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It was calling Jeremiah’s.
The worshippers were murmuring. A tremor ran through the ground, and they began to shout. Jeremiah turned back to them, arms still spread. “You see? Do you all see? God is here! God has heard us! It has received our offering!” His wide-eyed, wild smile fell on Victoria. “And It will receive another.”
I barely even had time to process what I was seeing as he dragged her up from the ground, screaming, fighting — and sliced her throat.
I had to swallow down the vomit that wanted to rise up in me again. Her blood spilled across the ground, and Jeremiah threw her into the dark, carelessly, roughly, her body flinging into the depths like a ragdoll.
Holy shit, I’d been wrong. I’d been so wrong. There was no saving her from that.
The ground rumbled again, a pulse thrumming beneath my feet. The air felt thick, sitting so heavy in my lungs that I had to desperately suppress the urge to cough. My body flushed cold as I realized thatsomethingwas moving in the mine shaft. The shape of it was morphing, constantly changing — the darkness itself moved, like ink being stirred. That ink was spreading, it was seeping out. Black tendrils tested the edges of the shaft’s frame, reaching out into the air as if grasping for something. There was a gasp and a cry from one of the white cloaks.
The murmurs passed through the crowd, “God is here. God is here.”
They began to fall to their knees. As Jeremiah looked over them, the veins in the whites of his eyes turned red, like blood cracking to the surface. He faced the dark again, his chest heaving with the effort to breathe in the atmosphere’s sudden thickness.
“Bless me, God,” he said again. “Bless me.”
The tendrils shot out. I clapped my hand over my mouth as they coiled around his limbs like snakes, moving rapidly, wrapping around every inch of skin as if cocooning him. He watched them with an expression somewhere between horror and fascination, and more of the crowd fell to their knees, throwing up their hands, crying aloud.
“God is here! The Deep One rises!”
But the God couldn’t get out...It couldn’t...surely It couldn’t...
The tendrils enveloped Jeremiah’s head. He jerked, and suddenly his mouth gaped open and the tendrils pushed inside him, down his throat, making it bulge as he choked. He bent backward, his spine curving to such an angle that he could look back on the congregation upside-down, his eyes rolled back in his head.
He began to rise off the ground, and I couldn’t even fathom what the hell I was witnessing.
The black tendrils held him suspended in the air, pushing inside him with such violence that his chest enlarged and his throat swelled. His body began to twitch, then to shake, and black ooze leaked from his mouth...his ears...hiseyes...
The rumbling stopped, and Jeremiah dropped heavily to the ground. All that remained was the rain, pouring around us. The tendrils were gone, disappeared inside him. No one spoke, no one got up. They merely extended their hands, trembling, toward Jeremiah’s limp body.
Something seized me from behind, one hand clapped over my mouth and the other grabbed my wrist. I thrashed, panicking, but only until a deep voice whispered harshly in my ear, “No stabbing me this time, little wolf. We need to get the fuck out of here,now.”
Zane. He dragged me up, giving no chance for protest or explanation. He was tense as hell and breathing hard.
Jeremiah began to rise. He raised his head from the ground, every movement a bizarre twitch. It reminded me of those things — those Gollums who had taken Marcus’s body. But Zane didn’t stop, no, he only moved faster. The last thing I saw of Jeremiah was him jerk fully to his feet, black goop seeping from his lips. He said something I couldn’t hear, but from the way his lips moved, I could have sworn he said, “Someone is here.”
46
Oh, this wasfucked.
Abelaum was fucked. Earth was fucked. We were absolutely fucked. But I wasn’t about to stick around and wait for maximum fuckery, no sir. I was getting Juniper and myself the hell out of there and putting as much distance between us and thatthingas possible.
I should have come looking for her sooner, but damn it, she liked having time alone and I wasn’t trying to fucking smother her. My mistake — I left her alone for a couple hours, and I found her in the midst of the Libiri, watching Jeremiah-fucking-Hadleigh get possessed by a God. I wasn’t leaving her alone for a second from here on. I was going to chain her to my goddamn wrist.
We reached the car, and I rummaged through her pockets for the keys. “Get in. Get innow.”
She looked shell-shocked, her eyes wide. She was far more confused than afraid, and I needed her to understand what the hell she’d just seen. I needed her to understand why we were running.
“I couldn’t save her,” she said, her voice monotone, deceptively void of emotion. “I couldn’t...I wanted to…”
“Save who?” I pressed the gas pedal to the floor the moment we were off the dirt road. I felt far too tense to be driving. It wasn’t fast enough. God, thesmellin those woods. Rot and brine, blood and terror — a deep and ancient terror, the kind of thing that built up over centuries, the residue of hundreds andthousandsof suffering souls.
“Victoria,” she said. “Jeremiah killed her. He made the second sacrifice, Zane.”
I slammed my palm against the steering wheel, wincing when it cracked beneath the impact. The God was too close to getting out, far too close.
Juniper’s eyes were on me, wide and uncertain. “What the hell happened back there? What happened to Jeremiah? Did you see it?”
