Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.

The dark within was unsullied by Dusk. It stood apart from the twilight standing without.

The understanding was immediate and absolute. It came before her eyes drank in the faint bioluminescence rising from the stone walls beyond the entrance, casting a faint, ghostly cerulean into a dark that drank in light with a fullness. It came before the smell of water betrayed its location within the hollow space between the stone. The burden that rested on her neck since the shootout at the camp three or five days before, was simply absent. Not lifted. Gone — the yoke had never existed, never had been slung across her neck, never pushed her body to the ground.

It was in stillness that she stood just within the threshold dividing the entrance between the gloaming and this new, fresh darkness, letting the feeling wash over her in waves.

She crossed over in fullness.

Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.

It was with an explosive frantic fluttering that the quail broke from the scrub, barely registered before the gun’s thunder broke the twilight calm, before any thought of the bird came to the fore.

Only after the bird had dropped to the twisting shadows of the mesa, had the stranger known she had made a kill. There was no magic in the act, although it might have seemed so had anyone witnessed the event.

Vengeance, My Heart is a work of serialized fiction. Jump to key story links to read earlier content.

As she made her way to where the crow perched, it was clear that Fallow was not the only equine casualty of the shootout. One other lay dead on the outrider’s side of the camp and the other two had panicked at the noise. The stranger could see the silhouette of one against the backdrop of the last of the failing light. It was looking back at camp, but seemed disinterested in returning. Of the other horse, there was no trace.

Dee was resting her back against the base of some mesquite once the stranger found her. She was pressing one hand firmly against her thigh, blood staining her fingers dark to match the growing shadows. Her other hand rested near the holster without quite reaching it. Her gun was not in the holster and it took the stranger a moment before she spotted the revolver in the gloaming, left almost under the wain.