Lothaire (Immortals After Dark #12)(7)

daughter is mine forever. And after I’ve slain you, I’ll eviscerate your young son, then sweep through your family like a disease.” She raised the cleaver above her, took a step forward—

Suddenly, black spots dotted her vision. Dizziness?

No, no! Elizabeth was rising to consciousness with all the finesse of a freight train. Every single time, she surfaced like a drowning woman held underwater, overwhelming Saroya.

The little bitch might reclaim control of her body, but, as usual, she’d wake to a fresh nightmare. “Enjoy, Elizabeth. . . .”

Her legs buckled, her back meeting the carpet. Blackness.



Heartbeat heartbeat heartbeat heartbeat—

Ellie Peirce woke to a mad drumming in her ears. She lay on the floor of her family’s trailer, eyes squeezed shut, her body coated with something warm and sticky.

No words were spoken around her. The only sounds were the living room’s crackling fire, her shallow breaths, and the howling dogs outside. She had no memory of how she’d come to be like this, no idea of how long she’d blacked out.

“Mama, did it work?” she whispered as she peeked open her eyes. Maybe the deacons had been successful?

Please, God, let the exorcism have worked . . . my last hope.

Her eyes adjusting to the dim, firelit room, she raised her head to peer down at her body. Her worn jeans, T-shirt, and secondhand boots were sopping wet.

With blood. She swallowed. Not my own.

Oh, God. Her fingers were curled around the hilt of a dripping cleaver. I told them not to unchain me until my uncle and cousins got here!

But Reverend Slocumb and his fellow members of their church’s “emergency ministry” had smugly thought they could handle her—

Movement drew her gaze up. A fire poker?

Clenched in her mother’s hands.

“Wait!” Ellie flung herself to her side just as the poker came slamming down on the floor where her head had been. Blood splashed from the carpet like a stepped-in puddle.

“You foul thing, begone!” Mama shrieked, raising the iron again. “You got my girl, but you won’t have my boy!”

“Just wait!” Ellie scrambled to her feet, dropping the cleaver. “It’s me!” She raised her hands, palms outward.

Mama didn’t lower the poker. Her long auburn hair was loose, tangled all around her unlined face. She used one shoulder to shove tendrils from her eyes. “That’s what you said afore you started snarlin’ that demon language and slashin’ about!” Her mascara ran down her cheeks, her peach lipstick smeared across her chin. “Afore you killed all them deacons!”

“Killed?” Ellie whirled around, dumbfounded by the grisly sight.

Five hacked-up bodies lay strewn across the living room.

These men had been lured all the way out here by her mother’s imploring letters and by evidence of Ellie’s possession: recordings of her speaking dead languages she had no way of knowing and photographs of messages in blood that she had no memory of writing.

Apparently, Ellie had once written in Sumerian, Surrender to me.

Now Slocumb’s head lay apart from his other remains. His eyes were glassy in death, his tongue lolling between parted lips. One arm was missing from his corpse. She dimly realized it must be the one under the dining room table. The one lying beside the hank of scalp and a pile of severed fingers.

Ellie covered her mouth, fighting not to retch. The five had vowed to exorcise the demon. Instead, it’d butchered them all. “Th-this was done by . . . me?”

“As if you don’t know, demon!” Mama wagged her poker at Ellie. “Play your games with somebody else.”

Ellie scratched at her chest, her skin seeming to crawl from the being within. Hate it so much, hate it, hate it, HATE it. Though she never knew its thoughts, right now she could nearly feel it gloating.

Sirens sounded in the distance, setting the dogs outside to baying even louder. “Oh, God, Mama, you didn’t call that good-for-nothing sheriff?” Ellie and her family were mountain folk through and through. Any Law was suspect.

At that, her mother dropped the poker. “You really are Ellie. The demon told me you wasn’t coming back this time! Told me you’d never return to us.”

No wonder Mama had attacked.

“It’s me,” Ellie said over her shoulder as she hastened to the window, her boots squishing across the carpet. She pulled aside the cigarette-stained curtains to gaze out into the night.

Down the snowy mountainside, the sheriff’s blue lights glared, his car snaking up the winding road. Another cruiser sped behind it.

“I had to call them, Ellie! Had to stop the demon. And then the nine-one-one dispatcher heard the deacons just a-screamin’. . . .”

What should I do . . . what can I do? Nineteen was too young to go to jail! Ellie would rather die, had already considered suicide if the exorcism didn’t work.

Because these five ministers weren’t the demon’s first victims.

There’d been at least two other men since the creature had possessed Ellie’s body a year ago. Early on, she’d woken to find a middle-aged man in her bed, his skin cooling against hers, his slashed throat gaping like a smile.

None among her extended Peirce family had known what to think. Had a rival clan planted the body? Why single out Ellie? Why had there been blood on her hands?