, she sliced the High Priestess’s throat just as the chalice touched her bottom lip, just as she was ready to drink the last of the ritual blood from the sacrificial child.
My blood
, Aludra thought as she collapsed back to the ground watching the High Priestess sputter and gurgle her last breaths.
Crimson spurted into the chalice to mix with Aludra’s blood. The chalice tumbled from the High Priestess’s hands and hit the altar, a ruby spray flying from the cup, the droplets catching the light from the flickering flames around the room. She reached for her throat, the shocked look on her face enough to please Aludra deeply.
Then the world exploded, engulfing the room in fire and pain.
The orb
, Aludra thought as she died. She didn’t feel the heat or the pain of dying. But she did see the orb blow up, saw the spirits trapped within.
Then the world was gone.
* * *
The blood, no, it can’t be mixed. Can’t mix the blood.
The spirit trapped in the High Priest’s flesh tried to escape one last time when it saw Aludra drag the blade across the High Priestess’s throat. Before it could blink, flame surrounded it. Its body turned black. Pain. Never had it experienced anything like it.
It screamed as the body died, as the flames consumed the flesh, the muscle, and left the bone. Finally, the body died. It had had no idea a body could endure so much before death.
Free, at last. But its spirit form carried the scars from the fire. It would find Rory. It would have revenge. It traveled out of the manor. There was another entry to the spirit world. It had to get back, had to plan, had to find another for its order. Nine hundred years would pass before he could join Rory again. It had nothing but time, now. It had all eternity to make this work, if it needed.
From a distance in the sky, it watched the manor, all its efforts, burn. But it could rebuild.
* * *
Rory walked in the darkness, cave walls surrounding it. The explosion buffeted it from the back, smashing it into a large rock it couldn’t see. Trapped. The cave behind it collapsed. Panicked, Rory went ethereal to pass through the rock, to travel outside. After a moment, Rory realized it would become stuck in the earth, encased forever in the mountainside if it didn’t turn back the way it had come.