by Lincoln Cole
But, if Abigail was alive and there was even the slightest chance of saving her…
The realization gave Arthur pause, and he felt a stirring of something he hadn’t experienced in a long time: hope.
The Reverend patted the loaner pistol at his side—a snub nose revolver that looked like a peashooter—and headed through the trees. He had a few other implements with him, including the knife and a vial of holy water, as well as the satellite phone, but he didn’t bring much else.
The phone was off for now: anything technological had a tendency to fail around the supernatural and was more of a burden than anything else. He’d considered leaving it behind as well but decided to hang onto it. He was supposed to report in every hour and give Frieda a status update, but that definitely wasn’t going to happen. This wasn’t about her, and it sure as hell wasn’t for her.
Instead, he followed the tracks.
Those tracks weren’t even hidden: broken branches, scraps of discarded clothing, and dried blood. Arthur felt like he was being led somewhere rather than chasing something. Never a good sign. After killing two members of Arthur’s order, this demon had to know there would be retaliation. Whatever Arthur was dealing with, it wasn’t afraid of him at all.
He walked for a few hours, stepping lightly and feeling his body limber up as he went. The air tasted perfect. He’d grown used to the stale oxygen from the caves, piped in through the elevator shaft and having an oily, metallic flavor. This air tasted of trees and nature. He hadn’t even known how much he missed clean air, and he could feel it rejuvenating his soul.
He paused at a tree line looking over an empty mining town. It was built into the side of a hill and consisted of around twenty dilapidated buildings. The tracks led him here, and he knew the demon was somewhere in the town, waiting for him.
Squat houses that were rundown, decrepit, and overgrown with vines surrounded a broken down church. This was an old country-store town, abandoned in the woods and falling apart in the preceding years.
Four spikes adorned with heads were standing in front of the church. Each had an expression of horror and served as a deterrent: a warning.
He remembered how a sight like this would have bothered him when he was a younger man. Two of the heads were the missing Hunters, and the other two he didn’t recognize. When he was younger, knowing that this creature had killed his friends would have made him furious enough to charge headlong into the church and start blasting everything in sight. The depravity of it would have bothered him.
The only thing that bothered him now was how little he cared.
A mist hung in the air as the sun rose, dew clinging to his boots. He felt a breeze of wind and tasted moisture. It was quiet in the clearing, filled with foreboding.
He walked through the overgrown street toward the church. Broken shutters and roof tiles littered the dirt road as he went. It felt like a ghost town: empty, uninviting, and threatening.
The sun flitted through the trees overhead. It was eerily quiet, not even birds or insects chirping. They could feel the supernatural presence, the sheer wrongness of it, as easily as he could. Even the forest could sense something was amiss.
The church was bigger up close, built on a hill and dwarfing the buildings around it. Part of the ceiling was caved in and it was covered in mold and vines. He guessed it to have been built in the middle of the nineteenth century. It must have been abandoned not long after.
He stepped past the spikes, barely noticing the grotesque expressions of pain and terror on the faces of his friends. He’d seen worse in his time.
He’d done worse in his time.
He moved to the door and slipped the snub nose revolver from his belt. It felt comfortable in his hand, ready and waiting to deal death.
The door was cracked. Inside, he heard the creaking of a board as someone strode across the floor.
“Whoever I find inside,” he said, “I will kill.”
A moment passed in silence, and then a silky, smooth voice came back to him. It was a voice he recognized instantly:
“That…”
The Reverend felt a shiver run down his spine and his heart skipped a beat. “No, no, no,” he muttered.
The door opened smoothly in front of him and he saw Abigail standing there, a lascivious smile on her face.
“…would be a shame,” she finished.
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