She looked less like a woman and more like a skinwalker wearing the skin of its last victim. She looked…wrong, off, toowild to be human. Or maybe she’d never been human. Her eyes were too bright, fever-lit and glassy, her pupils blown wide like a cornered animal’s. Her movements had that jerky, puppet-on-wrong-strings quality, every motion borrowed from instinct, not grace. Her short hair, once a helmet shellacked into place, now hung in damp ropes. Her lipstick had migrated into flaking rings around her mouth.
Archer was almost impressed with how quickly she tried to reassert her version of reality. “Who’s there?” she snapped, trying for her usual condescension, but the words landed a little too sharp, too brittle, on the verge of collapse. “You don’t scare me.”
“Oh, what a pity,” Archer drawled, stepping out from the laurel’s shadow with a flourish of his coat. The lanternlight caught the edge of his smile, all fake gold teeth and shadow, a fox wearing a pirate’s grin. “Are you saying I put on all this mascara for absolutely nothing?”
She jerked toward him, knife up. Mac came into view behind her—a ghost in her periphery—just enough for her body to recognize another threat. She spun again, found Shep leaning on a sundial, hands in his pockets, head tipped as if he were studying an interesting insect. The brothers flanked her like twin predators who’d grown bored of the chase.
The knife trembled. Her chin did not. “You. You’re—” Her gaze leapt from Mac to Shep and back again, confusion eating at the edges of her composure, like she was starting to question her own reality. “What is this?”
“It’s called karma,” Shep said pleasantly. “We’re big fans.”
“You hurt someone we love,” Mac added, voice as even as the horizon. “So we came to hear you explain yourself.”
“Explain—” Bev barked a laugh that cracked halfway through. “I don’t have to explain myself to you. I’ve never said a thing that wasn’t true. Sometimes the truth hurts. Zane hasalways been the weakest link in our family. I was trying to help him. I did what was necessary. I corrected. I improved?—”
“Improved him? You?” Archer tilted his head, his tone all velvet mockery. “He called you a virus. But you’re far more insidious than that. You’re a mold, a fungus, creeping in and turning everything you touch septic.” He let the pirate’s sing-song curl around the truth. “But I’m afraid your time’s run out. Tonight, we’re…eradicating you from this world.”
“I don’t even know who you are,” she spat.
“Like he said, we’re karma, luv,” Archer taunted.
Bev realized she was caught in the snare, surrounded on all sides, and like any good manipulator, she changed her strategy. Her face softened, trembling at the edges, voice pitching up like she could still sell her suffering as salvation. “You don’t under-understand. I only did what my mother did to me. She did it because she loved me.”
“She’s full of shit,” Zane hissed through the comms. “My grandmother died when my mom was an infant.”
Archer didn’t acknowledge Zane’s voice in his ear, instead letting a bit of uncertainty creep into his tone. Might as well play with the old hag a bit. “Did she abuse you? Tell you that you were nothing? Worthless? That she wished you dead?”
Bev’s breath caught. For a heartbeat, Archer almost pitied her. Then he remembered Adam bleeding, Zane’s voice cracking, and that sympathy burned itself clean away.
“Yes!” she cried, nodding like a dashboard bobblehead Jesus. “But I forgave her. I understood that she did it to help me, to make me better.”
“That must have been very hard for you, luv,” he said, voice dripping with an easy, honey-thick insincerity that anyone who knew him would recognize in an instant, but Bev grasped at like a lifeline all the same.
She nodded. “It was. It really was. I lo-love my son,” she said, stumbling on her words with the same carelessness she stumbled toward him, lurching for his hand. Her fingers shook, reaching out with all the fragile desperation of a drowning woman. Archer stepped back but gave her enough rope to hang herself.
He waved a lazy hand, spinning in a circle. “Yet you run to the tabloids with your ugly lies and spurious accusations. How is that love?”
Archer glanced at his husband, then Shep, both wearing similar expressions, though for entirely different reasons. Mac smirked because he adored this ruthless side of Archer; Shep smirked because, at his core, he was another predator who liked to play with his prey, and game recognized game.
“I just wanted his attention,” she cried. “He cut me off. He wouldn’t speak to me. I already lost one son…” Tears filled her eyes. “Now I’ve lost them both.”
“Not a villain but a victim?” Mac asked, his voice dripping with disdain.
“What would you know?” she said, spinning on him. “I’m an old woman. I’ve been tormented for most of my life. Nobody understands me, nobody understands what my life has been like. Yes, I’m the villain now, but you don’t know what I’ve been through.”
“There’s a popular saying…” Archer said cheerfully, reclaiming her attention like a cat batting a mouse back into reach. “Something along the lines of ‘a villain is a victim whose story’s never been told.’” His grin widened, teeth bright in the lanternlight. “But what they fail to tell you is, there’s a line. And once crossed, nothing before it matters. There’s not a man on death row who doesn’t have a sob story, luv. Not a one. They’re still going to pay for their sins with their lives.”
The knife trembled in her grip again, her knuckles white, eyes darting from shadow to shadow like she might find an escape between them. The garden hummed—crickets, wind, the soft buzz of a distant light—life carrying on despite her small apocalypse.
She advanced a half step, the knife describing a jittery arc in the air as she steeled her shoulders. “Get out of my way.”
“Not how the maze works, sweetheart,” Archer told her, voice smooth as silk and twice as cruel. “You don’t get out. You only go deeper.”
He walked his fingers through the air, then gestured grandly toward the heart of the hedge maze. Somewhere behind her, the wind moved through the labyrinth, the night closing in.
Her eyes cut right, toward Shep. “You. Move.”
“You’re pointing that knife the wrong direction,” Shep said, his smile chilling. “If you’re looking for danger.”
