While she's thinking over the possibility of Priscilla Cain having been in some sort of stasis, an errant observation escapes Matt. "Your mood changes a lot, doesn't it."
"It's not an issue." She frowns. "Big and explosive is the Tiff Sheridan way."
"You've got something wrong with you. Like— medically."
"Fuck off."
"It's always been like this. It's concerning."
She scowls and takes a second picture of him out of spite. "Fuck off."
"I wasn't going to try to stop you from feeling different. I just have to wonder where your head's at and where your priorities are. We got chased here by a monster, or did you forget?"
"I didn't forget. I just got distracted. And desensitized. Do you know how many times a monster has chased me into Our Lady of the Shattered Cross? I'm not even Catholic!" The answer is at least seven.
"Thank God for that."
"I just— I thought this place was an urban legend!" As if that's a defense. "Like Devil's Gutter in Utah!"
"Do you mean Devil's Slide? I've been there. It's real."
"No, I mean Devil's Gutter. It's a different thing." Fumbling for the camera she stuffed into her bra earlier (and hoping it isn't too busted from the bone creature's attack), she continues, "Whatever this mystery lady is— whatever her goals are— I think she wanted us to see this."
"Why, though? Why not lead us to the normal chapel?"
"History is a story we tell ourselves—"
"Nope. We're not doing the 'weird philosophy with Tiff' thing. Nuh-uh. Come on, get inside. It's about to rain, that thing is for sure coming back, and I want to fix up your arm."
It looks dry, at least. With the sky already drizzling through the dead leaves and the wounds in her body already starting to yell at her for letting them weep for too long, she can't really afford to stay out here. She lets Matt drag her in by the hand she's still holding.
It's the next best move to make. She can't fault that.
Matt opens the door. It takes him a bit of elbow grease to force the rusted lock to give and the old wood and stone to move, but he manages it.
Once they're inside, he takes a look around, nods, and gestures for Tiff to take a seat. She shakes her head and continues to stand.
"Tiff, come on. You're bleeding. Let me fix you up."
She looks to the left of his face, trying to give the illusion that she's looking him in the eye. Out of pure defiance, she takes a syringe out of her bag without looking, flicks off the cap, and jams it into her forearm. As soon as she presses the plunger, she knows she made a mistake. She tries not to let on that it was the wrong syringe, but it's probably obvious. She can feel her face go pale as easily as she can feel her stomach lurch.
Matt shakes his head, fully disappointed and not amused in the slightest. The corner of his lip doesn't raise at all. "Sit the hell down and let me take a look at your arm."
"I'm fine." She tries not to gag. "I hurt my arm all the time."
"And then you inject yourself with dubious brown chemicals?"
"I love dub—" She presses a fist to her mouth, but manages to keep it down. "I love dubious chemicals."
"If you throw up, I'll kill you."
"Kill me, then."
"I'm not going to kill you, Tiff. Come on."
"Oh, you would. If Peepaw said so, you would."
He frowns, looks a little disgusted by the accusation. "Can we not?"
"Fine. Whatever." She locates a pew that isn't so rotted it might break under her weight and takes a seat. She holds out her arm to her cousin and looks away, toward the broken, painstakingly-made glass.
She has been to historical exhibits before. She went to the historical church in Lake Wonder with Aiden back in April, and she's been to Fort Christmas and Castillo de San Marcos before. Those places are maintained, though. This one hasn't been.
Matt shakes his head in a bit of exasperated disappointment and sits down opposite her. He pulls all sorts of supplies from his belt and starts cleaning and bandaging the wound in her arm. It isn't as deep as she thought it would be, but it's deep enough that she isn't sure about just leaving it.
As he works, Matt doesn't look up at her. "What do you mean when you say that I would kill you if Peepaw told me to?"
"I know about the witch hunting thing. You know I know about that. And you want to quit. And you could. But, Drew— I'm— I'm not that."
It takes him a second. "Not a witch hunter?"
"No. Matt, I love the supernatural more than anything. And I'm not going to stand by... And I can do it, too, I guess. Magic."
"Can you?" Skepticism and worry bleeds through.
"Yeah. That's the thing about our bloodline, I guess. Usually, we can't. Usually, we're... I guess I could theorize on it and say that, since our ancestors have been so opposed to it, we can't really connect with it. Can't draw on the world around us, can't make things or summon them or change them in the way others can." She winces. "Ow, Matt, that stings."
Matt doesn't stop swabbing her arm with a small alcohol wipe. "What the hell did you make a deal with, that you can do magic? If you can do magic?"
"I didn't make a deal. I... got promoted."
"To what?"
She hesitates, knows she can't lie, and stammers, "Minor deity. Demigod, really."
He scoffs. "Fat chance."
"Well, it's true! Two years ago, I met a guy named Greg Dealerman at a skate park while he and my friend Eliza did some... minor drugs together, and he turned out to be the Elder Guardian of the Cosmos, and then New Greg— an old forest guardian— retired in August and had me and a few other people take over his position. So the Time Gnome— the gnome who can control time, you know him— let me know I could do it now. Not because of my bloodline or some pseudo-narrative role I play— not like my friends, not like the people around me— but because of that thing I agreed to do and be. I didn't ask for it. I was content to find workarounds with machinery and... and dubious chemicals, but..."
She reaches over the pew and grabs the small pair of scissors she figures Matt intends to use to cut the gauze and medical tape. She regards them in her non-dominant hand. She could show him, she knows. She could do the one thing she knows how to do and cut a small portal in the lost chapel of Fort Reverence, in spite of this piece of her family's history. She could do this, right? She could sully this place's memory with the harmless thing to which it is so opposed. Isn't that the hallmark of societal change? Isn't that the scent of rebellion, like nontoxic permanent marker fumes? It would be the perfect blasphemy, wouldn't it? To do magic in the lost chapel?
The prodigal daughter makes herself known. Tiff uses her right hand to uncap her permanent marker, then uses her left to draw the symbols on the portion of her knee visible through the small tears in the denim, swipes the blade against some of the goopy blood left on her forearm from where it dripped down, and readies herself.
This is only going to make her feel more sick, she knows. Matt slaps the marker out of her hand. The plastic clatters against the soft dirt floor. "Don't move your arm."
"Oh, I'm sorry, Doctor Matt. I'll be a better patient next time I single-handedly fell a bone creature."
"Teenage forest god or not, I could kill you. You're still human, dumbass."
"Oh, yeah? You don't seem to be very good at it, from what I saw during the fight with that bone creature."
"Oh, please. If falling were a crime, you'd have a life sentence."
She rolls her eyes. For all the still-bubbling anger beneath the surface, it's a calmer moment and she isn't as disgusted by him anymore. It's nice to get back to normal— or, as normal as she can in this situation.
Matt doesn't look up from his work. "You wouldn't happen to have any sort of local anesthetic on you, would you?"
She doesn't even have to think about it. "No. I could probably make one, given the time and tools, but... no. Not on me."
"What do you have on you? In terms of dubious chemicals, I mean."
"Uh—" She opens her bag with her left hand to take a look. "Healing reagents, expired healing reagents, some experimental pills for certain things Aunt Esther can't know about, and some medicine for werewolves."
"How many werewolves do you know, that it's necessary to medicate them?"
"That seems like a trick question."
"Humor me."
"It's not necessary. It's just— you know, the days leading up to the full moon yield certain symptoms, and if I can ease those symptoms? Like, it makes her bones weird. More painful. You know? And she's always more jumpy, so... I don't know, I'm trying to figure it out. For her mostly." She pauses, amends, "To answer your question, one."
Matt narrows his eyes, looking at the wall like he's thinking. "What's the general idea with those?" He waves off her answer as soon as he asks. "It'll work. Give me one, I'll crush it up."
"I mean— no. They're not for you. I've only given them to other people one time, and it didn't even count because we were in the Dream World the entire time and it wasn't real."
"Tiff, that's insane shit. Just let me see one."
"Absolutely not!"
"Your loss, then." He shrugs. He drives a needle into her arm.
She winces, but manages not to yank her arm away. "God damn!"
"I warned you."
"How the hell did you warn me?"
"You could've intuited."
"I'm not a psychic, Matt." She pauses, stammers, "Okay, technically I am, but— Not that kind of psychic."
He holds out one hand, tugging the string through until it's tight. "Gimme one of the pills, then."
"It isn't going to help. They don't work like that. They're meant for bones."
"Skin is a type of bone."
"Skin is not a type of bone."
"Let's agree to disagree."
"About skin?"
He drives the needle through her flesh again.
Tiff tries her hardest to seem disinterested in the pain as she goes about doing what she meant to do. There is no incantation there, just intention and the customary fatigue as she pours life and blood into while acting as a power source. She cuts the air with the scissors. It takes more out of her than she thought it would, but she didn't stop it. She didn't want to stop it. She proved her point, didn't she? If only she could remember what that point was.
"Hey, Matt," she says, failing to keep the delight out of her voice. "Look."
"Look at what?"
"Just look!"
He looks up, needle still in hand, and narrows his eyes. "What the hell is that?"
"I'm so glad you asked! I've been studying for the past month, using old books from this guy— I'm getting them secondhand, I'm working with this guy that used to work with this order called The Order Of The Way Through that—"
"Tiff, simple answer, please. Quit gesticulating. You're making this harder."
"It's a portal! It's a small and not particularly stable portal, and I don't know where it's going to let out, so I'm not going to put my hand in there. Sometimes it just... goes wrong. I'm new to this. I shouldn't mess around with it so much. It's probably a bad idea."
"Yeah, probably." He holds out one hand. "Give me my scissors back?"
She hands them to him. The portal closes on its own. She watches it wink closed— though she isn't sure if the Cyclops winks or blinks. They aren't exactly indigenous to Florida. (Though, technically, though they've been here since the 1600s, the Cains aren't indigenous to Florida, either. They're all transplants. She's very white, and she knows that. This is an odd line of thought.)
Head spiraling in all sorts of directions, she takes a look around the chapel. People worshiped here. This was a place where they gathered, for religion and community.
But she also knows, from studying those journals for hours, that this was also a place where they gathered to condemn people to death. Witch hunting wasn't just the role of the Cains in their capacity as bodkin-wielding witch testers. It was the whole community. It was the whole town. Nobody who lives here now, in the town around the area of the old fort or near the chapel, really knows that.
She would wonder if it didn't happen. If there's only one source of the so-called truth of what happened, then maybe it didn't happen at all. She knows enough about conspiracies that she knows not to trust that line of thought. Everybody who was involved is dead now— but it might have happened. She doesn't know for sure. It isn't like she can go back in time and ask them. Mr. Mathew isn't here, thank god.
Maybe she could figure it out— lower those mental walls, try to parse through the bias of unaddressed grief and anger— but she isn't sure if that's a good idea.
She looks over at Matt. "Are you almost done?"
"I'm taping the bandage in place. You don't want it falling off, do you?"
"I guess not." In the back of her head, she thinks about maybe seeing a doctor about this wound. It took falling off the highest point of an old wooden rollercoaster to convince her to see a doctor about a nasty bite when she was dealing with the Halloween Men. She isn't a fan of asking, and she knows Matt would never suggest it.
As soon as he's done, she scrambles up to standing and faces him properly, standing in the aisle. "Okay, so! I have an idea and I need you to not freak out about it. See, I'm— this is going to sound insane— Technically, I'm a little bit psychic—"
"Is this another 'guardian of Lake Wonder' thing?"
"No, it's different! A side effect of getting yanked into Dreaming— into the Dream World, I mean. It messed with my mind, I think, or maybe just exposed how vulnerable it always was. I practiced it after the first few times."
He gives her a look.
"Don't worry about it! This is normal. I just kept practicing at it after the fact. The only issue is, I have to have these walls up in my head all the time because something is always trying to get in there and it interferes with my experiments all the time!"
Matt shakes his head, starts stuffing things back into pockets and pouches. "Something's up with you, Tiff."
"I mean— I didn't sleep last night. Deprivation does weird things to you."
"That's not what I mean. Ten minutes ago, you were so pissed I thought you wanted to kill me— and you certainly did that bone creature in. And now you're so chipper."
"Oh. Yeah. See— even if I do sleep— and I do, often, even if there's... weird shit happening in there— Even if I do sleep, that's just the state of things. Moods are... weird. This is normal and I'm not going to examine it. You could ask Mr. Mathew, my friend Percy's dad? It can be a real issue or, in this case! It can be a real boon. Anyway, I'm going to do what I said I was going to do and see if I can tap into something."
"If you insist?" His voice conveys that he doesn't quite get it.
That's fine. He doesn't need to get it. He just needs to stand by in case something goes wrong. It inevitably will. Things always go wrong for Tiffany May Sheridan.
Briefly, she thinks of what Denny calls her: Tiffany May Sheridan Cain. It would be funny, if that were her name. She's just like them in everything but name. Being a Cain doesn't have to be what it historically was. She can make it mean something else, if she wants to. She can change things, break the cycle of what they are.
That's silly. She isn't going to do that.
She walks up near the podium, then back down the aisle, pacing. She's too amped to stand still— amped enough that actually lowering those defenses is much harder than she expected. It's still worth it to try. She closes her eyes, taps her fingers against her palms, thinks of stars— thinks of neon streaks on a canvas, thinks of the Milky Way on a clear night sky free of pollution, thinks of what she dedicated herself to (wonder and the pursuit of the greater good).
Something snaps. On a hunch, she opens her eyes and takes one of her cameras out of her bag. It's on, when she didn't turn it on; the screen glows gently, and she knows: this is how she's going to see whatever's going on here. That's fine. Electronics are great for that kind of thing.
It flashes on the liveview, like she's kneeling in front of the TV and desperately fast-forwarding a VHS. Flashes of scenes linger longer in the static, but she can see them anyway. Whatever the mystery lady wants her to see (Tiff knows this has to be here, and she can feel her hands turning her head down toward the screen, she can smell her), it's going to be here.
A young man with a familiar face reaches into the dirt as magic flies past his head in beams of green. When he raises his hand, he drags a sword with it.
A young woman under the ground gasps in shock, just like she did on that first night that Tiff was in the hole.
A blade is pressed to a young woman's neck; there's terror in her eyes. It lingers on the proverbial screen.
One of the broken yard sale radios in Tiff's bag crackles to life. This is also fortuitous. She doesn't have an EMF reader with her— it broke when she face-planted into a puddle in the alley behind Jaded Paradise and she left it on her workbench in the shed— but she figures that any sort of verbal contact would work. She can hear a conversation happening on the other end, but she can't quite make it out. Frowning, she walks around the room, trying to get a better signal.
More flashes through the static, displayed on the old camera in her hand. She catches them before they fade from the liveview: a body burning in the woods, hands pushing the podium back into its proper place, that young man with the familiar face throwing the sword into the pond, a head severed from a body. She looks at the camera's liveview screen, but focuses her fingers on the dials of the radio. As soon as she tries, she loses the signal.
"Shit." She bangs her head against the air.
When she looks at Matt, he has gone entirely pale. "I'm going to go outside," he decides. "I— I'm not used to this shit."
"What do you mean? My camera is fine."
"It's— on the windows. Whatever you were doing was on the windows— I just need a moment." Palefaced, he rises, leaving his gun behind, and pushes through the door and out into the rain.
Tiff frowns. She isn't sure what to do with that. She isn't sure what to do with any of this. She takes a second to scratch down notes in her journal about what happened, wracking her memories in the back of her brain. That young man— he had the same kind of nose as someone she knows (or, more accurately, everyone else in her family) and dyed blonde hair. It's another blow to her chest: that was Peepaw.
Her stomach lurches. She can't hold it back this time. She tries, swallows it back down— but she gags again and throws up in the dirt between two pews, grateful as she always is that she doesn't have the kind of hair that needs to be held back.
After a second, she pops up, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, wishes she had the foresight to bring a bottle of water so she could wash the taste out of her mouth. Wobbly and a little feverish, she shoves the devices back into her bag and tries to get her wits back about her. Of all the things to get sick about...
There are a few things to follow up on, she knows. The memory of what happened here gave her a few clues: Peepaw finding a sword, using it to behead the mystery lady, and throwing it into the pond behind the house. She knows what happened. She knows who did it. She doesn't know who he did it to, exactly when, or why. She doesn't know what the cave and the podium have to do with it.
She can put it together further, though. Aunt Esther said Almiel made her get a sword out of a pond. Her stomach twists a little more as she realizes she's holding the exact sword used to behead that woman.
It looked different in the flashes of what she saw. This blade is one of thorns, with a spiked hilt. The blade that her younger grandfather used was straight and normal-looking. It has to be the same sword, though. Maybe it changed when it changed hands, like it did in Dreaming.
Frowning at the sword on her hip, Tiff turns her attention to the podium. She's still catching her breath.
The door opens as soon as she puts her hands on the old, preserved wood. More breathless than she is, Matt rushes in, grabs his gun from the pew, and announces, "We have to go. The bone creature's back." He wrinkles his nose. "What's that smell?"
"Don't worry about it."
"Smells like puke."
"Ignore it. Let's just get out of here."
He rushes out, pushing the door with a well-timed hip bump; she follows him through, stomach hating her for jogging (as if she has a choice).
She steels her nerves and takes off after her cousin. Sure enough, the bone creature is outside, crouched down, laying in wait for them.
On their way down the path, the bone creature continues behind them, thundering loud enough that they know it's there. It's still there by the time they get to the bridge. It's all they can do to barely outrun it. Tiff's lungs and mouth burn from the bile and she wants to lose the taste of it— but she wants to lose the thing chasing her even more.
"Why's it still following us?" Matt yells ahead to her, only a few feet behind on the trail.
"You think I know that?" she calls back, trying to ignore the stitch in her side.
"Just get to the truck! We'll figure it out from there!"
"That was the plan."
It definitely wasn't, but she's going to pretend it was. It's certainly better than nothing, which is the alternative, and it isn't bad to know where you're going before you get there.
It's still hot on their tails by the time they get to where the truck is. Matt fumbles the keys with one hand, sprints ahead of her to get in and get it started. Tiff doesn't even bother to buckle herself in. What would the point of that be?
There's no point to it, not if they're going to die because of the bone creature.
"Start the car," she says. She repeats it a few more times out of sheer panic. She shouldn't be panicking. She should be fine. But here she is, about to lose it, because she's definitely going to die out here and so is Matt and maybe they deserve it, but she doesn't want it yet. They have to fix it first. Dying as deserved can come later. For now, they have to survive, and that means Matt needs to start the fucking car, he needs to start the car, he needs to start the fucking car.
Hands unshaking and eyes steeled, he does it. The truck roars to life. Before the radio even turns on and blares "Moving Right Along," he's already throwing it in reverse and getting them the hell out of there.
"Why the hell are we listening to the Muppets?" she asks, reaching for the gun he tossed on to the backseat when he got in.
"It was Andy's idea." As soon as they're on the road, he throws the truck into drive.
"Great. Fantastic. Keep driving. I'll hold it off or something."
He puts a hand on her arm like he's trying to stop her. "The hell are you doing, Tiff?"
"Don't you worry about it." After shaking him off, she cranks the window down, then climbs out of it. She only does it partially, straddling the opening, with one foot wedged between the seat and the door. She doesn't want a repeat of what happened in November, but she also wants a good view of this thing as she tries to blow it to smithereens, and there isn't a way to access the bed from the backseat.
"Hey, be careful," Matt warns, arm poised to grab her again. "I might have to swerve. I don't want you falling out."
His voice is partially drowned out by the music and the wind whipping the rain against Tiff's face and head, chilling her to the core and dripping from the sleeves of her jacket. She knows how to use this thing in theory. It's been a while. She's more used to the feeling of a pistol in her hand. Bracing a gun against her shoulder is so foreign these days— but she can do it. She reaches into the glove compartment for the cartridges, loads, aims, fires.
The show blows a chunk of bone off of the creature, splintering and shattering off, taking it off and knocking it off balance. It keeps coming, though.
"I have to swerve!" Matt yells, anticipating one of the bone creature's extra limbs coming down on the bed.
Tiff braces herself, feet against the chair and the chassis, re-aims, fires— the truck swerves and her shot only takes off a small chunk that spins out and hits her in the shoulder.
It's fine. The leather stopped the blow. It's just going to bruise later. She aims again, pumps the action; the truck goes over a pothole, and she loses her grip in the recoil. The butt hits her in the eye and scrapes down to her teeth, smacking them but not loosening them in the slightest. The bone creature looks a little worse for wear, but she isn't sure due to the falling rain and the distance. She shoots Matt a thumbs-up, re-aims, fires. It hits right in the other shoulder, opposite the one she cut through earlier.
She aims, fires again, while it's distracted— it raises an arm and brings it down on the road and part of the truck bed. Matt can't swerve out of the way in time; Tiff can't keep her balance. She falls through the window, only kept in place by one foot wedged between the seat and the wall and one calf she clenches hard. She tries to keep her head off the ground. She doesn't need a repeat of November, not now. She's in real life and nobody here can turn back time. Nobody here can save her.
Knowing it would be cool as hell if she could pull this off, she works one foot up the side of the truck bed, clenching every muscle in her legs and abdomen to keep herself in place. (Denny was right about working out again. Goddammit.) She pumps the action again while sideways, aims, fires— hits it right in its amalgamate skull, shatters the bone. The bone creature crumbles in the middle of the road.
Switching the safety on, she tosses the gun in through the window, puts one hand on the plastic, and tries to pull herself in. Matt reaches out that extended hand to help her while he keeps driving; she takes it, feels the rain between their fingers. He pulls her in.
She moves the gun, sits properly, and buckles herself in immediately. The moment stands for a second, a breath held in all the tension. They let it go simultaneously, locking eyes across the truck and breaking down into giggles.
They made it out. They survived. Like Kermit and Fozzie, they're moving right along.