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“We’d just finished hours of sermons when Adrian took me out to the barn on the property. They didn’t have animals inside so it was just a lot of tools and old hay taking up space.” A muscle began twitching beneath Teddi’s eye as Vera turned to her. The air between them plummeted. “Robin was hiding there. Waiting, biding his time until an opportunity arose. Adrian and I entered and he started in on another wave of brainwashing, how they were going to change the world with their drugs, how they could finally help people see the truth. His truth, at least. You have to understand that he was… he was terrifying and enigmatic and everything you think of when you picture a perfect cult leader. I understood how they got so many people to believe their esoteric rhetoric. They were effective but horrifying. How far they were willing to go, who they were willing to sacrifice to get more power, more money, and more people to worship them as gods incarnate."
“What happened?”
“Robin came out from one of the stalls with a gun in his hand. The weapon didn’t even waver, he was so sure. Ready to do what needed to be done to get justice for his son. To stop Adrian in his tracks and prevent any more parents from suffering the way he had.” Wiping her nose stiffly, she continued as her eyes filled. “Adrian used me as a shield before I could intervene. He recognized him. A screaming match ensued with Robin pointing his gun at my chest and Adrian clutching me to him so tight I could barely breathe.”
She pictured it. Vera trying to talk a desperate man down from a ledge. Another at her back, using her to keep himself safe. Her nails bit into her palms.
“Adrian, in all of his narcissistic foolishness didn't even bother begging for his life, he began to egg him on. Talking about how his son wasn't worthy, that he died because of his sins and lack of worth. He said all this horrible shit with me covering him and I watched as Robin began to unravel. His fingers stroked that trigger with every word and I knew, I knew from that look in his eyes that he was going to take all of us out as long as it meant Adrian never left that barn alive. When I took my chance to break his hold on me, Robin fired.
It went wide, missing us both. But Adrian drew a concealed weapon I didn’t know he carried. They fired at the same time. Robin was killed instantly by a shot straight through his heart. And then Adrian told me to pick up the weapon.” Vera’s eyes glazed over as she stayed in that barn a world away. “I just had this… moment. The pistol in my hand, Adrian at my back, barking at me to pass it to him because we needed to hide the body before anyone came asking questions. And I felt this thing awaken inside me. Like an animal that I thought was dead but she’d been hibernating. For years, she’d slept in the darkest parts of myself, folded down, down, down. She opened her mouth and this madness, this fury burst out like an eruption. It burst out of me as I realized this was my one chance. I finally had the power to make one of them pay in a way that got closer to justice than any jail cell could.” Her eyes burned into Teddi’s dark and deep. “I turned around and I shot Adrian between his eyes.”
The words split Teddi’s world in two. Before and After. Shock was too light a word for the way her blood halted beneath her skin. A heartbeat missed only to double down twice as fast. Her limbs ached with the cold that seeped into her marrow to solidify.
“In the motel room in Sylen, when I told you that my life had become grey, this is what I meant. Growing up I always followed the rules, did the right thing, and did my job to the best of my ability. But I've been slipping. Making excuses, cutting corners. I've been doing it more and more with every operation. Maybe that's what led me to pull that trigger, I don't know." She shoved her hands into her hair, splaying the short ends in every direction. "Seven years of watching criminals walk away unscathed. People and families were torn apart and it came down to this singular moment, a split second. I pulled that trigger knowing exactly what would happen and not caring anyway.”
“Was he going to hurt you?” Teddi rasped.
Vera laughed dryly. “I don't know. Maybe. Maybe not. At that moment, watching a murderer, a drug dealer, a dangerous megalomaniac cult leader die…I could finally breathe again. The world was that much safer for the blood I spilled. He wasn’t caged just to be released one day, he was wiped off the face of the earth. Obliterated. I don’t regret killing him. I just regret everything that came afterward.”
Teddi's brain fought against the admission. Two realities collided inside her like dying stars, illuminating a galaxy of truths she didn't want to know existed. Whoever the woman was sitting next to her, calmly telling her of the murder she committed… she didn’t know anymore.
“Then I was in that circle with those women, listening to them tell me about the most painful moments of their lives. Abuse on a scale I thought was only the stuff of nightmares, and they snapped too. They got tired of watching injustice happen in front of their eyes, daughter after daughter and mother after mother. So they took it upon themselves to set things right no matter the cost. They stole Alex's life but you didn't see what I saw in their faces. Horrors marked upon their souls so deeply they were altered to an entirely different shape. He didn't deserve what happened to him and neither did they.”
“Mackey isn’t saying much but she told me what they said to you, what they did to Sheriff Malis.” Some dark part of Teddi understood why they’d done it. It wasn’t just about revenge but prevention. It was why Alice Grennan ran with her two boys. Why Lily felt safe to leave her house for the first time in her life. Why Daisy could finish high school without someone breathing down her neck. A cleansing to wipe out a vicious blight. The Feds were still looking but she knew the bodies would never be found and the women never charged. Whether they were right in what they’d done, she didn’t know. She warred with herself, examining every shard of truth, trying to reconcile the pain and the punishment. "What happened in there? I saw you holding the knife over his body before that… that thing came." Even now she didn't know what to call it. A specter. A ghost. A person. There was no word for the entity and its unnatural energy.
Vera's head tilted as if she was trying to dig out a memory long buried. "I think… I think they did something to me. Or my brain shut down from the shock, I don't know which. But I went somewhere else. Like a door shutting me inside a dark space, I was alone. It was like being caught in a dream but you're awake. I couldn't feel the heat of the fire or the cold of the air. I wasn't tied up. I was just in this place of darkness." She wiped a hand down her face.
"It was like I was pulled back into my own life and memories. Memories, but they were so vivid, so real. Almost like I was me, living them again. I was standing beside a former boss who tormented me. A drug dealer I'd help put away. Victims who died at the hands of another monster. Adrian. I walked through so many memories of my time in that last operation until I fired that gun. I was shrouded in all of these heavy, dark echoes. Like a tornado of hatred and death and pain, as if that whirlwind of fire morphed into all the moments I once survived. It was a nightmare made real and it swallowed me whole. It was terrifying. It was worse than being in that circle with those women because at least there I knew I wasn't the real target of their revenge. But inside my mind, inside those moments where it could have so easily gone another way, I felt like they could reach out and touch me. Hurt me.
"And then I heard that owl, like that night outside the motel. I heard it call to me as fear began to swallow me whole and I reached for it like a lighthouse in a storm. As it became louder and louder, I tried to find it amidst it all and the memories began to change. I could see myself rewriting what happened. Taking out that kind of revenge and anger on them the way those women did. I could almost feel it. My heart pounding under my skin, blood on my clothes, fatigue in my arms and shoulders from swinging and swinging and swinging at anything that dared to touch me." The look in her eyes turned Teddi's heart to ice. "I liked it. I liked how glorious it felt to punish them. To make them pay for what they did to so many people, to me. I saw myself hurting Sheriff Malis and Deputy Butler, making them pay for what they did. When I came back to myself in that clearing… everyone was gone."
Teddi folded her arms across her stomach as she forced herself to ask the question. "So you don't know if you took part in what happened to Sheriff Malis?"
Vera was slow to shake her head. "I think they wanted it that way… to plant a seed in a soil that was ready to take it." She looked at the sky again, as if searching for something in the abyss above. "The women said I'm like them. That it…” She seemed to wager the words. “They saw something in me that was in them too. They said we were the same. And do you know what?”
Teddi's hair rustled against her jacket as she shook her head.
“I think they’re right. The scariest part of it all is that I get why they did it. That dark part of me even cheered them on once I knew their history, how they’d suffered at the hands of those men. What does that say about me? How far will I go next time? Where is the end to the amount of blood I’m willing to draw? Because I don’t know anymore.”
Teddi looked into the night sky as the stars seemed to blink out of existence, blanketing them in pitch-black. For the first time in her life, she felt the eye of something else look back at her.
Epilogue
The axe fell with a heavy thud.
Yanking it out of the wood, she raised the weapon above her head and swung it down again.
A crack rang out. Daisy looked at Lily.
“Again.”
Lily lifted her axe and swung.
The horizontal structure bowed in the middle but didn’t break.
“Again,” Daisy repeated.
Nearly there. Nearly there. Nearly there. She watched as Lily’s slim arms shook when metal hit wood.
