Chapter 10
The scream that tears through me is sandpaper in my throat, painful and ragged, but bolstered with rage. It’s a roar. It’s a declaration of war. Whatever they’re going to do to me, whatever depraved ritual this is, they won’t have me easily.
I refuse to give in.
I bolt for the door.
My explosion of energy and movement takes the sisters off guard, freezing them momentarily in shock. I elbow my way through the throng, clawing my way through what feels like an ocean of sisters until I slam against the door.
I grab at the handle, but my palms are slick with sweat. My vision blurs with tears, the hot drip of my still-wet hair.
‘Please,’ I beg, grasping at the handle even as they pull me back. ‘Please, don’t. Let me go.’
But they have me now. They’re lifting me bodily, carrying me toward the fire, their hands hot, my skin drenched in fear-thick sweat. I struggle weakly, but quickly realize there’s no point. Where would I go?
When they have me at the fire’s edge, they force me to my knees. The wooden floor bites my bare flesh. Sweat streams down my naked body. I’m ashamed, terrified, sick. I can smell the acrid stink of my own terror.
As I sit there in horrified anticipation, not knowing and yet also utterly certain of what is to come – that I am going to die here, or be tortured here, or be ruined in some way – I accept that it’s what I deserve. The world rights itself when wrong has been done.
Two men died. I was responsible. I walked free.
When I wake up in the night and I think of them, I know this is what I earned.
When the sisters prayed last night, when their chants lost all meaning and infected me like a sickness, I saw those men. I saw their faces, cracked wide open. I smelled their brains, splattered on my skin. I felt the metallic burn of their still-warm blood.
I kneel before this fire and I am vindicated. The sisters’ chanting fills my head and I am vindicated. All the fear that’s clawed inside my chest, the knowledge that something is watching me, coming for me, it was all for this. I am meant to be here.
The chanting rises.
The sisters surround me.
There is nowhere to go. I don’t want to go anymore.
The chanting coalesces and becomes oily, inscrutable.
The words darken and crack, reforming and reshaping.
The air around me is dense with the sisters’ words, with the power of their chant.
The sound is a reverberating echo against my skin, inside my skull.
These strange words seem to rewrite the fabric of my body, the air, the flames.
The flames are everywhere.
Tears, sweat, rainwater, drip down my face and naked body.
Steam rises from me. The sisters are on their knees now with me, swaying.
Their eyes are closed, their mouths still moving, their bodies driven to movement by some wild passion.
The heat in the room rises, the heaviness of the air, the terror in my heart.
Their voices rise too. A crescendo is coming; a climactic event.
The fire opens up.
The flames part, revealing a doorway of flickering blackness. Then – eyes. Eyes, crimson red, burn through the darkness between the flames. A shadow emerges as if from Hell itself, coalescing before me, forming fingers and hands, arms, shoulders … a face.
He emerges from the fire. He crawls languidly from it, steps through it, both fluid and not, a boiling excretion of black smoky shadow, and all the while those eyes flicker like the flames of the underworld.
He sees me.
He moves toward me.
He surrounds me.
The sisters’ chanting is loud. Pulsing. Deafening. They rock back and forth. Tears stain their ecstatic faces. They clutch their hair, pulling. They tear at their clothes. They froth and cry and demand and cajole.
Do it, their incomprehensible words seem to say. Do it. Open up. Let him in. Do it.
They speak in a language I don’t know, but I understand the meaning all the same. They’ve called me here for something. They’ve called him here for the same thing.
Their god. My shadow. Anguish.
His voice surrounds me like the smoke, like the suffocating heat of the fire. He speaks inside my mind, against my skin, a low rumble that is only for me.
HELLO AGAIN.
That voice. It skitters along my spine, dragging at the tender flesh of my stomach. It presses fingers deep in the meat of my thighs. It spreads my legs where I kneel.
His scorching presence engulfs me. The room darkens around me until he is all I see and feel and know, until his shadows drench the world in black, but even then I see his eyes. I see the planes of his face, illuminated in the flames. His gentle, burning fingers cup my jaw.
‘Midonia.’
At last I feel the weight of him against me.
A body of flesh and bone, but also of shadow, caressing me, touching me everywhere.
He leans over me, pulling my hair back until my neck is bared to him.
He kisses me there like a brand, agonizing in his ferocity.
He is shadow and flame, licking at my thighs; my breasts; every sensitive curve of my body.
The pleasure is so horrible, so terrifying, so perfect, that it could only come from a god.
I feel myself crying. Salty tears burn my cheeks. The dregs of fear roiling inside me grow weak, overwhelmed by the sensation of his touch. These aren’t tears of misery but of rapture.
‘Let me have you.’ His mouth moves against my ear.
Then he speaks inside my head, his voice reverberating like a drum in my skull.
TELL ME YES.
There’s no world in which I’d refuse him.
Not like this. Not with his hands all over my body. Not with his claws against my flesh. His caress between my legs. His teeth on my throat, biting down. All I want is more of him, whatever he is willing to give. The least I can do is reciprocate.
The word is fresh blood bursting from a gash. It is a curse. It is a prayer.
‘Yes.’
And then he enters me. He penetrates my softest parts, his clawed fingers gouging my too-hot skin as he possesses every part of me.
And yet even as he claims me, the sensation of his body against mine, his heat in me, all around me, both solid and ephemeral, a touch and a thought … even then, a new sensation takes hold.
My body – so often not my own, so often working and moving and feeling at the whims of something I can’t control – grows heavy with purpose.
With power.
PERFECT, his voice rolls like thunder in my mind. GORGEOUS. YOU ARE THE UNIVERSE. YOU ARE ENDLESS. TAKE ME. ENDURE ME. FORGIVE ME.
He envelops me like a galaxy of pleasure.
The last vestiges of fear abate and I’m left with nothing but a churning, agonizing desire.
This unreal creature, this vision of the god they call Anguish, his shadowed hands and his body and his voice, imbue me with a knowing that’s all-consuming.
I know that his deep thrusts inside me, his claws gouging my hips, the darkness coiling all around me … it is all worship.
He is worshiping me.
And when we come together, he gasps my name into the cosmos, and my mind is full of him, and my pleasure is impossible to contain. I come apart at the seams, spread across the stars, until the light of every sun caresses me as I ride wave after wave of orgasm.
I fall limp, skin quivering, gasping for breath.
I’m still wrapped in his impossible arms. I blink, expecting the room to come back into focus.
But there is only darkness and silence all around me.
The heat of the fire is gone, replaced by an ethereal chill.
I feel the wind on my face, a voice in my ear, though I can’t understand what it’s saying.
Exhaustion takes hold as I drift in this liminal darkness.
Am I dead at last? Or have the sisters sent me far away, across time and space to some unknown world?
My thoughts fade, becoming meaningless. The world falls away, and sleep consumes me.