Blood Rites

By J.M. McGee

A young women is plagued by her missing past. She seeks to uncover the mystery of her constant nightmares and the journaling that may have been her life. Like all good mysteries, the more she finds out, the further she becomes from the answers.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jan 23, 2012
• ISBN: 9781105460067

Book preview

Blood Rites

Copyright @ 2012 Lulu Press

ISBN 978-1-105-46006-7

All rights reserved. 

Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

First Edition: 2012

The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious.  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

www.jmmcgee.com

Prologue

You can’t do this, The woman whispered into the darkness.  Her voice was hoarse, barely a whisper, but she knew he’d heard.

She squinted up at the cloudless sky as the stars twinkled on their black velvet drop cloth of night.  It was the night of the full moon:  One of the most powerful magic making nights of the moon’s cycle. She knew that the man knew exactly how to manipulate Luna’s power.  It was the night of mischief, he had said over and over again.  A thick fog had risen from the summer’s hot earth.  It cloaked the man and muffled any sound that might intercede between the outside world and them, but it hadn’t moved past the tree line.

She was able to pick his shape out of the dark and mist.  The tall handsome figure readied himself for the sacrifice.  He wore a heavy ceremonial robe colored to match the sky.  To look closer would reveal careless patches of dried blood that sometimes flaked off if its wearer moved too quickly.

An innocent man-child was tied to the rock on the North side of the still, black lake.  She could not see the child’s features, but there was no struggle of consciousness, only the faint rise and fall of breath going and coming.

Yes, I can.  And you know it.  He replied quietly.

I won’t let you!  She pulled in vain at the sleeve of his robe:  A childish plea.  Please, came as just a whisper.

You have no say in this matter.  Go away and leave me to my work.  If you will not help me, at least stop nipping at my heels for a while.  Go entertain some of your little mortal companions.  Easily, he pushed her back into the sand pile yards away.  Her chest has burned where his hand had transferred energy from the earth’s core into her.  It would leave blisters that would be slow to fade into a bruise and slow to fade again into nothing.

The woman groaned and picked herself up off the ground.  She wanted nothing more than to be away from this place.

Darling?  His taunting voice echoed in her human ears.

She turned just far enough to look at him.

Be a good girl, would you, and stay out of trouble.

The boy is innocent, She tried one last time.  He has done nothing to wrong you.

I know.  That’s why I love it.  He paused to savor a secret memory.  You remember what I like.

She grunted with disgust.  Go to hell.  She muttered.

She backed away from the mist’s icy grip and crouched against a tree to watch.  Even though he had verbally offered her release from her duty to watch, there would be a price to pay if she left.  She lived in her own personal hell with him.  Sickened that she must stay and be bound to him in such a way that she would never be permitted to leave.

The robed one laughed.  His deep ringing voice echoed through the thick night.  The ceremony was to begin.

He slowly pulled back the hood, as he looked up to the sky and dared any god to strike him down. He untied the sash and let it fall to the ground with his robe.  Underneath was the naked body of a young man frozen in his prime.  He had no traces of fat, only hard, well-defined muscles.  Her breath caught in her throat as it always did when she saw him.  His eyes were cold like stone:  The irises solid black.  From a distance they could be taken for dark brown, but anyone close enough to see the lack of humanity would shudder.

His hard, lean body quivered with anticipation.  She knew he found no pleasure in just feeding anymore: Hundreds of years of just sucking the life out of a body did nothing to satiate his hunger.  The act of sex wasn’t even fulfilling anymore.  He no longer cared to force himself into some unsuspecting victim before he ripped his, or her throat out.  Like a seasoned drug addict copping his dope, only now did the hunt before the kill bring him satisfaction and complete release.

She knew his game all too well:  This sacrifice, this human on the stone was a prize.  First, hunted from a distance:  He was called out of his home from sleep, fully awakened and then chased through the midnight streets until he was cornered here.  Now he lay again unconscious on the flat rock.  Tonight the stone was for the blood rites, as it had been for centuries.

Master looked up at the trees surrounding the water.  Thousands of giant black birds sat watching in silence, their eyes as black as his.  The branches sagged from the beasts’ weight.  After taking his place at the head of the stone, he began the soft summoning chant.  He danced: skipping, stepping and leaping counter clockwise around his victim.  As his voice crescendoed, shadows of creatures rose up out of the ground like mist.  They were his demons that came only to his call to do his bidding: shadows of tortured souls from hell who gladly fled their burning inferno to feast with this powerful being.  His agents swirled around him.  He grinned like a mad man possessed as the wind made by the ceremony whipped his hair around his face.  His creatures circled the boy as Master did.  They chanted too, raising dark energy for his use.  They channeled all of their power into him, to assist with the kill.  Master’s eyes lit up with energy, like chips of emeralds encased in sweaty immortal flesh, betraying his human mask.

At his point of release the creatures and their keeper gathered around the body and began the feast.

Chapter 1

Rayen woke from the nightmare like many people do:  Her eyes shot open wide and she gasped for breath.  She collapsed back to the pillows and didn’t move again until her heart steadied in her rib cage and her pulse ceased its thundering in her ears.  Even then, she moved slowly. 

The dream had been so real this time.  It did not have the stop-motion effect of a movie with missing frames or the fractured dialogue of voices like the previous dreams had.  This time she was there.  She could taste the spilled blood on the air and smell the brimstone that rose up from the hell-creatures wing tips as they moved.  She’d had the same dream for the twelfth night in a row.  At that point she was beginning to fear it would never go away.  She still couldn’t figure out what it had to do with her; was she the woman in the scene?  The man?  Was this something that had happened, and she was meant to solve its mystery?  Or perhaps something yet to happen that she was supposed to prevent?

There were still no answers to her questions.  The biggest question though, the one she asked herself every second of every day still rested heavy in her thoughts:  Who was she?

Rayen Stowell did not know her own name. 

The first awakening had been the most traumatic.

She awoke in the room knowing that something was wrong; knowing that something was wrong, but little else.

Without willing her body to do so, she backed into the furthest corner away from the giant bay windows. 

Please, God,

Her body trembled as she looked around the sterile room with wild eyes.

Let this be a dream.

Her eyes darted around the room again, trying to place it; trying to place anything.

All there was here was the nightmare.

There were no memories but the dream.

Tabula rasa.

Tears came with the fear.

She pushed her body further back into the corner and turned her head so she could just see the door.

A gentle breeze brushed past her cheek and into nowhere.  She felt her toes tense, bare against the smooth, polished oak floor as she waited for something to come through the door.

Nothing came into get her. 

It was a blessing: There had been enough nightmares in one night to get her for the rest of her life.

After the first night of the dream she had woken here, in the neat and tiny cottage that she was too afraid to stray too far from.  There were no neighboring houses, just the silent trees that would not give up their secrets and the ocean that whispered in a language Rayen herself did not know.

Now every morning was the same.  She woke in the room, dressed in the soft nightgown, arranged like a doll or like a corpse being presented for funeral rites.

She pulled the knife out from under the pillow next to where she slept and looked at it with honest consideration.  Anxiety from the dream and the knife in her hand brought a chill to her skin.  Would it be so hard to do?  Would it hurt?  Would the pain of the amnesia and the nightmare finally end, or would the real nightmare begin? 

It was the last thought that convinced her to put the shining blade down and continue on existing, at least for one more day.

She pushed her hair back from her sweaty forehead.  A simple shower never washed away the feeling of filth that always accompanied her nightmares, but it would help to calm her nerves.

The hot water turned her skin pink, as she stood under the stream motionless and cried softly.  She sobbed, letting the tears swell, feeling powerless to stop the anguish that washed over her.  There was constant fear that there would be nothing to save her from this madness. 

Down in the basement bathroom it was appropriate to wash off the night’s grime.  The bathroom next to her bedroom was too pretty, too clean looking.  Somehow washing in the white tiled room would dirty it.  The nightmare would creep into the grout and stain it.  But down here?  It was more honest, easier to ascend into the fresh air once she was physically free of the sweat she excreted each night as her spirit tossed and turned.

Rayen cried to herself here every morning after she had woken into oblivion.  The second dream had left her stunned and terrified to move:  Petrified.  She had lain in the bed for an hour waiting for the fear to go away.  At least the sacrifice hadn’t been awake...  Then she had stood in the shower for an hour or more, her tears falling as steadily and as hot as the water pelted her from the shower head.

Today she wiped harshly at her cheeks and begged her tears to stop coming.

No more crying.  She swore.

A deep part of her knew it was an empty promise, but the resolve felt good and it was something that hope could spring from.

She looked at her reflection like she was looking at a portrait.  The artist had been most kind: long, thick dark hair, big grey eyes, an aristocratic nose.  She frowned a little.  The features looking back at her meant nothing.  There weren’t any secrets she could pull out of her ears like magic quarters, and there was nothing in her memory she could create herself with.  She tried to imagine what tragedy had befallen her life to make her mind block everything out as it had, but there were no clues.  Her body carried no scars or marks of trauma.  It must have all been up in her head that the damage was done. 

How long did it have to keep being like this?  How much could she endure?  She persistently stood looking at the available assortment of dressing materials.  She felt anxious and uneasy about putting the clothes here on.  They couldn’t possibly be hers?  However, she had to wear something.  Each day she would eventually pull out a wool, full coverage of everything, floor length dress of gray or black.  The color made the most sense to her, and she could hardly stand to look at herself. 

I’ve got to get out, She whispered.  In this house she felt trapped.  Each day was the same as before and before and before.  Sleep did not bring relief, it only brought the nightmares.  Sometimes she thought she could imagine a place better, a time when she knew who she was and what she wanted, but when she chased after that place, it would vanish into nothingness.

Pulling herself out of bed each morning was a chore.  She had little hope that the day would bring any change, yet sleep brought the nightmares and the bed resembled the sleep.  Eventually, the day would inch by and by the time she was ready to crawl back into bed, the nightmare would be clouded from her mind.  She went to sleep each night not remembering what the night would bring until it came.

This can’t possibly be real. Rayen was slumped on the couch facing the wall.  For a vacation home, or a secluded writer’s retreat, this would have been heaven.  For a woman that had no knowledge of her past or identity, it was torture.  Instinctively she looked to where a television would have set, but there was nothing here available except shelves of books written in a script she couldn’t decipher.

It would make the present so much easier if I knew something about my past.  Anything really.  Anything at all would be OK.  Looking out the window didn’t give her any answers either.  And the house?  It refused to tell her anything.

The house was beautiful; it really was.  It was actually quite perfect.  There were no lurking dust-bunnies.  There were no dark corners to hide hobgoblins.  There was also no television, no radio and no entertainment boxes.  Only the books:  The books she couldn’t read.  It was frustrating at first.  She had pulled one down and flipped through the pages and it all looked like gibberish and scribble.  The first one was put back gently.  The second one she couldn’t read either.  It was left on the coffee table.  The third and fourth were similarly abandoned.  Finally she left the living room frustrated and near to tears.  That was the first day she picked up one of the spiral bound notebooks that sat alone at the kitchen table next to the pile of pens.

Rayen sat at the table with the notebook open and watched the page.  She picked up the pen with her right hand and carefully unscrewed the cap.  The pen felt heavy and awkward in her right hand, so she switched it to the other.  Her fingers curled around it comfortably after a little adjusting and she sat posed to write. 

Nothing came. 

She took a deep breath and looked at the page.  Determination screwed her face to a painful grimace.  She clenched her jaw and her grip on the pen tightened.  The room started to shrink around her and she felt her chest tightening.  What was she so afraid of?  There was nothing there but a blank page.  She dropped the pen without returning its cap and pushed the notebook away.  For a moment she looked at the abandoned notebook as it watched her accusingly.

She quickly washed her hands and walked out onto the patio.  She wiped her hands against her skirt as she walked, trying to get the feeling of the paper off her skin.  Escape from the emptiness of the page seemed to be the only option.  Her feet took her away from the house and to the water’s edge.  The slope in the yard was such that she quickly lost sight of the house, and the sound of water breaking on a shore urged her onward.

There was a solitary pier extending out into the water.  A small boat would have no difficulty pulling up and docking.  The water was endless, and there was no body of land to impede its flow.  Nothing but the shore to the left and right of the dock which itself was plain except for its lone tall and slender lamp.  No light came from it now.

Rayen started to think she might like to have pockets to stuff her hands into so they wouldn’t have to hang so idly at her sides.  Crossing them in front of her chest didn’t quite feel right either.

The sky was clear as the sun started to set into the sea.  She was afraid she wouldn’t be able to find her way back to the cottage in the dark.  As she ascended the hill, she looked nervously for it:  How odd would it be if the house weren’t even there?  There were so many strange things that happened here.

Rayen did not notice the stack of notebooks and pile of pens returned to their original position as she walked past the kitchen table.

Escape.

Suddenly it didn’t seem like such a bad idea.  The last two days had passed just as the one before them. She would stare at the notebook, demanding that the words show themselves.  Nothing would come to her but the constriction in her chest.  In a panic, she’d flee to the water’s boarder.  There was no boat moored to the tiny dock.  She couldn’t see anything on the far off mountains beyond the treetops.  However believable it felt here, it was impossible that she was the only one in existence.

Every day felt like it should have been the same day as before.  But then she realized that she couldn’t really remember the day before.  It wasn’t that the