For all the guilt, she can't keep herself from smiling. Tiff whirls to face it on its approach, and draws the sword at the same time that Matt undoes the safety and cocks the shotgun.
There's no need to talk about a game plan, she realizes. Matt just gets it. He understands what has to be done and isn't going to yell about it. She might, but she's also a talkative asshole.
It's too bad she's going to ruin it, because she's definitely going to talk and she's definitely going to take her rage out on this thing. It's a good idea. It's just a shitty situation.
Matt moves first. At the same time he pulls the trigger, he takes a step back to brace himself— and puts his foot on a raised root, loses his balance, and falls. The shot goes wide, ringing out in the humid air, doing nothing but making Tiff's ears ring like alarm bells. She shouldn't have let him be so close.
She charges forward anyway, head off her shoulders, and hacks at the joint connecting the right front leg to the body. It's high above her, but it's a weak point, and she can only hope that she can generate enough leverage and apply enough torque to really make it work.
There's no grace to it. There is no medical precision. The jagged blade cuts through jagged bone, then collagen, then dripping shadows. The resistance the substrate offers gives way; still beholden to momentum, Tiff falls to kneeling beneath the bone creature as the leg detaches from the body and it loses its balance. Knees scraped through her jeans, she panics and tries to scramble her way out.
There. An opening, as the back legs give way before the remaining front one does. She scampers on hands and knees, until she gets an idea.
It's a bad idea. It's the kind of thing that would make Mr. Mathew upset with her. He isn't here, though. She might as well take a risk. What's the point of doing anything if she can't make mistakes and get messy?
She Frizzles down and makes a Tiff move; she rolls over onto her back and aims the sword up. As it falls onto her, the sword catches on the intercostal bone and scrapes through until it finds a hole, and slices into it like wood into a falling corpse. It falls apart in mid-air like a Jenga tower; the bones crash into the mud around her like tears, and the guilty are called home. She is nothing if not guilty. The only thing that hits her is a wave of black goo with the consistency of wet flour from a burst water balloon. She closes her mouth and eyes, but it still goes up her nose.
She sputters, looks over at Matt, and frowns deeper. He pushes himself up from the ground, brushes himself off, brushes off his gun (not that it does anything to get the mud off), and comes over to stand over her.
"Are you okay?" he asks. "Is anything broken?"
"I'm fine. I just need a moment." She lets the arms holding the sword fall, careful not to hit him.
"Are you alright to keep going?"
"Yeah, I'm fine." She pushes aside the hand offered to her and stands on her own.
This seems like it was a little too easy. She isn't sure why it went down like that.
Maybe it's the sword itself. Maybe it's just made to kill monsters.
She wants to examine this thing in her hands later. She sure as hell doesn't want to do it now, though. There are more pressing matters to attend to.
As soon as she stands, as soon as she wipes some of the goo from her face and tosses it to the ground, a wave of giddiness washes over her and is gone just as quickly.
She doesn't want to think about that. She mentioned it once. Drake suggested pills. Mr. Mathew suggested a baking competition.
What Tiff suggests to herself as she looks back at the bones is that they keep on going. She doesn't say anything. She just grits her teeth and keeps going.
Matt walks after her, not saying much of anything, either. Well, that's just great for him. They both know he would rather walk in silence anyway.
They don't have that much further to go, it would seem. There's a large rock in the middle of the path. As soon as Tiff scampers up it and Matt climbs it like a normal person— what an ass— she can see what lies beyond: a spiraling path of grayed-out and dead foliage and animals leading to a break in the trees and, sure enough, a cave.
It's more in the ground than the caves she has grown used to. The hole she and Matt were exploring was clearly man-made, but this isn't. The woods around Lake Wonder must have spoiled her and made her used to caves in the rocky parts of the mountains, obscured by pines instead of moss, mold, and fronds. The cave entrance is there all the same. She nods, goes to lower herself down on the other side of the rock— and hears a noise. Tiff cranes her neck, still holding on to the side of the rock, still trying to see around her cousin, still wanting to get into the cave and help this person (even if it's just to spite Matt and the rest of her family).
He's facing the direction of the cave, frowning. He must be seeing something by its entrance, Tiff reasons. At least someone's looking that way, then.
But Tiff is seeing something, too. Down the path, where they left it as a pile of black goo and off-white periosteum, the bone creature rises. Something is knitting it back together.
"Shit," she mutters, watching it knit itself back together. "Matt, it's back."
"That's not the only thing." he points over her shoulder. "Our mystery lady's in there and pulling some shit."
Tiff sneaks a look over her shoulder. Sure enough, the mystery lady they have been looking for all this time is standing there, with her arms and hands outstretched, seemingly in tandem with the rising of the creature. Tiff blinks, and she is gone.
She frowns, pulls herself back up over the rock, and steadies herself by putting a hand on her cousin's shoulder. "So what do we do?"
"We find shelter," he suggests. "We regroup, we figure out how to kill this thing for real—"
"I don't want to kill her."
"Then don't kill her."
"No, I mean— I don't want you to kill her."
"We'll talk about this later."
"No, we'll talk about it now—"
"Now is not the time for this kind of conversation, when it's about to start raining again and we're in the woods with a resurrectable creature that wants to kill us. Sort out your priorities before you get us killed."
She could slap him. She could slap him. But he's right, and she knows it.
The only issue with that is that they don't really have anywhere else to go. They're in the woods and, as far as she knows, this isn't a very populated area. There might be some so-called "feral" families here (as feral as you can get in Fort Reverence), but she's never seen them and she's pretty sure they're just an urban legend. Even if they were real, she wouldn't want to put those people in danger. For all its history, Fort Reverence isn't like Lake Wonder. People didn't abandon their cabins when the money dried up. Fruit isn't as finite as fur, and religion seems to have more staying power.
Looking around, Matt pops up onto his toes in his boots like he's searching for a way out of here that will provide the least amount of danger for the two of them and coming up empty. As level-headed as he is, he has never been all that good at improvising. There's a reason he quit playing music when he hit high school.
Tiff wonders briefly what was down the other path at the fork. It's as good an idea as any.
She takes her cousin's free hand and drags him off the rock, into the woods beyond to try to find the other dead area.
It isn't that hard. She just has to take off running for a few minutes in a straight line until she hits it.
They're the ones crashing through the underbrush now, with Tiff leading the way, watching only barely for snake holes and anthills. Matt knows better than to object. Something inside Tiff knows better than to let go of him.
When they finally catch up with the second path, it's clear that they're not being pursued by the bone creature. Though the mystery lady's influence has clearly wrapped this place and taken life from the world in the way it did near the cave and the hole, Tiff wonders if maybe, just maybe, the bone creature is more concerned with whatever is in the cave than whatever's down this path. At the very least, they could circle around, or go back, past the fork in the road to the hole and the bridge and the parking lot beyond. It isn't like that'll kill either of them.
Tiff keeps running, not wanting to lose their lead and not caring about the sweat gathering at her elbows under the dead girl's leather jacket or the way the sword hits her thigh with every step. Whatever is at the end of the path is more important than whatever discomfort she's feeling in the moments leading up to it. She pushes forward.
She finds a building.
There's something about it: walls made from cobblestone and coquina, mold and moss growing along the cracks and the shells, something colonial in the design, the broken steeple crashed down over the side, the once-white cross cracked and broken in the dirt.
Her hands itch for her camera and find it in her jacket pocket. It's not her real camera, not the one she would prefer, but a point-and-shoot works just as well for what she needs it for. The point isn't artistry. The point is quick, easy, and convenient documentation.
When she finally manages to speak, it comes out bright and breathless. "Matt. Matt, do you know where we are?"
He would scratch his head if he were a little more stereotypical. "I have no clue."
"The lost chapel, Matt. Matt, the lost chapel. I'm so sure we're at the lost chapel."
"Enlighten me, will you?"
"See, this is the issue, because I used to pay attention during church and I don't go anymore, but you still go and you don't pay attention, so you never know what's up. But I know, so— think of it, you know? Back at the town's original founding, which was coincidentally the time our ancestors got here, Samuel Cain among them—"
"God, I loved hearing about that guy as a kid. There was something so fun about it."
"Well— Considering he had an affair with a vampire during which he failed to kill a crone, and word got back to our family, we weren't supposed to hear about him."
That genuinely takes Matt aback. "He did what?"
"Yeah, uh— You've sidetracked me, but I'll allow it. Good old Popcorn Cain was over in Texas, met a vampire doctor working out of an absolutely tiny town, her name was Kate Spade, she was from California— Oh my god, my boss—" Tiff almost drops her camera. "My boss was Kate Spade."
"Am I supposed to know who Kate Spade is?"
"They had an affair, Matt."
At Matt's even-more-confused look, she continues, "My boss at the morgue, Dr. Katherine Deseret, she was Katherine Newton, then Kit Deseret, then Kate Spade, and I only know that because I was talking to her about how much I dislike horses and she told me she drank out of one once, 'but I went by Kate Spade back then' and— Oh, god. I'm— I'm off track. My point being, like me, like Aunt Esther, like Aunt Priscilla, he was supposed to be stricken from the record and forgotten about, but the truth is that trying to avoid something only makes it more noticeable. I wouldn't doubt that him being, you know, a man and a supposedly-righteous one contributed. Plus, he was pretty cool."
"He was. Weird that he fucked your vampire boss, though."
"God, I don't want to think about it."
"It only makes it more noticeable! Like a corner elephant!"
"Ignore the elephant in the corner. Samuel Cain wasn't among our initial ancestors in this town, though. He was born in, what, the 1840s? The 1850s? Somewhere around there— he wasn't that old when he was in Texas in 1870. These would have been the first Cains in America, back in the 1690s."
"I've sidetracked you again."
"You have." She knocks absentmindedly on the stone of the chapel, hears it ring through her knuckles. "At the town's founding, they built all sorts of places, and the thing is— The thing is, when they built the fort later— You know, the Spanish built the Castillo de San Marcos in 1674, but Fort Reverence was more like Fort Christmas, since it was built in the 1830s during the Second Seminole War— fucked up, by the way. The Treaty of Payne's Landing was fucked up—"
"Listen, I went to Florida history classes. I know we were super fucked up to native people." He pauses; for Tiff's sake, probably, he mutters, "And still are. You're getting sidetracked, though. That thing is going to come back. Get to the point."
"As time went on, things slowly shifted from the original settlement, some of which was moved and preserved for historical purposes, but— God, look at this stained glass." She gestures up toward a glass Christ to the south, sunbleached and weeping red from closed eyes and a crown of thorns. "Nobody found the chapel, nobody bothered to move it— They built a new one within the fort's walls, then built the First Church of Fort Reverence in, what, 1906? This is— God, this is more than fortuitous. This is amazing.
Leaning against the jammed-closed door, Matt shakes his head. "You're such a goddamn nerd."
"I'm not the one who likes the cracker museum out in Christmas."
He blinks. "The last time I went there was when I was fourteen, Tiff."
"It's a— This is a town history thing lost to time and secrecy and people really not giving a shit, like so many things about Fort Reverence, and—" She turns to the door behind him and tries to give it a push. It's jammed. If she wants a picture of the stained glass, she might have to go around to the side, which probably isn't a great idea. "I thought it was just another one of those things that may or may not have been true. Oh, Pappy Samuel used to hunt cowboy witches on the frontier. The kind of thing Mom would smack Uncle Mike on the shoulder about, but you knew she meant it. Tall tales, our own familial Paul Bunyan and Babe, like all that folklore I picked up between here and Orlando. It's real, though! It's right here! It's right here and we're going to go inside— We're going to go inside it, right? Like stepping into a history textbook, here we are!"
"Why the hell would you want to be in a textbook?" Matt runs his fingers along the lock of the door, metal in the rot- and termite-eaten wood. It comes away with moss and other natural debris. "Those things are boring as hell."
"When was the last time you read one? How long ago?"
"Not long enough."
"I suppose your point stands, though. History textbooks always carry the biased slant of those who wrote them, which often means they carry information about those in power and written to favor their perspective or try to justify and rose-tint their actions. But that's a whole thing."
"No, yeah, I remember. We had the same sophomore year history teacher—"
"Two years apart, yeah."
"And he always referred to the Civil War as the 'War of Northern Aggression.'"
"Yeah. Again, a whole topic." She takes a second picture of the surrounding area, then one of her cousin when he isn't looking. She considers the facts. "Whoever and whatever this mystery lady is, whatever her goals are— I don't think she knows where we went. It's like she led us to it through its absence in her worldview."
Matt pauses in his tapping on the stone. "Led us to what? To this?"
"To the chapel, yeah." Tiff lowers her camera from her eye slightly. "What did you think I meant?"
"I don't know. A clue or something. Like a skull."
"I don't think there's a skull here. That would be insane."
"Would it? Our ancestors were fucked up, Tiff. Not just to indigenous people. To each other."
"I don't think there would be one here unless it was underground. There was probably an adjacent cemetery, which—" Excitement sparks in her chest. "Do you think there's bodies out here?"
"God, I hope not."
"That'll be a project for later, I think."
"I don't know if we're going to get a later."
Tiff doesn't say anything to that. She just takes another picture of the chapel.
"How come she didn't find it before?" He pauses, clarifies, "The chapel, I mean."
That one's a thinker. "I don't know. Maybe she couldn't. She didn't exist out here when we were younger. It doesn't make sense for her to have died in the seventies and not been around in the 2010s, but be around now. Something had to have changed between when I left and now."
"Maybe she was taking a nap," he jokes.
"Yeah." Tiff frowns, lowers her camera to her waist, and looks back at him. "Maybe she was."