Devil's Track by Julie Hiner

Author:Julie Hiner [Julie Hiner]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-04-13T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 37

It Continues

The walls of the basement swelled with the heat from the ring of candles. The flames flickered, their small orange glows melding in a single red-yellow haze. The basement seethed with a sinister vibe.

Viviana clenched her jaw and willed herself to face the human hanging in the centre of the sacrificial circle. The second purge of the cycle. The cycle seemed to be driven by her sister’s energy. For a brief time between kills, she’d be on some sort of high, drowning herself in hallucinations, drinking her cacao wine and reliving the purging ceremony. After the second kill, the high intensified, morphing Damaris into the dominant woman she was, and beyond. She became savage and beastly. Something other than a woman. What would happen after the third kill?

Viviana shuddered. She couldn’t think about that right now. She had to focus on the current kill. She opened her eyes and looked at the man hanging from his bound wrists in the centre of the circle. Blood trickled down his arms, excreting from the open wounds raggedly cut into his wrists from the tight binds holding him captive. Sweat poured down his face, infused with heat from the flames and fear from his pores. His cries suffocated in the cloth shoved into his mouth and tied around his head.

She was supposed to believe this man was the spawn of Satan, purging people wrongly from the earth. The resemblance was there, to the man who had ignited the little house at the edge of the forest that she loved so much. The same age. The same build. The same features. Yet, Viviana couldn’t help but question the rightness of forcing someone else’s actions onto another human shell that looked the same from the outside. She couldn’t help but be pulled by the energy within, the higher spirits whispering in her ears, guiding her away from this.

“It is time,” Damaris’ deep voice boomed from the bottom of the staircase.

Viviana jumped. She spun around and looked at her sister. A yellow-brown tinge bled over the whites of her eyes. A sour odour seethed from the folds of her cloak. Damaris was the darker version of herself at this moment, as she always was during a kill. Damaris took on this demeanour. It wasn’t simply a mood change. It was more than that. It was as if Damaris was a different being.

Damaris walked over and stared at the sweating man as she pulled a glove over each of her hands. “It is time. For your purge. You are the one, the man, who unrightly took our coven leaders. It is your turn to be removed.” She walked over to the fireplace on the far wall, glowing with an orange-red heat. She picked up a long metal rod, the emblem of Satan moulded in a smooth circle of metal at the end. The brand that Dami had fashioned herself from an ancient looking pendant that she’d brought home one day. She had buzzed with excitement, telling Viviana that the pendant was titanium, and the key to purifying the earth.

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