Bane of His Existence
Chapter Fourteen
Late into the evening…
A knock sounded at the door of the cabin that resided miles from town where Gothel set up a lair for her and the coven of eight for once they were found. The old subway tunnel had been where she had found the Stabbington brothers lying low in order to remain hidden from the police after they had robbed several shops all throughout Hyperion Heights, including two jewelry shops, an antique shop, a pawnshop, a music shop, and finally a liquor store, having gotten away with well over two million dollars in fine jewels and gold and silver coins. Their cursed personas were hardly any different than their true identities. Only now that they were both awake, they were smarter and once again two of the coven's muscle and bodyguards.
When Minerva stepped up to the door to answer, she opened it up for another of their protectors once the man before her pulled back the sleeve of the uniform he wore to reveal the tattoo of their coven he bore on his right forearm to prove he belonged. The more enticing and beautiful of the witches smiled at him and suddenly pulled him against her to kiss him, while he hungrily kissed her back until she finally pushed him away again.
"Even though I'm grateful you showed me your loyalty is still to our coven, I don't need to see your tattoo or the news to know your heart still belongs to me," she whispered seductively as she traced her finger along his chest. "It's good to see you again, Gabriel Burke."
"Please… Burke is the name I was given when I became a security guard for that flea infested hospital ward," he responded and then followed the woman he longed for further into another room within the cabin. "It's just Gabriel again. Like the archangel Gabriel. Where's Gothel? I have some news she may want to hear. About Rogers and Weaver."
As they walked into the largest of the four rooms inside the cabin, the oldest of the witches and Gothel's most trusted friend was speaking with Anastasia until she replied for her sister, "Gothel's busy at the moment. She will be for awhile actually. Whatever you have to tell her about the detectives can wait."
The man glared down at the woman he had looked after within the psych ward for several months while he answered curtly, "You should know that I succeeded in doing what you witches asked me to do. I turned the video tape from the hospital into the news station after Gothel altered the footage to make Rogers look like a murderer, then I kept Weaver busy for you while you performed your sacred ritual. I planted a bomb in the younger detective's car he had been driving. It obviously didn't kill him, but it kept him out cold."
"Gothel will be very glad she chose to wake you then," Draya responded, seeming not to appear too impressed.
"I knew you wouldn't let us down," Minerva replied while she took his hand into her own. "Unfortunately, your efforts went to waste. Because it turns out it wasn't just Weaver we had to worry about. Rogers turned up in the subway tunnel as we were preparing to sacrifice Lady Tremaine and her youngest daughter, Drizella. He saved them and helped them escape."
She turned to her other sister again, then added, "It was a mistake to let them go. You and I both know Weaver won't let the out of his sight now that he has them in police custody. And he'll never release them to us."
Draya stood face to face with Minerva while she answered smugly, "Why do you think Gothel had us bring Hook… Rogers with us? We can use him to convince the Dark One to turn them back over to us if he and the other heroes care at all for their friend."
"That… and to have her way with him," the younger of the witches snidely retorted. "A part of me is jealous. But the other part of me thinks she developed her own unhealthy obsession with that pirate. It doesn't matter how good looking he is."
"You don't have to agree with her on everything, Minerva, but you do have to follow her," her sister responded adamantly. "We all agreed long ago that Gothel is the strongest of all of us and that we would follow her until our coven is no more. She's never let us down and you know it."
Minerva sighed in frustration upon going over this with Draya again and again, then she replied, "Like I said before, I never disagreed with you about that. Gothel is as much my sister as she is yours and I love her as you do. However, not even sisters agree with every decision we make. You've certainly proven that more than enough times in regard to the decisions I make."
Draya glanced at her sister's choice of boyfriend amongst the rest of the men she's seduced and then answered snidely, "Present company included. But… at least he's loyal to our coven and has returned to help us to find the rest of our sisters. Good work, Burke."
The security officer glared at her while he sneered, "It's just Gabriel."
Meanwhile…
Inside a private room, Gothel walked out from the bathroom after fixing herself up for her night with the man of her own dangerous desires. She then sat down on the side of the bed where Detective Rogers still laid unconscious since his abduction down in the tunnel, while he stared down at the pained features adorning his face with morbid glee in seeing him laying before her so helpless, until she at last reached out and tenderly began to caress his cheek in an effort to rouse him. However, when he didn't come around, she reached over him to pick up the basin of water she had poured on the nightstand, then tenderly continued to minister to cuts and bruises he received in his fight against the Stabbington brothers.
A large dark bruise ran across his left cheekbone, and a small, yet deep gash now ran halfway along his right cheek from the side of his nose. The worst of his wounds though were his ribs, as she could feel that a few of them were broken, while others were fractured and saw it had caused his left side to become dark purple in color.
While her magic was slowly returning to her the stronger she and the coven of eight became as her sisters have begun to come together again, she was still weak in this world and so healing his ribs and bruises took time and strength, which was why she could only use her power to heal the breaks while the rest she tended to without magic.
Finally, most of the darkness from the bruises was gone and she could feel that the broken and fractured bones within his chest were healed as much as she knew they would be from her care. Slowly, Rogers began to come around at last and once he struggled to clear his mind and vision, it didn't take long for him to remember his attack when he saw Eloise leaning over him as he was lying on a large bed shirtless, with his wrists and ankles bound to the headboards by cords too tight for him to break free from.
"Just take it easy," Eloise whispered gently, as she traced her fingers gently over his cheek once more. "I promise you, you're going to be alright. You're perfectly safe here with me."
"Eloise… What… why have you done this?" Rogers uttered weakly as he tried to fight against his bonds. "Where am… where am I?"
She laid her hand over his chest to calm him and responded smugly, "Someplace where your partner won't be able to find you. And it's miles away from everyone, so no one will be able to hear you try to cry out to them, or to help you should you manage to escape from these bindings."
Rogers stopped struggling to preserve what little strength he felt and looked coldly into the woman's eyes while she continued, "This isn't how I was hoping we would come to this point in our relationship…"
"We're not in any kind of relationship," he firmly interrupted her before she could finish talking about them as though they were anything more than a cop who saved her life and a woman he believed to be in distress. "I thought you were in danger. I've spent the last several years of my life beating myself up and losing sleep because I thought it was my fault you disappeared that night. I believed you to be an innocent woman looking for one person in this world who cared about what had happened to you. I never thought you would turn out to be a woman who practiced in the art of witchcraft and human sacrifices."
"That's one of the things I love most about you, Detective Rogers," Gothel replied while she ran her fingers up and down the contours of his chest, making him feel even more uncomfortable than he already felt. "You're a white knight. I find it the strongest quality you possess, and I'm very much attracted by it. Or at least… until I finally snuff it out so that you and I will finally come together as we always should have been."
Rogers looked away from her and closed his eyes in an effort to not feel the dread and yet the arousal also beginning to creep up within him from her seduction, then she answered strongly, "You and I will never be together. I'm a detective and I've vowed to try to protect as many people as I can from those who threaten to do them harm. People like you. You're a murderer."
The coven leader suddenly grabbed his chin and forced him to look up at her as she angrily responded, "And now so are you. Or at least as far as everyone here in Hyperion Heights believes, including your own partner and the friends you think you've made since you were made detective. That woman from the bar downtown, and the young man who's been busy weeping in the hospital over a child who isn't even his."
"You were never supposed to discover the truth about who I really am," she then said more tenderly once she calmed herself and continued to caress him. "I only ever wanted you to fall. So far, so that given time you would have no choice but to come to me and I would have taken care of you. You're mine now, detective. And I don't plan on letting you go until I've finished with you."
Before he could reply, the woman he believed to be Eloise Gardener, leaned further over him and began to kiss him seductively despite his resistance against her advances. The more he struggled, the more passionate she became until she finally sat back, then stood up beside him and slowly pulled the silk black robe she was wearing until she wore nothing at all.
Gothel then wrapped one of her legs over so that she was sitting on top of his stomach while she pulled a syringe from the nightstand and suddenly injected its contents into Rogers' neck, causing him to cry out upon feeling the needle jabbed into him and the drug burn its way through his blood. It wasn't long before he began to feel strange as the room dangerously spun around him, then he soon found that he could no longer resist the woman now on top of him while she continued to kiss him in between pulling away his own remaining clothes, so she could make passionate violent love to him against his will as she's longed to do since their first night together all those years ago.
Eventually she was able to remove his restraints because he couldn't move as he felt paralyzed throughout his entire body, yet he could feel her own against him as she continued on for what felt like an eternity once the drug eventually wore off well into the night. The longer she made love to him, the more shame he felt for allowing someone he had obsessed over himself destroy him with every kiss.
"This has been one of the best nights of my life thanks to you, detective," she whispered to him again at last when his humiliation finally ended as she slowly rose her upper body off of him, then continued to sit over his stomach again while she looked into his vacant eyes. "If you're wondering what it was I injected you with… it's actually something wonderful created right here in very world. A miracle drug Maggie discovered you call ketamine. It does wonders to loosen a man up. I do hope one day that we'll come to the point when you won't need to be restrained and drugged any longer, but until then…"
All of a sudden, as Gothel finally rose off of Rogers and began to get dressed into the dress she had laid out for herself earlier, she was interrupted when both of her sisters entered the room as Minerva spoke up curtly saying, "I'm sorry, sister. But you need to know that Anastasia has run off."
Draya also added, "She was talking about wanting a chance to talk with her mother and sister again to find out how things have come to be as they are, especially between them."
"Don't worry," their leader replied callously and then turned around to face them once she finished. "She'll be back. After Anastasia made no move to stop me from killing her mother and sister, they will never see her as their daughter and sister again and she will realize that we're the only ones who will ever love her the way she deserves to be loved. And she longs for the power she's felt inside of her, even if she doesn't yet understand it. In time, she will. Don't worry. She will come back."
"And what of Lady Tremaine and Drizella?" Draya then asked, not with contempt, but out of curiosity as to what her Gothel's plan was. "They're now in police custody, which means that Weaver will be keeping them close. Not for their protection, but to try to prevent us from finishing Anastasia's initiation into our coven. If we're to succeed in doing so, we need to spill their blood."
Minerva continued, "Draya's right, Gothel. If we have hope of reuniting our coven, we will need to trade Detective Rogers here and demand Weaver to release them to us. Rogers is still our bargaining chip against these heroes… isn't he?"
Gothel then angrily shouted, "When I'm finished with him! We have time. We know the Dark One won't let Victoria and Ivy out of his sight so long as they're in his custody, and he won't be able to find us here unless we want him to. The heroes know they can't do anything to break the curse because they care about Henry and Lucy, and there are still four more of our sisters out there waiting for us to find them. Anastasia's initiation doesn't have to happen tonight. As for Rogers… if you're worried that I feel some fatal attraction for this pirate, I assure you you're wrong. All I want is to destroy him, which I have begun to do."
"Perhaps it's possible Rogers can still be of use to us in our search for the others after all," Draya said again when an idea suddenly dawned on her as she looked between their leader and the barely conscious man still lying naked on the bed, unaware of the conversation being spoken around him. "Do you still have those vials you brought back with you from Neverland?"
"I do love how your twisted mind works, Draya," Gothel answered with a cruel smile. "It just so happens… I do."
