Tiffany and Knocks.
Tiffany Thatcher sat atop her uneasy beast, her eyes steeled upon Laila. Laila, naked, dripping with mossy lake water, didn’t let her nakedness or stature disadvantage her. She held firm, unwilling to give up an inch of ground.
Tiffany’s goat paced back and forth, its powerful muscles impatient to charge—ready to surge forward and run this creature down. It bleated once more, sounding its restlessness. But Tiffany Thatcher stayed her mount. Cold and unrelenting she stared at Laila, then opened her mouth, letting out a shrill shriek in some pained language spoken only in the deepest, darkest parts of Hell. The trill formed words that came out in a deathly warble sounding eerily like a chorus played backward.
“He was not yours to take.”
Laila looked around, a little confused. “He was not yours to begin with,” she replied.
“No!” Tiffany shouted, her anger whipping up a hot wind that rustled the trees and kicked up a cloud of dry dust. “He. Was not. Yours. To take.” The goat was having a hard time keeping itself in check. With a jerk of the reins and a firm hand on its horns, Tiffany dug spiked barbs into the fiend, managing to stay it a bit longer. “He was mine,” she hissed.
“I didn’t take your son. I only took what was left for the lake. Your quarrel is not with me. And it is not with my boy.”
“No, you took him! You took him and you drowned him! And you kept his soul! He was mine!”
“Your son isn’t dead. He’s . . .” Laila fell silent, her heart breaking. Tiffany Thatcher had not pierced the veil of Hell and ridden across time itself to kill the doppelganger that had driven her to suicide. This wasn’t about that at all. This was about Laila and the man she had drowned beneath the waves of Ladybird Lake half a dozen or so years ago. Until then, Laila was ready to die—she had something to die for, something that actually meant something. But this wasn’t sacrifice; this was revenge. Laila wasn’t going to die for her son; she was going to die for her sins. For her nature. And that wasn’t a very good reason at all to die.
“I loved him. I love him still,” said Tiffany of her husband. With that, she let loose her hellbeast and rode it full bore into the waiting nixie, whose eyes stayed locked upon Tiffany’s.
This fate was unavoidable. The only thing Laila had left in this world was one last lesson to offer her son. She turned, looking at Knocks—who cowered crying behind her—and mouthed “I love you.” Then she turned back to see the smoldering blackness of her own death.
The huge infernal goat ran her down like a cardboard placard, its hooves tearing off limbs as it passed over her. Knocks leapt to his feet, screaming at the top of his lungs, “Mama!” He stopped in his place, his arm outstretched, as if he were capable of stopping time in its tracks. But the goat still lunged, dragging limp pieces of his mother along with it, meat smeared and tangled in its long black fur.
Tiffany reared the creature around, passing within inches of Knocks, and wheeled about again, trotting back toward him. She stopped, looking squarely at the boy while holding Laila’s agonized soul firmly by the scruff of her neck.
Tiffany’s lip snarled back across jagged teeth—sharpened and fractured from trying to gnaw her way out of Hell. Her eyes went black and what little color had remained in her skin vanished entirely. She raised her arm, pointing a crooked finger at the abomination below her. “That’s not my baby,” she howled on the wind. “That’s not my baby!” Kicking its sides, Tiffany urged her lurching steed forward once more, its hulking muscles surging toward the changeling. But as its shoe touched the dirt with its step, the hoof disintegrated into ash, like the end of a lit cigarette. The immolation swept up its leg to the torso, and in that fraction of a second, both goat and rider were consumed, exploding into a cloud of cinders. Her hour was up.
Ash and embers drifted slowly to the ground, the remnants of Tiffany Thatcher coating Knocks in a fine layer of gray and black. Not entirely sure what to make of what had just happened, he staggered in a daze over to where his mother last stood, but she was gone, every last bit of her dragged off by the