“Tell me! Tell me or I’ll kill you!” said Vern, ready to lunge toward her babes if she needed to but desperate to get an answer out of the fiend.
“It’s not my doing,” said Ollie, coughing, eyes now closed. An animal traipsed in the darkness, out of sight, but Vern wouldn’t let it distract her. She kept her eyes on Ollie.
“Who, then?” asked Vern as her children cried for her.
“You’re in over your head.” Ollie’s breathing was rapid and off-kilter.
“Shut up,” said Vern.
Below her, Ollie gave a weak, barely perceptible shrug. “It’s the truth.”
“You don’t know anything about truth.”
“I know that it’s the truth that you’re making a mistake. Please, for your own sake, let me up. Let me go. And I can tell you all of it. About me. About the hauntings. About Eamon Fields,” said Ollie.
Eamon? What was there to know about Eamon? Ollie was still trying to burrow back in. Vern wasn’t going to fall for it. “You’re in no position to bargain. Tell me now, or I’ll kill you.”
“You’re just a little girl. You’re not gonna—”
Was that why Ollie had mistreated her so? Because she was young? Easy to manipulate? She wouldn’t be manipulated anymore.
Vern shook Ollie by the shoulders with all her might, slamming the woman’s head into the ground over and over until she passed out. Then she picked Ollie up and threw her into the dark. Her limp body made contact with a pine tree, and Vern heard a snap. Her spine breaking? Her neck? Whichever it was, Ollie now lay on the forest floor no more animated than a pile of dirty towels.
Energy pulsed through Vern. She wanted nothing more than to open Ollie sternum to pelvis. Sniff the insides. Eat her till she was empty. Vern licked her lips. Ollie looked like supper.
“Mam!”
Vern shook off the urge and ran to her babes to cut them down, careful not to hug them too tightly for fear of crushing them.
“Did you kill him, Mam?” asked Howling, either afraid or impressed. Snot dangled from his nose as he sucked in breaths through sobs. Feral cried more quietly.
“She’s gone now. She’s gone,” said Vern, though that was not wholly true. The walloping drum of Ollie’s heart still beat. Like a breeze, it floated across the air and brushed against Vern’s skin. Despite her distance from Vern, the woman’s shallow, skittering breaths were hot on Vern’s face. Vern felt the woman begin to die, but she wasn’t dead yet.
Vern inhaled. For the first time in a very long while, she felt sensations as they were meant to be felt: sweat dripping down her forehead and along her temples, cool air against her skin, smears of blood on her palm. She was alive, and the veil that was Ollie had been lifted.
The animal lurking in the trees emerged from the shadows, making a course toward Ollie. “Finish her off,” said Vern to the hulking beast. She figured it for a stag or an overgrown boar. Maybe a cougar who’d wandered out of its usual territory.
The night Vern first met the fiend, there’d been an animal, too. Was this one the very same? Had a mountain lion latched on to the fiend’s scent? Or maybe it had elected itself Vern’s guardian.
“Sleep, my babies,” Vern said, her mind already plotting. Reverend Sherman and whatever goons he was working with would be coming soon now that his scout was dead. It was time to go.
8
THE NEXT NIGHT, when Vern was all packed to leave, the sky slit open like a fish’s gut and washed away their home. The winter stores of food drowned, and the grounds of their campsite flooded. The little oasis in the massive woods gave way to the deluge and would soon rot.
Vern shouldn’t have wasted time returning to Ollie’s apartment. She’d heard the rumbling sky and felt the darkness growing in the woods. She’d known the storm was coming and that she’d have to pack well, but it had been her last time in the area to grab clues. Papers. Ollie’s wallet. Her laptop.
Vern whisked Howling and Feral from the sodden forest floor onto a branch. They held fast to it, neither of the two crying despite the wet and the cold. They were only three years old but were strong. Could’ve climbed the slippery bark of that tree themselves.
“Mam!” Howling called. “Lightning!” He had one arm steady on the branch, the other thrust up to an opening in the treetops to the sky, rain pelting down on him by the bushel. “Look, Mam, look! It’s flashing! It looks like veins. Is it full of blood?”
“Quiet, child, let me think,” Vern said, arms wrapped around herself. She watched her ruined realm succumb to the rain. She’d packed up most of their belongings, but they wouldn’t be able to take them all.