Soultaker

CHAPTER ONE

The boy and the girl eyed each other nervously as they stood in the clearing in the woods. The distant buzz of speedboats on the lake and the chirruping of crickets were like dim signals from another world, alien transmissions neither boy nor girl perceived. The whole of existence was comprised of their bodies and the aching space between them. Adolescent urges raged inside the boy, needs he could never quite articulate and only half understood.

All he knew was nothing in all of creation mattered more than this girl. He was horny, yes. Filled with lust, as any boy his age would be in his place. But it was more than that. He felt such great love for her, the kind of grand, pure love that was the stuff of fairy tales. She was a damsel, a radiant princess, and he was her shining knight. Thinking this made him feel silly, but he could at least be honest with himself-it was how he really felt.

Yet, he felt fear, too.

One thing he’d learned in his short time on the planet was that within love lay the potential for great hurt. He’d lost loved ones to death, drugs, and divorce, and he feared the hurt this girl could bring him if things went wrong, if he somehow failed to be everything she needed him to be.

Trey McAllister glanced heavenward and said, “Full moon to night.”

Myra Lewis shrugged. “So?” She took a drag from her clove cigarette and blew fragrant smoke Trey’s way. “You’re not superstitious, are you?”

Trey made a face and waved the smoke away. “Jesus Christ. Those cloves fucking stink.”

Myra smirked. “You don’t like it, you can find someone else to hang out with.” She blew another cloud of smoke his way. “Maybe one of those preppy chicks your buddies fuck. Or one of those Paris Hilton or Lindsay Lohan wannabes. Rockville High’s full of both.”

Trey frowned. “I don’t want one of those girls. You can’t talk to a girl like that. Not really talk, I mean. The way, uh, you and I talk.”

Myra rolled her eyes, but she ran a hand adorned with multiple silver pagan rings and black nail polish through her choppy jet-black hair, a self-conscious gesture. “Yeah. I’m special.”

Trey wrapped his arms around her and drew the girl’s small body close. “You are, you know. I’ve had other girlfriends, but they never meant much to me.” He smiled. “That was kid’s stuff. You’re the first girl I’ve ever wanted to have a real…relationship…with.”

Myra laughed. “You’re just saying shit you heard on Dr. Phil or something. You’re seventeen, Trey. You don’t have real relationships when you’re seventeen.”

“I’ll be eighteen next month.” He slipped a hand under the silky fabric of her blouse and shuddered at the feel of her bare flesh. “And my parents got married right after high school. We’re almost adults in the eyes of the law.”

They’d only been going together two weeks. She’d told him it was too soon to be fucking. But sometimes girls said things like that and didn’t really mean it, or only half meant it. Sometimes they were so hard to read, as complicated and hard to follow as one of the old novels you had to read for English class. But maybe she was beginning to relent. She seemed to melt against him. His arm moved higher, lifting her blouse as his fingers slipped under her bra. He leaned into her for a kiss. She cupped both sides of his peach-fuzzed face and matched his carnal hunger.

Trey pulled back and said, “I want you.”

Myra was breathing hard. She stepped out of his embrace and tugged her blouse down. The gesture was instinct, Trey thought, maybe some remainder of her mother’s attempts to make her believe in the virtues of teenage chastity. He gripped her wrist and drew her back into his arms. She did not resist. His tongue probed her open mouth, making her moan. She cupped the bulge at the crotch of his jeans and gave him a squeeze. The way he reacted-with a squirm and a husky grunt-obviously pleased her. It made her feel powerful, like she could make him do whatever she wanted with just the right touch.

Trey managed to say, “Are we…are we…”

Myra gripped a handful of hair at the back of his head. “Yes.”

This brought a trembling smile to his lips. “I don’t have a condom.”

Myra unsnapped his jeans. “And I don’t care.”

“But-”

Myra reached inside his jeans and said, “Shut the fuck up. You can pull out.”

“But-”

Myra gave him a squeeze. “I told you to shut up.” Then she released him and tugged her blouse off over her head. The blouse fell to the ground. “Your turn.”

“Wha-what?”

She laughed. “Take something off.”

Trey Marshall was eager to do as she commanded. He’d dreamed of this very thing for months, from the moment he’d laid eyes on the strangely alluring new girl at the beginning of the school year. He’d still been dating Hannah Crawford, his girlfriend since Christmas break of the previous year, but the blonde and busty preppy girl soon seemed so ordinary to him, a bland and uninteresting bubblehead compared to this exotic creature. For months he’d worked up his courage, then, finally, he dumped Hannah and asked Myra out.

He’d expected to get shot down. He was a good-looking guy. One of the popular kids at school. The opposite, he’d been certain, of anything that would interest Myra Lewis. So he’d been surprised when she’d accepted his offer of a date. That first date was a real eye-opener, too. She took him to an all-ages punk show at a downtown club, where they saw a band called The Cramps. This was a seriously weird, loud band with a freaky-looking lead singer and a hot chick guitarist in high heels and a tiny dress. He’d felt so self-conscious in his Joe Straight clothes. Everyone else at the club was decked out in punk or goth gear. But Myra, who of course did look as if she belonged, clung to him throughout the evening, making him feel like he belonged, too. Just two weeks had passed, but his whole life seemed different now. He didn’t just love her, he idolized her. He burned copies of her favorite albums and listened to them incessantly. He memorized titles of books from her library and ordered his own copies from Amazon.com. They went to more shows. Always the same kind of thing. The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black. The Genitorturers. His friends joked about his obsession with the “weirdo” and called him “whipped,” but he just didn’t give a shit what they thought anymore.

Myra.

Fuck. She was everything to him.

His hands shook as he began to remove his shirt. God, how he loved the way the brilliant moonlight sparkled in Myra’s eyes. She was so beautiful, like some kind of gothic angel. He was so enraptured the approaching noise took longer to register. He paused with the shirt bunched up around his shoulders, squinting at the dark line of trees beyond Myra.

She frowned. “What’s wrong?”

Trey tugged his shirt back down and stepped past her. “Someone’s coming.” He stared at the black line of trees, straining to see what was out there. Then he saw a flicker of light, a burning flame moving at shoulder level. Then more flickers, like a line of approaching torchbearers. The flickering lights grew brighter and he began to hear the crunch of twigs beneath multiple pairs of feet. And he began to perceive another sound; a soft, rising murmur, a chantlike cadence drifting closer on the gentle evening breeze. He took an unconscious step back and gripped Myra by the wrist again. “Come on.”

Myra knelt to grab her fallen blouse. “Jesus, Trey, what’s the big deal?”

Trey didn’t have an immediate answer for that. His panic was fueled by instinct. Something about this new presence in the woods bothered him on a primal level. He was pulling Myra toward the opposite side of the clearing even as she struggled to get her blouse back on. As they stumbled over the uneven ground, the chant grew louder and more distinct. The words were Latin, so Trey had no idea what was being said. Not that the actual substance of the words was all that important. A bunch of people carrying torches and chanting Latin phrases at night in the woods couldn’t be up to anything good.

The teenagers slipped into the woods mere moments before the leading end of the strange procession entered the clearing. Trey pulled Myra behind a thicket and hunkered down with her on the ground. Through a small opening in the thicket, they watched the interlopers form a circle around the site of an extinguished campfire. Only a few members of the group were carrying torches, but there was enough light to distinguish a few new things. The torchbearers were all nude males with black hoods over their heads. The others wore monklike dark robes with hoods.

Myra wriggled closer to Trey and put her mouth to his ear to whisper, “Look at those dudes with their dicks out in the air. Fucking hilarious.”

Trey cringed. He didn’t want to risk drawing the attention of the-what the hell was it? A coven? Some sort of satanic cabal?-and even a whisper was too much noise. He turned his head to meet Myra’s gaze and put a finger to his lips.

Myra scowled. “What, you’re afraid?”

Trey winced.

She snorted. “You are, aren’t you? You’re a fucking pussy.”

The words stung. Trey figured he was as brave as the next guy under normal circumstances. He wasn’t the type to back away from a fight. He would never start anything without just cause-he just wasn’t that type-but he wasn’t shy about standing up to assholes. But these weren’t normal circumstances. This constituted what you could maybe call supremely-fucked-up-to-the-nth-degree circumstances. This was twilight zone type of shit. He had no frame of reference for dealing with…well, for dealing with whatever the hell was going on here. And Myra should know that. He couldn’t fathom why she wasn’t as freaked the fuck out over the tableau in the clearing as he was. Sometimes, hell, a lot of times, she had a sharp tongue, snapping off a string of caustic words that sliced through the vulnerable parts of his psyche like a razor. It didn’t bother him most of the time, because she always seemed to sense when she’d gone too far. This time, however, there was no evidence of regret on her part.

She put her mouth to his ear again. “Coward.”

Now Trey was mad enough to speak. “That’s not fair, Myra,” he said, his voice a low hiss. “I’m no coward, but I’m not fucking stupid, either.”

Her eyes narrowed to slits. “Oh yeah? Bullshit.”

Trey flinched. She was getting upset, and the volume of her voice was near normal speaking level. He hoped like hell the people in the clearing were too immersed in their ritualistic weirdness to perceive anything occurring outside their little circle.

Trey said a silent prayer before saying, “Nothing. I’m sorry.”

But Myra wasn’t backing down. “No. Fuck that. You’re fucking chickenshit.”

Trey’s fingers clawed at the damp ground. Part of him wanted to dig a hole deep into the earth, just wriggle into the ground like a worm, where he’d be safe from the chanting weirdos and the piercing glare of the girl he loved-who, he was just realizing, was a little bit mean. And who, if her voice went up another notch or two, would be yelling.

“Please, Myra.” A pitiful, helpless whimper escaped his throat. “I’m begging you. Let this go for now. You can rip me a new one later, okay?”

She grunted. “Count on it.”

But Trey was content-her voice had dropped back to a whisper.

The group in the clearing had taken up a new chant. This also wasn’t in English, but it wasn’t immediately recognizable as Latin, either. It sounded like some alien language. He half expected to see a shimmering mother ship descend from the heavens. The words seemed more rhythmic than before, more musical and sensual. The robed figures began to move as their voices rose from a whisper to something approaching an ecstatic roar. Trey began to recognize repeating patterns in the chant, like the choruses of a song, and the end of one such passage seemed to act as a signal to discard clothing. Robes fell to the ground and Trey gaped at the sight of a dozen nude women dancing and whirling around the freshly lit campfire. Their faces were obscured by white masks that resembled the comedy and tragedy masks of theater. But they were all beautiful, the flickering torchlight licking at their tall, full-figured bodies like eager tongues. The breasts of each woman were high and large. They all had long legs, trim waists, and flat stomachs. Trey imagined some bizarre underground society of ex-models, Playmates for Satan, something like that. Absurd, yes, but everything about this was surreal. So maybe he was dreaming. Or maybe Myra had slipped some weird drug into his last beer.

What kind of drug could conjure visions like this, though? He noticed that the dongs of all but one of the male torchbearers stood erect. Maybe the lone limp-dick was gay. Or maybe not. He was standing well-removed from the rest of the group, and Trey could just make out his hooded head moving in a slow arc, his gaze taking in the periphery of the clearing.

Trey shuddered. He’s standing watch. Oh God, what if he sees us?

He nearly jumped out of his skin as he felt something cold on his back. But it was just Myra, sliding her hand up under his shirt. She wriggled close to him again and curled a leg around him. “Let’s do it.” Her voice was husky in his ear. “Right now.”

Trey’s eyes widened. “What?”

She sat up and, again, pulled her blouse off over her head. She flung it away into the darkness. Then she unsnapped her bra and her breasts popped loose. Trey opened his mouth to speak again, but no words came forth. Her breasts weren’t as large as those of the women in the clearing-who looked like fucking Amazons-but they were a nice size anyway, with stiff pink nipples that she pinched to erectness.

Trey experienced an epiphany in that moment. He loved Myra, yes. Enough to do practically anything she wanted. But she was, without question, stone-cold crazy. The spectacle in the clearing was making her horny! She ought to be shaking with fear, but instead was consumed with lust. Trey mulled over any number of ways to defuse that lust without making her angry, but none of them seemed workable. Then there was the matter of his own libido. His erect cock was straining painfully inside his jeans. So he was crazy, too. He breathed a loud sigh of relief as Myra unzipped him, releasing him into the cool night air. He moaned and fell onto his back as she knelt to take his hard length into her mouth. He closed his eyes and clawed at the ground as she expertly manipulated him with her tongue. Good Lord, how could any girl her age be so skilled at this?

He was so consumed with the incredible pleasure provided by Myra’s mouth that all thought of the cavorting cult vanished. There was no room for anything in his consciousness but this pure ecstasy.

Which was why he failed to perceive the approach of the hooded guard he’d noticed earlier. A pair of strong hands seized him about the wrists and yanked him to his feet. The initial sense of dismay he felt when his cock popped out of Myra’s mouth gave way to terror when he looked into the eyes of the hooded man, which were visible through ragged slits cut in the coarse fabric. The terror paralyzed him for a few moments; then he tried to tear out of the man’s grip but was hampered by the man’s incredible strength. That, and the fact that his jeans were tangled up around his ankles. The man had little difficulty pulling him out of the thicket and out into the clearing.

Trey looked at the masked dancers, who were no longer dancing. Twelve masked faces and three more hooded ones turned to face him. The bodies of the women were even more astonishing in their utter perfection up close. Though he knew he was in mortal danger, his hormones compelled a quick inspection. He saw stiff nipples and pubic thatches glistening with moisture. Maybe the chant they’d been doing was some sort of sexual spell. That would account for Myra’s otherwise inexplicable behavior. And his own.

Myra.

“Myra!” he screamed. “Run! Get the fuck out of here!”

The man tugged him into the center of the campfire circle and tossed him to the ground. The heat of the nearby flames baked his skin. Trey reached for his jeans, meaning to pull them up, but the guard kicked him in the stomach, making him curl into a tight ball on the ground. He squeezed his eyes shut against the pain. When he opened them, he saw the night’s most shocking scene yet.

Myra, nude, strode into the clearing.

The masked women bowed as she stepped through their circle.

Trey rolled onto his back and stared up at her. She stood over him, a strange, small smile touching the corners of her pretty mouth. “Trey, darling?”

A tickle of nausea touched the back of his throat. The only response he could manage was a moan.

Myra’s eyes glittered in the firelight.

“Remember when you told me how you wanted me from the moment you laid eyes on me?” Her voice mocked him, a tone of sadistic amusement that tore at his heart, pulverizing the love he felt for her. “Be careful what you wish for, idiot.”

Trey finally managed to speak. “What…what is this?”

Myra threw her head back and laughed heartily. Then she leered at him again. “This, baby, is the night you surrender your worthless fucking soul to me.”

A new chant, low and murmuring, arose from the still-bowing women.

Myra grinned.

A grin that grew wider and wider, impossibly wide, as her face began to…change.