Page 21

Nineteen

“Now,” I murmur, keeping my lips stationed at her sex. Hovering her swollen lips close enough that I bet she’d burst with a single flick of one end of my tongue, but she doesn’t move on my command. “I said now!” I repeat, this time shouting. The insult of her disobedience marinating in my veins. She remains still.

Why is she doing this now?

How is it that now, with the evidence mounting so blatantly high in front of her, even with me giving her the veritas serum— truth serum —that none of us receive until after initiation? That I gifted her. She still is unwavering in her defiance.

I rise to my feet, no longer interested in giving her the gift of my mutilated tongue. If she insists on being so thickheaded, then I’ll match that energy… tenfold.

“Is there a problem?” I don’t bother hiding the instigating tone in my voice.

“Why did you stop?” Her question directed to me as her back arches and her ass juts out, swaying left to right, just begging for me to lower to my knees again and devour her.

In due time, my gruesome sinner. In due time.

“I gave you a simple instruction. I told you to wait for my command and in return, I’d give that greedy cunt what it’s been always pining for.”

Me. In my true form. No longer the suppressed, easily silenced pastor’s son, but the heathen of her dreams.

She shakes her head, the knife in her hand coming dangerously close to her temple.

Closing the gap between us, I reach for her wrist, pulling it away from her head.

“You’re not getting out of this that easy,” I whisper. “Now finish what you started. Think of everything he’s done to you.” To us . “Let that motivate every strike.” I instruct her and this time… she listens.

She unleashes on him. Stabbing his flesh like a pincushion, and the desire I had to punish her dwindles. Bloodshed. Revenge. All of it, present before my eyes, acts as an aphrodisiac more than it does a warning flare or deterrent.

“You lied!” she repeats. Her yelling, though bold, grows more distraught with each stab and the mayhem that ensues becomes her, just as much as it becomes more apparent that I need her violence as much as I need her.

I take a step back from her just enough that I have better access to her already torn pants and continue the job I started on them, shredding them until they are no longer on her body and tossed on the ground.

Keeping behind her, I reach around and over to her pussy, dipping all but my thumb—which I reserve for her clit—into her warmth.

She trembles upon contact. Arching her back enough that it forces my hand deeper.

I keep it there, working her as she exacts a revenge that’s been written in the stars, waiting for her to seize.

“That’s it. Let it all out,” I encourage her. Let it go.

Just how it’s meant to be.

Just like how she wrote about in her sick journal .

Lifting my free hand, I snap my fingers for one of the Cross members to see.

“Yes?” A member runs over to me, eager for instruction.

“Bring a bucket.” He nods. “No,” I stop to correct myself. “Make that multiple buckets.” The eagerness increases as he instructs the others.

Seconds pass before cloaked members gather around us with buckets in hand. Two walk ahead of the others and place them in front of the man, who I was forced to call ‘Dad’, lays in the balance. The buckets are set down to form a V-shape in front of him, aimed to collect the splatter from different angles.

Araceli doesn’t notice, she’s lost in a trance. Too preoccupied with making him pay for everything he’s done to her, and all those who are not here physically to fight for what was taken from them.

“You killed her! You’re the killer! You killed all of them!” she pants.

My father. The pastor. The murderer.

The truth, which I’ve had more time to process than Araceli, still hits like a whip. All this time, he fooled people into thinking our town was under attack by the enemy. Yet the only enemy that existed was the one he worked so hard to keep hidden.

“That’s it, little sister. Tell him the truth that he has denied. Gut. Him.”

The heathens around me pick up on the last of my instructions, all chanting in unison.

Gut him.

Gut him.

Gut him.

Araceli starts to chant as well.

“Gut him,” she breathes. Her pussy clenching around me as she says it.

She repeats it over again, growing closer to her orgasm as she says it. She’s so close that I can practically feel it reaching the horizon, squeezing around the calloused fingers I have jammed inside her. So. Fucking. Close. Though I fear if I let her finish like this, she won’t be able to finish the larger job. So I pull back, opting to watch instead.

We can’t have that, not when we have a Ferryman to feed after all.

She mewls from the absence of my hands, but the betrayal of me leaving her hanging isn’t enough to stop her. Her movements become more erratic. Drawing deep gashes into his bare chest like she is carving a pumpkin.

Like a twisted jack-o’-lantern getting ready to be lit on Halloween. The day he detested more than anything.

Oh, the irony.

Up, down, slide.

Up, down, slide.

The makings of a jagged grin form on his abdomen.

I peel my gaze from the bloodbath, registering the mouths moving around me, but I can’t hear their words.

Too distracted by the rich smell of earthy incense and the click-clack of coins being dropped around me, my hearing becomes robbed.

A fellow heathen with a hood that protrudes more outward than any of ours walks over to my side. A soft, feminine voice follows, leaking into my ear. “She’s doing so well. Adhering to what has been written.”

I turn to face the woman I know to be Frida, but her cloak offers a veil of anonymity that my eyes can’t penetrate.

“Shh,” she breathes and her voice coils around me like a rope, securing me to her words and twisting my body in the direction of the cross.

“The initiation passage has begun.”

Frida’s wrinkled hands raise, one holding a key and the other holding two masks. Two familiar masks. Almost identical to the ones from the Halloween shop.

The Ferryman and the passenger.

“She left these with me the last time she came to see me.” The woman takes it upon herself to lower my hood as she stretches the elastic band over my head, lowering the mask into place.

She hands me the key next. Another surge of eerie familiarity ripples through me. “He won’t be needing this anymore.” She tilts her head towards my father’s lifeless body. “He’s gone. Lost to the abyss he created. Now she’s ready for you. Your perfect passenger with payment in tow. Go to her. Make her pay the toll. Let her sail. She can’t escape you now.”

I close my eyes for a second to blink, but the moment my eyes open she’s gone and that horrid song starts replaying in my mind, infecting my brain. Even worse, my brain is reciting it in the same sinister singsong she did when I heard her sing it in the graveyard years ago.

“Harlan Rainey has to go. Has to go, so no one knows. Harlan Rainey has to die. Blood for blood. Eye for an eye.”

“No, this isn’t right,” I mutter to myself as I look up to Araceli who is now exhausted on her knees in front of a very dead and gutted Pastor Harlan Rainey… senior .

The song should’ve stopped. He’s dead. The sick and twisted melody infects my brain. The one from the graveyard, and the one she sang over and over again while she smothered me with her pussy, that undoubtedly belongs to me now.

Frida’s voice sounds again. Whispering to me from deep within, but she’s nowhere to be found. “The song was never about your father. It was always about you. She wants you dead, Harlan. Kill her before she kills you.”

I know . She’s right. It’s nothing I haven’t already known deep down.

It was always about me and her.

Little did she know that the last part of her song, the whole blood for blood and eye for eye bit, is part of the credo of the Heathen’s. Being Lucian Suárez’s daughter may mean she has Heathen in her blood, but it starts and ends there. To be a member of Heathen’s Cross is to believe in fatum enim eligimus —for we choose fate. Except our fate is very seldom a solitary path. Often people find a way into our stories and sometimes when they do, betrayals occur. That’s where the credo comes in, that her father, Lucian Suárez, created when he founded Heathen’s Cross, back when it was known as La Cruz De Los Paganos in Puerto Rico, before he moved stateside. Blood for blood, eye for an eye, adds a layer to choosing one's fate. It means deciding how to exact revenge when necessary. Granted, Lucien meant that part for enemies of his people and those who didn't respect their spiritual freedom like my father, and not his daughter. But what he doesn’t know won’t kill him… he’s already dead.

Araceli rises from her knees. Blood stains her skin, only adding to her allure, but it’s the knife in her hand that steals my attention. The way it’s clutched in her grip. The way it shines beneath the moonlight as she moves it up and down with each step of her stride over to me. It reminds me that if I don’t end her the way the ancestors of the cross wanted, she will finish me…for good.

I lift both my hands, snapping my fingers for my fellow Heathens to attend to my command.

“You,” I point to one, “retrieve the bucket and bring it to me.”

I turn and point at another random, yet willing, heathen, “And you, put this on her.” I toss the mask over. I point to two hooded members, both built so broad and tall, they look as if they can be on stilts. They can handle her when she puts up the fight that I know she will start once she realizes what I’m making them place on her face. “You two. Make sure she doesn’t go anywhere.”

Araceli’s gaze falls to the mask and horror blossomes on her face, dulling her natural glow. “No,” she cries, trying to fight the two members approaching her. “I don’t want it.”

My loyal Heathen’s ignore her. The two I instructed to hold her down, grab hold of her arms, holding her in place while the other stretches the mask over her face.

“I changed my mind!” she pleas.

A grin mars my face, stretching the mask over my head as I approach her. “Too late, you started this and now you’re going to finish it. But this time you’ll finish it with me ,” I announce with sadistic glee.

I continue over to her. Relishing in the way the fear—the reminder—of that night with the masks and carnage is ripping her boldness away, making her putty in my hands. “You look beautiful,” I lie. Though her body looks as fuckable as ever. The mask is hideous, but even so, its putrid state becomes her.

It’s adorable how hard Araceli is trying to fight against the hold of the Heathen’s I’ve tasked with keeping her still until I’m ready for her. “Let go of me!” she shouts, though the vigor in her voice is dwindling. The knife drops to the ground and I bend down to retrieve the weapon she used to kill my dad. I should feel remorse, but that emotion died a long time ago. For the man I was, I feel nothing, and that includes all those associated with me before my fall, my dad included.

He got what was coming to him.

Finally.

Now she will get what’s coming to her.

“Why are you doing this, Harlan?”

I ignore her, snapping my fingers for one of my fellow Heathen’s, who has what I’m looking for, to listen and bring me it. “Snake!” I call out. Even through the hideous mask on her face, there’s no missing the disdain—the terror—ripe within her irises.

I take an additional step forward, teasing her with the edge of the knife while I wait for the bucket with the snake. I remember how much she hates them, but she should appreciate my reasoning behind making sure a snake is present. Despite our upbringing, which made us look at serpents as evil creatures who represent God’s enemy, snakes are rich in symbolism. Something a writer such as herself should appreciate. Snakes represent many things. Such as transformation, renewed energy, and in some cases, rebirth .

A holy trinity of sorts.

A new beginning .

A new trifecta to become attached to.

The bucket with the snake now arrives in front of her, and one Heathen holds it in place while the other takes its contents out, guiding the poisonous snake onto Araceli’s body.

“You—” she stammers, the snake taking its sweet time wrapping around her thigh. I lick my lips at the sight of the pebbled marks on her skin. “You’ve changed.”

“I know. Isn’t it great how time has molded me into the heathen you’ve always wanted, but can’t have?”

“You disgust me.”

I click my tongue as my lips fall into a pout. “You shouldn’t talk like that. Your hatred does things to me.” I stifle a moan, watching her center glisten as her body remains in place by the force of hands that are not my own, and by the snake that has managed to tie her legs together as if it were practicing shibari.

Closing the gap between us, I dip one finger into her cunt. The pulse and clench it makes around my finger is a pathetic cry for me—one that I will make her work for if she wants it bad enough. Quick as I dove my hand in, I retract it, and she growls in anger. “You’re pathetic. I want nothing to do with you after this.”

A laugh sneaks past my lips. “After this? Who the fuck says there will be an after this? Look around, this isn’t the Holy Harvest. This is the meeting ground of Heathen’s Cross.”

She shakes her head in defiance… in denial.

“No, this is impossible. Heathen’s Cross was never here. It was out of town. It was far from here.”

“Was it though?” My question is purely rhetorical. “You keep choosing to believe that, but the fact remains that it’s All Hallows Eve, and since we have all gathered here today, a sacrifice must be made.”

Araceli fumbles her words. “I—I thought you said initiation.”

“Initiation. Sacrifice. Same shit.”

“No, it’s fucking not!” Araceli screams.

“There she is,” I mutter as I clap my hands. “Goddammit, you are such a bore when you get all whiny and confused. I like your mean side. It gives me something to work with. Don’t look so sad, though. This is the end, sister, get excited.”

Live a little… before you can’t anymore.

“You’re a fucking idiot. I made a sacrifice for you. That part is done.”

“For that, I thank you. Sincerely, I am so grateful. You have no idea how long I’ve waited for him to croak. But, with the only law of three, it wouldn’t have worked if I took the liberty of killing him myself.”

Her head tilts ,and I pick up on her confusion, continuing on only to add to it more. “Three. You know, like the Holy Trinity. Except in order to achieve true initiation, three deaths need to occur tonight before midnight. That way, you have three tokens to feed the Ferryman. Since you so rudely skipped out on him before, this time he wants to be paid.”

“No.”

“Yes,” I retort. “And since you already killed the guard, and then dear old Daddy, there’s just one more death that has to occur to complete your initiation into Heathen’s Cross.”

“This isn't happening. You’re taking what Heathen’s Cross was, and you’re manipulating it.”

“Oh, so only you are able to manipulate the truth?” I challenge her, bringing the blade to her chin, grazing it with enough pressure that a thin red line forms on her flesh.

“See, you made your sacrifice, but I’ve yet to make mine.” My voice ignites with excitement, thinking of how fun my sacrifice will be.

“This isn’t who you are.”

“Wrong. This isn’t who you remember me being. But what was, and what is, are two different things. You should be thanking me. I’ve become who you’ve wanted me to be. What you’ve always wanted me to be— free .”

“I hate you.” She says that like she believes it.

“Fuck, there’s that hatred again. You’re so fucking sexy when you pretend that you hate me. Will it make that needy cunt of yours pulse and beg for me, if I say that I hate you too, sister? I bet you’d cream yourself right here and now if I told you that everything that has transpired tonight is your fault. That my downfall is your doing. That I no longer give a shit about making you feel anything other than what you made me feel. Which, in case you forgot, is like worthless, fuckable, disposable trash. At least this time I’ll fuck you with more than just my tongue. Don’t want to send you to your grave unsatisfied.”

She’s speechless. Too much truth to process at once. So, I continue. “Remember, you’re the one who fantasized about my hatred pumping in and out of your cunt that you came back here under the guise of needing a stupid necklace back. What happens tonight is on you. I’m just a vessel for your punishment and you just so happen to be the wet hole worthy of the punishment only I can give you.”

Araceli remains motionless, quiet and unsure.

“Lift her.” I instruct. The snake remains knotted on her legs and the two heathens signal for more to help transport her. “It’s time we really take her to the last stop .”

Let’s see if she sails this time.