Chapter Text
Jackie had imagined this reunion more than once. She’d pictured it, sketching out the image of Shauna and Callie seeing one another again behind eyes fixed close in fruitless attempts at sleep. Each time, the Jackie of her visions had been visibly out of place, awkward and fumbling, and that assumption was likely exactly why she’d fixated on it. It was an old habit, the urge to replay fears in hopes of course correcting before they could come true. She’d also assumed, understandably so, that the reunion would come later, under much different circumstances—ones where the danger had been dealt with, where Jeff would be lurking in the background, a mirror to her own clumsy presence, where Jackie could, at the very least, hang back and allow Shauna a moment with her daughter.
But anxious minds were an imprecise tool, deceptive as often as prophetic. Shauna and Callie were reuniting now and, in this harsher, messier reality of it, Jackie felt simply as though she was finally where she belonged. She squeezed Callie’s arm as Shauna hugged her tight and felt neither too aloof nor too intrusive. She studied Shauna’s face carefully when Callie released Shauna and hugged her in turn, and she found nothing there but love.
So, not out of place with them, which was something that Jackie would celebrate privately later, jumping up and down in a bathroom growing thick with fog from the running shower, a ritual in memoriam of her bright-eyed eighteen year old self, who had once snuck away to celebrate such seemingly comparable wins as making captain or securing Shauna a treasured gift. But definitely out of place generally speaking, because this was still a battlefield. A battlefield that Callie was now on— thank God she was, thank God she’d come, thank God Shauna was alive —and if Callie was on it, that meant that—
“Sadie?” Van screamed.
Fuck. That meant that Sadie was, too.
Jackie surveyed the scene, her eyes sweeping over the carnage to seek the living among it, both the still-breathing threats and the women who threatened to break her heart if their own stopped beating.
She searched for Sadie and Van, first. They were on the perimeter, a few yards from where Jackie stood with Shauna and Callie, both unharmed. Jackie made eye contact, but she couldn’t risk running toward them. She was getting her bearings back, the initial shock of almost losing Shauna, of seeing Callie in this mess, had abated. Now, it was all strategy. All getting the fuck out of this mess alive. Shauna had snapped back, too, Jackie realized with a quick sigh of relief. With cautious, fluid movements, she took the gun Callie had fired and passed it off to Jackie, pulled her own knife from its holster, and produced a switchblade from her back pocket, which she placed into Callie’s trembling hands.
Tai and Misty stood back to back in the heart of it, so close that their curls brushed against each other, threatening to tangle, stirring in Jackie a memory of Shauna giggling as Jackie braided strands of her hair through her own. Tai and Misty’s weapons remained raised in vain, for there was nowhere worthwhile to sink a bullet or a blade.
Lottie was crouched over a young woman who looked dead, aside from feet and hands that still twitched sporadically, as though energy was being artificially channeled through her lifeless corpse. Jackie noticed Lottie’s fingers wrapping around a large rock just in time to twist Callie’s chin to the side and avert her gaze. They both flinched at the violent, cracking thwack that followed.
Nat stood perched on a large, lopsided stump, the clear remnant of a tree fallen rather than felled. It was as close to high ground as she could get in this setting without testing whether the ability to scramble up weak lower branches remained intact with age. Her eyes narrowed as she swept the perimeter, her energy somehow at once more frantic and steadier than Jackie’s.
That was all of them accounted for, once again given the familiar gift of life against all odds, the gift that Jackie herself had resented for years after she’d had it thrust upon her, the one that still came coupled with the sick, creeping suspicion of a force that had its claw buried deep, unwilling to part with its toys until it was ready to tear them apart itself. Jackie kicked that fear down, forcing her focus to threats that she could actually see. As for the cult members, the only ones visible were dead or dying. Jackie didn’t have time to count, but she didn’t have to. There weren’t enough.
Jackie jerked her head toward the center, where Tai and Misty stood frozen in their readiness. Shauna seemed to realize what she was thinking immediately, or maybe she’d come to the same conclusion on her own in the mere seconds since they’d begun to assess the situation, because she turned to face the treeline, her knife held firm. Van took Sadie by the arm at the same time that Jackie took Callie, and together they moved inward.
Jackie waited until they were closer to the others than the perimeter to say it aloud: “Everybody fall in.”
“What’s the count?” Tai asked, the spell of silent anticipation broken.
“Thirty-six,” Nat answered immediately.
They met in the middle, in the one space where no bodies littered the ground. Jackie pulled Sadie into a heedless, crushing hug the moment they were close enough, unable to hold back any longer.
“Oh, honey,” she whispered, her wits about her just enough to keep her voice low. She rubbed Sadie’s back in firm, wide circles, just as she had when Sadie was a little girl, pink in the face from crying about one of Siobhan’s biting remarks, or shivering cold after playing out in the snow too long. “Where’s Midori?”
“Back at the trailhead,” Sadie said. “She’s with Jeff. We snuck out.” Shauna stiffened at Jeff’s name, Jackie could sense it even though she wasn’t looking her direction. “You scared the shit out of me,” Sadie sniffled into Jackie's shoulder. “Thank God. Thank God you’re okay.”
Jackie knew Sadie was holding back, was both proud that she was managing to and shattered that she had been put in a position where she had to. Jackie allowed herself one more kiss to the crown of Sadie’s head, then released her into the middle of the circle, where Shauna had already pushed Callie behind herself. The women surrounded the girls, their backs to them and their weapons raised toward the treeline that made a near perfect concentric circle to their own.
“They probably ran,” Tai said. “They could be a mile away by now, maybe even two, in any direction.”
“They probably did,” Nat said, “but we can’t be sure.”
“We should sweep the cabin,” Shauna said. She made to move, but Jackie gripped her wrist tight, her nails digging in hard enough to make her wince.
“What’s going on?” Sadie demanded.
Van, standing shoulder to shoulder with Jackie on her other side, made quick eye contact. Her lips pursed, her eyes begging for advice that she knew Jackie didn’t have, couldn’t possibly have, because there was no way to fix this. This wasn’t a court battle for custody or a mangled stuffed rabbit. Jackie and Van couldn’t smooth this over, couldn’t hide the worst parts of it from Sadie.
“Were they…were they sick?” Sadie said. “Is there something—”
“Mom…” Callie’s voice was eerily calm, and she hesitated just long enough to give the same determined inhale that Shauna always had before saying something she didn’t exactly want to say, “you guys did this, didn’t you?”
Their collective silence was answer enough.
“Oh my God,” Sadie whispered. “Okay. Okay, well, it was—it—it was self defense, right? I mean—”
“We can talk about it later, sweetie,” Van said, shooting Jackie a look that said cover me. Jackie nodded and Van turned, pulling Sadie into another hug. “Soon,” Van corrected. “We’ll be out of here real soon, okay?”
“Let’s sweep the cabin,” Tai said. “Shauna was right.”
Misty and Lottie went, not exactly the recon team that Jackie would have chosen, but one she had to trust. One they all had to, and that knowledge had clearly settled among the group: they had to believe in each other, there was no time for squabbling, no room for doubt. They wouldn’t have any vantage point, soon. In all their careful planning, they’d forgotten one thing. The sun was setting. Their flashlights, along with the bonfire in the near distance and the few torches set up in regular intervals by the cult prior to their arrival, had been the perfect lighting for last night’s activities. But for this? Jackie didn’t want to know what would come when the sun set on them.
It took Misty and Lottie a few minutes, during which the others scanned their surroundings for signs of movement that never came.
“It’s clear,” Misty said, Lottie trailing out behind her, nodding her agreement.
“Good,” Shauna said. “Jackie, take the girls inside.”
Two voices joined Jackie’s in perfect unison: “No.”
Callie and Sadie were shooting Shauna the same look that Jackie was, and Shauna seemed to be unsure what to do with all three of them disagreeing. She blinked at the girls, then at Jackie, who shrugged. She didn’t have a better answer, but she knew that wasn’t it. It wasn’t even her pride. It wasn’t some unwillingness to take the less physical approach, to hide and wait it out. Protecting Callie, and now Callie and Sadie, had been Jackie’s objective this whole time, beyond any other. She wouldn’t have squabbled over being tasked with it, and she didn’t have someone else in mind to do a better job than she could. It was just that something in her gut was telling her, screaming at her, that it was the wrong choice.
“Jax,” Shauna said. “I need you to—”
“I have a bad feeling,” Jackie said, unable to arrange any other words, anything more logical or convincing. “I just think it’s a bad idea.”
Van, who Jackie had felt watching her intensely, made heavy eye contact with Shauna, and something shifted.
“Okay,” Shauna conceded. “So, what? We hike them out?”
“It isn’t that far,” Sadie said. “We’re really only five or six miles from where they’re parked.”
“Half of us stay, half of us go?” Van asked.
“I don’t think that leaves us with enough people,” Nat said. “Splitting up feels like a mistake. We all go, get them to the car and out of here, then we come back and finish—”
“Awooooooo!”
Van jumped first, heard the howling a fraction of second before the rest of them, but it became clear as more noises joined that it had come from a human, rather than an animal. Some new, twisted ritual, Jackie assumed. Something the Patagonia-clad freaks did to feel closer to nature.
“Is that…” Lottie trailed off, none of her frequent put-on air of intrigue, simply true, cautious recognition.
“It can’t be,” Tai said.
Jackie had missed something, clearly. She tried to catch Shauna’s eye, but Shauna was laser focused on the treeline, tense and ready, bracing herself for something Jackie couldn’t begin to imagine.
“Aiy, aiy, aiy, aiy!”
“Ca-caw, ca-caw!”
“They—they had Shauna’s journals,” Misty said, her voice pitching toward true terror for the first time since this had begun. “Maybe it’s…” She, too, trailed to nothing.
They were definitely humans—young, female voices ringing out. Jackie caught herself turning to check, momentarily convinced that Sadie and Callie had slipped away somehow, squeezed right past her and ran off into the night without her noticing. But they were there, strawberry blonde and deep brunette hair swinging against their shoulders as they searched for the source of the sounds, just as their mothers were.
“How the fuck is this happening?” Nat asked. Jackie startled at the desperation in her tone.
Hearing Nat break into fear like that, hearing her off-balance and out of control in a situation like this, made Jackie’s stomach drop, lead-heavy. It left, in its absence, too much room in her chest—a gnawing, hungry space that no inhale could satiate.
“Mom?” the twin trembling voices of Callie and Sadie rang out. Hushed, young, like little girls who had sensed how seriously they were meant to keep their quiet, but couldn’t help but break it.
“Shauna?” Jackie asked, when the only answer to their pleas was the cacophony of strange noise growing closer with each passing second, hooting and baying and hissing nearer.
“Shhh,” Shauna shushed Jackie, clipped in a way that would’ve offended Jackie if it hadn’t instead scared her too much to feel anything else. “I—I’m thinking.
“Thinking what?” Jackie demanded. “Care to enlighten me here?”
“Thinking,” Lottie said, “about whether they’re trying to help us, or them.”
An answer came before Jackie understood the question, in the form of a man—sprinting in the way one only did when they were being chased, his distraught face lit eerily by the sun’s final bow, a deep orange glow that meant it would soon retire, leaving them to whatever silver dregs the moon was kind enough to offer.
“There’s more girls!” the man shrieked. “They’re everywhere, they’re—”
He stumbled, fell forward, and landed perfectly in a trap that Jackie knew hadn’t been there when the night had begun. They’d sweeped the land, and re-sweeped, and sweeped again. And yet, as brush was cleared by the motion of his fall, the displacement of air carrying leaves gracefully out of the way, a set of spikes was revealed, laid intentionally into the dirt. They weren’t long enough to go through the man’s body, but the blood that pooled around him was a clear enough indicator that he would be dead in less than a minute.
One more down, six to go, Jackie thought, unable to prevent herself from reveling in the relief of being that much closer to done with this, as she watched the dirt run red.
“Oh my God,” Sadie gasped. “Fuck, fuck, what the fuck?”
“It’s okay,” Jackie said. “It’s okay. We’re okay.”
She knew it to be true, but she had no logical explanation for the knowledge. There was no part of her that could lay out a sound argument, no fact or reason behind it, no explicable indicators any more than there were for the fire pits at the four corners of The Manor’s property, for the way burning the right things in them on arrival had always meant safety, seclusion in the best sense of the word. Some things simply were.
The following minutes passed much as the weeks before them had: stretching endless, passing in the blink of an eye, showing, more than anything, that time was a concept, a theory, as poorly understood as every other, so complex that it could not be tied down neatly and expected to remain in place. Jackie had two jobs, held two things close, and allowed the rest to fall away. She let everything else fade to background, cut herself off from wonder, didn’t stop to think why she could’ve sworn she’d caught the sound of familiar voices on the air, ones that belonged to different woods and a different time.
She simply kept track of her people: of Sadie and Callie, of Shauna and Van, of Tai and Nat and Lottie and Misty, and she counted the bodies that fell.
One: another man, dragging an injured woman with him by her elbow, who was seemingly chased by something that Jackie couldn’t see into a bear trap that sprang tight, trapping him just beneath the knee. Tai the closest, shooting him square in the back of the head, his misery quick to end.
Two: the woman he had led back to them, shot in the heart by the only one of them who could’ve managed that aim, Nat cursing under her breath as she reloaded.
Three: another woman—older and slower, but able to remain unseen amongst the chaos as she crawled toward them on hands and knees—who grabbed Jackie’s ankle, her eyes wide with something closer to fervor than terror, her mouth open in the first breath of a question, when Shauna pulled her away and slashed her throat, quick and clean.
Four: a man who stumbled straight into Misty, seeming almost to impale himself on her knife, rather than be stabbed by her.
Five: a woman shouting please into the night, facing away from them, her eyes locked on something in the distance, who backed up close enough for Lottie to force the air out of her lungs with one swift movement of the knife clutched in her hand.
Six: a person so consumed by fire that the smell wrinkled Jackie’s nose before she saw them run closer, someone who must’ve fallen completely into the bonfire to light up like that. Jackie clutched Sadie and Callie close to her, finally let herself hear their surroundings, the screams of the others, frenzied and chaotic, the sobs of the girls, now muffled by her coat where they’d both taken easily to burying their faces, the crackle of fire, and the boom of the shot that Van took to end it once and for all.
And, with that, it was over. The not quite human, not quite animal noises were gone. There were no more cult members running through the woods. There was, finally, just them.
Nat and Tai doused the flames, but Jackie wasn’t sure how. She was only vaguely aware of their discussion as they did so, and she couldn’t bring herself to look. She felt herself shaking from head to toe, noticed that she was trembling the way one would notice something about their surroundings, feeling so far removed from her body. She fought it, tried to maintain some presence, squeezed Sadie and Callie tight and kept her eyes shut even tighter.
Then she felt Shauna. She didn’t have to look; she knew Shauna’s touch, knew it was Shauna’s hands on her hips, Shauna’s chest pressed against her back, Shauna’s lips placing a series of kisses against the back of her head, Shauna’s arm wrapping around her to find Callie’s shoulder.
“It’s over,” Shauna whispered, and Jackie came back into herself, felt the ache of her muscles and the cold burned tears on her cheeks and the steadiness of her feet on the earth. “It’s over. It’s okay,” Shauna repeated. “We’re all okay.”
“We have to call the police,” Tai said, as she finally stepped out of the cabin.
Each of them had swept it in turn for anything incriminating, all of them trusting each other innately with their lives, but less so with matters like these.
(“I still think maybe we should just burn it down,” Jackie had said, Shauna’s coat wrapped around her shoulders, her eyes heavy with exhaustion, her frame so small beneath it all that Shauna had to repress the urge to immediately cease crime scene curation and find her a snack, “y’know, just to be safe.”)
“We have to drive out to get service,” Nat said. “Won’t the cops be able to tell it’s been hours?”
“That CSI shit isn’t real.” Tai rolled her eyes. “They can barely tell their asses from their elbows, they won’t know down to the minute.”
Tai had been right, as she nearly always was. Shauna, like the rest of them, was on autopilot for most of it. The anxiety didn’t kick in during the hike out. It didn’t kick in during the overcrowded ride in the van to the trailhead, nor during the reunion with Jeff. It made itself known only when Taissa made the 911 call and, even then, it was marginal, a whole lot of nothing compared to everything else they’d done. Tai was so calm, so even, so careful, that it made it hard to worry about any possible repercussions.
Shauna was not the right person to speak during situations like these. She knew it, just as she’d known all those years ago that she wasn’t meant to use firearms. She had served her purpose in this. She had done what she needed to do. Everyone was safe, and the threats were gone in the only way they truly could be: every last one of them was dead. So, Shauna didn’t try to speak to the 911 operator, like Misty did, forcing Tai to hold up a finger and walk three paces away.
She didn’t allow herself to wonder what had happened back there, just as she had never allowed herself to wonder what had happened back in the first set of woods. It didn’t matter. The outcome was the same. It helped that Callie had decided not to ask too many questions, that she seemed content simply to sit near Shauna in silence, ignoring her father’s rapidfire speech the same exact way Shauna was.
And Shauna certainly didn’t try to speak when the cops arrived, two idiots with one brain cell between them and no concept of what they had wandered into. She did as she’d done years ago—not twenty-five, but thirty—and allowed Jackie to speak for her, feeling nothing about that other than sweet, beautiful relief.
The cops had no idea what to do with them. They weren’t used to this sort of thing, and who was, really? There was no practiced protocol for this on their end, just as there was no easy way to explain that, a few miles into the woods, there were dozens of bodies of people who had been killed in a myriad of ways that ranged from brutal to very brutal, that everyone here had survived the blood bath and just thought maybe the police ought to know. And, oh, who was this woman taking turns with New Jersey state senator elect Taissa Turner—whom the idiot cops recognized not by virtue of her political career, but by virtue of her high school soccer stint—to rattle off information at them? Why, that was none other than dead homecoming queen Jackie Taylor, but there would be time for that later.
It was almost funny, watching them try to make decisions: how much backup did they need (every available unit, but they decided not to get ahead of themselves, whatever that meant); whether they should go check the scene now, in case there were potential survivors (yes, but they decided not to); whether they should send out a search and rescue team now, or wait for morning (now, but they decided morning, since the sun would be rising in an hour or two anyway). It was a true display of idiocracy, of, Shauna thought, the very reasons it took nineteen months for them to be found out there.
For the first time since Callie was a little girl, Shauna allowed her to nod off with her head on her shoulder, as they waited for a decision. The only decision that was made that night by those cops with any sort of certainty was that everyone sitting or standing or pacing in the gravel lot by the trailhead needed to come into the station for questioning. And, even then, their ability to solidify the details left much to be desired.
“Okay, so how are you going to get us all there?” Jackie asked the officers, one hand on the back of her hip and the other waving at their car, its lights still flashing jarring, unnatural red and blue. “There are two of you and one car between you. Are we all walking together, or do you think maybe you should let us take our own cars?”
The small town cops exchanged slack-jawed looks, as they decided whether they would rather walk ten miles than admit a woman was correct.
Jeff drove the girls to the station. They had remained present through the entire ordeal, despite the women trying to convince them to leave, to head to a rest stop or a hotel or even The Manor. The women had known it was futile as they’d said the words. Those girls would do whatever they wanted, and Jackie couldn’t help but be proud of the choices they made, even if those choices pained her.
Callie and Sadie had agreed easily that it was for the best to omit their presence during the thick of it, to go along with the story that Tai had listened to Jeff and Midori rehearse until she was certain that they were ready. They were all hostages in equal measure, and members of this violent, crazed cult had been watching them, Callie and Sadie and Midori and Jeff, from the moment they released Callie to them. They were told they’d be shot, and all of the women sacrificed, rather than just Jackie, if they did so much as move too quickly. Their phones had been taken away. (It was Sadie who had thought of that, gathering them up and stashing them fifty yards from the trailhead, next to the jacket that one of them had given Callie to wear, and two half empty water bottles. Again, this meant both pride and fear for Jackie, but she didn’t think she could handle interrogating that just now.)
The cops were easy to manage, and there was nothing worth noting said between them. Taissa ensured the arrival of lawyers who practiced criminal defense, rather than land use. Jackie let the cops’ mindless banter, their questionable decision making, their embarrassing lack of critical thought fall in one ear and out the other, listening only well enough to give a vague response when one was required of her. There was something to this, to surviving the way they had, that allowed for a sense of inviolability. Jackie wasn’t stupid. She knew there was a long road ahead, for her and her death certificate and her years of name changes and off-grid living especially. But this, unlike being stranded in the wilderness, unlike being separated from her very heart for most of her life, unlike being stalked by a crazed cult that put the fan in fanatical, was nothing that a sizable sum of money spent on lawyers and some carefully calculated smooth talking couldn’t fix. It was a problem for later, and it was one she had no doubt she could face.
The only thing that mattered about the hours they spent in the shitty little joke of a police station was that, in the end, they were declared free to go. And so they went, leaving—without much fanfare—a night, a month, an era of their lives to come to a close.
Sadie fell naturally into the shitty van when they were finally released to go their own way—of course she did, Shauna thought, because of course the one person they would’ve deemed the least likely of all of them to have a kid was the only one who seemed to actually be decent at it—and her girlfriend fell in naturally after her. Shauna began doing frantic seat math, calculations that she hadn’t done since high school, trying to assess who would be booted, who would be in the less desirable car, what the odds were that Jackie would be riding separately from her. She hadn’t needed to worry about that then. She wasn’t quite sure why she had, now that she had the clarifying distance of time. Jackie had clung to Shauna. Jackie had counted the seats in the car and then recounted. Jackie had saved her bus seats and bleacher seats and cafeteria seats their entire childhoods. She had pulled Shauna into her lap, or flopped down on Shauna’s—in boys’ cars, in friends’ basements, wherever she had to in order to avoid being separated from Shauna by the seemingly unbearable, threatening distance of one car behind or three seats down.
This seat math was the kind Shauna ought to have done throughout Callie’s childhood. She ought to have actually had PTA mom friends, to have driven Callie’s classmates to games or the mall or wherever else kids went now. But she hadn’t done that. None of it. Her minivan was aspirational, something Callie poked fun at when Shauna found reasons not to haul her friends around with her. (I’m an only child, Mom, why do you even have this thing, then?)
So, this was the first time in a long time she’d done seat math, and it felt far more serious than it had when they were teens. Shauna was choking on it, on the knowledge that she would have to let Jackie out of her sight eventually, that a promise Jackie had made through tears and through moans and syllables forced out on gasping, stuttering breaths, one that Shauna had coaxed her into, wouldn’t last in the real world and its mundane demands.
“Shauna,” Jeff said, the driver side door of his shitty sedan half open, his hand tight around the handle. “What’s the hold up?”
Shauna squeezed her hands tight, and realized suddenly that she held Jackie’s wrist in one of them. Jackie shifted with enough force to trade her wrist for her own hand, but she leaned in closer to Shauna as she did it, letting Shauna know that she was there, that she wasn’t leaving, and Shauna wanted to say thank you out loud, but she knew how off that would sound, so she kept her mouth pressed shut.
“Jackie can ride with us,” Callie said. “Right, Dad?”
Jeff set his jaw.
Shauna’s hands shook, and she found herself slipping. She found herself becoming the woman she’d been months ago, the one she’d shoved herself into like the hide of an animal during a hunt. Not fierce like a predator, but wide-eyed and terrified like prey. She was the woman who chided her daughter into behaving at the dinner table, so that her husband wouldn’t get pissed off. The woman who was—though she’d never have admitted it at the time, not if faced with perjury or with torture—genuinely afraid for her husband to find out that she’d dinged the bumper on the stupid fucking minivan. She had been so many things for so many years, and while she hadn’t strictly feared Jeff finding out about the affair, while she’d sort of wanted him to know at times, there were other times where Shauna had felt herself becoming her mother. Shrinking, placating, offering her husband every convenience on a platter: a clean home, a closet that seemed to magically replenish itself, a carefully curated stern look that would shut their daughter up so as not to distress him, a body for him to grab and to fuck and to toss aside when he wasn’t interested.
Shauna hadn’t gotten that way because he’d forced her to be. Shauna had remembered that over the past month, slowly but surely, with her knife buried to the hilt in a ribcage, with her fingers buried to the knuckle in a woman whimpering her name between hiccuping gasps. Shauna had gotten that way because Jeff had been a tool in the prison of her own design. But things had changed. Her sentence had been twenty-five, rather than life.
Shauna’s hands shook at her side, but only for the briefest of moments. Before Jeff could speak, she clicked her tongue against the roof of her mouth, gave a sharp roll of her eyes just as he parted his lips to no doubt equivocate uselessly, to drag everyone along in his quest to pretend that he got to make the decisions, that any woman’s idea must be warped and repackaged and branded as his own.
“I haven’t slept for shit in three days,” Shauna said, “but if you’re just going to stand there I guess I can drive.”
She held out her hand for the keys, more than ready to snatch them from his hand and leave him there, stranded at the Bendock Sheriff’s Department.
“No,” he muttered, defeated. “I’ll drive. Let’s go.”
He looked at Jackie, and she gave him the most forced smile Shauna had ever seen. Jeff didn’t notice, because while he was looking at her—staring intently, in a way that Shauna didn’t like, a way that made her repeat the promise she’d made to Jackie in her head like a mantra: I won’t kill anyone else ever again —he wasn’t actually seeing her. He never had.
The car was quiet. Music didn’t feel right, not now, and there was so much to think about that Shauna felt she had her own talk radio hammering inside her skull, the only station that got signal.
It had all happened so fast. There was no explanation. No grand manifesto, no villain monologue from Willow. But, Shauna thought, that was the way it went in real life. She’d learned that long ago. There could be shocking violence, lives taken, ritual acts built, but they would always end as swiftly as they’d seemed to begin. They happened with a thrill, with a rush of adrenaline and a one-mindedness that made it feel as though they would change everything, as though they would stretch endless and consume one’s life, as though no one who survived them would ever be able to exist apart from them again, and then they would end. And, when they ended, there was wood that needed splitting and fires to be stoked. Even apart from the wilderness, it was much the same. There were groceries to be bought, dinner to be prepared. There were jokes to be made, new books that sounded interesting. There was sleep and sex and all the soft stuff in life, and none of it vanished just because something fucking crazy had happened.
Shauna still had a husband who she needed to divorce, a daughter who she needed to repair her relationship with, a soulmate, in the truest, most beautifully terrifying sense of the word, who she would crawl into bed with that night, just as she had every other night, just as she would every night until her last. What had been true then was true now, would be true long after Shauna was dead and buried: if you were lucky enough to be breathing at the end of it all, life always went on.
“You okay?” Jackie whispered.
Shauna opened her eyes just long enough to look at her and smile. “Tired.”
Jackie stroked Shauna’s hair off of her forehead and nodded. “Sleep,” she said. “It’s a long drive.”
Shauna could feel Jeff’s eyes on them in the rearview mirror. She ignored the challenge, perhaps even relished in it a bit. She sank into Jackie without having to look, knowing the exact way Jackie’s arms would be open for her, waiting for her, as though no time at all had passed between drunken nights out with Jeff driving and Randy in shotgun and the two of them in the back. Shauna had always been the one who fell asleep. Jackie had been too alert, too hypervigilant in public to ever let herself nod off, even more aware when Jeff was around, which Shauna could have understood the reason for even back then, had she not been drowning in jealous, blinding, possessive love. Jackie had always stayed awake, and she’d always encouraged Shauna’s habit of sleeping, always offered to be Shauna’s pillow in one way or another, to let her own body serve as an entire bed for Shauna, her arms wrapping around her like a comforter, whenever she could manage to get the angle right and the audience limited.
Things had changed, though. Of course they had. Shauna waited to hear one more quiet snore from Callie, who had stepped into the passenger seat automatically, even though she never had done so with both her parents in the car in her life, as though she was well aware that Shauna wouldn’t part from Jackie, not even a few feet. Shauna could trust Jeff just enough to have no initiative, to drive along the road exactly as he was told, followed by the van carrying the others. And, above all else, she could trust Jackie to ensure that he didn’t veer off course by even one inch. Because Jackie was different now, so very different than Shauna had imagined she could be, but she was the same in all the ways that counted. She kissed the crown of Shauna’s head, as though in agreement with her thoughts, and Shauna drifted off in her arms.
The only place to land after something like this was The Manor, and there was plenty of room to spare for the people they’d picked up along the way. Sadie and Midori took the room Sadie always had, when she wasn’t tucked into bed with one of them. Jackie led Callie to the room closest to her and Shauna’s, and Van pointed Jeff to the smallest room in the house, just next to Callie’s, with a clipped “here” that made it clear exactly how bizarre it was for them to have a man present here.
They didn’t talk about it, as they got ready to sleep. There was nothing to be said that couldn’t wait for a few hours. Jackie felt herself nodding off in the shower even as she stood, felt Shauna stand close behind her and prop her up, run fingers through her hair and make quick work of rinsing her off.
“You won’t go back with him?” Jackie asked, in a moment of pure, self-conscious weakness.
“Jax,” Shauna said, dropping a long kiss to her shoulder, “never. Never anyone but you.”
Jackie nodded, so exhausted that she barely noticed Shauna cutting off the water, drying her with a towel, dressing her in a tee shirt and pajama bottoms. Shauna laying her in their bed, drawing each heavy curtain closed until it felt like blissful, peaceful night in their room, before slipping in beside her.
“I love you,” Shauna said, and Jackie had just enough strength in her to say it back, before she gave herself over fully to sleep.
She woke with a start, no idea whether she’d slept for minutes or hours, to the sound of padding feet and a creak outside the door. She gasped into Shauna’s neck and jerked her head up and back, just far enough to loosen Shauna’s hair that had been clinging to her lips and to free both of her ears to listen closer. More padding feet, slower now, as though their owner had lost some resolve. Jackie committed to waking, propping herself up on her elbow and switching the bedside lamp on. She realized somewhere in the motions that she was waiting for Sadie to let herself in and slip into bed, mumbling something about a nightmare.
Until she remembered, with a slight chill, that Sadie was twenty. That Midori was here and they were curled up in the bedroom they always took, the one that Nat had stayed in before she’d started sleeping in the master with Lottie, and that Sadie would know the other half of Jackie’s bed was occupied.
There was no knock, but Jackie could hear a different sort of creak, this time nearly imperceptible, the telltale sound of shifting weight on the old floorboards that meant someone who wasn’t Sadie was still waiting there, lurking outside their bedroom.
“Shauna,” Jackie whispered roughly, giving her shoulder a gentle shake.
“Mmm,” Shauna hummed. She was still unconscious, doing her very best to prove wrong all of Jackie’s comments over the years on what a light sleeper she was. She shifted, even in her sleep, to grip Jackie’s hip tighter.
“Shauna!” Jackie infused her tone with more urgency, shook Shauna hard enough that her pillow eclipsed more and less of her perfect, stubborn face in rocking waves.
It only took three shakes. Shauna’s eyes snapped open, comically wide, if you omitted the fear.
“Jackie?” She searched Jackie’s face, commenced the routine frantic press of her hands across as much of Jackie’s body as she could reach, and seemed to settle almost instantly into deciding that nothing could be too wrong.
“Lay down, baby. S’early.” Shauna tried to pull Jackie back down, whining when Jackie didn’t budge. “Jax, I’m tired, what’s—”
“Somebody’s at the door,” Jackie whispered, jerking her head toward it.
The floorboards creaked again, but this time the sound traveled in a way that indicated footsteps in retreat. Jackie saw recognition in Shauna’s eyes—the kind that belonged to a mother, the kind that Jackie was so fucking relieved to see in action on Shauna’s beautiful, sleep-swollen face.
“Cal?” Shauna called out, quiet enough to avoid disturbing anyone in the rooms near them, but loud enough for Callie to hear her clearly.
“Uh…y-yes, I…um…” Jackie heard the doorknob jostle slightly, but Callie didn’t seem to be sure whether she could open it.
“It’s unlocked, honey,” Jackie said. “Come in.”
Callie pushed the door open a crack, peering around it. Her eyes were watery and her cheeks were splotchy. She’d so clearly been crying. Jackie wanted to jump up and hug her, but she knew that she needed to control herself. Needed to let Shauna be the one to comfort her.
“Hi,” Callie mumbled. She pulled her sleeves over her hands and twisted the material between her fingers, in the exact way Shauna had at her age. “I just…couldn’t sleep because…well, Dad—he—he snores and I can hear it from my room, and it’s, like, totally miserable.”
“The worst,” Shauna agreed automatically.
Jackie swallowed down her irrational jealousy (more like performed the mental equivalent of beating it into submission with a bat) and waited. The waiting was fucking killing her, but Shauna was slower with these things, and that was okay. That had to be okay.
“Come sit,” Jackie said, something small and innocuous, or at least as much so as she could handle.
She patted the bed and Callie walked closer slowly, eyeing Shauna carefully. Shauna nodded once. Callie sank down at the foot of the bed, tucking her legs beneath her, looking so like a teenage Shauna in her oversized shirt and her baggy sweats, her dark hair falling in her eyes, eclipsing half her face as she stared down at the floor.
“Are you okay, Cal?” Shauna asked—a little forced, a little formal, but Callie latched on.
“They…they took me out of my bed,” Callie admitted softly. “When I was asleep.”
“Oh, Callie,” Jackie said.
“And we’ve been sleeping in shifts in the car since then, so this is the first time I’ve had to sleep in a bed and it’s just, like, totally creeping me out,” Callie said. “And Dad is useless, but…you’re, like, a total badass, Mom. So I was wondering if I could sleep on the floor or something, maybe? In here with you?”
“Oh!” Shauna said, clearly shocked, but cautiously pleased to be needed. “Not the floor, honey. There’s…maybe we could drag another mattress in? Jackie, is there—”
“Just get in bed with us, sweetie.” Jackie said, scooting to the far edge to make room. Shauna and Callie blinked at her, speechless and motionless. “Or…I’m sorry, that’s probably weird with me here, right? I could go sleep on the couch downstairs, you two should—”
“No,” Shauna and Callie said, together.
Callie blushed, and Jackie’s heart broke as she remembered the words Callie had sobbed into her shoulder in that damp, crowded shed: you don’t understand, she loves you more than me.
“It’s a big bed,” Shauna said. “There’s room, Cal…if—if you want.”
Shauna shifted closer to Jackie, making room for Callie beside her.
Jackie turned out the light and, with the darkness, Callie finally broke, crying quietly into her pillow. “Sorry,” she mumbled.
“It’s okay,” Shauna said.
At the same time as Jackie insisted: “You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“I thought you were going to die, Mom,” Callie whispered, barely loud enough for Jackie to hear.
“I know.” Shauna squeezed Callie’s shoulder. “It was…fucking scary. I’m so sorry. But it’s over. We’re okay.” Jackie nestled into Shauna’s back, nodding against her. “I promise, everything’s going to be so much better now.”
“So,” Nat said, flopping down on the sofa between Lottie and Misty, “what’s the plan now?”
“We deal with the fallout as it comes.” Tai shrugged, pouring herself a cup of coffee—her first for the day, rather than her fifth or sixth. “But I think we’re officially playing a defense only game, at this point.”
“Amen to that,” Van said with a grin, her hand finding the small of Taissa’s back.
Shauna sighed, playing absentmindedly with Jackie’s hair, feeling the silk of it twist and untwist around her fingers. “I can’t believe we pulled that off.”
“I can,” Lottie said. “We’ve always been capable of so much.”
Jackie snorted, and Shauna let her eyes fall into a roll, unsuccessful in preventing a smile from pulling at her own cheeks.
“We’ve got to stay in close contact,” Misty said, shifting in her seat, in a tone that told Shauna she’d be whipping out a poster board filled with all the reasons why, should anyone disagree.
“Don’t worry, Misty.” Nat patted her knee, equal parts placating and kind. “Don’t think we could avoid it if we wanted to.”
“Let’s stay one more night,” Jackie said, sitting up straighter, her mug clutched tight between her hands, her eyes lit up with a kind of excitement that felt snagged from another era, another life. “The girls are gone, fucking Jeff is gone—”
“Thank God,” Nat muttered under her breath. “Asshole still owes me fifty fucking grand.”
“I told you, Natalie,” Lottie said, “I’ll—”
“It’s the principle, Lot!”
“We have lives to get back to,” Jackie said, louder, “or…to get to,” she corrected, shifting closer to Shauna, settling nearly on top of her, “but they can wait one more day. Let’s just…let’s stay here. One more night.”
“One more night,” Tai agreed. “But, Misty, I am not watching any fucking musicals, so don’t start.”
“Who hasn’t seen Cats?” Misty asked. “Seriously, it’s a classic, if you’d just—”
“We’re not watching Cats,” Nat groaned. “Van, pass me the remote.”
“If anyone should pick the movie,” Van said, snatching the remote and clutching it close to her chest, “it’s me.”
“You’re good with that, right?” Jackie asked, her voice in Shauna’s ear just loud enough to transform the others’ banter into nothing more than a soothing rumble in the background.
“Yeah,” Shauna said, kissing her long enough and deep enough that Nat had to launch a pillow at the back of her head to break them apart. “I’m good with that.”