Damaged Queen (Darkness Within Duet 2)

“I still don’t understand why you’re telling me this.”

“Well, I had forgotten about Alan’s hiding place because many years ago, I believed it was haunted.”

“This is getting weird now, Axel.”

“Oh, I know, believe me, I know. Anyway, just at the peak of the cliff, there’s a path that leads into a cave. Do you know any of the town history?”

“No.”

“Oh, good, I can tell you a story then as we walk.”

“This is crazy,” she said.

“Not completely crazy as an old man filming everything in his office and hiding it, but Alan was never normal. So, story time about our town. Many, many years ago, Stonewall was nothing more than a little, quaint town. They didn’t have supermarkets and banks and stuff. They had fields upon fields of cattle and food. Farming. It’s how they as a town survived. So, anyway, one year the town suffered a huge famine. Most of the cattle died, and the crops, they didn’t grow. Back then, they didn’t think it was down to the fact it was too hot or too dry. Anyway, the elders in the town knew they had in some way upset the weather gods, I’m going to call it.”

“Is this actually true?”

“I have no idea if it’s true. I wasn’t born back then. This is the story I was told.”

“By who?”

“My dad. Let me finish.”

“Fine. Fine.”

They kept on walking. Axel didn’t let go of her hand.

“Like dirty old men do, they decided the only way to appease their weather god was a virgin sacrifice. You know, the good old reliable woman’s blood. I still don’t get it, but I digress. The elders convinced the town that the gods would pick a willing sacrifice. The sun beamed down and ta-da, that woman was their virgin sacrifice. Now, any good town story has to have a lot of dirt, so they brought the woman up to this cave. She walked willingly as well, thinking she was doing this for her town’s people. So very noble and fucking shit if you ask me. They laid her on the platform within this cave, and according to the rules, they sacrificed her. However, the story I was told, the men couldn’t resist her virgin flesh and took her for themselves, each raping her. The six elders took their turn, spilling her virgin blood before slicing open her wrists and draining her. Of course, her neck got sliced in the end.”

Harper didn’t like this story one bit.

“The next year, a wonderful harvest. Well done, old chaps. You did it. So Stonewall had a couple of really good seasons until, like the weather predicts, it didn’t. Another sacrifice. Then they decided to guarantee a good harvest every year, they had to pick a girl every single year. They’d take her up to the cave, rape her, kill her, drain her, burn her, and move on to the next girl. Until, the girls started to realize what was happening. Personally, I think the elders got a little cocky and talked openly about it, and one of the girls told the others. There were no virgins in the village.”

“You’re kidding me, right?”

“I’m not. It is kind of cool. They spited the village, and the women banded together to kill the elders, on the exact table they had slaughtered so many innocent girls. So that is the end of my tale. Only, the reason I never came here and Draven, Buck, and Jett never did, we were told it was haunted by the ghosts of those dead girls, and if you had hurt a woman or female in any way, they would know. Not only would they know, you’d be dead. Needless to say, to a couple of young boys, we didn’t exactly want to plunge to our deaths.”

“You never went to the cave.”

“Exactly. As kids, we didn’t go because we were fucking scared. By the time we were teenagers, I was told the cave had collapsed, and was fucking dangerous. I wasn’t going to go and risk my life like that. Then, three days ago, I figured why the fuck not. I’d tried everywhere else. And I discovered the cave hadn’t fallen in on itself in any way.” They paused outside of the cave, and Harper didn’t even want to look over the ledge. Axel pulled a flashlight from his pocket and shined it into the room. “This was the only place I didn’t look. The last place I even thought about.”

With the flashlight shining into the cave, Harper didn’t like being here. However, right at the end of the cave, she saw the files.

“You’re really serious right now, Alan hid his files here?”

“This cave is reached from my house. No one can have access to it unless they enter my land. I mean, Draven’s land. You get the gist of it. My dad was many things in life, but he trusted Alan. They were a team, and they hid a great deal of stuff here, together. I doubt my father even realized Alan wanted it all to himself. His … complacency killed him. So, I started looking. The tapes are labeled by date, and seeing as I remember the day you left so clearly, I was able to locate it.” He went to a box, opened it up, and pulled out a tape. “Here you go,” he said.