Her Soul to Take (Souls Trilogy #1)(2)

It didn’t take me long to dig down to him, using my bare hands and claws to wrench up the loose dirt. The coffin was a plain wooden box, utterly unadorned. The moment I tugged up the lid, the stench of formaldehyde rushed in my nose. Marcus had been buried in a cheap suit, his youthful face waxen with the amount of makeup that had been coated onto it.

“Wakey, wakey.” I hauled him over my shoulder and crawled up from the grave, dumping him beside the pile of dirt I’d just dug out. “Just give me a minute here, buddy. Can’t have your mother knowing her son’s grave has been desecrated.”

I quickly filled back in the grave, then, with the corpse over my shoulder, began to make my way toward White Pine. The area of forest, and the mine shaft that lay within it, was a quick enough run to make, but cumbersome with Marcus flopping over my back. Still, running through the trees with a corpse was preferable to my concrete prison.

The witching hour neared as I reached White Pine. A misting rain had begun to fall, and Marcus was smelling worse by the second. But beyond his stench and the aroma of wet earth, I could smell smoke. A bonfire somewhere in the woods.

Deep in the trees, and a little way up the hillside, I found Kent and his merry band awaiting me near the flames.

They’d all donned their white cloaks and stag masks. There were at least two dozen of them scattered among the trees, speaking softly beneath black umbrellas. It was no wonder this little town was booming with cryptid sightings. Thanks to Kent’s little cult, who called themselves Libiri, nearly the entirety of Abelaum’s population had some fantastical story about seeing a monster in the woods.

They weren’t exactly wrong. They were seeing monsters, but of the human variety.

The only one not in uniform was Everly, Kent Hadleigh’s bastard daughter. A few months older than her half-siblings, Victoria and Jeremiah, Everly was blonde, willow-y, and garbed in her usual black ensemble. The fledgling witch looked absolutely petrified to be there, and when her blue eyes fell on me and the corpse I came bearing, she looked as if she would vomit.

“Brothers, Sisters, the sacrifice comes,” Kent spoke in a bizarrely theatrical voice when he was in front of his band of zealots. Somewhere between a fire-and-brimstone Southern preacher and a Kindergarten teacher who had bodies buried in his garden. It grated on my nerves, that voice, as did the way he snapped his fingers at me and pointed to the ground at Everly’s feet. “Here. Put him down.”

I let Marcus flop down unceremoniously at the young witch’s feet, and a flicker of pain went across her face. Had she known him? A fellow student at the university perhaps? Or had her heart gone suddenly tender when all her father’s preaching about the beauty of death became a very ugly reality?

“Remove his clothes,” Kent said, and I promptly stripped the corpse down, ripping the cheap suit like paper. With his chest laid bare, I found the wounds that no amount of mortuary makeup could have covered: multiple stab wounds were gashed haphazardly across his chest, and scrawled among them were the lines and runes of the sacrificial offering.

Messy. Very messy. Unplanned, if I had to guess. Spontaneous even.

I tweaked an eyebrow at Kent, a silent question I knew he wouldn’t answer. He gave Everly a brisk nod, and the young witch, looking sickly pale, knelt and began to examine the marks across Marcus’s chest.

“They’ll work,” she said at last. She hurriedly got to her feet and averted her eyes from the body. “The marks are crude but efficient.” Her eyes flickered among the crowd in a brief moment of worry. She thought what she’d said might offend, and offense could bring consequences.

“Very good,” Kent said softly. Then, louder, all theatrics once more, “Long have we waited for this day, my children. Long has the Deep One waited for this, waited with utter patience and mercy. Today, the first of three go to Its depths. May two more follow.”

“May two more follow,” the crowd murmured, save for Everly, whose lips were pressed into a thin, hard line on her pretty face.

“Servant, bear the sacrifice up to the mine,” Kent said. Servant. Fucking hell. I wanted to gag him with his own tongue. “Jeremiah will accompany you. This sacrifice is his to offer.”

A figure stepped forward, reeking of body spray. Jeremiah, of course. This messy, unplanned, absolute botchery of a sacrifice was all thanks to Kent’s dear son. I rolled my eyes, but hauled naked Marcus up off the ground and, without a word to Jeremiah, stalked away into the trees, away from the fire’s light.

Jeremiah tried to make a point of walking ahead of me, but I kept my pace just fast enough that he couldn’t. The boy had even less patience than his father.

“Slow the fuck down, Leon,” he said. “Or I swear I’ll have Dad rip your balls off next time.”

“Temper, temper.” I shook my head, but slowed. I’d let the asshole lead, let him revel in his little power trip. Staring at the back of his head at least let me fantasize about cracking it open. “So, this one’s yours, eh? Have a little trouble with him?”

“Bastard tried to run,” he said, then laughed darkly. “He didn’t get far. Squealed like a pig. I think I understand why you enjoy killing so much, Leon. It’s a fucking rush.”

I grit my teeth. “Don’t think you understand death from one messy murder. Just wait until your God wakes up. It’ll teach you a thing or two about death.”