Stormbreak (The Serenity Strain Book 1) Read online

  “Oh, how marvelous.”

  Her voice filled the chamber, the sound of power humming, smoky and purring. She seemed to whisper and roar at the same time.

  They all turned, but Marsten was the first to see her. His mouth opened in wonder. “You are even more beautiful than in my dream,” he whispered.

  Her nude body touched down, toes first, until she stood on the cold marble floor. Her long, red hair wrapped itself around her torso and then coiled along one arm like a serpent. Her legs of living alabaster, her sex masked by ginger hair, her breasts full and inviting, her eyes of emerald and violet—each in turn commanded the Maestro’s attention as his eyes devoured her. Marsten fell to his knees, all concerns of Smack’s loyalty slipping from his consciousness.

  As the others faced her, the beauty of the goddess conquered them. One by one, they too sank to the floor, prostrating themselves before her. Maggie gasped in abject defeat as she too fell to her knees.

  “What a lovely gift to welcome me.” Her voice was fire and warmth, pain and pleasure. It filled their ears with an overwhelming need to hear her speak again.

  Her eyes took in the sight of Franklin’s futile struggle against the final darkness. She approached him, ignoring the others for the moment. She smiled and knelt beside him, careless of the spreading blood. His eyes, terrified as Death stood over him, fixed on her for a moment.

  “Your time is at an end,” she said to the grotesque form shuddering on the floor. “But know this. Your death helped bring me here in this moment, at this time. You are the sacrifice that binds your companions to my will.” She reached down with her right hand and cupped it beneath the fount made by Franklin’s upper jaw and throat. When his flagging heart had filled her hand, she brought her palm to her mouth and drank. It was the last image Franklin saw.

  Turning to her acolytes kneeling behind her, she said, “Quickly, before the blood begins to cool!”

  Marsten and the others looked at her from where they knelt, uncomprehending.

  “Come here to me!” She stood up over Franklin’s corpse and raised her hand. The blood ran down her arm. First Marsten, then the others approached. “Your left hands. Dip them in the blood of the sacrifice.”

  Marsten went first, painting his left hand and arm to the elbow in Franklin’s blood. Its warmth enveloped him, reminded him of the family and the little girl. Of how it felt to carve their flesh with his hands.

  “Stand.”

  Marsten arose.

  “Present your left hand to me.”

  Marsten offered his blood-soaked arm. She extended her right.

  “I baptize thee in blood on behalf of He Who Is To Come.”

  She clapped his arm in the iron grip of ancient fellowship. Her long auburn hair snaked around the two of them, binding them together. Marsten’s flesh burned with the red fire of unrestrained desire. His mind registered the pain, but his heart embraced it like a child would a lost mother. Every covetous emotion he’d ever felt, every want or yearning he’d ever satisfied, every sight, sound, taste he’d ever experienced—all roiled within him. They took shape in Marsten’s stomach as a single, overwhelming longing to be hers and to do her will.

  She drew him to her. His eyes opened wide with pain. Seeing her so close, he wanted to reach out and touch her breasts, to have her for his own. Her body arced with Marsten’s agony, reveled in his quickening.

  “Yes,” she whispered to him. “Desire is all, my child. Sating it is how we complete ourselves.”

  He smelled stardust and sex and the death of the grave on her breath. He felt the worms under his flesh again, only this time they drew patterns in his arm, which she clasped so firmly in her own. The worms and the fire and the nearness of her body made him roar aloud in the barren emptiness of the courthouse.

  When she released him, Marsten fell to his knees. They cracked on the marble floor. The others gathered around them during the ritual, staring wide-eyed and wanting.

  “Who would be his second in command?”

  Maggie threw herself to the floor, smothering her forearm in Franklin’s blood. “Please …” she said, offering it up, begging for a baptism of black pain.

  The goddess smiled and reached out, drinking in Maggie’s screams.

  As each of the others—Juggs, then Smack, then Simpson—took their turns with her, Marsten recovered first his breath, then his presence of mind. His eyesight cleared as a thin, orange veil of pain lifted at last. He stared down at his left arm. His hand now resembled the jaws of a great lizard. His arm was its neck, its skin cracked and blackened, seared with the flame of desire itself. The red of Franklin’s blood cast the scales of cauterized flesh into sharp relief. The Maestro flexed his hand and watched in wonder as the jaws of a dragon opened and closed.

  The others recovered, each in turn, and stood in their order—Maggie, Juggs, Smack, and Simpson—next to Marsten before her.

  “I am your mother. You are my children,” she said to them. “I am Id. You are my disciples. And now you are baptized in the blood of He Who Is To Come.” The sound of her voice was something each of the five longed for. When it was absent they desired it. It tasted to their ears like mother’s milk tastes to a newborn babe. “You are my champions. You are the generals of my Army of Anarchy. Come and receive my blessing.”

  One at a time, she took each of them in her arms and kissed them passionately.

  All of them, even Marsten, smiled their enchantment as each parted from her embrace. They were raised above humanity. They were, at long last, blessed by a god who’d owned their hearts for as long as any of them could remember. A god of violence and lust. A god of chaos and fire.

  “The changes wrought inside you by man’s hubris you will spread. Every man you strike in anger. Every woman you take in lust. Every child whose face you cup with your blackened fingers. Every human you touch with your left hand will become my right. The five of you will lead my armies. And you—Maestro—you will be my king of generals on Earth.”

  Marsten dropped to one knee. It was instinctive. It was necessary. The others followed suit after him, their capo dei capi.

  Speaking to the floor, Marsten said, “Where do we begin, Mistress?”

  “Rise and see.”

  As the five stood, the door to the courthouse opened. First one, then three, then ten more entered, followed a score, then countless others. Soon the rotunda was full of former inmates dressed in the white jumpsuits of Huntsville State Prison. Living ghosts from their time together in hell.

  “Begin with these,” she purred.

  Chapter 18. Sunday, night.

  Lauryn stared at her mother’s arm for what seemed like forever while Megan sat with her. Mark searched the wreckage on the lot for anything they could dig with. He found a shovel with half a handle and solemnly dug a hole in the space that was once his mother-in-law’s favorite patch of knockout roses. Megan escorted her mother while Mark—out of their sight and gingerly, as if handling a ticking time bomb—wrapped the arm in a towel and placed it in the shallow grave. He hoped it was deep enough to keep it safe from animals scavenging for food. They’d buried the ring on the finger that was swollen around it.

  Someone should say something, Mark thought. He was about to speak when Lauryn began singing softly. Surrounded by sobs, the words were almost indistinguishable. But then Mark recognized it as a lullaby Lauryn had shared with him a long time ago. A lullaby her mother had sung her to sleep with on nights when she was young and scared and kept her arms and legs held tightly beneath the covers, away from the edges of the bed. Megan began to sob too. Her mother was singing the same lullaby Lauryn had sung to her at bedtime, when Megan too had been a little girl afraid of the dark.

  After the small ceremony, they walked for a while. Lauryn was in shock, clearly, and Mark carried some inexplicable guilt for having failed to get them to Conroe sooner. His feeling guilty made no sense. Clearly, Lauryn’s mother had been a victim of Hurricane Glenn earlier in the week. The state of he
r body … her arm … made that fairly clear. But guilt was a familiar companion these days, and it was difficult for Mark to shake it.

  As maybe it should be, he thought.

  A full moon shone overhead, and the city’s lack of lights allowed the stars to shine down like hundreds of pinpoints in a blanket of blackness. Megan, the most lucid among them, led the way. With the power off, the still-standing homes they passed were lit occasionally from the inside by bobbing flashlights or flickering candles, but none of their owners came outside. That seemed odd to Mark, even considering the amount of damage and horrid loss of life of the last few days. But the streets were absolutely quiet. Nothing moved that wasn’t stirred to it by the evening breeze.

  Mark snapped himself out of his self-pity party. Lauryn needed him. And Megan shouldn’t be the one leading them across a ruined town in the shank of the evening when who knows what could be lurking around the next corner. Maybe there was a reason the streets seemed so deserted. Maybe the animals had fled the forest making way for … something.

  “Let’s stop for a minute,” he said.

  Megan and Lauryn marched on, oblivious.

  “Hey,” he said. “Let’s stop. Come here, sit down for a second.” Mark took a seat on the curb first, hoping to lead by example. They’d just passed two churches, one on either side of the street, that hadn’t faired nearly as well as Capstone. He glanced up at the sign, bent at about a 30-degree angle on its pole, and saw they’d turned onto South First Street. The road led deeper into the heart of Conroe, he remembered from their past visits to the in-laws.

  Good. Closer to downtown and the police station, he thought. The empty streets and rubble of what was once a community were feeling creepier by the minute. And the occasional flicker of light behind boarded-up, shattered windows did nothing to make him feel better.

  Mark stretched out his legs as first Megan, then Lauryn sat down mechanically next to him. The bottoms of his feet hurt like hell. His butt pressing down on the concrete felt grimy through his pants. His hair felt greasy. Minor stuff compared to … He felt like an ass. Nostalgic over needing a hot shower? What the hell’s wrong with you, dude?

  “How are you doing?” he asked quietly.

  Lauryn didn’t answer. She’d stopped crying but was isolating herself, out on some prairie somewhere in her mind, standing alone in a wide-open space of hurt and sorrow. She was usually one to confront hardship head-on, but that only seemed to be the case when it wasn’t her own. Lauryn was always the first to be someone else’s champion. Megan’s to him, when Lauryn felt like he was being unfair. Jasper’s to him, when he’d wanted to get rid of the dog after Jasper had once eaten his way through the back door. Hell, back in college, she’d even defended Mark to her mother, who didn’t much care for him as a suitor.

  But when it came to her own emotional turmoil, Lauryn withdrew inside herself, cocooned up, and was just as likely to lash out at anyone offering solace as accept it for the honest attempt to help that it was. He’d even jokingly nicknamed her Ironheart early in their marriage, when such quips can be laughed off and ignored as harmless, even endearing by their target. But that was a world away from who they were to one another today.

  Mark thought again about reaching out to her, then settled for simply placing his hand lightly on her shoulder. He didn’t want to appear threatening. He didn’t want to invade her space. But he’d loved this woman deeply at one point in his life. And, he was somewhat surprised to learn, seeing her hurting so badly now still possessed the power to cause him to ache inside as well.

  He was astonished when Lauryn reached up and touched his hand on her shoulder, then squeezed it fiercely. In her grip he could feel her renewed anguish at losing her mother, and she began to sob again. He felt Megan’s arm come around Lauryn from the other side.

  “I’m so sorry, Mom,” she said.

  Lauryn nodded but didn’t speak. They sat there for a moment, the three of them. Mark glanced around them, keeping an eye on the deserted street. Creepier and creepier. The light breeze was almost refreshing after the humid afternoon and their odyssey. A paper cup bobbed against the curb’s sewer drain as the last of Helen’s floodwaters tried to sink it below the street.

  “I knew I’d lose her,” Lauryn whispered. “That’s what you do with parents. You lose them. It’s the way it works. I know that. I just … my God, like that? Did she suffer? Why wasn’t I there? I should’ve stopped by last weekend. I should’ve moved her in with me a long time ago. I should’ve … I should’ve done something.”

  She stopped. The crickets and bullfrogs came back to their ears, the only sounds save the stirring of a shredded American flag in front of the bank across the street.

  “Somebody would’ve killed somebody within the first week,” Mark said to fill the silence. Maybe he shouldn’t have, but it just tumbled out. Five years ago, it might’ve been funny, even in these circumstances. Now, with this familiar strangeness between them, this distance of divorcing …

  Lauryn snuffled a sound between a snicker and a sob. “Yeah, probably so,” she said, wiping her nose.

  Encouraged, Mark said, “You, your mother, and Megan in the same house? Look out, sanity!”

  “Hey!” said Megan, playing along. “I’d’ve been the sanest one there.”

  Lauryn laughed a little. “Yeah. Probably.”

  They just sat for a moment, Megan rubbing her mom’s back and Mark letting Lauryn hold his hand tightly. Finally, Lauryn said, “I guess we should get moving, huh?”

  “Where?” Megan asked.

  Mark gave Lauryn’s hand a final squeeze and, smiling at her with his eyes, stood up and looked around.

  “Well, we shouldn’t go knocking on any doors this time of night, especially after the storms. Something’s not right about the way this feels. Like back in that church. Something is just off. I don’t know what. There should be someone out on the streets, wanderers like us. But there’s not. Maybe best to just find a place to hole up until morning.”

  “I’m hungry,” Megan said.

  With her shock passing into the low throb of aching grief, Lauryn’s stomach began to rumble too. “We could all eat, I guess.”

  Mark sighed. “Well, there’s a convenience store halfway up the block there. Gets us a little closer to the police, anyway. We can head to the station first thing in the morning.”

  He stuck out his hand. Lauryn regarded it, then looked up at him and, grimacing to herself, placed her hand in his. He hauled her up as Megan got to her feet and dusted off her butt.

  “Hope it hasn’t been raided yet,” said the teen. “Like on The Walking Dead.”

  “That’s a TV show,” said Lauryn, almost automatically. Then she looked at Mark, who raised an eyebrow. They both laughed lightly. “Guess this is pretty close to that, huh? Only, no zombies.”

  “That we know of,” said Megan. “Buwa-ha-ha.”

  Mark led them this time and they reached the storefront quickly. The familiar sight of hurricane-shattered glass greeted them, though quickly nailed boards remained in place, barring their easy entry.

  Lauryn motioned them behind her. Mark began to protest, but she raised her finger to her lips, and he knew better than to argue with the steely resolve in her eyes. She withdrew the .40-caliber from her jeans.

  Leaning against the frame of the outer wall, she peered inside. In the dark, she could see little, but they’d all cocked their ears, searching the depths of the stone for footfalls or breathing, or the slightest scrape of a mouse. All was still. They stared at the windows and door, crisscrossed with boards.

  “Maybe there’s another way in?” wondered Megan.

  “Shhh.”

  Lauryn placed her hand on the door and pushed. It didn’t budge. So she pulled. Locked.

  “Flashlight,” Lauryn said, moving around to the window and angling her eye between two of the boards. Mark snapped on the light, which had grown dimmer with use since they’d begun their odyssey. He stuck it between two
boards a little lower down. Standing water covered the floor, but it was only the remnants of flooding. Mark panned the yellow light around, revealing snacks in plastic bags, basic necessities like toilet paper, boxes of cigarettes, and a fountain drink machine, its dispensers destroyed. He stopped his scanning suddenly and moved the light back to find two gray eyes reflecting the light back to him. Two wild ears swept backward and a hiss followed as a cat flattened itself against the floor.

  “Go on you,” said Mark. “Go on!” He brandished the flashlight like a club and the cat bolted into the darkness and out the front window.

  “Dad! Did you have to do that?” carped Megan. “Jasper’s out there somewhere. Wouldn’t you want them to be nice to him?”

  Mark looked at his daughter. “What does that have to do with chasing the cat off? Who’s ‘them’?”

  Megan rolled her eyes. “Whoever finds Jasper. Don’t you believe in karma?”

  Her father sighed. “Megan, do you even—”

  “Guys. I’m going to declare the coast is clear. Because if there was anyone inside intending to do us harm, I think you both just scared them off along with the cat.”

  Lauryn reached for the board, found it solidly nailed in. Careful to put the safety on first, she handed the pistol to Megan, who held it away from herself with two fingers. Lauryn motioned to Mark to help her. Together, they pried the woefully inadequate hurricane preparation away from the large window and tossed it into the street. One more board later, and Lauryn was kicking out the rest of the unbroken glass. She stepped over the window frame and into the store.

  “Okay, let’s get in here and, first thing, make a safe place to sleep.”

  “Here?” wondered Mark.

  “Yeah,” answered Lauryn. “It’s late, we’re tired and hungry, and if we set up in the back, we can see anything that comes in the front. We’ll build a barricade inside, for protection.”

  “A what?”

  “A barricade, Megan. I want us to be ready for scavengers. Just in case. Let’s just arrange a few of the shelves for defense. Just in case. It won’t take a minute. Then we can eat and rest, okay?”