Arianna Rose: The Gates of Hell (Part 5) (2 page)

No one had suspected the
soft-spoken mechanic, the honest man who’d repaired cars with an easy smile and a straightforward approach to pricing.  No one had suspected her husband, Beau, not even her. 

She’d immediately fled the shed and raced inside her house.  She’d phoned the police and, after an exhaustive investigation
that had included an in-depth probe into her life, it had been determined that her husband, Beau Watkins, was one of the worst serial killers in recent United States history.  His body count, though not high by comparison, boasted more than twenty-eight victims, all under the age of nineteen, and all female.  The girls had been beaten brutally.  It has also been determined that Beau had practiced necrophilia with his victims.  

She shivered when she thought about that night
, about all that he’d done.  The same body he’d used to copulate with corpses had been used to copulate with her.  Her insides began to shudder violently.  Even though he’d been dead for years, she felt as if he could reach across time and space and prowl his way into her reality, stroking her with a touch of savagery.

Clutching her glass of wine in one hand, Suzette wrapped her other arm around her waist and walked into the bathroom.  She placed her glass on the edge of the tub and twisted the hot water valve. 
She wanted to purge her mind of him, purge her body of the stain of his touch.  She knew it wasn’t possible, that she would never be fully cleansed of him, but she would try. 

The tub filled as she stripp
ed out of her clothes, turned on the portable radio and CD player she kept tuned to the country music station and scooped her hair up into a ponytail she secured with an elastic band waiting on the vanity. 

S
oon, ribbons of vapor curled from the filled tub, drawing her near like gossamer fingers to a warm and welcoming oasis.  She stepped inside and submerged herself in the soothing water, took a drink of her wine then draped a washcloth across her face and felt the stress of the day melt away.

Suzette did not know how much time had passed, whether she’d dozed off and was dreaming or was awake, when t
he overwhelming stench of nicotine and motor oil polluted the air around her and was tinged with something else, something metallic.  Blood.  The unmistakable odor of blood hung in the air like a mist.

With the scent came memories, too many to count, flooding back in a cold rush.

“Hello, darlin’,” a voice stretched through the ether and landed like a fist to her gut.  “It’s been a while, and I have to say, time hasn’t been your friend.  Can’t see your face yet, but the body . . . well, it looks like shit.”  His words were emotionless, his tone flat as it had always been, and the blood in Suzette’s veins turned to ice.  Her entire body went slack.  Her glass of wine slid from her hand and shattered against the bathroom floor.

“Huh, I guess I rendered you speechless,” the voice
taunted.  “Wish I coulda done that years ago,” he said with the calm of a coiled snake.  “It woulda saved me a lotta time in prison, that’s for sure, that and the death sentence.”

That voice, she knew that voice.  She could never forget it, no matter how hard she tried to
expel it from her brain.  The voice belonged to the monster in her nightmares, the monster that made all others shun her as soon as they recognized her.  

Fear
shook her to her very core; fear, abhorrence and revulsion.  She squeezed her eyes shut tightly, certain that she was hallucinating. 

“I wanted this day to happen for so long, wanted to see the look on your face.  Never thought it would happen though.  But it has.  And now I want to see
it.  Drop the rag,” the voice hardened as it ordered her to remove the cloth from her eyes.  She could imagine his glacial eyes narrowing like dart tips and was loath to look at him.

“It, it,
c-can’t be,” she stammered, raging against what was happening.  He was dead.  Ten years ago he’d been put to death.  After serving five years on death row, he’d been electrocuted.  She had the coroner’s report and his death certificate to prove that he was, in fact, dead.  This couldn’t be happening.  None of it could be real.  She was dreaming, or drugged, something,
anything
other than having her dead husband in the bathroom with her. 

Air squeezed from her lungs and felt as if both had collapsed simultaneously.  Her body felt cold despite t
he warm temperature of her bathwater.  And waves of dread lapped against her like waves against the shoreline. 

Dangerously close to
apnea, she slowly slid the washcloth from her eyes, took a small, ragged breath, and felt the world around her begin to crumple.  The walls billowed, undulating like a charmed serpent.  But the only serpent present was not made of plaster or sheetrock.  Impossibly, it was made of flesh and bone and standing before her. 

Bottomless pits filled w
ith dark secrets bored into her eyes with sick, predatory hunger.  “There, that’s better,” Beau said. 

Suzette felt as if she m
ight faint.  He looked as he had before he’d went away, before he’d been caught and convicted of his crimes: thinning hair on top with a horseshoe of thicker, darker hair around the sides, piercing blue eyes, and a straight nose.  Each of his features was symmetrical.  None was unpleasant.  But what lurked beneath them was wholeheartedly unpleasant, evil. 

His mouth twisted to a cruel slash, and the flimsy grip on reality Suzette clung to like a lifeline slipped from her fingertips. 

“Y-y-you aren’t real.  You can’t be here.  You’re dead,” her voice argued what her eyes beheld.  “How in the world am I seeing you?”

“This isn’t your world anymore,” he replied with a sinister chuckle.  “Darius, Prince of Darkness, has begun releasing us.  We’re coming back to claim this realm for ourselves.  He is leading us to a new day.”

“No, no, no,” she said and shook her head from side to side.  She was convinced her mind had fractured, her sanity splintering into irreconcilable shards.  “This is crazy.  You aren’t real.  This isn’t real,” she cried.  

“Oh, it’s real all right, darlin’,” Beau assured. 

“Oh my God, no!  No,” she keened. 

“Say, do you have any idea how much being electrocuted hurt?  How much it hurt to die in such a way?  That electric chair was somethin’ else,” he said, his gaze distant.
  But Suzette barely heard him.  His voice echoed thinly, as if it traveled a great distance to reach her, and reality oscillated like a great pendulum, swinging to and fro between fantasy and actuality, refusing to commit to one side or the other. 

“No,” she mumbled as she blinked rapidly. 

“Well I’m about to show you how much it hurts, how bad it feels to be betrayed by someone you love,” he said evenly.

Love?  The word dizzied her.  He wasn’t capable of love.  He was a monster.  As the room began to spin, Suzette slid her feet be
neath her and tried to stand, but found that her movement was far too slow.  Within the space of a breath, Beau was on his feet, gripping her boom box.  He hoisted it overhead then dropped it into the full bathtub of water in which she sat. 

Pain unlike any she’d ever felt bit her body and branched to each of her limbs, ricocheting with white-hot heat as volts of electricity shocked her.  Her body twitched and jerked, searing twinges tearing through her cells and forcing her heart
to beat erratically. 

The last sound Suzette Fontaine heard before succumbing to a torturous murder by electrocution was the sound of her dead husband, convicted and executed child killer, Beau Watkins’
cackling with baleful glee.

Chapter 2

The sky, a rich indigo canvas that stretched infinitely, rolled before Arianna Rose like a velvet tapestry.  A full moon, veiled by gauzy clouds, had glowed with silvery lavender radiance, but was retreating fast now. Soon daybreak would embrace the horizon, and the time to move on to a new town would be upon her. 

Leaving again, moving on to God only knew what, caused panic to arise within her.  The last place she’d been pulled to, Limousin, a rural region in central France
, had been a wholeheartedly unsettling experience.  Ripe with rolling green hills dotted with old churches and castles and charming villages and cottages, the entire area had been deserted.  She’d passed countless storefronts as she’d searched for inhabitants.  Restaurants with tables and chairs set up outside, a movie theater, quaint shops and boutiques, and markets of every kind had lined the road.  But all had been abandoned.  Crowds had not lined the cobblestone streets.  Not even a trickle of people that should have milled about had been present.  Not a soul had strolled on the sidewalks.  Shops had stood empty, chairs unoccupied, and the letters announcing a feature film had glowed vacantly, an eerie reminder that life had existed there not long ago, at least
human
life had.  Everywhere she’d looked, signs of death loomed like spectral reminders.  Limousin had become a ghost town.  But bodies of any kind had been missing.

Standing in front of the window of
the cabin and peering into the distance, Arianna shivered at the recollection of her recent trip to France.  Goosebumps prickled her limbs as waves of apprehension swept over her.  She wrapped both arms around herself, pulling her oversized sweater tighter to her midsection, then turned to look behind her.  Sprawled on the bed, Desmond rested.  Even when sleeping, he managed to steal her breath. 

Waning threads of moonlight kissed his
golden hair and pale skin, highlighting his strong, angular jawline.  He looked as if he’d been carved by the gods themselves, lovingly chiseled from the finest marble.  He hadn’t been, of course.  Desmond was flesh and blood, warm and supple.  Arianna still did not know how she’d ended up with him, what she’d done to deserve love that filled her soul so fully it threatened to overflow.  She, a girl who’d bounced from trailer park to trailer park and had lived a fast, hard life, didn’t seem destined for a guy like Desmond.  Happily ever after hardly ever happened for girls like her, which was not to say that her life was a tale of happily ever after in the traditional sense of the term.  Far from it, assuming her role as Sola meant loss and insurmountable heartache, fear, and fierce, casualty-laden battles.  Fairies, princesses and candy-colored castles held no place in her existence, only her Prince Charming, Desmond, who wouldn’t be caught dead in a tunic and tights and who also happened to be a ferocious warrior. 

Warrior or no warrior, she feared for his life incessantly.  With each new destination they journeyed to, that worry multiplied exponentially. 
She relished in the moments he was safe, sleeping and near, just as he was at the moment. 

She watched him, watched his chest rise and fall with each even breath, watched the subtle flutter of his golden-brown eyelashes as he dreamed. 
His expression was so peaceful, so serene.  Arianna wanted nothing more than to go to him, to trace the perfect lines of his face, to press her mouth to his full lips and pour every bit of love she felt for him into one unspoiled kiss.  But she did not dare.  He needed his rest.  She did too.  Sleep eluded her of late.  As long as Darius existed in the same realm as humanity, she doubted she’d ever sleep again. 

Darius and his heinous inten
tions for humankind plagued her unendingly.  He planned to kill off millions of people, all the while ushering in others like him, legions of evil beings currently residing in hell.

She could not allow him his reign on Earth.  She needed to stop him.  Yet each time she’d arrived in a new place she’d been pulled to,
he’d already left, as if he had been just a step ahead of her.  Her fight with Darius was near, she could feel it.  She only hoped Desmond would endure.  The world needed him, even if she did not survive.  She needed him to live.

Arianna turned her attention
from Desmond and forced thoughts of her impending clash with Darius aside.  She gazed out the window.  A fusion of pink and orange began to slowly infuse the heavens as the sun made its appearance.  At first, it was little more than a fiery ridge peeking from the skyline.  But gradually, the blazing mass pushed back the darkness, striking it with magnificent beams of yellow.

Watching the day dawn as it was, Arianna bundled her fears, the many worries and regrets that knotted in her belly, and breathed deeply, pausing in the moment night surrendered to day. 
She closed her eyes and concentrated on the sun’s majestic ascent, focused on the breadths of lavender and gold overtaking sapphire sky.  She envisioned her power harnessing that of the sun, forcing out the evil that walked the earth, saving humanity. 

When she opened her eyes, she saw that g
ilded rods caressed treetops and haloed a now familiar face.  Long, snow-white hair billowed in the breeze that stirred, making tendrils wave and dance about his shoulders as Briathos unfurled his arms.  The draping of his white, cotton top resembled the wings of an angel.  He tipped his chin skyward, letting the first light touch his face.  Arianna felt a stirring in her chest, an effervescing that stretched from her belly to her collarbone.  Then, as if sensing her presence, he slowly lowered his head and turned to face her.  Pale-blue eyes, almost translucent in their clarity and paler than any she had ever seen, stared straight at her.