Air whooshed out of my lungs.
“That’s mine!” I sounded petulant even to my own ears.
Luther ignored me, staring at the worn cover and tracing a finger over the front. It seemed nostalgic for him to be holding it. Until he opened it, the spine cracking quietly before he flipped through the pages. And his eyes, they scanned the nonsense as if genuinely understanding the gibberish I’d been trying to decipher.
“Can you read that?” I blurted, curiosity getting the best of me.
“Of course I can.” He scoffed. Ocean eyes flicked to me, glinting with the dangers of the briny deep. “I was taught by the best, after all.”
“You need to start making sense,” I demanded.
He set the journal on the counter between us with a definitive smack. I held my breath, watching as he spread his fingers across the pages. Then he pointed to the sigils sketched in the margins.
“Your family…” he started, pausing for a bracing inhale, “I’m sure you know the Ashcrofts were one of the founding families of Kilbride.”
A beat passed before I remembered to nod.
“Those founding families were the first settlers in the area. But precious land and resources weren’t all they found, Ophelia.” My heart skipped several beats, and a frigid chasmrent apart my chest. “They found the ruins of an ancient temple built to honor a long-forgotten deity: Moloch.”
“Moloch,” I repeated, inaudibly. Just speaking the name aloud sent ice shards shooting through my veins.
“In the wreckage of those crumbling ruins, the founding families discovered a new god to worship. One that answered their prayers and granted them strange powers. They developed into a cult that quickly rose in wealth and status on the East Coast. A church of acolytes horribly and monstrously devoted to the will of their infernal god. A terrible religion where only the most devoted apostles were granted the ability to transform into something new, into a grotesque mimicry of their god, into beings touched by their master and eager to serve him.”
“The stolas,” I mumbled.
“Precisely.” The affirmation dropped a stone into still waters, sending shockwaves rippling through my being. “Moloch’s favorite apostles have the power to transform into demons. An ability that eventually passed through the bloodlines.”
Every feather, every dream, each paralyzing encounter, every sigil in the insensible journal melted and morphed together into a terrible truth taking shape in the raw space in my mind.
“So, the ones you kill—”
“Apostles of Moloch. People just like you and me on the outside but warped by an infernal power down to their very cores. They walk amongst us during the day wearing the guise of a human, then at night they transform into monsters and plot the return of their master.”
The kitchen compressed around me, squeezing into a throat swallowing, suffocating me.
“Me… but why me?”
Our eyes locked, and his smile was grim.
“Your grandfather,” he said simply, and everything came full circle from such an abrupt answer. “Hunter was the first Ashcroft, the first acolyte, to ever leave their cult. He was a brilliant man, truly. They don’t make men like him anymore. He chose real academia over fanaticism. Truth and language over mysticism and terror.” His head dropped, and he pressed his fingers into the handwriting on the pages. “Eventually he began searching for a way to bring an end to the cult. A way to fight and kill the stolas. A way to stop them from bringing Moloch into our world.”
My breath hitched, and the soup I’d managed to eat gurgled uncomfortably in my stomach.
“But what… What does any of that have to do with you? Why is a history professor involved in all this?”
He paused, shifting from foot to foot and avoiding my eyes. “A stolas killed my sister.”
A gasp breached me. I slapped my hand over my mouth to cover it before another wave of words escaped. “Oh God, I’m so sorry for your loss. I can’t imagine—”
He held up a hand, stopping my ramble.
“It was a long time ago.” His shoulders sagged, and he ran a hand through his hair. “But your grandfather was there seconds after it happened. Showed up like some dark knight and killed the fucking thing. Not in time to save her, but…” He sighed and blinked away the cloud of misery forming in his eyes. “He took pity on me, I suppose. Saw my need for revenge and taught me everything he knew. The demons, the cult, the real history of Kilbride. More importantly, how to kill them.”
An asphyxiating nightmare, everything crawled from the darkness and threatened to sweep me into an unfathomable sea of agony. And it was too deep, too dark, too fathomless.
I would drown—Iwasdrowning.
With his eyes on the journal, he continued. “Hunter eventually told me the story of how he betrayed the cult by leaving them, how he lost his inherited power to transform into a stolas, and consequently working against them for the rest of his life. He’s a traitor in their eyes. Because of that, all the remaining stolas will be trying to get to you. They might see you as the penultimate sacrifice to bring their god over into our world.”
