Sacrifice (Dylan Hart Odyssey of the Occult)

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, ragged 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 face 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.

Cyrus shifted his ever-swelling eyes from me to Mike, and
back again. He was mulling it over and it looked as though he was making a very
wise choice.

“I got scared,” I blurted out. “Someone was following me
home and it scared me. That’s all.” I put my hand on his thick shoulder.
“Thanks for coming to check on me. Really, I’m fine.”
And completely full of shit.

“Bullshit.” And he knew it. “Why are you home so early?”
Sunday morning sunshine was poking through my ratty old mini blinds. I was home
well over twelve hours ahead of schedule. So was Cyrus. I knew how and why I
was home, but had no clue as to why and how Cyrus was back in California.
However, I damn sure was going to find out.

“I didn’t like it. I came home.” His head turned to look
over his shoulder at me. He scrunched his eyebrows together, letting me know he
didn’t buy one word I’d said. “I am an adult, Michael. I can come and go as
often as I please.” I was being overly defensive and was beginning to feel a
bit absurd. I’d called him for help. I was frantic. I’d shot up my living room,
and something busted my front door down; he was a fucking cop; I was getting
away with nothing.

“Humph,” he grunted with pursed lips, still looking at me
out of the corner of his eye over his shoulder.

Cyrus lay silent on the floor. The bleeding had stopped, but
he still looked like a little bitch huddled on the floor, silent as the day was
long, waiting for a
woman
to give him
the go ahead to speak. My evil little heart skipped a beat with delight.

“Mike, really, I’m fine.”
My door is in a million pieces and I emptied a clip into headless
corpses in my living room, but I’ll be all right.

Without another glance in Cyrus’ direction, he turned his
wide body in my direction and stomped toward me in one fluid motion. He had the
ability to be a badass when he wanted to be. His hands gripped my arms in the
same place Cyrus had moments prior. The difference in the two grips was
startling. One was firm, confident, and hot to the touch. The other familiar,
safe, and filled with a need I could never satiate.

“You are a horrible liar, Dylan Hart. Always have been.” His
voice was so much calmer than I had expected it to be. He was wrong though. I
was actually a pretty good little liar. He was just the only person on earth,
aside from my mother, who could tell. Usually. “What happened?” His eyes bore a
hole into my eyes and out the back.

Filling in Mike would open a can of necropolis worms I was
not ready to deal with. Like the fact he had pretty much told me something like
this would happen. Or the fact I just might be crazy as a fucking loon. Neither
shed me in a good light. “I came home upset. Someone followed me from a few
blocks down and it scared me. I called…I called you both. He got here first.
When I refused to open the door, he broke it down to get in. I was in here huddled
in the corner, crying like a bitch.” Well, most of it was true.