“Drop your sticks and fight us,” one shouted.
“Mmm, nope,” I sang. “I’d much rather see you burn.”
I jabbed, catching the torch on his chest. He howled and staggered away, arms flailing and ripping the singed coat off. The guy tripped into the arms of Fonsie—bleating as his hands were wrenched behind his back.
“Hold them,” Arsenio said. A dozen guys leaped on the intruders, hauled up the one choking in the dirt, and dragged them out of our way. “After, we’re gonna have a chat about his delusions of running this town and exactly where they came from. But first!”
“Sac-ri-fice! Sac-ri-fice!” The chant began anew.
We spread out, brandishing our torches over the wells we dug around each post and filled with gasoline. Around and under each sacrifice was a mound of sand that prevented the fire from spreading and turning their deaths from metaphorical to literal. The worst they’d get out of that was uncomfortably warm. The real lesson would’ve come from the tubs of rotted fruit waiting inside the Drumlins, and a couple riding crops. Roan had a thing for the latter.
A little pelting, some light beating, coupled with the kidnapping, fear, public humiliation, and threats of worse if they caused us more problems, was enough to get the point across.
A point I was now eager to make, get it over with, and let them limp on home. I felt something approaching sorry for the poor bastards weeping and bleeding on their stakes. Not even I went for the crotch. I fought as dirty as the next reprehensible thug, as I’ve been affectionately called, but there were standards.
“Bedlam now!” I roared.
“Bedlam forever!”
I dropped the torch. A ring of fire erupted around Cavendish, blowing me off my feet. I laughed.
It was Roan’s idea to have a burning. I should tune him out less often. The guy has a good idea every now and—
Something shot across my vision. In the millisecond the information traveled from my eyes and sent the alert in my brain, a faint pop rose above the flames, and was engulfed in the inferno.
The fire surged out of control, grasping for Cavendish’s legs and clinging tight. Hungry. Greedy. Desperate. It crawled up his body—consuming in seconds.
“Ahh!” Screams tore from him— No, that wasn’t the word. The gates of hell opened beneath his feet, and the noise that came from him as Satan himself dragged him under couldn’t be described with as small a word as scream.
Revelers ran. Shoving and trampling over each other, they took off in every direction, fleeing for no damn reason. There wasn’t far enough they could run to shake loose the sight of a human being burned alive. This would haunt them in their dreams till they died.
“Holy shit!” Dan Helsing was free—the guys on him somewhere fleeing through the forest. He seized my shoulders. “I take back everything I said. You guys are ruthless,” he laughed. “Inhuman! I’ll remember that when we come for you.”
He sprinted off, knocking me aside and spinning me toward the house. I think part of me meant to look that way. Gaze rising to the second floor to see that face in the window.
“Cairo! Why are you standing there?” Roan got in the way. “Get a fire extinguisher. Now!”
I beat it to the pill table, grabbing one of the half dozen we stashed there and joining Arsenio and Jacques, hosing the now silent sacrifice down.
The revelers emptied out the field. The other sacrifices bellowed their heads off to be freed, and promising we’d pay for this as damp soaked their pants. And the face in the window—
I looked back up to my Rain.
She was gone.
***
Rainey
I burst out of the house and spotted a familiar back of the head almost immediately.
Paris ran, clutching Amy’s and Zara’s hands. I raced up behind them.
“Oh no, it was awful!”
Her head snapped around. “Rainey,” she cried. “I was looking everywhere for you.” She hugged me tight. “Did you see? Oh my gosh, that poor man.”
“I saw.” A heavy, crushing weight bore down on my chest. I couldn’t take in a deep breath, and at the same time, couldn’t stop gasping for one. “We need to get out of here.”
“That’s what we’re doing.” Amy grabbed my hand and yanked me along.
I chanced a glance upstairs where I left my bow in the floorboard’s gaping hole. It’d have to stay there till I came back for it.
Our group raced to the top of the road, finding Paris’s car parked on the side, and sporting a new dent in the bumper.
“Shit!”
“Someone must’ve sideswiped you getting the hell out of here,” Amy said. “They’re assholes and we will get them later, but we have to go. We cannot be here when the sheriff finds the man the Bedlam Boys burned alive!”
“Cairo didn’t do this!” she shot back even as we piled in the car. “It was an accident— Something happened. I don’t know, but he did not kill that man.”