Free DeVante's Curse by S. M. Johnson Page A

Ernesto's
left flank was bruised, his limbs ached, and he wanted nothing more
than to lie on the stones under the caress of the sun. Felix lifted
his face to the sun and stood basking in its warmth for several
minutes with his eyes closed. His face was tranquil and his mouth
almost smiling.
    When Felix opened his eyes, the tranquility
slipped away. He frowned, dual creases forming between his
eyebrows. He nodded his head toward the pit. "We have only one
really bad job."
    Felix led Ernesto to the bedchamber of their
cruel mistress, where he dragged a limp form from the bed. It hit
the floor with a thud, but made no moan or sound of complaint.
    "If they are alive in the morning," Felix
said, "we do what we can to keep them that way, so she can have
them again." He dragged the body across the floor and out of the
room.
    Ernesto turned his head away, but asked,
"Does she beat them to death?"
    "No. She feeds from them."
    Ernesto shook his head. Perhaps it was a
barrier of dialect, because he thought the boy said the woman fed
from them.
    "Their blood," Felix added, and tapped the
side of his own neck.
    Ernesto looked at the dead man, then
shuddered and looked away.
    Felix shrugged. "It is so. Now help me. We
need to drag him outside and lift him into the pit."
    They pulled and jerked the corpse through the
castle, lifted it over the edge of the courtyard pit, and then
observed the burning. It was the most horrifying and gruesome act
Ernesto had ever performed.
    The smell of it could not be described.
Ernesto headed water in the kitchen fireplace and bathed, then
bathed again, and still the putrid stench seemed permanently bound
to his skin.
    Gentle, innocent Ernesto let his head sink
beneath the cool water, closed his eyes, and died.
    DeVante, baptized in horror, rose from the
metaphorical grave.
    The pit itself was twenty feet deep. A
corridor beneath the castle gave access to a walkway that led
around the whole circle where bellows were in place that could be
worked to make the fire burn hotter. Felix tried to keep the fire
smoldering at all times because it was easier to stoke the embers
into heat than to coax fire from cold ashes.
    "It takes a lot of heat to burn bones," Felix
explained, "and most of our work here is to that end."
    DeVante's second morning in the castle was
not as gruesome. There was an uprooted tree in the courtyard, but
no corpse in Katarina's bed. It took DeVante and Felix the full day
to chop the tree into manageable segments. They heaved the large
sections of trunk into the burn pit, then stacked the smaller
branches in the fireplace grates.
    DeVante wondered aloud where they came
from.
    "She plucks them from the ground and drops
them here. You must know that she flies through the night air like
a bird."
    Of course he knew. It was how she brought him
to this place. "She is that strong, that she can pick a tree like a
child picks a flower?"
    "She can do anything," Felix said, with sad
eyes. "She is strong and all-powerful, like a goddess."
    She was no goddess, DeVante thought. She was
a scourge, a disease. He yearned to escape back to the simple
jungle life of Ernesto.
    "You get used to burning the bodies," Felix
assured him, but DeVante did not believe him.
    "What if we refuse?" DeVante asked, a couple
of weeks and six or seven burnings later. This day there were two
corpses, a fine-looking man and a small child, and the sight of
them renewed DeVante's initial horror.
    "I won't refuse," Felix said, with a weary
shake of his head. "And if you refuse, it will be your body burning
soon enough."
    "Where do they come from?" DeVante asked.
"Does no one ever come looking for them?"
    "They come from anywhere," Felix said. "She
flies to wherever, plucks some unlucky bastard off the street, and
brings him back here. She's like… a wraith. No one comes."
    "What if we leave?" DeVante asked.
    Felix laughed, but the sound was just as
hopeless as the slow shake of his head had been. "There is no
escape. She left a door