I stayed at the table after he’d left, nursing my beer. I was already drunk as hell; it was the only way I’d managed to get the courage to meet him here. The whiskey I’d sucked down earlier clashed with the beer in my stomach, and I leaned heavily on the table, head hung low, trying to keep myself from vomiting.
What the hell had I done? I’d thought he’d get it over with. I thought he’d snap up my soul the moment I offered it. I’d come here ready to brute-force my way into bravery, but he’d told me to sober up and think.
There was nothing to think about. I knew what I needed to do. There was nothing else left for me, nothing but this: a deal to damn my wretched soul, a deal that would bring me under the mercy of a monster.
I jumped at the touch of a hand on my back. But it was just Joanie, her long brown hair tied back, with a glass of water in her calloused hand.
“You look like shit,” she said, in her usual straight-forward, no-time-for-niceties manner. “You’ve been drinking too much.”
I shrugged. “Too much? Too much for what? For my fucking health?”
She narrowed her eyes. “Don’t get smart with me now. I’ll still whoop your ass.”
I believed her. I picked up the water, sipping down as much of it as I could bear. She leaned against the table as she watched me. “I heard about your brother. I’m really sorry, Juniper.”
Words like that were supposed to be a comfort. Instead, it felt like a needle being slowly, meticulously pierced into my heart. I nodded slowly, and chugged down the rest of the water. “It is what it is.”
She shook her head. “Don’t be doing that to yourself now. I know you’re hurting.” She sat across from me, hands folded on the table. “It’s been a long time, Juniper. You know you can always call us. If you ever need a place, Alice and I would be more than happy —”
“I’m okay,” I said quickly. “I got a place.”
She nodded, but she didn’t look like she believed me. She knew my story, or at least she knew it the way the news had told it, the way gossips had framed it. By the time I was let out of the hospital at eighteen, I’d learned better than to try to make anyone believe me anymore.
“Did that, uh…friend of yours give you any trouble?” she said.
I shook my head. “Nope. But I’ll be trouble for him.”
She chuckled, clapping me on the shoulder as she got up. “That’s my girl. You give ‘em hell, Juniper. Don’t worry about hurryin’ anywhere. I’ve still got all the cleanup to do. Just let me know when you’re heading out and I’ll unlock the door.”
She went back to wiping down the bar, and I drank down the last of my beer. I’d give them hell, alright. Hell was just the beginning.
Dad left when I was ten, but I think he and Mom separated long before that. I had no memories of him living in the trailer with us. Instead, the days I could remember spending with him were in the little stone house in the woods.
It wasn’t truly a house, but I’d called it that as a child. It was a hunter’s cabin, built of stone. It sat on a half-acre of land that Dad claimed had been in the family since Abelaum’s founding. Isolated and quiet, it overlooked a creek and was surrounded by the woodland on all sides. He would go out there a few weekends out of the year to hunt and fish, and he’d usually try to bring me and Marcus with him.
Dad taught me how to use a gun. He taught me to hunt, how to clean a fish, and butcher a deer. He taught me not to be afraid of the dark, because there wasn’t a damn thing out there I couldn’t learn to protect myself from.
I was eleven when he died. It was the first funeral I’d ever been to. Marcus had cried, and Mom had been so silent. But I felt like someone had punched a hole in my chest. It was a great aching void, irreparably raw. The grief never left, it just grew numb.
Dad left me the cabin and the land it sat on. One of the things I’d made sure to do before I fled Washington was ensure the place was signed over into my name. I think Dad had hoped I’d sell it and go to college, but instead I’d clung to it. It was my last anchor to home, my last tie to him.
I was lucky I had the Jeep, because the narrow dirt road toward the cabin had gone so long unused it was almost entirely overgrown. The cabin itself was far more run-down than I remembered. The front window was shattered, and graffiti was sprayed across the walls. Inside, rats had eaten away the couch cushions and chewed holes in the bed in the loft. Luckily the well hadn’t gone dry, but the spigot sputtered and ran brown for a few minutes when I turned it on.
I’d stayed in worse places. The cabin was a mess, but it held memories. Here had been warm fires, and Dad’s hugs. Here there had been smores and ghost stories, fishing in the river, running around the yard with Marcus. Here my dad had put a rifle in my hands and said, “Juni, don’t let your hands shake. If a bear is coming down on you, you don’t have time to think. You stay calm. You take a deep breath. And you pull that goddamn trigger.”
I collected some wood from around the yard and got a fire going. I had no idea how I’d manage to sleep, even as exhausted as I was. A thousand thoughts were swirling in the murky alcoholic soup in my head: demonic deals, the price of a soul, the cost of revenge.
Revenge had been a long time coming.
It had taken nearly forty-eight hours for search-parties to find me after I crawled out of the mine and ran blindly into the woods. I was dehydrated and barely lucid when I was finally found, strapped to a gurney and wheeled into the back of an ambulance. When they let me out of the hospital, with a bottle of pills and a therapist’s recommendation that I be “watched carefully,” I returned to school with a kitchen knife in my backpack, went straight up to Victoria Hadleigh in the middle of second period, and tried to slit her throat.
She’d tried to kill me. It had only seemed right I return the favor.
So much of what happened after the police found me was a blur, smeared like paint. I hadn’t been sleeping, I’d barely been eating. I was doubting everything I’d seen, everything I’d heard. I’d sat there and had doctors so calmly and patiently tell me I was delusional. I’d had police laugh at me. I’d had friends and family turn their backs on me. All the while I’d lie awake at night, terrified to close my eyes because I knew the nightmares would close in, terrified to leave the house because I could still hear that voice calling me.
There were months of court cases, meetings with lawyers, meetings with psychiatrists. Evaluations, tests. My mother telling me how lucky I was the Hadleighs were being so understanding. Then, finally, commitment. Sent to a hospital with locked doors and quiet hallways. More pills. Watched 24/7.
At least in there, I hadn’t had to endure my mother looking at me like I was a rat that had crawled into her house. At least the woods were on the other side of a large brick wall, and although I’d sometimes hear howls in the night, there was no more scratching outside my window. At least in there, I managed to survive until I was eighteen, and they told me I was “rehabilitated.”
But three years in the hospital had given me a false sense of security. The Eldbeasts couldn’t reach me in there. Only once I was out did I realize just how persistent they were.
Wherever I went, no matter how far I ran from Abelaum, they came. I had to learn their weaknesses, their vulnerabilities, where to shoot, to stab, to crush. I learned the dark was never safe, but daylight usually was. I learned how to sift through the myriad of legends and myths to find nuggets of truth — truth I could use to protect myself, truth I could use to make sense of what had happened.
No matter where I ran, no matter how far I went, the God knew. It clung to me like a stain I couldn’t wash away. It came to me in dreams. Grasping tentacles. Endless darkness. Visions of impossible things, of a twisted world beyond reality.
God owned the Libiri, and the Libiri owned Abelaum. Like fungal roots, spreading far and wide, choking out all they encountered, so too was their reach. They recruited in whispers, in nudges. They captured curious minds and reassured fearful ones. The Deep One is watching. The Deep One is merciful. The Deep One will rise.
Complete the sacrifices. Free the God. Serve with loyalty as humanity falls under the rule of an ancient deity.
Marcus was only the first. Two more sacrifices were meant to follow. Two more tragedies. I wouldn’t let them win. I wouldn’t let them make those twisted visions I saw in my nightmares a reality.
They’d tried and failed to make me their victim. What remained of me was what they’d made of me: a shadow of their evil, an echo of pain, a storm of their own creation.
A storm that would destroy them, even if it meant destroying myself in the process.
