Howling Sacrifices (2 page)

Chapter Three

Lucy stared down the muzzle of the weapon in abject fear. Her body started shivering as she instinctively raised both arms into the air. The masked man glanced up, seeming to notice Dougald for the first time. “Hand over yer cash.” The gun moved away from her and pointed at Dougald, but Lucy didn’t believe for a second that she had a chance in hell of making a break for it.

After a long moment, a thick leather wallet landed with a thud on the floorboard in front of the man. He quickly trained the gun on Lucy again as he picked up Dougald’s wallet and shoved it inside his jacket pocket. “That’ll do,” he muttered. “And ye may consider yerself lucky I’m feelin’ charitable tonight and leavin’ ye with yer life…if not yer wife.”

What? What did that mean?

The stranger leaned in and grabbed Lucy’s wrist. He pulled her forward hard and fast. She bit off a scream as she fell out of the carriage into the gravel. The man kept walking, dragging her along behind him even as she fought against his iron grip and struggled to get to her feet.

One of the coach’s thin-spoked wheels looked like it had been shredded by something and a few feet away she noticed a warped metal rod lying in the road. She looked up at the outside front seat of the carriage but didn’t see the driver until she was dragged right past him, her flailing hand trailing through the thickening pool of blood that had poured from the long, wide slice across his neck. It gaped like a dark, moaning mouth and his dead eyes were accusing as they watched her from already sunken sockets. Her scream rang out before she choked it back.

I’m sorry, sorry, sorry
. If she hadn’t acted like such a selfish, horny bitch they might have been able to help him. They might have—

Her attacker swore with impatience as she pulled and twisted…anything to get away. He turned and glared at her from behind the black ski mask. When he pushed her back into the dirt and climbed on top of her, straddling her thighs, she bucked and kicked madly.

“No, don’t,” she begged. “Please—” Cold circles of metal snicked closed around each of her wrists and a deeper terror lodged in her throat, keeping her from screaming like a banshee. And then it was too late to scream anyway because he’d stuffed a rank-smelling, balled-up cloth in her mouth and tied it in place with something else.

Alarms were blasting off in her head, pealing sirens of warning that disoriented her even as she was hauled back to her feet and led a few steps away from the downed carriage. “Get on.”

Lucy only realized she’d clamped her eyes shut when she couldn’t see what he was talking about. Opening them, her gaze fell on the motorcycle and she shook her head. “Can’t,” she mumbled through the gag in her mouth.

“I’m not asking ye, bitch.” The gun was shoved in her ribs so hard she’d have bruises later…if she survived long enough. “And hurry the fuck up.”

In her long skirt, hands clasped together and a gun pointed at her, getting onto the motorcycle without falling onto her face proved difficult, but she did it. The man climbed in front of her and the engine roared to life. She tried not to think about Dougald just sitting there in the carriage, but it was no use.

They were strangers who had shared little more than a dozen words and a surprisingly molten kiss. The reality was he had no obligation to her, especially considering his life had been threatened, he’d been forced to give up his wallet and had a gun shoved in his face.

Still, even if he couldn’t do anything personally, Lucy hoped at this very moment he was at least pulling out a cell phone to call the authorities.

Oh God, would a cell phone even work out here?

The motorcycle jerked into motion. Lucy instinctively clutched fistfuls of her kidnapper’s dark-colored canvas jacket to keep from falling off, but she thought they were going to overturn as the back wheel screeched and skidded dangerously to the side. The vehicle righted itself at what seemed the last minute.

Just then she heard the howl of a wolf again, louder this time. Closer.
So close.
In fact, she thought she caught a quick glimpse of a wiry body and light-gray fur jumping out of the carriage as they sped past. But that couldn’t be right.

She told herself not to worry about wild animals unless she was lucky enough to get out of her current predicament. She had enough problems at the moment.

The wind tore at her hair, chilled her to the bone. Her stomach turned. With her wrists cuffed, white-knuckled fists clutching the fabric of his coat for dear life, there was little she could do to brace herself and she was forced to lean into her captor so she could move with him and the bike as he raced deeper into the pitch-black woods…and farther from any hope of rescue.

After about five minutes racing hell bent for leather, the bike slowed back down. Because he didn’t think anyone was following them?

A couple of twists and turns along the bendy road and suddenly they veered off onto a narrow dirt path. With only the thin beam of the bike’s headlight to illuminate the way ahead of them, Lucy clenched her eyes tightly closed. She didn’t want to see death racing up to meet her, thank you very much.

After what seemed like hours, they made a final turn and pulled to a stop. Lucy heard the thunderous crackle and pop of a large fire and dared to open her eyes, but she wasn’t reassured by the sight that greeted her.

They were at the entrance to a circle of trees, a gaping black maw that would swallow her whole. In the middle of the circle something was indeed burning, but this was no simple bonfire. It was a blaze that burned so hot, it was out of control and might never burn itself out. Blue flames jumped as high as the tree tops and sparks shot up even higher, lighting the sky like fireworks on Canada Day at the park in her home town.

The fire gave Lucy hope that someone would be able to find her. A blaze this big raging away in the middle of the Scottish Highlands would be hard to miss.

Her hope fled just as quickly as it had come when Lucy’s captor tugged off the black ski mask and revealed his scraggy, hardened face to her.

Shit, shit, shit.
She’d seen enough television to know that if he was showing his face, he wasn’t planning to let her leave. Not alive, anyway.

“Come on then,” he snarled, reaching for her elbow and dragging her off the bike.

“No. Let me go.” Lucy struggled, but he was strong and he was determined. When she twisted left and right, planting her feet into the dirt and kicking his shins, he whipped his arm up and backhanded her, then grabbed hold of both her shoulders and shook until her teeth rattled.

“Cut it out or ye’re goin’ over me shoulder,” he warned. The dark light in his eyes said plainly that if she proved too much trouble he wouldn’t hesitate to take stronger measures to subdue her.

It was then that she noticed there were other people in the circle around the fire. At least half a dozen men dressed in full-length, odd-looking red robes, and they all seemed to have stopped whatever they had been doing to turn and look at her.

One figure broke from the rest to approach Lucy and her kidnapper. His fluttering red robe and the blazing fire at his back made it seem as if he glowed.

He reached them and when he looked into her eyes and smiled, it was a smile so evil she had the ominous thought that she’d just come face to face with a demon. A demon from the very bowels of hell…and he was going to drag her back there with him.

Terror hammered a frantic beat in her head and chest. Even knowing she didn’t stand a chance with her hands still cuffed behind her back, Lucy tried to run. She struck her shin on the front wheel of the motorcycle just as she was grabbed by a pair of rough hands and hauled back against her formerly masked captor’s chest.

“No! Damn you. You can’t get away with this!” Her mumbled words were barely coherent through the gag.

“Ye’re so sure about that?” He laughed at her futile attempts to fight him.

She screamed, but no one cared. She was jerked around to face the robed man, who looked her up and down with an approving nod.

Suddenly there wasn’t enough air left in the world. Oh no, just what did he approve of, exactly? Her breaths came faster and shallower as she fought not to pass out from worry and fear.

“Samuel, good. You’ve brought us our third.” Oh God, they were even using names now. She definitely wasn’t going to live through the rest of the night.

“And in good time. The moon is just about right and my priests are ready for the ceremony. Go on and get her ready.”

Third? The moon?
Ceremony?

Just what in hell were these crazy fucks going to do to her?

Chapter Four

The good news was they’d removed the handcuffs and the gag and hadn’t killed her. Yet.

The bad news was…she’d been tied to a stone slab.

Naked.

Lucy pulled at the ropes. There was some give, enough that she could move her legs a little bit, but it wasn’t much She swallowed the tears that stung the backs of her eyes. She wouldn’t give in, wouldn’t let this break her. There had to be some way out. Granted, at the moment, she was finding it hard to focus on coming up with a viable plan, but something would come to her. It had to.

Samuel—now wearing one of the creepy red robes like the others—had torn her clothes from her body and manhandled her until she’d thought she was going to be raped, but then he’d stopped and roped her down to the cold stone altar. He and two other “priests” had circled around her and started chanting, repeating the same refrain over and over again.

She couldn’t understand a word and assumed they were speaking in Gaelic. Not that it really mattered because when all three of them drew long daggers and held the blades with outstretched arms to the sky, she had a bad feeling she knew exactly what the chanting was all about.

A sudden scream ripped through the chilling incantations. It hadn’t come from her.

Tugging madly at the ropes securing her ankles and wrists, Lucy twisted her head to the side, trying to see around the men and through the glow of the fire. For the first time, she noticed there was another stone altar, also surrounded by a trio of priests, and that another girl had been strapped down onto it.

A fourth man—the same one who’d spoken to Samuel earlier—approached the slab and climbed on top of it. He shrugged off his robe and stood bare-assed between the woman’s spread legs, ignoring her increasingly frantic screams as he joined the chanting. While he held no physical dagger like the others, one hand was slowly working at his metaphorical one.

Suddenly the chanting came to a stop. Even the men standing around Lucy paused. She moaned and shook her head in horrific expectation of what was to come.

“Ancient Famora.” Their naked leader looked directly into the fire as if it was a doorway to hell and he was waiting for some acknowledgement from the netherworld. “As is holy and proper, the Order honors you on this most powerful of moons with our righteous sacrifice. We ask you to accept it and grant us your rewards for another year.”

Suddenly the fire surged higher, its flames flashing a strange, almost fluorescent green. The dire words were followed by an impassioned resumption of the Gaelic refrain by the other priests as the spokesperson for the group dropped to his knees over the girl on the altar, becoming mostly hidden from Lucy’s view. Not that she needed—or wanted—to see what was happening. From the poor thing’s tortured screams it was all too obvious.

A sob broke from her lips as Lucy felt the girl’s terror. It seemed to last forever, but her screams and pleading cries finally devolved into choked sobs and weak moans that shattered Lucy’s heart to pieces.

She didn’t know what sick god or devil these freaks thought they were sacrificing to and she was way past caring. Lucy yanked on her bonds, scraping her skin raw against the rope until she felt blood coating her wrists. She glared up at Samuel, who sneered down at her as he chanted.

“Stop this! You have to stop this now,” she demanded. “Please. How can you—”

Suddenly the tone of the chanting changed, becoming faster. More frenzied.

Oh Jesus, no.
Somehow, Lucy knew without looking what was going to happen next. She couldn’t bear to see it and turned her head away, but Samuel laughed and closed a fist in her hair, viciously forcing her to look. With a cold shiver she witnessed all three daggers descending in exaggerated arcs over the other girl’s supine form.

“No, please don’t!” The tears she’d been trying so hard to keep back poured down her face in wet tracks.

Lucy watched in horror as the three long blades tore into the girl’s body. Her pelvis, her torso and through her neck. Her back bowed off the stone slab and she screamed again and again, her voice hoarse and ragged, splitting the night just like those knives cut through her. Like she was nothing.

The sharp steel daggers lifted and fell again and again until the altar was covered in blood. The firelight turned it black, like an oil slick coating everything, running down the sides. It would soak into the ground, stain the earth. Contaminate it for all time.

The girl’s screams had died off, but it was only when the one Lucy already thought of as a demon raised his arm over her that Lucy realized the poor girl was actually still alive. Through all of that, the priests must have strategically planned their jabs so that their sacrifice wouldn’t die too quickly or too easily.

And it seemed that none of their blades had pierced her heart…because that final violation was left to the leader. He opened his hand for one of the daggers and when it was placed in his palm, closed his fingers around the hilt and plunged it straight down with a loud cry that sounded as if he reached orgasm doing it.

Lucy clenched her eyes tightly closed, but it didn’t help. She has already the blood spraying up, the girl’s naked form covered in a blanket of her own blood. As much sorrow as she felt for her, Lucy also felt a bone-chilling fear stabbing her in the heart, because from the expectant looks she’d seen on the faces of her own triad of Satan worshippers, she was next in line for the personal treatment.

She swallowed, her sorrow turning to rage. And she vowed that if she died here tonight, she was going to haunt these sick bastards until she’d driven each and every one of them insane and sent them tumbling, screaming, to the bottom of a deep, rocky cliff.

And that would only be the beginning of how they would suffer.

“You aren’t going to get away with this,” she promised in a loud, surprisingly powerful voice.

Their chanting had stopped again as they waited for their leader, and she glared at the three men, ignoring the way their long daggers glinted in the firelight, taunting her with the promise of excruciating torment. “Each one of you is going to pay for what you’ve done here in unspeakably terrible ways. Ways you can’t possibly imagine.” She hoped she sounded brave. If these were going to be her last words, she wanted them to be burned into their brains, to act as a curse on their souls.

Just then, as if to add credence to her prediction, she heard something echo from the woods.

The wolves.

No lonely howl this time, but a menacing growl that was joined by another. And another. And they were close.

So engrossed in their evil ritual, the others didn’t seem to notice, but Lucy did.

After all that had happened, Lucy felt as if she could call to them, the wolves, and that they would actually answer her. She even imagined that the wolf she’d seen and heard back on the road—a lifetime ago—had followed her to this glade to help deliver her wrath upon these…monsters.

“Lucy?” A small, hoarse female voice.

Oh no. She knew that voice. “
Aileen
?”

Three.

The leader had called Lucy the third. Turning her head to the other side, she finally saw the last stone slab.

“Oh, Lucy,” Aileen sobbed. “Lucy, I’m so sorry. They came for me and they…they tied up my brother, chopped both his hands off right in front of me and stuffed them in a bag. They said they needed them for their ritual, but that wasn’t all. Then they killed him. God, Lucy, the things they did to him.” She was babbling, as if she had to get it all out or explode. “They took his tongue so he’d stop screaming but the sounds he made then were worse…and then they popped out his eyes like they were stuffing their thumbs into ripe plums. I begged and cried, but they had me tied up in the corner and just kept going, cutting and stabbing and taking pieces off him, like they were having
fun
with it. Like it was all a
game
. And then…and then you called and they realized you were on your way. They drugged me with something and I couldn’t… Oh God. Lucy, if I’d known…”

“Aileen!” Lucy was frantic. The chanting had started again. She looked over to see the priests’ leader walking toward her. Black splotches covered his skin from head to toe in a thick spray pattern. Her gorge rose as she saw that it was the other girl’s blood.

He stood at her side now, gazing down at her nakedness with a depraved leer. She choked on a sob, realizing there would have been some mercy in being the first to go. It was way worse to have survived a little while longer, because now Lucy knew very well what they were going to do to her. Her brutal defilement and murder was already playing out in her mind. By the time it actually happened, it would be like going through that horror twice.

As if from a long way off, Lucy thought she could hear Aileen screaming her name, but the thunderous boom of her racing heartbeat drowned it out as the bloody, naked priest climbed up onto her stone altar. He didn’t have to take his cock in hand this time. The engorged staff stood straight out from his lean body as he called to his demon lord and offered up the next sacrifice.

Her.

“Lord Famora. Again we ask that you accept our sacrifice and grant us your rewards.” His voice was shrill and the words came faster now, as if he was riding a high—a high scored from the stench of blood and death, and the rush of power.

Lucy’s eyes were dry now. She had no more tears to shed, at least not for herself. No more fear, either. She felt surprisingly calm, even as she sensed the movement of something just outside her field of vision.

Her gaze flickered back to the mad priest as he knelt between her legs, and her hands clenched into tight fists at the inhuman light in his eyes as he leered down at her. She wanted to hurl when he touched her. The sensation of his hands sliding first over her breasts and then over her belly, leaving smears of blood from his last victim behind, was like a snake slithering over her skin. Her ankles wrenched in the loops of the bindings coiled around them as he grabbed her knees and roughly shoved them wider, opening her up as far as the ropes and her hips would allow.

She had the insane thought that whatever deals he’d been making with his very special devil had done more than guarantee him a spot in hell—they had already taken his soul there.

Lucy tensed, preparing for the inevitable degradation of his cock pushing inside her, followed by what was certain to be a painful and bloody death by multiple stab wounds. Suddenly her gaze was drawn past the knives and red robes, which was how she saw the flash of fur, teeth and claws a split second before the large wolf launched itself into the air.

Pandemonium was immediate and total. The priest tumbled from his position over her, a wolf’s snarling muzzle tearing into his throat as more of them—Lucy couldn’t count how many—bounded into the circle.

Most of the men looked around helplessly, without any clue what was happening. But Samuel looked down at
her
. His lip curled and he raised his dagger high, the tip pointed right at her belly.

Before he could stick it in her, a light-gray wolf—
her wolf
—jumped onto the altar, putting itself between Lucy and the knife, its hackles raised, teeth bared in a low growl. Samuel visibly paled and stumbled back a few steps, his eyes glued to the menacing beast. In the next moment he turned to run, but only got a few feet before a pair of black wolves launched their long, lithe bodies at him.

He went down in a blur of snarling teeth and slashing claws. The wolves immediately started tearing him apart. She heard the crunch of bones breaking just before Samuel screeched. One wolf had crushed his hand between its massive jaws until he was forced to drop his knife. The other wolf went straight for the man’s throat. His screams turned to whimpering gurgles of agony as his own blood spurted and showered back down on his face into his wide, horrified eyes.

A third wolf joined the fray. It bared its teeth and seemed to smile as Samuel raised his arms weakly, trying to hold it off.

And then it went for his gut, slicing right through the silk robe and chomping down, digging its snout into the soft, fleshy white skin until there was nothing left but a lacerated, pulpy mess.

Lucy clenched her eyes shut, trying to block out the gurgling sound of Samuel’s screams, but not before the sight of that dark blood dripping from the wolves’ muzzles and fur was forever implanted in her brain.

She remembered Aileen then and twisted her head around to find her friend, but she was gone.

“Oh God, no. Aileen!” Lucy started struggling against her bonds once more, desperate to be freed. Her wolf turned around to face her. When she looked into its face, she froze in fear and astonishment.

Those eyes looked too familiar. Light eyes that reminded her of a winter storm.

The wolf lowered his head and nosed her raw, bloody wrist. Lucy’s breath caught at his soft whine before he carefully licked her wound. She felt the brief, intimate contact through her whole body. It was all too much for a simple girl whose idea of adventure during her first trip abroad had been an intoxicating midnight kiss with a stranger in a dark carriage.

Her vision swam as her eyes rolled up into her head. She started shivering uncontrollably, feeling the world start to warp away from her, making her dizzy and weak.