Chapter 23
Chapter
Twenty-Three
Light spills into the basement, and I blink, recoiling.
I’m tired after a restless night of sleep on a concrete floor, and it takes my mind a couple of moments to catch up to where I am and register the danger.
Precious moments in which I could have reacted, but instead the two looming figures are on me before I can manage a shout.
They yank me to my feet, away from Cain, who is just starting to stir as well.
“No,” I shout, fighting, clawing, trying to get back to him. I get in a couple of lucky hits—the fact that my hands aren’t bound catches them off guard—but they overpower me when they recover.
Cain wakes faster than I did and lurches toward me, desperate, hands reaching, only to stop short with a clink of metal as the chains snap tight. “Let her go.”
His shout is loud, fraught with power, and I can feel the wave of it flowing through the air.
One of the men holding me stumbles, pressing a hand to his ear that comes away wet with blood.
But the other man drags me up the stairs and slam the door shut behind us, cutting me off from Cain.
I can hear his muffled shouting from behind the basement doors, but I can’t make out the words.
I’m weaker than yesterday. Hungry, thirsty, sleep deprived, already battered and bruised from the rough treatment yesterday. I try to fight, but it feels even more hopeless than before. Soon I’m out of breath and energy, and I’m dragged, panting and dizzy.
Without a bag over my head, I get my first good look at where we are.
There’s nothing but sand and cacti in every direction, aside from the cluster of buildings nearby.
They’re old, paint peeling, roofs sagging; old farmhouses, from the look of them, though I don’t know what could grow out here, deep in the heart of the desert.
The closer I look at the buildings, the more familiar they look.
No.
Fragments of memory flit through my head. I know those houses, know the feeling of this hard-packed sand beneath my feet. I know this place.
When the cultists drag me toward a building with a wooden cross nailed upon it, I remember walking through doors just like these so many times, though they seemed so much larger when I was small.
I remember the last time I walked into this place. My tiny, chubby fingers clutching my mother’s as she smiled and told me, “This is going to be a very special day.”
Now, the cultists kick the doors open and drag me into the church.
Pure, blank, animal fear grips my mind as the cultists drag me down the center aisle between the rickety wooden benches.
My mind ricochets violently between the past and the present.
Dusty old bibles sitting face-down on the pews.
A pristine copy clenched in my small hands, struggling to hold up the weight.
Broken glass crunching beneath my boots.
Sunlight streaming through stained-glass windows onto the bodies sprawled across the floor.
I’ve been transported straight back into my worst memory, and I am helpless to do anything but be dragged.
Up, onto the empty pulpit, into the back room of the church where I never would have dared set foot as a child.
I’m surprised to find a small, windowed room with a cot, a bathroom, a table.
This must have been the living quarters for—
My already fried brain short-circuits as I see the man standing in the corner, hands clasped behind his back, dressed in a white robe.
His hair is white and thin, and his face is more lined, his dark eyes buried in wrinkled and sun-spotted flesh.
But I know that face. It smiles at me in my worst nightmares.
“Hello, Willow,” my father says.
The cultists holding my arms force me down onto my knees in front of him. He reaches to touch my face. His hand is gentle, but I flinch back. He clicks his tongue, and the hands on my shoulders grip me tighter.
“Our agent sent word that the Harbinger had grown close with a woman working at the Facility,” he murmurs, studying me.
“I thought she might be a useful hostage, but I never thought it would be you.” His smile is wide, unnervingly placid.
“God works in mysterious ways.” But his smile fades as studies me, frozen in terror before him.
“Your hair,” he murmurs, disappointed as he tugs at a dyed strand of it.
“What happened to you? What happened to my little girl? You used to be so good, Willow.”
When he reaches again, I remain perfectly still until his cool, dry fingers graze my chin. Then I snap forward and bite.
I expect him to scream, or recoil. Instead, he lets my teeth sink into his hand while staring down at me.
The way his smile disappears, his mask vanishing into complete coldness, is somehow more frightening than shouts or anger.
His other hand grips my jaw—shockingly strong—and forces my teeth to release him, leaving red imprints on his pale white skin.
“Willow, my girl,” he says, and the mask is back on, his voice full of affected sorrow. “If you behave like this, you’ll never be able to join me and your mother in paradise.”
“Fuck you,” I spit at him.
He sighs, shaking his head, and his lips lift into a thin, sinister smile.
“You are lucky,” he says, “because there is one thing that may yet redeem you. And it is why, I suspect, you survived in the first place.” He leans in close, his hands holding my head in place while he whispers in my ear.
“You will be the perfect sacrifice to awaken our Harbinger. I suggest you pray beforehand, child, lest you burn with the rest of the sinners in the cleansing to come.” He leans back, and his eyes shift somewhere behind me. “Sedate her,” he says, his tone flat.
There’s a sharp sting in the side of my neck, and the world goes blurry.
I’m not knocked out. Not entirely. Instead, I am granted glimpses of what is happening to my numb and limp body.
I’m lifted up, stripped of my clothes. Pushed into a bathtub full of steaming water and scrubbed until I’m red and raw.
But the hands that touch me aren’t rough.
They’re shockingly gentle, almost reverent, as they wash my hair and cup my face so my lolling head does not fall beneath the water’s surface.
Faces swim in and out of my vision. Not my father or the men who dragged me, but women who smile at me benignly.
They pat me dry and pull fresh clothes over my newly cleaned body.
Plain white underwear and bra, plain white dress.
My feet remain bare. The women comb my hair, humming hymns I vaguely recognize, and place something on top of my head.
At the end of the process, I glimpse myself in a mirror.
There’s a strange sense of familiarity as I see my reflection: dressed in all white, hair left loose and wavy, a flower crown resting atop my head.
It takes me a moment to place the rush of déjà vu, and when I do, my stomach drops.
This is exactly how Cain’s mother looked in those pictures of the ritual all those years ago.
When they summoned something obscene and made a sacrifice of her.
When the preparations are over, more cultists arrive to drag me to one of the houses and lock me up again.
Not in a dank cell like before, but a tiny room.
It’s almost cozy, with a little cot and a nightstand, even a small window high on the wall.
They didn’t bother to tie me up again. As though I’m not any real threat.
Yet as I curl up on the mattress and try to fight against the tide of drugs dragging my thoughts into nothingness, I feel so much worse than I did in that basement with Cain at my side.
What are they doing to him right now? How far has his transformation progressed without me there to calm him down again?
And the worst question of all: What have they planned for him? For us?
My consciousness drifts in and out. I must have fallen asleep despite my desperation to stay coherent, because when I jolt awake again, the sky outside of that tiny window is painted orange and red by the setting sun.
I sit up in bed, blinking away the grit in my eyes.
The sedation is wearing off, but my head still feels too heavy on my neck.
My mouth is so dry, it hurts to swallow.
It would be too easy to lie down again and let sleep drag me under once more.
But I force myself to stand on the bed, grabbing hold of the bars on the windows to lift myself up.
There are torches out in the darkening evening, and I hear the faint sound of—singing.
The sound is joyous. Reverent. A song that prickles the vestiges of memories from church as a child. But right now, it fills me with such a deep and terrible dread that I can hardly breathe for a moment. This was the melody I heard as I drank poison, as I died in the church at my mother’s side.
A moment later, the door opens. Two men in golden masks step into the room and drag me off the bed, away from the window.
I kick and claw and bite at them, drop my full body weight to the floor, spitting curses and fighting as hard as I can.
They’re so much bigger than me that it barely slows them down.
Despair is a pit in my stomach as they half carry, half drag me outside.
I don’t want to die.
Especially not when I’ve just started finding reasons to live.
When I finally, finally realized I don’t have to spend my life earning my survival because of something that happened to me as a child.
That I don’t have to keep carrying the shame and guilt that have always plagued me. A quiet life would have been enough.