Sacrifice: Dylan Hart, #3

By R.M. Gilmore

What would you do to save someone you love? Would you die for them? Kill?

When her best friend, Tatum Price, doesn't return from New Orleans, Dylan returns, this time with backup.

But what she doesn't know, evil has descended upon her. Its ripe with death. And thirsty for her undoing.

• Language: English
• Publisher: R.M. Gilmore
• Release date: Oct 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215311158

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Sacrifice by R.M. Gilmore

© 2022 R.M. Gilmore All rights reserved.

Anniversary Edition

No part of this book may be reproduced in any written, electronic, recording, or photocopying without written permission of the publisher or author. The exception would be in the case of brief quotations embodied in the critical articles or reviews and pages where permission is specifically granted by the publisher or author.

Although every precaution has been taken to verify the accuracy of the information contained herein, the author and publisher assume no responsibility for any errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for damages that may result from the use of information contained within.

Edited by Becky Johnson

Design by RMGraphX

Mac Gille Mhur Publishing

the others from R.M. Gilmore

Dylan Hart

The Scene

Endless Night

Sacrifice

Forsaken

Bound

White Walls

Prudence Penderhaus

17 Marigold Lane

19 Marigold Lane

21 Marigold Lane

And the Creek Don’t Rise

Table of Contents

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Cheers to the hooker who inspired our tragic end..

Out of the eater,

something to eat;

out of the strong,

something sweet.

-Samson’s Riddle, Book of Judges

One

What in the fuck? I screeched as wood splinters from my front door pelted my shoulders, stinging when they collided with my tight knuckles. Pressure from some unseen force had shattered the shitty old thing, leaving in its wake, a gaping hole that led to the blackness of my porch.

I held my pistol and aimed steadily at the black hole in front of me, the steel warming under the heat of my skin. Nothing came. The phantom power that had busted my door made no attempt to make itself known. Reluctantly, I lowered my aim downward at my lush carpet.

My gut churned with nervous vomit, but I released my breath and allowed my shoulders to relax, even if only just a bit.

From the darkness on the other side of the hole, a streak of white moved quickly, then nothing. My eyes trained on the hole in the door, I waited. Again, lightning fast movement of white through the black, but nothing more. My stomach roiled again. I swallowed it back and focused on the blackness outside. Something was coming for me. It wasn’t a matter of if anymore. It was a matter of what.

A stark white leg stepped through the human-sized gape in my door. My eyes went wide, but I refused to let the fear overtake me. I steadied my trembling hands and aimed the barrel of my gun in the dead center of the hole in the door. Fuck, through the hole and past the hole, at whatever was attached to the ghostly white limb. The leg pulled the lower half of a body through the hole, exposing the rotten flesh of an inner thigh and pubic area.

Fight or flight, bitch.

I gagged, swallowed it, and forced myself to stay where I was. Gun trained. Fight engaged. The torso followed, bare boobs smushed together between bound arms. I knew what was coming then.

Oh, fuck this shit.

Without a further thought, my finger squeezed almost subconsciously. The recoil sent shockwaves up my forearms. Fear had blocked my brain from hearing the shot, but the telltale ringing in my ears told me the gun had fired without a hitch.

Standing in my living room, a naked girl oozed rusty dead blood from the hole I'd put in her belly. The nub of a neck left on her shoulders was dull with death and decay. I waited for the walking corpse to fall dead, or dead-like, leaking decayed fluids from her wounds. It never happened. Her feet shuffled forward toward me in an awkward, jerking cadence. Hands, wrapped in her black hair, reached in my direction. My ass left the edge of the couch as quickly as I could force it, and I stumbled away toward my room.

What? I screamed at the corpse. What am I supposed to do?" Spit flew from my mouth with little control as the words came.

Movement at the door. A leg. A torso. Bound hands and boobs. Another headless body came through my door and into my safe space.

Stop! Please! I wanted to run. I wanted to hide, to leave and never come back.

You have nowhere to go, idiot. Out that hole the dead things were coming through? I don’t fucking think so.

Gun in hand, I pointed at the thing in front of me. I heard the shot this time. It rang in my head like a marble bounced on glass. Another wound oozed, but nothing hindered the endless shuffle of dead feet toward me. At the door, a leg, torso, boobs, hands, matte blood atop white shoulders. A third corpse breached the hole in the door.

Why? Why are you here? I helped you! I killed the men who killed you! I screamed desperately at the dead girls in my living room. Didn't matter. Nothing mattered.

A leg, a torso, boobs, and hands. Again. Again. Again. Seven decaying headless bodies shuffled through my living room. My feet moved back farther and farther until my back slammed into the jamb of my bedroom door.

What do you want? I pleaded with the headless things. They couldn't answer me. How? Chopping a bitch’s head off proved better than duct tape.

Fourteen hands reached out for me. Seven muted red stumps met my eyes where seven faces should’ve been.

Eight. There should be eight.

At the door, a leg, a torso, boobs, and hands bound with purple strands of hair appeared. Regina's living corpse came into my home uninvited. Eight dead things inched closer and closer. Each decaying at a different rate. Each dead in her own time line. My heart felt like it'd flip out through my open mouth if I hadn't already been swallowing back bile compulsively.

Stop!

Sliding backward, I maneuvered into the sanctity of my room. My trembling hands made music with cold steel and Azelie’s rosary, which was still wrapped around my palm. My front door didn't stop them. Why I thought the cheap hollow core would save me, I didn’t know. I just wanted the fuck away from all those dead girls.

I slammed my bedroom door shut, locked the knob, and backed deeper into my darkened room. Never taking my eyes from my door, I inched backward until the backs of my knees hit the edge of my bed. My butt automatically sat, giving my shaking legs a much-needed break.

As my breath and heartbeat quieted enough to hear something else, anything else, the whimpers began to come in clearer. Disgusting images of gurgling, bloody stumps trying to form sounds ran through my head. Which terrified me more than the bodies as a whole, merely because they had no natural source. Things with no heads should make no vocal sounds, theoretically. I swallowed hard and realized they were my whimpers. My short sobs. My fear seeping out.

The noises from my throat stopped, and with it my breath when my bedroom door began to rattle. The dead things on the other side were trying to get in.

No. My soft, pitiful voice caused me to wince with anger, but it didn't change anything. My fear was too strong. I was just too terrified for the rage to build in me. Stop. Whining sobs filled the abyss that was my lonely, dark room.

My legs pulled me from the edge of my bed and backed me against the wall farther away from the rattling door without so much as a casual thought from the thinking end of me.

No more, I sobbed. Please. No more. My hands trembled, gun rattling in my clutch. My back flush with the cool wall, my legs buckled. I slid to my ass on the floor. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry they did that to you.

"The rattling persisted, and I thought then of Azelie. She'd done this to these women. These dead girls at my door were here because of her. Dead because of her. She'd killed them with her greed and refused to let them rest in her quest to punish me for inadvertently foiling her plans. For spilling blood that didn’t belong to me.

Fuck that cunt.

Fear remained, but I fought it with all my might. I'm sorry they killed you! I yelled through my door to the things with no ears with which to hear my cries. My voice still shook but the sobs were gone. But I'm not sorry I killed those boys. The door shook fiercely with my revelation. And I won't be sorry when I kill that voodoo bitch either!

The door shook, and the knob creaked under pressure from something on the other side. Azelie sent the dead things for me. She sent the bodies of eight dead girls to relentlessly crawl through my front door. They weren’t going to stop. It was never going to stop.

I took a deep, ragged breath and lifted my gun.

It's never going to stop.

BANG!

Two

Cyrus’s thick body burst through the door.

Tears trailed down my face carrying with them smears of spent black makeup. I stood in an instant and let out a loud, frustrated grunt at the sight of him. He’d left me. He’d fallen victim to that woman and he’d left me to come home alone. To face the madness by myself.

In two long strides, he moved from the door of my room to my position at the far wall. A guttural scream escaped my lips again, and I slammed my fists into his chest. The butt of my pistol, still clutched in my closed fist, assisted the abuse. Sobs and screams spewed at random intervals as I wailed against his thick chest. He grabbed my arms with thick, strong hands and I fought in vain against them.

How dare he touch me? Evil was at my heels, in my home, in my head and he wasn’t there to save me. I ripped my arms from his grasp. My left arm reared back and released a stinging slap to the side of his face that reverberated a wet meat sound through the darkened apartment and made my stomach churn. A gasp left my throat, and another slap followed it. Cyrus grabbed my arms again and held tight. I screamed again and pressed my lips against his. It was a ridiculously instinctual motion likely imbedded in my subconscious by hordes of action flicks. The kind where the guy gets the girl only because he saved her life in some over-the-top fashion.

His hands moved to snatch me up by the ponytail and hold me in my position. Passion and heat rolled between us. Sobs tickled my throat and made small sounds as my lips touched his. I didn’t know what compelled me to kiss him in the first place, but the inner turmoil it created nearly tore me from limb to limb. Of all the times to have a legitimate first kiss, headless dead bitch party probably wasn’t the best.

Regardless of how wholly amazing kissing Cyrus Atossa was, I shoved his warm body away from mine. Gun still in hand, I had half a mind to kill us both and end the madness. Suicide wasn’t my thing, so the thought disappeared quickly.

Whe… wh… how? I muttered, tears drying into crusty black lines on my cheeks.

Crying had always been a last resort, like after murder last resort, but things changed drastically when haunted by living dead girls. Seeing help, no matter what form, filled my soul with the need to be coddled and protected more than any other time in my life. Honestly, Cyrus was the last person I expected to come riding in on his white horse.

How…? I left it at that. My head refused to form any other words. One word was all I needed.

There will never be enough hours in a day to explain to you ‘how.’ Even if we had the time, it’s not important right now. What you need to know is, Azelie d’Entremonte lives and will continue to torment you until she gets what she wants. He said this so matter-of-factly, I had no choice but to take it all as truth and decide what the fuck to do with it.

What happened to you? For some ridiculous reason, the well-being of Cyrus outweighed my primal need for survival. I should’ve kicked myself square in the vagina at that moment, but all I could manage was not to throw myself at his mercy.

His eyes slid down, looking anywhere but at me. I really am not sure. Whether he was embarrassed about his failure to protect me, and himself in the process, or he was full of shit, I had no clue, but his poker face sucked.

His hands gripped my shoulders, squeezing in a seemingly unconscious cadence. His eyes didn’t really focus on anything, just stared out into nothingness behind me. For all I knew, behind me was literal nothingness. A void I would be sucked into if I didn’t hang on tight. My heart still raced from the absolute horror I’d faced only moments before. I searched the area behind Cyrus. Searching for more dead things. There was nothing. No cause for my hysteria. Only the cold—figuratively, of course—steel still clutched in my grasp was left as a reminder of the horror. The seconds passed, and my brain began wrapping itself around the situation I’d fallen in ass first.

Cyrus? His eyes shifted quickly in my direction and met my stare. What do I do? There was nothing else to say than that. Nothing else really came to mind anyway. Self-preservation was beginning to win the fight between head and loins.

Leave the heart out of this equation; there is no room for it here.

The green flecks that interlaced his irises moved as his pupils dilated out and back in again. He was staring into my eyes, but I swore he wasn’t seeing one inch of me. His focus was suddenly trained on something I couldn’t see. Something I tried desperately to figure out.

His lips caught me by surprise. I’d been staring directly at him, and I still missed the slight movement of his head before he plowed his mouth into mine. It was lovely but highly unnecessary and at an impractical moment. Also, a bit too desperate for my tastes. It was acceptable when I did it, I was in distress. I didn’t know what I was doing. Honest.

Hypocrite.

My hands pushed gently against his shoulders, not exactly wanting him to stop. When he didn’t budge, I pushed a little harder and tried to talk through his lips pressed on mine. His persistence started to piss me off.

Just as I tensed my arms to shove him away from me, a familiar voice barreled through the room. You have got to be fucking kidding me, it bellowed.

Before I had a second to shove Cyrus away from my face, Mike flew into the room, elbow reared back ready to lay a huge fist into the beautiful face of Cyrus Atossa. I stumbled back just in time to avoid becoming a casualty of war.

Mike landed on top; his massive form made Cyrus look practically petite. He landed blow after blow against his face. The gun hanging from Mike’s hip swung back and forth with each swing. A fear sunk in my gut that I couldn’t fight off.

Stop it, I screamed. Mike didn’t even acknowledge I was there. You fucking idiot. I stomped along my bedroom floor, my footfalls echoing through the building, toward the mass of men in the corner.

Without a second thought, I leaned back for momentum and kicked Mike square in the ribs with the sole of my foot. A grunt escaped the big man, and he toppled to the floor next to Cyrus. I didn’t quite give two shits about either one of them at that point. The possibility of leaving the two of them there as a sacrifice to Azelie crossed my mind. Twice.

What the fuck, Dylan? Mike grumbled from the floor.

I stood over them as they writhed on the floor; Cyrus bleeding from his face once again and Mike rolling around on the floor cursing my name. Just another day in the life of Dylan Hart. Nothing to see here, looky-loos.

What were you thinking? Barging into my house and pummeling someone in my bedroom? My voice was high and squeaky with adrenaline.

"You called me! Mike’s dramatic wailing was about to earn him another kick to the kidney, but he had a point. You scared the shit out of me. I show up— He coughed to add to his bullshit. Your door is busted down. There are bullet holes dotting your living room walls like fucking Morse code, and someone is mauling you in your bedroom. What the fuck did you expect me to do?" He was acting like a dick, but not one thing he said was incorrect.

Fine. I folded my arms across my chest. Are you going to help him? I said, nodding my head toward a bloody Cyrus on the floor. Mike had no business mixed up with monsters and magic, no matter how stupid it all seemed. I’d called him out of desperation and fear, and now it was time for him to kick rocks before something bad happened to him too. Or he locked me up tight in a nuthouse. Both were equally plausible.

Mike scoffed, but pulled himself up onto his knees and crawled toward Cyrus. Hey, get up. Mike’s beefy hand shook Cyrus by the shoulder. I couldn’t believe he was actually listening to me for once. C’mon, guy, get up. I didn’t hit you that damn hard. Cyrus didn’t so much as groan.

Christ, Mike, kill a fucking guy in my apartment why don’t you? That’s all I fucking need right now. Whatever impulse I had to give a shit about Cyrus flew out the window with his inappropriate kissing and subsequent lack of manliness. I reserved the right to change my mind and change it again, especially in times of peril. I was a survivor. It was what I did, and there were prices you paid for that life, like fickle girly bullshit.

He’s not dead. Mike’s face didn’t match his words.

Then wake him up. Look at his damn face Michael, dead or not, that is fucked. My face didn’t match my words either. My voice said I’d survive, but my traitorous face said otherwise, in a wide-eyed sort of way.

Would it really tear you up inside if his pretty little face was mauled up? His eyes narrowed, and he glared at me for a few heartbeats.

Just as I started to consider the idea fully, the man in question gurgled a sloppy noise. Saved by death rattle.

Hey, open your eyes. Mike gripped either side of his face and shook it to get his attention.

Shit, Cyrus spat through clenched teeth. Heavy puffs of air spewed blood from his nostrils and spattered Mike’s white button-up shirt. One eye opened then the other. The muscles in his forearms twinged and flexed with the understandable urge to reach out and choke the life out of Mike.

Mike climbed to his feet and stared down at the lump of a man below him. What the fuck is going on here? he asked, not really directing his question at anyone in particular.

I knew for a damn fact that it was not the best idea to fill Mike in on my recent psychosis. He wasn’t one to necessarily believe in headless dead things and evil witches. Shit, vampires, werewolves, ghosts, any bump-in-the-night beastie you can think of. I didn’t even know if I believed, not one hundred percent. I refused to roll over and accept that everything we had been told was fiction was, in reality, completely and unwaveringly factual. No. Fuck that.

When will you learn, silly girl?

Not wanting Cyrus to spill the magic beans, I glared at him from behind Mike. I understood Mike had the right to know that the other headless girls popping up throughout the U.S. over the last few months had one connection, a deadly priestess with a bone to pick with yours truly. There was no way in hell I’d let him know I was seeing those dead chicks shuffling through my living room. My subsequent lobotomy would leave a nasty scar. Still fairly terrified and pretty certain I was in the thralls of some form of voodoo hex, I knew Cyrus was likely the only person who could steer me in the right direction. Involving Mike at that point in the game would’ve not been a smart move. He’d run off and arrest the bitch and then where would I be? Couldn’t kill a bitch behind bars. I didn’t have those kinds of connections.

Cyrus shifted his ever-swelling eyes from me to Mike, and back again. He was mulling it over, and it looked as though he was making a very wise choice.

I got scared, I blurted out. Someone was following me home and it scared me. That’s all. I put my hand on his thick shoulder, and the memory of his mostly nude dream body popped into my head. Thanks for coming to check on me. Really, I’m fine.

And completely full of shit.

Bullshit. And he knew it. Why are you home so early? Sunday morning sunshine was poking through my ratty old mini blinds. I was home well over twelve hours ahead of schedule. So was Cyrus. I knew how and why I was home but had no clue as to why and how Cyrus was back in California. However, I damn sure was going to find out.

I didn’t like it. I came home. His head turned slowly to look over his shoulder at me. He scrunched his eyebrows together, letting me know he didn’t buy one word I’d said. I am an adult, Michael. I can come and go as often as I please. I was being overly defensive and was beginning to feel a bit absurd. I’d called him for help. I was frantic. I’d shot up my living room, and something busted my front door down; he was a fucking cop; I was getting away with nothing.

Humph, he grunted with pursed lips, still looking at me out of the corner of his eye over his shoulder.

Cyrus lay silent on the floor. The bleeding had stopped, but he still looked like a little bitch huddled on the floor, silent as the day was long, waiting for a woman to give him the go ahead to speak. My evil little heart skipped a beat with delight.

Mike, really, I’m fine.

My door is in a million pieces, and I emptied a clip into headless corpses in my living room, but I’ll be all right.

Without another glance in Cyrus’ direction, he turned his wide body and stomped toward me in one fluid motion. He had the ability to be a badass when he wanted to be; instead of just an ass. His hands gripped my arms in the same place Cyrus had moments prior. The difference in the two grips was startling. One was firm, confident, and hot to the touch. The other familiar, safe, and filled with a need I could never satiate.

"You are a horrible liar, Dylan Hart. Always