Chapter 28
Chapter Twenty-Eight
L orelai…
“There we go.” Torment clipped the white swath of bandage around my hand and sat back.
“Thank you,” I murmured.
“It’s all good.” He got up, went around the counter, and pulled a jar toward himself out of the corner unlidding it and reaching inside. He came back around and held out a lollipop from around his back.
I smiled and laughed slightly and took it.
“I’m going to get you a bottle of water from the fridge, sealed. I want you to drink some.” I nodded a bit apprehensive, but that left me a little when he cracked the seal on the bottle in front of me and held it out.
I took it and drank… and drank, and drank, and drank until over half of it was gone. I hadn’t realized how parched I’d let myself become.
“Yeah, I thought so,” he said.
I smiled a bit wanly and said, “Sorry. I feel like I’m being a pain in the ass.”
“All good,” he said, shaking his head. “You are most definitely allowed to do whatever makes you comfortable after shit like this. No one in this house is going to hold it over you.”
I started at him, silently critical and his lips turned up into a half smirk as he said, “Right, okay, you have a point – but Specter doesn’t count he’s like one out of all of us – quit breaking our balls.”
I laughed a little and he smiled encouragingly and nodded.
“That’s the ticket,” he declared, smacking his palm on the counter, and getting up to shut off the timer on the oven and take more appetizers out. He arranged them quickly on a tray and sent one of the catering servers bustling right back out into the busy house loaded for bear.
“Hey,” Corvus returned. “I’m going to take you home,” he told me. “You ready?”
“What about Hangman?” I asked apprehensively.
“Handling business?” Torment asked casually. Corvus shot a nod in his direction.
“He’ll be fine, sweetie,” Tor said. “Be along probably around dawn or something, don’t you worry.”
“Let’s get you out of all this hustle and bustle, yeah?” Corvus suggested. He liberated a ring of keys from his pocket and swung them around on his index finger, catching them in the palm of his hand.
I rubbed my lips together and nodded and he held out a hand taking the elbow gently on my good arms as I slid out of my seat and put my feet to the floor.
“Goodnight,” I told Torment. “And thank you, again.”
“Anytime – just try not to kung fu grip anymore glassware, though.” He made a face and I smiled.
“You take anything for it?” Corvus asked and I shook my head. My hand throbbed and hurt but not enough for me to want to take anything for it.
“You should when you get home. A Tylenol, at least something .”
I nodded, logically he was right, and I could trust what Hangman and I had at home.
“Come on.” He put a hand out to gesture me to the French doors, here off the kitchen. The night beckoning beyond, the drive loaded with cars out there.
“Are you even going to be able to get out?” I asked and he smiled.
“Yes,” he said. “Later, Tor.” Tor saluted us and winked at me as we made our way out. I didn’t know what that meant – but I tried not to let it whelm me or panic me. It was a stiff and uncomfortable fifteen minutes or so from the mansion to the gates of Bonaventure.
“Shit, I don’t have a key to the gate,” I said. Just the house.
“I got it covered,” Corvus said, pulling up right outside the gate and killing the engine to his purring Mercedes.
We got out and he keyed open the smaller gate and let me through.
“You got it from here?” he asked me and I already had my keys out and nodded.
“I do, thank you,” I said.
“Go on inside, flash the lights for me so I know you got inside safe, then lock your doors, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, stepping to the other side of the gate.
He shut it and locked it back up and as I turned to walk to the house called out, “Oh, Lorelai?”
“Yes?” I asked, turning back to him.
“If you hear something out there tonight or any other night?”
“Yes?”
“No, you didn’t,” he said.
I blinked and nodded carefully, taking his meaning quite clearly.
“Heard, understood, and acknowledged,” I said with a slight smile. It was a thing that Hangman said regularly, although I didn’t think I would ever say the abbreviated version. It sounded silly when I did it.
I went up to the apartment and let myself in and flashed the light switch dutifully when the doors were locked behind me.
I got ready for bed, out of the fancy party dress and into my comfortable, white, regency vibe nightgown that probably looked prudish – but I didn’t care, and Hangman didn’t seem to mind either – although when I was feeling up to things, I tended to wear the sexier night things that’d been purchased for me.
No, tonight called for comfort, and thus I went for comfortable things, hugging my stuffed bunny close and curling on my side in the big bed, wishing Hangman were here, but also knowing that he was out there, doing bad things in order to make me safe… simply because I had asked him to.
I felt guilty, and like I maybe wasn’t a good person… but by the same token, I had been a good person. I had always been a good person and I’d been preyed upon because why?
It bothered me. The not knowing why … why me of all people? Of all the beautiful women and girls wandering Savannah that night – why had I been the one?
I cried myself to sleep, my hand throbbing and stinging from the punctures and cuts from the glass I’d crushed and I honestly felt in some way I maybe deserved it. That maybe I wasn’t as good a person as I thought I was after all… maybe none of us were. Maybe there was no such thing as good versus evil – just varying states of being.
I didn’t know. I didn’t have any answers. I doubted anyone would.
I pushed myself into a sitting position and listened, unsure of what I was hearing. There was heavy equipment moving outside and Corvus’ words came back to me… “ If you hear something… no you didn’t.”
I swallowed hard, and pulled back the blankets, abandoning the warm bed in the air-conditioned cool of the house and slipping out into the apartment. I could hear it, rumbling down the central track through the cemetery – but there were no lights.
I gathered my courage and ignored Corvus, this once. Swearing that if I ever heard anything ever again I would, in fact, ignore it… but I had to know just this once. I had to know he was taken care of. That it was over.
I didn’t bother with shoes, I didn’t bother with a wrap or a shawl or anything – it was warm outside, sultry, the night blooming jasmine tucked around the graves here and there heady before the acrid tang of diesel reached my nose.
I followed the scent and the rumble and stopped in the central track through Bonaventure under the arched canopy of high old oaks.
I looked from the forklift to the gate and realized between the dark and lack of moonlight, I could barely see the gate and only by virtue of a dim streetlight beyond it.
I turned back and startled as three leather clad men stood behind the piece of equipment and stared down the wide tract at me.
I swallowed hard and crept closer, knowing I’d been spotted and willing to take whatever dressing down or punishment might come my way for the transgression. My hunched posture easing some when I got close enough to realize that the central man was Hangman.
“You shouldn’t be out here, sweetheart,” Grim called from beside him.
“I know but I couldn’t not – I have to know…”
“He’s not dead yet, we were just getting to the good part,” Reaper said, and I swallowed hard.
“You don’t have to be out here. You don’t need to watch this, baby,” Hangman soothed and he came to me, settling his hands on my bare shoulders, caressing my skin. I wrapped my arms around him and hugged myself close to his body.
“Please don’t be angry with me,” I breathed. “I just… I have to know. I don’t feel like I can close the door,” I said and he held me tight and kissed my hair.
“You do this with us, there’s no going back, Lorelai. You understand this is a secret meant to be taken to the grave,” I heard Grim say.
I swallowed hard.
“Have you hurt him badly?” I asked.
“Yes,” Reaper said. “Felt good.”
I looked up to Hangman and he traced the side of my face with rough fingertips.
“Eye for an eye, Sweetpea. We hurt him as badly as he hurt you, and then some.”
I blinked and asked, “You?”
He chuckled mirthlessly. “Not my jam,” he said. “I just beat the fuck out of him when they were done with him.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Now what?” I asked.
“Fast or slow, sweetheart? Only seems right that you should choose.”
“Slow,” I said without hesitation.
“Get the rope,” Hangman said and Reaper moved to comply.
“Go back inside,” he whispered to me, an urgency to his tone.
“I can’t,” I said, looking up at him.
“I don’t want this for you,” he said, holding my face between his hands.
“I know,” I said, putting my hands over them, holding them in place, the tears welling and spilling. “I do. I need to know why. I need to see him die and I need to know he can’t hurt me or anyone else, anymore. I want to close my eyes and not see his face,” I said, closing my eyes. “That cruel smile, the way I can’t get the way he touched me out of my head. Please…” I opened my eyes and let the pleading fill them. “Please let me see this through.”
He searched my face and kissed my forehead and held me tight.
“I’ve got my own fears, baby,” he said and I nodded.
“I know,” I said and my voice broke on a little sob. “I know, and I promise not to think any differently of you if you promise not to think any differently of me .”
“Shit,” he muttered and he held me so tight I felt my bones begin to flex and creak and I liked that. It hurt in such a good way… made me feel safe and secure and like nothing bad could ever touch me again.
“It takes a long time for a man to strangle to death,” he whispered. “It’s not a pretty sight. You need to go, you go, okay?”
I nodded against his chest and he helped me around to the front of the forklift. There was a pallet on the forks, and the man who’d hurt me sat bruised, bloody, face swelling into something almost unrecognizable in places. Lips torn, eyes puffy, and looking like so much tenderized soft meat and I felt my shoulders go lax, and a small smile of relief, paint my lips.
“It’s him, I promise you,” Hangman said evenly and I nodded.
“I know,” I said. “I would recognize that mark on his shoulder anywhere…” I pointed to the wine stain birthmark under his skin.
He was nude and looked ravaged, stripes and welts across his body from where Hangman had likely removed his belt and lashed him.
I swallowed hard as Reaper flung the rope up and over one of the nearest branches. His arms were tied behind his back, and Grim roughed him up onto his feet.
They marched him several feet away and stood him rounding him to face me.
“Why?” I asked him, before I knew the word would even escape my lips.
He glared at me, his sclera darkened with blood in one eye, as he spit yet more into the dirt at his feet. He looked angry, but resigned and I suppose it was probably too much to hope that he would tell me.
Reaper slid the noose around his neck, Grim walked the other end to the tether to the forklift and hooked the hook at the end of the rope through a hole cut in the end of one of the forks.
“Tell me why, and I’ll opt for quick,” I told him. “You won’t have to suffer anymore.”
“Fuck you, you fucking—” he grunted and wheezed going to his knees as Grim had rounded and socked him in the solar plexus. He choked and tried to get a full breath, but he would likely never have one again.
“Come with me, baby.” Hangman led me back to the running forklift and pushed me up into the cab. He took the operator’s seat, pulled me down into his lap, and said, “Let’s just end this.” He showed me which lever to pull when I was ready.
I pulled back on it, and he worked the pedals and the forklift started to roll back, the slack taking up in the rope.
Calrose Pierce struggled to his feet, ahead of the tightening rope, and eventually, not even that was enough. He rose, higher and higher onto his toes and then he was airborne, his feet scrabbling for purchase in the dirt below him. Still, we crept back, and still he rose higher, head tilting, neck stretching, wheezing, choking, drying to pull in breath as the rope creaked and grew ever taut under the weight of his pulling body.
He hung, suspended, kicking, and struggling and Hangman stopped the forklift, braking, and putting both arms around my waist as I sat on his knee, my own arms around his shoulders.
“I expected to feel something,” I said as I watched with a sort of detached fascination as Cal struggled and kicked and his body and mind began to panic with his lack of breath.
“You might later, you might not,” Hangman said and he sounded sad. “If you do, just know I’m not going anywhere, Sweetpea. We’ll get through it, just like we’ve gotten through everything else.”
I swallowed, my eyes glued to the dying man dangling above us. “I feel more guilty about not feeling bad or guilty about killing him than I do about actually killing him,” I said.
“That’s normal,” Grim said, drawing up beside the forklift and leaning against it, arms crossed over his chest.
“It gets easier every time,” Reaper said, staring dreamily up at the man’s suffering.
“I don’t want there to be a next time,” I said softly. “I don’t need to watch the rest die.”
Hangman sighed heavily and it was with something like relief.
“Truth, baby,” he said and he always said that when he was about to tell me the stark honest truth and he feared that I wouldn’t like it.
“This is the only one who will die for what they did, isn’t it?” I asked.
“The rest will learn their lesson, don’t you worry about that,” Grim said.
“What will their lesson be?” I asked and I worried vaguely about how detached I felt from the reality in front of me.
“They’ll be missing pieces before we’re through,” Reaper said.
“Like a finger?” I asked.
“Worse,” Hangman said.
“That’s good,” I said simply.
He cuddled me close and I asked, “Is he dead now?” He hung limp above us except for these fine tremors that racked his body.
“Probably, but we like to give it a while yet, until he stops moving completely,” Grim said starkly.
“Thank you,” I said.
“For what?” Hangman asked.
“For keeping me, and countless other women safe from this monster. For trusting me enough to allow me to be here. For laying the nightmares to rest… for everything. Loving me, giving me peace… just all of it.”
He kissed my temple and I slouched down, tucking myself against his chest and under his chin.
“Thank you for being trustworthy,” Grim said.
I looked to Reaper who was silent and staring up at the man who had to be dead by now.
He looked at me, dragging his eyes away from the morbid sight and asked, “Does this make us even?”
I couldn’t even begin to understand him… but then again, I didn’t really feel like I had to.
“Yes,” I said and he nodded.
“Good,” he said simply, and he turned back to the dangling man. “I thought you were dead. If I thought for one second you were alive, I would never.”
…and it clicked.
Dead was dead. Looking up at Cal’s swinging body, face deep purple but the color draining fast I think I understood. There was nothing there. Not one spark, nothing… he was dead. Whatever made him him was gone and it really didn’t matter what happened to the rotten shell he’d inhabited.
I swallowed hard, and wondered if whatever that thing was that animated us, and made us smile, and feel, and love, and grieve, and move through this life as best we all could… well… I wondered if it had passed to whatever Hell he believed in, or if there really was any sort of existence at all after this.
“What happens now?” I asked.
“Now, we get him down, and you ride on back up to the front with Hangman while Reaper and I take care of the rest,” Grim said.
I nodded and leaned into Hangman, a tiredness washing over me after another wave of relief as some burden that I’d carried since the lot of them had victimized me, lifted from my spirit and followed whatever Cal’s essence was out into the ether.
“I’m tired,” I confessed, and Hangman rubbed my back through the thin cotton of my gown.
“I bet, Sweetpea. I’m tired, too. Let’s get you home.”