Cult of the Hexad (Afterlife saga Book 6) (2 page)

Apart from looks we had very little else in common. She was beautiful and reminded me of the goddesses we had been taught about in class. Although I would switch off in our teachings when they said to shun such creatures as beauty only brought trouble.

Well I guess they weren’t wrong if my cousin was anything to go by, I thought bitterly. It wasn’t as if I was jealous, far from it as I preferred to have a warm heart and kind soul over beauty any day and as my sister often told me, I was blessed with both. I would only blush and laugh the compliment away like I did most things. But oh what it would feel like to be more like the girl in the mirror. For a start, what would it feel like to have those captive hands holding me instead of her?

I shuddered just thinking about him. And what last night’s dream had brought me. I had felt myself getting so close to it. As if I had been reaching out trying to chase the unknown. That feeling a woman has when being with a man like that. It had been so hot and carnal. So forbidden and if any of my church members knew what thoughts really went on in my head, then oh my, wouldn’t I be known as the wild child. Shunned wasn’t a strong enough word to cut it.

Banished more like.

Because they didn’t know what or who I dreamed of. They didn’t see what I saw. They didn’t see another version of my naked body being taken on an altar in wild abandon. They didn’t see me giving myself to not just a man…

But a Demon with wings.

“Hey Sinner girl, you been chastised again?” Ariana’s voice shook me from my dangerous thoughts. I looked round after realising I must have been staring at Hell for a good twenty minutes now. It was a replica of the painting ‘The great day of his Wrath’ by an English artist by the name of John Martin. It was something I found myself spending far too much time staring into thinking about the world I lived in. It was a depressing image and one that was put there for that very reason, I was sure.

It showed the end of the world and a great eruption where both mankind and mountains fell together into the pit of ultimate despair. It often made me shudder to look at but I had to admit that in times of my own despair I found something unexpected in the sight of such destruction. For there at the bottom, amongst the other doomed souls and as the world crumbled into fiery depths below, one figure sat there and simply cried as she waited for her death.

So I would look at that lone figure whenever I felt lost in a life I didn’t feel as though I belonged in and thought…well at least it could be worse.

“You’re not looking at that God awful painting again are you?” My twin sister asked as she came to sit on my side of the bed and we both faced the wall that held the one reason for our sins, sins that we seemed to commit without even knowing it. Even though we were twins we were as far away from each other as fire and ice, in both looks and personality.

We both had long blonde hair that we were forced to wear tied back into tight and often painful buns at the base of our necks. We were both pale and we were both short being only five foot three but that’s where the similarities ended. Ariana had a pair of cute dimples either side of her lips and when she smiled I often felt that as long as they were showing then everything would be okay.

Her eyes would shine like blazing topazes and gave away her mood no matter how she tried to hide it. They were definitely the windows to her soul and that soul was nothing short of beautiful. Her lips made the perfect cupids bow and she had often been reprimanded for wearing lipstick as they always seemed to have a natural red tint that never went away.

We were both curvy creatures and thankfully looked nothing like our mother who was painfully thin and looked far older than she was. But whereas I was heavier on top, Ariana was heavier in the bottom, with curvy hips that she couldn’t help but sway as she walked. I would often have little daydreams about what it would be like when we were freed of this place and could do the simple things we knew the outside world took for granted. Things like shopping for new outfits before going out for an evening and letting our hair down in more ways than one, I thought as I felt the digging pins in my neck holding all my hair into place.

I had gotten dressed shortly after my mother had closed the door on me and the itchy woollen shirt under the hideous sandy coloured burlap dress they made all the woman wear was already making me sweat. I swear it was only forced upon us as another form of torture for us to endure. The summer months had been Hell.       

“Do you ever wonder what it’s really like down there?” I asked making my sister scoff at the question and scratching at my dress being reminded of what we were both still looking at.

“God, its worse than I thought…you have stable duty again don’t you?” I laughed once and then shook my head.

“They’re going to make me talk to someone this time.” I said looking down at my lap and ignoring the pang of hunger I usually got when being locked in my room.

“You had another dream?” I nodded and closed my eyes against his image as if seeing him in my mind as often as I did actually caused me pain. I didn’t understand this addictive behaviour and why I couldn’t find the strength to let it go…to let
him
go.

“Ah…I see.”

“What am I going to do Ari, this is getting out of control?” I said covering my face with my hands and feeling ashamed, the way we were brainwashed to think. I felt my sister’s hand at my back and it took little force to lean into her embrace for the much needed comfort I craved right then.

“We will figure this out Kay and if we don’t, then at least we will be out of this shithole soon.” I snapped my head up and shot a panicked look to the door.

“Ssshh, you don’t want them to catch you saying that.” I warned knowing what our punishments were like. She just shrugged her shoulders and said,

“Don’t worry Kay Bear, there’s no one home…some important meeting at Elders Mount or something, so we are safe.” I had to smile at her nickname for me that had stuck ever since my love of Carebears when I was a kid. And for some odd reason whenever I thought back to my childhood toys the image of a green haired girl came to mind. I had to wonder if it wasn’t some distant memory my mind was searching for. Maybe some eccentric neighbour or someone from the school we used to go to. Either way I doubted it was someone my mother would have known, not with green hair and a body full of colourful tattoos.    

“Yeah for now but what about Rory?” I asked leaving the image of that girl and getting back to our spiteful cousin knowing the last thing we needed was a repeat of what happened only a week ago…the bruises had only just started to fade.

“Yeah well if that bitch wasn’t pregnant then she wouldn’t have dared, Uncle or not!” I shuddered at the thought of
his
wrath but decided not to remind her of our joint punishments during her rant.

I wished I could have been more like her. Ari didn’t seem to be afraid of anything and I felt bad a lot of the time that she spent so much of her energy looking after me. Well okay, so it wasn’t like we were kids anymore but sometimes I think she forgot that.

It was as if since that fateful day that drunk driver crashed into us she took on the role my father no longer had the chance to fill. He had died instantly and I would have been next if it hadn’t been for my sister, who dragged both me and my mother out of the car. She had saved us both that day but we both knew the mother we shared had also died in that accident. It was the most sinful of thoughts but we both wished it had happened that way so that we could simply mourn the woman we once loved as our mother. Instead the brutal reality was that the love we once had was lost long ago along with the fading memory of our father and hate had quickly replaced it.

It was a sad truth our new lives had been forced to learn the very first day we were brought to the Hexad Colony. If I thought my sister and I had been close before the accident then what happened after was to forever cement that love and devotion for the rest of our lives. If it hadn’t been for Ari then I really don’t think I would have survived being forced to live here and no doubt Ari felt the same. To the Elders our ‘wilful ways’ as they called it, had to be beaten out of us for good and they had been trying to do just that for the last seventeen years.

“Hey, come on Kay, it won’t be long now.” Ari reminded me that we only had a month until we finally got our time to leave like the others had. It was shortly to be our joint birthday in just over a months’ time and everyone who reached their twenty fifth birthday got the option to leave the Hexad Colony. I don’t think Ari and myself even spoke once about which choice we would make, no it was more of a case of counting down the days.

The day we lost our father was the day we entered our own personal Hell. I looked up at the only painting I was allowed on my walls because its sole purpose was to show me what would happen to my soul if I disobeyed the Elders’ teachings. My sister had a similar painting in her room by the same artist and its title was just as depressing as mine being ‘The Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah’.

“I don’t think he was a happy man, do you?” Ari asked nodding at the painting and I had to laugh as she referred to the artist.

“Maybe he lived here for a spell.” I said this time making her laugh.

“It’s a possibility.” She replied nudging me and that was it. That was all it took to drag me from my distracted mind and back to the reality we needed to focus on.

“I don’t see why you get to dream of the kind one.” I muttered pretending to be sulky. When Ari didn’t fire back with a witty reply I turned to look at her and was surprised to find her blushing. For the last eight months we had both been plagued with dreams of another life and let’s just say that the man in Ari’s dreams was a lot less frightening than the one in mine… or so the way Ari told it. But that wasn’t the only difference between our dreams. Ari experienced her dreams as herself, which I can imagine added to the deep blush that had crept its way across her usually milky cheeks.

The man she dreamt of she only ever described as kind and loving towards her which was why we called him ‘The Angel’. But as for me, well that was a different matter entirely. My dreams were always as some useless bystander who was left to watch helplessly as another version of myself remained captive in some dark and handsome man’s bedroom. I had often woke silently screaming and panting to catch my breath as the sight of her destitute cries got too much for me to bear.

I didn’t know why this was happening to us but for me at least it always felt like my other self was trying to tell me something. Maybe she was trying to let me know how I could save her from the dark man. It was strange the pull he had over her and the pull he had over me for that matter. It was as if whenever he was out of the room she would try everything to try and reach me. She would cry, she would scream, one time she even threw a chair to get my attention but there was never any sound in my dreams.

Then he would enter and it was as if she did everything in her power to try and hide the fact I was watching. He never saw me and given the power it was obvious he had in abundance I was more than glad of it…or was I? Oh, who was I kidding, I had often wondered what it would feel like to have him look at me at least once the way he looked at her. 

I had once dreamt that after only minutes of entering the room he found my other self in nothing but a small towel after showering. One look was all it had taken before he ripped the towel away from her, bent her neck and bit into it as though his ravenous thirst for blood had been too much to wait. Her knees buckled and I let out a silent gasp just before he caught her then carried her to the bed all the time still with his fangs firmly embedded in her neck before he firmly embedded something else of his inside her.

I wasn’t naive to what happened between a man and woman in love inside the bedroom. But having not experienced it myself did mean that when these certain dreams occurred I was left with a torrent of mixed emotions. Confused, flustered, embarrassed, torn but most of all, unbelievably aroused.

I was ashamed to admit that seeing what I was forced to often left me feeling disgusted with myself. The fact that I managed to get turned on by watching him take her the way he did. But even more disturbing was how much my captive self seemed to not only enjoy it but crave it. It was all so confusing but most of all frightening to witness. There was no denying how much he scared me but my reactions to him added to that fear tenfold. He seemed to possess the power over the mind and that was one of the most frightening possibilities of all and one of the reasons we had named him…

‘The Demon’.

“You had another dream as well…didn’t you?” I guessed when I saw her twisting the same dress I wore around in her hands. It was a nervous habit of hers and one that didn’t happen very often. Mainly when I asked questions like this one. My own nervous habit on the other hand was tucking my hair behind my ear or playing with the ends, one that definitely happened often seeing as I was far shyer than my twin.

“Yes but I don’t want to talk about it this time.” She said, which was unlike her.

“But…”

“Do you want to tell me about yours?” Well she certainly had me there.

“There you go.” I frowned at her smug face at guessing that I wouldn’t.

“Don’t worry, we will sort this out.”

“How?” I asked as I had long ago given up on these dreams ever fading into distant memories.