Page 65 of Oh, Sacred Dark
Roman flinched as the woman suddenly spoke.
“My sister was a sub too,” she said, voice low and lethal. “You’re both subs, and you didn’t give a shit, did you?”
Roman turned his head into the car seat. “They killed a lot of subs. I think my father hated them.”
“They?You meanyou.”
Roman didn’t have a response. “What…what was she like?” he asked instead.
“And how is that any of your fucking business?” she spat.
“I…it’s not, you’re right. I guess I just wondered.” Roman fell into the rabbit hole of memory, his body fading away from him. “When they first…at the beginning, I tried to pretend the people sacrificed weren’t actuallypeople. That it wasn’t real. That I wasn’t actually there. But I realised that I was the last person to reallyseethem. So I did. And I wondered who they’d been before…that.”
“That’s not gonna work on me. You can talk like you weren’t part of it all you want, but Iknow.”
Roman grabbed his head. It felt heavy. Hazy. “Sorry. I know I didn’t do enough. I was too late, and I was too scared, and I didn’t…”
If there was a response, Roman didn’t hear it, his mind fracturing away.
There had been several different ritual grounds—some in the darkness, some where they could be exposed to the light of the moon. Roman’s least favourite—because that had been his life, filled with the rankings of terrible things—had been in Jeremy’s basement. They’d drag someone down there, awake and screaming, or vegging, or caught in a terrified silence. Some tried to cast magic, others didn’t have a skill they could use.
It didn’t matter either way. Everybody in that room except Roman was stronger and more ruthless.
The person would be shackled to the stone altar, already stained brown by past corpses. The killings were slow, going slice by slice. The scent of blood was something Roman would never forget. The way screams could echo even in open spaces.
Even then, the worst of all had been the magic. It felt alive, a hunter, a demon, piercing into the caster’s blood and rejoicing there.
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Roman said.
“I’m not fucking stopping,” the woman replied.
It had been a while, but Roman suddenly recognised the feeling.
He was headed for a Drop.
Roman tried to be quiet. Small. He was scared of the pain that was to come, though, the hollowness, the nothingness he was about to become.
The woman was saying something. She sounded mad. It made the shaking worse.
“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’ll try to be better,” Roman begged.
The next moment, he was gone.
*****
Coming up from a Drop was like dipping into hot water after being cold for too long, the change so quick and brutal there was little time for relief. Roman made a pained noise and then a surprised one as somebody twitched beside him.
“What the fuck was that?” a female voice demanded, and all at once, Roman realised where he was, and with whom.
He was untied, at least, on the back seat of the car, propped against the window. He straightened even as he felt his skin shrink, a desperate attempt to get away from the Dom barking at him. “Sorry.”
He’d tried not to think about what she would do to him after he told her where her sister was—or until he failed to do so. It would be better if it was just death, but there were nightmares far greater than that.
“What was that?” the woman repeated. “You had a, like…seizure or, I don’t know. I swear to the moon and back, if you were faking that…”
“It was just a Drop. Sorry.”
That stunned the woman into silence. “I took you a day and a half ago—you’re not Dropping already. That’s ridiculous.”
