Covenant (23 page)

The first thing Joe noticed as they entered the crystal chamber was that the blue crystals lining the room seemed to be alive with a faint light of their own. He didn’t need his flashlight. Through their unnatural light he could see Cindy spread-eagle on the rock in the center of the room. A sacrificial altar. The caver was crouched on top of her, readying himself to violate her as he had Angelica. How, Joe didn’t know. The caver shouldn’t be moving at all. The guy’s back was a gash of ripped flesh, and blood was flowing out of him in all directions. The floor was slick with it.

“No!” Joe shouted, and dashed ahead of the women, arms poised to shove the dying rapist from the poor girl. Just before he reached them, another arm grabbed his and dragged him to a halt.

“It’s His will and His right,” Rhonda said through gritted teeth. Her eyes looked vacant.

He tried to shake her arm from his own, but her grip was like a vise. She was under the power of the demon; he could tell. Her lips growled something only the spirit would say: “It is the beginning of a new Covenant.”

“Then we have to stop it!” he yelled again, and then turned to beseech the others for help. “Angelica, Karen,” he cried. “Stop Him. Stop Him before it’s too late for her. Don’t let him make her suffer the way you have. Don’t let Him make her one of you.”

Karen darted forward, but then stopped as a voice rang out clear and powerful throughout the chamber.

“Ah, but she already is one of you, isn’t she?”

The voice came from Ken’s mouth, but was not his own. Joe, Karen and the others stared in shock. Cindy raised her head from the pedestal, eyes focusing with rapid blinks on Joe, and then moving to the gored man crawling over her body like a predatory lion.

She looked confused.

Ken’s horrible eyes caught them all. One by one, he stared them down, and then with a chuckle, his gaze stopped on Joe.

“Tell them, Joey boy. Who is this little girl beneath me? This ripe little nugget that I’m going to impregnate with my seed, to birth a new Covenant for Terrel?”

Joe remained silent.

“Cat got your tongue, Mr. Reporter? Allow me, then.”

Ken looked down at Cindy and trailed a bloodied tongue from her lips to her forehead. The red stripe glistened sickly in the light.

“The search is over, my ladies. We have found our missing child. Actually”—the possessed caver pointed a trembling finger at Joe— “he exposed her to me. Without our little reporter friend, none of us might ever have found Rachel’s sweet child, raised and rocked right here in our midst. But now we have.”

Joe stammered, “But how…”

Ken grinned, black blood staining his teeth.

“When you sleep with her, you sleep with me. I know what you know. I’ve never needed to forge a new Covenant to possess you because you gave me all I needed freely.”

A tremor rocked the body of the caver and suddenly Ken stiffened. Cindy reached up to stroke his face and said, as if in a dream, “James.”

Ken grinned and looked back at the women.

“I have your final sacrifice. Our Covenant is met. Go now while you can, or stay and begin a new one with me.”

Joe was pulled backward as Rhonda yanked him toward the tunnel leading to the ocean.

“No,” he said again, and held his ground against the woman and the demon. “She is not yours to take.”

“Ah, but she is,” Ken’s grave-rough voice answered. “Ask her mother.”

Without thinking, Joe glanced at Angelica, who had fallen to her knees. Tears streamed down her face.

“Yes, ask her mother,” the voice continued. “Ask her how happy she is that you found her daughter. Ask her what she’ll do to thank you.”

Angelica’s face was awash with tears, betrayal and heartache etched into every pore. Joe couldn’t meet her eyes. How could he have been so stupid? He had brought her right to Him. He had undone the one victory Angelica had maintained over the demon.

Joe slumped in defeat. The game was won. And he had not come out on top. Once again, he had managed to undermine the woman—women—that he loved.

Ken’s eyes glowed with inner sparks as Joe met his gaze.

“Time to seal the bargain,” the monster said.

With that, the caver positioned his legs between Cindy’s and leaned into the girl. Then he raised up, laughed aloud at Joe’s open mouth and…

…collapsed on top of her.

The cave suddenly exploded with light; the blue fire in the crystals beneath Cindy’s naked body glowed. Cerulean fire raced like manic Christmas lights down a strand, chasing and doubling back. Ken’s limp arm hung over the edge, a dull stream of dusky red dripping from elbow to cave floor. The light illuminated his sightless eyes, and Joe felt a ray of hope. Taking advantage of Rhonda’s disorientation, he leapt forward, smashing his knee against the pedestal in his haste to push Ken’s lifeless body from Cindy’s mesmerized form.

“Shit,” he said, but the dead caver slid to the ground. Then Cindy’s eyes met his own and she smiled.

“Yes, my darling,” her voice rasped. Its normally girlish tone seemed deeper, harsher. “You can take his place. I need a live one for this part.”

Suddenly Joe’s body was not his own. His hands flew over the buttons of his shirt, ripped with clumsy haste at his belt. He could feel his erection rise, though he wanted nothing less than to make love to Cindy right now.

“Stop it,” he cried silently.

“
Sit back and enjoy the ride
,” Malachai whispered. “
You
know you want it
.”

He realized in horror that this was what Angelica had probably felt like the night she had seduced him. Powerless. Angry. Used. He cursed himself for not having gotten to the chapter on possession in the book George had given him. He knew of no way to fight this hold on him.

But the demon knew its business. The room seemed to fade from his view and before him, he saw Cindy as she’d been in the back of his car, innocent and sweet. As she’d been on that night in his apartment, seductive, loving. His clothes were now gone and his erection raged. Joe couldn’t think of anything but lying with her. Having her.

Fucking her.

She was ready for him, her body glistening with sweat and blood, her sex engorged and open. The demon let him waste no time. The cave swam in and out of focus, a blue-green wash of light and sound. He could hear voices, distantly. A scream? Below him Cindy’s eyes danced with light, her mouth whispering over and over, “Yes, James, yes.”

And then he heard the laughter.

It began deep in the back of his brain and spread with his impending orgasm to shiver through every muscle.

“
Say g’night, Gracie
.” The laughter mocked him as he slipped and slammed in the blood covering Cindy’s body and came deep inside her. As his orgasm rocked him, Cindy’s mouth opened in an O of pleasure. She yelped a series of short, sharp cries, and then moaned with contentment beneath him.

“Oh, James,” she whispered, still not seeing the world around her.

Joe could see Rhonda to one side of their rock altar, her large teeth gritting, hands above her head. The piton that had spelled Ken’s end was now in her hands.

The demon had used him and now was throwing him away. And he was helpless to stop Him. His hips shivered in the last throes of ecstasy and he watched, in slow motion, as the steel spike completed its upward arc behind Rhonda’s head and then began its descent toward his spine.

Then there was another sound, another “no,” and something hit him, hard, jarring his awareness closer to reality. A weight slapped his body down harder onto Cindy, whose “whoof” of surprise blew spit onto Joe’s frozen face.

There was a scream, and another impact, this one less intense than the first.

Karen threw herself face-first over the top of Joe and Cindy, protecting them from Rhonda’s attack with her body. Monica screamed as Rhonda brought the steel down to stab Karen instead of Joe.

Something snapped in Monica at that moment. All her life she’d been the one bossed around. The one who’d meekly said “okay” and done whatever the group wanted. The one who the demon had told to kiss the lips of her dead friend Bernadette, and who had. She had been bossed by Rhonda, had sacrificed her child to a demon and married a man who would just as soon beat her as kiss her. But one woman had helped her keep her sanity through it all. One woman had sat with her night after night at her kitchen table, soothing her fears. Karen had saved her.

And as Monica saw Rhonda bring the steel spike down to stab her—their—friend, Monica felt the anger of a lifetime surge at Him, at Rhonda, at herself for her entire wasted life. It coursed through her in a white-hot angry instant filling
her with a power she’d never felt before. Every hesitation she’d ever known was washed away. Monica sprang to action, throwing her thin arms around her friend’s beefy neck and holding on for all she was worth.

Get up,
Karen’s lips mouthed to Joe. Her brow creased in violent tremors of pain, and she closed her eyes and collapsed to the stone altar half on top of him.

Joe didn’t waste the time she’d bought him. He slid from between Karen, who was gasping for air, and Cindy, who seemed oblivious to everything, and stood, naked and trembling, to stare at the scene behind him.

Monica was screaming at the top of her lungs, her ear-piercing cries echoing through the cavern like the sound track to a horror movie. Rhonda twisted and struggled, battering behind her clumsily to remove the other woman from her neck. For a moment, Monica held her off balance, but with her own natural strength and the urging of the demon, Rhonda quickly recovered, and threw the woman to the ground. Not content with freeing herself, Rhonda stomped over to Monica, who was already turning to fight again. But this time, Rhonda had the upper hand. She held the smaller woman’s shoulders and pushed her back to the ground. As Joe watched in horror, Rhonda grabbed the other woman by the hair and began methodically bashing her old friend’s face into the rock of the cavern floor. Joe could hear each wet, thudding impact.

“Spirit,” he screamed. “I invoke your name, Malachai, and command you to stop.”

“
Don’t do this
,” a cold, familiar voice whispered in his skull.

But at Joe’s command, Rhonda did stop, her face suddenly gone blank.

“Malachai, if you wish to remain any longer in this realm, I insist that you release them all,” he continued. Behind him, Angelica coughed and cried. And then he heard footsteps slap the rock. They faded as she ran from the chamber.

“
You have damned her,”
the voice mocked.
“She can never
live with the knowledge she has gained of herself. She runs toward
the depths of the water now
.”

Joe looked back and forth between a bloodied, confusedly blinking Cindy lying on the dais and the now-empty corridor that led to the ocean.

“
Who will you save?
”

“Stop her,” Joe commanded, and the spirit laughed.

“
There’s only so much you can command using only my name,”
He said.
“I’m under Covenant to another
.”

“That other is dead and buried,” Joe answered. “And that hundred-year Covenant has been done for years now. Your pledge to Broderick Terrel is over. You have no right to remain here any longer.”

“
Ah, but I have extended it
,” the spirit taunted. “
Just ask the
women around you
.”

“An unfair bargain,” Joe complained. “They had no choice in the matter.”

“
Nobody forced them to my cavern
,” the spirit said. “
Nobody
forced them to push their children from the top of the cliff
.”

“I don’t believe that,” Joe countered. “But it doesn’t matter. You yourself said moments ago that this Covenant with these women was over. You are free and not bound on this plane to anyone…and so I name you—”

“Yeeeaaaiiii,” Rhonda screamed, and charged at Joe, mouth drooling long dribbles of saliva, sausage fingers clenched in rakelike claws.

Joe sidestepped her attack and screamed, “Malachai, I command you—”

“
You don’t know what you’re doing
.”

“Stop this instant. You—”

“
Don’t!
”

“—are mine to bind.”

From an achingly long distance came a sudden shriek. And next to him Joe felt rather than saw Rhonda slump to the ground as the demon released her.

He was surrounded by bodies. The blue crystals electrified the room again, just as it had when Ken’s body had finally expired. Did that mean the demon had claimed another soul? Was the light a signal that someone had been “absorbed”?

He knew without question that Angelica had just died. And now her spirit was locked inside the crystals. Locked in the dungeon of the demon, Malachai.

Sliding the piton slowly from the wound Rhonda had carved with it in Karen’s bloody shoulder, he twisted around and smashed its needle point into the glowing crystals in the center of the cavern, those that supported the sacrificial dais.

A hurricane exploded in his head.

“
AAAHHhhhheeeiiiiii!
”

A shriek of unearthly power…and peril.

But Joe stabbed again and again, chipping away blue electric sparks and bits of crystal as clear as rock candy from the pedestal. An unseen force lifted him, and he flew backward through the air. He crashed with a shattering impact into a wall, and slid with a painful scrape to the corner of the cavern.

But he didn’t stop. Instead, arm over arm, knees grinding the grit of the floor into his flesh, Joe advanced again on the speeding phosphorescent trails of power, and hammered at the seat of the demon’s strength.

“Demon, I release you and command that you—”

“
Covenant!
” screamed the voice in his mind, and behind its desperation he could hear a thousand keening wails of grief and bliss. The voices of all its captured souls. Would they be free upon the earth if Malachai was killed? Or would they dissipate to silent air? Joe couldn’t stop to wonder as he was once more propelled backward. This time his head hit the cave floor with a blinding smear of heat.