Shadows and Light Ch. 02

Chapter 2 Cullen's Secrets

He couldn't believe that she was alive.

Cullen, his older brother, hadn't come back from his weekend at the old cabin he insisted on keeping. Ian was irritated that his brother had not picked him up from the airport as planned. He had been gone for three months looking for new art for his galleries and was looking forward to showing off some of his finds. After waiting three days he had had enough, and had driven the four hours to get to Cullen's cabin, which happened to be in the absolute, ass end of nowhere. The cabin had all the lights on and the front door wide open. Cullen was nowhere to be found. There had been no answering hail to his call for his brother, just vague, muffled sounds from below his feet.

As he stepped into the cabin, he was hit with how rustic it appeared. It was rather sparsely decorated with real wood paneling and hardwood floors. Ian was a bit surprised. Cullen had always been very contemporary in his decorating, all clean lines and minimalism. Hell, there was even a stuffed deer head on the wall, looking at him with its glassy eyes. The cabin was small, just a small living room with a woodstove, a galley style kitchen, small bathroom and bedroom. It was not Cullen's style at all.

Eventually he discovered the trap door, closed. The large box full of wood for the large cast iron woodstove had been slid to the side and forward into the room. It was obviously designed to hide the trapdoor. He grabbed the ring, pulled it open and was assaulted by a variety of smells, decay and death primarily. Screaming, insane and repetitive started, sending chills through him.

The room the ladder descended into was something out of a medieval nightmare. The ceiling was higher than he would have thought it would be, and the room was huge, much larger than he would have expected given the size of the cabin. Manacles and chains hung from the ceiling, whips of every description were held on a rack, knives of every variety, sex toys and implements of sexual torture lined the shelves, arranged ever so carefully. One wall was lined with skulls, empty eyed and grinning at him from their carefully arranged places on the shelves. 'My God what the hell is going on here?' he thought, his heart beginning to pound. He continued to take in the room, looking around in shock.

Dark stains of what he could only assume was blood covered the floor and the large, oddly shaped table in the center of the room. The room reeked of decayed flesh and rancid blood. A few steps and further back to the north side of the room he could see a large pentagram gouged into the cement floor. The etchings were filled with a silvery metal, both inside and outside of the circle. It was large enough for even him to lay down spread-eagled and still be inside the circle. There were chained manacles bolted to the floor at strategic places. Ian shivered. It looked like it had been set up for some kind of ritual, with fresh chalk lines and black candles. He didn't go too close. He didn't know much about black magic but what he did know was you didn't go near that kind of thing unless you knew what the fuck you were doing.

"Cullen, what are you doing?" he whispered to himself.

One of the small doors on the west side of the room held the ravening, mindless, screaming remains of a half-turned human. It had a heavy collar around its neck and was securely chained to the wall behind it. He pulled out his handgun and put it out of its misery. Shaking badly, he was surprised that only one shot had been required. The stench was overwhelming and he suppressed the urge to turn and run, back upstairs and into the clean, outside air. Littering the small room were the remains of bones that crunched under his feet. His mind reeled for a moment. Cullen had to know about this. How could he not? His big brother, how could he be involved in this?

A few more steps led him to a second door. This room stank of sour urine, dust, and blood. Here he found the remains of Cullen, stabbed through the heart with one of his own blades. He fell heavily to his knees. The dry, withered remains of his brother were swathed in a black robe with ornate black glyphs on the hem. It was obviously some kind of ritual robe. His rational mind refused to believe what he was seeing. Cullen was responsible for the first room, for the mindless thing in the second, probably for the skulls that lined the shelf and God only knew what else.

His eyes didn't register her at first. Lying on the floor, on the other side of the room, was the nude, broken body of a young woman, his last victim lying in a crumpled heap. It looked like she had been flung there, like a broken doll. She was painfully thin and so battered her skin looked like a patchwork of blue, purple, yellow-green and gray. He had done this, the bruises, the lash marks, the bite marks on her neck, oh God. She had killed Cullen, that was obvious, and then lacked the strength to leave the hell she then died in. Horror rose within him. His hands continued to shake as he covered his face for a moment.

He had killed before, but that was different. This was sick, sadistic, relentless torture and murder. By the look of the skulls, Cullen had been doing this for a very long time. Random, wanton killing was forbidden. It attracted too much attention. This was going to cause more than a scandal.

He heard a faint whimper; she was alive? He crossed the small room and knelt. Bite marks were plain up and down her neck, the insides of her wrists to the elbow, her femoral arteries. She had been whipped, beaten times beyond count, and bled until her skin was pale and drained of any hint of color, and still her heart beat, her body breathed.

Almost without thinking he reached out to check her pulse. With the single touch on her cold skin she had cried out, wordlessly, agonizingly. Her mental pain assaulted him: despair, agony, and a tenacious will to live that was crumbling. Ian jerked back, strengthening his mental shields. It wasn't often that he picked up on other's emotions so easily. He carefully lifted her into his arms. He carried her upstairs and in the strong light of the well-lit cabin she looked like a skeleton covered with skin. She was so light she felt like she would float if he let her go.

She had taken water frantically, gulping it down, moaning in protest when he pulled the glass away. He had been afraid she would choke, or vomit it up if she got too much. He vaguely remembered something about electrolytes. Looking in the fridge, he grabbed a bottle of Gatorade. Rising unbidden was the thought that it was Cullen's favorite flavor. He fed her an entire bottle, making her take it in small sips. He brought another bottle with him into the bathroom. The smell that had permeated her made him sick, reeking of blood, semen, and death. He drew a warm bath. He would get her warm and clean all at the same time.

Ever so carefully, he supported her so she wouldn't drown and tried to clean her without taking the scabs off of her half healed injuries. The water went from clear to black within a minute as he scrubbed off accumulated filth and dried blood from her skin. He had had to change the water three times before he finally got her clean to his satisfaction. Her hair was now clean but very tangled. Her skin was very fair where it wasn't bruised; a sharp contrast to his tanned hands. She also looked young, far too young.

He carried her naked and dripping into the only bedroom, wrapped her hair in another towel and carefully dried her. This somehow seemed more intimate than he had ever touched another person, even for sex. From the look of the flesh between her legs and the amounts of dried semen he had washed off of her, she had been raped repeatedly. There were old, healing bruises along with fresh and welts from a lash covering her entire chest, pelvis, pubic area and thighs. Her wrists and ankles were bruised and raw from being restrained. The rest of her thin body was covered with dark bruises, lash marks and bites. He was almost ashamed to handle her so intimately after she had been so savagely brutalized. He had no choice however, she was completely defenseless and vulnerable, she needed someone to take care of her, and he was it.

Cullen had done this; every mark, every bruise, every bit of blood, semen, and filth that had covered her. How did a brother that you had known all of your life turn out to be a monster and yet you saw nothing to warn you?

He tucked her up between the clean sheets in the bed with a towel under her hips to keep the sheets clean. Then he tackled her hair with a wide tooth comb. He ended up cutting it straight at the chin, discarding the rest. It was just too tangled.

For the next few days he fed her everything he could get her to take: water, juice, broth, soup. For the most part she seemed to sleep quietly but would sometimes scream in terror with bad dreams. Her screams chilled him to the core; they were anguished, more like the scream of a tortured soul than a tortured body. He kept his mental shields maxed. He didn't have a choice but to touch her and her emotions were so strong they could easily overwhelm him if he wasn't careful. He was still struggling emotionally from what he had found and tried to keep himself steady. He held her, rocked her, and talked to her. It was the only thing that seemed to calm her. She clung to him like a child, staring at him with dark blue eyes that seemed to look straight into his soul. She didn't speak. He couldn't tell if it was because she didn't want to or because she couldn't.

When she had seemed to sleep, he had disposed of the body of the half-turned human in a makeshift grave behind the cabin. He had burned it first, in the hole he had dug deep. The last thing he needed was to start a forest fire and have the Dept. of Natural Resources crawling all over the place. There were other piles of dirt that looked like graves in the small clearing. Cullen's remains he left where they were. The council members needed to see it for themselves or they might not believe the grisly truth.

He kept turning over what he had found. He had also found himself walking around the basement more than once with a kind of macabre fascination. Why had Cullen done it? What had happened to his brother to twist him so badly? Tears rose to his eyes and he angrily wiped them away. Whatever good memories he had of his brother he couldn't get the skulls with their empty eye sockets and toothy grins out of his head. How many victims had there been? How many more would they never find?

Four days after he had found her he made an early, short trip to the nearest town. The day was luckily overcast. He needed to pick up supplies for the girl and feed. It had been easy enough, a bored waitress who was more than willing for a quickie in the small restroom with her only customer. She had come over and over while he fed from her.

He also made a few calls. Simon would come in a few days, bringing with him his knowledge of the arcane and occult, as well as supplies for an extended stay and equipment to excavate the graveyard in the back of the cabin. Somehow, they would have to identify them; their families deserved that much.

He hesitated briefly before dialing the emergency number he had memorized long ago.

"Yes," came the crisp voice on the other end of the line.

"This is Ian Sterling. Is Mr. Witherspoon available to speak with me?"

"One moment please." Ian was put on hold briefly as his call was transferred.

"This is Carl Witherspoon," came a deep voice.

"This is Ian Sterling and I have something of a situation I need help dealing with."

"Yes, go on."

Ian took a deep breath. "My brother Cullen is dead. Apparently he has been kidnapping and murdering people up at his cabin in northern Minnesota."

There was silence on the other end of the line for a moment. "How did he die?"

"His latest victim managed it. I have no idea how, she looks like a concentration camp victim," Ian replied. "And yes before you ask she is still alive. She is in and out of it and hasn't responded coherently yet. Considering that he has his own little torture chamber set up and the condition I found her in I don't know how coherent she will be when she does come to." More bitterness than he intended leaked through his voice.

"This is disturbing," Mr. Witherspoon replied. "Are you aware that Cullen had recently been voted in on the junior council?"

"No," said Ian. "How did this... aberrant behavior escape the screening process?"

"I'll most certainly find out. I take it you have the situation well in hand for the moment?"

"I suppose you could call it that," Ian responded dryly. "I called Simon Drake and he will be up in a few days. Cullen also had a pentagram set up for some kind of ceremony. If anyone can figure out what was going on it would be Simon. He is also going to start excavation on the graveyard and cataloging the....well....trophies that Cullen kept of his victims."

"It will be at least a week until I can come up. Give directions to my secretary and let Mr. Drake know that I am coming and will expect a full report."

Ian nodded absently. The fact that he was coming personally instead of sending an underling was a sign of the seriousness of the situation was well understood. "I have a personal request Mr. Witherspoon."

"What is it?"

"My father and I are not on the best of terms. Will you inform him of Cullen's death and the investigation? There is no cell phone reception up at the cabin and I should be getting back fairly soon."

"Are you sure that you don't want to be the one to tell him?"

"Absolutely. He might actually believe it if it comes from you. You will probably also be more diplomatic than I would be. I don't really want to make anything worse between us right now. This is going to be shocking enough for him as it is."

"Very well."

The rest of the conversation went quickly and Ian was relieved to be headed back to the cabin a few minutes later.

Cullen's death would be a terrible shock to his father, and so would the things that he had been doing. Cullen had always been held up as a role model and comparison to Ian and their younger half brother, Finn. Cullen's death would hit the eldest Sterling hard. What would probably be harder to bear were the circumstances and how far off track Cullen had wandered from his father's rather straitlaced ideals of the perfect son.

On the drive back to the cabin he started to worry. He had been gone longer than he had anticipated. He took the curving road faster than he should have. What if she woke to find herself alone, what if she panicked and hurt herself? He had hurried, breathless with his bags into the cabin, only to find her still resting quietly, her silky soft, blue-black hair scattered over the pillow.

He put the groceries in the kitchen and brought the clothes he had purchased for her into the bedroom with him. Settling back, he read a book in the comfortable chair he had brought in from the living room. The girl woke shortly afterwards and she replied to him coherently for the first time. Isabelle, her name was Isabelle.