when it was over, she’d taken a razor from where she kept it hidden in her bra and took the rest of him, from his anger to his fear. His last scream still echoed in her dreams. She loved the sound.
Emmaline anointed herself now in his blood, blood she had saved from Derek, blood from a man thirty years dead, and said a prayer to the spirits who loved the degraded and sick. Then she made the upside-down sign of the cross over her naked breasts and rose.
Wadding her clothes in a ball, she stepped quickly up the plank stairs. It was long past bedtime. Still, she was anointed in blood, so she’d need a shower. Magic and demonology really had nothing on the demands of real life. In the end, all that really mattered were sleep and food. She’d had the latter and now she needed the former. She could think of nothing more than bed.
Emmaline dropped her blouse and skirt into the hamper in her bedroom and then turned on the shower to draw out the hot water. She brushed her teeth. When she stepped inside the tub, the water ran dark red. She rubbed the shampoo across her breasts and smiled as the death washed away, and then she scrubbed her hair and leaned her head back. The blood stripped back from her skin. She’d let it all go: the soap, the sin, the evil thoughts.
She luxuriated a final moment in the warmth of the water and then forcibly stopped, shutting off the tap with a quick twist of her hand. She was done. Now she really needed sleep.
In moments she was out of the shower and toweled off, pulling on a nightshirt and heading with staggering steps to bed. Exhaustion had washed over her like a wave; her legs felt like tree trunks sunk solidly into the ground. But the glint of silver on the sheets woke her.
At first she only realized there was something that didn’t belong in her room on her bed. Then the color of that errant object registered. And then the shape: a butcher knife. Emmaline stopped and looked around.
At first, all seemed fine: The dresser with votive candles and a small painting set on a plate holder. The painting was of a symbol, if abstract and strange, just a collection of thick and thin black lines. The sight of it made the skin crawl; there was something about it that was just
But Emmaline wasn’t afraid of the symbol; she knew what it was most intimately. The Perenais family had decorated their homes with it for generations. It was the sign of the devil they had courted for over 300 years. They had given him the blood of virgins and the blood of whores. They had done deeds so evil that writing them down only led readers to laugh and nervously exclaim, “Oh, come
She looked away from the dark symbol and saw the empty doorway. Nobody was there. But in the past ten minutes since she had walked through her room and taken a shower, someone had broken into her house, gone into her bedroom and laid a knife upon the bed.
Suddenly, Emmaline’s life of secret evil seemed like just a game. This was no game. Someone had left her a sign. But what kind of sign?
She racked her mind for some kind of spell, some protective ward to render ineffective someone who wished her ill. She came up with nothing. She had always been slow at turning her wishes into actionable magic, and now her mind was completely blank. She wanted to call to her ancestors for help, but she wasn’t sure of the right words.
She stepped closer to the bed, intending to pick up the knife, but a low laugh filled the room from somewhere nearby.
“That one’s for me, not you,” the voice said. The laughter had stopped.
“You!” Emmaline said, staring in surprise at the face of the man who’d entered her bedroom. “But you’re . . .”
“I am,” he agreed. “And now I’m going to show you what it really means to worship Maldita.”
“But you aren’t one of us. You aren’t even . . .”
He smiled, and with one hand he raised a second knife. It was long and thin in his black-gloved hand. “It doesn’t matter which hand holds my instruments. It only matters that I am here and this is now. This
Without thinking, Emmaline nodded.
The man grinned, his mouth going wide in a way about which she’d only had nightmares. “I am here for
“But,” she said, struggling to find an argument. “But, I am family.”
He nodded. “The weakest of two hundred years. Accept without protest, and I promise my blade will be quick. Or . . . at least I will not prolong your crossing more than I need to. You will feel the transformation, though, and for a moment see yourself through other eyes.”
“No,” Emmaline gasped, and broke for the door.
He whirled and brought the knife down fast. She felt it slice against her spine, a cold bite that turned hot in an instant. His hand grabbed her shoulder, but she threw it off, half ran, half fell through the open door into the hallway. She felt the wetness of her life seeping out to drench the back of her nightshirt, but she forced her feet to keep moving. Time was of the essence.
There was only one way she could think of to thwart her enemy, now that he had shown himself as such. This was not the soul of Maldita manifesting, as it might like her to think. But it was the Pumpkin Man, the thing that had possessed her brother. It was one of the cold creatures of the dark beyond, one of the things her family had courted for centuries. George had paid the price, and she didn’t intend to join him.
Emmaline grabbed for the handle of the basement door, twisted it hard to the right and pulled. The door shot open. As it did, though, another shot of pain seared her side, horrible fire that made her long to double over and hug the floor; the Pumpkin Man’s blade had split two ribs. She screamed and felt liquid in her voice. The blood slipped like water into her lungs, and her scream ended in a wet cough.
Emmaline staggered over the edge of the basement stairs, grabbing at the handrail to slow a calculated fall, but pain shot through her side from the new wound like the burning of her back screamed at her to curl up. She cracked her head against the bricks on the stairwell; a flash of light crossed her vision as she coughed again, a wet, gasping, horrible sound that didn’t stop and didn’t stop and didn’t stop. She took three more staggering steps down, still coughing.
Near the bottom of the wooden stairs, she leaned against the bricks and willed the cough to stop. It did, and her breath came in a wheeze that sounded like wind through a narrow eave. When she took her hand away from her mouth, it was dripping with blood. The sound of the Pumpkin Man came from above, and his foot set down on the first stair and then the second.
Emmaline pushed off the wall and staggered down the last few steps. She fell to her knees on the hard- packed floor, reached out and crawled toward her late husband, but the motion sent a paralyzingly sharp pain down her middle. She choked up another gout of blood, which drizzled like warm chocolate from her lips to the mud. Then she pushed forward one more meter.
There were two things that might stop the demon behind her. One would be destroying his anchor to this world, but that anchor was not here, she knew. The other was a banishment spell that existed in the
She had read the book so many times she should have had it memorized, but dark magic had never come easily for her. She admired it. Yearned for it. But in the end, she had watched from the sidelines as her brother inherited both it and the family legacy and then squandered his gift with lack of interest. How unfair.
Behind Emmaline the stairs creaked with increasing speed. As she tried once more to inch forward on the cold, damp ground of the cellar, in her mind’s eye she saw the face of Jennica Murphy. Tonight that naive girl had fed her what would be her last meal, she realized, and Emmaline laughed bitterly to herself. The poor thing would be following her soon into the darkness. Jennica had nothing to draw on to handle this situation. Who would teach her? Emmaline herself had enjoyed a lifetime of knowledge, and it wasn’t going to do her a bit of good. She was already dead.
