Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.
The stranger stepped back into the gloaming of the desert and the last of the humid warmth sealed itself behind her. As she stepped over the threshold of the Old One’s ruins, those six sand-chiseled eyes watching her emerge from the shadows.
All six remained frozen in time until the wayward son emerged and they pushed past the stranger to embrace the son and brother they had lost.
The stranger walked over to her waiting pale horse, mounted and put on her leaded goggles once again before wrapping her crimson scarf around her face against the winds and sands. If they hurried, she reckoned, she could still make it to Nod.
The mother’s shriek tore through the wind and blowing sand. The pilgrim’s daughter held herself, crouched and rocking on the balls of her bare feet, sobbing. The son was staring blankly at the horizon from which the stranger had come, at those distant mountains melting in and out of sight behind the windswept sands.
The pilgrim stormed up to the stranger’s horse, grabbing at the reins.
“That is not my son!” he shouted at her. “You promised to bring me back my son! You brought me a husk! Have you no shame? That ought to be you instead!”
“You were warned,” she said. “I did not commit to bringing your son back whole. I only said that I would bring him back. He had been inside too long.”
“We agreed you would bring him back, so go back there and demand he be made whole again, damn you.”
She looked up at the mother and daughter in a cluster with the shell of the man’s son. The girl was standing behind her brother. They traded looks. The tears were gone.
“It cannot be undone,” she said, looking the pilgrim in the eye as she said it.
“No!” the mother yelled and the stranger looked up to see the daughter had taken a thin blade from the folds of her clothes and watched as the girl, with eyes dark from crying, pressed the blade into the base of her brother’s skull and upward. Dark, black blood flowed over her hand and down her arm as pilgrim’s son swayed, then crumpled to the ground while his mother howled into the wind.
Dumbfounded, the pilgrim dropped the horse’s reins.
“It could not be undone,” she repeated, nudging the horse back onto the broken cobbles of the Old Canaan road towards Nod while the wind carried the mother’s banshee wail to salt the alkali flats with her sorrow.
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