The Initials | Nanowrimo 2023

11| Conquering The Flame

But he has always been obsessed with her, and she was just the right kind of messed up to keep letting him in.

"My son was stupid for getting you involved. I'd warned him we weren't ready to move things forward."

Dinah hides behind her wavy shoulder length hair, cursing under her breath once she notices he's locked the doors, preventing her from leaping out. "How many did you lose?"

"The demon took out fifteen and then we had to get rid of the witness he left us."

"You had to or you chose to?" She inquires, understanding the truth would remain unsaid, his silence enough of an answer for her. "Where are you taking me?"

"To the crime scene."

"Won't the station be swarming all over it by now?"

"Sometimes it's like you forget who you're talking to." Cillian utters, making a sharp turn before deciding to play music on the radio loud enough to silence her.

At the cemetery they find only remnants of the horror that occured the night before, grimacing at the foul stench.

"What made these?" Dinah asks, bending down to inspect a paw print engraved into the ground, placing her hands to compare the size only to be astonished to discover it is almost twice the size.

"The Elders believe it to be a demon hound of some kind. The scriptures speak of many such creatures but it's their only working theory."

"A hound couldn't have put your son up on a cross. Not with these paws. So either he's a shifter or he had help."

Cillian's eyes sparkle as he peers down at Dinah, producing a tablet that he offers her to look at. "We have these pictures of a man stealing a bike not that far from here but we're unsure if he's the hound or something else."

"It's not him." she announced after swiping through only a few frames.

"Okay...why?"

"If he was the shifter he'd have no clothes on at all."

"What if he stole the pants? We found one of the bodies with no clothes on."

"Do you really think he would have bothered stealing their jewellery too? I mean look at the rings on his fingers...no, that's not the guy."

Before they can argue further, a member of the Church interrupts to inform Cillian that the Elders are ready for him.

Dinah senses the change in him but says nothing as she follows him into the creepy looking church, grateful to be out from the cold and away from the graveyard.

She steps around the scorch mark burned into the ground and takes a seat in one of the pews near the back, watching from afar as Cillian approaches the circle of cloaked figures draped in red.

During her life Dinah has stumbled across many aspects of the supernatural world, all of it ranging from creepy to deadly, but none frightened her more than these men and women hiding behind faceless white masks.

They strip Cillian of his coat, allowing him to roll up the sleeves of his shirt before placing a black cloak over his shoulders.

The red cloaks surround a large basin of holy water that was hauled in this morning, the water now stained red with the blood of the innocent.

"Let us begin."

Dinah feels a cold chill run through her as the light coming through the stained glass windows fade until the room is shrouded in darkness.

She climbs to her feet once their harmonic chanting summons a beam of light from the ceiling, flinching as the faces of the saints in the windows crack one by one and the flames of surrounding candles are snuffed out by another invisible force.

From the sky, a single black feather drifts gracefully towards the red cloaks, swaying from side to side as gravity pulls it towards the basin.

When the feathers lands upon the holy water it sends out tiny ripples, barely grazing the surface at all.

Everything stills and the surface of the pool remains unblemished until a second wave emanates from the feather.

Then a third, and a fourth, tripling in intensity until the big one that knocks Dinah and the red cloaks off their feet.

Cillian Black remains the last man standing, gradually opening his hands out in a wide fan shape, looking down at the now bubbling basin of blood and water with idle curiosity.

He offers his hand to the darkness and from the depths a hand caked in thick layers of blood emerges from the basin, quivering as it crawls its way back to the living.

The beam of light that was once white is now tainted red.

And similarly, so too does the vessel emerge, now tainted by dark materials, renewed to a world that caused her so much pain.

The scarlet girl that rises simply crumbles to the ground, having forgotten how to use her legs after being dead for some time.

Cillian calls her name but even the language that she once spoke has been lost upon her. It comes at her as noise, vibrations that feel familiar and yet unattainable as the screams of the damned are all her brain remembers.

Eventually the screams quieten down and she is left shivering in a puddle of blood, her knowledge of the world slowly returning to her.

She looks up at Cillian when she hears her name a second time, glaring through her eyelashes as more cursed feathers fall from the sky.

"Freya of Fury, you are bound to my will!"