Arianna Rose: The Awakening (Part 2) (21 page)

             
Howard Kane, Jr.

Soldiers of the Divine Trinity Church

102 Heather Road

Corning PA 06806

Arianna’s mouth went dry as she read the words in front of her.  Howard Kane had her mother.  He held her mother as his hostage.  He had been to her trailer and had killed her mother’s lover.  Another innocent had died because of her.  And now, her mother’s life teetered at the brink of a great precipice from which there was no return.  Her mother would die if she did not face Kane. 

Her hands continued to shake as she held the note in her hand as a fresh wave of tremors racked her body.  But instead of trembling with fear, Arianna began to tremble with ire.  Fury seized her, gripping her with an urgency so consuming she could no longer be still.  She stuffed the paper into the front pocket of her jeans and fled the room.  She dashed down the hallway, pausing only to sling her bag over her shoulder and raced out the front door
.  She slipped behind the wheel
of her mother’s car and turned the spare key her mother had insisted she have in the ignition.  The engine groaned to life and
she rif
f
led through the glove compartment for a GPS navigation unit her mother had relieved Carl of weeks earlier.  When she found it, she frantically punched in the address Kane had left her then stomped on the gas pedal.  S
he sped down the driveway of Shady Pines Trailer Park
and on to the main road
.

She drove for three hours, blind to traffic, the weather, the world.  She
traveled with a single purpose: to rescue her mother from Howard Kane.  She had not called the police and she had not called upon Desmond, though a part of her had wanted to do both.  In her heart, she knew neither the police nor Desmond cold help her. She was the Sola, and she w
ould face Kane alone.  Left
with the irritating female voice of the navigation system and her own tortured thought
s
, Arianna arrived at The Soldiers of the Divine Trinity Church
a little after four o’clock
. 

She pulled down a lane lined with stately
cedar
trees. 
The limbs of the trees sagged as if bearing the weight of a great secret upon each of their boughs, and lent their appearance the impression of majestic mustached watchmen guarding confidences they’d rather not keep.  At the end of the long pathway, an imposing structure loomed.  Made of stone and beveled stained glass, the cross at the apex of the steeple looked as though it had punctured the heavens above.  Leaden clouds began to weep fat raindrops
sporadically.  Thunder growled in the distance threatening at any moment to hemorrhage a downpour. 

Arianna pulled her car in front of the Soldiers of the Divine Trinity Church and
slid
out of her mother’s car.  She climbed a small set of concrete steps and paused before a set of wooden doors.  She tugged at one of the ornate metal handles and was surprised when it opened silently.  She stepped inside and found herself in the vestibule of the building.
 
Faint light spilled from lit
candles and cast eerie shadows all around her.  She reached out and touched the cool stone of the wall and edged her way around a large vat of holy water in the center of the passage until she reached another set of doors. 

The d
oors opened to the congregational
seating area.  Rows of pews faced the sanctuary.  From where she stood, she saw a man kneeling at the altar.  She ran down th
e center aisle past the pews,
up three steps and stopped beside the man.

“Where is my mother?” she demanded. 

The man turned his head toward her slowly.  He looked like an ordinary man, and she was certain he wasn’t Howard Kane, but something gleamed in his eye, a flicker of something familiar.

“He is waiting for you,” the man replied in a deep voice.

The sound of his voice, the look in his eye, both hit her and an image flashed in her mind. 
The man kneeling at the alta
r
had worn
a long, hooded cloak
.  He
had
stood alongside Kane and chanted indecipherable words
,
and
had
watched as Lily burned

“He is out in the courtyard,” the rumble of his voice snapped her fr
om her vision.  The man gestured
with long thin fingers to the right of the sanctuary. 

Arianna rushed in the direction he’d pointed her in and silently vowed to return and find him when she’d finished with Kane.  He would pay for what he’d done to Lily.  She would make sure of it. 

To the left of the altar
lay the sacristy.  The sacristy was little more than a storage room for books, vestments and an assortment of odd-l
ooking tools.  There was a sink
,
a narrow window
and a single door
.  She reached out and tried the handle without delay and discovered it was
unlocked
. 
Though the handle turned, when she pushed against the door itself,
it did not budge
. 
Undeterred,
she dropped her shoulder and rammed the weight of her body against it several times until
,
finally, it gave way.  She found herself standing on a small rectangle of concrete before a
courtyard. 
An immense fountain surrounded by ornate statues blocked her view, but beyond the overly elaborate display,
something else was happening, a nefarious scene was unfolding
.
  A tingling whisper of awareness inched down her spine and propelled her forward.

She ran around the statues and fountain and she immediately saw a woman’s frightened face.  Her mother had been tied to a stake in the middle of the clearing
,
brush piled beneath her, tears streaming down her cheeks
.  She cried out to Arianna, “Run baby! Get as far away from these deranged killers as you can!” her mother’s voice was panicked and shrill, unlike Arianna had ever heard it before.

“Shut your mouth, sinner!” a voice boomed and a man stepped from
the shadows
. 

He gripped a torch in both hands and
Arianna recognized the charred and puckered flesh of the man’s face, the same burnt face that had haunted her nightmares.  Only this time, it was n
ot Lily who burned at his hands.  H
er mother
would be the one who burned
.

Fierce tremors shook Arianna’s entire body and her vision became veiled in crimson.  Her racing heart slowed and all she could see was Howard Kane. 
H
er scarlet
gaze
glowed
, shining from her eyes,
and soaked
him in a blood
red shroud.  She could hear his lifeblood coursing through his
veins;
smell the
coppery scent of it.  But she did not feel the need to retch.  She did not feel sickened by it.  She felt incensed by it.  A primal voice inside urged her to
kill
, kill him where he stood, spill his blood and feast on it.  Howard Kane had claimed the lives of countless innocents and the day of reckoning was upon him.  Her muscles twitched, eager and aching to channel the energy that stormed inside her.  She started to raise her arm, the force of her e
nergy pulsing like an electric
current.

“I would think twice about that,” Kane warned confidently and signaled.  A man
appeared from the direction Kane had just gestured to with an assault rifle in hand.  The rifle was equipped with a small, black scope and aimed at Arianna’s mother.

“This is Eli,” Kane spoke.  “He is one of more than a dozen men who have your mother in their crosshairs.  If
you do not lower your arm and c
a
l
m yourself right now, she will be killed.”

Arianna felt her energy begin to flare despite her effort to control it.  Men surrounded her and her mother.  She could sense them.  And there was no way for her to unarm them simultaneously before one took their kill shot at her mother.  She spun, scanning the clearing, looking to the woods beyond it for
armed
shapes
, when a man sprung from her left.
The bite of tiny electrode
s
against the nape of her neck was immediate and followed promptly by a
burst
of
electrical energy
that dropped her to her knees.  As soon as she felt the cold, wet earth touch her
legs
, she felt the prick of another set of electrodes
hit her back and shoulders.  Men rushed her, she could hear the urgent tone of their voices, knew she had been tasered
more than once
, as her body began to convulse.  She tried to scream, to thrash, but her body refused to cooperate.  Darkness embraced her, stroking and lulling with silky sinuous fingers.  She strained to shirk it, to evade its elusive allure, but was overtaken.

Chapter 16

Heat
warmed Arianna’s face.  She blinked and tried to open her eyes, her vision bleary as though she’d slept for far too long.  But she hadn’t slept.  She’d been unconscious
, and not for long.  Night had not fallen yet
and the brightness of day made her eyes tear.  Sporadic rai
n still fell.  S
he could feel it on her face
. 
A scent infused the air, acrid and foul
.

The smell of burning flesh struck her, burning her nasal passages and the back of her throat.  She concentrated on seeing more clearly, willing them to focus.  When finally the fuzziness lifted, she saw that her mother burned before her, still tied to a stake. The flames had reached her mother’s waist and her body still twitched as she moaned weakly, suffering.  But the twitching and moaning faded quickly as the fire swelled suddenly and consumed her head.  Arianna watched, frozen
, a prisoner
in her own personal hell, as the last bit of life drained from Cathy Rose.  She watched as her mother’s head lolled to one side, her beautiful face blackened, gone forever.  

A sound escaped Arianna fr
om a deep
,
primitive part of her.  The sound tore through the
courtyard
, her soul crying out.
  She felt as though a hole had been punched in her chest, a bottomless pit of pain and loss that would never heal.  Tears spilled down her cheeks and a lifetime of memories rushed to her mind.  In each were she and her mother. 

“Why did you do that?
” she heard herself ask Kane.
 
“
It’s me you want, you monster!” she cried.

Howard materialized beside her, his face gruesome.  “I am no monster,” he hissed in her ear.  “It is
you
w
ho are a monster.  And that
woma
n
,” he pointed to her deceased mother, “
that sinful, wretched woman,
she birthed you.  She raised you, readying you to begin your dark mission.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about!” she screamed
and felt her anger swell.  He had murdered her mother and continued to insult her as she dangled lifelessly from a pole.

The grieving hole in her chest began to fill with the purest of rage.  The world around her became awash in a crimson glow again.

“Your powers will be of no use to you, Arianna,” Kane said.  “Your wrists have been shackl
ed with restraints designed more than
two hundred years ago for the
sole
purpose of containing the Sola
,
you
.”

Kane watched her, apparently waiting for some kind of reaction.  But she would n
ot give him the satisfaction, so he continued.

“And I have one more surprise for you before I end
your
mission before it ever
truly
began,” he said theatrically.

He signaled to the tree line and Arianna saw a man approaching.  He walked slowly and was followed by another, larger man who pointed a gun at his back.  As both men drew closer, she gasped in horror as she saw that the man with the gun trained on his back was Luke.

“Arianna!” Luke called to her.  Tears streaked his dirtied cheeks and panic filled his voice.  His eyes were wide with terror as they searched hers for answers.

“Leave him alone!” she yelled.  “He has nothing to do with this!”

“I’m sorry, I can’t do that.  He helped you kill two of my men, two servants of the Lord.  Their deaths cannot go unanswered,” Kane said and withdrew a pistol from his robe.  He aimed it inches from Luke’s forehead and Luke began to cry uncontrollably.

“No!” Arianna screamed but the sound of her voice was stifled by the deafening sound of a gunshot.  Luke’s body fell to the ground, his once lively silver eyes now vacant.