Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (free romance novels .TXT) 📗

As the tree grew, would its roots grow around Aashrita’s burial vault, or would they worm their way through tiny cracks in the concrete, widening them until they’d breached the vault and could slither toward the casket – and its occupant? When Lori reached Aashrita’s grave, she stepped off to the side to avoid standing on her friend’s resting place, body angled so she could face the headstone. Fifteen years of exposure to the elements had worn the edges of the letters and numbers somewhat, but they were still easily legible. AASHRITA DHAWAN. That was all, aside from her birth and death dates. There was no sign anyone had visited the grave recently. There were no flowers, and the grass could use some trimming. Lori wondered if the sound of a lawnmower would disturb the dead’s sleep, or if they would welcome sounds of life, however impersonal those sounds might be. She felt an urge then to say hello to Aashrita, but she couldn’t bring herself to do so.

She felt memories pushing at the threshold of her consciousness, demanding that she pay attention to them. But she’d spent so many years suppressing them – sometimes so successfully that she forgot Aashrita had ever existed – that she was afraid to let them in. She feared they’d overwhelm her, inundate her, drown her….

She experienced a powerful urge to run back to her car, get in, drive away, and never look back. But she forced herself to remain where she was, forced herself not to look away from Aashrita’s headstone.

Start with one memory, she told herself. Just one.

She closed her eyes and waited for a single memory to emerge from the roiling maelstrom in her mind.

* * *

She opened her eyes and gazed upon the face of a man without any eyes of his own.

“Have you figured it out yet?” the Driver asked.

In the light cast by the mass of firebabies slowly swirling above her, she saw the Driver held a knife large enough to be a machete, the blade slick with blood. Her blood, judging by the fiery lines of pain that crisscrossed her naked body.

There was no way he could see her take in the knife, but he said, “I didn’t have time to clean it off after cutting that cat in two before using it on you. Sorry. You might want to put some antibiotic ointment on those cuts later.”

“If you don’t die from blood loss first,” Goat-Eyes put in.

“Excellent point,” the Driver conceded.

The woman stood on the Driver’s right. She wore a metal gauntlet on her left hand, needle-like spines covering the fingers. The spines, like the Driver’s blade, dripped with blood. Rauch stood on the Driver’s left, his neck gills opening and closing so fast they buzzed like a hummingbird’s wings. He held a flail that looked as if it had been made from the craggy gray skin of some reptilian creature. It too was streaked with blood.

She looked past her three tormentors and saw the crimson-robed figures of the Cabal standing shoulder to shoulder on the tower’s upward-curving spiral, observing her with silent intensity. She tried to move her arms and legs, felt the shackles’ restraint, heard the chains rattle.

“I was in the cemetery,” she said, her voice a soft dry rasp.

The Driver smiled.

“There’s nowhere you can go that we can’t find you.”

“Not even death would permit you to escape us,” Goat-Eyes added.

“You’re ours until we release you,” Rauch said.

“And we won’t do that until the Intercessor is satisfied,” the Driver finished.

He turned to face the assembled Cabal, raised his hands high above his head, and shouted, “Everyone?”

Hundreds of the red-robed mystics spoke through the firebabies in a single thunderous voice, their words so loud Lori felt the X-cross vibrate against her body.

“Confess and atone – or suffer.”

Lori spoke again, her voice louder and clearer this time. Her words still came out as barely more than a whisper, but she had no doubt the entire Cabal could hear her.

“Tell me what I did and I’ll fix it…if I can.”

The Cabal was silent for several long moments, and then the chamber was filled with the roar of riotous laughter.

The Driver, Goat-Eyes, and Rauch were laughing too as they raised their implements of torture and stepped toward her. Seconds later, her screams joined the thundering cacophony of sound within the Vermilion Tower.

* * *

She woke to wet and cold. Aashrita’s headstone lay in front of her, but something was wrong with it. It lay sideways, as if someone had knocked it over. Had she done that? She didn’t remember going close enough to the headstone to touch it, let alone shove it onto its side. And even if for some bizarre reason she’d wanted to knock it over, the thing was made of solid stone. No way was she strong enough to….

That’s when she realized she was lying on the ground. The headstone wasn’t sideways. She was. She remembered being in the Vermilion Tower again, and for an instant she felt the pain of the wounds that had been inflicted on her there. She was about to scream, but the pain receded so swiftly that within an instant it was as if she’d never experienced it at all. She pushed herself into a sitting position with trembling arms and attempted to wipe water from her eyes and face, but the rain was still coming down and her actions accomplished nothing.

She had been dragged back to the tower in the middle of the day without having to fall asleep first. If the Cabal could pull her there whenever they wanted, what would happen if they did so while she was driving? It wasn’t as if she’d had any warning. One moment she was conscious, the next she was manacled to that goddamned X-cross again. If she passed out while behind the wheel, she’d wreck, injuring herself and possibly others. That was a really nasty new wrinkle to this game.

And that’s what it was beginning to feel like to her