CHAPTER 53: THE RITE

  THE THRESHOLD

  ?

  Cameron inhaled and lurched forward.

  The world was dark. Darker than dark. Darker than black, if such a thing was even possible, and yet, he could see everything plainly. He woke on a precipice overlooking a sea of fire the color of midnight that reached towards a sky with no moon and no stars, curling and twisting not like flame, but like the tendrils of an octopus. He woke to contradictions, and with a feeling in his chest that told that these opposites were somehow right, and that all things were as they should be.

  He looked at his hands, and then to the ground, where the dirt was gray the long-dead remnants of bushes and undergrowth and flowers waited for him. What had once been beautiful and inviting was cold and dead. Thorns, bramble, and dread.

  He stood up and dusted himself off, paced towards the edge of the cliffside and stared into the sea of black and ichorous fire, and towards whispers that told him he needed to welcome its embrace. Closer and closer he veered towards the precipice, his wolfish eyes made docile by the invitation. There were no whispers, and there was no hand that extended itself for him to grab, only the notion that if he continued, things might be alright. In that sea the color of midnight, where the flames moved like tendrils, there was an answer to a question Cameron did not yet ask. So he took another step, and felt the rocks tremble beneath his feet, becoming more unsteady the longer his foot anchored itself in place.

  A hand pressed down on his shoulder. Cameron slowly turned to look at it. He found tattoos and rings and spiked bracelets, and twisted his neck further to see who had touched him. Moira Saunter. The same hand she placed onto him was withdrawn, only to be whipped forward against Cameron’s face.

  Cameron blinked and held his face, and slowly turned to look back towards the sea of black.

  Moira grabbed his chin and pinched his cheeks with her fingers. “Don’t look over there, look at me. Listen, kid, and listen close. You’re going to see things that call to you. You’re going to hear things that you wish you didn’t. You’re going to feel the pull of something you feel like you can’t shake. It’s a place that mixes memories with false futures—a place we were never meant to be.”

  Cameron brushed her hand down and inhaled. The air felt stale in his mouth. Behind Moria was a forest of dead trees, dead vines, and mist that made the fog in the city look airy and thin. In this mist there were faces of skulls and impressions of hands, arms, torsos. Bodies, live and dead, trapped in a mirage that slithered between the dead roots like a river that cared little for who it carried away.

  Moira snapped her fingers in Cameron’s face. “Cameron.”

  Cameron blinked. “Yeah. Yeah, I’m here. This place, it… what would’ve happened if I jumped, Moira?”

  “Everything here is meant to guide you towards one side of the line. The Threshold is near-death given form, and it wants you to choose the path of least resistance. Those flames in that sea won’t reach out to snag you. Behind me, in that forest, those apparitions in the mist will not touch you—not unless you touch them. Most will hover, just out of reach. They’ll breathe down your neck and whisper things in your face and show you things that they think you want to see, or they’ll construct horrors and convince you that that’s what you’ll see if you don’t give in.”

  “If I choose to live, you mean,” Cameron muttered.

  Moira nodded.

  “What now?” Cameron asked.

  “You go into that forest, and you keep walking,” Moira said assuredly, placing a hand on her hip. “And you walk until whatever is inside of you takes notice.”

  “So, I’m bait,” Cameron said curtly, brows furrowing inward.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Cameron glanced down at his belt. No Reign 18, no vials of pasteurized demon blood. No Guts. Just him, Moira, and a path of uncertainty forced in front of him by a place that wanted him to die.

  If Moira’s expertise could be trusted, the demonic essence inside of him wanted anything but that. Why it didn’t yet take notice was beyond him, and what it would take for it to notice was all the more dreadful. How much would he have to see and endure before it figured it was time? Before it decided that he was at risk of falling victim to what the Threshold wanted of him?

  “Moira,” Cameron said, stepping closer towards the dead forest. “This place wants me to choose death. Inside of me, there is something that wants me to live. Right?”

  Moira nodded, crossing her arms over her chest. “Uh-huh.”

  “Why didn’t it stop me, just now? Why didn’t it come out?”

  “Don’t know,” Moira admitted. “Being a witch doesn’t give me all of the answers, okay? Just some of them, which, mind you, were learned the hard way. And this place doesn’t do well with answers—in fact, it’s a place made up of non-answers and opposites and chaos.”

  “Well, try. Give it your best guess,” Cameron said.

  Moira exhaled and rubbed her tattooed scalp in focus, her pale features drawn into folds and creases of contemplation. “Alright, here’s my guess. It knew, intuitively, that I was here with you, and that because I was here with you, that I’d be liable to stop you from jumping. Bang.”

  “Then it knows I want to live,” Cameron said.

  “Here’s my other guess, which is less of a guess, and more what I learned from the last time I did this with a hexling. You remember what I told you, right before I initiated the Sacrament of the Threshold?”

  “Cheese, rat,” Cameron said with a dull voice. “Yeah I remember.”

  “The rat will only get the cheese if it feels like it can. The demonic essence will only come out if it feels like you’re really at-risk of choosing death, and this place won’t let you choose death on your own. You have to—”

  “Want it. Really want it. Is that it?” Cameron interrupted.

  “Uh-huh. And the only way that’ll happen is if you step into that forest,” Moira said, opening up her hand to the dead forest.

  “Whatever happens, then, don’t stop me,” Cameron said, pointing a finger into her sternum. “You got it?”

  Moira curled a brow and scoffed. “You think I’m going with you? In there?”

  Cameron grimaced. “What? You’re not?”

  “Were you not listening to anything I just said? If I’m with you, it’ll know, and it’ll think you’re not really at risk of falling victim to the Threshold. I’m keeping my ass here. When you’re done, find me here, and we’ll end the Sacrament. Simple as that."

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  Cameron bit down on the inside of his cheeks and turned, shuffling his hands into the pockets of his gray cargo pants. A menagerie of curled bramble awaited him, and the tangled arms of sodden trees held each other in an embrace of decay, and that canopy of was a guarantee of what Moira had promised: memories mixed with false futures and the breath of phantoms on the back of his neck.

  He followed a set of stony steps into a beaten path.

  ?

  Branches creaked beneath the weight of his boot. Light existed only in the curtains of the mist that wormed its way through the trees, and the mist wailed with an infliction of agony. But those wails were muted, and they reached his ears as white noise—the static of suffering without a clear source.

  If what he’d learned so far could be trusted, he had two options: do it through the Sacrament of the Threshold, or wait until his dark passenger decided to initiate it itself, which could take years. Decades, even. He didn’t have that kind of time, and neither did Leroy.

  Fingers curled into palms, and Cameron allowed his knuckles to whiten as he proceeded.

  “Does it bring you shame?”

  Cold breath trickled down Cameron’s neck. His heart beat in his chest, and fear anchored his feet to the ground. He’d almost forgotten the sound of her voice. With pivot, he turned, only for the mist to deny him the sight of her.

  “Mercedes?”

  Cameron trudged forward and glanced from side to side.

  Faces erupted along the mist, their features only vague impressions of what could be recalled from his memories. Corrupted, twisted things that looked ghostly and awful but still so eerily similar to what he’d grown to know and remember. A miasma that took the form of David St. James bursted out, reaching his hand toward Cameron, who fell flat onto the ground, rocks the rocks and branches digging into his palms and wrists.The apparition's hand lingered in front of Cameron’s face, wearing the glove he’d never forget the name of. Pauper.

  “There was a way out, Cam, and I was your ticket to getting what you wanted, hell, what you still want, that you push down, and down, and down, and down!”

  Cameron lifted a trembling hand, mouth agape. He reached for David’s hand, only for it to rip and tear before their fingers could touch. Blood ruptured out from the mist, as real as the tainted warmth of its wetness and its iron scent, covering Cameron’s face. With a hurried hand, he wiped the blood from his features, only for it to turn to a red vapor, hot and burning and hissing, and within each hiss, David’s voice returned in pieces.

  “I made a family for us. For you, and you went and bit the hand that only wanted to feed you.”

  Cameron’s face erupted in a scowl. He brought himself to his feet, and with a harshness to his face, searched through the mist for David’s apparition, rage swelling in the scars he’d gathered. “You didn’t make anything. You found two strays and tried to make pets out of us! And you… you aren’t even dead! You were never my ticket, you were my fucking collar!”

  He pivoted, wiping the final dredges of blood off his features, and continued along the path, wafting deeper and deeper through the mist of many faces, climbing over thick, dried up vines and squeezing his way through clusters of rotted trees. On the opposite end of it all was a clearing of dead grass. Moira had warned him of all of this, and somehow, it didn’t make it any better. Knowing that this was all some convoluted illusion didn’t erase the weight of those memories, or the pain of seeing faces that had once meant something to him.

  “And you broke out of one just to let another clasp around your neck.” It was Mercedes’s voice, or something that sought to mimic it, same as before.

  It came from behind again, its presence hovering just behind him, and just as it was before, when Cameron turned, the source of the false impression was gone. In its place was a blanket of mist, so thick that it created a veil over the forest path he’d just exited. Distress forced Cameron’s hand forward as he tried to grab hold of the voice, trying to create something from the absence.

  A wrist formed, thin, olive-toned and familiar.

  “Mercedes?” Cameron whispered.

  It wasn’t a wrist. It was a neck. Mist twisted and snapped into a different shape, and into a face he’d sworn he’d never cared to dignify with a memory at all. Germaine. He gasped for air as color was brought to his face and his eyes—how the red lines of his eyes deepened, how the blue of his oxygen-depraved skin spread in blotches—only to show how the color was leaving it, and how his features paled as Cameron’s hand took his life from him.

  Cameron withdrew his hand and stumbled backward, his eyes wide and frantic. “No… no, he—he deserved it!”

  His shout fell on deaf ears. There was nobody to hear him.

  Cameron pivoted too quickly and fell face forward onto the ground, and laid with his chest against the dead grass. Mist grumbled and moaned into a new shape, and when he lifted his dirt-covered face, he saw another.

  “No—”

  Quiet tears welled up in his eyes.

  Her raven-black hair fell to one side and settled into the dirt and her brown eyes remained open and without any light behind them. Dried blood crusted over from where it had leaked from her nose and her ears. She wore the same black button up and her nametag still read JESS.

  “Please, stop,” Cameron whispered. Saliva poured from his mouth as a congealed spittle that framed each word that left his quivering lips.

  Movement trickled around his mother’s mouth, but the words that left it weren’t hers. It wasn’t even her voice. It was his. “Don’t you dare cry.”

  “I didn’t mean it,” Cameron muttered. He crawled up off of the ground and rested his mother’s body in his lap, holding her body in his arms. “I was young, stupid, I-I… I was wrong, please, Mom, I didn’t—”

  Her chapped lips uttered his words once more. Some of the last ones he’d ever said to her. “Don’t you sit here, Mom, and tell me what I’m doing is somehow worse than what you’re doing.”

  Mist gathered from behind her body, drawing new shapes out of the veil. Just behind her, Cameron saw a vague impression of himself. A version of him stood with his back facing Cameron, who bloodied his hands bludgeoning someone to death—Hughes, who pleaded and pleaded only to be silenced more and more by every strike.

  “No, that’s not what happened, he’s… he’s alive.” Cameron’s throat tightened. “That’s not what happened!”

  He saw himself very nearly punching holes through Katia and Boris outside of the Nightingale Theater, turning Gideon Draves’s comrades into shells and husks of life, barely hanging on by a thread. He didn’t remember if that’s how it happened, or if he’d truly left them for dead.

  He saw himself shooting and killing the guards from the Argent Group, and sparing none of them. He didn’t remember if he had or hadn’t killed them all, only the phantom of pain in his arm and his ear, the sound of his gun going off, and the bodies that he left in his wake.

  He saw himself doing things that hadn’t yet happened. Things that the Threshold wanted him to see. Moira had cautioned him—he’d told him that this place would show him false futures. But the longer he laid eyes on what the Threshold predicted of his fate, the more convinced Cameron became of his future’s certainty.

  His victims grew in number, and in each iteration, they lost more of their features.

  He witnessed his own hands take the lives of indiscriminate silhouettes, and with each soul that he harvested, those hands trembled less and less.

  Cameron glanced down at his mother, who he had held in his arms. Her face was different. Everything about her was different. A gasp was forced out from between his lips. His heart drummed in his chest and his throat dried up. Mercedes stared up at him from where his mother’s head had once rested in his lap, her brown curls weaving between his hands. Her ushanka cap sat atop her head as it usually did, and she was wearing that long sleeve, oversized black shirt.

  “Was it worth it, Cam?” she asked.

  “What? Was.. was what worth it, Mercedes?”

  Before he could think to answer, he felt a wetness spread over his features. A gaping hole emerged in Mercedes’s chest, framed by frost and ice that bore a distinct azure outline. She reached a hand towards the collar of Cameron’s sweatshirt, gently pulling him closer to her as blood steadily poured out from her lips.

  “Your revenge.”

  Her hand reached further and grabbed hold of his chin, forcing him to look upon his own silhouette, towards himself, and the future that he was promised: one built on a mountain of bodies and blood. Cameron’s silhouette turned to him, and with each step, that which mirrored him lost more and more of itself until the face that he knew to be his own belonged to another.

  Leroy squatted down in front of Cameron and tipped his checkered flat cap.

  Cameron cradled Mercedes’ body only to realize that his hands hugged a blanket of mist. He leaned forward on his knees and set his elbows into the dirt, holding both of his ears. A noise left him, one he could’ve sworn that he’d heard before. When he’d entered the forest, he’d heard wailing that reached his ears as white noise—the static of suffering.

  Moving forward, I'll probably be upping the requirement for the Ritual meter by one or two stars, just so I have a bit more time to prepare those bonus chapters in advance. Frankly, I didn't expect to get 5 ratings back to back like this! Either way, I'm stoked, and super excited to write more with Esme. When Esme's chapter drops, I will open another poll. Thanks again for your readership, it means the world.

  CAMERON KESSLER

  MoirA SAUNTER

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