Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (the ebook reader .txt) 📕

sound as the monsters killed him, maybe because he’d already died once that day, and doing it a second time meant little to him.

Lori turned away from the window to face Rajini. She felt tears threatening, but she couldn’t let them come, not yet. She still had work to do. She reached out and took Rajini’s hands.

“I’m so sorry about your husband. But I’ve got something very important to tell you. Something I should’ve told you a long—”

Lori’s words were cut off as the picture window exploded. A lone Shadowkin leaped into the living room, slammed into Rajini, and knocked her to the floor. Her hands were yanked out of Lori’s, and before Lori could do anything, the Shadowkin went to work on Rajini with its black, clawed hands. Unlike Brian, Rajini screamed when the Shadowkin tore into her. Blood sprayed the air as the Shadowkin savaged Rajini’s body, the blood faded in midair, and Rajini began to vanish as well, almost as if the Shadowkin wasn’t killing her so much as unmaking her. When the Shadowkin finished its awful work, nothing of Rajini remained. No clothes, no gobbets of meat, no splintered bone, not even a patch of wet blood soaking into the carpet. It was like she’d never existed at all.

The Shadowkin rose to its feet then and turned to regard Lori.

It’s all over, she thought. There was no one left for her to confess to. She couldn’t fix the Imbalance, and the Intercessor would soon come and destroy everything. She didn’t want to be here when that happened, so she walked toward the Shadowkin, arms spread. “I’m all yours,” she said.

The Shadowkin made no move toward her. It looked at her for a moment, then turned and leaped back through the broken window.

Lori stood there, waiting to see if another Shadowkin would jump inside and finish her off. When none did, she stepped up to the broken window and looked outside. The Shadowkin in the yard were dispersing, moving off in different directions to search for other things to destroy.

“What about me?” Lori shouted. “What’s wrong with me?”

But she knew what was wrong. The Shadowkin had grown so strong that they didn’t need her anymore.

The departing Shadowkin didn’t react to her words, just kept going, and soon the yard and street were empty of them.

Lori looked out at the falling rain. There were no bodies on the lawn now. The Shadowkin had cleared them away, reducing them to nothingness, as had happened to Rajini. She wished she could join them in oblivion.

* * *

Lori, still clad only in Larry’s jacket, stood before Aashrita’s headstone once more. A metallic blue Lexus was parked nearby. It was Rajini’s car. Lori had found the key in the Dhawans’ kitchen. She didn’t think Rajini would mind that she’d borrowed it. The woman certainly had no use for it anymore.

The goddamned rain was finally starting to let up, had become a light sprinkle. She was still wet and cold, though, and she couldn’t stop shivering. That was okay. She deserved to feel uncomfortable. That’s why, in a weird way, she was grateful for her bum knee. It throbbed like hell and she could barely put any weight on it. She didn’t have any pain medicine – that was in her purse on the Nightway, along with her phone – but even if she’d had pills, she wouldn’t have taken them. She wanted to feel the pain. Needed to.

“I’m sorry,” she said, eyes focused on Aashrita’s name carved into the stone. “I didn’t mean to get your parents killed. I didn’t mean to get anyone killed. And I’m sorry I never got to confess what I did to you. I’m sorry because I wanted to stop the insanity that’s been happening, but I also wanted to take responsibility for what I did, to stop hiding from it. Hiding from you – or at least the memory of you. But I failed, and I’m so, so sorry.”

She waited, half expecting to hear Aashrita’s voice, especially after interacting with her – or a version of her – in the Garden of Anguish. But the only sound came from the falling rain.

Given everything that had happened, she would’ve expected to have a killer migraine right now, but her head felt fine. She would’ve welcomed the pain, though, felt it was the least she deserved. “We never get what we want in this life, do we?” she said.

Aashrita, of course, didn’t respond.

“One thing I don’t understand about all this.” Lori paused, then gave a bitter laugh. “Okay, one of the many things I don’t understand, is why if my urging you to kill yourself created an Imbalance between Shadow and the real world, the Cabal waited so damn long to do anything about it. If it was such a big deal, if it was going to cause so many problems – maybe even threaten the world – why not try to fix it right away? And why did it take the Shadowkin so long to show up? Seventeen years seems like a hell of a long time. I suppose the Imbalance might’ve taken a while to build up to critical mass. Maybe the Cabal didn’t detect it until recently because of that. But – and I don’t want you to take this the wrong way – how could what I did to you upset the Balance? You and I, we’re just two people. How could anything we do or anything that happens to us have any real impact on anything?”

She heard Aashrita’s voice then, maybe for real, or maybe it was only a memory. Either way, the voice repeated the words that Aashrita had said to her in the Garden.

You say you wanted to get back at me in a small way? Well, small actions can have pretty goddamn big consequences!

“What I did had serious consequences, that’s for damn sure, but it wasn’t small. Not to you, and not to me.”

She heard Aashrita’s voice again; this time