Chapter Seven

The Nightmare Deepens

When the demon touched her, no iron-hot sizzle of pure evil leaked through his hands into Alodie’s skin. Though rationally such an event would have been unlikely, a small part of her had expected that very thing. What else did one expect from the touch of a demon?

The nightmare was deepening. Had she been captured because God knew in his heart she’d never have the courage to give herself over freely? That hadn’t been how she’d felt.

Alodie never had a chance to say goodbye.

Perhaps she should view a lack of—what should she call it? Leave taking?—as a blessing. Without attempting a farewell, there was nobody who could talk her out of her scheme. Many people would see the trade as more than fair. Her in exchange for the demons vanishing. If they left without bloodshed and without the loss of their princess, they’d be glad to see the back of her.

The princess, though…she’d never have allowed anyone to make such a sacrifice for her. Nobody, high or low. Which made the sacrifice all the more worth making.

Trying to rise above the flood of nauseating terror, Alodie stilled in the demon’s arms as he stole her into the night. The smell of him should have made her gag. It was no more than he deserved. But the scent of leather and the sea on his skin made him more human than he had any right to seem. Curse him.

She closed her eyes to calm her racing thoughts. She needed rationality. Not panic. Acting out of fear or instinct didn’t guarantee a bad decision, but she’d rather make reasoned choices.

First, language. She couldn’t let them know she understood most of what they said. Understanding didn’t put her in a position of power, but it might lend a slight advantage.

Second? Second…

Her mind was blank.

Surely there had to be something else. Physically, all she had was what she wore, and that wasn’t much. She was glad of the cloak. That was something. And she had the rope that secured her pouch. If needs be, she could use it to strangle one of the demons.

How? If he were in a drunken stupor? And what would she do then? One dead would mean nothing to them. But it would mean everything to her.

If this was the direction of her thoughts, she wasn’t thinking clearly. Aside from the impossibility of every scenario, she could never take a life. Peering through the imaginary surface of what it would mean for her to kill made it all too obvious that at the deepest level, these brutes were men, not true demons. If she killed a demon, she killed a demon. If she killed a man…

Better not to sacrifice her immortal soul. At the very least, she’d be left the pleasure of thinking of them as demons. She’d have little enough gratification in her life now that it’d taken this turn.

When they walked through the gates, the situation became all the more real. Her heart, choked by thorny vines, began to bleed. Would this place continue to be her home once she no longer lived there? Her whole body shook uncontrollably. There was no question as to what was coming. But merely pondering what this future might be like and actually being forced into the situation were two very different things.

At the beach, glowing embers were all that remained of the cooking fires. The men lay in heaps, snoring. Bloody bones lay scattered about the camp, some with strings of meat and other sinew still attached. They’d made a kill. One at least, probably more to feed their numbers. It wasn’t difficult. Plenty of game roamed the woods.

The woods she would never see again. What sort of animals lived where they would be going? That was, if she lived. Maybe they meant to slaughter her. Did they believe their pagan gods required human sacrifice? The idea made terror-induced bile rise in the back of her throat.

The leader put her down on the sand, the grains grown cold in the dark night. Stance wide, he stood above her and began to shout. “Get up, we’re leaving. Wake up and get ready.”

The lank one who’d been with the leader in the chapel—the one he’d stopped from taking what he’d found under the altar—began striking the sleeping men awake with his foot, kicking up the occasional spray of sand as he went.

The men responded slowly at first, with grunts and snorts and pithy eruptions. The words were bitten out too quickly for her to catch, and probably included terms she had yet to learn, but the tone and edginess suggested they complained. Some things didn’t need exact meaning to be understood.

“What’s going on?” came from a particularly grizzled specimen. Finally, something she understood in totality.

The leader gave a rapid response. Alodie strained her ears, but only caught princess and sail. That must have been the gist, for the hellish faces turned to her. The black with which the demons lined their eyes was smudged from sleep.

She looked up at the big one—the leader—and studied his face. On their way out of the chapel, he’d given a direct order for the items to be left. That meant they had come for the princess.

Why? What were they going to do to her? She wasn’t valuable. And if they expected to demand a ransom from the king, they were in for an awful shock.

What would it mean for her when they discovered she was not the princess? That she, in fact, she was not valuable to them? Alodie needed to swallow, but her mouth was too dry. Instead, she coughed.

Another of the demons groused at the man rousing them from slumber and putting them to work, this time at length.

“There is no more reason to remain.”

“How about we have a look at their silver? Better to sail with it than without it. What good is a raid without returning with treasure?”

Out of the darkness, the leader replied in a chilling, deadly calm. Everything about him, even the way he spoke, testified to what sort of creature Alodie would be dealing with. He had absolute control and natural dominance. “You know why we came. And there will be other raids.”

A few of the demons began tossing wood on the embers to rebuild the flames while the rest packed up camp, rolling blankets and gathering belongings. The men stumbled about as if they hadn’t had the time to sleep off their drink. But they knew their business, and prepared quickly.

When they released the horses they’d stolen, eerie whinnies cut through the night air. The moon had already set, but the abundant stars cast an otherworldly light on the ships waiting by the waves.

No. Not ships. Monsters.

And they were waiting to swallow her to hell.

In the murky promise of dawn, they were ready. The birds had been singing for some time, ignorant of Alodie’s ordeal. Or perhaps not. It would be comforting to think they bid her farewell, since she’d had no other. The parting gift she’d been denied from those she’d known.

The leader plucked her up. Instead of handling her like she were a bag of supplies, his touch was gentle, like he was conscious she was a person who could be hurt. Her stomach fluttered.

Alodie balked internally. How dare her body betray her by responding in any such measure to the likes of him?

Gentleness wasn’t the very last thing she wanted from the spawn of Satan’s fetid loins. But it was close. She went weightless with fear, lungs heaving for air as if suddenly there was none. After her brief childhood, she’d never been weak or helpless. Now she was no more than a dried-up leaf, tossed by the winds of fate.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Sickness and pestilence took lives. They were the trials God gifted to His people to purge them of sin or test their faith. This was utterly different. This was unimaginable.

If God saw all—and that was not a fact she should question—He saw her now. Was this His hand at work? What did He want from her? How had she offended Him that He would punish her so? Her sins weren’t so numerous or grievous as that, were they?

The leader swung a leg over the hull, stepping on board one of the ships. The wood creaked under his weight.

The ships had appeared huge when she’d first sighted them. They weren’t. There were a lot of men. Somehow, this little vessel traveled over the sea. They’d come, so the ship must have been able to make the voyage—neither was it the first time demons had appeared on these shores, so their arrival hadn’t been an accident of chance.

He placed her at the far end and stood nearby at the prow ornamented with a fantastical creature. “All right, men. Time to sail.”

Alodie studied the carved wood. The skill and decoration were neither of them mean feats. The styling was both familiar and foreign. One troubling question crawled over her skin. What exactly did it depict? Their heathen god? A creature of the far north? Something they believed demanded a sacrifice and it would be her?

A line of hulking demons on either side of the longships ran the vessels out past the waves.

Alodie’s heart began beating wildly in the hollow cavern of fear that had become her interior self. In difficult parts of her life, she’d thought she’d felt like she was adrift at sea, alone and at the mercy of wind, weather, and tide. When she’d told the blacksmith she wouldn’t marry him, for example. Right after they’d…

Whatever she’d felt then was nothing like this. Nothing. Now she was truly alone. With demons. In a ship following the motions of the waves…on a fast and fathomless sea.

Not since her mother’s untimely death had the fragility of life been so patently obvious. Each person balanced on a slender thread of fate as delicate as spider silk. And her thread had snapped.

There was no bed to return to. No princess to watch and try to emulate. No duties or work to keep Alodie occupied so she could stop her thoughts from wandering.

More than that, she’d been wrong earlier about the nightmare deepening.

The nightmare was only beginning.