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

– a game. A sick one with life-or-death consequences, but a game nevertheless. One that she was being forced to play without knowing the rules. She thought of how the Cabal had laughed when she’d asked them to just tell her what they wanted her to do. Maybe, she thought, her not knowing the rules was part of the game, too. If so, it was an even shittier game than she’d thought.

She stood, legs weak, but they supported her. She’d been out in the rain long enough that she was soaked from head to toe, and she wondered how long she’d been unconscious, how much time had passed in the real world compared to within the Vermilion Tower. She supposed the details didn’t matter much, but then again, maybe the details were all that mattered in this game. How could she know? She was grateful she hadn’t passed out during her conversation with Reeny. Her sister would’ve been on the phone to nine-one-one within seconds, and Lori would likely have woken up in a hospital.

She looked at Aashrita’s headstone once more, focused on the letters that comprised her name. She needed to remember everything about Aashrita, not just that day at soccer practice when she’d been the goalie and Lori had fucked up her knee, destroying any chance at a college soccer career. She recalled the details of that day without difficulty. It was what had happened in the days and weeks afterward that mattered, she was sure of it. If only she could fucking remember.

She lowered her gaze to read the information beneath Aashrita’s name. Birth date, death date. Aashrita had died when she was seventeen. They’d been the same age – their birthdays were only six weeks apart – so that meant Aashrita had died during their senior year of high school. That sounded familiar, more like the memory of a memory than the thing itself, though. What had the cause been? Accident? Illness? Suicide?

Migraine pain erupted in her head, so intense and crippling that she fell to her knees once more. She clapped her hands to her head and squeezed, as if trying to keep the contents of her brain from exploding outward. Through the agony, she thought, Guess suicide it is.

She hoped this realization would be the key to unlock the rest of her memories about Aashrita’s death, but she experienced no sudden influx of images and emotions, no tidal wave of data crashing into her with psyche-obliterating force. There was nothing.

I’m sorry, Aashrita. She meant this to be an apology for forgetting how her friend had died, but she sensed there was more to it than that. Much more. Before she could explore this feeling further, though, she caught a flash of black out of the corner of her eye.

Oh no.

She didn’t want to look, but she knew she had to. She directed her gaze at the slender tree next to Aashrita’s headstone, saw a shadow creature clinging to the thin limbs like an ebon spider, looking at her with its featureless dark face. Another flash of black, and she turned to see a second shadow creature half-crouched behind a neighboring headstone, long multijointed fingers folded over the top of the stone, sharp black nails clicking against it in eager anticipation. Within moments, a dozen more of the things were visible, most partly hiding among old headstones and young trees, but some standing out in the open, clawed hands at their sides, held slightly away from their bodies like Wild West gunslingers ready to draw on a foe.

Lori got to her feet, turned, and ran toward her Civic. Her shoes slipped on the wet grass, but she managed to keep from falling. She’d left the car unlocked, and when she ran around to the driver’s side, she opened it, threw herself inside, pulled it shut, and locked it behind her. She hadn’t looked back to see if the shadow things had pursued her, but of course they had. They closed in on her car from all sides and slammed into it en masse. The vehicle rocked back and forth, and she screamed. The sound of her terror seemed to energize the shadow things further, whipping them into a frenzy. They began slapping, punching, clawing at her windows, doing so with motions so rapid it sounded as if her car were being bombarded with baseball-sized hailstones. Up close, in the gray light of the overcast rainy day, the shadow things appeared even more awful than they had in her apartment last night. They’d seemed dreamlike then, things that existed half in nightmare, half in the real world. But now they fully inhabited the waking world, the contours of their forms clear, their dark substance possessing depth and a certain fluid solidity, as if they were formed from living, animated oil. Horrible black faces smooth, without even the suggestion of eyes, noses, or mouths, hatred radiating off them like heat from a blazing inferno. Their voices – sound issuing from nonexistent mouths – were like the violent crashing of waves against an arctic shore, the howling shriek of gale-force winds tearing across a midnight desert, the deep rumbling crack of stone being rent asunder by vast seismic forces…. If these voices spoke words, she couldn’t discern them, heard only raw, malignant rage, the entirety of it directed at her. And just as last night, she began to feel strength flowing out of her, and she realized with horror that the shadow things were somehow feeding on her, siphoning away her life bit by bit.

She had to do something; she knew that if she remained here much longer, the shadow creatures would shatter the Civic’s windows, rush into the car like a flood of darkness, and finish her off. She had no way to fight them, though. She didn’t know whether physical weapons like knives or guns would have any effect on them, but since she had neither, it scarcely mattered. She didn’t have any tools in her