I kept off the trail, sprinting through the trees. I had my knife out, at the ready — God, I was a fool to come out here without a gun. But I was going to lay low. I knew what I had to do. Once they threw Victoria down, I’d wait for them to leave, then bring her out. What the hell I’d do with her then, I didn’t know. I’d always thought I’d kill her without hesitation. I’d tried to kill her, years ago, and gotten locked up for it. I wanted her dead.
But not like this. Not when I’d done the same shameful, hypocritical shit as the rest of those cowards. I’d watched them cut her and done nothing. As much as I hated her, as much as I wanted to put a knife to her throat and bleed her out, I wasn’t going to let her vile God have what It wanted.
I wasn’t like them. I was better than them. I was better than watching horror in silence.
I wasn’t going to let the Libiri succeed. I wasn’t going to stand by while they pleased the Deep One with even more suffering.
I was soaked to the bone, but I was close: numerous talismans dangled over my head, suspended on bits of knotted twine, spinning in the wind. It was truly storming now — the rain coming in torrents, thunder rumbling. I could see white cloaks ahead, stark between the trees.
The mushrooms covered nearly every inch of ground here. I crouched down, creeping slowly forward, crushing them underfoot with every step. They released a pungent scent of rot, squishing disgustingly under my shoes.
“Come on, Zane,” I whispered to myself. “Find me. Fucking find me so we can kill these bastards.”
If he could get here in time, we had all of them in one place. We could take them all out, we could end this and destroy them all.
I kept to the shadows as I tried to get into a position to see past the sea of white cloaks. They all had their masks on: bone white stag skulls, the eyes black pits. It was haunting how still they stood, how calm they were, all gathered around a place so drenched in evil it made my skin crawl just to be close to it. Had they convinced themselves this feeling of disgust was beautiful, like they had convinced themselves suffering was noble?
I was thankful for the rain and thunder muffling my footsteps as I crawled through the underbrush. The smell of rot and death was unbearable, thick in my nose and cloying in my throat. Finally, I could see Jeremiah standing before the open maw of the mine shaft. He wore his mask too, and Victoria was on her knees at his feet. She was bleeding, her shirt ripped away to make room for the awful, ragged marks cut into her skin. They’d removed her gag, and although her voice was raw, she still screamed at them.
“You can’t do this to me! I know you, I fucking know all of you! You’re wrong, you’re all fucking wrong!”
“Keep carrying on, Sister, and we’ll start to think you’re defying God,” Jeremiah said.
“Fuck this! Fuck all of you! Dad would have never let this happen —”
“Oh, you don’t think so?” He knelt down, and Victoria jerked away from his hand. “Dad told us since we were in the cradle that one day, one of us would go. You’re blessed, Victoria.” It was hard to tell with the mask and the roar of the rain, but I could have sworn I could hear laughter in Jeremiah’s voice.
He knew it was all a lie, but he carried it on because it gave him power. It allowed him to stand there proudly with his sister in the mud. It allowed him to feel untouchable. My hand tightened on the knife. It didn’t matter what God he served. It didn’t matter if he thought he was blessed or chosen or whatever other bullshit he concocted.
He was going to die like his father.
“Is she not blessed?” he yelled toward the crowd as he stood. “Who among you would rush forward to offer yourself to the Deep One? Who here isn’t a coward before God?”
There was a beat, then another, and for a moment, I thought no one would step forward. I hoped I was about to watch them all turn their backs on this. But then…
“I would!” A white cloak stepped forward. Faceless, nameless. “I would give myself to God in a heartbeat. I would be honored to be so blessed —”
They didn’t get to finish. Jeremiah sunk the knife into their chest up to the hilt. He caught them as they fell to their knees, holding them close. “Then you’re blessed indeed. The Deep One has blessed you. The Deep One will take you into eternity.”
Not one of them moved. There were a few fervent murmurs of “All is as it should be” as Jeremiah dragged the bleeding acolyte toward the mine. He stood before the shaft and pulled off his mask, holding up his victim with his fists knotted in their cloak.
“God! Hear me!” His voice cracked as he screamed. “I offer you a soul, unbidden! I offer a soul in devotion, in worship! I ask for nothing except your blessing!”
He shoved his victim into the dark. There wasn’t even a scream, and the rain covered the sound of them hitting the water below. It was as if they simply fell into an abyss, and would be falling for eternity.
Victoria was weeping now, shaking her head. Jeremiah’s cronies kept her from crawling away.
Jeremiah spread his arms before the dark. He was breathing heavily, his white suit stained with blood. He closed his eyes, tipped back his head, and yelled, “Deep One! Bless me!”
It was as though everyone there collectively held their breath. Waiting…watching. I stayed low next to the trunk of the tree, but movement at my feet made me look down.
Mushrooms, sprouting up rapidly around my feet. A shudder went up my back, like a cold finger trailing along my spine. The wind howled around me, and with its howling came something horrifyingly familiar, a voice I’d heard too many times before.
But this time, It wasn’t calling my name.
It was calling Jeremiah’s.
The worshippers were murmuring. A tremor ran through the ground, and they began to shout. Jeremiah turned back to them, arms still spread. “You see? Do you all see? God is here! God has heard us! It has received our offering!” His wide-eyed, wild smile fell on Victoria. “And It will receive another.”
I barely even had time to process what I was seeing as he dragged her up from the ground, screaming, fighting — and sliced her throat.
I had to swallow down the vomit that wanted to rise up in me again. Her blood spilled across the ground, and Jeremiah threw her into the dark, carelessly, roughly, her body flinging into the depths like a ragdoll.
Holy shit, I’d been wrong. I’d been so wrong. There was no saving her from that.
The ground rumbled again, a pulse thrumming beneath my feet. The air felt thick, sitting so heavy in my lungs that I had to desperately suppress the urge to cough. My body flushed cold as I realized that something was moving in the mine shaft. The shape of it was morphing, constantly changing — the darkness itself moved, like ink being stirred. That ink was spreading, it was seeping out. Black tendrils tested the edges of the shaft’s frame, reaching out into the air as if grasping for something. There was a gasp and a cry from one of the white cloaks.
The murmurs passed through the crowd, “God is here. God is here.”
They began to fall to their knees. As Jeremiah looked over them, the veins in the whites of his eyes turned red, like blood cracking to the surface. He faced the dark again, his chest heaving with the effort to breathe in the atmosphere’s sudden thickness.
“Bless me, God,” he said again. “Bless me.”
The tendrils shot out. I clapped my hand over my mouth as they coiled around his limbs like snakes, moving rapidly, wrapping around every inch of skin as if cocooning him. He watched them with an expression somewhere between horror and fascination, and more of the crowd fell to their knees, throwing up their hands, crying aloud.
“God is here! The Deep One rises!”
But the God couldn’t get out…It couldn’t…surely It couldn’t…
The tendrils enveloped Jeremiah’s head. He jerked, and suddenly his mouth gaped open and the tendrils pushed inside him, down his throat, making it bulge as he choked. He bent backward, his spine curving to such an angle that he could look back on the congregation upside-down, his eyes rolled back in his head.
He began to rise off the ground, and I couldn’t even fathom what the hell I was witnessing.
The black tendrils held him suspended in the air, pushing inside him with such violence that his chest enlarged and his throat swelled. His body began to twitch, then to shake, and black ooze leaked from his mouth…his ears…his eyes…
The rumbling stopped, and Jeremiah dropped heavily to the ground. All that remained was the rain, pouring around us. The tendrils were gone, disappeared inside him. No one spoke, no one got up. They merely extended their hands, trembling, toward Jeremiah’s limp body.
Something seized me from behind, one hand clapped over my mouth and the other grabbed my wrist. I thrashed, panicking, but only until a deep voice whispered harshly in my ear, “No stabbing me this time, little wolf. We need to get the fuck out of here, now.”
Zane. He dragged me up, giving no chance for protest or explanation. He was tense as hell and breathing hard.
Jeremiah began to rise. He raised his head from the ground, every movement a bizarre twitch. It reminded me of those things — those Gollums who had taken Marcus’s body. But Zane didn’t stop, no, he only moved faster. The last thing I saw of Jeremiah was him jerk fully to his feet, black goop seeping from his lips. He said something I couldn’t hear, but from the way his lips moved, I could have sworn he said, “Someone is here.”
