Soultaker

CHAPTER FIVE

“Crawl.”

Trey fought a brief mental battle against the command, but it was no use. He was helpless. Always helpless. He might have felt despair had he not already endured so much humiliation, but all he felt now was a deep numbness. His momentary resistance was just the flinch of instinct. He knew he was powerless.

He fell to the concrete floor and crawled toward where Myra, nude, straddled the body of a dead security guard. The guard’s head was a bloody pulp. Staved in with a brick. Trey tried to blot out the image of the man’s head collapsing beneath a flurry of blows, but the mental replay unspooled anyway and Trey saw himself slamming the brick down again and again, the motion of his arm controlled by something else.

By the evil thing, the Dark Mother, that lived inside Myra’s body.

Lamia.

Myra grinned at Trey as he drew near. Her teeth were bloodstained and bits of gleaming viscera were visible on her body. She reached into the dead guard’s body and drew out another loop of intestine.

Trey felt only a slight tickle of nausea.

He’d seen her do too many other awful things, many of them far more depraved, far sicker, than even this. But then her grin became a leer, a horribly knowing expression, as if she could read his mind.

She laughed. “Come to me like a dog, Trey. On all fours.”

Tears welling in his eyes, Trey rose to his hands and knees and did as she said.

“Sit.”

Trey sat, mimicking a dog’s posture.

Myra proffered the length of viscera.

“Feed.”

Trey whimpered.

He drew the dead guard’s guts into his mouth and began to chew, and as he did he retreated to a remote area of his mind, a corner of his consciousness where his essence, the real Trey, went to hide when the really bad things happened. Myra’s laughter sounded dim and far away, like an echo from deep within a dark cavern.

“Do you still love me, Trey?”

Her voice sounded sweeter, a dulcet, almost angelic tone-it brought him back to the here and now. Myra knew when he was shutting things out. Sometimes she allowed it. Not this time. Trey mumbled an affirmative reply around a mouthful of intestine.

Myra stroked his hair. “That’s a good boy, Trey. That’s a good little doggie.”

He really did still love her.

Trey was convinced that the real Myra was the girl he’d always believed her to be, and that her body was being used as a vessel by this thing that called itself Lamia. It was the only way he managed to maintain even a loose grasp on sanity. He refused to believe Myra was some kind of evil incarnate. And he held on to the hope that one day, somehow, he’d be able to cast the thing out of her body.

But it just seemed so fucking hopeless.

He couldn’t even control his own body.

Myra scooped up another handful of dead security guard and pushed it into Trey’s open mouth. “Try some brain soup, baby. It’s good for you.”

Trey gobbled it down.

There was a sound of approaching footsteps behind him.

A male voice said, “That’s all of it. We should get out of here.”

Myra sighed. “Aw…just when I was starting to have fun.”

She stood and stretched, her lean body magnificent in the dim light. She looked to Trey like a warrior goddess of myth, her body bathed in the blood of battle, but he knew the truth was nothing as fanciful as that. A warrior goddess, or just about any other significant source of power, would quake with terror in Myra’s presence.

She donned a cloak, beckoned to Trey with a slap of hand on thigh, and they followed the other members of the Sacred Circle out of the building.

Outside, the wind that came up was like a cold hand closing around Trey’s bare flesh.