Faith of the Divine Inferno - Leslie Thompson (best short novels of all time TXT) 📗

them. I watched her warily for some sign of what she was going to hex me with and why and I could have sworn that I saw something move out of the corner of my eye. I turned to see what it was, and all I saw was one of Charlotte’s creepy fetishes. Then the temperature dropped in the room and my breath billowed in front of my face.
I wish I could say that I didn’t know what was happening, but I did. Charlotte was a medium or voodoo priestess at best or a necromancer at worst. Either way, she was the one who had gathered spirits into this place and she was the one holding them there. I wanted to run from there and never come back, but with the witch watching me, I didn’t dare move. It’s the height of stupidity to be rude to a witch.
“Mom, don’t do this right now. They aren’t paying customers.” Baja’s voice held more fear than warning. Charlotte turned her cold eyes on her son and the man visibly cringed. In his corner, Kootch caught some of the look and he tried very hard to become one with the corner he was standing in. He was terrified of her.
“Go and get the things you came for,” she told Baja firmly. “Take the idiot and the cop with you. I wish to speak to Rebecca alone. I will call you when we are finished.” I expected to see cold arrogance in her eyes when she turned back to me, but instead there was a terrible fear haunting her eyes. Grabbing Kootch by the scruff of his shirt and forcing him into the room in question, Baja did as he was told. Shaw followed reluctantly with a worried look at me over his shoulder.
Charlotte wrapped an arm around my waist in what was supposed to be a comforting, friendly gesture, but only succeeded in making my skin crawl. I tried to pull away from her, but the woman was much stronger than she looked, and she held onto me easily.
“Your father has a message for you Sarika,” she whispered in my ear. My heart leaped into my throat and threatened to choke me while my lungs convulsed painfully because I could not breath. I felt tears of fear spring to my eyes as I struggled to keep my composure. No one had uttered my true name in almost two thousand years, and now it curled from the lips of a woman I had just met. I wanted to believe that she was lying to me about my father’s spirit, but I could think of no other way that she had learned my name.
“What message would that be?” I asked, forcing my voice through a throat that was convulsing.
I had not given my father a single thought since we got word that he had been slaughtered by bandits somewhere along the Silk Road. He’d been a merchant’s soldier, guarding traveling caravans as they bought and sold all over the known world. He would be gone for months and years at a time, only to return without warning to drink away his earnings and beat my mother and brothers. I had quickly grown to despise the man, and none of us had shed a tear when we had received word of his death. I think my brothers threw a party over it. I’m not sure though; I had been a child when he died.
“Let’s go into the kitchen to talk.” Charlotte steered me to her tiny kitchen and left me next to a chair and told me to sit in it. I refused.
“What is the message?” I snarled as soon as Charlotte let me go to pull two glasses from the cupboard. She smiled serenely as she went to the refrigerator and pulled out a pitcher of tea. “You know what, never mind. I don’t want to hear anything from you or that son-of-a-bitch. Tell him that I hope the flames are really hot in Hell.” I turned to leave.
“You have to hear the message!” she called after me. “I can’t face that man again!”
“Then stop jerking me around and give it to me.”
“He was specific.” Charlotte’s eyes were too wide and glassy to be normal and her hands shook as she poured the tea and pushed a glass toward me. “He wants you to drink the tea while I give you the message.”
“No.”
“Please.”
“If you’ve been talking to my father, then you know why I won’t do it.”
“I understand your caution. Your father would test the potions he found in his travels on your mother and then beat her when she became ill from it. He was evil.”
I had no reply for that, mostly because I hadn’t known that my father had been poisoning my mother. I had thought that she was chronically ill and he was merely a big douche bag about it. I wish I hadn’t ever known he’d spent years torturing her, or that she took it without snapping and beating him to death in his sleep. Dear gods, I hated both of them.
“If the lazy bastard wants me to drink tea, then he can fly his ghosty ass up to the material plane and make me do it.” I gave Charlotte one last hard look and moved to leave again. This time the woman tackled me to the floor and sat on me. She pressed her sharp elbows between my shoulder blades and pinned me to the floor. Her cheek pressed against mine and a heavy, black opal fell out of her shirt and bumped the tip of my nose.
“You’re Divine Inferno,” I gasped in horror, remembering the stones gripped in the sweaty hands of stoned worshippers a week ago.
“Listen to me,” Charlotte hissed into my ear. “Your father says that you stole what is rightfully his, and he will have it back.”
I waited for her to elaborate, but the woman only trembled on my back and breathed hot and stinky breath into my ear. I got my palms flat against the floor and pushed. Charlotte pushed me back and shifted her weight so that she pressed me harder into the floor. Her hand snaked into my back pocket, pushing something soft and squishy into it. “Keep this with you always. It has herbs and charms to keep you from being trapped by their magic. Whatever they plan for you is more terrible than even your father realizes and cannot come to pass. Promise that you will prevent it.”
This was an unexpected twist. I had not thought that the crazy cult lady who talks to dead people would want to be on my side. With Charlotte still pressed hard against me, I could only watch the opal swirl with a riot of color and light, and note the strange scratches on the surface. I admit that my fear and the awkwardness of the situation made my thoughts take a strange turn.
“What’s with the necklace?” I asked.
“It is how he claims his worshippers. The stone gives them a small power rush and holds them in his thrall,” Charlotte answered as if she had not expected me to ask a coherent question. I can’t blame her. Even I thought that I should be babbling an angry tirade over my crappy parents or fighting her in an effort to get her off of me.
“Who?”
She started to answer and then she stopped. “He will kill me if I tell you.”
“Does your son know you’re working with his enemy?” I made the question a threat.
“I will kill you if you tell my boy!” she hissed.
“No you won’t,” I scoffed back. I admit that it is difficult to be snarky when a woman teetering on the edge of her golden years has you pinned like a cockroach to her kitchen floor. “Tell me which demon is after me and why.”
Charlotte made me wait for it while she considered her next words. “If I tell you, will you keep my secret from my Lloyd?”
I nearly laughed at Baja’s unfortunate name. “Sure.”
“Your father made the deal with Stolas for your immortality. They have taken magical items they believe will steal your immortality and transfer it to someone else.”
There it was; the reason behind the thefts and the cult’s desire to get me. I can’t say I was surprised. Whenever my secret gets out, life becomes an endless parade of people who beg for my secret or those who try to blackmail or steal it from me. No matter what I do now, it was going to end in a bloodbath with plenty of dead bystanders to litter the landscape.
Charlotte finally got off of me and let me sit up. I stretched as I used my fingertips to massage the cramps the woman had pressed into my muscles. “Why are you telling me all of this? Won’t Ryerson kill you for it?”
“The spirits are afraid of what will happen if you are taken. They’re at me night and day to stop it. I have to have peace.”
“Fine then, I won’t let Stolas get a hold of me,” I told her. I stood up off of the floor and stretched the rest of the kinks out. “Do yourself a favor and throw that opal away then get out of the city before they can get a hold of you.”
“I can’t. The jewels are like crack. Once you put it on you can’t take it off, ever.” Charlotte practically wept at the idea. Her hands clutched the necklace protectively as if she was afraid that I was going to snatch it from around her neck. I was sorely tempted to do it.
“Even if it means you’ll die if you don’t?”
Charlotte shook her head. I did not say any more to her about it. I think one of the saddest things about addicts is that they can only be rescued by themselves; no one else can do it for them. They must reach the point when they have suffered more than they can bear and they are forced to do something about it. If they are weak, they will fail and ultimately die. The strong ones can take a lot of misery before they begin the long climb out of the abyss. Sometimes they can take so much pain that they don’t know that they’re dying until it’s too late. It’s such a shame.


Chapter 26

It was all lies, I was sure of it. If the old bastard was coming back to haunt me, why would he wait twenty-five centuries to do it? He had not been a man of patience when he lived, and I saw no good reason why death would change him. The old man was dead and gone, and it is far more likely that his soul suffers the eternal torments of whatever Hell is willing to have him. Charlotte was parroting garbage from Ryerson and she had accidentally stumbled upon my true name and that is all there is to that.