The Isle Of Sin And Shadows - Keri Lake Page 0,176
ritual I watched on the video saved to the chip a while back.
Rolling waves of rage move through me like a tidal wave at the thought of someone hurting Céleste that way, and I have to will myself not to accidentally pull the trigger in my hand.
“I need you to answer my next question very carefully, Jude. Has anyone touched Céleste?”
“Well … c’mon, Thierry, of course they’ve touched her.”
Raising my gun, I aim at her head, my free hand ready to grip the steering wheel when her brain explodes all over the driver side window.
Her eyes widen, glancing between me and the road. “Not like that! I can assure you. Not like that. Ceremony won’t take place for a couple more hours. She’s fine.”
“If you’re lying to me, if someone hurts her, I’ll spend the next seventy-two hours showing you my level of expertise at keeping someone alive during excruciating torture.”
“I’m not lying. She’s alive and well.” A glance toward me, and Jude nods at my gun. “You don’t need to keep that on me. I planned to take you there, anyway.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s my belief that women are far less cruel than men.”
“And what does that have to do with this?”
“Everything, actually. But it’s a rather long story.”
“We seem to have a bit of time.”
“Very well.” Both hands gripping tight to the wheel, she stares through the windshield as if gathering her thoughts. “Do you believe in the devil?”
“Red, horned man with a pointed tail? No. I don’t.”
She sighs. “That’s too bad. You’d probably appreciate the story a bit more, if you did.”
“Pretend I do, then.”
“Okay. I was sixteen when I was first seduced by the devil. He was my father.” Throat bobbing with a hard swallow, she doesn’t bother to look at me. “He would come to me every night, on cloven hooves that clicked against the wooden floors. One night, he asked me what I wished for, and I told him I wished to be more clever than he was. He laughed.” Smiling, she shakes her head. “Three years later, he died of long-term arsenic poisoning.” The snorted chuckle she gives fails to breach her tight lips. “When I met my husband, I was innocent as the winter lamb, with hopes of the kind of happiness that I never knew. But alas, it seemed my husband only ever enjoyed the company of winter lambs. And as I aged, he sought out a flock.” With a sigh, she shakes her head again. “I was given the best of him in our son. Even if he didn’t see it that way. He insisted our child was useless and grotesque, based on a small, rather minor spinal defect. You know what my husband’s kin do with useless babies? Cut their tongues out. But I wasn’t having that.” A strange jerked movement of her head tightens my muscles around the grip of the gun, and I realize it’s a tic of some sort. One I’ve never seen before in Jude. “I knew the devil was angry with me. And that, one day, he’d come back to stake his claim. See, he doesn’t like to be outsmarted. Sometimes, I think he disguises himself to fool us. The nanny I hired was as sweet as sugar on the outside, but inside, her soul was as black as the darkest depths of the sea. She seduced my sweet boy when he was hardly a teenager. Swept him up into a world of carnality I was all too familiar with.” A pause follows, and still, she doesn’t bother to look at me as she goes on with her story in a cold and detached tone. “So I did away with her. And in return, my son retaliated.” Knuckles white, she rolls her tight grip over the steering wheel. “It began as small sacrifices. Rodents I’d find mutilated around the house. Bones in the pockets of his trousers. I tried to save him by having him poked and prodded, studied. When they finally released him back to me, he was not the same, sweet boy. He was colder. Much colder. And I knew then, the devil had his hooks in him, too. And, well, after a lifetime of running, I decided perhaps it was time I surrendered. I gave him my soul. The very thing he’d been chasing this whole time. In return, he took my pig of a husband. And I was finally free. Free of the men who sought to rule over me.”