Page 74 of Daddy's Muse
Pappa.
My stomach bottomed out.
He moved with such calm certainty it scared me worse than if he’d been raging. In his hand gleamed the flash of a knife, angled down, like he was about to drive it into Bryan’s back.
My vision tunneled as the world tilted, sounds warping and fading until all I could hear was my own pulse screaming in my ears.
“No…” The word rasped out before I could stop it, too soft to be heard.
The edges of everything went dark. I staggered back from the shed, knees buckling. Butter tumbled against my chest, but I curled around her, clutching tight, making sure she was safe and not crushed beneath me as I hit the ground.
My last thought before the darkness consumed me was one of relief. Relief that at least Butter was okay.
A loud creak sounded from the door of the shed flying open, heavy footfalls racing towards me.
“Colby?!” Pappa’s voice was sharp and panicked. “Colby! Baby, can you hear me? Faen,faen!”
And then nothing.
19
Bodin
Bryan’s muffled screams faded into background noise, like the cawing of distant crows. My focus was on the arrangement, the order, the care that something like this demanded.
The circle was already chalked onto the shed floor, perfect and precise. Each line was measured three times before I was satisfied with the result. At the points of the circle, I set the bones one by one. Eight trophies from past kills, all laid around the perimeter. They were clean now, beautiful, polished down to their essence through hours of scrubbing with my own hands. Soon, Bryan would be joining them.
Not as a bone, but as somethingmore.
And at the center of the circle would be the guest of honor: Colby.
That’s where he belonged. He would not be bound or broken, but cherished. He would be the axis around which this sacrifice turned. The books I had studied, the fragments of ritual passed down through fractured sources, all agreed on one thing—purity mattered.
Virginity.
The act of consummation not as defilement, but as binding, the joining of two bodies into one current that the sacrifice would anchor.
Colby wouldn’t understand any of this, but he didn’t need to. I wouldn’t let him carry the weight of it. All he would feel was warmth and closeness, the caress of my hands, and the haze of something sweet that would let him drift into the rhythm without fear. I had already set aside what I needed—powdered extract from a flower that dulled fear and softened pain. Dissolved into water, it would leave him pliant, eyes heavy, with his lips parted.
The knife in my hand cut another careful line across Bryan’s back, carving wings that would never lift him anywhere. His cries rattled the boards, but I only thought of Colby—small and luminous in his innocence, curled up on the blanket in our cabin, cradling that rabbit against his chest.
That light in him would be preserved here, bound to me not just by my word, not just by my need, but by something older, darker,permanent.
The sacrifice of nine souls and the virgin’s bloodless offering.
Bryan was nothing but fuel—a tool. His death would purchase eternity.
When the time came, I would carry a blindfolded Colby into the circle, lay him down gently, and pour the doctored water down his throat. I would whisper to him until his body relaxed, until he gave himself to me the way he always did. And then I would claim him, in flesh and spirit, while Bryan’s broken bodybled out into the circle, sealing us in ways Colby could never walk away from.
He would be bound to me through the nine realms.
And that needed to happen today, because I wouldn’t survive him trying to leave me. He had been so pale when I found him in the dirt outside earlier.
For one terrible instant, I even thought his heart had given out, that the sight of me and Bryan together had broken something inside him that I couldn’t repair. I’d dropped to my knees, hands shaking as I pressed two fingers hard against his throat, then again against his wrist. I had to triple-check his pulse before my own began to steady.
The relief had been so violent that it nearly made me sick. I gathered him into my arms, clutching him to me with a desperation that bordered on savage. Butter wriggled against us, soft and harmless, and I wanted to tear the world apart for letting either of them feel fear.
Even if I had been the one to scare them.
