Chapter 12

“Ira, Odium, et Mala Voluntas,” she whispered. – Anger, Hatred, and Ill-Will

She paused to make sure she hadn’t roused Leah. Once started, the Litany was sacrosanct. It cannot be interrupted, or the soul was lost to her. Once she was sure Leah remained sound asleep, she continued.

“Flagellum Fulgurum et Tempestatum.– Scourge of Lightning and of Storms.

“Dabo tibi mortem aeternam.” – I shall grant you eternal death.

Her heart was pounding now. Only one line left to say. All she had to say was, ‘Te in ignem infernalem mittam – I shall cast you into infernal flames’ and the litany would be complete and Leah, whose soul exists now in Limbo, would be free for Sam to reap. Five simple words, then she would be released. She opened her mouth to say the words but suddenly couldn’t find the will to say them. All of Leah’s memories ran through her mind. The love that was there as well as the pain and fear and anger. She thought of their kiss the night before, and the look in Leah’s eyes when she claimed that they were kindred spirits. She was right. They were kindred spirits. They had both suffered trauma in their lives and sought to right the wrong that caused that trauma. They both made promises to the ones they loved. What right does she have to take away Leah’s chance to keep her promise to Isolde? How could she live with herself if she did? How could her soul bear it?

She sighed. She couldn’t finish the Litany. She couldn’t deprive Leah of her promise. She crawled back into Leah’s arms and kept her eyes on the ceiling, with no hope for sleep for at least an hour, perhaps two.

Leah finally stirred. She smacked her lips and yawned. She opened her eyes and smiled when she met Rachel’s eyes. Her smile grew. Her teeth reflected the moon. Her eyes appeared wet. They alarmed Rachel with their sinister gleam.

“Mein spatz, aren’t you going to finish your little song? I was hoping to hear how it ends.”

Rachel was dumbstruck. The hair on the back of her neck rose. Fear spiked her heart. Her eyes darted instinctively to her nightstand for her ampoules but found they were not where she always left them. Leah had absconded them.

Leah lunged at Rachel and grabbed her neck. She forced Rachel down on the bed and straddled her as she tightened her powerful clutch.

“What are you –” Rachel choked.

But before she could finish her question, Leah answered by squeezing ferociously. Her eyes glowed crazily. Her lips curled open in a snarl. Her canines grew. Rachel thrashed. She flailed her arms. But it was hopeless. She was easily overpowered.

She turned her desperate eyes to her cane that leaned against the bedroom wall, the last furious thought gripping her mind before fading: How stupid she was to give it all up so willingly.

⛧ Chapter 6 ⛧

The fluttering sound of candles was the first thing she heard.  Then the winds howling against the stone. The world slowly twisted into shape. The fog from her vision lifted. Amorphous shadows began to take shape.

Rachel squirmed as she became conscious but found herself constrained. She was suspended in the air, shackled at her wrists and her ankles. Chains stretched out to massive stone columns on either side of her. She was naked in a cold, cavernous space.

She found tubes running from her forearms. They ran down to a collecting pot.

“What’s this”?” She muttered groggily. Her memory came back. She remembered being helpless. Her potions far out of reach. Isolde’s beautiful face twisting into evil.

She struggled more vigorously against her chains as vision slowly seeped its way back into her eyes. “What is this!” She demanded. “Where am I?” But no one answered her.

She looked all around her. There were rows of lofty windows. A grand vaulted ceiling high above her. Braziers blazing with fire throughout a forest of stone columns. On the far wall, a large banner with the sigil of the Black Sun.

Then she spotted Schmidt. He stood in front of her. In front of shadows. A lilted smile on his face. His face sagged. His jaw dropped.

“Schmidt! Schmidt help me!”

He responded only by cocking his head slightly.

“Heinrich!” She screamed. He didn’t stir. He was out cold.

From the shadows emerged Doctor Sabine Schmidt, wearing a crisp white military jacket. The same SS jacket from Leah’s memory. She put her hands on Schmidt’s shoulders.

“Welcome, Doctor Blake, to Heidelberg Castle,” said the rector. “Isn’t it a marvelous place?”

“Heinrich!” Rachel screamed again, ignoring the rector. “Heinrich, help me!”

“I’m afraid Herr Schmidt won’t be able to, my dear.”

As Rachel’s vision grew clearer, she noticed them. All the people in the room. Hundreds of them. A sea of black hoods and black robes.

“What is the meaning of this?! What did you do to him?” Rachel cried out.

“He was being a fidgety boy, putting his nose in places it didn’t belong, so I had to fix him.”

Rachel looked into Schmidt’s eyes, and the horror dawned on her as she saw in them the burnt smoke of a man who had had his soul and mind irreversibly severed. Doctor Fischer had lobotomized him. A thousand screams boiled like a storm inside Rachel. She strained savagely against her bindings.

“You bitch!” She snarled. “You fucking bitch! I’ll make you pay!”

The rector’s eyes gleamed dark and as bright as the gloam of an abyssal ocean in moonlight. “Hardly,” she replied.  She approached Rachel, stroked her cheek, whispering

“Fenrir, devourer of the sun, once unfettered, shall ravage the world of men.”

“Let me go you bitch,” Rachel sneered, glaring furiously.

“You’re angry and confused. I know you’ve many questions. So, I’ll give you answers, then perhaps you’ll see why I cannot simply let you go.”

Then, from the sea of black cloaks, Isolde emerged with a knife’s edge of a smile curled onto her lips.

The rector put her fingers on Rachel’s chin to force her attention back on her. “You were lured here under false pretenses.”

“Rauschenberg and Schulz. You murdered them to draw me here, didn’t you?”

“Very good! Yes. They were the bait, and you were the prey. But if that makes you feel guilty, don’t worry your little heart too much, we had other reasons to dispose of them. They had strayed from the path so they were quite apt as sacrificial lambs.”

“How wonderful to have Leah at your side. After all that you did to her. After all that you did to the one she loved, to your very own daughter.”

Rachel directed those words not to the rector, but to Leah. At least as a ploy for sympathy. Her heart sank when she saw that Leah standing steadfastly at the rector’s side, showed zero remorse. There was rather a gleam of pride in her eyes. It occurred to Rachel then, that somehow all those memories that she saw were fabricated. Fabricated to win her trust.

“She saw the light, Doctor Blake. In the eternal darkness, she saw the light.”

Rachel glanced down at the transfusion tubes in her arms. The notion began to be quite clear to her. If there was anything to be said about occultists, it is that despite their fascination with the obscure and the cryptic, they were all quite predictable.

“You want my blood then. Is that what this is all about? You believe it will give you immortality?”

The rector chuckled. “You are quite sharp, aren’t you? Yes, that is exactly what we want from you. Your blood. With a little modification of course.”

Leah went to Doctor Fischer and gave Rachel a wink as she placed a hypodermic needle in the rector’s hand. Rachel recognized the jade green liquid inside as being the same liquid they injected the test subjects in the sanatorium. The lycanthropic virus.

“Why me? What makes you think the outcome will be any different than with any of your other victims?”

“Because you’re special, Doctor Blake. You have extraordinary powers. You have congress with the arcanic like I have never seen.”

“I’m a witch who knows a few parlor tricks.”

“You are not. Believe me. I’ve been watching you for a very long time, Doctor Blake. Your ease in transcending the mortal planes, your sway over souls, your grasp on mortal memories, and your ability to rend arcanic energy to your whim. It is a power beyond that of any mere witch. You have the spark of the divine in you. You have the blood of the Watcher. You are Nephilim. That is the difference.”

“I’m flattered that you think so, Doctor Fischer. But it’s beyond me how you could possibly know that.”

“My dear assistant Leah confirmed the hypothesis firsthand. You see, that’s why we lured you into the sanatorium first. That’s why Leah held you in limbo for so long. She was testing your powers to confirm to us what we had always suspected. Any other witch would have lasted a fraction of the time you’ve lasted. Believe me, we tested it.”

Doctor Fischer raised the hand holding the needle. She squeezed the plunger, and a stream of the pale green liquid squirted out of the end of the syringe.

“Thanks to you, Doctor Blake, our destiny is now manifest. Thanks to you, today we celebrate the start of the eternal and glorious Fourth Reich!”

She stuck the needle into Rachel’s arm. She pushed the plunger in. The serum entered her vein, and she felt it seep up her arm like an ice-cold knife. Soon, it would enter her heart, and seep into the rest of her. She screamed. She raged against her inevitable fate. And then she stopped and waited for the transformation to take her as there was nothing she could do now to stop it. Her head grew dizzy. Her vision began to blur at the sides. The transformation was beginning. Once complete, she would become a feral monster, helpless against her fate. They would exsanguinate her completely. All the faceless conspirators in this room would imbibe on her blood, hoping for their immortality. Of course, she would not live to see if it would actually happen, but she didn’t care about any of that. All she cared about in that fading moment was that she had failed her sister. That she would never find her sister’s killer and have her vengeance. Wrath filled her. It coursed through her. With the last of a mental constitution strengthened by her wrath, she realized then that the rector had made one small mistake. She had confessed her sins. Perhaps the depraved bitch would become immortal, but that wouldn’t stop Rachel from marking her soul.

She raised her head, and with all the strength she had left to muster she spoke with a voice that resounded in that vast chamber, the Soul Hunter’s Litany:

Ira, odium, et mala voluntas,

Te in ignem infernalem mittam!

When she finished, she felt the wind of death rush through the room like a gale to taint Sabine Fischer’s soul with its mark. It was done. Sabine’s soul belonged to Sam — should she ever die. A small consolation in the jaws of defeat.

At the final cusp of consciousness, Rachel heard howling. Who was howling? Was she howling? Had she turned already? She looked down at her feet and saw that she hadn’t. Curious. Perhaps the howls were in her mind. The awakening of her beast.

Then she heard human screams. Voices rising. Chaos. No, not inside her. The din came externally. She raised her head and looked all around her. The howling rose. An entire symphony of howling. The howling seemed to come from everywhere. Mad, hurried footsteps. People were running, screaming. Terrible screaming! Bloodcurdling screams. Bones crunching. Tendons snapping. Blood spraying everywhere. What was going on?

With tremendous effort, she focused her eyes and she was met with a surprise. Werewolves — many of them, cutting through the crowd of cloaked Nazis. Slashing their claws across soft bellies. Gnashing their jaws at throats. Blood quickly flooded the floor. Braziers were toppled and fire spewed everywhere. One brazier had caught the bottom edge of the Black Sun banner as it toppled, causing the banner to burst into raging flames.

In her final winks of waking, Rachel watched Isolde transform into a werewolf and lunge at the rector, tackling her to the ground. Sabine Fischer let out a gurgling scream as the transformed body of her daughter tore into her throat, condemning her soul to Sammael’s scythe. Rachel had just enough of her failing strength and consciousness to afford a smile. Just as everything faded to black.

⛤ Chapter 7 ⛤

When Rachel woke, she felt the pleasant bite of the sun on her face. She cracked her eyes open to a honey-golden room. Dust motes glittered in slanted sunlight. Thick layers of soft blankets weighed her down like a loving embrace.

A goldfinch fluttered to the windowsill and chirped a cheerful song at her with a cocked head before flying off again.

A rooster crowed distantly. Cowbells jingled just outside. The scent of silage filled her nose with sweetness. She was far from the city, certainly, but where, she didn’t have the slightest clue. Nothing here was familiar to her. For a moment she considered that she was in heaven, but when she turned her head and found Sam sitting in a rocking chair beside her bed, a pipe in his mouth, reading a book, she knew that she was far from it. The smile disappeared from her face; the blissful moment ruined.

He glanced up from his book and his face brightened when he saw that she was awake.

“Oh, my darling, what a relief!”

Rachel groaned. She rubbed her forehead. A terrible hangover started to creep in. She tried speaking but her mouth felt like it was stuffed with cotton balls. Very bad-tasting cotton balls. But otherwise, she felt better than she had last remembered. The stabbing pain in her soul had tempered. It was manageable now. She could at least properly think.