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

of blood on her, too, but her features were clear enough, and Lori saw she was one of the two officers that had come to her apartment last night to investigate the Shadowkin’s break-in. Officer…McGuire. She’d never learned the woman’s first name, but that didn’t matter. All that mattered was poor Brian and her devastated sister. Lori focused on them, tried to reach out mentally to Reeny, to let her know she was not alone in her grief.

Then Brian opened his eyes.

Lori felt almost giddy with relief. He wasn’t dead! He was only wounded, and despite all the blood, evidently not too seriously, for he sat up easily, displaying no sign of distress. He started speaking, and although these visions came with no sound, she could tell by the increasingly angry expression on Reeny’s face that whatever her son was saying, it was making her furious. What the hell—

The vision faded, was replaced by yet another.

This time she saw a scene of Oakmont viewed from above, as if she were flying over the town. There wasn’t much left, just some scattered buildings here and there. Most of the structures had been destroyed, reduced to broken brick and concrete, splintered lengths of wood, shards of shattered glass, bent and twisted metal. The ground was torn up too, as if dozens of tanks had rolled through, treads churning the soil. It looked as if a mass of tornadoes had swept through Oakmont, their merciless winds pulverizing everything in their path. There were bodies, too, so many of them, some more or less intact, some only partials, others smears of bloody meat and crushed bone. There were no signs of life, not even animals – no dogs or cats, no birds.

She tried to scream, needed to release the horror she felt, but the sludge from Aashrita’s colon was still being extruded into her, and it clogged her throat, and she could make no sound. And then the coils of intestine grew slack and she slipped through them. As she fell to the ground, the end that had been forced into her mouth came free, and she was able to breathe again. She pushed herself onto her hands and knees, her body shaking so violently that it was all she could do to keep from collapsing back onto the ground. She opened her mouth to scream at last, but instead a torrent of thick black liquid shot forth. The muck that came out of her smelled foul – and tasted worse – and the sensation caused her to vomit even harder. She continued vomiting, abdominal muscles contracting painfully, spine arched and rigid, for what seemed like hours. But eventually the flood of sludge became a trickle, and then she was dry heaving. She felt the blanket being draped over her body, and she might’ve flinched at the unexpected contact if she hadn’t been so physically spent.

“You okay?” Edgar said. “Sorry – stupid question. Of course you aren’t. Want to try and stand?”

She realized her migraine was gone, not a trace of it remaining. That at least was something. She nodded weakly, and Edgar gently helped her to her feet. Her legs were wobbly, and Edgar kept hold of her left arm to steady her. She saw he’d tucked his strange weapon into the waistband of his pants to leave his hands free. Is that a gun in your pants or are you just glad to see me? she thought, and almost laughed, but she was too weak. She didn’t want to look at Aashrita, partly out of shame for what she’d done to the girl, but also because of what this version of Aashrita – whether it was truly her or some kind of monstrous duplicate – had done to her. She’d helped her remember, had showed her visions that she didn’t understand, but which she knew were important. But she had violated her in the process in an unspeakably horrible manner. She looked, though. She felt she owed her that much.

Aashrita was still bound to the T-cross, but her flesh now sagged on her frame, flowed slowly downward like melting wax. Her features were distorted, almost unrecognizable, but her eyes remained unaffected and they fixed on Lori. The anger that had blazed within them a moment ago was gone. Lori saw sadness in them now, along with love and…was that forgiveness? Lori didn’t know for certain, but she desperately hoped so. Then the eyes liquefied, just as the rest of Aashrita’s body was doing. In a sudden rush, the meat slid off her skeleton all at once. The bones quickly followed suit, and the mass puddled at the base of the cross, where it slowly began to be absorbed into the gritty black soil. Lori saw that the sludge she’d vomited was doing the same thing, disappearing into the ground. When both the vomit and Aashrita’s remains were gone, the fluorescent light attached to her cross flickered and died. The flies that had been clustered on Aashrita’s body had taken to the air when she began to melt, and now they flew off in search of new hosts for their eggs.

Lori realized then that she hadn’t seen Larry in any of the visions that Aashrita had shown her. Did that mean he was okay, that the Cabal hadn’t done anything to him? At least, hadn’t done anything to him yet? She hoped so. If even one of her family and friends was safe, it would be something she could hold onto, one small glint of hope in what was otherwise becoming an increasingly dark picture.

“Have you gotten what you came for?”

Lori turned, startled. She hadn’t heard the Haruspex approach. As she looked upon the being’s featureless cloth face, it struck her that this creature was perfect for tending the Garden of Anguish as it was kind of a scarecrow, albeit one garbed in more sophisticated-looking clothing than most.

“Yes,” she said.

The Haruspex inclined its head in a nod. She saw that it still held