HALEN
Lights strobe against my shuttered eyelids. At times, I’m able to fight my eyes open to see the glare of streetlights through a blurred windshield, but I’m unsure of how much actual time has passed. I struggle to move, as if my body is submerged beneath a thick substance, trapped in a night terror I can’t wake from.
It’s like trying to breathe through cellophane when I finally come up for air. I’m aware I’ve been drugged. Rohypnol or some other hypnotic drug, although it’s not strong enough to drown out the pain as I’m pulled right back under, drifting beneath a sea of memories triggered by the flashing lights.
The metallic taste of blood fills my mouth. Pressure builds at my temples. My forearm is on fire. The blaring blue and red lights ache in my eye sockets, competing with the angry wail of a siren. Sluggish, I look over, and Jackson is there. But like being hit with the force of a tidal wave, I immediately know he’s gone. There’s no slow progression past denial. No hope to cling to. His unseeing eyes stare vacantly into mine, and I know he’ll never see me again.
My first impulse is to cry out for my mom, to hear her soothing voice, feel her comforting embrace. Then the memory of losing her just months before detonates, imploding my entire world in a black hole.
I suffer the loss alone.
And pray the guilt kills me.
The flicker of light against my eyes grows stronger. I see the candle flame dancing in my room, Kallum’s shadow lurking in the corner, and despite the fear his presence stirs, warmth touches my cold skin, and then I’m engulfed by the heat. The strobing blue and red fades, replaced by a sun so brilliant, I raise my arm to shield myself from the burn.
A heavy, rhythmic drumbeat vibrates against my skull. The tempo increases, pulsing inside the hollow cavity of my chest. My heart syncs with the furious drumming, luring me out of the void, and when my eyes finally open to take in the waking world, I want oblivion back.
A circle of fire blazes amid the darkness. The flames rise up all around, casting obscure shadows over dark walls. Through the smoke piercing my vision, I make out the jagged mouth of a cave, the opening wide and partly expanded along the ceiling to reveal a starry sky.
That’s not right, my inner voice intones. There are no caves in Hollow’s Row or the surrounding towns.
The drug haze shrouding my mind weakens enough to allow me to push onto my knees. I touch my face, my stomach, thighs, assessing my body. Anxiety barbs my chest as I find my clothes have been removed. Every probing touch is met with a numb, tingling sensation as restored blood circulation attacks. My mouth is dry, and I swallow past the vile taste coating my tongue.
As my vision clears further, the obscure shadows sharpen. Shapes become distinct and silhouettes surface through the undulating flames, and my breath stalls at the sight of bone-white antlers branching above the crackling fire.
Then I hear the guttural moans. The sickening, disembodied sounds echo against the walls of the cave.
The higher men.
The victims.
They move in closer to the circle of fire. Shadow and light emphasizes the grotesquely mutilated features of their faces. Eyes sewn shut, thick black stitches slash their discolored lids, the sockets concaved. Bodies unclothed, their bare skin gleams with sweat and blood. Fawn skin drapes the shoulders of many of the women. Men are clad only in armbands—and they’re aroused, erect. Their movements are disjointed, enacting a disturbing dance to the rising drumbeat, which stems from a shadowed man striking some archaic drum.
They’re not just terrifying figures, or victims, or pictures from files. Despite their marred features, I recognize Roni Elsher and Vince Lipton. Two of the victims I studied to interview their families.
These are people.
People who had lives. Families and careers.
Still dazed, I try to keep this thought central as a wave of sickness crashes over me at the sight of their horrifying presence. I touch the cool earth to calm myself. Before the fire, symbols have been carved into the hard-packed dirt to ring the magic circle.
And I realize, as panic rakes my insides, I’m at the center.
This is some version of hell.
And Devyn is its goddess.
Fearless, she walks through the flames unscathed to enter the circle. Adorned only in a necklace of bone, gauzy skirt, and armbands with the same sheer fabric, she holds her head high. The spiny antlers atop her head reach toward the cave ceiling. She’s a Dionysian priestess, and every wicked fantasy from the underworld come to life.
This is her replica of the Dionysian Mysteries to support her delusion.
I can reach her.
I have to reach her.
Despite the heat from the perimeter fire, my skin prickles with a chill as Devyn approaches. Inhaling a steadying breath, I dig my fingers into the soil to feel the cool earth, something real and tangible to latch on to reality. “I’m here,” I whisper to myself. I close my eyes and fist the dirt. “I’m here. I’m here…”
I find the scar on my arm, trace the inked words tattooed over the ruined flesh. Recite them over and over. One must cultivate one’s own garden.
The garden is this moment in time.
And I, within it, is all I have control over.
The panic encasing my senses subsides, but only slightly. The drug coursing my system makes me feel as disembodied as the moans.
Devyn’s consuming presence draws near, and I’m forced to open my eyes. My gaze travels up her naked body. In her right hand she holds a thyrsus, the god’s staff coiled in ivy. In her left, she carries a silver chalice engraved with stars, moons, and other symbols I’m unable to discern.
She drinks from the cup, sending a rivulet of red dripping down the corner of her mouth. As her eyes fall to me, her pupils are blown. She’s not just intoxicated; she’s drugged out of her mind.
“What did you give me?” I ask, my voice hoarse, my stomach pitching in need to rid the contents.
Her backdrop of flame and disfigured herd lends to her ethereal appearance. “A little taste of ecstasy,” Devyn says, her persona fully absorbed in a frenetic state as she sways. “To reach our zenith, we have to submit to ekstasis.”
Devyn snaps her fingers, and a woman with reedy antlers and her dark, naked skin decorated in red symbols walks through the fire. She’s carrying the circlet of ivy, bone, and fawn antlers—the one Kallum designed for me to wear in his ritual, the one I gave to Devyn along with the other evidence.
Staring past the woman’s shoulder, I see the same symbols on the wall that’s marked on her skin…then the lifeless stag right below.
As Devyn offers her the chalice, I realize it’s not filled with wine.
And the stag is not the main sacrifice tonight.
After handing off the staff to the woman, Devyn sinks down in front of me and, taking my face between her palms, she begins to rock us to the rhythmic drumming. “Don’t look at them,” she whispers. “Keep your eyes on me.”
Body exposed and skin blanketed in gooseflesh, I surrender to her movements, letting her sway our bodies as I try to find her through our drug induced state. “Devyn, please listen to me—”
“The act of sparagmos was more than reenacting the god’s destruction and rebirth,” she says, cutting me short, her voice as immaterial as our scenery. “It’s a sacred rite to summon the god into the animal.” She rests her forehead to mine, intimate, comforting. “Rending and eating of the raw flesh is communing with the god, inviting him in. By consuming the animal, we in turn become one with Dionysus.”
She breaks away, her mouth stretching into a captivating smile, and my heart pangs at the sight.
There is no greater destruction than one of self. And therefore, no catalyst more powerful to wield in alchemic creation.
“Destruction isn’t an end,” I whisper, Kallum’s words falling from my lips, “it’s a beginning.”
Her dark eyes gleam brilliantly in the dancing firelight. “Exactly.”
The loss I feel carves a hollowness through my insides. I fold my arms over my chest, feeling the raw ache of mourning as I cover my breasts.
I’d closed myself off from friends, colleagues, everyone in my life, never wanting to feel that pain of loss again. Then Kallum blew my barriers wide open. But Devyn…she opened up a passage inside me, a tiny ribbon of hope. “I don’t want to lose you,” I tell her.
“You won’t.” She strokes my cheek. “We’ll be connected forever. Two halves made whole through primordial unity.”
As she takes my hands in hers, she pulls me to my feet. I stagger before she helps me gain balance, then she turns toward the woman holding the crown of bone and ivy.
Devyn brings the crown up, holding it aloft before she places it on my head, detangling my hair from the stems as she coaxes my strands over my bare shoulders. The weight of the fawn antlers bears down on me, like I’m reliving a nightmare.
My mind spins as I again tip my face toward the open sky, trying to pinpoint our location.
Come morning, wherever this place is, the aftermath will be a crime scene. There will be evidence of the people here, the objects they handled, the substances leached into the ground.
As I look around to take in the site, I view it through the eyes of a profiler. I observe the behavior, read the motives and actions in an abstract part of me that breaks down each movement and object beyond its purpose.
I see the macabre artistry, the violence, the horror. I see the shifting of dirt beneath their stomping feet. I see the staff held in reverence. I see Devyn’s core nature. I see the flickering flames rising higher. The spines on the antlers. My clothes thoughtlessly discarded in a heap.
I see the way out.
The moaning grows louder, becoming a haunting song with the intensifying drumbeat. If I can break through to just one person… A small measure of doubt is all that’s needed to stop this.
I turn in a circle, catching myself on a wave of dizziness as I stare past the fire, trying to latch on to a familiar face.
The heaving, gyrating bodies dance and grope in a display of debauchery. These people have no eyes, no ears, no tongues, yet they’re absorbed in every other sensation of the flesh, using their bodies to touch and entice. Hedonistic acts so base and depraved as they give in to their desire, I feel feverish at the lewd sight.
“Vince Lipton,” I say, my voice trembling. Then, louder: “Mr. Lipton—” The man I identify from his file doesn’t respond to his name. Antlers nearly as large as Landry’s were, he’s a massive man, currently in the throes of a vulgar act as he ruthlessly thrusts into a woman on her hands and knees, his rough grunts rising over the drumming.
“Did you really come here willingly to save them?” Devyn’s question is whispered close to my ear. She moves in behind me and wraps her arms around my waist. “Or, deep down, is it you that wants to be saved?”
The implication of her words pits out my stomach as her palms drift over my belly. Incensed, I trap her, my dirty fingernails stabbed into the backs of her hands. “I don’t believe in any of this,” I say.
“You don’t have to.” She releases me then, moving around to stand before me. “The deer didn’t believe, yet they were a pure vessel for the god. And you, Halen, are the purest vessel.”
As the priestess lifts her chin, she turns her palms up, giving herself over to the rhythmic bass imbuing the air. A cold sensation prickles my flesh, the emptiness a physical entity invading my soul.
I lower myself to the earth, knees dug into the cold soil, and search out the mark on my flesh. My hand slides between my thighs, and my fingers delicately trace the sigil. Just as I’d done before, lost in the darkness, adrift in a vulnerable state, afraid of my feelings…I seek out a connection to the man who frightens me, who challenges me. Calling to him just as I did in that moment. My connection to Kallum is tangible—more real than my fear—and my pain is a summons to him.
Kallum can feel me.
And the fact I believe this shatters all my logical defenses.
I reach up to remove the circlet, and Devyn’s hand coils around my wrist. “That’s enough indulgence,” she says, yanking me up to stand. “I’ve been patient too long.”
“Devyn, if you do this…it won’t change anything. You’ll still be the same. Whatever you’re suffering, whatever you’re trying to heal, it won’t be cured through me.”
“Us,” she stresses. Her eyes take on a furious edge, and that anger reveals a fault in her façade, if only for a heartbeat before she re-erects her guise. “We’re the path. When I saw you dancing at the Lipton’s house, I beheld your profound suffering. You were already so close to enlightenment, to experiencing transcendent Rausch…I was in awe.”
I swallow past the raw ache. “What you saw was me being seduced by Kallum. What I experienced with him has nothing to do with any of this…” I glance around at the frenzy of sex and delusion. “This is monstrous, Devyn. What you’ve done to these people is monstrous.”
Her dark eyes flash with firelight. “I’ve liberated them.”
“You’ve mutilated them.” I grab her hand. “This can’t be what you wanted, what you imagined. I refuse to believe that.” As I stay locked to her gaze, a tiny flare of hope springs within me. “What happened to you?”
What she allowed me to see within her at the ravine was real. It can’t all be a part of her mask. The moment Kallum said the site was a glimpse into what made the Overman vulnerable, I felt the truth in his words.
Tragedy.
I recognized that fatal pain inside her right then.
And right now, I have to go for the jugular.
“Where is Colter?” I demand, gripping her hand tighter. “Where is your brother? Did you mutilate your own twin, your own flesh and blood for your vanity—?”
She breaks out of my hold, her palm striking my face in a sharp slap.
Head canted sideways, I feel the burn of her heartache, my skin alive with the searing sting. I focus on that pain, allowing it to sober me further.
Just as suddenly, Devyn’s hand seizes my throat in a firm clutch. Nails biting into my skin, she draws my face close to hers. For one second, I glimpse behind the perfect, beautiful mask she wears. In the quickening beat of a drum strike, I see the hurt, the grief veiled behind the drugs in her shimmery eyes.
“You think I give a fuck about some ancient god or his brainless followers,” she hisses. Shaking her head, she laughs breathlessly. “I wanted to give you all your answers, Halen. But—” She slowly and deliberately releases my throat. “I think you should die with your mystery.”
As quickly as I break through to her, she shuts me out. She’s a master.
A shiver coasts over my naked skin, and as Devyn backs away, she reaches out to the woman holding the chalice. Her eyes stay trained on my face as she brings the cup to her mouth and drains the contents.
When she drops the cup to the earth, her eyes are glassy, her features slack.
She’s gone.
Devyn raises her arms, the fire seeming to snap and rise higher at her command. “I will take it freely or by force, but I will take it, Halen.”
“What happened to choice?” I demand of her.
“You already made yours. Now you’re here. At least you were given one.” She whirls toward her devoted subjects. “Hear me,” she shouts. “We willingly gave up our worldly possessions, our mundane lives. A test of our devotion.”
The horned people around the circle of fire groan and pound their chests in answer.
Devyn spins around and around, arms outstretched. “And you know the word,” she cries, her voice pitched high, carrying over the drumming. “I love those who do not first seek behind the stars for a reason to go under and be a sacrifice, but who instead sacrifice themselves for the earth, so that the earth may one day become the Übermensch’s.”
I recognize the recited passage from Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Devyn uses the wordage, twisting the meaning, to control her higher humans.
“The Primal Man sacrifices himself, tearing free of worldly constraints, in order to be reborn, to recreate himself,” she says, her glassy eyes settling on me. “This is the way to our divine immortality.”
I push forward, staring her in her bloodshot eyes as I search my memory for a passage to combat hers, any purposeful words I can use to get through to these people. “Zarathustra stated, ‘This is my way, where is yours?’” I shout, “thus I answered those who asked me ‘the way,’ for the way, that does not exist’.”
I turn to face the victims, these people who have been misled, following literally blindly, offering pieces of themselves to achieve Devyn’s misguided wisdom.
“This is what you believe?” I ask of them. “Nietzsche defined it so damn clear that there is no formula or path to follow, that each person must seek their own way. But you’ve followed hers. You’ve sacrificed yourselves for her way. Can’t you see the failed logic in that?”
The eerie moans ascend higher, the flames popping against the dark abyss of this hell. The higher men fall to their knees in frenzied worship of their priestess. They’re too far gone, lost to depravity as they fuck and worship and submit to their will.
“You have no idea what they’ve suffered to be here,” Devyn says.
Then, with a defiant smile, she tilts her head. The dark tresses of her hair spill over her bare shoulders as she oscillates in sexy rolls of her hips to the rhythm of the swelling drumbeat. Her body gyrates, succumbing to the drug in her system, her movements becoming frantic, and a band of fear cinches my chest at the powerful sight of her.
She touches the antlers affixed to her scalp, caressing the bone as she dances closer to me. “Nietzsche was such a misogynist,” she says. “Overman. A ridiculous translation. I prefer Over-woman. As the Maenads, the fucking followers of the god themselves, were in fact women. Figures a man would try to rewrite history for his own vanity.” She spits the word back at me, her dark eyes alighting on my naked skin. “Your profile was wrong on that, profiler. My vanity has no place here.”
“Dance with me,” she urges, clasping my waist and drawing me toward the center of the ring of fire.
Smoke curls up toward the open ceiling of the cavern, and I follow the billowing trail, anxiety a claw constricting around my lungs as I breathe in the smoky air.
As Devyn coaxes me into an erotically sensual dance, I flash back to the ritual when Kallum endeavored to do the same, luring me into the frenzy.
“Where they have some,” Devyn says, motioning her head languidly to her higher men, “you have every aspect of the Übermensch, Halen. At first, I envied you that. Your connection to the primordial pain. But then, every path is unique, just as you said. And then there you were, amid my ritual ground, my answer.” Her eyes shine fiercely in the glow of the fire. “My path.”
She drapes her forearms over my shoulders, her eyes listless, her body rocking in seductive waves. For the briefest moment, I yield to her desire, allowing myself to be swept up in her embrace, trying to connect with her, where I can reason with her…
I stop, motionless.
The Overman’s ultimate weakness was always their humanity, what they needed to sever to fully ascend. I’ve been trying to reach Devyn’s humanity…but that’s no longer possible. She’s succeeded in concealing it beneath drugs and her delusion.
Torn over the knowledge that I’ve already failed, the pain point is realizing I have to turn her over to authorities like this.
Her body stills as she looks deeply into my eyes. “I’m offering you eternal reprieve from your suffering. I even liberated you from the vile sorcerer, the wicked pharmakeus. I made it so he’ll finally do the time you know he deserves. I’m giving you everything you wanted.”
She braces my face between her palms. As her glassy eyes track my face, I allow her to press a tender kiss to my lips, embracing the connected sorrow between us, before I pull away.
“Devyn,” I say, gliding my fingers over her soft features. “I promise, I’m going to get you the help you need. I’ll be there. I won’t leave you.”
Her expression twists, a mix of uncertainty and her dazed state giving me the advantage to turn in her hold and elbow her side. Dropping to my hands and knees, I crawl toward the perimeter of the circle and rake my fingers through one of the alchemic symbols.
“No,” Devyn shouts.
She drops to her knees beside me, her obsessive-compulsive nature triggered at seeing the defaced symbol. While she attempts to fix the marking, I claw the earth and pitch the dirt into her eyes.
She releases a furious, shrill scream that activates her herd.
“Fuck.” I shove past her and dart toward the lowest hedge of flame. I blink hard, clearing my vision of the tracers streaking off the sparks as I glance around at the blind men and women feeling their way toward the center of the circle.
The woman holding Devyn’s staff makes a sluggish move toward me, and I duck and grasp the long wand at the base, snatching it free of her grasp. I run toward the fire, holding my breath when I reach the wall of flame, then dart through to the other side, where my clothes lay in a pile.
Breath ragged and lungs searing from the smoke, I tie my shirt around the end of the shaft. “Come on…” Once it’s secured, I thrust the staff into the flames. My shirt catches fire.
The ghoulish herd encroaches from all around, and disorientation chews at my mind. I reach up and remove the circlet, tossing it to the ground. Gaining balance, I grasp the staff with both hands and slash an arc through the air.
My attackers can’t see the fire, but they can hear the searing pop, feel the heat. I use the fire to push them back as I hedge along the wall. Their groans compete with the ringing in my ears, and I try not to look at their stitched eyes, to feel even a measure of sympathy that will hold me back.
The massive Vince Lipton closes his arms, making a grabbing motion as he forcefully barrels toward me. I plunge the fire into his chest, halting him and earning a furious roar.
As I fight my way toward the mouth of the cave, Devyn pushes to the front of the throng.
Wreathed around her neck is the chain of bone, and she unhooks a slender, pointed antler from the necklace and starts toward me.
I tighten my hold on the staff, the light of the flame illuminating her as she draws close. “I don’t want to hurt you—”
“Want is powerful, Halen.” She swipes the talon-shaped bone through the air, forcing me to back away. “I want to rip you open and wade around in your depths. My want is stronger than yours will ever be.”
Holding her fierce gaze—seeing even a sliver of what remains of the woman I know—I make a decision.
I drop the staff and run.
Making it as far as the opening, the pale moonlight spilling in to show the way out, I feel her hand snare my hair before she snatches me backward. I hit the ground hard on my shoulder. Pain flares through my bones.
Devyn descends on me, a wildness cast in her dark eyes. I block her strike with my forearm, keeping the weapon locked in my sight as she bears down.
A cold, despondent look passes over her face before she tears into the flesh of my arm, coming away with skin and blood between her teeth.
A gritted scream rakes free of my chest. Adrenaline firing through my veins, pain isn’t what ignites my rage. Fury tears a destructive path through my reason at seeing the damaged ink. Fight comes alive, and I dig my nails into her throat, squeezing her trachea until I hear her wheeze.
I gain leverage and roll her body off, where I mount her chest and capture her wrist. Eyes flashing wild, Devyn cries out, refusing to relinquish the antler as I pry it from her grip.
Chest heaving beneath me, a faint smile touches her mouth. “It’s a delicate shift,” she says, her voice coming out in a rasp. “Like walking a tightrope over an abyss. The choice to either take a life or sacrifice your own…”
Weapon clenched in my fist, I stare down into her face, at the blood smeared across her mouth. My heart riots in fluttering bursts against the wall of my ribs. I see the sharp tip of the antler impaling her neck; I see it so clearly…just as I stabbed Landry in his jugular.
I could kill her.
It feels so easy…
With that awareness, another vision fights for dominance, plunging me far past the depths. The horrifying imagery was stirred from the abyss when Alister held me trapped, the bloody face of a man surfacing to seize my mind.
The weight of the tire iron held in my hand.
No.
I’m not a killer.
“That’s it,” Devyn says. “Let it in. There’s the answer, Halen. You see it.”
Freeing the aching breath trapped in my lungs, I cry out, lashing back against the images shredding my mind. I draw the antler up, my aim fixed on her neck, and release a scream.
I throw the weapon.
Devyn rebounds the moment I surrender. She thrusts me off her chest and commands her herd. “Take her.”
I flail as they grab my arms and legs, but my fight has been depleted. I’m lifted in the air and hauled back to the inner circle of the fire ring. The beat of the drum resumes, the disturbing cacophony of moans and wails filling the dark cavern.
I’m dropped to the earth, my back smashed to the dirt, my arms and legs stretched out. Chest rising as I try to grasp a breath not tainted with smoke, I struggle in vain against the banded hands around my limbs that pin me to the ground.
All will to fight lost, I close my eyes against the fire and surging bodies. I close myself off from the pain. I let the drug dull my senses.
Sharp pain slices into my shoulder. My eyes forced open, I see Devyn carving the point of the bone to draw blood. I bite into my lip, my arms braced against their brutal grip, a scream caught in the base of my throat. Then I feel the soft probe of her lips and tongue over the wound.
My head sways with the effect, my vision blurred.
She sinks her teeth into my shoulder. The piercing feels almost orgasmic, an answer to the constant, muted ache encasing me.
I’m about to be rend apart and devoured.
My system crashes into shock. I delve below the surface of my consciousness, searching for an escape, surrendering to the blackout…
And a shrill screech invades the dark.
A web of terror encases my body at the sound, the high-pitched chirp of the death’s-head hawkmoth. A distinct sound I’ve only heard while obsessively hunting a killer.
The Harbinger.
