Bless the Child (54 page)

Y
ou wanted to see me, Nicky?” Jenna asked, in the same seductive purr she generally used with him. She’d always known that he wanted her, and it pleased her to imagine this arrogant son of a bitch lusting after what he couldn’t attain. She liked the fact that as Eric’s wife, she was the only woman in the coven who was unavailable to the others.

Nicky closed the door with a deliberate shove, and stood watching her. Jenna was wearing an apple green satin gown that left little to the imagination; beneath his insistent gaze, she felt suddenly naked and vulnerable.

“You enjoy teasing me, don’t you, Jenna?” he said, in a husky voice that made her stop brushing her hair to pay closer attention. She turned from the dressing table mirror to face him, curiously.

“I don’t know what you mean by that, Nicky,” she replied uncertainly. “I never meant you any harm. Look . . . there are a lot of people coming tonight for some new ritual Eric’s cooked up, and I’ve still got to finish dressing, so maybe you’d better go until he gets home.”

Nicky took a step closer to the seated woman, and as he did, he slipped off his suit jacket, and dropped it soundlessly onto a boudoir chair, behind him. Jenna watched his movements as fascinated as cobra with a mongoose. He begin to loosen his tie and belt; there was something singularly threatening in the gestures. Self-protective instincts rose in her. She’d lived on the streets; she knew trouble when it was coming her way. Jenna smiled as disarmingly as her rising fear would allow, and turned away from Nicky, with what she hoped was nonchalance. If she could just make it to the dressing room behind her, the door there had a dead bolt . . .

“I was just about to get high, Nicky,” she said offhandedly, as she stood up and began to move toward the door. “Want to join me? I keep a stash in my dressing room . . .”

Sayles’s long legs crossed the room in two strides; the strength of his fingers on her wrist was stupefying. Jenna heard her bones crunch against each other with a sickening internal sound.

“Yes, I want to join you,” he said, low and mean. “I think you’ve known that for a very long time—and you’ve had a great deal of fun at my expense thinking about it, haven’t you?”

Jenna’s sharp cry only made him squeeze her arm harder. “Please!” she grasped, as he twisted it upward behind her back, the pain forcing her to her knees. “You’re hurting me. Are you crazy, Nicky. Eric will kill you!”

“Eric couldn’t care less about you, bitch,” he said, holding her struggling helplessly, with one hand, while he used his other to tear the robe from her body.

“Ghania tells me you like to be naked,” he breathed heavily, as he touched her flesh. His face flushed red with desire, and Jenna began to scream—piercing, ear splitting sounds that should have brought the servants running. Nicky’s laughter was the only response to her urgent cries.

She would have to save herself. The thought zinged through her, bringing everything into sharp focus. Nicky relaxed his grip enough to strip off his own clothes, and Jenna lurched away from him, scrambling to her feet, looking right and left for escape, like a fox in a snare. Why was nobody coming? The servants must have heard her! She threw herself at the dressing room door, but Nicky dragged her back, scraping her flesh hurtfully across the floor. She felt a splinter pierce her skin.

With the strength of genuine terror, Jenna wrenched her arm free of his grip once again, scratching at his eyes with her Mandarin nails. She aimed a kick at his jockey shorts, but Nicky parried it easily, and knocked her off her feet with a fierce blow to her head that dazed her. Then he was on top of her, and she was struggling against the risen flesh that pinned her, the overwhelming male strength of his malevolent intent. And she was screaming again, loud enough to wake the dead.

Jenna felt Nicky force his way into her body, painfully, relentlessly, just as her bedroom door sprang open.
Thank God!
Someone had come to help her!

“Ghania!” she shrieked, outraged. “Help me! Get Eric.
Help me!”
Jenna’s words were punctuated by the thrusting male force that was tearing her apart . . .

Other people were moving into the doorway, now, behind Ghania. Dinner guests, in evening gowns and tuxedos, were filing into the room past the witch, laughing and chatting, and pointing to the couple writhing on the floor.
Eric always has the best entertainment at his dinner parties,
was written on their leering faces. Jenna turned her head away and began to sob silently, hopelessly, as Nicky rutted and fondled and spent himself, all the brutality of his nature finding freedom in the act.

A very long time later, the guests filed out again, and Nicky rose from on top of his victim, and stumbled away to the bathroom. Jenna lay hurt and bleeding, on the Aubusson carpet, too miserable and humiliated to move. Ghania surveyed the ruin with a practiced eye; there wasn’t a lot of blood, but it was hard to get out of a good rug. She clucked her tongue in annoyance, and moved toward the sobbing girl, oblivious to her suffering.

“Why? Ghania,
why?
” Jenna rasped, as she felt the strong black hands begin to raise her from the floor.

“Because he wanted you,” the woman responded simply. “Because you are unimportant, and are now more use to us dead.”

Jenna’s head jerked up. “Dead! What do you mean dead?” The unexpected threat made her pull away from her new captor, but she was no more a match for Ghania’s gargantuan strength, than she’d been for Nicky’s.

“You will be the sacrifice at tonight’s Mass,” the Amah pronounced, as if discussing the inevitability of rain. “I will prepare you.”

The full impact of betrayal rocked Jenna. “But I’m Eric’s wife . . .” she blurted. “This is insane. He’d never allow such a thing.”

“Fool!” Ghania spat contemptuously. “You were no more than a gift with purchase to Eric. It was the
child
we wanted. Only the child . . . whom you so willingly provided us. Even a hyena would be a better mother than you.”

Jenna felt bile rise in her throat, reality seeping in as nauseatingly as the drug sickness. “He wanted Cody? That’s why he married me?”

“He only married you, so he could adopt the child,” Ghania gloated. “Had you been equipped with a less-lovely body, you would have been discarded long ago, you may be sure. And do not tell me you did not know the child would be sacrificed, for I know better.” The Amah’s eyes glinted with evil mischief.

“Sacrificed? What are you
talking
about?” Jenna’s voice was shrill with fear. “No! I swear I didn’t know that. Eric said she was special, but he never said anything about sacrifice . . .”

“Hypocrite! Do not play innocent with me. You sold yourself and your daughter—there is no greater sin! You didn’t even care enough to ask what would become of her. But I will tell you in detail, so you can carry the full magnitude of your guilt with you to your eternal torment.

“Do you know how carefully we stalked you, once the Prince knew that you had borne the Star-Child? Nurturing your need for drugs, luring you by your own weakness, into our snare. Do you know how easy it is to control an addict? How every fix opens your soul a little wider to the lower Astral where our minions wait impatiently? How every new drug you sample gives access to the demons, who have swarmed the fringes of humanity for eons, awaiting access. You and your generation of the damned have invited the Prince of Darkness within the Citadel . . . you have opened the floodgates to his Legions!” Ghania’s voice had risen triumphantly. “And you are too stupid and selfish even to realize what you have done.”

She shook her head in disgust.

“I must say you gave us quite a turn when we found you’d left the baby with your mother. Of course, that wasn’t by chance either—the other side, too, has its power to guide events . . .

“Oh, we did debate what to do about your little adventure into self-determination. But in the end, we knew there was no need to have possession of the child until a few weeks before the Ceremonial date. Long enough to Awaken her Powers, without having to cope with the results of them, too long.”

“Powers? What
Powers?
What are you talking about?” Jenna demanded through the haze of memories Ghania’s soliloquy was conjuring . . . Eric had never loved her. He had merely used her. They had
all
used her. Even the drugs had been a means to control her.

“You little fool,” Ghania said disdainfully. “You bore mankind’s only hope, and didn’t even recognize her worth. Oh, you will suffer for your sins, you may be sure. Although, the Prince may choose to mitigate your agony somewhat because you made our job so easy. Your daughter is the Isis Messenger! The child who holds the key to Materializing the great Amulets of Good and Evil that have been stored on the Inner Planes these five thousand years! We have sought them down the corridors of the ages, and now, in one week’s time, Cody will provide Maa Kheru with the means to control every horror on this planet. And all because you were too self-indulgent to question why a man like Eric Vannier would ever choose to be with a nothing like you.”

“What will happen to Cody?” Jenna whispered in a daze.
Isis Messenger?
Amulets of Good and Evil? What lunacy was the old witch talking about?

“Her soul will be imprisoned by demons for all eternity . . . her body will become the immortal temple for the Goddess Sekhmet’s flame.”

Jenna barely struggled against the men who awaited Ghania’s orders; she felt nausea, so rank and overwhelming, she could barely breath. Cody’s soul would be damned because of her . . . her own life would be sacrificed! Remorse rushed through her like a flash flood, sweeping everything in its wake. Why had she not thought of this? Why had she not left the child with her mother? The drugs were quickly wearing off; reality was struggling to surface, puddling up in corrosive pools within her mind and body. She was almost tempted to pray to God for help, but she had been rebaptized to a different deity, and she knew in her heart that all was well and truly lost.

Ghania watched the dispirited girl led away to her doom. She didn’t pity her, but the waste of the body rankled.

The effects of her last high had dissipated hours ago. Jenna was dope sick now. Her head pounded, she was vomiting, her flesh felt as if insects crawled inside it. An iron band of terror constricted her breathing—but that was a response to terrible reality, not drug induced.

At first, she’d been too dazed by Nicky’s attack and the devastation of Eric’s betrayal, to even fight back. Her whole body hurt from being raped; she felt bruised and wounded, everywhere—it was not just her aching sexual parts that felt violated.

Eric had
never
loved her,
never
needed her, never wanted to share his world with her. He had used her—her body, her mind, even her child.
Oh Christ!
That bastard had made her sell out her kid! Jenna didn’t know if dope deprivation, or that horrific knowledge, was the main cause of her nausea.

It had been such a lark, when it began . . . an exciting, rich, and powerful man had wanted her. To the exclusion of all others, he had chosen her to be his consort. When he’d finally shared with her the secret of his success—the whole Maa Kheru world of magic—some part of her had thrilled to the ceremony, the licentiousness, and the raw unbridled power of being so far beyond the law. She had loved dressing up and playing priestess . . . she hadn’t wanted to kill anyone, of course, but even that conviction had been blunted by dope. Eric knew more than any pharmacist about how to make everything work out the way he wanted. How to make you high, or bring you down, slow and easy. How to make you feel like queen of the world, smart and omnipotent, and free from the fucking rules that fettered lesser humanity. Eric knew how to make sex rage in you, so nothing else mattered—so you would kill for the chance to rut, or sell your soul to satisfy your desperate flesh. And then there wasn’t any conscience anymore, or any need for one either . . . in the world of Maa Kheru
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law”
was the only rule.

The thought of Cody floated into sharper focus in Jenna’s mind, as the drugs continued to fade. She had loved Cody once . . . really loved her. Even leaving her with Maggie had been an act of love. Just like going on methadone had been, while she was pregnant.
Christ!
She had really meant to stay straight, all the time she was pregnant. She had meant
never
to stick another needle in her arm. How many times had she almost gone home? But then the baby got born, and it needed things. And it cried if it didn’t get them. And it was a real pain in the ass to mind. And she needed money to take care of it, and patience to mind it, and the whole thing just looked hopeless again. So she’d dropped off Cody at her mom’s. Her mother was a big pain in the ass, too, but she was so reliable . . .
that,
at least, had been the right thing to do. Then she’d gone back to the streets . . . and gotten a job at the club . . . and then Eric had come along, and everything had looked like maybe she’d done it right, after all . . .