Sacrifice (Dylan Hart Odyssey of the Occult) Read online

  Sacrifice

  A Dylan Hart novel by

  R.M. Gilmore

  Sacrifice by R.M. Gilmore

  © 2014 R.M. Gilmore All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any written, electronic, recording, or photocopying without written permission of the publisher or author. The exception would be in the case of brief quotations embodied in the critical articles or reviews and pages where permission is specifically granted by the publisher or author.

  Although every precaution has been taken to verify the accuracy of the information contained herein, the author and publisher assume no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for damages that may result from the use of information contained within.

  Editor: Becky Johnson (Hot Tree Editing)

  For my husband, my daughter, and all those rotten bitches that said no.

  Dylan Hart Odyssey of the Occult series

  The Scene

  Endless Night

  Sacrifice

  Sacrifice

  Fear. Fear above all else is the driving force behind every negative emotion I own. Heart pounding, skin slick with sweat, mouth sticky, rage and fury building upon itself until it's forced from every pore. Fear, my darling, is the end all, be all of Dylan Hart.

  Evil has descended upon me and it's ripe with death. Death from me. By me. For me. My penance. My ultimate retribution for the sins I've committed. My pound of flesh. My sacrifice.

  Chapter One

  "What in the fuck?" my voice screeched out as the wood of my front door splintered and shattered, leaving a gaping hole that lead to the blackness of my porch.

  I held my pistol, and aimed steadily at the black hole in front of me, the steel warming under the heat of my skin. Nothing came. The unseen force that busted my door made no attempt to make itself known. Reluctantly, I lowered my aim toward my lush carpet.

  My gut churned with nervous vomit, but I released my breath and allowed my shoulders to relax, even if only just a bit.

  From the darkness, a streak of white moved quickly, then nothing. My eyes trained on the hole in the door, I waited. Again, a movement of white through the black, but nothing more. My stomach roiled again. A stark white leg stepped through the human-sized gape in my door. My eyes went wide, but I didn't let the fear overtake me. My hands came up pointing the barrel of my gun at the hole. Fuck, through the hole and past the hole, at whatever was attached to the ghostly white limb. The leg pulled the lower half of a body through the hole, exposing the rotten flesh of an inner thigh and pubic area.

  Fight or flight, bitch.

  I gagged and forced myself to stay where I was. Gun trained. Fight engaged.

  The torso followed, bare boobs smushed together between bound arms. I knew what was coming then.

  "Oh, fuck this shit." Without a further thought, my finger squeezed. The recoil sent shock waves up my forearms. Fear had blocked my brain from hearing the shot, but the telltale ringing in my ears told me the gun had fired without a hitch.

  Standing in my living room, a naked girl oozed rusty dead blood from the hole I'd put in her belly. The nub of a neck left on her shoulders was dull with death and decay. I waited for the walking corpse to fall dead, or dead-like, leaking decayed ooze from her wounds. It never happened. Her feet shuffled forward toward me in an awkward cadence. Hands, wrapped in her black hair, reached in my direction. My ass left the edge of the couch as quickly as I could force it, and I stumbled away toward my room.

  "What? What am I supposed to do?" I screamed at the corpse. Spit flew from my mouth with little control as the words came.

  Movement at the door. A leg. A torso. Bound hands and boobs. Another headless body came through my door.

  "Stop! Please!" I wanted to run. I wanted to hide, to leave and never come back.

  You have nowhere to go, idiot. Out that hole the dead things were coming through? I don’t fucking think so.

  Gun in hand, I pointed at the thing in front of me. I heard the shot this time. It rang in my head like a marble bounced on glass. Another wound oozed, but nothing hindered the endless shuffle of dead feet toward me. At the door, a leg, torso, boobs, hands, matte blood atop white shoulders. A third corpse breached the hole in the door.

  "Why? Why are you here? I helped you! I killed the men who killed you!" I screeched at the dead girls in my living room. Didn't matter. Nothing mattered.

  A leg, a torso, boobs and hands. Again. Again. Again. Seven decaying headless bodies shuffled through my living room. My feet moved back farther and farther until my back slammed into the jamb of my bedroom door.

  "What do you want?" I screamed at the headless things. They couldn't answer me. Chopping a bitch’s head off proved better than duct tape.

  Fourteen hands reached out for me. Seven muted red stumps met my eyes where seven faces should be.

  Eight. There should be eight.

  At the door, a leg, a torso, boobs and hands bound with purple strands of hair appeared. Regina's living corpse came into my home uninvited. Eight dead things inched closer and closer. My heart felt like it'd flip out through my open mouth if I hadn't already been swallowing back bile compulsively.

  "Stop!" Sliding backward, I maneuvered into the sanctity of my room. My trembling hands made music with cold steel and Azelie’s rosary, which was still wrapped around my palm. My front door didn't stop them. Why I thought this cheap hollow core would save me, I didn’t know. I just wanted the fuck away from all those dead girls.

  Locking myself in, I backed deeper into my darkened room. Never taking my eyes from my door, I backed and backed until the backs of my knees hit the edge of my bed. My butt automatically sat, giving my shaking legs a much-needed break. Finally, sitting and breathing, sort of, I was able to hear small whimpering sounds. Disgusting images of gurgling, bloody stumps trying to form sounds ran through my head. This terrified me more than the bodies as a whole, merely because they had no natural source. Things with no heads should make no vocal sounds, theoretically. I swallowed hard and realized they were my whimpers. My short sobs. My fear seeping out.

  The noises from my throat stopped, and with it my breath when my bedroom door began to rattle. The dead things on the other side were trying to get in. "No." My soft pitiful voice caused me to wince with anger, but it didn't change anything. My fear was too strong. I was just too terrified for the rage to build in me. "Stop," whining sobs filled the abyss that was my lonely, dark room.

  My legs pulled me from the edge of my bed and backed me against the wall farther away from the rattling door. "No more," I sobbed. "Please. No more." My hands trembled, gun rattling in my clutch. My back flush with the cool wall, my legs buckled. I slid to my ass on the floor. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry they did that to you."

  The rattling persisted and I thought then of Azelie. She'd done this to these women. These dead girls at my door were here because of her. Dead because of her. She'd killed them with her greed and refused to let them rest in her quest to punish me for inadvertently foiling her plans. For spilling blood that didn’t belong to me.

  Fuck that cunt.

  Fear remained, but I fought it with all my might. "I'm sorry they killed you!" My voice still shook but the sobs were gone. "But I'm not sorry I killed those boys." The door shook fiercely with my revelation. "And I won't be sorry when I kill the voodoo bitch either!"

  The door shook and the knob creaked under pressure from something on the other side. Azelie sent the dead things for me. She sent the bodies of eight dead girls to relentlessly crawl through my front door. They weren’t going to stop. It was never going to stop.

  I took a deep, ragg
ed breath and lifted my gun.

  It's never going to stop.

  BANG!

  Chapter Two

  Cyrus’s thick body burst through the door.

  Tears trailed down my face carrying with them smears of black makeup. I stood instantly and let out a loud, frustrated grunt at the sight of him. He’d left me. He’d fallen victim to that woman and he’d left me to come home alone. To face this madness by myself.

  In two long strides, he moved from the door of my room to my position at the far wall. A guttural scream escaped my lips again, and I slammed my fists into his chest. The butt of my pistol, assisting me in my abuse, still clutched in my closed fist. Sobs and screams spewed at random intervals as I wailed against his thick chest. His hands grabbed my arms and I fought against them.

  How dare he touch me! Evil was at my heels, in my home, in my head and he wasn’t there to save me. I ripped my arms from his grasp. My left arm reared back and released a stinging slap to the side of his face that reverberated a sound through the darkened apartment and made my stomach roil. A gasp left my throat and another slap followed it. Cyrus grabbed my arms again and held tight. I screamed again and pressed my lips against his. It was a ridiculously instinctual motion likely imbedded in my subconscious by hordes of action flicks. The kind where the guy gets the girl only because he saved her life in some over-the-top fashion.

  His hands moved to snatch me up by the ponytail and hold me in my position. Passion and heat rolled between us. Sobs tickled my throat and made small sounds as my lips touched his. I didn’t know what compelled me to kiss that man in the first place, but the inner turmoil it created nearly tore me from limb to limb.

  Of all the times to have a legitimate first kiss, headless dead bitches meandering through your house probably wasn’t the best.

  Regardless of how wholly amazing kissing Cyrus Atossa was I shoved his warm body away from mine. Gun still in hand, I had half a mind to kill us both and end the madness. Suicide wasn’t my thing, so the thought disappeared quickly.

  “Whe…wh…how?” I muttered, tears drying into crusty black lines on my cheeks.

  I was not a crier, not in the least, but things changed drastically when haunted by living dead girls. Seeing help, no matter in what form, filled my soul with the need to be coddled and protected more than any other time in my life. Honestly, Cyrus was the last person I expected to come riding in on his white horse.

  “How…” I left it at that. No other words formed in my head. One word was all I needed.

  “There will never be enough hours in a day to explain to you ‘how’. Even if we had the time, it’s not important right now. What you need to know is, Azelie d’Entremonte lives and will continue to torment you until she gets what she wants.” He said this so matter-of-factly, I had no choice but to take it all as fact and decide what the fuck to do with it.

  “What happened to you?” For some ridiculous reason, the wellbeing of Cyrus outweighed my primal need for survival. I should’ve kicked myself square in the vagina at that moment, but all I could manage was not to throw myself at his mercy.

  His eyes slid down, looking anywhere but at me. “I really am not sure.” Whether he was embarrassed about his failure to protect me, and himself in the process, or he was full of shit, I had no clue, but his poker face sucked.

  His hands gripped at my shoulders, squeezing intermittently. His eyes didn’t really focus on anything, just stared out into nothingness behind me. My heart still raced from the absolute horror I’d faced only moments before. My eyes searched the area behind Cyrus. Searching for more dead things. There was nothing. No cause for my hysteria. Only the cold steel I still clutched in my grasp was left as a reminder of the horror. The seconds passed and my brain began wrapping around the situation I’d fallen in ass first.

  “Cyrus?” His eyes jutted in my direction and met my stare. “What do I do?” There was nothing else to say than that. Nothing else really came to mind anyway. Self-preservation was beginning to win the fight between head and loins. Leave the heart out of this equation; there is no room for it here.

  The green flecks that interlaced his irises moved as his pupils dilated out and back in again. He was staring into my eyes, but I swore he didn’t see one inch of me. His focus was suddenly trained on something I couldn’t see. Something I tried so hard to figure out.

  His lips caught me by surprise. I’d been staring directly at him and I still missed the slight movement of his head before he plowed his mouth into mine. It was lovely, but highly unnecessary and at an impractical moment. Also, a bit too desperate for my tastes. It was acceptable when I did it, I was under distress. I didn’t know what I was doing. Honest.

  My hands pushed gently against his shoulders, not exactly wanting him to stop. When he didn’t budge, I pushed a little harder and tried to talk through his lips pressed on mine. His persistence was starting to piss me off.

  Just as I tensed my arms to shove him away from me, a familiar voice barreled through the room, “You have got to be fucking kidding me!”

  Before I had a second to shove Cyrus away from my face, Mike flew into the room, elbow reared back ready to lay a huge fist into the beautiful face of Cyrus Atossa. I stumbled back just in time to avoid becoming a casualty of war.

  Mike landed on top; his huge form made Cyrus look practically petite. He landed blow after blow into his face. The gun hanging from Mike’s hip swung back and forth with each swing. A fear sunk in my gut that I couldn’t fight off.

  “Stop it!” I screamed. Mike didn’t even acknowledge I was there. “You fucking idiot!” I stomped along my bedroom floor toward the mass of men in the corner.

  Without a second thought, I leaned back and kicked Mike in the side with the sole of my foot. A quick groan escaped the big man and he toppled to the floor next to Cyrus. At that point, I didn’t quite give two shits about either one of them. The possibility of leaving the two of them there as a sacrifice to Azelie crossed my mind.

  “What the fuck, Dylan?” Mike grumbled from the floor.

  I stood over the two men, Cyrus bleeding once again from his face and Mike rolling around on the floor cursing my name. Just another day in the life of Dylan Hart. Nothing to see here, lookyloos.

  “What were you thinking? Barreling into my house and pummeling someone in my bedroom?” My voice was high and squeaky with adrenaline.

  “You called me!” Mike’s dramatic wailing was about to earn him another kick to the ribs, but he had a point. “You scared the shit out of me. I show up…” He coughed to add to his bullshit. “Your door is busted down. There are bullet holes dotting along your living room like fucking Morse code, and someone is mauling you in your bedroom. What the fuck did you expect me to do?” He was acting like a dick, but not one thing he said was incorrect.

  “Fine.” I folded my arms across my chest. “Are you going to help him?” I said, nodding my head toward a bloody Cyrus on the floor. Mike had no business mixed up with monsters and magic, no matter how stupid it all seemed. I’d called him out of desperation and fear, and now it was time for him to kick rocks before something bad happened to him too. Or he locked me up tight in a nut house.

  Mike scoffed, but pulled himself up onto his knees and crawled toward Cyrus. “Hey, get up.” Mike’s big hand shook Cyrus by the shoulder. I couldn’t believe he was actually listening to me for once. “C’mon, guy, get up. I didn’t hit you that damn hard.” Cyrus didn’t so much as groan.

  “Christ, Mike, kill a fucking guy in my apartment? That’s all I fucking need right now.” Whatever impulse I had to give a shit about Cyrus flew out the window with his inappropriate kissing and subsequent lack of manliness. I reserved the right to change my mind and change it again, especially in times of peril. I was a survivor; it was what I did, and there were prices you have to pay for that in life, like fickle girly bullshit.

  “He’s not dead.” Mike’s face didn’t match his words.

  “Then wake him up. Look at his damn f
ace Michael, dead or not, that is fucked.” I guessed my face didn’t match my words either.

  “Would it really tear you up inside if his pretty little face was mauled up?” His eyes narrowed and he glared at me for a few heartbeats.

  Just as I started to consider the idea fully, the man in question gurgled a sloppy noise. Saved by death rattle.

  “Hey, open your eyes.” Mike gripped either side of his face and shook it to get his attention.

  “Shit.” Cyrus spat through clenched teeth. Heavy puffs of air spewed blood from his nostrils and spattered Mike’s white button-up shirt. One eye opened then the other. The muscles in his forearms twinged and flexed with the obvious need to reach out and choke the life out of Mike.

  Mike climbed to his feet and stared down at the lump of a man below him. “What the fuck is going on here?” he asked, not really directing his question toward anyone in particular.

  I knew for a damn fact that it was not the best idea to fill Mike in on my recent psychosis. He wasn’t one to necessarily believe in headless dead things and evil witches. Shit, who the fuck knows, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, any bump-in-the-night beastie you can think of. I didn’t even know if I believed, not one hundred percent. I refused to roll over and accept that everything we had been told was fiction was, in reality, completely and unwaveringly factual. No. Fuck that.

  Not wanting Cyrus to spill the magic beans, I glared at him from behind Mike. I understood Mike had the right to know about the other headless girls popping up throughout the U.S. over the last few months, had one connection, a deadly priestess with a bone to pick with yours truly. There was no way in hell I’d let him know I was seeing those dead chicks shuffling through my living room. My subsequent lobotomy would leave a nasty scar. Still fairly terrified and pretty certain I was in the thralls of some form of voodoo hex, I knew Cyrus was likely the only person who could steer me in the right direction, and involving Mike at this point in the game would not be a smart move. He’d run off and arrest the bitch and then where would I be? Can’t kill a bitch behind bars. I don’t have those kinds of connections.