Vern grabbed a stick and drilled it into the ground, breaking up the earth. The floor of the woods was dry and densely packed. It should’ve resisted Vern’s efforts, but she smashed the ground open in a single strike. She loaded her arms with earth and tossed it onto the fire, then dug more dirt, repeating the sequence until the fire was out. She’d put out a bonfire with a stick.
Vern turned when she caught movement to her side. A rustle of clothing, of leaves. A dark figure in the distance, no doubt the fiend, darted away. Vern stared after him, unmoving. The fire was out. She should go home to her babes.
Where the fiend was running, toward the edge of the woods, was no place for her. This was Vern’s world, in the dark. She lived in the place where trees stood as mighty as gods. Hands on her knees, Vern tried to catch her breath. Restless energy darted through her.
She could still hear the patter of the fiend’s feet against the ground, the sway of leaves as he brushed against bushes and trees. Vern, her good sense overtaken by desire, gave chase. The air against her face was intoxicatingly bracing. This was the feeling she’d been longing for when gorging herself on berries, when cutting her palm. She was half animal now, only instinct and need.
She leapt over a fallen branch and hopped through a scattering of dead logs. Trees thwacked her face as she ran. Her legs should’ve been tired, but they felt fresh and unbothered, brand-new legs recently attached. She ran until there was nowhere left to run. Vern had made it to the edge of her world. She’d reached the place where the trees, for just a moment, stopped. A road split their pine kingdom in two. The fiend darted across it, slipping into the woods on the other side. Vern ran after him but stumbled when a long bellow roared in her ears. Someone was honking at her. A pickup truck grazed Vern’s side, knocking her to the ground. Dazed, Vern scrabbled up, another car hurtling by, swerving sharply to the right with a loud screech.
Vern jogged on wobbly feet off the road. After a year in the woods, she’d forgotten about cars. She wiped her eyes, still wet and buzzing from the siege of bright white from the headlights.
Down the road, music blared, real music—not one of her damn gospel lullabies, not birdsong, not a nursery rhyme for the twins. Music with instruments and a beat, music you could dance to. Vern closed her eyes and swayed back and forth to the faint noises. Too far away to make out the words, she walked toward it. One step, then another, then another, until her good sense came back to her. She turned toward the woods. That was where she belonged. With her children, where the world made sense. No one lied in the woods. No one charged you money for a decent meal in the woods. No one charged you rent. No one balked at the way you looked or smiled when what they really wanted was to devour you.
Yet it would take Vern ages to locate her camp in the dark. She’d lost track of her whereabouts when chasing the fiend. If she waited until first light, it’d be a quicker trek. Besides, she’d lost all her fish today chasing the drownt child. If she followed the music, maybe there’d be a place to steal food.
Vern hurried again toward the music until she found its source, a small cabin-like structure with a neon sign. It wasn’t much more than a shack, its white paint faded. It seemed to Vern, best as she could tell, a white-people sort of place. A row of motorcycles sat in a line outside, a small crowd gathered around it talking. The music playing was country.
There was nothing else around, no convenience stores, no fried-fish joints or barbecue spots. The neon-signed wooden shack was an island in a dark rural wasteland. “You lost, girlie?” somebody asked, and Vern stumbled backward in surprise, barely catching herself before falling.
“I’m fine,” said Vern, voice trembling, knowing how she must look. She was wearing one of her Cainite dresses, the sleeves ripped off and the hem cut from ankle-length to be above the knee. Dirt and ash smeared her face. Sweat clung to her. Leaves and seedpods in her hair, which she gave only a cursory comb with her fingers every now and then.
“Something happen to you, honey?” asked a woman dressed in leather, a bottle in one hand.
“I’m fine,” said Vern again, voice hard now. She’d not let it shake in front of these strangers again.
Truth was, she was better than fine. She’d just cracked open the ground and put out a bonfire, had torn a thick branch from a tree and tossed it away like it was a ball. She didn’t know where that rush of adrenaline had come from, but it was still in her, pulsating.
“I think you might be looking for someplace else,” said one of the men. He had a long, dark beard and a shiny bald head.