Free Her Only Desire by Gaelen Foley Page A

her vicious form with a creeping horror that still raised the hairs on the back of his neck, even after all these years.
    Monstrous.
    Kali, the goddess of destruction.
    She was absolute night, the Dark Mother, the end of time—nightmare. Death, fear, and pain. And to serve her, he had made himself into all of those things. To be worthy of worshiping her.
    It was a hard and lonely path, but he was one of the few who grasped its importance. After all, without the horror of her and all she stood for, everything good and light in the world would be meaningless.
    Kali’s naked body was painted black, her long ebony hair wildly disheveled from her dance of death. She wore a necklace of human skulls and a skirt made from the severed arms of men. Her eyes bulged with bloodlust; her gold tongue thrust from her mouth, as though to devour the world. In her four arms, she held a bloody sword, a decapitated head, the power to vanquish fear, and the secret of bliss.
    Firoz wondered how many more he’d have to kill before that secret was given to him.
    It was true that he was favored by the goddess. Even his brethren in the Thuggee cult were jealous of him. Jealous and afraid. But none of them served her as ruthlessly or as skillfully as he.
    So much did he enjoy her protection that the British authorities could not catch him, and though he had killed in the hundreds, he remained immune to Hindu law. She protected him by sending him constant communication through many signs and omens, and tonight, the cawing of the crow had signaled to him that it was time to go to her to pray at her great temple.
    He crouched low as he praised her by her many names in a fervent whisper: Devi, Bhavani, and of course, Mother Kali, for whom Calcutta had been named.
    Shiva’s wild consort.
    She was all he had, all he had known ever since the night long ago that his own parents were slain in her name. They, too, had been travelers on the road, overcome by a band of Thugs. He had been a small boy then, and the brotherhood refused to kill children, so he had been spared.
    After his parents had been placed in the earth, the men who had sacrificed them took him in and raised him, and initiated him into her secret ways.
    Through years of training, Firoz had risen to become the most revered killer in all the brotherhood. First he had served as a scout, mastering the skills of planning missions and gathering information without drawing attention to himself.
    Next, he had been designated as one of the grave-diggers, disbursing the required rituals over their victims and learning how to dispose of the bodies so they would never be found. Dismemberment was grisly work, but even as a lad of barely sixteen, Firoz had never flinched.
    Thus he had gained the approval of his guru, and had been promoted to
shumseea.
His job then was to lull and charm the wealthy travelers he met along the road and soothe away their fears so they suspected nothing, becoming easy prey for the highest rank within their organization: the stranglers.
    Firoz had achieved the level of
bhurtote,
ritual killer, some ten years ago. Each month since then, unfailingly, he had sacrificed four lives to the goddess, one to place in each of her hands. He was as efficient as he was remorseless. Why mourn? Their souls lived on through reincarnation, and their deaths helped to maintain the balance of the universe, which the Dark Mother represented in her terrible dance. If there was life, there must be death; if there was light there must be darkness.
    Her dance whirled now in his brain as he prayed. Sometimes in his mind, the two mysterious female powers that he served blurred into one, the terrible goddess and the dark queen.
    For all he knew, the earthly lady behind her heavy veil might be an incarnation of the goddess herself, testing him, as the gods were wont to do with their favorites; therefore, the tasks
she
gave him carried an extraordinary weight. He did Her Majesty’s bidding with