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Teddi grabbed her hand and squeezed. "Nothing that happened is your fault. It doesn't matter now. Just stay hidden and don't come out unless you hear the police or me say your name.”
Crouched down, Teddi headed towards the imposing tree line. Her steps felt too heavy, giving her away to whatever cut her. Or whoever had tied them in the forest in the first place. She didn't know which thing she feared more; the killer or the creature. Maybe they were one and the same.
Making it nearly to the edge of the glade, she halted at what she found. A circle of tall torches encompassed a group of people around the rock, the flames blazing bright as the noonday sun. Thick hazy air blurred everything inside like a wall. Twenty feet from the flames there was a hole in the earth. She edged forward to get a better look. It was a hatch lifted open to an underground space, much like the one on the floor of the abandoned building. Teddi shivered. That’s where they kept the victims. How they kept them silent and hidden. She listened for any sound but couldn't see far enough inside to tell if there was a new body there.
Tracing the tree line, she got a better look at what was inside the circle of torches as the heat of the fires began to reach her.
The first thing she saw were the limbs. An ankle hanging from a thin strip of skin, waiting to drop like the forgotten peel of an apple. An arm now removed was tossed between spread legs. Teddi gagged into her elbow. The slices and severed appendages threatened to drop her to her knees.
Sheriff Malis’s face was a frozen mask of pain and terror. Blood flowed from his lips in thick streams.
It wasn’t until she saw who stood above him with a knife that the world fell out from beneath her.
Vera.
Teddi lurched forward as she screamed her name. All forethought forsaken, all planning dissolved in the face of her holding the bloodied knife.
Her eyes were pitless and black from corner to corner, all color erased.
“Vera,” she gasped, eyes burning as a wave of heat pushed against her. Desperate to get to her, to stop her, she broke out of the forest in a frantic run.
The flames hissed, billowing higher as she neared, forcing her down.
“Please,” she sobbed over the pain lashing across her heart. What had she done? What had they made her do? Her eyes blurred as she looked at the others inside the protective circle.
Seven women. Nora, Danielle, Elaine, the elderly neighbor they met at the Grennan’s. Other women she never met but she recognized. They were spaced around the body, the white dresses they wore stained with fresh crimson blood.
As one their heads turned to her.
“Stop it! Stop her!” She screamed. “Let her out!”
Elaine Malis spoke, her voice somehow audible above an unnatural wind that only fueled the flames. “We’re not making her do anything she doesn’t want to do.”
Teddi shook her head vehemently, hands grasping at the wet dirt in trembling fists. “You’re lying, you’re fucking lying. She would never.” Elaine’s head cocked slightly, like an animal smelling a curious scent on a breeze. “Vera,” she sobbed looking at her, still unmoving. Her hollow eyes were lost, so far away as she held the knife gleaming in the light. She’d seen that look on her face before. “Vera, love. Listen to me, it’s alright. Whatever’s happened, it’s alright.”
Reaching her hand out towards her, Teddi cried when she saw why it was wet. It wasn’t mud but blood that seeped into the ground. It covered her skin up to her wrists.
“Oh God.” She tried to wipe it on her pants, the metallic smell filling her nostrils. It was a nightmare. An unending nightmare as she became caked in viscous blood. As she watched Vera, frozen and unable to hear her. “No. No!” Her voice became hoarse, its tattered cry dying against the circle of killers unmoved by her plight.
“She’s accepted the truth, have you?”
“What truth? You’re murderers and now you’ve tried to implicate her. She isn’t part of this. Do you hear me?” Elaine gave her back, unbothered by the sharp edge of her words.
It was then, as she begged, that she felt it again.
The thing that moved on the wind. The figure she saw in the forest. The wraith that struck her.
A gurgled moan came from the body on the rock. In one fluid motion, the women all took one step backward.
Teddi couldn't look away as she locked her eyes on Vera's haunted face. She had to look at her to keep herself from looking back. She knew what was there. She knew what was waiting in the pitch black.
“Vera,” she whispered hoarsely. “Vera,” she begged.
Had it come for her? Had it come for the man on the stone?
Bitter cold washed over her.
The gentle caress of someone touching her face came again, right over the stinging cut. A digit so cold it nearly burned. Teddi bit down on a cry, staring at the blurring image of Vera through her tears. “Vera,” she whispered. She needed her to look up, to look at her, to say her name.
