Fated Hearts (Echoes of Darkness Prequel)

33

Ava

T emples throbbing fiercely, I try to pry my eyes open, but the only movement I manage is that of fluttering eyelids. The sensation throws me back to the day I woke up in Logan’s basement. There’s something different now, though. I still smell wood and pine sap, but it’s overpowered by a repulsing odor carving a path down my throat. As if someone decided to make a soup of burned hair, coagulated blood, and melted plastic with a healthy dose of soured meat on top. It’s so foul, I have to swallow down the urge to projectile vomit.

C’mon, Ava, open your damn eyes! When I finally do, I realize I am tied up in another cabin. And this time, instead of hanging from the ceiling, heavy, fiery chains pin me to a wooden chair as the skin on my wrists and ankles sizzles under them.

It’s me…the sickening smell is coming from me.

I struggle against the restraints, and my own strangled scream obliterates every coherent thought. The pain is so intense I feel like I might black out again. Taking a few deep breaths in and out, I let my eyes wander over the room I’m in, trying to distract myself from the blinding pain. The windows are all boarded shut, and a thick layer of grime covers the floor and wooden walls. The only pieces of furniture are the chair I’m tied to and a big old dusty bookshelf on my left, pushed against the wall and lined with huge jars and lit candles. The jars all look the same, filled with some sort of liquid, and something is floating inside them.

?Mierda! Is that? Are those…are those organs? No, not just organs…they’re all hearts.

Jesus fucking Christ.

Tearing my eyes from the gruesome picture before me, I look down. There’s a weird drawing under my chair on the floorboards, a red circle filled with intricate symbols, and I’m sitting right in the middle of it.

The sound of shoes slapping against the creaking floor reaches my ears before a woman enters. She’s wearing a long, dark blue dress under a black cloak—the same cloak I saw in the woods when Tony was torn to pieces. She must be the witch.

“Ah, you’re finally awake,” she says. The first thing I notice about her are the inky black tendrils covering every available surface of skin as though her veinsare filled with tar-like blood. Even her face is full of them. The strange veins seem to be shifting and moving under her skin with a mind of their own. She’s holding an ancient copper bowl with symbols etched on it, and she saunters toward me, her white as-snow hair flowing at her back.

“What do you want from me?” I manage to grit out in a scratchy voice.

She pins me with a sinister smile. It’s unsettling how wrong it looks on her face. And you know that saying, “Eyes are the mirror of the soul”? Well, hers are…empty. Said soulless eyes lock with mine. “Just your blood…for now. Then your heart, of course.” She lifts the sleeve of my mesh turtleneck roughly and takes out a knife from the holster hanging from the belt at her waist. The sharp blade slashes through the skin of my forearm, right over a fresh cut that’s oozing blood.

Muttering a sharp curse, I struggle against the chains holding me to the chair, but the intense pain explodes through my nerve endings again as the metal burns through another layer of my skin. I still immediately, taking jagged breaths through a clenched jaw. A bead of sweat gets stuck in my eyelashes, and I blink it away.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you. The chains are made out of pure silver.” Shadows obscure half of her face, and the other is illuminated by the flickering candles. She places the bowl under my arm to catch the blood flowing from the deep gash in rivulets, painting the inside of the bowl red.

My nostrils flare. “Why are you doing this? Why kill so many innocent people?”

She shrugs nonchalantly with a bored expression. “It’s nothing personal. I just needed their hearts for a spell.”

My eyes widen in shock. “All that for a spell?”

She smiles like a cat. “No, not just any spell. A demon summoning one.”

“Why would you want to summon a demon?” I sputter.

No, seriously, why would anyone want that?

She looks at the blood that’s still dripping in the bowl, eyes fixated on every drop as she speaks. “Well, you see. I was in love once. Hundreds of years ago.” She pauses. Sighs as if reminiscing her long-lost life, and then her dead gray eyes lock with mine. “Me and Beelzebub were happy for many years until those foul archangels came and took him back to Hell. They imprisoned him in blessed chains so he could never escape. I have waited five hundred years to come back and break him out.” She turns her head and bellows toward the door she came through, “She’s awake, Clayton. Bring your phone.”

When the bowl is half full, she takes a few steps to my right and crouches, dips her fingers into my blood, and starts to draw another circle on the floor the same size as the one beneath my chair. The sound of a door opening and closing echoes through the cabin, and then heavy footsteps follow before the rogue wolf prowls into the room like a predator cornering its next meal.

“Look who decided to join the party. How’s that pretty little head of yours?” Clayton taunts, wrapping my jaw in a punishing grip.

“Fuck you!” I shake his hold before I spit at him. My saliva hits his cheek and runs down his face.

“You fucking, bitch,” the rogue sneers. He wipes at my saliva with his fingers. In the next second, the back of his hand collides with the side of my face, sending my head flying to the side.

Despite the exploding pain, I straighten my head and give him a bloody smile. “That’s all you got?”

His fingers clench at his sides, and he bends his knees to be at eye level with me. “You’re going to regret disrespecting me like that, you stupid cunt,” he spews, and his big hand wraps around my throat, cutting my air supply and crushing my windpipe, making my eyes bulge in my head.

“Stop playing with the sacrifice and call her mate already. She can’t talk if you crush her larynx, you idiot,” the witch admonishes him from my right, still painting with my blood on the floor.

The rogue finally lets me go with a sly smile and an icy glare. “This is how this is going to go. I’m going to call your mate, and you’re going to convince him to come get you.”

Panic trashes beneath my skin with the force of a hurricane. I can’t let them lure Logan here. They’re going to kill him. “No, just leave Logan alone. You have me. You don’t need him.” I swallow hard. “Please.”

“Actually, for the spell to be completed, I need the hearts of two fated mates,” the witch tells me as she lifts from her crouch and judges her bloody circle. “Perfect,” she mumbles to herself.

Clayton taps on the screen and then puts it on speaker as it rings.

Logan answers on the first ring. “Who is this?” he asks.

The rogue brings the phone to my lips and mouths at me, “Talk to him.”

I press my lips in a thin line and give him a defiant glare. Silence stretches between us, and then Logan’s voice breaks through. “Ava?” He pauses before inhaling sharply. “Ava, is this you? Where are you, baby? Please talk to me.” His voice is coated in desperation, and I can almost see the anguish etched on his face as if he’s in front of me.

“She’s right here,” the rogue answers after a few moments and pushes his thumb into the deep gash in my forearm.

My eyes roll to the back of my head, and I bite my tongue so hard I draw blood, but I refuse to scream and do his bidding.

“Oh, you wanna play, little bird? Let’s hear you sing.” A sadistic smirk lifts the corner of his lips, and something flashes in his eyes before he takes out a knife and stabs it into the middle of my right thigh.

This time, I can’t stop the bellowing scream that rips from my lungs as he twists the blade. The metal slices through skin and bone and burns my flesh from the inside out. The acrid smell of charred meat—my own charred meat—coats my lungs, and the fiery pain is so intense I throw up in my mouth.

“AVA! What the fuck did you do to her?” Logan snaps into the phone.

“I just stabbed her with a pure silver blade, and I’ll do worse if you don’t listen carefully to my demands.”

“What do you want?” Logan seethes.

“I’m going to send you a location, and you’ll come here alone. If I sense you’re not, she’ll be dead before you can lay eyes on her. And make it fast. I don’t like to wait. For every ten minutes that pass, I will carve a new mark into her skin and make her sing like the pretty little bird she is.”

Logan’s voice softens, and I can hear his ragged breaths through the phone speaker. “Ava? Hang tight, baby. I’m coming to get you, all right?”

“No, Logan! Don’t! They’re going to k—” I try to warn him, but Clayton ends the call abruptly and twists the knife again, eliciting another agony-filled scream from me.

He curls his upper lip in a sneer. “You. Only. Speak. When. I. Allow. You. To.”