When his lips curved, I felt as though I was absolved. Atoned. Pure—not for being desireless—but for beingdesired.Desired as I was, darkness and light.
I waited, watching his lips. I was pliable in his strong hold. I waited for Wes to tell me what to do and how to do it.
“Perfect.”
A scream pierced through our explosive moment. The blood-curdling sound of it made my blood run cold.
I slid down Wes’s body back to the floor. After another scream, Wes pinned me with a severe look.
“You are not to move out of arm’s length of me, do you understand?”
This sounded like domming, the thing Wes swore he would never do again. But given the feral look in his eyes and his reaction to the auction, Wes seemed past the point of caring about his self-imposed moratorium.
I nodded. Wes intertwined his fingers with mine, and we followed the sound of feminine terror. Luckily, it was not coming from the VIP section.
The commotion led us and a few other curious guests into a room where a small crowd huddled around a nude woman on a sacrificial altar. Jayne, Archer, and a harem of cloaked and masked beasts and demons lorded over a woman strapped to the wooden table. Jayne tied a cloth gag around her mouth, muffling her screams.
I recognized her as the woman who’d been flirting with Archer and asking to scene with him at the soirée.
“Are they roleplaying a human sacrifice?” I hissed to Wes.
Wes tracked everyone’s movements, holding me against his chest.
There was an open duffel bag at the woman’s feet, and Archer pulled what appeared to be a pizza cutter from it.
The woman screamed and writhed. “No, no, no.” The word was barely decipherable through the gag.
Archer trailed a metal spike attached to his finger up the woman’s leg as she wrestled with her restraints. I saw a low spark of electricity where the metal met skin. But when Archer stood next to her head, he wielded the pizza cutter like a weapon, theatrically looking out over the crowd.
“What’s a Midsummer party without a sacrifice to the gods?” he asked.
The demons and beasts cheered.
I twisted to look up at Wes, waiting for him to make sense of what was happening with growing alarm.
“They’re using a violet wand and a body contact cable,” Wes whispered. “It’s making Archer’s body the conductor of electricity, as well as any metal tools he’s holding. He could touch her with his bare finger and shock her, but the metal is more intense.”
“To another year of abundance, good fortune, and even better sex. To another year of beautiful, willing victims…” He trailed the metal finger down the woman’s arm as she stared up at him, pleading with wide, teary eyes. “To another year of The Circle!”
Anyone holding a drink raised their glass.
The girl shook her head, screaming into her gag. Jayne stroked her hair once before stepping away, eyes warm and unaffected by the woman’s pleas.
“After ascension comes descension. We must face death before we are reborn. These are the initiation rites of our ancestors,” Jayne said, her silky voice holding us in a trance. “Let us travel to the chthonic together, the underworld, so that we may bring back wisdom and fertile soil ripe for seeding. The Circle, the ouroboros, death and birth and death and birth…”
Rhythmic percussion and chanting—possibly Latin—played through hidden speakers. Jayne found my eyes. She smiled.
Wes’s grip on my waist tightened. I held my breath, the intensity making it hard to discern theater from reality.
Archer brought the pizza cutter down to the woman’s skin. He slid it slowly across her neck as she screamed like he was literally cutting off her head.
My heart beat wildly. The room was silent aside from the buzz of the metal and the strange music. And soon, the screaming girl went just as deathly quiet.
She went utterly still, her eyes glassy and faraway. There was only a faint pink line on her neck from the dull blade.
Archer lifted the pizza cutter into the air like a valiant knight. The room cheered. One of the demons grabbed a nearby woman and plunged his fingers inside her cunt, as if overcome with lust. Her eyes rolled back with a moan. Another took out his cock and slammed it inside a willing mouth, hand gripping hair roughly. The rest of the room quickly devolved into the same animalistic frenzy, as if Archer and Jayne truly had unleashed some potent, supernatural force upon them.
Archer seemed to have powered off his electric implement, as his touch no longer shocked the woman. He slid two fingers in and out of the woman’s mouth before slowly dragging them to her clit, bringing her back out of her shock with slow circles. Jayne joined him, playing with the girl’s tits.
