The revival split the church open.
The floor groaned. Candles burned blue. A choir member vomited glass, and the singing never stopped. Reverend Gideon Bell kept preaching, his voice bending inside scripture, his eyes lit by something that wasn't the Holy Ghost.
Mercy Bell watched from the front pew as her father fed something ancient with every raised hand.
She carried her grandmother's warnings, her mother's sealed altar, and a coffin nail set for vengeance. A brand marked her by a Bible that named her both enemy and heir. Jonas stood beside her, graveyard dirt still on his hands, while the voices of women who refused burial rose through the floor.
Time was already spent.
The pact ran for decades. The names in that red Bible belonged to the living. Her mother's name was written among them. And the thing her father called at the bayou's edge, the thing fed by devotion for thirty years, had finally turned toward Mercy.
It wasn't afraid.
It should have been.
Anointed in Blood is Book Two of The Conjure Testaments. Start with The Ninth Nail. Then see what answers when the altar starts feeding.
