Page 52

CHAPTER

FORTY-SEVEN

ASHER

E very muscle in Asher’s body ached.

After being drugged twice, traipsing through the desert all night, and not getting any sleep, his body was finally beginning to protest in earnest.

Fortunately, he’d learned a long time ago how to push the pain away, whether it was physical or mental, and he could do so now. Especially knowing that help was on its way at last.

Cora was safe. The teenage girls were most likely safe.

And most importantly, Karlin was at his side, his loaded gun standing between her and Lily.

He could hardly believe how much the older woman’s appearance seemed to have shifted. Her slightly messy, hippie-inspired look had been nothing but a facade, designed to conceal not only her true identity as Dana Corbett, but the warped depths of her clearly unstable mind.

“She’s right, Lily,” he said at last, nodding toward Karlin. “You locked her in a cabin and Cora drugged me. It’s over now. You may as well tell us how we got here.”

The woman’s lip curled up in a snarl. “I have nothing to say to you. You’ve ruined the ritual. You’ve taken our hope. You’ve destroyed everything!”

He’d gathered that much already.

Sorry, not sorry.

Careful to keep Karlin behind him, he stuck his gun into the waistband of his jeans and raised his empty hands.

“Can you at least tell me about this ritual?” he asked, letting his voice take on its usual, more lighthearted tone. Lily ignored his plea, but to his relief, Cora nodded.

“Well, you’ve probably heard about our community on the news,” she started. “Though it’s not quite as big as everyone on Facebook is saying. I’ve only just joined, but it’s been around for a while now.”

He wanted to let her keep talking, but he wasn’t surprised that Karlin was unwilling to tamper her own curiosity any longer.

“How long? How did it start?” Karlin prodded.

“It was founded by a brilliant man. His name is Dr. Peter Rorhart, but we all call him the Professor.”

“Do not speak of someone you’ve never met,” Lily snapped. “I knew him intimately. He was a world expert on the history of the Texas panhandle, with a special knowledge of the Antelope Creek phase Indians. But the academy shunned his ideas.”

Asher shot Karlin a glance. He remembered Cora had told Karlin something about some Indian tribe that had supposedly gone missing. Was this the same one?

“What do you mean?” he pressed, glad that Lily was starting to talk after all. By the sounds of it, she knew a lot more about the cult than the younger woman did.

“The Professor was willing to follow the evidence where others would not,” Lily said proudly.

“This tribe disappeared almost six hundred years ago. The mainstream wisdom is that they left their settlements due to drought, resource exhaustion, or being driven out by the Apache, but that’s not where the evidence leads. ”

Karlin raised an eyebrow. “If my memory serves me, you yourself said that their disappearance was down to mundane, earthly causes.”

“I couldn’t exactly tell you what I really thought, could I?” she sneered.

“So you and this Professor actually think these people were abducted by aliens?”

Asher couldn’t blame Karlin for pushing. The whole thing sounded completely insane, and yet, after everything he’d witnessed tonight, there was little he would doubt.

Lily scoffed. “Hardly. They were saved from imminent extinction by benevolent, interdimensional beings. They contacted them through their traditional plants–”

“Psychedelics?” Asher clarified.

Lily nodded.

“–and eventually, the tribe was brought to a new planet, where they could live in peace.”

“Now your community is seeking the same contact? Seeking to leave this world for a better one?” Asher asked.

It was Cora who answered this time, and Lily made no effort to stop her. “Primarily, our goal is to serve Mother, but yes, in the end, we know that our final home is not here on Earth.”

“Mother?” Asher asked, looking over at Karlin, who looked just as confused as he was. “Who’s Mother?”

“She’s our everything,” Cora said dreamily, as though she were a teenager talking about a pop star she was madly in love with. “She’s going to save us from extinction, just as she saved the Antelope Creek peoples hundreds of years ago. She has a whole new planet, waiting just for us.”

Asher opened his mouth, trying to think of some clarifying question, but it seemed both he and Karlin had been rendered momentarily speechless.

Cora went on.

“Lily doesn’t need the drugs to talk to Mother, but the rest of us do. Ayahuasca is pretty good, but DX8 works the best of all. It’s a miracle potion, Ms. McKenna. You should be proud of your work in helping to bring it into the world.”

Karlin looked horrified, but a second later, her brow furrowed in puzzlement.

“Wait a second. You’ve been stealing DX8 from my lab, haven't you?”

Cora looked nervous, but Lily’s mouth curved into a cruel smile.

“This retreat was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. Not when I knew that the formula for DX8 would have only gotten better since the last time I came and stocked up. Meeting Cora was an extra gift.”

Karlin looked like she was going to either throw up or throw punches. Maybe both.

“I still don’t understand. Who, exactly, is this Mother person?” Asher cut in quickly.

“I would call her a goddess, but she is too humble to accept such a title,” Lily said, her expression softening just as Cora’s had at the mention of Mother a few moments before.

“I suppose she’s an interdimensional being.

She cannot manifest herself fully in the everyday world, but across time and cultures, she has always been there. ”

“How? How does she appear?” Asher demanded.

“For those of us worthy to see, she appears as a large serpent, as green and shimmering as an emerald. She is the most beautiful thing on Earth.”

KARLIN

Karlin took a step closer to Axel, recoiling in horror at Lily’s words.

“You think the savior of mankind is a giant snake? Seriously?” Axel asked, shaking his head.

She had to agree with his assessment.

From what little she knew of God and the Bible, it was pretty clear that talking to snakes was a bad idea, as was human sacrifice.

And yet, she shouldn’t have been surprised. She was familiar with the decades of academic literature on psychedelic drug use, and hallucinations of serpent-like beings were sometimes reported by those who had used the drugs, particularly more potent ones such as ayahuasca and, apparently, DX8.

But she was no longer convinced that the snakes these people saw were mere hallucinations.

Lily ignored Axel’s jab. “We were so close to completing the task that Mother laid out for us, but you two were clearly up to something. Always sniffing around, always asking questions. I couldn’t risk you finding out too much.”

Karlin’s mind raced as everything began to come together.

She’d brought Axel in to investigate Senera’s misdeeds and to set herself free, but all the while, a much bigger crime had been happening for years, right there in the shadows.

“You were the one who called the cops on Bajwa, weren’t you?” Axel asked.

Lily smiled, clearly pleased by her own cleverness.

“I had originally planned to report Ms. McKenna, but then I had second thoughts. Unlike Dr. Bajwa, she was actually working here at the time Amira died, and I was worried that fact might lead the police to dig a little too deep. I didn’t think they’d have time to do much before the ritual, but still. Why take the risk?”

“We also couldn’t be one hundred percent sure that Bajwa wasn’t working with you guys,” Cora chimed in. “Mother has a lot of enemies. We had to be careful. In the end, we figured getting all three of you away was the best option.”

“But it didn’t work,” Axel said flatly. “You were too cowardly to kill any of us. I guess it was easier to rope in a conspiracy nut like Cora. Someone who wouldn’t resist her own murder.”

“I’m not a murderer,” Lily snapped. “I would kill only for the greatest good.”

Karlin couldn’t hold back her speculations any longer. “Amira was part of your cult, wasn’t she?”

Lily frowned. “Calling it a cult is so…cliche,” she said. “It’s a community. We take care of each other.”

“We offer people the truth,” Cora added. “I had been searching for it my entire life. Until I met Lily and she told me that Mother had chosen me.”

“What about Amira?” Karlin snapped, blinking away the tears that were quickly beginning to build. “Did the snake choose her too? Choose for her to kill herself? To leave her husband and daughter behind?”

She felt Axel’s hand resting gently on the small of her back, but his touch offered little consolation.

Years of guilt and sorrow were bubbling to the surface again, threatening to consume her.

She had spent so many years blaming herself, so many years convinced that DX8 alone had been enough to push Amira’s mental health beyond its breaking point.

Part of her preferred that story.

At least it made some level of sense.

To consider that the poor woman had been recruited into a violent alien cult was even worse, regardless of whether or not it lessened Karlin’s own culpability for her tragic death.

“That was never what Mother, or any of us, wanted,” Lily said.

For a moment, Karlin could see a flicker of sadness in the woman’s eyes, but it was gone in seconds, replaced by the same cold, expressionless mask she’d worn before.

“Amira was chosen to be the sacrificial victim, yes. By her blood, Mother would bring us all to the empire of light–including her husband and her little girl.”

Axel’s jaw tightened, and it was Karlin’s turn to place a soothing hand on his forearm. They had no choice but to listen now. Whatever the ugly, terrible truth was, she wanted to know it.

She had to.

“Unfortunately, Amira was weak,” Lily continued. “She took part in, shall we say, a preliminary ritual and got cold feet about going through with the final deal.”

She remembered that according to Lily, Amira had wanted to talk. To tell her everything. The thought made her sick. Maybe if she’d been paying more attention, the poor woman would have had a chance. Maybe she could have saved her.

But there was no point now dwelling on what could have been. It was far too late for that.

“For what it’s worth, I thought we should just let her go and wait for someone else who was willing, but Mother didn’t agree. She told me that if Amira took back her willing offering of her blood, I would have to kill her.”

“How big of you to disagree with the snake demon,” Axel cut in, his muscles tensing beneath Karlin’s fingertips.

Lily ignored him.

“By this point, the retreat had ended, and Amira went home. I started to formulate a plan for how I would complete the sacrifice without implicating the community or myself, but I never got the chance. Amira took the third option. She killed herself.”

ASHER

Asher reached out a hand to steady Karlin beside him.

Lily’s words had stunned everyone into a momentary silence as the full weight of what happened all those years ago began to sink in.

Even Cora looked a little disturbed, and he couldn’t help but to wonder just how many of the gritty details she knew about the mess she’d chosen to get herself involved in.

He could sympathize with her a little, but then again, if he let himself go very far down that road, he’d be making excuses for Lily, too.

He doubted she’d woken up one day and decided to follow the commands of Mother, either. Someone–probably the Professor–had passed this dark knowledge down to her.

Either way, at the moment, both she and Cora had made their choices.

So had Amira.

As horrific as her death was, and as much as she may have been failed by Senera and by Karlin, she’d been failed even worse by the demon masquerading as a savior and by the people she chose to do her bidding.

All he wanted now was to understand why.

Just as he was going to ask one of the several questions competing in his mind, however, he heard the sound of sirens outside.

Finally, help was coming.

The answers he wanted would have to wait. For the moment, he didn’t care.

All he wanted was a warm bed, some food and water, and to know that Karlin was finally safe.

Somewhere behind him, he heard the sound of footsteps. He shifted his position just a little, intending to beckon the first responder over to where they stood, but the half-second distraction was all that it took.

Cora jumped down from the table.

“No!” Karlin screamed, but it was too late.

Asher watched helplessly as the woman picked up the knife from the floor, held it firmly, and plunged it into her chest.