“I know how people see us,” Tammy said. “We live a self-sufficient lifestyle, so we don’t need to come into town very often. We grow most of what we need, Aileen even sews us clothes. It sounds all hippy-dippy, and people probably think we’re strange, but it works for us and the kids.”
Tammy was nothing like Theresa had expected, certainly not the outcast the town thought her to be. She caught the same scent Maggie had worn when the mayor visited Treasured Things. It had been bottled at the hippy-dippy Petty place, no doubt.
“We had a support group before we moved here,” Tammy said. “It was a real help, confiding in and supporting women with the same problems.”
Theresa was surprised to see Janice sitting near the front of the room. In the low light, the scar along her head seemed to glow a ruddy purple. She did not look embarrassed to be here, like some of the other women. Her jaw was set, her eyes blazed. She was not here for healing. She was here out of defiance.
Mayor Maggie stepped up to the microphone and tapped it. All heads turned to her. Theresa and Tammy took seats.
“Thank you all for making the possibly hard decision to come here tonight. Among you there are stories of sadness and strength, stories I hope you will all share. Let me introduce the organizer of this event, Tammy Lawson.”
A murmur rose from the attendees. Theresa was as stunned as the rest. She was amazed Tammy and Janice were here at all, let alone one of them leading the meeting. Tammy took the mic and the mayor departed through the cafeteria door.
“Thank you all for coming. Janice and I were part of a support group like this in Birmingham. We got a lot out of it and missed it when we moved, so we offered to set up a group in Moultrie.”
Janice nodded.
“All of us here are victims. Some of us feel guilty for not standing up against evil, or for not protecting our children, or for mistakenly thinking we were part of the problem. Most of you feel alone, isolated by the abuse you suffered, thinking no one else could ever understand how things could get so bad.”
Tammy spread her arms, palms open. “We understand. The women here understand like no one else. And together we are stronger than we can ever be apart.”
Tammy shared her story of a psychologically abusive husband, her white knight who, instead of delivering her from her parents’ hell, simply moved her into a deeper circle of it. Sexual domination devolved to public spouse-swapping parties. His one beer after work became a six-pack. He isolated her until she barely left the house unless under his watchful eye. One by one, her friends slipped away. Tammy became anorexic and was hospitalized. Her last friend visited her there, when she was at rock bottom, and got her into a women’s shelter. Tammy was reborn.
The longer she spoke, the more animated the faces of the women in the room became. Eyes that had avoided contact locked on hers.
Janice spoke next. She gave her story of violent cohabitation with a meth head who converted their basement into a lab. She took the brunt of his bouts of paranoia, slaps escalated to fists, which upgraded to any handy blunt instrument.
She traced the scar along the side of her head and told how he’d said she was a snitch and thrown her through a sliding glass door. The good news was that 124 stitches saved her life. The bad news was she lost the baby, a baby she did not know she carried. Her husband went to prison.
The women had watched Tammy. They teared up for Janice.
Janice became more animated as she continued her story. She denounced the male domination of society. She talked of the superiority of the female gender, the strength of women as the center and the natural head of a family unit.
This change, of course, took Theresa aback. Janice’s wasn’t a message of strength and empowerment, but of anger and revenge. Her talk wasn’t about healing, as much as hate. Looks on the faces of the audience said that most seemed to share Theresa’s reaction. But a few others did not. They gave nods of understanding and subconsciously clenched fists in approval. If there had been a line for Kool-Aid they would have been at the front of it.
Theresa knew this wasn’t the place for her. She’d had a bad marriage to an ignorant redneck, but he was nothing compared to the duo of psychos these two had hooked up with. Bobby wasn’t worth pulling out of oncoming traffic, but Janice wanted her to throw him in front of it.
When the meeting broke, several women went to speak to Janice. Theresa was the first to the door. Tammy met her there.
“I saw your reaction to Janice,” she said. “I’m sorry. She can be a bit over the top. All of us don’t share her message. Her speaking out is just her way of exorcising her demons.”
“I don’t think my experience really compares to either of yours,” Theresa said.
“I hope you didn’t get turned off from the process. We want word of mouth to get us some more women next time, Aileen for one.”
“Aileen?”
“She won’t talk about it, but something about her short marriage really tore her up. Fellow victims can tell. She needs a supportive group to share with. Maybe she’ll be here next time. Will you?”
“I may,” Theresa said. This wasn’t the time and place to say no.
“I hope so,” Tammy said. “You’re the kind of success story women need to see.”
Theresa let the slipstream of departing women pull her out into the hallway. Dustin came running out of the day-care room.
“Mom, you should have seen the dinosaurs. They totally crushed the city!”
“They always do,” Theresa said.
Ms. Gentry, who had been watching the kids, handed Theresa a flyer for a one-night sleepover during Donkey Day. “Parents’ night out after letting the kids play all day,” she explained.
Theresa slipped the flyer into her purse.
Dustin’s lights went out as soon as he hit the backseat. That gave Theresa time for some mental digestion.
First, she filtered Janice’s militancy from the rest of the group. Then the curtain opened and let light dispel all the stupid rumors about 214 Pear Tree Lane. It was just two abused women taken in by a third, with children fostered to compensate for a loss of family. Small-town gossip got so many things wrong so quickly.
The group wasn’t for her, but perhaps it would help some of the others in awful situations.
Tammy and Janice stood alone by their minivan in the dark parking lot of Princess Day Care.
“Any likely candidates?” Tammy asked.
“Several,” Janice answered.
“Excellent,” Tammy said. “We have a lot of support coming in, but nothing beats a little local help, especially afterwards.”
“What about our prime candidate?”
“No way.”
“A shame. Her boy might be the one we need, now that we’ve lost the Gift’s consort.”
“Someone’s looking into that,” Tammy said. “If her son’s the one, Theresa won’t stop us from getting him.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Of all the places Sam expected a crime scene, the Shaw County Animal Shelter was the last. He had Gladys, the dispatcher, double-check before he responded to the morning call there.
The rectangular block building on the edge of town wasn’t anything special. It had been a print shop before unpaid taxes transferred it to the county’s ownership. The National Society Against Animal Exploitation had provided a grant to convert it to a shelter for strays, but, even so, the supply of strays always exceeded demand.
Melanie Siroto greeted Sam at the front door. She was well past retirement age but leaving her post at the shelter was out of the question. She’d come of age in the early 1960s and still embraced all the flower-power ideals that arrived with the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. Her gray hair hung down around her shoulders like silver straw and round glasses gave her an owlish look. Melanie was as laid-back as they came, but this morning she looked furious.
“You get right back here, Sheriff,” she demanded, dispensing with any normal opening pleasantries. “You see just wha
t they’ve done.”
Sam followed her in. The building was as utilitarian within as without. Heavy doses of bleach and antiseptic worked overtime with marginal success to mask the acrid smell of animal urine. He’d been here before, delivering friendly strays he’d picked up during nuisance calls. There was one big difference. The place was quiet. The usual cacophony of yelps and barks was missing.
Melanie led him past the check-in counter and down a hallway. On the left, a glass wall separated them from a room with a wall of cages. Behind the wire doors, dogs lay silent, the smaller ones curled back into the far corners. The tiniest shook like tuning forks.
“What’s with all of them?” Sam asked as they passed.
“No idea,” Melanie said. “We came in this morning, and they were all terrified. Whoever was here last night spooked the hell out of them.”
They exited through a door at the end of the hall and entered a fenced run along the back of the building. The industrial-grade chain link ran eight feet high to meet with a tin roof. Gates on one side opened to six large fenced holding areas. Five of the gates were open.
“We left six dogs out here overnight,” Melanie said. “This morning we had one.”
She walked Sam into one holding area. The outside fence was torn open, like someone had unzipped it up the middle.
“Were the dogs out here rare?” Sam said.
“No, just big. Too big to keep in the cages. A Rottweiler, a German shepherd mix, that kind of thing.”
“Couldn’t someone adopt these dogs for free?” Sam said. “Why steal them?”
“Either the person wouldn’t meet our adoption standards,” Melanie said. “Or it was those animal rights wackos.”
“Animal rights wackos?” Sam had a hard time processing those three words coming out together from the aging hippie’s mouth.
“The extremists,” she said. “The ones who want flyswatters banned and pets made illegal. Donkey Day would attract them like a magnet. I’ll bet they cut the fence and ‘liberated’ the dogs.”
Sam examined the ragged breaks in the chain link. They weren’t clean, the way bolt cutters would have done it, and they didn’t have the striated finish of being sawed through. The torn metal was all jagged edges. He couldn’t think of what could do that, short of the fire department’s Jaws of Life.
A few of the edges were tinged dull brown, one with an embedded coarse black hair. The concrete pad showed no signs of blood, but the far corner had a pile of feces and a puddle of urine. The terrified dog’s side had scraped the fence’s sharp edge on the way out, as it was dragged through. If the inside dogs were spooked beyond belief by someone outside the building, whoever it was would have sent the outside dogs into shock. They wouldn’t voluntarily go anywhere. No animal rights group, however misguided, would terrify animals it thought it was rescuing.
“What about the last dog, the one they didn’t take?”
“A pregnant Golden Lab,” Melanie said. “Due any day. They probably didn’t want the mess.”
If Moultrie had access to a DNA lab on short notice, Sam could prove whether the blood was dog or human, and, if human, see who had kidnapped the canines. But even a big city department wouldn’t spend time or money on this kind of crime.
“Anyone have a grudge to settle with you, any threats?”
“No, I never have any trouble. Animal rights people, that’s who you need to check into.”
Melanie said that as if the true radicals checked into a hotel under that name and all Sam had to do was knock on their door.
“I’ll check it out,” Sam said. “Randolph’s Hardware carries fencing. Lon will have his son come fix this for you.”
“You bring those dogs right back when you find them,” Melanie said. “They’re probably terrified.”
Sam shook his head as he left. Melanie’s “animal rights wacko” theory wasn’t going to hold up. Something didn’t fit, or fit too well, he could not decide which. First the bull was butchered out in the field, then he found the deer in the trees. Now worthless dogs are stolen from the animal shelter. In the space of nine days, there had been a lot of animal-related incidents. They weren’t similar in modus operandi, and targeted different creatures, but the timing was too close to have them be coincidental.
He checked his watch. He had to wedge in a visit to the local jail. This little mystery would have to wait. Tomorrow was Donkey Day and his department had time for little else.
A mile away, near a fork in a creek through the woods, the eviscerated carcasses of five dogs lay in a pile. Blood coated the ground and dried droplets sprayed the bark of the trees around them. All five hearts were missing.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Hours before, in the last moments of nighttime’s rule, the longarex flew below the treetops, propelled by great leathery flaps of its wings, careful to avoid the direct rays of the rising sun. It flew uphill, to just below the location of its earlier rebirth, and landed on the branch of an ancient oak. Its talons pierced the thick bark and sent a waterfall of wood dust drifting down to the ground, thirty feet below.
The longarex rested back on its haunches. Its wings retracted and covered its back like a skin-covered shell. It sidestepped down to the base of the branch, where its dusky-gray hairless body better blended in with the shadows. With one pointed ear cocked downhill, it listened for any pursuers. The woods remained silent.
It thought that tonight’s hunt was the best of all.
The first had been little more than unleashed madness the night the witches freed it. The creature had been so long in that static, shapeless place where the demonic dwelt until called. Had it been years? Had it been eons? When last it flew across the earth, human prey had been few. With its first breath after resurrection, it smelled an abundance, a vast herd calling to be culled.
The longarex’s first feeling was hunger. Its physical entity coalesced in this world with centuries of accumulated starvation. Human male pheromones in the air whetted its appetite, but such a meal would have been poison before the final transformation. It took off into the air that first night and dived on the first target it found.
It barely remembered its frantic ravaging of the bull. It did not drink the bull’s blood so much as bathe in it, nourishing its near-mummified skin directly with the life-giving fluid. It tore the beast apart with the talons at the ends of its sinewy arms, tucked its wings and dived into the body cavity. It gobbled entrails with abandon, not just the precious heart, without regard for flavor or need, just for the sheer thrill of sinking its fangs into soft, warm organs that pulsed with life.
When the inert bovine could provide nothing more, the comparatively smaller longarex grabbed the bull in its talons and launched without effort. It released the carcass far from the kill site and returned to its oak tree.
Its second hunt had more discipline. It picked wild prey, deer that would not be missed. It had swooped in from behind, severed the deer’s spine at the base of the skull and cleanly drained the blood from the neck wound. The longarex had hung the bucks from a hover and eaten only the powerful organ, the heart. Its only mistake was biting the doe. In the heat of the attack, it had mistaken her for a male in the scattering herd. One taste of the estrogen-tainted blood nearly sent the longarex into a convulsion. The creature had to beat a quick retreat when a human stopped to watch the doe succumb to the venom.
The later slaughter of the hogs had yielded more hearts, ones so pleasingly similar to the still-toxic human versions it craved. But tonight’s hunt, the extraction of the kennel dogs, had a new element. These victims had fear and fight. Stronger with each kill, the longarex no longer hesitated to test its mettle in combat. The guard dog at the farm had been an inadvertent kill, collateral damage while assailing the hogs. These kennel dogs were prey themselves, expected to resist and attack. They did. And they died. It was glorious.
Only the fast-approaching human kills would bring more pleasure.
In the ecstasy of the kills and the
joy of hunger’s satiation, the longarex dropped its guard. It lolled in the crook of two branches, wings spread in debauched joy, eyes closed, mouth open, exposing its pointed teeth.
The sun crested the hill and sent a shaft of yellow light between the leaves of the tree. The light lit the tip of the longarex’s wing like a tiny spotlight. The skin sizzled. The longarex shrieked and yanked its smoldering wing from the sun. It leapt to its feet and dropped down to a lower branch of the tree.
A vulture’s skin hung across the base of the branch, the protective, deceptive covering the longarex came into this world wearing. The longarex snapped the skin open like shaking out a tablecloth. Though it seemed impossibly small, the longarex stepped into the vulture skin’s legs. Its huge, muscled calves contracted and conformed to the skin’s restrictions. It pulled over the rest of the skin like some feathered, hooded sweatshirt. The longarex’s body shrank into the confines of the scavenger’s covering. The open slit up the front sealed itself.
The longarex twisted its vulture head in a wide circle, testing the stretch of the reassumed skin. It raised its now-feathered wings and flapped them twice. A breeze tossed the oak’s branches and sunlight flashed over the reskinned longarex. Back in its protective cover, it did not flinch.
Each feeding made it more powerful, sharpened its mind and took it one step closer to the final phase of its transition. When the sun next set, the witches would cast the second spell, and the human blood that was now fatal would, instead, give it eternal life.
Chapter Thirty-Four
“You’re here to see who?” the corrections officer at the main desk said.
The lack of professional courtesy rankled Sheriff Sam. He was here in uniform, after all. The usual corrections/sheriff’s department rivalry wasn’t what it was in larger cities, so he had to assume it was more about him than his office. That rankled him even more. He again questioned why the mayor had appointed him, and why he had accepted. He leaned into the glass between him and the doughy corrections officer.
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