Dark Vengeance Read online

  Won’t make it to Pear Tree Hill. Dustin in danger. Call me.

  She needed a second line of defense. The all-consuming fear that used to plague her when Bastard Bobby lurked in every shadow came back with a vengeance. After his arrest, she’d let her guard down, and relished being able to do so. Her pepper spray migrated from her purse to a kitchen drawer. She stopped setting the house alarm. She stopped clearing the Explorer’s backseat before getting in. She wondered what the hell she had been thinking.

  An action plan formed. Pepper spray into her pocket. Hide kitchen knives in each room. Charge the cell phone. Then call Sam. Laura would need help at Pear Tree Hill. He needed to be in the loop. Theresa entered the kitchen.

  Someone grabbed her from behind. Powerful hands pinned her arms elbow to elbow. A black bag covered her head and the world turned to night. A drawstring pulled tight around her neck. She sucked in a breath and got a claustrophobic mouthful of cotton.

  From his room, Dustin screamed.

  “Dustin!” Theresa yelled but her voice bounced uselessly inside the bag.

  The assailant at her elbows lifted her and slammed her to the floor. Her head cracked against the floor and a shower of stars flashed in the darkness. The noose around her neck tightened. She choked and gasped for air.

  “Mom! Mom!” The bag muffled Dustin’s wild, high-pitched scream. Theresa croaked a response and flailed in her attacker’s iron grip.

  Near her head came the unmistakable metallic double click of a pistol chambering a round.

  “No!” a vaguely familiar female voice commanded. “We don’t kill a woman. Ever.”

  The drawstring cinched tighter. Theresa gagged. She imagined Dustin being dragged away, away to some sacrificial rite in the woods. She made another feeble tug against the hands that pinned her. Lightheadedness swept in like high tide. She passed out.

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Aileen sat in a rocking chair in her room, reading glasses perched on her nose as she poked and pulled at a needlepoint project. The sun was close to the horizon and she would have to soon stop for the day. Dinner for five would not make itself.

  Two sharp knocks sounded on her bedroom’s solid wood door. She looked up. The door creaked open a few inches and Tammy stuck in her head.

  “We need to talk,” Tammy said. Her smile did not match the authoritative tone of her voice.

  The door swung open, and Tammy and Janice entered. Aileen dropped the needlepoint in her lap. The unwritten rule was that Aileen’s bedroom was her personal space. The other women had never once crossed the threshold, never asked, never been asked. Aileen caught her breath at the awful sense of violation.

  Tammy had a bowl in her hand, wide and made of some black ceramic. Janice failed to hide a length of clothesline held behind her back. Each took a position at one of Aileen’s shoulders.

  “We’re having visitors tonight,” Tammy said.

  Aileen’s eyes narrowed above her reading glasses. The idea of someone giving orders in her house…

  “We most certainly are not,” Aileen said. “We have no company after five.”

  She started to stand, but Janice laid a meaty hand on one shoulder and shoved her back down into the chair. The chair gave a violent bounce back and forth until Janice stopped it with her foot.

  “Now it’s because we appreciate what you’ve done for us and the children,” Tammy continued, “and your gender, that we’re being so polite here. But believe me when I say, you can fall from our good graces pretty quickly.”

  Janice slipped behind Aileen, whipped a scarf from her pocket and bound it around Aileen’s mouth. She yanked it tight. Aileen’s jaw creaked as the scarf pinned back the corners of her mouth. She choked a bit on her tongue. The dry cotton and her growing fear turned her mouth desert dry.

  “We wanted you to be part of this beautiful event tonight,” Tammy said, “this culmination, this delivery of justice. But while you wanted to live off the earth, you did not want to live with her. You were so enamored with piddly white magic that you missed seeing its real power.”

  Aileen had never called it white magic, the rituals she practiced, the ones she had shared with the other two women. The simple acts had just been to help draw forth the natural powers of the earth to fuel their plantings.

  “You are so in denial about the harm done to you by men,” Tammy said, “that you can’t seek the revenge you deserve. We saw early on that you’d never be part of the sisterhood, but could still help us reach our goals. When you see the results, you’ll embrace the truths you are now too blind to see.”

  Janice knelt and pinned Aileen’s hands behind the chair. Tammy lit a lighter and touched the flame to the contents of the black bowl. Blue-gray smoke curled up into the air. She held the bowl under Aileen’s nose. Aileen recognized the smell, the tangy herbal scent the children’s classroom always had. But much stronger. She twisted her head back and forth and held her breath until her lungs threatened to explode. Her eyes watered.

  She exhaled like a burst balloon. Tammy grabbed her under the chin and shoved the smoldering bowl back under her nose. Aileen inhaled and the smoke ran up her nose nostrils and into her skull like twin snakes. It wrapped around her brain, and she relaxed.

  She wondered what she’d been thinking. These two women were all right. They could be trusted. Whatever they said would be the best thing for her to do. She was more certain of that than anything she’d ever known.

  Rough clothesline bit into her wrists. That was okay. All for the best, she was sure.

  “Now, when you see what we accomplish tonight,” Tammy said, “when you see what justice is done, you’ll feel as good about it as you feel under this spell now. You’ll face and be ready to avenge the evil your husband did to you. You’ll beg to join the coven and we’ll embrace you as our sister.”

  Aileen smiled against the gag. It hurt to smile, to stretch muscles so long unused. But it was a good kind of hurt. Janice bound Aileen’s ankles to the rocker’s front legs.

  “Now you’ll be still tonight and by the morning you’ll be ready to share in our glory,” Tammy said.

  Aileen gave a lazy, dopey nod. Of course she would. It would all be perfect in the morning.

  Tammy and Janice left the room. Aileen looked out the window across the front yard. The flaming-red disc of the sun nearly touched the horizon. A white Camry with Kentucky plates drove up the driveway.

  Tammy’s guests, she thought. How nice to have visitors.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  “I’ll get the children,” Tammy said as she headed for their bedroom.

  “The Gift?” Janice asked.

  “Not until the groom arrives,” Tammy said.

  Janice slipped on her red, hooded cloak and went out to the backyard. The preparations for the ceremony were complete. Two square posts stuck six feet out of the ground, a few feet apart. A crossbeam joined the tops to create a large inverted U. Kindling surrounded the base in an oval. It was the wedding altar for a marriage that would be short but permanent, a marriage that would produce one offspring the likes of which the world had not seen since the rule of the Mayans.

  Four tiki torches stood at the cardinal compass points around the kindling oval. Janice put a lighter to one. Orange flames leapt from the head. She tossed a pinch of dried herbs into the blaze and spoke a soft incantation. The flames turned bright red, ritually purified and worthy to light the sacrificial pyre when the time came.

  Janice stepped back to admire the altar in the torchlight. The great inverted U looked like the Greek omega, the symbol of the end. How fitting.

  Tammy arrived with Bo and Caroline. The two appeared near catatonic. They stood, heads slightly skewed to one side, eyes vacant and glassy. Tammy had stoked the incense at double-strength and laced their dinners with a second round of bewitching herbs. The children were no longer just susceptible to suggestion, they were dependent upon it.

  “Lie down before the altar,” Tammy ordered. The children o
beyed and took positions on their backs, feet towards the posts.

  Cars began to arrive. One by one they pulled up and parked. Cars, trucks, SUVs. License plates heralded from around the nation, even an Alaskan one on a rusty Dodge Ram. But one thing was the same with each arrival. One woman got out, with a dark, hooded cloak across her arm, and one child followed her to the backyard.

  The children had their own observable consistency. While they were a mix of boys and girls, they were all within months of the same age of nine. The girls wore red, the boys black. All had the same uncomprehending look, the same dull shuffle towards the impending ceremony.

  Unseen was the consistency of their backgrounds. Each child was fostered or adopted, selected by their witch, first for being unbaptized, then for specific attributes, specific strengths. Each child here was a single fleck of color, with a specific place in the palette the coven would use tonight to paint. Channeling their combined spiritual power to the longarex would free it forever.

  The event’s catalyst, the bridal couple to seal the longarex’s existence on this plane, was on the way, a place saved for each at the uprights.

  A black pickup truck rolled up the driveway and parked to the side. A tall witch in a red robe got out of the front. She opened a back door and led a dazed and wobbly Dustin from the truck. His eyelids drooped and he dragged his feet with each step. The witch led Dustin to Tammy and Janice. She wore the locket she’d retrieved from the wreckage of Galaxy Farm, Sarah Hutchington’s locket, around her neck.

  Tammy and Janice nodded in an understated sign of fealty. Mayor Maggie McCormack pulled back her hood and gave her hair a shake.

  “We had to use Plan B,” Maggie said. “The boy’s sedated. It took a bit of doing with the trauma of us having to take him from his mother. You’re sure he’s the one?”

  “Dalton said his numbers were off the charts,” Tammy said. “And he’s the son of a woman with the gift of prophecy. He’s got the gift as well, whether it has manifested or not. He’ll be perfect.” Tammy turned to Janice. “Get the girl. Dose her before you bring her up, to take the edge off. She’ll want to participate, but the crowd will throw her.”

  Janice nodded.

  “Do you think everything is set at the fairgrounds?” Tammy asked Maggie.

  “Our women are on the way,” Maggie said. “And I appointed a spineless fool to organize it and promoted a pliable sheriff to protect it. I’d say everything’s set.” She smirked. “Big Things for Moultrie!”

  Tammy and Maggie led Dustin to the uprights. Janice went to the shed. She unlocked the door and swung it wide open. A wheelbarrow sat in the center of the floor. She pushed it forward and tipped it up against the wall. She reached down, grabbed a recessed iron handle and pulled open a heavy trapdoor. Poorly finished concrete steps led down into the darkness of an old root cellar.

  She slipped a flashlight off a hook on the inside of the shed door and snapped it on. From a shelf, she took a shallow white bowl piled with the bewitching herbs, the last dose Janice would have to administer. She was halfway down the steps when a girl’s thin, bleached face loomed out of the darkness ahead of her. Janice stopped.

  “Is it time?” the girl asked.

  “Finally,” Janice said. “The moment you were born for.”

  She lit the incense in the bowl and held it in front of the girl. The girl inhaled deeply, as she had been trained to do over the years.

  “You don’t have your mask,” the girl said. Her voice wavered under the smoke’s influence.

  “The time for masks is over.”

  Janice set the bowl of herbs aside. The girl ran her hands down her shapeless white dress to straighten it. Then she mounted the steps, one at a time, a bride walking down a vertical aisle. Tammy followed step for step.

  The girl rose out of the shed. The hooded faces of the coven turned in her direction. The girl recoiled as she saw the crowd.

  “So many people,” she said. “How could there be so many people?”

  “Nothing to fear,” Janice said. “They are here to see you. To witness your offering.”

  Janice turned her to face the uprights between the burning torches. Dustin was tied to one.

  “See, your groom awaits.”

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Dalton couldn’t contain his most confident smile as he drove to the witches’ farmhouse. His small investment was about to yield great dividends.

  He’d had a minor role. Gain access to Luther through the marriage and subsequent “accidental” death of his wife, then a little reconnaissance in Moultrie at that teacher’s expense. And now he would take his prize.

  The truth, though the witches were loath to admit it, was this: a coven, without a warlock to lead it, was a disaster waiting to happen. There were examples back to Salem and beyond of the results when women tried to go it alone. Emotions ruled the day, petty jealousies split the ranks and power ebbed away. Witches needed the rational leadership only a warlock could provide. And Dalton was just that warlock. His magical powers were weak to nonexistent, but that wasn’t his selling point. He would rule the band with a firm hand and a hard dick. After all, that pent-up sexual tension within a cloister of witches needed a release. He’d be happy to provide it. Oh, and they’d be happy to get it.

  Luther sat beside Dalton in the car, staring ahead, virtually unaware of his surroundings. The final mix of bewitching herbs from the coven had a little something extra added and this dose had sent the boy to some place very special. Dalton wished he’d had this level of compliance from the boy every day. Not that that would be a concern soon. He’d be free of the little anchor in a few hours.

  He pulled into the long farmhouse driveway and marveled at the turnout. Cars were parked two deep all along the way. He’d counted on three witches, perhaps a few more, but so many… Not all would stay after the ceremony, but he could convince a few, a few of the more nubile ones, to remain behind and receive his services. After all, he wouldn’t be touching Janice anytime soon.

  He parked and exited his car. One of the witches arrived at the passenger door and led Luther away into the backyard without a word. Dalton barely noticed, too enticed by his future to worry about one of the last trappings of his past.

  He pulled on his best black robe, the one with runes along the sleeves in actual gold-infused thread. He hung a silver wolf’s head medallion around his neck. With a quick check in the side-view mirror, he licked a pinky and swept an errant eyebrow into perfect place.

  He strode up the driveway alone and turned the corner of the house. Witches in hooded robes, faces hidden from view, silently positioned children on the ground. So many of them! His fantasies about a three-way turned to visions of a harem. Janice and Tammy, he assumed from their red robes, stood near a large set of wooden beams lashed into an upside-down U. They were tying a child to each of the uprights.

  As he walked to the lead witches, the others paused what they were doing and turned their heads in Dalton’s direction. He couldn’t see their eyes, but he didn’t need to. He knew they were hungry, hungry for structure, hungry for discipline, hungry for what he had for them under his robe. He hardened, imagining the fantasies each one entertained as he passed.

  “Ladies,” Dalton said.

  Tammy and Janice turned. At this distance, he could see their faces. They did not display the look of adoration he’d expected.

  “Looks like things are progressing nicely,” he said. He gave the scene an approving scan, though he really had no idea what he was looking at. “What exactly does this creature we are summoning do?”

  “It’s a hunter,” a voice behind him said.

  He turned to face a witch in a red robe that matched those of Tammy and Janice. Only her mouth showed beneath the hood.

  “Ah, the third triumvir,” he said. “The silent partner I’ve yet to meet. And what does this beast hunt?”

  “Men.”

  Dalton leaned back. She didn’t sound like she was kidding. But the
idea was so ridiculous… The other witches formed a circle around the four.

  “My place for the ceremony?” he said to get things back on a better track.

  “Oh, front and center,” she said. Her lips broke into a venomous smile.

  Tammy and Janice grabbed his arms from behind. Janice gave his legs a kick and he dropped to his knees. The lead witch’s hand shot out and clamped around his throat.

  “What are you doing?” he wheezed out. “I’ve helped you.”

  “No,” the witch said. “You served a purpose. And you will serve one more.”

  Indignation surged through him. “You need me! A coven without a warlock’s guidance—”

  She squeezed and choked off the rest of his words.

  “—is perfection,” she finished for him. “Has anyone else heard enough from men this evening?”

  She pulled a straight razor from beneath her robe and flipped it open. She released her choke hold on Dalton and Janice clamped a meaty arm around his neck. The witch grabbed Dalton’s tongue and yanked. He gagged and tasted earth and sweat. He tried to pull back but Janice was like a brick wall behind him.

  “This might sting,” the witch said.

  The silver blade rolled in and out of his mouth in one quick motion.

  Then came the pain; searing, blinding, white-hot agony that started in the back of his throat and blasted in every direction. Warm, viscous copper gushed in his mouth. He choked and spit bright-red blood all over his robe. He looked up to see the lead witch with a pink chunk of meat in her hand, the chunk that had been his tongue.

  Witches whisked him up into the air and backwards behind the children bound to the uprights. They dropped him on his back and his spine flexed against two large boards fashioned into an X. Small hands pulled his arms and legs to the sides. Leather straps bit into skin as they secured him, spread-eagled, to the boards. His feet went skyward and the coven planted him inverted into the ground.

  Blood rushed to his head and it felt like a volcano ready to explode. The searing stump of his tongue pulsed blood with each beat of his heart. Twin trails of hot, red liquid ran from the corners of his mouth, down into his eyes, and blinded him.