Redemption (Covenant Book 3) Read online

  “The demons sometimes come through the cracks in the walls,” the man at the other end of the bar was saying. He was a thin guy, with shaggy blonde hair and sunken eyes that seemed to jut when he spoke. A small audience gathered around his barstool. Joe tuned in hard to the conversation. A short, dark-haired guy wearing an untucked, pinstriped blue shirt was nodding at every word. The thin man was adamant. He looked convincing.

  “There are cracks in the walls…” he said. “That’s how they get through. They can slip right through the cracks. And if they do…”

  Joe’s head cocked, straining to listen.

  The waitress interrupted the conversation on the other end of the bar, picking up glasses and dropping a green slip of paper. Apparently the bill. “I think you’ve had enough tonight, Arnie,” he heard her say. “I don’t need you scaring off the customers.”

  The man shook his head and a mass of ragged curls colored the air. “I’m sure ’nuf just telling him what happens out there at the Birchmir,” he insisted.

  The brunette only smiled and tapped the green check. “You know the rules,” she said.

  The thin man complained but he dropped money on the bill, and slipped off his bar stool, missing a step as he went. Joe thought he was going to topple, but he recovered, and stiff-walked out of the front door of the bar onto the patio without looking back. Joe hoped he didn’t stagger into the band – they played right next to the exit to the sidewalk.

  “What’s up with the Birchmir?” he asked, when Cindy came back to his half of the bar.

  She rolled her eyes and the glitter of her eyeliner flashed in the low yellow bar light. “He comes in here every week and talks about how ghosts come out of the walls in the old Birchmir Mission, just outside of town. Give him a beer and he’ll give you a ghost.”

  Joe smiled, but there wasn’t really a lot of smile in it. This sounded like a lead.

  “I would love to talk to him sometime.”

  Cindy smirked. “Good luck with that. If his breath doesn’t kill you, his stories will.”

  She disappeared to help a newcomer at the bar. Joe considered. Was there anything worth checking out in the blather of the drunk?

  It was impossible to tell. Part of him wanted to investigate. Part of him wanted to drown the other part in a heavy slosh of bourbon.

  Truth be told, Joe wanted to get lost. That seemed to be a cyclical desire for him. He had left Chicago when his investigative reporting for the Chicago Tribune ended up getting his girlfriend indicted. How close to the bone should you really have to go for your day job? Well, that story had been too close for him. He’d packed up and driven to the tiny southeast coastal town of Terrel, gotten a job at the half-assed newspaper there, and within a few months, had found out that the litany of dead bodies that annually plagued the cliff outside of Terrel had occurred because the damn town literally had a deal with a demon to protect it from other demons – the Curburide.

  Joe himself had ultimately made a deal with “the devil” that inhabited the cliff (a creature that called itself Malachai) and saved a pretty blonde named Cindy from being sacrificed to the invisible – but still deadly – demon’s hungers. And then he’d hit the road to try to get lost again, only to find himself back in Terrel less than a month later, this time trying to save Alex, a teenage hitchhiker he’d picked up on the way to Denver who, strangely enough, could actually talk to the dead. And once again Cindy was at the center of it; she’d managed to get herself tied up on a sacrificial altar, thanks to her loser brother.

  That time around, he hadn’t managed to save Cindy, or Alex. The former got herself sacrificed to the succubic Curburide demons by an ex- almost-nun named Ariana. The latter – poor, broken Alex – used Malachai to help her drag Ariana and the flood of Curburide demons back through a rift between the Earth and the hellish world of the dark demons. Alex had closed the door that Ariana had opened… but in the process, she ended up on the wrong side of it.

  For the third time in his life, Joe had felt the urge to run. After he left the cave beneath the cliff where Cindy’s body lay, slaughtered and bloody, he hadn’t had to think a bit.

  He had packed the few things he really cherished and a couple hours later, driven out of town. He’d stayed in many places since then, but never stayed long.

  The hills of Santa Fe weren’t far enough. The Pacific Ocean wouldn’t be far enough. Because the memories of Alex’s blood-spattered face disappearing above his head into a swirling blackened hole in, what… the freakin’ air… haunted him every night. Hell, every morning too.

  He missed her smart-assed comments and her fake black hair.

  He missed Cindy too; he’d tried to leave Terrel to get out of her life and instead he’d simply ended up back in it just long enough to see her die.

  What he didn’t expect? He missed Malachai, a devil he couldn’t trust. Because the devil you know….

  Joe tipped back a shot of bourbon and Santa Fe Cindy came back to his place at the bar with a smile and a tip of her narrow cowgirl hat and slid the empty glass off the bar. “Another round?” she said sweetly.

  Joe shook his head. “What are you doing tonight?” he asked. His voice only slurred a little bit.

  Cindy tipped her cowboy hat back an inch and looked at the clientele that still held on to the edge of the bar. A man in a half-buttoned, faded orange Hawaiian shirt and long white hair curled wildly to his chest gestured and laughed at a slumping brunette leaning on his shoulder. A guy who looked as if Viet Nam were only last week – plus 40 years of wrinkles – nodded in conversation with a skinhead covered in boneyard tattoos and piercings beside them. And a Chicano in a dew rag held court with a group of other Mexicans on the far side of the bar.

  Cindy sized up her options fast.

  “I’m driving you home?” she suggested. “I don’t think you should drive, and I caught a ride here tonight.”

  Joe paid his tab, and handed her his car keys.

  CHAPTER 2

  “YOU FUCKIN’ BITCH!” Ariana flipped a stray lock of kinked black hair out of her eyes. Which were on fire.

  Alex could see her thinking of those last minutes, when she’d tried to finish a sacrificial ceremony to fully open the door to Earth, so the Curburide demons could come through. But instead of being a savior, she’d woken up on the other side, in the world of the Curburide. Nobody here was going to thank her for opening any trans-world doors, or anything else. Just the opposite…the game had changed completely.

  “What the hell were you thinking, dragging us through the doorway like that?” Ariana demanded.

  Alex smiled, though the side of her grin trembled. “I got you out of Terrel, didn’t I?”

  “Who said I wanted to get out of Terrel?” Ariana hissed. “I had created the cycle of Sacrifice. I had given the Curburide the last offering. I was ready to take my crown as their mortal queen…”

  “Queen of the demons?” Alex laughed. “What, did you think they were going to flock around you and feed you grapes? They would have eaten you alive, you stupid dipshit. They were using you.”

  “Of course they were using me. And I was using them. That’s how the worlds go ’round.”

  “Yeah, well, they don’t need you anymore,” Alex pointed out. Literally, pointed out. She gestured behind them. The doorway out of the tiny room they’d ducked into just a few minutes before was beginning to glow a dull red where the air slipped through the cracks. Something was behind them. And it was coming after them. Something hungry.

  “Where the hell are we?” Alex asked, as she watched the red glow build, illuminating the outline of a door.

  Ariana laughed. “Pretty much where you never, ever wanted to be,” she said. “You’ve dragged us up into the world of the Curburide.”

  “So you should be happy,” Alex said. “Didn’t you kill all those people so that you could be with them?�
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  Ariana shook her head. “I killed to give them something they wanted so that they would reward me. Coming here, is not going to help that. They don’t need my help to be here. So I’m not going to have a fuckin’ chance in hell of…” she stopped and looked around, as if confused for a second. “Speaking of hell… where’s Jeremy?”

  Alex remembered Ariana’s former partner rolling off the dais to lie bloody and unmoving on the cave floor towards the end of the sacrificial ceremony that had landed them here. It seemed like just seconds ago. “Jeremy… won’t be joining us.”

  “Well, someone apparently is,” Ariana said, pointing toward the door. The seams were growing an ever-brighter red. “We need to be somewhere else.”

  “Come on,” Alex said, grabbing Ariana by the arm. “There’s a hallway over here.”

  Ariana had no choice but to follow. No matter what she thought, she had to realize that they needed to not be where they were. Alex pulled her down the narrow passageway through the dark. There were noises coming from behind them. Soft, wet sounds. The corridor wrapped on and on; the dark was total. Both women held the wall for support, but they kept walking.

  “We’re just going to get lost in here,” Ariana whispered.

  “Better lost than eaten,” Alex said.

  “You have no idea,” Malachai answered, somewhere inside her head.

  “Which way should we go?” she asked him. “Help us out here.”

  He didn’t answer.

  Typical. A demon was never there when you needed it.

  The air grew colder, damper. It stank of earth and age. The spongy sound continued to pace them from behind.

  “It’s cold,” Ariana said, hugging her naked chest.

  “You should have kept some clothes on,” Alex said.

  “You have to be naked to perform the Sacrifice of the Twenty-One Cuts,” Ariana hissed.

  “Yeah, well, see what that got ya.”

  “You little…” Ariana suddenly gasped as her foot caught on something soft and round. She lost her balance and fell forward, one hand grabbing at Alex as she went down.

  “Watch where you’re going!” a voice called from near her feet.

  Alex turned and squinted at the ground. The faint glint of someone’s eyes met her own. Ariana had tripped over a human head that protruded from the soggy ground. Its chin barely raised above the black of the earth. There was almost no hair on his scalp, but Alex could see a glimmer of hope in the man’s wide eyes. They were blue… and bloodshot.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Help me out of here and I’ll tell you,” the voice answered.

  Just then, a faint red light glinted off the side of the wall behind them. There were voices now too. An angry buzz that was quickly and steadily growing.

  “Curburide coming,” the head said. “They’re not going to like finding humans out of the filth. How did you escape?”

  “Hurry,” Alex said, and pulled Ariana back to her feet. “Ignore it. C’mon.”

  They staggered a step away, and the voice behind called. “Tell me how you escaped?” he cried. “You’re not just going to leave a poor soul here, are you?”

  “I left my shovel at home,” Ariana said.

  “Use your hands,” he begged. “It won’t take but a minute if both of you help.”

  “We have to go,” Alex warned. “Now!”

  “I’ll tell them where you went,” he threatened. “I’ll tell them you were here.”

  Ariana shook her head. “I don’t think so.” She turned and raised her foot before delivering a kick right into the shadowed face of the buried man. The air snapped with the impact, and the head tilted to one side. It didn’t speak again.

  “Jesus,” Alex complained.

  Ariana shrugged. “I don’t like threats.”

  “Well, I hope you’ve got a lot of muscle in that leg, because I think there are a whole lotta threats coming this way.”

  “Shut up and walk,” Ariana answered.

  “Bitch,” Alex whispered under her breath.

  “Damn right.”

  “I can smell them,” a voice said from just a few yards away. Alex now saw dozens of dark round shapes on the ground all around them and realized there were many heads in the earth that had noticed them. Others struggled to turn in their direction. The whites of their eyes gave them away. She pushed Ariana in the back and they both began to run as the murmur of voices grew louder around them.

  The corridor widened, and the earth began to suck at their feet. They slipped and fell as the incline grew steeper; the earth itself grew wetter, stickier. The air tasted thick, rank. It smelled like a swamp, and a locker room. And a toilet. Alex’s foot connected with something hard, and she looked behind just as the object complained.

  “Asshole,” the ground called. Another head.

  “I see light ahead,” Ariana said.

  And sure enough, the murky black turned to grey just a few yards away as they rounded a corner. The ceiling suddenly disappeared, and Alex skidded to a stop next to Ariana under the open sky. If sky was what it was. The air above grew hazy and faintly ocher. Clouds of mist hung like sulphur in the air, and the black, oily earth ahead led into a yellowed sea. The beach was littered with what looked to be large eggs… but Alex knew better.

  They were heads.

  Dozens, maybe hundreds of people buried in the muck to their necks. They stuck up from the slimy earth every few feet and led right out into the water, which lapped at the lips of those farthest away from the tunnel they’d just left.

  There was a faint rumble overhead, and suddenly the sky let loose with a gentle rain. As it reached them, Alex realized it was warm. And stank.

  “Oh my God,” she spat, as the realization hit her.

  Ariana nodded, shrugged, and used the yellow spray to rinse the dried blood from her naked chest. She’d cut herself intentionally in the ceremony in Terrel that had brought them here. As the caked blood from the wound rinsed away, it slowly revealed the long red cut of her sacrificial mark. A wound that stretched from throat to crotch. She didn’t seem to mind that she was bathing in demon piss. “We’re standing in the Curburide’s toilet,” she announced offhandedly.

  “Ugh!” Alex screamed.

  “Come on in, the water’s warm,” a head taunted from down the beach.

  Ariana backhanded Alex. “Shut up, it’s just piss. It’s anti-bacterial. Let’s go.”

  Ariana began to run down the black beach. A building jutted out from the rocks a few hundred yards away. It looked to be their only chance to hide from whoever, or whatever, was coming. Alex followed, at the same moment understanding exactly what the sticky muck beneath her feet probably really was…. but also knowing that the creatures following behind them should be exiting the tunnel any moment.

  Ignoring the stink and the warm rain that ran down her cheeks like dirty tears, she followed. Ariana ran hard, the bare muscles of her thighs and ass rippling in the dreary light as Alex struggled to keep up. She could see the occasional fuzz of pubic hair between the other woman’s thighs as Ariana ran, spreading her legs wide and occasionally leaping over a head protruding from the shitty earth. The other woman was definitely in shape, she had to give her that.

  “Like what you see?” Malachai asked. “Maybe you could get to be closer friends.”

  “Shut up,” she said under her breath.

  “If you ever wanted to get a little kinky, this is the place to let loose,” he said.

  “Stop it.”

  “Of course, this is also the place to be buried in shit and pissed on, three hundred and sixty-five days a year for eternity.”

  Alex ignored him, and followed Ariana’s ass up the stone steps to the small building. It seemed to grow out of a small hill, and she guessed that its hallways disappeared deep underground; the
re was no actual “back” to the structure visible.

  Behind them, she heard someone yell, and another voice answer.

  “They saw us,” she breathed, as they dove into the doorway. There was no door, just an entry arch.

  The room beyond was small. All its walls were covered in cages – tall, silver cages, with bars made of knives. Instead of round steel, each bar was a sharp blade, and threatened both the captor and the captive.

  Alex walked closer to the wall and saw that the floors were the same. There was no surface within the cages that didn’t offer injury.

  “I don’t think this is the kind of zoo you want to be stuck in,” Ariana said from behind her. “Come on.”

  Together they ran past the cages and into a dark hall. There were entryways along the hall, all of them shut with heavy wooden doors. They passed them, trying to find an end. The light grew fainter and fainter.

  “I don’t know if we should keep going,” Alex gasped after awhile. “I can’t see in front of me anymore.”

  “I don’t think you want to be seen by what’s behind.” Ariana warned. “I can hear them; they followed us in here, into this building. We need to find another way out.”

  “How about this one,” a deep voice said from her left. Ariana yelped in surprise.

  A large, rough hand suddenly clasped Alex by the shoulder and yanked her into one of the hall doorways.

  The door slammed shut behind them.

  CHAPTER 3

  CINDY DIDN’T WEAR her cowboy hat to bed, but she proved she knew how to ride like a cowgirl just the same.

  Maybe it was the beer, but Joe soon found it difficult to keep up with her. When they finished, or at least, took a break, he was dripping with sweat.

  “Wow,” he gasped. “I must be out of shape, I can’t catch my breath!” He stretched out on his back, pulling the soft white sheets around him, as she lay on her stomach next to him, hands on her chin, elbows to the bed. She watched him breathing with a faint smile. She looked like a proud cat guarding her prey.

  “Too much for you?” she asked.