AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The Deacon was shaped differently from the men she usually desired. The opposite, in every way, of her first love, Gregory, and of the man with the scarred face.
The Deacon could fill a door frame. His hands were large, his thick fingers wrapped around his drink when he sipped his water in the late mornings. He always came in close to when she was ending her shift. He took a seat by the window—as far away from the kitchen as one could get—and he looked out that window. She wondered what he was watching, what he could see with his blind eyes. What heheard.
And some days, she wondered what his hands would feel like around her neck. She thought she’d like it.
Valerie had been drawn, in the past, to tender looking men. Dark eyes and lips more pink than most. Slender fingers and soft voices, though the words they often enticed her with were lies.
The Deacon’s voice was old, deep, and she felt it everywhere.
It commanded.
How did a beautiful girl like Valerie end up a virgin at twenty-six? In high school she was the redheaded, brace-faced younger sister of the most popular girl in school. She only wanted one boy, and he was taken from her.
In the earliest days of her life on the ranch, Valerie thought she had fallen in love for real. She’d let the scar-faced man map her body, let him play her like an instrument. She made sounds. She hummed. She wanted to give in all the way. But the voice in her head wouldn’t allow it. The dirty reminder. The planted seed. Partly because of Serendipity’s words. Mostly because of her deformity.
The scar-faced man had found it, but he had not cast her out, and he didn’t make her leave the ranch. He’d kept her, but he never touched her again.
Valerie was good at bottling. Stewing until the anger inside spread to her bones, her fingertips, her toes. Until she became rage …
Saving it up.
Exploding on contact.
She used to steal Serendipity’s toys, her things. She would break them, burn them, or throw them in the trash. She never caught Valerie, but that wasn’t the point. She wanted her sister to wonder. To search in vain. She wanted some sort of power over her.
Serendipity liked to steal for show. To show you what she had taken. To make your changed face a pleasure party for her eyes. Instant gratification. Not Valerie. She liked to watch the insanity grow slowly. She liked to watch the search grow and swell. The warmth that simple pleasure gave her sat well in the pit of her belly. She never let her desires show.
As she sat alone in the front seat, Valerie outlined the Deacon’s figure in her mind; her tongue traced her incisors, and she blinked twice, wondering if a man who could not see could love a woman like her. He couldn’t see her marred parts.
Couldn’t see her ugly.
She jumped when Nicholas knocked on the passenger window, pulling her from the sighs that echoed in her head.
“I’m coming,” she said, briefly wondering what those words would sound like in a dark room, alone with the Deacon.
SIX
They’re coming.
It was ritualistic—a loop. And the time had come to feed, to find rebirth in the town. Deacon Rex crept down the stairs in Steele Mansion and made his way to the elevator. When his bare feet stepped in, he was fully dressed. Grey. White. Heavy. Stifling as he traveled down to the deep parts no one knew about.
The house on the hill was old but the caves were older.
The water rushed by, calming as it entered the lake. The cave opening that fed to the water was obscured, and no one dared float by.
The locals called the cave haunted; a feeling of illness came over them when they considered fishing the waters. They knew better, as their fathers before they did.
Don’t go far upstream in Casador Lake.
The mouth of hell sits there.
They weren’t wrong.
When The Deacon exited the elevator, he stripped his coat, his white button up, and his pants. Clothes were for the mortals …
For the animals he walked among and pretended to fit in with.
Here he did not need to hide, though he had nothing to fear from the townspeople. Or any people, for that matter.
