Chapter 2
Damon
The hand doesn’t go back under.
For a second, I’m waiting for the punchline. A speaker hidden in the bushes, a fog machine, even some college kid with too much free time and not enough parental disappointment. Anything that makes this make sense.
Then the fingers dig into the dirt.
Rick makes a sound beside me. It’s not a word, more like air catching wrong in his throat.
The grave splits wider, and a second hand breaks through, gray and thin, nails packed dark with soil.
The chanting around us doesn’t change. The women don’t move closer; they just stand in their circle, with their candles held steady, like they’ve done this before and know exactly how long it takes for the dead to crawl out of the ground.
“Okay,” Tyler stammers, backing up half a step. “That’s enough.”
Nobody laughs.
The top of her head appears next, dark hair hanging from her skull.
She drags herself up slowly, elbows braced in the wet earth.
Her movements are too human to be fake, and too wrong to be alive.
Dirt slides off her shoulders. Her pale blue dress hangs in ruined strips, the fabric plastered to her body in places and torn away in others.
My stomach pulls tight.
She kneels in the open grave for a moment, head bowed, hair hiding her face.
Aaron huffs out a shaky laugh. “This is insane.”
The woman lifts her head, and the laugh dies in his mouth.
Her skin has a sickly green cast beneath the candlelight, the color settling over her like a healing bruise.
It stretches tight over sharp cheekbones, split in places where decay has already claimed its piece.
Her eyes aren’t white or cloudy like I’d expect; they’re pale and empty, like they’ve forgotten what it means to blink.
She climbs from the grave barefoot.
The smell hits me when she gets closer. Dirt first, cold rain after that, and something underneath that I don’t want to name.
Rick whispers, “Dear God.”
The dead woman looks at him.
His mouth shuts.
“You touch what you should not,” she intones.
Her voice echoes through the cemetery, and no one moves.
“You take what is never freely given.” Her gaze travels across us, slow and certain. “All but one of you stand guilty.”
Aaron’s face twists. “Guilty of what?”
The dead woman turns toward him.
He points at the women in robes. “Is this supposed to scare us? Because it’s not funny. My father’s the pastor, and if this is some anti-church bullshit, you picked the wrong family.”
One of the strangers near the gate mutters, “I’m leaving.”
He gets three steps before every candle flame goes black. Not out. Black.
A sound moves through the cemetery, low and wet, like the ground itself is breathing.
The stranger stops.
The woman moves faster than she should. Her hand shoots out and clamps around the stranger’s throat before he can even flinch.
Fingers sink straight through his skin with ease, similar to the ripping of wet paper.
She rips upward in one brutal motion, tearing his jaw clean off his face.
Blood sprays in a hot arc across the nearest gravestone.
His tongue flops out, dangling from the torn bottom half of his mouth, while his eyes bulge in pure animal panic.
She doesn’t stop. Her other hand punches into his chest, fingers curling around his still-beating heart.
With a wet, sucking sound, she yanks it free, ribs cracking like dry twigs.
The organ pulses once in her grip, then twice, before she crushes it into pulp between her fingers.
His body jerks, legs kicking uselessly, then goes limp.
She drops the mangled corpse. It hits the ground with a heavy, boneless thud, blood pooling fast beneath it. His ruined face stares up at the black sky, jawless and empty.
I don’t know his name; maybe that’s why my brain refuses to accept what just happened.
He’s just a stranger, but most of the others aren’t.
Nobody screams at first. That’s the worst part. There’s this tiny slice of silence where every man standing there is waiting for his brain to fix what he just saw.
Then Tyler bolts. Rick grabs my sleeve hard enough to pull the fabric tight against my arm. “Damon.”
I don’t answer him. I’m looking at the woman, at the way she stands over the dead man, without even breathing hard. Without blinking. Like the killing didn’t cost her anything.
Aaron stumbles back, palms up. “No. No, no, no. You can’t just...”
“You chose victims who couldn’t fight you,” she rumbles.
His face drains of color.
The cemetery gets so quiet, I hear my own pulse in my ears.
“What?” Aaron whispers.
She steps toward him.
He shakes his head once. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes,” she counters. “You do.”
Her hand lashes out and seizes Aaron by the hair, yanking him forward.
With her free hand, she drives her fingers into his mouth, past his teeth and tongue, and grips the back of his jaw.
One savage twist, and the bone cracks wetly.
She rips downward, tearing the entire lower half of his face away in a spray of blood and shattered bone.
His scream comes out as a gurgling, high-pitched whine through the ruined throat.
She doesn’t pause.
Her other hand plunges into his belly, fingers sinking deep.
She tears upward in one long, ripping motion, splitting him open from navel to sternum.
Intestines spill out in hot loops, steaming in the cold air.
Aaron’s eyes roll back, legs kicking weakly as she keeps pulling, dragging more and more of his insides out until they hang in glistening ropes from her wrist.
She lets the body drop. It folds in on itself, still twitching, blood and viscera pooling fast around the corpse.
“You preyed on teens in the youth group you led. It was supposed to be a place of confession. You turned it into trauma and pain.”
Aaron taught Sunday school. He shook hands after every service, and smiled like he’d never had a bad thought in his life.
I was alone with him more than once growing up.
Nothing ever felt off.
My stomach twists.
How many people knew? Worse… Did anyone?
Rick lets go of me, and takes off.
For a second, I almost follow. My knees bend and my body gets ready. But the woman turns her head, and Rick freezes like something has hooked into his spine.
“They were your employees, and you paid them less when they said no,” she accuses.
Rick’s lips part.
I think about the hardware store. The little bell over the door. His hand on my shoulder when I was twelve, telling me I had a good swing, and that my dad would’ve been proud.
He looks smaller now.
“Please,” he whines.
She moves so fast I can’t see her, then she clamps a hand around Rick’s throat, fingers driving straight through skin and muscle like it’s nothing.
Blood gushes around her wrist as she squeezes, crushing his windpipe.
With a sharp upward jerk, she tears his entire throat out, the windpipe and arteries ripping free in a wet spray.
Rick’s eyes bulge, mouth working soundlessly as blood pours down his chest.
She doesn’t stop.
Her hand slams into his abdomen hard enough to fold him over, then burrows through the wound in a spray of blood.
One brutal yank, and she rips a long strip of intestine out, pulling it through the wound in a glistening coil.
Rick’s knees buckle, body jerking as she keeps tearing, dragging more and more of his guts out until they spill heavily onto the grass between his feet.
She lets go, and Rick drops hard, body crumpling over the pile of his own insides, blood spreading fast beneath him. His fingers twitch once, then go still.
Rick bought me my first baseball glove after Dad died. Every birthday, he knocked ten bucks off whatever Mom picked out at the hardware store. He remembered my name. He remembered everybody’s.
The image from the past crashes into the one in front of me, until I can’t tell which version of him was real.
Maybe both.
I don’t know when I drop to my knees.
The grass is cold through my jeans. My invitation lies a few feet away, black paper open against the ground, the red ribbon bright as blood beside it.
Eight men came here.
Eight men with jobs, families. They were people who waved at me in the grocery store. Every one of them carried something I never saw.
So, why am I still here?
I’ve never forced anyone. Never wanted to, never even crossed that line in my head.
Why did she bring me here?
Tyler is crying. Evan is praying. One of the strangers is bargaining with the women in robes, offering money, names, anything.
The women don’t answer. But the lady in blue does. One by one.
I should look away… I don’t.
Every accusation lands before the killing. Every denial sounds exactly the same.
I didn’t. She’s lying. Please.
Then she tells them something only they could know.
My stomach rolls. I think I’m going to throw up.
I also can’t stop thinking… they deserve this.
When the last body falls, the chanting stops, and I’m the only man still breathing.
She turns toward me.
I keep my hands where she can see them as she walks closer. Each step is slow enough that I have time to think about running, but I know I won’t make it.
Her ruined dress brushes the grass, and a strip of lace clings to her collarbone. Up close, the decay is worse, but so is the proof that she used to be something else… someone else.
She crouches in front of me and I stop breathing.
Her eyes move over my face.
“You feared becoming the thing they are,” she remarks.
My throat works, but nothing comes out.
She reaches for me, causing me to flinch, and her hand pauses in the air.
For the first time since she crawled from the grave, something flickers behind her expression. Not softness exactly, but more like she’s remembered that people can break before they die.
“You’ve wanted,” she states.
The words land low in my gut.
Her cold fingers touch my chin, barely there.
“But you’ve never mistaken wanting for permission.”
My breath comes out uneven as she studies me for another second.
Her gaze drops to my hands.
“You’re innocent.”