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I hope he’s okay.
But then my thoughts stop because outside of the torches, holes begin to open up in the ground and thin pale arms reach out, like something rising from the grave.
Oh, no.
I stare, scared to death, watching as four girls pull themselves out of the soil. They’re all ghostly white, with long black hair, barefoot, dressed in matching white dresses.
They get to their feet, taking position beside the flaming torches, and the dancing light illuminates their faces. The girls all look to be the same age, maybe a bit younger than me, but they also all look exactly the same. Like quadruplets, they all have the same small mouths, skinny noses, and piercing dark eyes. Even their posture and the way their hair falls in their face is the same, like someone copied and pasted over and over.
Who are they? I ask Jeremias, who is standing there, staring at the girls, and the girls are staring at him, like dogs awaiting a signal from their master.
“My apprentices,” he says in a deep voice. “They need to learn. You will be a great example.”
An example of what? I ask, my eyes going wide, but suddenly I feel wind at my back, my robe blowing around me, and I stare down in wonder as it twists and turns around me, like it’s a black snake, like it’s alive, and then suddenly the color fades to gray, and then to white, and now I’m in the same white dress as the girls.
I look at Jeremias in shock, but he just flicks his finger toward the flames and suddenly my spine is arching and my feet are going forward, and I’m on my back, floating in the air, moving along the path as if pushed on an invisible stretcher.
I cry out as I fly through the air, dizzy, the pain in my lungs increasing from the pressure, and now I’m in the middle of the circle, surrounded by the creepy girls and the torches, suspended above them.
What’s happening? I cry out in my head, my throat filling with blood from my lungs, making it impossible to speak.
“Hush,” Jeremias says as he walks toward me. He’s now holding a silver chalice filled with black liquid, though when I breathe in deep, I can smell that it’s blood. Not human blood, though. It seems almost alien, and entirely repulsive.
I tilt my head to the side, my hair dangling, long enough to almost reach the ground from this angle, and I watch as Jeremias lifts the silver chalice above his head. He closes his eyes and his face continues to morph and change.
“Unum tenebris, hac nocte voco te, filia mea, ut praeter eum,” Jeremias says in a low voice, speaking something that might be Latin. “Nisi ab ea a venenum, venenum dare me illam.”
“Venenum, venenum,” the four girls start to chant in a raspy monotone.
Venom? Venenum is Latin for venom, maybe?
“Unum tenebris,” Jeremias repeats.
“Unum tenebris, unum tenebris,” the girls chant, flat and unmusical.
Suddenly there is movement and sound coming from the forest. I turn my head to look as cloaked figures move through the branches. They remind me of the Dark Order, and that’s enough to scare me shitless. They wait in the darkness of the trees, watching. Maybe learning like the girls, maybe biding their time.
“Ea cura corpus cum sanguine,” Jeremias drones on.
Corpus? Body. Sanguine? Blood.
Whose blood?
Mine?
“Ea cura corpus cum sanguine,” the girls chant flatly.
Jeremias takes a step forward and stares down at me, and now his eyes are no longer black. They are yellow. No iris, no white, just sulfur-yellow, with a black slit down the middle.
My skin crawls with horror.
“Ea cura corpus cum sanguine,” he whispers, as if to me, then he takes the silver chalice and tips it, so the blackened blood spills out of the cup and onto my chest.
I scream.
The blood burns and hisses, steam rising from my body, and suddenly I’m contorting in the air, back arched, limbs moving and stretched in all directions. Pain throttles me from the inside out.
“Ea cura corpus cum sanguine,” Jeremias repeats, louder now, his voice vibrating inside my skull, and my vision starts to get blurry, red tears filling my eyes. I can’t stop screaming from the pain, my body won’t stop burning, my skin pulled so tight I might splinter into a million pieces.
Suddenly the chanting is louder, more ominous, and through my faltering eyes I see the cloaked figures at the edge of the forest remove their hoods with skeleton hands.
They have deer skulls for faces, empty sockets for eyes, antlers that were improbably hidden by the cloaks, and they raise their arms—human arms, bare bone—to the sky as the chanting continues to grow.
I’d be horrified if I wasn’t already in so much pain, if it didn’t feel like the blood was causing fissures in my soul as it seeps into my wound, my chest grinding, like my ribs are moving independently.
