Shadow's Kiss (Monstrous Hearts: Fleur's Story)

Chapter Six

As Greg Iaquinta shoveled dirt over yet another patch of blood, he thought to himself that this was the shittiest night of his life. His fucking car was gone, stolen by Mason. His earlobe was bleeding from being nicked by one of Mason's bullets, and his leg throbbed and bled from where that bitch had laid into him with a board.

All he could think to do was bury all evidence of the ritual and try to walk out of there once it was daylight. It wouldn't be too long; the sky was already light enough to make out the shapes of the trees surrounding him. As he worked, he tossed any broken pieces of wood onto the bonfire to keep it going. The last fucking thing he wanted to see was a bear or bobcat creeping up on him in the dark, even if the flames might attract a game warden.

The thought made him feel like throwing up. He couldn't get caught. He'd be fucked. It was the second time he'd done this with Mason, and at the first one he had to provide a sacrifice. It had just been some hobo, a guy too fucked up to even know what they were doing, but murder was murder. He never should have bombed that calc class and fucked up his GPA. It had felt like Fate flipping him off when Hayley had arrived with her sacrifice and it had turned out to be not only a girl from that class, but the only one who had breezed through it, hunched over in her ragged hoodie and barely talking.

Just as he began burying the ropes they had tied her up with, the bonfire flared up with a roar. The flames were taller than him, and their heat drove him back a few steps.

"What the..." He stared at them open-mouthed until a hissing noise started up near the remains of the bed. The symbols scratched into the dirt around it were now glowing as brightly as the bonfire. Then the ground erupted.

"Shit!" Greg scrambled back as dirt sprayed him. The rumbling beneath his feet felt like an earthquake. Sweat ran down his neck from the bonfire roaring at his back.

As he squinted through stinging eyes, something crawled up from the ruins of the bed, straining with obvious effort. Roots and vines trailed behind it like tentacles. When a limb smothered one of the symbols in the dirt, the eerie light briefly outlined it, revealing it to be a mud-covered hand.

The shovel trembled in Greg's grip as he raised it, ready to swing if the thing got any closer. Instead, it hunched over and panted while the fire died down to a sputter of flame and the symbols winked out one by one. When the final symbol disappeared with the smell of ash, the figure shifted slightly toward him. Its shape was obscured by thick mud and gnarled roots. Then it spoke.

"E tu chi sei?"

Greg stumbled back, raising the shovel higher. The figure twisted as if tracking him. Then it crawled closer.

"Fuck this," he muttered, and swung as hard as he could.

The figure ducked the shovel and lunged, impossibly fast despite its misshapen form. Greg screamed at the feeling of hands clutching his head, and screamed again when he felt himself lifted in the air while terrible pressure closed in all around. The last thing he heard while the dim sky swam above him was the sound of his own skull cracking.

The spray of his blood extinguished the nearby fire, reducing it to sullen smoke and a few final embers.