Note: This excerpt contains elements of horror, so if that isn’t your thing… click here to browse our shelves for more great reads! 🙂
From the Publisher: “The sky has opened. Angels descend to earth in fiery fury. Some claim to have seen these creatures, others claim to have been touched by them. Those with psychic abilities find their gifts magnified by the spiritual presences rising from Hell and falling from Heaven. Yes, the end is near. Or is it the beginning? After a life of violence and crime, gang-leader Torrence provides meaning to her groups’ destructive endeavors through discovery of Conrad, a once-possessed orator of demonic doctrines. Destroying virtues for the sake of sin, Torrence leads her band of bad-boy brethren to murder, blood sacrifice, and supernatural ritual in an effort to restore her dark savior’s powers so the apocalypse can be an unholy paradise.”
About the author: “Living inside her imagination and backed up by a BA in English from Penn State, Brooklynn Dean is only storytelling. She is an avid reader, an award-winning author, and lover of linguistics in any form. However, she is not a fan of traditional heroes, traditional characters, or traditional endings. Fair warning to those who like Happily Ever After, you typically won’t find it here. Instead, Brooklynn uses her writing to explore various aspects of humanity, and she allows her characters to tell her their stories. She goes as far as to claim they’re real people she’s mentally connected to; people who exist, just not in this realm. Reality be as damned as her characters!”
CHAPTER ONE
Idolatry
Handsome face, tanned skin, dark hair and eyes. The corners of his lips upturned even when he grimaced, creating the illusion that he perhaps took pleasure in even his personal pain. How ghastly and alluring equally. And how apt that reaction within her was.
This visage, so enchantingly beautiful while it performed haunting acts, was appealing in some way unexplained. Something atypical, something asexual. Something which created its own separate lens through which she might view him. A camera angle no one else could achieve.
He was the subject of dreams while being the fuel of nightmares. He was the physical incarnation of the divine, but the spiritual manifestation of everything unholy in existence. And wouldn’t the devil’s best disguise be one of utter beauty?
Yes, she imagined him saying softly, come with me. Follow me. And as he offered to drag her into darkness, she begged for the ecstasy of it.
The shape of his plump lips as he recited devilish incantations. The swelling of his pupils which cast his alluring eyes in darkness. It was all things pleasurable bound up in steel chains and barbed wire, held captive there by an unimaginable pain. The look he possessed, the beautiful flesh-and-blood house which contained only sin and torment; it was a dichotomy she hoped to somehow achieve, though she feared it might be something one could not attain by choice.
After all, did he choose the body to which his spirit had been attached? If he were a demon, perhaps the answer was yes, but if he were a person, then surely any choice in the matter was unlikely.
Either way, he certainly had the form anyone— human, demon, or otherwise— would desire. The flesh was such an easy target to manipulate, capture, own. She knew she’d follow him into the depths of hell itself if he so called, and she knew it had much to do with the appearance of that outer shell, that bronze skin, the shape of his hands which were not only elegant but also talented. How carefully they crafted words with pens and paper. How masterfully they carved his dark desires into flesh.
She practiced this same skill, documenting her inner-most desires which had all been fueled by him, by his face, by the lips with their pout and natural grin, by the words they formed, the manner in which they formed the words, by the voice which breathed the words into existence by means of chords and exhales.
God, she imagined the sounds of his exhales, the shape of those lips, when they breathed intensity into more intimate scenarios.
Then again, she considered, what could be more intimate than a blade thrust into willing flesh when the recipient of steel was not the performer of the violent act?
She sang his words in his rhythm as she dragged sewing needles across the flesh of her thigh, her calf, her ankle. She followed him as closely as one could in such an age as this.
His photos were in her hand, saved and stored away secretly in folders labeled “Savior” and “Destroyer”. When he was violent, he saved those who might fear him, but his beauty, the ultimate tool of enticing them into deviance and destruction.
She, however, would not be swayed. Steadfast, she was resolute in her worship of him. No, it had nothing to do with desire for him, but the desire to be him. To be what he was— fearless of repercussion, giving in to every want and every need, the violence of release, the bliss of it. The amazement of what it might be like to simply be who he was, this person with a seductive tongue and handsome features who felt most alive when he brought death.
As she lay in her bed this night, his serpentine symbol in bloody rips of flesh upon her leg, she fell back into the sheets of black satin and pillows full of down.
A decision had been made. What good was passion or desire if it led only to itself? To continued inaction? To her own deviance that never saw the light of day; that had not been seen or talked about or witnessed in any way by her dark savior.
There’d be no more distant voyeurism. No glass-framed circuit boards acting as a barrier between the object of her affection and the body in which she existed.
Up close. Personal. A witness of the deviance which came so naturally to him it seemed divine. Holy. But she supposed deification was as subjective as musical taste or reading preference, or the desires hidden in the shadows of souls, performed only in the stillness of a darkened night.
Did she want to consume the gospels of the masses, the glory-to-Gods, and the so-called uplifting serenity of salvation? Of heaven? Or did she, perhaps, thrive in the violent words of horror tales and the gruesome songs of death?
A surge ripped through her spinal cord at the mere thought of it; the power. To take by the wrist a warm body, wrap her fist around it, and through a blade of silver thrust inside it her imperceptible beliefs until the physical crumbled under the force of will— well, that was enough to urge her hand into a much different action.
As she slipped her left hand down her stomach, over the elastic band round her waist, she made sure to bypass her sensual anatomy in pursuit of her thigh. His symbol still upon it in fresh, tender tears of flesh, she pressed down forcefully as she dragged her hand across the dripping wound.
Gasping inside gritted teeth, the pulling apart of sticky gashes reminded her of where she was. She withdrew her hand, lifted it to the ceiling where the smears of blood seemed as bright as candy apples against the harsh white of its paint, and she considered Halloween, then Devil’s Night, then the acts her seductive savior performed for them respectively.
Her hand twitched in the thought that she might join his congregation this year, and when she imagined herself standing in the middle of a blackened road, broken streetlights flickering as they filled the air with the ominous buzzing of electric death, yielding a crowbar or some other such improvised weapon, her eyes cast in the shadow of her hood which hid her visage as well as her humanity, she let it fall back to her leg.
She sat up as she pressed her fingers into the carving, watching the way the pressure of even the smallest touch forced blood from it. Painful, pink around the frayed edges of flesh, broken open and alive.
Alive, she thought. And with her other hand, she reached for her phone. Called up her files, one of few still-working options of cellphones, and chose the album labeled “Savior.” She elected the third recording from the bottom and played it.
Alluring was the voice. Calm and dulcet, nothing at all like it had been on the tape. She still had it— the tape— and it was almost time to release it from her possession. Such a pity. But at least she had the recordings that circulated in more evolved mediums; the voice recordings of his speeches, his beliefs. The prophetic, angelic, utterly divine voice as it spoke the words of truth, of fate, of demonic prophecy which gave meaning to every monstrous move she’s ever made.
“Come now, children,” he said, “we mustn’t weep for what we lose. We must rejoice for what there is to gain, for what we become a part of.”
Someone— a follower of his, but a very close one, a most-trusted one— chimed a bell. The deep, ominous tone rang out into the night air followed by the static of a gust of wind.
Torrence shook. Closed her eyes. She could feel the air if she focused enough on it; felt the vibrations of the church bell which had been corrupted.
A woman screamed on the recording. Gut wrenching, blood curdling. Fearful of death and praying for salvation, she begged him, “Please, no, please.”
Again, he spoke, “Fear not.” His words, exasperated and low. He’d explained this already. “All there is to lose is the body.”
“Flesh,” Torrence said in unison with the follower. She wished she knew his name too. She wanted to know everything.
“But what there is to gain,” her savior said to the sobbing woman, who gasped in the seconds after he finished; Torrence assumed he’d grabbed her, maybe by the arm, but maybe by the chin. She imagined those hands around her own chin, digging fingernails into her flesh, bruises forming in the shapes of his fingertips. “It’s eternity,” he said to her, so lovingly. Torrence imagined a glistening of tears at the brim of his deeply hazel eyes. Power oozing out of him in that way. The depths of his soul, of his knowledge, escaping his lips through his words and his eyes and through his tears. “Don’t you want to be eternal?” he asked, but he knew the answer even if she didn’t.
“N-no,” she sobbed still.
“Yes, you do,” he said, and another gust wind blew static into the speaker.
“Please,” she cried, but her fate had been sealed.
She represented charity. She was a virtue.
“It had been decided,” he said calmly, the distance of his voice coming closer to the recorder now, indicating to Torrence that he must’ve stood again. “Long before you were ever born.”
“What?” She gasped, confusion as clear in her shaking voice as fear, but Torrence knew what he had meant. Torrence knew how brightly this woman must’ve shone, and how that shining, virtuous aura must’ve called him to her. The woman cried, gasping, questioning him. “What does that mean?”
Abruptly sharp screams replaced her breathy voice. She wailed and moaned and begged him to stop, but the sound of a blade tearing into flesh continued on.
No sound came from the savior until the screaming stopped. Over the gurgling and weighted breath, he panted, “Greed…”
“Cures liberality,” Torrence said in sync with at least three followers on the recording. She’d already cured this virtuous virus herself, but reliving his versions of these sacrifices wasn’t instruction, not anymore. Now it was closeness, connection, a ritual performed by many but only functioning for two.
The sound of dead weight falling to the pavement thudded in the speakers of her phone. Again, the bell tolled.
A groan came from her left, and Torrence looked up from her own wounded flesh.
“I really hate that one,” War said, rushing a towel across his dripping hair. His lips curled as if he could smell the corpse decaying the savior’s feet. Torrence hadn’t even heard the shower stop.
She turned the recording off. It was almost over anyway. “Which do you prefer, then?” she asked, rolling onto her stomach, discreetly wiping the blood from her hand onto the dark sheets of her bed, and looking at him playfully.
“None of them,” he said, still working at his hair with the towel.
“None?”
“No.”
“Come on.”
“You come on, Tor,” he said, stepping closer to the bed. “It’s repugnant.”
“It’s not repugnant,” she said, almost offended by such a remark.
“It is,” he argued, muttering. “Crying, screaming innocents being tortured—”
“Innocents,” she repeated disdainfully, brows lifting in surprise at the word-choice.
“The storyline doesn’t even make sense.”
“It makes complete sense, actually,” she said, her tone rising, “if you listen to all of them.”
“I’m not so sure hearing even more poorly-acted ravings of a crazed murderer killing people for being too kind or too chaste will make it make sense.”
“Poorly acted?” She raised a brow.
“Fine, the actors are good.” War shrugged a shoulder, then a chill shook down his spine. “I will never understand horror as an art-form, I suppose. So much destruction and chaos, so much pain. And I certainly don’t understand why he targets the victims he targets.”
“You don’t?”
“Good people, Tor. No, I don’t.”
“And you call yourself a Catholic,” she said, sitting up now, eyeing the way her black towel hung loosely on his delicate hips, just below the brand-like tattoo next to his bellybutton. Nothing else separating his body from her eyes save for the single pendant he wore. His taut frame, small waist, perfectly shaped torso, all exposed and so fragile; so easily ripped or torn, so easy to break or make bleed.
“I don’t know what my religion has to do with it,” he said. Tendrils of wet hair separated from themselves as they fell into his eyes. Glistening, the varying baby-blue and pale-pink tones lost in a sea of softened gold appeared to sparkle, as if he were an otherworldly being ready to re-enter the kingdom of heaven. His head lowered, and he lifted a hand to it, brushing back those crystalline locks from his vision. Droplets of water fell around him, catching the faint light of her phone screen, creating the illusion that his radiant skin was shimmering.
“Well,” she said, grinning, “the focus is not your religion, it’s mine.”
“I wasn’t aware you had a religion.” He chuckled gently, eyeing her. “At least not one outside yourself.”
“An anti-religion,” she said, pursing her lips, considering it. “Anyway, the first recording is the message, the true path to salvation.”
“Murder gets you closer to heaven?” he asked.
“Certainly not heaven,” she said. “Salvation.”
“This is supposed to clarify?”
“It would without your interruptions,” she said. “The first recording is the message, a repeat in some ways of the very first piece of this story— the video tape.” She paused, exhaling a hint of frustration. She was hesitant to call the prophecy a story, or to continue pretending that these sacrifices were works of fiction. “It serves as affirmation,” she continued, hoping now to ease War into the clutches of her communion. “What was said on the tape was true, and what was recorded on it was real. The next seven are individual killings— humans as representations of concepts. Kill the representation, kill the concept. It makes sense.”
“Sure,” War said. “Literature is full of metaphor, but I still don’t understand why the metaphors must be so violent. And why there are so many of them.”
“There will be more,” Torrence said. “I still have the video tape, if you’re curious about it.”
“I most certainly am not.” He exhaled harshly, looking at Torrence, her beautiful blue eyes and her delicate features. What did she find so appealing about such darkness? Why had this been the path she’d chosen?
She could’ve been a consumer of Edgar Allan Poe or H.P. Lovecraft if she sought out something so morbid; but this Conrad fellow, this author of horrific production and storyline, it was something different from the general macabre. It felt dirty, gruesome in some spiritual way. It wasn’t merely a tale of caution or commentary; it was brutal, and seemed only to glorify its brutality. Why was this so enticing to her, and further why were audible and visual representations of its story the preferred means of consumption?
“You might enjoy the audio more if you watched the tape.”
“Nothing could make me enjoy the sounds of someone dying, even if it’s fiction.”
“What if it isn’t fiction?”
“Then it’s illegal and—”
“Illegal? War, look at the world around you. Barren and dangerous and grim. Nothing is the same as it was before the sky opened.”
“I know that,” War said, looking down at himself, at his flesh, at the branded circles of eyes and wings at his hip. “I know that far better than you realize,” he whispered, guilt-ridden and full of turmoil for the very last place he should be in such a time as this was the bedroom of a beautiful woman. “But I’m afraid too many people hear merely a fraction of a very immense truth and run wild with it.”
“A fraction of truth?”
“A piece of prophecy or—”
“The apocalypse isn’t merely a piece of prophecy, and it’s obviously quite real. Again, look around you.”
“Torrence, I’m just… I’m worried you’re taking it too seriously.”
“Aw,” she said, “you’re worried?”
“I’m serious.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I know what I’m doing. I’m trying to explain it to you but you won’t listen, and quite frankly I’m not sure you’d accept it if you did take the time to understand it.”
“I don’t understand real death and real pain and real violence, so I don’t want to hear people screaming and fake-dying, especially when there is nothing to learn from it.” He shifted uncomfortably, looking at the towel and fidgeting with it. “It was bad enough when television was a thing… Witnessing the red concoctions splattering everywhere—” He shuddered. “I don’t want to watch whatever tape you have that remains of the genre, and hearing it is even worse because you can’t see how fake it is.”
She stared at him, chin lowering. Gazing at his face, peering into the soft flesh of his high cheek bones, the sharpness of his jawline. What a divinely crafted being he was. What an utter nightmare such a dream could become if he were to join her or her savior or either of their respective followings. “What if I told you it wasn’t fake?” She asked, her voice ripe with desire, words falling from them in passionate pulls of breath.
He looked up to her through his long lashes. Solemn and concerned, undeniably terrified, however briefly, that this Conrad was, in fact, the Messiah he claimed to be, War exhaled a shaken pant of worry and tried to pass it off as a laugh. “It isn’t,” he said, attempting a smile. He tried to remain convicted in that.
“It is,” she argued.
War peered into her eyes, scanning them for any semblance of humor, but found only severity; conviction. Regardless of how certain she was, he couldn’t admit to himself that there was validity to this statement. The souls that started this would reveal themselves through art; he knew that. That wasn’t conjuncture. That was absolute fact. But War wasn’t certain much soul could have existed inside such cruel forms of creation. After a long moment of reminding himself of who he was, no matter how sinful that made this scenario in Torrence’s room feel, he smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “Okay, it’s real.”
What a pity, she thought, but it wasn’t so troubling. She had all necessary pieces of her plot exactly where she wanted them. War was just something extra, something sweet— the deliciously devout cherry on top of a sinfully sinister just-deserts. “Fine.” She sighed. “But you know what is real?” She grinned, eyes dancing along his torso, hipbones, the towel.
“What’s that look about?” he asked playfully, eyes falling to his feet and scanning slowly, hesitantly his own body.
“It’s unfair,” she said.
“What is?” He blushed.
“That you come out in that towel. Such a tease.”
His arms lowered, a playful exasperation on his lips. “You just had me. How insatiable.” He chuckled, looking back down to the towel, taking it in both hands and touching around the seam of it. A simple smile, calm and serene on his face, he looked over to her through his lashes and locks of dripping hair. “Greedy.”
She moved back into the bed, pulling the blanket around her feet and signaling for him to join her inside it.
Obeying, obedient, and not-at-all violent, he did as he was instructed. Lips, no longer curling in dismay and disgust, pressed against hers in a sensational blend of absinthe and caviar, decadent and illegal and sinfully sweet.
“Greed,” she breathed against his lips, “cures liberality.”
“Isn’t this lust?” he asked between embraces.
“It’s all of it,” she said. “This is everything.”
“This is sinful,” he said lowly.
“It’s also spiritual.”
“More physical, arguably,” he said.
“Don’t be a downer.” Torrence scoffed, brushing his hair from his eyes and smiling when it inevitably fell back into them. “You drive me insane.”
“Non compos mentis,” he tittered, letting his eyes close when her fingertips tickled the back of his neck. “I agree.”
She smiled, watching him tilt his chin in response to her delicate pets. Such trust there was between them in this moment, this gentle intimacy. How opposite it was from her original intent, but how delectable in its subservience it was regardless. She considered briefly, as his eyes fluttered closed, if corrupting the holy was more thrilling than extinguishing it. Either way, here in her bed, beneath the tender instruction of Torrence’s typically-violent fingertips, War laid unguarded, neck exposed, arteries vulnerable.
Torrence acknowledged that most people probably didn’t consider their intimate partners in such a way, but Torrence wasn’t most people. Torrence knew the Savior, her own personal deity, and before Torrence had begun working violence for him toward his ungodly goal, she’d been vicious for years and for no purpose.
But where her Savior made sense of certain urges, War made sense of others, and he taught her a patience she never knew possible; A patience that was necessary, especially to one so tempestuous and, quite literally, trigger-happy.
Here he was, after all, lying in her bed with her, exposed save for the unfurling towel around his hips, and he’d pulled back when she’d kissed him.
He let her touch him. He let his hands wander hesitantly along her frame. But what War saw as giving himself to Torrence was nothing she hadn’t already taken from many others, some of whom still followed her into the darkness their deeds worked to spread.
She realized chastity was a part of War when they’d first met, though it hadn’t mattered then, not to this purpose. He was selected for it, among other things, but there had been something magical about him— about his gleaming eyes and radiant, iridescent skin, that baby blue undertone in his face naturally highlighted by the purest pink any artist could conceive of. From a distance, he was the same virtuous soul both Torrence and the Savior wanted to destroy. Up-close, he was something of which Torrence could not have conceived, even in such as time as this.
Maybe, she considered as she continued her ministrations at the base of his hairline, there was nothing magical about him. Maybe, she questioned, letting her free hand roll across his shoulder and down the side of his back, War was magic. Maybe he’d been touched by some deity claiming to be an angel, maybe lightning struck him, and maybe he’d been a tarot-card-reader before the skies opened. Maybe not. Maybe he was a breed all of his own, something purer than people.
His lips curled upward gently, and he peeked at her with one eye before opening them both. “What?” He chortled.
“You’re precious,” she said, her fingertips still moving down his side, fluttering now at the top of his undone towel.
“You’re cunning,” he breathed, leaning into her and pausing just above her lips.
“I’m serious,” she whispered, closing the small space between them.
“I’m slipping,” he whined against her lips, mimicking her motions and caressing her side with his fingertips.
“Slip away,” she breathed. “I’ll take care of you.”
He hadn’t resigned to giving in, not yet, but he wasn’t fighting her as actively as usual. She was gentle with him, tender even, and he believed her— for whatever reason considering their meeting, or perhaps because of it— when she said she’d keep him safe.
Lost in Torrence, in the palpable reverence which guided her body more gently against his than either of them thought she was capable, War let his body melt into the sensations. He kissed her, felt her, let her feel him and kiss him. His hand slipped across her hip and down her leg, stopping him; his eyes opening wide when he felt the crusting wound on her thigh. “Oh.” He lifted his hand away, looking down toward it and realizing his state of dress. “Oh, God,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“No,” she exhaled exasperatedly as he moved away from her. “War—”
Lying on his side, his body against hers, his hand still hovering above her abdomen, War looked up to her apologetically. “I can’t…” he said, biting his lip briefly. Looking back to her leg, he let his hand reach for her injury again. “But I can—”
“Stop,” she demanded, stopping his hand with both of hers. He looked up to her, brows lifted gently, his lips parted ever so slightly. “I hate it when you do that,” she said, jaw clenching.
“But it…” He glanced down at their connection, at the drying blood forming a swirling center shape, like a serpent, with points at its sides and head and curls extending from its top. “It looks painful.”
“Being alive is painful,” she said.
“It can also be pleasurable,” he countered.
“When you start participating in that one, you can worry about the first.”
“Tor, you don’t understand,” he said.
“We don’t understand each other.”
“We can try.” He smiled sadly. All he’d been doing here was trying… and failing.
She considered arguing further, but the clock on the wall reminded her of the time. Nearly one a.m. and she had a very important meeting at three. Looking back to him, she smiled. Rolling onto her side, she pulled his arm around her waist. “Tomorrow,” she said. “We can try tomorrow.”
Though tomorrow wasn’t promised to War. No time was dedicated to him, not even tonight. It couldn’t be. Torrence had no control over the light of the virtues nor when that light would be revealed to her.
Sometimes it took weeks. Other times, mere hours. Tonight was an unholy communion, and soon it would be Devil’s Night. She closed her eyes, considered the power swirling in her savior’s veins, in her veins, in the communions shared by them through spirituality and fate and nothing more, and she prayed to her demonic orator that tomorrow would bring virtue to her too.
This excerpt from Deification by Brooklynn Dean is published here courtesy of the author and should not be reproduced without permission.
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