Two more meetings were taking place in the dead of night, deep in the forest and much closer to Rallsburg. The other two ghosts of the broken town had finally appeared for their agreed-upon meeting, at the agreed-upon time.
"I wondered if you'd show up," Robert growled, tossing a pine cone at a nearby tree in frustration. "What the fuck happened?"
Brian Hendricks didn't answer him. He wandered in half-dazed, still processing what he'd witnessed in the clearing of the heretics.
Jackson wasn't supposed to die. He couldn't die. He was supposed to be more powerful than everyone, commander of impossible and terrible magicks and ruler over the monsters of Hell itself. Jackson was the unwitting tool of God chosen to cleanse the earth—and yet Rachel had shot him in the back. With a simple, mundane handgun.
"What are we gonna do now?" Robert asked.
Brian didn't answer. He was still working his mind through the day. They'd laid a trap for Jackson. Not once, but twice. Something felt off. Brian's mind was churning through hellish possibilities. An inferno of illusions danced behind his eyes as he envisioned Jackson dying a thousand horrible deaths at the hands of the cruel sorcerers that had infiltrated Rallsburg. Had his dying throes triggered the explosion that ripped the very town apart?
No, that had happened first. Brian was mixing up his timeline of events. The Awakened, those devil-worshipping lunatics, had destroyed his home. They were responsible for every terrible deed committed within, killing the last good man of the town and forever damning the rest. Jackson had set out to find their hiding place, leaving Brian in charge of surrounding the town.
He needed to know something concrete, and Robert had been in Rallsburg proper more recently than he. "My daughter, is she all right?"
"Yeah," Robert said, though he had hesitated. Brian didn't believe him to be lying, but he was still concealing something. Something important. "Nat's fine. So's the Brit takin' care of her. You ain't gotta worry about them."
He felt some relief at that reassurance, but still, his mind was troubled. It wasn't his daughter's fate—Brian still truly believed Natalie would be better off if he focused wholeheartedly on cleansing the world for her—but something else. Something more sinister, like a worm nestling its way through his skull and chewing out his ears for not hearing what he was meant to hear.
"Pity he didn't finish the job when he could," Robert added, chucking another pine cone at the tree. "Bitch must've got him, yeah?"
A note clicked in Brian's mind. It was a sweet, heavenly note of truth, baring Robert's lies for him to see like the sun emerging from behind the clouds. Robert had slipped and revealed himself, though he didn't yet know his damnation.
He grasped the black rod that was in his jacket pocket, and to his astonishment, the familiar thrum of energy was still present. The monsters, infinite in number and eager to bend to his will, were coiled inside like a snake waiting to strike.
"How did you know?" Brian asked quietly.
"Huh?"
"How did you know he was dead? Or who killed him?"
Robert stood up suddenly, and Brian called to them the moment he did. One of the monsters, faceless and merciless, began to emerge out of its portal in the forest floor, silently rising to the ultimate doom of the unsuspecting hunter standing before him.
Robert's eyes narrowed. "Fuck you, man. Fuck. You. Your daugh—"
Brian turned away, ignoring his ranting. A painful crunch somewhere behind him was the last he ever heard from Robert Harrison. Brian set out into the forest, heading west. The pouch of stones Omega had given him clattered against his side. He didn't have a home anymore, but he knew how to survive at least for a while in the wilderness. He'd get his bearings, find food and shelter, and marshall his forces.
His war wasn't over yet.