Traveler trilogy Book 2, updates every Friday!
Five years after killing Levi Cornwall, Arthur Morgan is happy. He has a wife who loves him, an honest job he enjoys, and two beautiful children named Sadie and Hiram. All of it is turned on its head, h...
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The brightness of the moon struck Jenny as odd.
After leaving Mac alone in the hotel room, she'd gone out riding in the bayou hoping maybe the Night Folk or something would find her and give her an excuse to shed blood. Unfortunately, it was not to be. She'd seen no one except one bumbling, idiotic man who appeared to be trying to take photographs of some alligators out in Bluewater Marsh.
Finally, being bored and desiring to be there when Arthur, John, and Dutch returned from speaking with Angelo Bronte, she'd headed back to camp sufficiently depressed and hopeless just as darkness fell.
Now, she stood out behind the chuck wagon with Sadie, slowly smoking a cigarette with her and staring at the towering bald cypress trees with their branches covered in gently swaying Spanish moss and their massive trunks and knees carpeted in kudzu. The silhouettes of the canopy against the bright silver sky made them almost look like grim reapers carved from stone, a silent, spooky reminder that death came for every man in the end. The trees were as beautiful as they were terrifying.
"Sadie?" Jenny asked at last, breaking the silence.
"Yeah?"
"When your husband died, would you say that was the worst day of your life?" She sucked gently on her cigarette, watching the red ember blaze to life in the presence of oxygen and fall back to a black lump of burnt paper again.
Sadie blew smoke gently into the darkness and sighed. "Yeah, I suppose so. I had a happy childhood. Felt like the happy endin' of a fairy tale when Jake and I were married. Now, it's like I'm livin' in a nightmare that just gets worse and worse the longer I sleep."
"What if you found out he didn't have to die? That... that you could have been killed in his place. Would you rather be dead than live with all the pain you feel now?" Jenny sighed as a lump built up in her throat. Of all people, Sadie might have been the only person who had an inkling of how much pain Jenny felt in regards to Micah's awful deeds and Mac's betrayal and lies.
Sadie shrugged. "I don't rightly know, I guess. On one hand I suppose I would. It would certainly save me a lot of hurtin', but I ain't sure Jake would have wanted that for me. I guess the easiest path would have been for us both to die. But I was a woman, so the O'Driscolls kept me alive to... to..." She took another long draw on her cigarette. "Well, you've probably guessed by now what they did to me even if nobody else has. One after the other, like animals. I was in that cellar for nearly a week before you folk found me."
Speechless, Jenny looked at her. After all that, how could Sadie not immediately choose to avoid the pain with death? Perhaps because of her husband, Jenny supposed. If Sadie had died and he had lived, Jake would have been the one in pain, and Sadie clearly could not bear that thought.
But Jenny didn't have a Jake in her life. She thought Mac might have been at one point, but now her feelings about him were so complex that she wasn't quite sure what to make of them. He loved her, and she supposed on some level she still loved him, but the fact remained that he had hurt her by keeping the truth about her death from her, regardless of whether she would have believed him at first or not.
