DOMINION Bentley Little (accelerated reader books .TXT) 📖

paid a substantial amount to a local artist who had later joined her for two days in the bedroom.

He stepped into the room and breathed deeply. The odor here was stronger due to the fact that the room had no windows, but it was more blood smell than sex smell and was not nearly as pleasant as the scent of the bedroom. He walked forward, kicked a jawbone out of the way. He had brought in the sacrifices, but he had never had to dispose of them.

After Mother had finished her rituals, there had never been anything left to dispose, only these cleaned bones and blood and occasional isolated bits of meat.

He had often wanted to join Mother in her rituals, but she had told him bluntly that he could not participate. Only in the last year, after she had reread the prophecies, had she decided that he should be allowed to carry on after her death. Only then had she fully regained her faith.

Only then had she told him what he must do.

Now even there he had failed her.

He thought of the infants in the basement. He would give them another hour, then check to make sure they had all drowned.

After that he would try again.

There was nothing more he could do.

He regretted that he’d had to dispose of the mothers as well. It had felt so good when he took them, when he beat them and forced them to submit to his will, when he felt the hot animal passion rising in them as well. Then he had truly felt that he was his mother’s son.

But there would be more. He would find them the same way he had found these, and he would take them the same way, make them bear his children.

And if they failed to give him a boy, he would try again.

And again.

An hour later, he returned to the basement. The women had all been drowned—he could see their hair spread outward across the top of the filthy, bloody water like twisted lilies—but the babies were alive and happily swimming.

He stood there, shocked. This could not be!

Furious, he leaped from the top of the stairs and jumped into the cold, dark water, anger coursing through him. He grabbed the head of the nearest infant, pressing her down. There was a sudden sharp pain in his index finger, and he cried out, jerking back, letting the baby up. The thing had bitten him! He shook his hand to clear it of the hurt, then pressed the infant down again, gratified to see small bubbles percolate upward through the water.

He felt a stab of pain in his back and whipped his head around. One of the other infants was digging into his lower back with claw-like fingers. Another baby bit down on the fleshy part of his arm, teeth clenched hard around skin and fat.

The other infants were paddling forward. Laughing excitedly, their little mouths filled with tiny teeth—newborns didn’t have teeth—they splashed through the water toward him.

Frightened now, he let up the first baby, which promptly bit into his stomach. He screamed with pain, then screamed louder as tiny fingers dug into his crotch.

How many babies were there? He could not remember. One of the women had had twins, he thought. His feet touched a box underneath the water, and he pushed off, trying to reach the stairs. A tiny grinning infant head popped up directly before him, and thin hands lashed out at his eyes. He batted the baby away, but she bit into his too-big hands even as she was knocked back.

“Help!” he cried, and his voice sounded high, feminine.

He was not a man.

“Help!”

But no one heard.

And his children took him down.

PART I

1

It was hot as they prepared to leave Mesa, the temperature well into the eighties though the sun had not yet risen. The pale brightening above the Superstitions would soon bloom into a typical August morning, Dion knew, and by noon the lighted display on the side of the Valley National Bank building would be flashing triple digits.

He helped his mom carry the last of the luggage out to the car—the bathroom suitcase, the sack filled with trip snacks, the coffee thermos—then stood next to the passenger door as she locked up the house for the last time and deposited the keys in the mailbox. It felt strange to be leaving, but he was surprised to find that he was not sad at the thought of their imminent departure. He had expected to feel some sense of loss or regret, depression or loneliness, but he felt nothing.

That alone should have made him depressed.

His mom walked purposefully across the brown grass to the sidewalk. She was wearing a thin halter top which barely constrained her large breasts, and shorts much too tight for a woman her age. Not that she looked like a woman her age. Far from it. As more than one friend had admitted over the years, she was the closest thing to a real-life sex symbol any of them were ever likely to meet. He had never known how to respond to that. It would have been one thing if they were talking about a stranger, or someone’s cousin or aunt, but when it was your own mother… Sometimes he wished his mom was fat and plain and wore frumpy old lady clothes like everyone else’s mother.

His mom unlocked his door and he got into the car, stretching across the seat and pulling up the lock on her side. She smiled at him as she positioned herself in front of the wheel. A thin trickle of sweat was cutting a path through the makeup on the far right side of her face, but she did not wipe it off. “I think we have everything,” she said brightly.

He nodded.

“Ready to go?”

“I guess.”

“Then let’s hit it.” She turned on the ignition, put the car into gear, and they pulled away from the curb.

Their furniture was already in Napa,