Pine Needles (Veil Realms Series) (4 page)

The poisonous dart injected in me has paralyzed my body, and fear patrols my mind. Soon the nefarious substance will claim my ability to breathe, disintegrating thoughts shift, if they want us dead then why is it not an instant death?  Unless....

Chapter Three

The Catacombs

My ribs rack with an exploding
strike and then my stomach rivets with the same jolting pain. “Get up.” A cynical, baneful voice bellows out again, “Get up!”  Absent-mindedly my hand shoves a heavy leather bound boot back. I suddenly realize I’m being literally kicked back into reality. I push myself up from a floor, dirt lies beneath me and I’m not alone. With heavy lidded eyes and lethargic movements I sit up watching as the barbarous male strides away out of the…cell.

I’m in a cell and fifteen other women pile almost on top of each other, the area size is only a small infixed cove. I lean in against the cold metal bars and
gasp at the sight, catacombs with rows and rows of women prisoners. In my field of vision I catch a chilling sight, down the corridor a round structure made entirely of human skulls. Hundreds compacted and stacked together forming a morbid column.

“They are everywhere...the bones....” A woman quietly steps in beside me and points up, my hesitant eyes follow her direction and find bones artistically designed above us in bizarre noisome patterns.

I turn in a frenetic voice and blurt out, “Where are we?” The tall brunette shakes her head with a slight shrug.

A voice from behind me
calls out with a bristling tone. “Underground, in their lair, honey. And it is exactly what they say would happen.”

I move swiftly around to face the condescending voice
. “When what happens?” I inquire staring at a pale bleached blond woman, appearing to be a few years older than me. The one thing that stands out to me is her diamond nose piercing, which reminds me of my own earrings, instinctively I reach up and touch the empty puncture marks. 

“The fucking polar shift sweetie, it's been all over the new
s and stuff. Don’t you watch TV? They say the earth does a hundred and eighty degree rotation and opens up other dimensions. My boyfriend told me that the energy level elevates so much that it can knock out an entire city’s electronic devices, who knows by now, Florida could be our new North Pole.”

“Ok
ay... but that doesn’t explain why we are here,” I reply waving my hands dramatically.

She bears her hands down on the ground and shoves herself up, and walks over to me. “And they say blondes are dumb.” She hisses in my face.

Taking a step forward I glare in her scowling, insolent eyes. “What?”

She tips her head forward with an amused smirk and grips the bars before us. “We’ve shifted int
o another dimension or rather they shifted into our world, either way we are not in Kansas anymore, Toto. I’ve only been here for about a day now.” She nonchalantly nods her head over her shoulder and adds, “The others have been here longer, it’s like they are collecting all the women. The men have just suddenly vanished. I think they are some other kind of life form, maybe their intent is to experiment on us, you know, like the people that get abducted and come back telling their stories.”

The brunette delicately rubs her neck where a faint gash still remains,
she quietly replies, “The darts don’t seem to have a long term effect on us.” Discreetly I massage my own shoulder taking in the scene, some women group together clinging to each other’s clothes, hands, and arms with a million expressions shadowing their faces. Only a few lay somnolently on the putrid ground, distinct welts and bruising exhibit the brutality of their savageness here.

A younger girl from the huddle
yells out, “Shut the hell up! They’re coming back.” As she quickly wedges her body in-between everyone, the blonde and I separate from the bars forming our own assemblage. Two males appear. Merging at the entrance of our cell chamber, from looking at them they are not as ample as the warriors. Wearing only golden arm bands clasping to their left arms and animal skinned pants, they almost seem humanistic.

Flecks of gold outline several unknown symbols along their bare chest, stunned at their surreal perfected bodies I don’t even realize they are speaking to me. “Come.” Th
e tone is more of a command than a request; the one closer to the entrance reaches in and clamps a dooming hold on me. The other cell guard literally steps in and tosses two dark haired females over either shoulder and marches out.

Both thrash and scream with pleas for help and I dig the heels of my feet into the ground with no results of cessation. We follow a narrow stair-casing to a lower level
. Once we enter a small landing I notice it opens up to a huge room. Water sloshes tranquilly against the four freestanding piers as the guard heaves the women in, I peer up to see a high rise ceiling which seems to provide openness to the stark room. 

A guard turns to two more piers facing the entrance, which has insets for torches and lights them giving off a hazy afterglow. The one that effectively dragged me down here shoves me in the tepid waters. As they stand like statues on either side of the low lit entrance, three older tormented
looking women rush into the waters before us.

Stripping our clothing away, immediately I try to clutch my top, but relentlessly they rip away everything from our bodies, scrubbing fiercely the dirt and grime from our faces, fingernails, and eventually down to our feet. The girl beside me jerks back from the women, “Don’t touch me, I can wash myself!” Wrestling feverishly away she almost falls backwards into the water.

The oldest of the three women, reaches out extending a hand to help her and with a gloomy whispering voice she speaks, “Hush... do not speak, because your lips may not ever mumble another word here again.” The girl bitterly slaps the old woman’s hand away, with a galling tone.

“You shut up, you don’t know what you are talking about you old hag.”             

The old woman feebly picks up the scrubbing brush and turns to the others, “It’s time. We are through here.”

Before she wades away in the dismal waters I reach over and grab her arm
begging her to explain, “What do you mean, what’s going on here...please, tell us.” Staring my imploring dark eyes at her, I cover my arm over my bare chest and take a step closer to her. Graying studious eyes peer back into my own, as she inches up to me, as if she is carefully considering her next move. Her ever-soft hand of time holds my face and then with her ethereal finger, marks an x across my lips.

“My sister was taken by the warlords here, she spoke too much, angering them so, and they had her lips sewn shu
t.” My heart falls with despair as I watch her and the other women step away from us, retrieving our clothing they seem to simply disappear through the limestone entrance.  I take a flaccid glance to the girls stepping in beside me as the maleficent guards guide us to another level, more catacombs of cells only larger and fewer women within each cell.

Each guard tightly wraps leather bindings around our wrists and hoists us onto large metal hooks, lining the three of us in a row. Dangling our bare feet from the dirt floor, we are naked as a sheared sheep from its wool.  

Left alone with panic stricken souls I stare directly across from us to another identical cell. “Look....” I nod my head toward the cells, “It looks like they are grouping us somehow, by the color of our hair.” Double checking myself, I recline my head back to see that both the girls I’m imprisoned with have dark hair. Motioning with my bare foot, “That cell holds six with red hair and that one over there has five with blonde hair.”

The girl on my right begins crying with anguish, “I don’t care. I don’t care how they group us. Don’t you get it! They are cannibals and they are going to kill us!”

I allow my head to droop back and sigh with frustration, collecting my mixed emotions I peer over to her. “Cannibals eat their own kind.” She snaps her head up and glares over to me.

“I don’t fucking care, I don’t have anything left to live for anyway. I want to die...
I want it fucking over with already!” Twisting in her leather restraints, she struggles violently for a moment and then drops her weary head forward helplessly. I close my eyes feeling like we are slabs of meat hanging in a meat locker, waiting for the butcher to come.

“I’ll do whatever they want, no matter how disgusting it is.” The declaring voice comes from the other dark haired girl hanging on my left; slowly I open my eyes to look over at her. “Seriously, I will.”

I quietly nod my head believing her, why would I not. Desperate times, means desperate measures for people to take. The rustic door to our cell clangs open and a male guard steps in unhooking the girl on my right and instantly she starts begging for mercy. She refuses to stand, so he flips her over his shoulder and strides away. Her beseeching drifts eerily down the corridor until we can’t hear her any longer.

Shortly after another burly guard enters our cell removing the girl on my left, her exit wasn’t as intense, but none the less disparaging. One by on
e the number of women diminishes, leaving only a handful. The sound of their shedding tears rebound thoughtlessly through the catacombs, with my head languished forward I hear the cell unlock.

A leviathan male emerges, and not like any of the cell guards before
. He steps inside and his form reminds me of the warriors, but without the mortifying armor and weaponry. Relieved of his bloodcurdling, horrid helmet I can see his face now. Ashen green eyes scan over me. Absorbing everything I can, I note he looks surreally human just as the guards do, but a distinct pure gold dust covers his body and his left arm carries the same golden bands, except his arm adorns four, and the perplexing symbols displaying across his chest are different.

His hair is as white as a dove, flowing like silk down to his broad shoulders. As he vigilantly moves around me, my mind shuffles through chaotic thoughts, and I begin to wonder, if he is one of the livid warriors then why wasn’t his haunting eyes, raging red?

I feel his hands run along my back, as his feather-like touch soars up my spine. My pulse quivers in an untamed rush, as he idly steps in front of me with consideration.  He grips my chin, forcing me to turn to my left and then facing to the right. Surly he releases his grip and swoops a hand down to my stomach slithering his way up to my breasts. Before he reaches his intention, I yank myself up using the hook as my anchor and swing my legs out driving him backwards. Catching him off guard, my question earlier is resolved. The once ashen eyes swirl with blood red resentment.

In an eye-blinding strike, quick as a snake, he lashes out and whips his hand around my leg. Coiling his deadly arm around my entire thigh, a frightening image slams to mind, he’ll snap my leg in two. Bearing down on the hook again, I contort my body whirling my other leg out laying siege to his face. Kicking and pounding with everything I have, groaning and grunting fills the cell as I continue to fight myself free from him.

His fist collides into my jaw thrusting my head backward. With my next rampant heartbeat he has me by the hair. He glares down to me with a razor smile, making my body shudder as I stare at the rows of sharp carnivorous teeth. My aggressive breathing raises my bare chest up and down and he quickly notices, instantly his greedy hand clutches my breast clenching hard, forcing an afflicting, painful groan from me.

His
feral smile quickly eats away, and replaces with an open mouth, dripping with saliva. He leans over me, preparing for his teeth fraying attack, but an effectual tone stills the air, making us both frozen in our conflicting positions.

“Go.” 

Only one single, consequential word is spoken and the warrior removes his claw-like clasp from me, enabling me to lean my head upward. There, standing by the cell entrance, is the god of gods, the leader of the hungry pack. Towering at least seven feet tall, gold dust sheaths his frame, five thick gold bands adorn his left arm and the same markings cross his bare chest. He takes a scowling step closer waiting for the warrior to leave, and then he makes a subtle gesture with his hand and the menacing male egresses.

I huff at the loose strands of linger
ing hair in front of my face and I narrow my eyes at him waiting for his move. But he steadily holds a stance like no other, superlatively still, not even a trace he even takes a breath, unblinking golden eyes lock onto my face. I swallow blood down as my jaw swells, I’m shocked it’s not broken from the blow, but maybe the warrior didn’t want his meat too tenderized.  

His hair is not white, completely opposite
, it is dark, much darker than my own, and shorter just past his chiseled jaw line. As I look I see the muscles in his jaw clench briefly and I immediately peer back into his avowing eyes. I realize now they all have their own unique eye coloration and what it looks like when they become agitated, but the leader’s indigeninous gold has me benumbed. 

The movement of his liberal hand startles me as he flexes it against my neck, it’s a motion I wasn’t expecting, but his next action stuns me even more. Using his other free hand he holds my breast, fondling, lowering his head he begins licking, and sucking my nipple boldly, I hold my breath with animosity. I keep myself restrained from showing any emotions as he switches to my other breast, feasting his impassioned mouth over me.