Chapter 1 - Alysia Rose V2 - The Eholi Cross! A Supernatural Horror Novel

The Pacific Ocean was quiet again, but it had sang once of supernatural horrors.

From a window within the rebuilt Safehouse, or as the Sect of Light was now calling it, the Ocean House, Christine Carlyle watched through her dark blue-gray eyes as the tide press against the shore, each wave folding in on itself like a thought she didn’t want to finish. Today, the calm air softly whispered through the dune grass, bending it leftward. Christine’s gaze drifted to the trees on the dunes, their flattened crowns and slanted trunks whispering tales of relentless winds, each of them leaning towards the left. She wondered if weather always came from the south? The storm that brought chaos that night also arrived from the same familiar direction. If she had been a meteorologist, perhaps she would care about the data, but right now she was struggling to forget the events that had occurred on that dark evening.

Christine turned inward to look at the home. The Sect had repaired everything — the shattered glass, the scorched siding, even the gouges where claws had scraped through steel. Erasing the evidence, hiding the devastation.

As with Alysia’s house in Moclips, where a horrific helicopter crash and a demon-spawned sandstorm ravaged the entire property, the Sect worked quickly and in mysterious ways to cover any trace of a malevolent presence. They returned the Ocean House to its former self within a week, but they added modifications like bulletproof glass, fire suppressants, and a hidden room well-equipped with advanced weaponry tailored towards their new enemy.

But no fresh paint, appliances, or enhanced safety features and protocols could cover what that night had left behind.

The Sect believed Christine’s best chance of recovery would be to face her ‘demons’ within the same structure she had fought them, and in return, had lost her arm up to her elbow in defense of the child, Bethany, a ward of Alysia’s. Her team was responsible for protecting the girl while the others searched for the Kalama Dagger in the deserts of Las Vegas, mainly in the Valley of Fire. Alysia had not known Crimson would attack both teams, and although Christine resented Alysia for the damage done not only to her body, but her mind, she recognized there had been no other choice.

Even so, the phantom pains she continued to feel in a limb that no longer existed, and the restless nights filled with nightmares of demons one should only see in movies, made forgiveness difficult to come by.

Christine currently stood where it had all started. Her eyes left the investigation of the interior of the refurbished home and stared down at her stump. Her soft black skin came to a rough flap of flesh wrapped around bone and sinew. As she watched, she could feel the phantom ache of her missing hand pulsing in rhythm with the pounding of the tide. Every crash of surf brought the sound back to her—the mechanical snarl that had filled the dark, the guttural grinding of metal on bone.

They had come out of the sea mist, over the dunes, even as heavy winds and rain should have obliterated any low-hanging fog. They stood, dark statues, watching them from the dunes as the grass thrashed against their scorched bodies.

War Hounds — this was the official name for these creatures that dwelled in the fiery realm of Jarapenth, but Christine simply called them Hell Beasts. They had been monstrous and full of muscle. Each creature moved on four limbs. These limbs had human arms that bent in too many directions, and a charred lattice of skin stretched over glowing sinew. Where faces should have been were circles of rotating teeth, grinding and clicking in perfect synchronicity, a sound that chewed its way into memory. When people asked her to describe their facial features, all she could tell them was, think of giant lampreys with ten to fifteen circles of chainsaw teeth, each circle rotating in the opposite direction of the one next to it. No eyes, no nose, no ears, just row upon row of jagged teeth whirring and churning. The visual usually stopped further questions.

She and Roland had been standing in front of these very plate-glass windows, discussing what it meant to know there were gods, but they had abandoned them long ago, and the human species were simply castaways from a failed experiment. To know they were only cosmic dust fighting an enemy with considerable powers that mere human intelligence could not fathom. Irrelevance.

Christine had felt forsaken that night, her beliefs crushed as she slowly realized, like a child left in a foster home, she was unwanted by her creator. Her mother was a devout Catholic and had taken Christine to church every Sunday morning, so this discovery carried significant weight. But the revelation of loveless gods was only the appetizer on a menu of horrors to come.

A warning had interrupted their discussion. It had come through the house itself—through the walls and glass, a voice crawling from the foundation upward:

Perform as told, or the War Hounds will feast upon your flesh.

Then the silence. It was total. The storm outside continued, but without the screaming sound of wind or pouring rain. The only noise had been the pounding of her own blood within her ears. She had understood that evening the true meaning of, silence was deafening.

Her memory became fragmented after the voice. She could still see herself standing by the window, the storm light cutting across her face. Roland shouting. Martha was bleeding from her ears. The child, Bethany, was screaming from somewhere in the house. Windows exploding inward, wind and rain thrashing them as the War Hounds rushed from the dunes.

The first Hound met her halfway. The sound it made was a scream and a saw in one. She fired point-blank, and the world fractured into pain and heat and motion. Something ripped, and for a heartbeat she thought it was her weapon. Then she saw the space where her hand had been.

The rest blurred together: Roland dragging the girl to safety, Martha firing blindly into the dark, one beast writhing in fire and smoke before collapsing into ash. The house convulsed like a living thing as the War Hounds withdrew, fading back into the storm that had birthed them. Roland placed a tourniquet on her arm as she faded from existence into a black nothingness.

Now only the sea remained, calm and gray, pretending none of it had ever happened. If only she could do the same, to be as strong as the waves constantly reshaping the shore, all knowing in their purpose.

She pressed her remaining hand against the cold glass, feeling the faint hum of the tide against her palm. The phantom limb ached. The ghosts whispered.

Behind her, a reflection took shape—refined posture, a dark silhouette, eyes that saw too much. And although she had seen her reflection approach, when the chilly hand landed on her shoulder, she still jumped.

“Christine,” Madame said softly. “It’s time.”

Christine didn’t move. “You should’ve left this place buried,” she murmured.

Madame stepped in, the pressure of her hand on Christine’s shoulder increasing. “You saved the girl. That’s more than most could have done.”

“I didn’t save shit. Roland rescued both my and that child’s lives. Those hounds chewed me up and spat me out. I was nothing to them. I’m finished,” Christine said. Her voice was flat, the calm that followed ruin. “Let someone else chase demons. My purpose has been driven out of me. And exactly how am I supposed to be of any value to my team missing this?” She lifted her stump to reflect through the window like a transparent mirror.

Madame’s hand tightened, the quiet authority of command in her tone. “If you walk away now, the rest of them will fall. Every one of them. You cannot hide here forever, Christine. Evil has a memory, and you are but a name in its journal. Whether or not you take part, they will come for you. You cannot escape your fate. They chose you from an early age; this is the natural progression of things.”

“No offense to you, Madame, or disrespect to the Sect, but to hell with your natural progression of things. Tell that to my broken psyche, which keeps me awake at night in tears and tremors. Or that I keep reaching for coffee with a hand that no longer exists. I think I have sacrificed as much as I am willing for your cause, Madame.”

The air between them went still. The tide struck the shore again, heavy and rhythmic, like a heartbeat refusing to stop.

Madame withdrew her hand, leaving a faint scent of smoke and lavender in the air. “Be ready,” she said, turning toward the door. “The ocean never forgets—and neither should you. You can kick and scream all you want, Miss Carlyle, but you will help your friends, because if you do not, I will make sure you never forget.”

Christine looked back through the glass and watched as the Madame’s reflection disappeared. Out on the horizon, Christine witnessed a change. The waters appeared to turn red, and above that vertical line in the far distance, the sky opened, a tear that stretched across the entire visual plane.

The water seemed to pulse with memory, each wave carrying echoes of the night she could never escape. She stared into the abyss and could find no way out but to continue going down.

She turned from the window, from the calm of the ocean, and prepared herself for a war she had no commitment to continuing.

***

Three months earlier, before the ocean turned red, and the sky split open, they still thought they could win the war.