Faith of the Divine Inferno by Leslie Thompson (e textbook reader txt) 📕

It was time to stop going along and resolve the situation once and for all. If it meant that I had to leave the corpses piled up in my wake then so be it. In the decades since law enforcement and communication became more efficient, I’ve had to learn to be a lot less blood-thirsty in order to avoid detection. The cops were too good at their jobs and it would only be a matter of time before they arrested me and took me away.
There was a time when I would have taken out Ryerson and his entire congregation the second they annoyed me without losing a moment’s sleep over it. And with the body count I was planning on, I would get the death penalty for sure. Wouldn’t it be a hoot that I didn’t die when they stuck the needle in me? I wonder if a second attempt to carry out my death sentence was double jeopardy.
Philosophical legal questions aside, I knew that if I remained passive things would not go my way. I would either end up dead (I admit that possibility felt odd to me) or a gooey mess for some unsuspecting coroner to poke at. It was time to take matters into my own hands and the consequences be damned. After two thousand and five hundred years I know all the best ways to do it. Since murder is easy, and mass murder only slightly more complicated, I decided that there was no time like the present to get started.
I didn’t pay much attention to what was going on after Charlotte let me up off of the floor. My mind was too wrapped up in the horrifying thought of my father coming back from the dead to get me to care what was happening around me. I was vaguely aware of walking through cold patches of air and the odd sensation of something oily caressing my skin. I smelled something indescribably foul, but I was standing in a slum, and such smells are common in places like these. I convinced myself that Charlotte was a fraud and that these little oddities were some of her tricks and kept going. Some days, I’m just that damn thick.
Time became weird and the sunlight turned on the high beams and stabbed at my eyeballs as we reached the bottom of the stairs. I flinched and squinted while the world twisted and spun right. Unbalanced, I grabbed a nearby wall to steady myself while Charlotte called frantically to Baja from her apartment door. I turned to see what had her so worked up and I felt something punch my chest. Gasping for breath, I lifted my hand to the spot where I had been hit, and my fingers came away coated in blood.
Shocked, I was dumbly aware that Kootch and Baja were bellowing, Shaw was yelling my name, and Charlotte was screaming frantically in terror. Popping explosions rang in my ears as bullets flew through the air like a swarm of yellow jackets after the nest had been kicked. There were men dressed in yellow swarmed around me with guns held out in front of them. The barrels flashed with bursts of bright light and pieces of wood burst into the air.
Around the chaos and pain, I finally reached my breaking point and my mind snapped. This was the third time that I had been shot in a week, I had lost count of how many times I had been kidnapped, and I was tired of having to wrap my mind around things that should have stayed in the realms of myth and legend. My mind broke in a haze of red and black that drove all thoughts but murder from my head, leaving me little more than a rabid animal.
I slammed my stiffened fingers into the apple of one man’s throat, felt the small bulge pop, and the man went down. I turned to the next with my teeth bared in a snarl, grabbed his jaw in both hands and broke it with a twist of my palms. Something slammed into me and I hit the wall hard enough to rattle my teeth and drive out what little air I still had in my lungs. I became aware of the pain rushing through my body and the blood filling my mouth as I struggled back onto my feet.
Heedless of my injuries, I screamed my fury and leaped back into the fray, or at least I would have if my legs hadn’t folded underneath me. I slid down the wall and landed hard on my butt. The gunfire ended abruptly, and other than the terrible shrieks of Kootch dying somewhere nearby, everything was silent. A gun pressed painfully under my chin tilting my head up at an awkward angle. Spitting with fury and blood I looked into the face of the one holding it. Of all the crazy fucking bitches in the world, Mabel Fortuno had gotten the drop on me. Gods, my day could not have sucked more.
Gone was the fresh faced innocence, replaced by cold cruelty that twisted her beauty into something ugly. Around her slender throat was a thin gold chain with a damned opal hanging from it. I bellowed my rage at her, promising that no matter what she did, this moment would end with her dismembered.
“You are the loudest fucking bitch I have ever met,” Mabel snarled. She shifted the angle of the gun and pulled the trigger. The bullet severed my windpipe and smashed my spinal cord and rendered me less than useless.
Nothing snaps a woman out of a rabid, homicidal frenzy like being simultaneously paralyzed and suffocated. I flopped uselessly as my neurological signals went haywire from trauma and my lungs wondered why I wasn’t drawing in oxygen. I could only stay slumped against the wall with blood spilling down my front to pool on the cement beneath me. I saw Kootch lying silently on the pavement, his chest rising and falling in frantic beats as the last of his life bled away. I could see an enormous writhing leg that belonged to Baja sticking out near his partner. Shaw had been near the other two but there was no sign of him. I wanted to look around to see if he was okay, but the paralysis lingered and I could only stare straight ahead as Mabel crouched down next to me so she could gloat.
“I cannot believe you didn’t see this coming,” she laughed. “Did you really think that I would ever betray a man as great as Reverend Ryerson? For shit’s sake Rebecca, you’re almost three thousand years old! I would have thought you would have learned how to read people by now. But the Reverend told me that you are stupid and arrogant, and that you would be easy to catch. I thought that maybe this time he had made a serious misjudgment, but he was perfectly right as always.” Mabel cast a careless glance at the dead men around her and shrugged. “Well, maybe you weren’t that easy to corner, but still you really should have seen this coming. Who did you think you were dealing with?”
I had thought that I was dealing with lunatics, and contrary to the claims made in myth and legend, crazy people are notoriously short sighted and that makes them stupid. I wished I could tell her so to stall her long enough for the cops to get here, but my vocal chords had been destroyed by the bullet.
I never heard a whisper of a siren as the surviving men picked me up off of the concrete by my arms and legs and chucked me into a white van and I didn’t have time to wonder about it. My head bounced like a basketball off of a metal floor covered in thin carpet, sending agony through my head and neck. The last thing I saw before I sank into blissful unconsciousness was Mabel laughing triumphantly. This wasn’t my week.
I came back as I was grasped by one of my ankles and pulled toward the open van door. I swallowed and found that my throat was whole and functional once more, and that I could feel the course texture of the carpet along the length of my body. For the first time I was truly thankful that Bres had geased me. If all of this had happened a month ago, I would still be paralyzed and helpless for weeks or even months after what Mabel had done to me. My captors were unaware of my recovery, and I would use it to my advantage.
As the hands grasped my hips, I flipped onto my back and kicked out as hard as I could and connected with a body. The man grunted and pulled back in shock while the rest of the people around him called out in alarm. Desperate to escape while the getting was good, I launched myself into the light and hoped for the best.
I immediately encountered a man with his arms spread wide to grab me, and I punched him in the face. I felt a crunch when I broke his nose and I turned for the clear opening I saw out of the corner of my eye. My escape was quickly thwarted by a woman blocking my path, but I got rid of her with a kick to her gut. I jumped over her curled body and I made my escape.
I was on a short, broad driveway that branched off into two narrow roads that went in opposite directions. Not knowing where I was or where I could find safety, I picked a direction and ran for it. What I had hoped was a road to homes and businesses turned out to be a paved path through a large cemetery. I cussed and swore at my bad luck as I searched a thick line of trees to my left, unaware that there was condos, a grocery store, and a government office on the other side. To my right was nothing but a retention pond and centuries old gravestones that were stained and faded from age and stretched for acres to my right.
Mabel screeched like a harpy for my recapture over the pounding of feet bearing down on me. I dared not to look back to see who was chasing me, and forced more speed into my legs and put all my effort into my burning muscles. Alas, it was not enough. I was tackled from behind by an enormous man and I made a bruising face plant onto the cruel pavement. Driven witless, I lay there while he straddled me and twisted my arms behind my back and held me in a powerful grip. The others caught up seconds later with Mabel berating them violently, calling the people all manner of foul names. A rope bound my wrists and then ankles so tightly that it dug painfully into my skin and cut off the circulation to my hands and feet. Then to add insult to injury, they bent me backwards so that my ankles and wrists could be tied together in a posture that arched my back painfully.
My joints threatened to dislocate as I was lifted carelessly and carried back the way I had come. Praying that there was someone nearby to hear, I screamed fire at the top of my lungs until Mabel produced a rag and jammed it