Sacrificed in Shadow (25 page)

Father Armstrong was gone.

“Shit,” Seth said. “Where did he go?”

“Turn back,” Elise said. He flipped a u-turn and backtracked slower than before. A turnoff was concealed within the shrubbery on the curve. “That way.”

Seth decelerated, guiding the truck over the bumpy shoulder and onto a dirt road that cut through the mountain. The trees were thick. Elise dropped the jacket from her legs.

After a few minutes, the road opened into a small clearing between the trees. A cabin stood snugly against the face of the mountain, with a decorative well out front and a well-tended garden along the side. There was even an above-ground swimming pool surrounded by a deck.

“Doesn’t exactly scream ‘evil cult,’” Seth said.

Elise had to agree. If not for the list and the weird Bible, she might have thought that Father Armstrong was just trying to go on a fishing trip.

But he wasn’t carrying a tackle box when he emerged from the car again. He had pulled a bag out of the back seat of the sedan, and it was leaking blood. The scent of it made Elise’s nostrils flare. There was meat in the bag. It wasn’t packaged as if it had come from a butcher’s shop.

Elise’s heart skipped. The bodies had been found with missing parts.

She needed to get that bag before he could hide the evidence.

“I’m going in,” she said, opening the door.

But the wolves beat her to it.

Abel and Rylie erupted from the trees, pounding across the clearing. Twin streaks of lightning tackled Father Armstrong and his accomplice before either of them noticed that they weren’t alone.

The accomplice struggled under Rylie, kicking her away, and freed himself. She snarled as he broke into a run, hauling ass back toward the road.

Rylie looked torn—stay with Father Armstrong, or chase his friend?

“Get him,” Elise urged. “Go!”

The Alpha didn’t need to be told twice. She gave chase, disappearing into the trees.

Abel stood over Father Armstrong, nosing around the bag of meat without actually getting into it. He had one heavy paw on the priest’s chest. But it didn’t seem to be necessary. The man wasn’t moving.

Elise stretched out her senses.

No heartbeat.

“Shove over,” Seth said, nudging Abel with his knee.

The wolf backed off, and Seth checked Father Armstrong for a pulse. It was only a formality. Elise could already tell that he was dead. “What happened?” Elise asked.

Seth slipped a hand underneath the priest’s head. His fingers emerged bloody. “Hit a rock, looks like,” he said. “Accident.”

Elise kneeled at his side and pulled the meat out of the bag, grimacing at the texture in her fingers. It looked like any cut of steak she could get at a grocery store. Could have been pork, maybe.

She dropped the meat back into the bag and licked her bloody forefinger. “It’s not human,” Elise said.

Abel had just killed the priest over a slab of pig.

Great.

The black wolf’s body rearranged, losing its fur. Abel stood, naked and human, and gaped at the unmoving priest. “I didn’t… He wasn’t… I jumped on him, is all.”

Seth grabbed clothes out of the pickup and tossed them at his brother. “Get dressed.”

“Fuck,” Abel said with heat. He jerked a pair of jeans over his hips and belted them.

“He was probably with the cult anyway,” Seth said, resting a hand on Abel’s shoulder. The bigger man looked pale and shaking. Almost like he might faint.

Abel shoved his brother off and paced into the trees.

Rylie raced back into the clearing, sides heaving with exertion. She stepped behind the truck and changed even faster than Abel had. When she emerged again, she was already dressed. “I lost him,” she said. “His smell totally disappeared by the road. Someone must have picked him up.”

And if his first stop was the sheriff’s office, they would be well and truly fucked.

Rylie frowned. “Where’s Abel?”

Seth jerked his thumb at the trees. Rylie gave Elise an apologetic look, then chased the other Alpha.

Elise threw Father Armstrong over her shoulder and stood. “I’m moving him inside,” she said. “I want a look around.”

“Should we do that? Mess with a crime scene?” Seth asked in a whisper, as if trying to keep Abel from hearing him.

Her plans were much worse than disturbing the crime scene. Elise planned to swallow Father Armstrong’s body. No cadaver, no evidence.

The inside of the cabin was as nice as the outside. The living room walls were covered in shelves, which held dozens of antique, leather-bound books. Ceramic vases held potted plants, and the air smelled like damp soil and cleaning chemicals. The glass coffee table glistened, as if recently washed.

Elise dropped Father Armstrong on a couch in front of a brick fireplace.

“Get into the kitchen,” Elise told Seth when he followed her inside. “And shut all the doors. I don’t want to get confused and swallow the wrong person.”

He paled. “Swallow?”

“Close the doors.”

Seth did as she ordered, locking Abel and Rylie outside before retreating into the kitchen. Elise drew the curtains.

Once she was alone, she lit a cigarette and sucked deep. The smoke settled her nerves.

She was going to go incorporeal for the first time since her exorcism. Elise had to do it sooner or later—she couldn’t remain in her human form all the time.

But what if she flung herself back into Hell and didn’t return?

Elise took a long drag, letting the smoke curl out of her nostrils. It was going to be fine. She only needed to disappear long enough to make the body disappear.

She dropped the cigarette in one of the potted plants, pushed her doubts away, and relaxed.

Elise released her skin.

She filled the room with her presence, blacking out the indirect light and flooding every corner until there was no air left. She traced the shape of the couches, the coffee table, the wine racks, the antlers on the mantle.

Then she settled on Father Armstrong.

His body was cooling rapidly, quickly becoming unpalatable. If Elise had possessed a stomach in that form, she would have been nauseated by the idea of eating something without a beating heart, flowing blood, a mind filled with sparkling neurons.

She didn’t want to eat the dead—especially not when there was a perfectly appealing heartbeat the next room over.

Can’t eat Seth. Concentrate.

Elise contracted over Father Armstrong, condensed, and swallowed.

When she popped back into her corporeal form, there was no body on the couch. The only indication that he had been there was a smear of blood on the arm rest. A decorative throw pillow had also gone missing.

Elise picked a blue thread out of her teeth.

“Crap,” she said, spitting it into the waste basket.

The back of her mouth tasted sticky, like she had eaten a heavy meal and it was trying to come back up. She was suddenly, desperately thirsty.

She pushed into the kitchen.

“Father Armstrong?” Seth asked, peering over her shoulder.

“Gone,” Elise said. “Don’t ask. Water?”

He handed her a glass from one of the cabinets. “You need to see what I found while you were…busy,” he said as she filled it in the sink and knocked back a good twelve ounces in one guzzle.

She set the glass on the counter with a sigh. “A Jacuzzi?”

Seth grimaced. “A basement.”

Rylie and Abel
were quietly grim as they followed Seth into the basement. Elise drifted behind them, rubbing her aching stomach.

Abel’s mind was wracked with guilt, twisted and tormented. But his guilt vanished the instant that he saw the giant, bloody pentagram painted on the wall of the basement.

The cabin above was the kind of place that people would pay hundreds of dollars a night to vacation, but the basement looked more like a dungeon. It was bigger than the cabin itself, probably carved into the mountain, and cavernously dark. They couldn’t see into the far end of the room—only the wall with the pentagram.

Elise pressed her hand to the bloody symbol. Through the barrier of the warding ring, she could feel the burn of power, hot enough to scorch her palm.

If she tilted her head the right way, she could see lines of magic streaming through the walls, into the earth, and funneling toward…something else, something beyond the perimeter of the cabin. But what?

“What is this place?” Rylie asked, hand over her nose, as if trying to block out smells.

Elise dropped her hand. The table beside her held large jars of colorful fluid. “Looks like an embalming room,” she said, lifting one of the lids to sniff at its mouth. She pulled a face. It reeked of formaldehyde.

Seth flipped a switch, and the lights came on. Elise immediately regretted being able to see.

She had been in autopsy rooms before, but nothing quite like this basement. It was a medical facility twisted by nightmares, a hellish pit of scalpels and jars of bone fragments. There was no hospital with candles placed around the floor at equidistant points. The iron cages on the left-hand wall, big enough to hold seated adults, weren’t typical hospital fixtures, either.

The stainless steel tables had been wiped clean, and their glistening surfaces seemed like an insult to the horror of the rest of the room—the crust of blood staining the concrete floors, the barrel of discarded gristle, the dripping brown pentagram painted on the wall. A trio of tables were aligned parallel to each other in the center of the room, waiting to receive bodies.

Elise edged along the wall, taking in the sight of what had to be some kind of ritual space, though she had never known a witch that was quite so…gruesome. Even the necromancer she had once faced preferred a homier setting; her ingredients had been kept in Tupperware, with clean floors and a dining room table for the sacrifice. The industrial nature of the room only made the gore that much worse.

She held her breath as she peered into another plastic barrel. The glistening black mass at the bottom seethed with maggots.

Rylie clapped her hands over her mouth. Her eyes watered. She kind of squealed as she stifled a scream. Her Alpha toughness didn’t seem to extend to bloody symbols inscribed on the walls of a torture pit.

She let Abel fold her into his arms, burying her face against his chest.

A low growl tore Elise’s attention away from Rylie.

Chains rattled. Claws scrabbled against concrete.

“What is it?” Seth asked, lifting the rifle to his shoulder as he circled around the tables, taking the left while Elise took the right.
 

She jerked a silver throwing knife from her boot.

The light didn’t quite reach the far end of the room, which was shadowed by another row of cages. Elise’s night vision was superior, so she realized what she was seeing in the back of the room before Seth did.

It was a huge, four-legged creature, with a box-shaped head and jaws that would have made a shark proud. Splayed paws dug into the ground as it strained against a chain, which had dug a bloody furrow into its neck. A ratlike tail thrashed from side to side. It was big enough to be a small werewolf, or some kind of imp from Hell, but Elise quickly realized that it was nothing quite so exotic.

“The pit bull,” she said, heart sinking. The dog growled in response.

They had found the pit bull that had been chewing on cadavers post-mortem. It was certainly big enough to fool the average person into thinking its bite was a werewolf’s, although it was still only half of Rylie’s size.

“This is where it happened, isn’t it?” Rylie asked in a tiny voice. “This is where everyone got sacrificed.”

She was right. The room was set up like a one-stop sacrifice shop, from the holding cells to the tables in front of the pentagram and the dog to destroy the evidence of cutting marks.

There was nobody in the room now. And their invasion probably meant that the cult wouldn’t dare use it again. Elise wished she had known what they would find when they followed Father Armstrong there. She would have waited to act until the next moon and tried to catch the entire cult in the act.

“Careful,” the Alpha said.

Elise turned to see that the pit bull was leaning against the end of its chain, lips peeled back in a growl. Tags jangled from its collar.

“I’m putting it down,” Seth said, angling the rifle to its skull.

Elise grabbed the end of the gun, covering the end with her hand. “Wait.”

“Shit, don’t do that,” he said.

“Don’t shoot.”

Elise released the rifle and stepped forward, hands out, fingers spread, shoulders hunched so that she would look smaller. The dog’s growls softened as she approached.

“Hey, there,” Elise murmured. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

It shied back, shrinking against the wall. Not an “it,” she noticed—the dog was a very impressive, unaltered “he.”

“Elise…” Seth said warningly.

She reached for the dog’s collar.

The pit bull’s jaw clamped shut on Elise’s arm, and he jerked. It felt like having a car roll over the left side of her body. The immense weight made her shoulder pop.

Elise grunted, falling to her knees. The crushing pain was bad, but not quite as bad as having an Alpha’s teeth in her throat—which was like saying that suffocating to death wasn’t quite as bad as being skinned alive.

Blood smeared the dog’s muzzle. He threw his head from side to side, thrashing her arm.

She slammed her free fist into the pit bull’s eye. His growls peaked, but he didn’t release. A vein bulged on his forehead.

“Let me
go
,” Elise said, jamming her knuckle into his eye again.

He released her. She shoved his head to the floor, hand in his throat, and his paws scrabbled wildly against concrete. His tail whipped against her bare legs hard enough to leave welts.

Seth appeared at her side, looking for a good shot. Elise kept her body between them.

She panted as she studied the dog, considering the tawny brown saddle on its back, white-furred hips, and pink underbelly. He was a beautiful creature. The scars on his face didn’t diminish his big eyes, uncropped ears, and pink button nose.