The ship rocked and the baron swayed to its hypnotic movement. Years of experiments had led to this foul night. He could feel it in the air, coiled tight from thunderstorm and thick with tallow. Here laid real power. His assistant, however, was not so convinced.
"The lilac is in place," Bernard said limply. "What is the next step?"
"The gold," answered Julian.
Like bovine in a labcoat, Bernard dragged himself over to the chest and removed the small pouch within. Carefully then, as if dazzled by its shine, he withdrew the coins and set them down inside the summoning circle. In total there were six, unremarkable, unmarked pieces; one for each day of the spell.
"And now?"
The blood.
Calmly as to not alarm the man, Julian Malkolvo walked around the glass window dividing the cabin, opened the iron door, and shot three bullets into his chest. His reaction was oddly not so much that of betrayal, but of timing. He gurgled something and dropped the empty pouch. With at most one lung, however, he could not scream as his white labcoat bloomed a horrid red. There was no going back now.
With a loud thud Bernard slumped to the cabin floor and Julian listened, with a fox's intensity, for any signs the rest of the crew may have heard. Lightning flashed across the bow, into the portholes, and then -- distant thunder. They were too busy battling the storm.
"Had you ever taken interest you would have known," he said gaily, watching the last convulsions shake from the man. "But none of you do."
Something happened then that he didn't expect: a cold satisfaction settled deep in his gut. The risk, or the act of disposing of such a man felt empowering, justified. Bernard's wife and children would be defenseless now, in need of a father figure once he returned. Perhaps he would take her as his wife. She
had
fine features. The thought of those conceited eyes looking up at him as she bobbed up and down his cock -- a sharp inhale brought him back to the cabin.
Where pooling blood began to move.
Joining the spines forming the outer ring of the ritual, the liquid sucked out of Bernard's orifices and over cracks in the wooden floor. Not realizing it, Julian began to mumble words of old scripture that he'd memorized from childhood. It was one thing to understand such powers, but something else entirely to see it with his own eyes...
Horror began to accumulate like a bad bet, going deeper and deeper into the red. The gold coins were being
plucked
into the circle of blood as if it were literally a pool and a creature swam beneath it. The hand that grabbed was crooked and sinuous. Part of the baron's brain attempted to pair it with drawings he'd seen in ancient text, but the sight of it turned his brain numb and his prayers into senseless chittering.
Had he made a mistake?
The crimson liquid lifted from the circle then as if it were a trapeze hoop. And where once there was nothing bones slowly materialized a monstrous curtain of bat wings. The blood rained as it raised toward the ceiling, but not enough to disguise the body of a giant prehistoric snake.
A demon.
Yet as if Lucifer were playing some immortal joke, from its head reared the upper body of a angel with fire-born skin and large bare breasts. No chains of light wrapped its scales.
It is supposed to be bound! Words! There are words. Summoner's words...
