chapter 15
423 Words
.
---
The storm rolled in without lightning, without warning, like a breath held too long by the heavens. Dust spun low over the hardpan, twisting itself into little devils that danced around Mara’s boots as she crossed the forgotten churchyard.
The Shepherd’s Land.
A cursed strip of country where men came to bury their sins and ended up buried themselves.
Mara felt the weight of it in her bones.
The chapel stood half-collapsed, its steeple broken, its door hanging from one rust-eaten hinge. Wind moaned through the boards like a dying choir. Beside her, Coyote trotted silent, ears back, hackles raised. Even the ghost-wolf could feel the wrongness here.
Inside, the chapel stank of old incense and older blood.
Pews toppled. Hymnals rotted. A Bible lay on the altar, its pages fused together by something darker than water.
And there—
Footprints.
Bare.
Small.
The Girl in the Ash had been here.
Mara knelt, touching one print lightly. Still warm. The girl wasn’t just close—she was watching.
“Come out,” Mara whispered. “I ain’t here to hurt you.”
The shadows shifted. Something moved behind the pulpit. A flicker—too quick, too thin, too shaken to be fully human. When the girl stepped out, her skin was pale as winter bone, hair wild, eyes black with soot and fear.
“Mara,” she rasped. “He’s waiting.”
Mara’s breath caught.
“Who?”
“The Shepherd.”
Cold rolled down her spine. The Preacher she’d hunted for three years wasn’t just a man anymore. This land had fed on him, fattened whatever darkness lived beneath his ribs. And now he was ready.
The girl trembled. “He wants you to come. He said you’d follow the ashes.”
Mara stood slowly, hand brushing her holster. “Where is he?”
The girl lifted a shaking arm and pointed to the back of the chapel—toward a trapdoor Mara hadn’t noticed.
Beneath the church.
Of course.
A place this rotten always kept its worst secrets in the dark.
Mara took one step toward the trapdoor and froze as a voice drifted up from the floorboards—smooth as oil, warm as honey, wrong as sin:
“Welcome home, child.”
The Shepherd’s voice.
Coyote growled low, teeth bared.
Mara swallowed her fear and said the truth:
“Judgment’s here, Shepherd. And I ain’t God—but I’ll do His work.”
The trapdoor slammed open.
Blackness rose like breath from hell.
And the Shepherd climbed out.
- Writer
