Chapter Sixteen
The plane tickets sat in my email, proof of a decision I couldn’t get a refund for. Two adults, and one child for a round trip to Charlotte.
I stared at the confirmation screen a moment longer than necessary, as if it might rearrange itself into something less permanent if I waited.
Charlotte was still nearly two and a half hours from Woodland, so I’d have to book a rental car as well.
And pray that my son would be delighted by all the transportation that day.
Between my fingers, the small plastic leg of a Barbie bent and clicked faintly.
The paint on her face had worn down to a ghost of itself—eyes half-erased, lips chipped into something crooked.
The outline of her shoe was deliberately erased with nail polish remover a decade ago.
I turned her over, thumb dragging across the scuffed plastic, and tried to remember why I’d kept her.
Something about her felt like proof.
I set her down beside the keyboard and opened a new tab.
Social media loaded in a blur of color and noise—faces I half-recognized, names I didn’t care to remember, lives arranged neatly for public consumption.
A game I used to be particularly good at, but lost interest in somewhere in my mid twenties, though I still kept the account.
August had hated it. He’d refused to make a profile on any of the big sites back then, he’d said something once about not wanting to be cataloged. I’d admired that in a way I hadn’t known how to name. It felt…free. Or maybe just stubborn in a way I couldn’t afford to be.
Now, I found myself hoping he’d changed his mind on the matter.
My fingers hovered over the keyboard. For a moment, I almost closed the tab. But then I typed it anyway: August Brooks. The name looked smaller on the screen than it had in my head.
A list of profiles appeared—men with beards, men with children, men holding fish or guitars or women who smiled too hard beside them. None of them were him. I exhaled slowly, something between relief and disappointment settling low in my stomach.
I kept scrolling past the list of suggested profiles, down to the “mentioned” post, and found a familiar face framed in a thumbnail posted by a radio station local to Salisbury. I clicked before I could think better of it. The page loaded, and there he was.
Older, of course. The sharp edges of his face had softened, worn down by time into something steadier.
His hair was its natural blonde color, no longer the box-dye black from my memories.
Faint lines bracketed his mouth, and creased at the corners of his eyes.
Those eyes that still glowed an impossible green.
And his cheeks—God—they still carried that soft coral bloom beneath the skin like something alive and taunting. My breath caught in a way that annoyed me.
The headline sat just beneath the video in bold lettering: Local author, August Brooks, digs deep on devil worshipping band in his new novel!
I leaned back in my chair, staring at it. Then I laughed once, sharp and humorless.
“That fucking asshole,” I muttered. “He really stole my dream and wrote a book.”
I opened my desk drawer with more force than necessary and rummaged through it until I found a tangled pair of headphones buried beneath old receipts and dried-out pens. The cord resisted when I pulled it free, catching on something unseen before finally giving way.
I plugged them into my laptop with more force than necessary. For a second I just sat there, the Barbie staring blankly up at me from the desk, the video paused on August’s face like he was waiting. Like he knew I’d come looking.
The host sat across from August with that easy, practiced kind of charm. The man was smiling like he was about to ask something harmless. His voice had that warm, honeyed tone people use when they want you to forget you’re being led somewhere.
“So,” he said, leaning back in his chair, “what made you want to write about The Amen Thieves?”
August shifted a little in his seat, one hand coming up to rub at the back of his neck. There was still something about him that felt just out of place in a room like that. Like he’d wandered into the wrong life and decided to stay anyway.
“They were just…around,” he said after a second, voice steady but quieter than the host’s. “When I was growing up, I mean. They were kind of a big deal in the indie punk scene back then. Not huge, but—big enough.”
He gave a small shrug, like it wasn’t anything worth lingering on, even as he kept talking.
“I had a friend in high school who was obsessed with them,” he went on.
“Like, obsessed. Knew every lyric, every rumor, every place they were playing within a two-hour radius.” A faint smile touched his mouth, gone almost as soon as it appeared.
“We’d go see them whenever we could. Didn’t matter if it was a school night.
Didn’t matter if we had to lie about where we were going. ”
I swallowed, my fingers tightening around the edge of the desk.
I didn’t like the way he said we. I figured he was talking about Penelope, she had always been into that punk scene.
The host nodded, clearly pleased. “So they were a big part of your teenage years.”
“Yeah,” August said. “I guess they were.”
There was a pause, just long enough to let the weight of that settle before the host leaned forward again, his tone shifting—subtle, but there.
“And how did you feel,” he asked, “when you found out about the…religious aspects of the band? Was it surprising to find out they were devil worshippers?”
August let out a breath that almost sounded like a laugh, but not quite. “I mean,” he said, “it wasn’t that surprising.”
The host’s eyebrows lifted. “No?” August shook his head, glancing down for a moment before looking back up.
“Not really. I mean, the name alone kind of gives you a hint: The Amen Thieves. And if you actually listen to the lyrics…” He trailed off, one shoulder rising in a loose shrug. “There’s a lot going on there.”
He shifted again, leaning forward slightly, forearms resting on the edge of the table like he was settling into something heavier.
“When I was a teenager, especially growing up somewhere like Woodland—small, conservative, very church-centered—religion didn’t feel like guidance. It felt like…” He hesitated, searching for the right word. “Like something that wanted to take things from you.”
I felt that one land, familiar and tightening.
“Your individuality,” he continued. “Your choices. The way you saw yourself. A lot of my friends were queer, or questioning, or just didn’t fit into what people thought they should be. And it wasn’t just them. Even girls who did fit, at least on the outside—there was still this expectation.”
He glanced away for a second, like he could see it if he looked hard enough. My stomach twisted and lurched all at once.
“Get married,” he said in a mockingly deep voice.
“Have kids. Don’t want too much. Don’t be too loud about it if you do.
” Something sour crept up the back of my throat.
“So bands like that,” August went on, quieter now, “they felt like rebellion. Like a way to push back. They gave us permission to question things we previously had been taught not to think twice about.”
The host nodded slowly, like he understood. Maybe he did. Maybe he just wanted August to keep talking. August leaned back in his chair again, hands folding loosely in his lap.
“But I never expected them to have taken it as far as they did.” The room seemed to still around that sentence.
The host let out a soft breath, his expression tightening just a touch. “Of course,” he said. “I don’t think any of us in the community expected that they’d take it as far as human sacrifice.”
The words sat there, heavy and unmoving. Human sacrifice. I felt my stomach turn, like something old and buried had just shifted under the surface.
On the screen, August didn’t react right away. He just sat there, looking at nothing in particular, like he was somewhere else entirely. Then he gave a small, humorless nod.
“Yeah,” he said. “That part…wasn’t exactly advertised.”
I dragged the cursor forward, skipping over whole chunks of the interview in jagged bursts. The audio warped and stretched, voices turning thin and unnatural, like something caught between stations. I didn’t need to hear it again. I already knew the story.
I’d read it the year it had all come out—late at night, phone lighting up my face while the house slept around me. Articles stacked on articles. Headlines that felt too big for the quiet places they came from. The band, missing kids, countless bodies that hadn’t all been found.
I pressed play again without thinking. “…you know, I think about this kid that went missing in my hometown,” August was saying. My hand stilled.
“His name was Shannon O’Kinzy. The Amen Thieves had been in town around the same time, and I’ve always wondered if maybe the two events were related.
But of course, there’s no way I could prove it.
But that’s what got me really thinking about these guys, and ultimately led me to writing about them. ”
The name moved through me slowly, like something woken up instead of remembered.
Shannon.
I could see him the way he used to sit in those hard church pews—knee bouncing, eyes bright like he was always on the verge of saying something that mattered more than anyone else realized. Staring at me.
The host’s voice cut in, lighter, almost curious. “It seems like you’ve gotten a lot of backlash on this. Some people think you might be romanticizing the band.”
August let out a dry, quiet laugh. “Well,” he said, “I do have a tendency to romanticize people I shouldn’t, but—”
I slammed the laptop shut. The sound cracked through the room, loud enough to force myself into a pause, waiting to see if I’d woken my son from his nap.
“Jesus,” I muttered, already pulling the headphones from my ears. The cord caught on the edge of the desk before slipping free, falling in a loose coil like something shed. I stood too fast, the chair teetering behind me.
I didn’t want to hear the rest of it. I didn’t want to hear Shannon’s name turned into a stepping stone for a book. Didn’t want to hear about the band, or the people they hurt. Didn’t want to hear August talk about his ability to romanticize the wrong things.
Some things weren’t meant to be brought up over and over. Picked at and pulled apart instead of being left to rot in peace like they deserved.
I moved down the hallway without turning on the lights. The house felt dim and close around me, the kind of quiet that presses in on your ears. My bedroom door creaked when I pushed it open, the sound stretching longer than it should have.
I went straight to the bed. For a second, I just stood there, staring at it like I was waiting on the bedspread to beg me to stop, then I bent and lifted the mattress, just enough to slide my hand underneath. My fingers found the journal with ease.
I let the mattress fall back into place and stepped away, already flipping it open, the pages whispering under my fingers. I skimmed without stopping, eyes catching on pieces instead of whole things.
dark between the trees
I think there’s part of you
or maybe part of me
something I’d meant to let go missing
something I’d forgotten to lose.
I slowed on the page, my gaze snagging on the last line like it had teeth.
I pressed my lips together. There was more beneath it—something about light breaking through branches, something about dirt under fingernails, something about not knowing if what I’d found had ever belonged to me in the first place.
I let out a quiet breath. “I could write a book,” I said to the empty room.
I closed the journal halfway, keeping my index finger tucked between the pages, and turned back toward the hallway. When I got back to my desk, I set the journal down beside my laptop, pages open, and stared at both for a moment that stretched too long to time.
I opened the computer again, the screen blinked awake, too bright for the dim room. I squinted at it, my reflection faint in the glass for half a second before August’s face reappeared.
I clicked into a new tab, and the cursor pulsed expectantly on an empty document.
Then I started writing.