Twisted Ginni by Nicola Rose
Ginni
To say my mood was dark didn’t even scratch the surface of it. Being commanded into silence and total obedience stirred the nasty voice in my head to a frenzy. It was one thing to be a slave to my masters, but having all free will removed was a step so far that not many had dared tread it before.
The command would wear off over time as his intent faded but my wrath wouldn’t. Andras had just royally fucked himself in the ass.
I sat in the corner of a new motel room, glowering at a damp stain on the wall, refusing to even look at any of them. They bickered non-stop about all the things they should or shouldn’t have done, going round in pointless circles, tension whipping across the room from one angry tirade to another. Even Sam yelled, cussing like a sailor to get his words out. Funny how he seemed to be this quiet, shy boy, but when he spoke it was with a constant string of profanities.
Andras had been through a cycle of crunches and push-ups as they fought. I wasn’t sure if the exercise was that important to him that it had to be done there and then, or if it was more of an attempt at distraction, trying to defuse himself.
They seemed to have forgotten I was there. Not something that happened often, I guess because I always stuck my oar in with a snarky comment here or a threat there.
Assholes.
“I’m telling you, guns are not good enough,” Andras said, wiping his face on a towel and yanking off his sweaty t-shirt and holy mother shit that body. “A bullet is too quick. I want them to suffer. I want them to burn.”
“It doesn’t even matter if we get guns or fire or bombs or an army of undead warriors, we can’t finish this if we don’t know where they are first,” Phoenix groaned. “I’ve been checking and New Rising is still deserted. They ran when we did, they knew we’d be coming for them. They could be anywhere. Our priority is to find them, scout it out, then we work on the taking them out part.”
“They will burn.”
Phoenix rubbed the back of his neck, casting a quick glance at me. “And what about her? We need to get wiser about utilizing her skills.”
“She’s good for nothing, we’re better off alone.”
“Maybe, but she’s here now, we might as well try.”
Andras joined Phoenix in staring at me. I twirled my hair, once again seriously considering killing them. If only there weren’t demons waiting to drag me to purgatory across the veil. The hard-to-swallow truth was that them owning me kept me safe. If they were all dead, I’d be zipped straight back to the other side.
And if only I didn’t quite like the mixed-up feelings they caused in my belly…
“We can’t even go out in public with her. Look at the state of her! That face is horrific and the clothes are gaudy enough to draw attention from fucking outer space. She looks like she ran away from the circus.”
Ouch. It kinda hurt to have Andras so openly criticize me when I was sat there ogling his body like he was cut from the hand of God. Even with the faint scars across his chest…
“Do you have to look like that?” Phoenix asked softly, apologetically.
“Seriously? You finally speak to me and it’s to insult the way I look?”
“Just answer the damned question,” Andras growled.
After blowing a calming breath, I leveled them my most patient gaze. “I can be invisible in spirit form or I can manifest as any animal you like, but for human form, this is the only one I’ve got. So no, I can’t change my creepy face, but I guess you could force me into boring clothes if you really wanted.”
“You’re not to shift invisible unless told. I want to know where you are at all times.” Andras dropped into a chair and leaned over his knees, steepling fingers under his smooth chin. Glaring at me with such intensity my heart stuttered.
“Obviously. You already made sure I can only do precisely as instructed, oh intelligent master.”
Phoenix rolled his eyes. “Andras, try to go easy on how much you offend her. Don’t take advantage, don’t push her with commands you don’t need to make.”
“Never were wiser words spoken,” I smirked.
“You don’t think keeping the deceptive little witch visible is important?”
“Just chill a little, that’s all I’m saying.” With Phoenix’s words, I could have sworn I felt a calming wave trickle over me. Weird. Did the others feel it, too?
“Ginni, I’m going to start at the beginning,” he continued. “I want you to know why we’re here. Why you’re here. Then maybe you can help with a plan?”
Yep, his voice was a definite soothing balm over the rough edges of Andras’s will because as I nodded, Andras huffed, leaning back, releasing me from his intense focus. Sam just stared at the floor with those haunted, glistening eyes. Such a beautiful face…
Phoenix cleared his throat, scratching his wrist. As much as I hated these dick-weasels, it was obvious this story was hard for them, and my heart beat faster, picking up on their energies.
“We were born and raised in a cult called The Order of the New Rising. We spent our whole lives in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, the heart of the Chihuahuan Texan desert, among a population of around seventy. All of them total, Satan-worshipping scum.” He rose from his perch on the bed to cross the room, staring out of the window into a dreary sky and an empty parking lot.
“We’re not brothers, us three. We have separate parents and they make up The Six, the council, the founders of the cult. They believe in the Blood Moon Prophecy. We’ve been preparing for it our whole lives. We were named after powerful demons in the belief that upon the fourth lunar eclipse in the current tetrad, when they perform their rituals, our bodies will become hosts to those demons, coming to Earth with their legions, and the apocalypse will begin.”
Movement caught my attention — Sam, his head twitching from side to side. “Fucking tick-tock.”
“You know what a lunar tetrad is, right?” Andras asked with a sneer.
“Yes, Master, I do.” I offered him a sickly-sweet smile. “A rare phenomenon consisting of four total lunar eclipses that occur over two years, with a certain number of un-eclipsed full moons between them. This current tetrad will end with the final eclipse taking place during a supermoon, even rarer. Many have prophesied this as the End of Times, not just your shitty cult.”
Andras projected all his hate onto me with a single look of disgust before turning away. Guess he wasn’t expecting me to actually know. And in truth, I wouldn’t, were it not for the recent whisperings across the veil. Still, I couldn’t help feeling pretty smug right then. Maybe it’d shut him up a while.
“The first two eclipses have already happened. The third is only days away. The fourth, six months. Then we’re out of time.”
“Fuck you!” Sam yelled. “Those motherfuckers don’t need us there, Ginni! They have our blood, our hair, they’ve marked our b… b… bodies in fucking symbols. We’re already connected, already linked to the fucking shit-sucking demons. There’s no escape, th… th… this is happening unless we stop it.”
We all gawked at Sam. He flicked his head side to side and then re-focused on my knees, eyes slowly tracking my hands as I lifted them from my lap to twirl my hair. His shoulders visibly relaxed as the seconds ticked by and he was drawn deeper and deeper into me.
“Right then,” Phoenix said sharply. “Now that’s out, do you have any idea how we find them? All I know is that they won’t have gone too far, it’s too much trouble trying to relocate fifty people in their mobile homes, somewhere remote, hidden. But it’s so vast out there in the wilds, I barely know where to start. We could drive for days and find nothing.”
“I thought you said seventy?”
“Yeah, well, that was before the chaos during our escape. Some of the members turned on each other, finally lost their shit after all they’d seen and done. There were… deaths.” Phoenix and Sam both shot a quick look to Andras, something I couldn’t decipher.
“Do they need to be anywhere specific for these rituals? Were there ley lines or anything at the commune?” I asked.
“No, not that we’re aware of.”
I thought back to all the gossip I’d heard on the subject, rifling through memories for anything useful. “Wait, you said you’re from right here in Texas? I heard that during the second eclipse there was a spate of weird natural disasters in the area, is that true? Like earthquakes and tornados, arriving days before the event and lingering after? Any other weird stuff?”
Phoenix nodded. “There was definitely stuff going on. We’d only been on the run less than a week, we were hiding away. But I did see reports of weird shit happening in the neighboring towns, even though the closest one was thirty miles away. Talk of animals randomly dying, whole herds of cattle dropping, horses going crazy and attacking people.” And there it was again, the thinly veiled glance at Andras with talk of unusual violence.
My eyebrows rose as I waited for him to realize the importance of these events.
He frowned. “Shit, that’s it!” Hurrying to his bag, he grabbed a laptop. I smiled at Andras whilst he stared me down with his usual menace.
Phoenix tapped away at the keys with hands covered in black tattoos, right down his fingers. Chunky silver rings on several digits. Every so often, he paused to pull on his beard as he read the screen. He’d drawn his hair back into a loose ponytail. Before, it hung in a long, wavy brown mass past his shoulders.
Dragging my chair closer to the bed, I kicked my feet up, very aware of how my fishnet-covered legs went on forever, only a tiny pair of black hotpants covering, well, not a lot. I only did it to taunt Andras, seeing as he wasn’t looking at a screen and it was fun to watch him battle the lust and hate.
It did draw his attention, but he wasn’t really looking at me, more through me. The thousand-yard stare of a man who’d seen too much, done too much. His eyelids so heavy he looked permanently stoned, only, in an attractive way. Guarded, brooding, intense. So much internal scarring inside him that he couldn’t hide it, no matter how much aggression he threw up as a wall.
There was something so raw about him, on the verge of explosion, I couldn’t help being gripped by it. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to soothe him or push him over the edge just to see what happened.
His thumb brushed absently against his lower lip as he continued to stare through me. Was he thinking about the cult, about his revenge? Was he thinking about me? Was he lost in memories of the past? I leaned forward over my legs, shoving my cleavage in his face, my boobs almost falling out of the red circus-mistress corset.
He simply sat back, rubbing a hand over the back of his neck, clicking it from side to side with a crunch. Showing off that insanely sculpted chest. But his angry blue eyes re-focused, settling on my face, emanating all the malice of Satan himself. I steeled myself against the onslaught, refusing to look away, but feeling a sudden vulnerability I wasn’t accustomed to. My cheeks flushed.
Phoenix spoke before I could analyze this unsettling development. “Here, in a small town around one hundred miles east.” He pointed at the screen. “Locust plague. Unexpected, massive.”
I snorted. “Locusts? Well, that isn’t stereotypical at all.”
Phoenix snapped the screen down, shoved it in a bag, and gathered everything together.
“Road trip it is, then!” I just couldn’t wait to be stuck inside a truck for hours with these emotionally-unstable psychos.