Page 45 of Ravenous Prophecy
The door was unlocked.Ajar, too. Of course it was. Williams was expecting us. Worse, he was daring us to find him. I knew in my gut that we were walking into a trap, but what choice did we really have? The Hive Father was here. JA Williams needed to be stopped.
I nudged the door open with my foot. I would have preferred to bust it down with my brass knuckles, but no sense expending energy when it was better saved for the upcoming fight. Because of course there was going to be a fight. Of course there was going to be some villainous monologue where we’d have to sit through Williams talking through that rancid pucker he called a mouth.
A bullet. He’d put a bullet in Bradley’s chest. My fingers curled, my hand tightening into a fist as I imagined punching that mouth over and over again.
What little we could see in the house was illumined only by moonlight, streaming in through the open door, spilling through tall windows and sliding glass doors. I winced at the sight of the captain’s wheel on the wall, the driftwoodfurniture, the ancient anchor that was probably meant to tie the whole room together. What I wouldn’t give to smash all his dubious decor to pieces.
“It’s dark in here,” Julian muttered. “Too dark.”
Elaine whispered something in a low voice, then flicked her wrist forward. A globe of light launched from her fingers, but even that didn’t help much.
“Best I can do,” she said. “This darkness—it isn’t natural. Something here is suppressing all the light. Swallowing it.”
Three guesses what that was.
We passed one of the floor-to-ceiling windows. I glanced at the ocean, the waves black in the dark of night. A chill ran down my spine when I thought back to everything Bradley had said about the Hive. They would rush over our reality like a flood, like water, crash against the earth like waves. I clenched my fists harder and strode forward.
“It’s the Hive Father’s influence,” Bradley said. “Patches of supernatural darkness—it helps them hunt. It helps keep their prey frightened.”
Brigette held her arms out, calling for a halt. “There. The room at the far end. Do you hear it?”
Chanting. Several voices, in fact, repeating words in a language I couldn’t hope to understand. Maybe Bradley knew, the way his ears strained to listen. And then I smelled it, the metallic tang of something awful and familiar.
“Sacrifices,” I said. “They’ve spilled more blood. That’s where the ritual is taking place.”
We rushed forward as a single unit to one of many doors around the foyer, Julian’s blade drawn, Brigette with a bookin one hand and a pen. I breathed deeply, reorienting my arcane energies into my fist, into the ancient brass.
Elaine pressed her wrists together, palms held out, and barked a single word. A burst of mystic radiance blasted the door off its hinges. Good. No time for subtlety now.
But the chanting didn’t stop, and now the smell of gore was almost overpowering. A large room with a sunken pit—it resembled a living room, that retro style that, at one point, might have had all the couches in a square at the center. I couldn’t imagine Williams ever relaxing or lounging with his family. It was hard not to think of him as a monster.
And true enough, all the furniture had been cleared out, the pit surrounded by the Hive’s devotees. I’d expected hooded robes and wicked daggers, but these were just people. Something about the way they were dressed, though, the smartly fitted shirts and trousers, the effortlessly elegant dresses. They were part of Williams’s inner circle, as if the wealthy and powerful of Moraira City didn’t yet have enough.
Slumped on the ground were unmoving bodies, all arranged in a circle, their torsos etched in blood red with those awful, familiar glyphs. Standing in the center was JA Williams himself, arms upraised, his lips still dedicated to an ongoing recitation. Blood bathed his hands and arms up to the elbows, stopping just short of the sleeves of his linen polo, gore soaking the hem of his bleached trousers. Our eyes locked. He smirked.
And then I realized why everyone was dressed so nice. This was an event to these people. These bastards had enjoyed a dinner out on the terrace, sipped champagne asthey watched the waves and the sunset, all as a prelude to this ritual. These sick fucks. These utter monsters.
Williams never broke his chant. He nodded at our group, his hands making the subtlest of movements, turning slightly at the wrist.
Four of the cultists closest to the door began to convulse, mouths falling open in agony, then tearing as their jaws unhinged. Bone cracked as Williams’s dark magic embedded Hive essence in their bodies, their eyes bulging, their minds gone feral. No. Their minds gone completely.
All four fell upon us. Another bolt of magic from Elaine’s hand went streaking through the room, the Hive’s movements so rapid and erratic that it threw off her aim. Julian slashed out with his sword, drawing blood. I screamed, fist upturned as I dove into the fray.
The chanting had abruptly ceased, the remaining cultists realizing their ultimate purpose. Only Williams’s voice remained. He’d reached the final stage of his ritual and no longer had need of them. The still-human cultists ran for the exits. At least two lunged for the circle, a desperate bid to stop Williams from turning them, too.
But it was too late. Laughing, he thrust his arms up, fingers pointed to the sky. Every last unpossessed cultist in the room stumbled and screamed, bones breaking, bodies quaking from the agony of their unholy transformations.
Great. Just great. A snap of his fingers and Williams had instantly bolstered his forces. Typical rich guy, always getting what they want. The cultists swarmed the room, forming a mass between the business ends of our weapons and JA Williams’s face.
But they all bled and broke just fine. Every smash of myknuckles collided against Hive-human flesh with a crack and a flash. The windows shook with every blow, the cannon’s magic explosive enough to make the cultists consider whether getting up again was the right move. The ones who were still conscious, that is.
And amid all the chaos, blood and fists and blades flying, somehow none of us had noticed that the chanting had ended. Even Williams had gone silent. Maybe it was easy to miss in the din of all the inhuman screams the cultists emitted as they attacked, their wails as we struck them down and knocked them out of their insectoid fury.
Then Williams’s bones began to crack. He threw his head back, a blood-curdling scream ripping out of his body, his mouth opened wide as if to make space for the agony. Even his servants froze in place, watching as their master howled into the night. And then his mouth just kept on opening. And opening. Skin ripped. His jaw popped from its hinges. He was transforming, too.
“No!” Brigette cried. “No, no, no. He wasn’t summoning the Hive Father.”
Bradley finished her thought with a hoarse whisper. “Heisthe Hive Father.”
