3
Margaret Ann Worthing was too furious to sleep.
The master bedroom reflected that fury back at her in polished mahogany and silk. The canopy bed rose like a throne carved from dark wood, draped in heavy cream curtains she had chosen herself. The mattress beneath it was stuffed with imported down. The sheets were soft enough to silence sound. A marble fireplace sat unused across the room, its mantle lined with silver-framed portraits of a life she insisted was perfect.
Everything in the room whispered wealth.
Everything in the room whispered ownership.
And none of it could keep her husband in her bed.
She stood before her vanity mirror, candles flickering low on either side, watching her reflection as if it were a rival she meant to defeat.
"Look at you," she muttered, lips barely moving. "Drowning in that ridiculous purple."
The silk nightgown hung off her frame like it had been tailored for someone stronger. Her collarbones cut sharp shadows against pale skin. She turned sideways, studying the slope of her hips, the hollow at her waist.
"Who let a skeleton wear lace?" she whispered cruelly.
Her fingers brushed her ribs. Too thin. Too fragile. Too breakable.
"Would you even be anything without the hair?" she said, lifting a long strand of golden blond and letting it spill through her fingers. It was her one undeniable feature. Thick. Glossy. Worth envying.
"At least you have that," she exhaled. "Enjoy it while you can."
She stared harder, as if she could force beauty to appear through hatred alone. The more she looked, the smaller she felt. The more she thought about the barn, the tighter her jaw set.
He used to come to bed. Now he lingered outside. Now he found excuses.
Now he preferred the company of those moon crickets.
This time Her reflection had no rebuttle. "Screw you, Franklin," she breathed.
Each time he strayed, something in her shrank. Each time another porchmonkey was born it felt like a slap she was expected to accept gracefully.
"Why cant i?" Anger hissed out of her like a hot
air balloon.
all these ugly black harlots did not deserve him. Each black child who walked around this property with his blood were just another reminder of the list indulgences she was expected to swallow with grace.
A reminder of how infertil she was.
The thought twisted into something uglier. Something she fed instead of confronting.
"It's not me," she hissed under her breath. "It's them."
It was easier that way.
Easier to blame skin. Easier to blame blood. Easier to believe that something lesser had tempted him rather than admit she had lost him long ago.
She slid open the glass door to the balcony.
Cool night air rushed in, carrying the scent of soil and distant trees. Normally, that view calmed her. The Worthing estate stretched wide and indulgent beneath her acres upon acres of manicured lawn rolling into dark forest. Fences carved neat boundaries into land she called hers. The moonlight turned the fields silver, soft and obedient.
It looked like heaven.
It was supposed to feel like power.
But tonight, the land didn't soothe her.
It only reminded her that even with all of this the house, the fields, the livestock, the people she could not command the one thing she wanted.
Her husband's loyalty.
Her eyes drifted across the property and landed on the barn.
It sat at the edge of perfection like a blemish.
A dark, stubborn silhouette in the middle of her manicured world.
Now an eyesore in her paradise.
She hated it.
Hated the way he disappeared there.
Hated the way she imagined him inside. Hoping the baby died in his arms. Hated how there was no wails of anguish. Hated the way the night seemed to swallow him whole while she stood alone in silk and candlelight.
The wind shifted.
Margaret leaned over the balcony railing, fingers digging into the cool iron until her knuckles blanched white.
She told herself she was trying to understand.
That this could still make sense.
It had to.
Because the alternative was unbearable.
Not when that home-wrecking harlot had her husband wrapped around her filthy brown finger.
The words came easily, comfortingly,
wiley was a new slave.
No, not a slave.
A SUCCUBUS!
Yes. That was better. From the moment the girl stepped onto the property four years ago eyes too steady, spine too straight something shifted in Franklin. Margaret remembered the exact dinner. The exact silence. The way his laugh sounded… different.
Corrupted.
That was the word.
Wiley had corrupted him. "Should have plucked her eyes out the moment they looked at my Franklin," Margaret muttered, jaw tight as she glared at the barn below.
She could map it perfectly in her head. The timing, the straying, the coldness, the temper, the distance in his touch.
The way he started sleeping less in their bed and more out there.
Where they fucked, where he slept as if the house disgusted him.
As if she did.
She ignored the other truth. The way his voice had deepened strangely. The way his temper felt foreign, the way sometimes his eyes didn't look like his at all.
No.
It was Wiley, it had to be Wiley.
If Margaret accepted anything else, she would have to admit that the man she married was gone long before she noticed. That the husband she remembered might already belong to someone else.
And she could not allow that.
So she leaned harder into her hatred. Wrapped it around herself like armor. She was still gripping that feeling when the sound came.
Not a scream.
Not thunder.
Something wrong.
It was closer.
It rolled across the fields in a deep metallic clang followed by something that did not belong in the human world.
A roar.
Margaret froze.
The noise struck her chest like a physical thing. It rattled the glass behind her, vibrated the iron railing beneath her fingers. The dogs began barking and did not stop.
"What in God's name!"She swallowed.
The second boom came harder.
Not a crash.
An impact.
The ground shuddered beneath her feet as if something enormous had just struck the earth itself. And then came the roar again louder, closer, layered with something furious and wounded.
Margaret tried to stand upright, but her legs shook under her.
Stumbled forward.
Her foot caught.
And she went over.
The fall wasn't far one story but it knocked the air from her lungs when she hit the dirt. The impact jarred her spine and snapped her teeth together painfully. For a moment she could only lie there, blinking at the sky.
Pain bloomed, sharp and immediate.
But not crippling.
She forced herself upright, breath ragged, checking her legs with frantic hands.
They moved.
She was alive.
She looked up.
And for the first time that night She was afraid.
Too afraid to move.
The estate had gone silent in a way that felt deliberate. Her ankle twisted awkwardly from the fall. Breathing fast, eyes locked on the barn.
Light began to leak from it.
At first she thought it was fire. But fire didn't behave like that.
Thin beams sliced through the cracks in the wood, sharp and blinding, cutting the dark in straight, violent lines. The barn glowed from within as if it were holding something far too bright to contain.
Like it had swallowed the sun.
Margaret blinked, confused, and then she noticed something worse. Movement.
Slaves were emerging from the quarters.
Slowly at first. Cautiously.
Then more of them.
They began to gather around the barn not running away, not screaming but forming a loose circle at a distance. Faces lifted. Eyes wide.
Watching.
The light intensified, pouring through the boards in widening streaks. Heat rolled outward in waves, strong enough to sting her skin even from this far away.
"What are you doing?" she shouted, though her voice wavered. "Get back! Put it out!"
No one moved. The barn pulsed.
Then Something inside struck upward.
A Bolling ball sized hole erupted upward send a thick beam of light into the sky.
Margeret watched the light show in awe.
And then it happened. A scream. It tore across the fields raw and uncontained, slicing through the night with a sound so human it froze her blood.
Margaret knew that voice.
She had heard it laugh at dinner tables.
Heard it whisper in her ear.
Heard it curse at slow workers and bargain over livestock.
It was Franklin. The sound of him unraveling. Her breath caught in her throat.
"No," she whispered.
He screams again higher now, splintered, it did not sound like anger, it did not sound like fury, it sounded like agony.
And in the same instant that recognition struck her, the barn detonated with light.
The beam erupted upward from its center, violent and absolute, ripping through the roof as if the wood had never existed. Shingles and beams exploded outward in a shower of splinters, silhouetted for a heartbeat against the rising column of brilliance.
Night vanished.
Fields, fences, forest everything was swallowed in merciless white.
The world turned to day in a single breath.
Margaret staggered back, hand raised to shield her eyes, tears springing unbidden from the brightness.
Franklin let out a screech that broke his wifes heart. His voice echoed off the house, off the trees, off the earth itself. Unnaturally, it broke her heart.
"SAVE HIM, PLEASE!!" She begged her slaves.
The sound of a man no longer pretending.
And in that moment illuminated in impossible light Margaret understood one terrible truth:
Whatever was happening in that barn her husband was losing.
She heard the murmuring before she understood it.
Voices low, reverent rolling across the field like wind over tall grass.
"The Lord walks tonight."
"An angel."
"God's fire." They had gathered. Not running. Nor hiding, Watching.
Some had fallen to their knees. Others stood frozen, faces lifted to the smoke, eyes reflecting flame and something dangerously close to freedom.
Hope!
The light faded. Day collapsed back into night.
Franklin's screaming stopped. In that silence something inside Margaret tilted.
Then she heard it, cheering. Soft at first, then louder. A laugh, a cry of praise.
A sound of release that did not belong in her fields.
Especially since they're master was inside that barn. Her husband had just screamed like a dying animal. And they were rejoicing. Her mind refused the obvious.
He wasn't dead.
He couldn't be, he was trapped, hurt, waiting, every second mattered.
Every second.
If they moved now, if they ran, if they doused the flames he could still be saved.
She desperately told herself on repeat clinging to that thought like a drowning woman clings to driftwood.
"Shut up," she whispered. No one heard her.
"SHUT UP!" Her voice cracked across the field, shrill and desperate.
She shoved herself upright, hands streaked with dirt, lungs burning as if she had run miles instead of fallen from a balcony.
"What are you all standing around for?" she screamed. "That's my barn! That's your master!"
No one moved.
The fire devoured the wood faster than any blaze she had ever witnessed. Beams folded inward as if eaten from the inside. Smoke churned thick and black, rising into a sky that had only moments ago been torn open by light.
She could still hear him in her head.
Franklin's scream. It echoed, looping, replaying. He needed her.
He needed them.
And these heathens dared to worship at his pyre.
"You fools!" she shrieked, voice cracking into hysteria. "He's alive! He's alive cant you hear him? He's alive! Get water! Move!" No one obeyed.
Some were crying, some were smiling. The sight of it snapped something fragile inside her.
They had forgotten.
For one moment one blasphemous moment they had forgotten they were slaves.
And she could not allow that.
"He is your master!" she screamed. "Every second you stand there is a second he burns!"
She believed it.
Even though his final scream had carried the unmistakable rasp of a death rattle. Even though the silence afterward had been too complete.
Margaret did not accept endings.
Not for him, not yet. If they moved now, if they obeyed, if they acted she could still fix this.
She had to.
Because if she couldn't save him, then she would have to face the truth. And that truth was unbearable, So she screamed again.
And again.
And again.
Until her voice was raw and her eyes were wild like the fire that was consuming her husband.
She lunged.
She didn't choose him. She grabbed the nearest body. A tall young man, smoke streaking his face, eyes still lifted toward the dying glow of the barn. Brown. Steady.
She hit him with everything she had.
For a thin, brittle second she had the advantage of madness. He hadn't expected her. No one had.
Her shoulder slammed into his chest. They went down together. There was a sharp crack.
His head struck a jagged shard of timber blown free from the barn's collapse.
The sound was small.
Final.
Margaret didn't notice. She was already on top of him, hands wrapped around his throat.
"Shut up!" she screamed, even though he hadn't made a sound.
She shook him violently, ash and soot rising around them in choking clouds.
"Douse the flames! DO YOU HEAR ME?"
His body didn't resist.
Didn't move.
The terror in his eyes stayed frozen there not blinking, not shifting fixed forever on the sky.
Margaret's fist came down.
Once.
Twice.
Again.
She wasn't hitting him anymore she was hitting the fire, the silence, the cheers, the memory of Franklin's scream. She struck until her knuckles split, until blood slicked her fingers, each blow drove the sharp debris beneath him into his skull.
A sick, grinding sound. Still she screamed. "PUT IT OUT!"
The cheering had stopped. The field was silent now not reverent, not hopeful. Horrified.
The other slaves stared, not at her but at the body beneath her.
At the way his eyes no longer moved. At the blood spreading dark beneath his head.
Margaret finally paused, chest heaving, hair fallen loose from its pins, nightgown streaked with dirt and soot.
The boy lay limp beneath her.
Broken.
"TUNKA! NO!" Someone screamed his name. Another young man rushed forward, shoving Margaret hard off the body. She stumbled backward into the dirt.
The brother dropped to his knees, cradling the boy's head, rocking him as if motion alone could reverse what had already happened.
That was when Margaret felt it. They were closer now. They had stepped in. Not scattered.
Not bowed. Closed in. Faces no longer reverent. No longer distant.
They were many, she was one.
For the first time that night, fear pierced her delusion. Not the fear of losing Franklin.
The fear of losing control. They formed a loose ring around her. Not touching. Not yet.
Breathing.
Watching.
Something fragile trembled in the space between them. A moment where history could tilt. Margaret scrambled backward on her hands, dress dragging through ash.
"You will not" she began, but her voice cracked.
And then.
BOOM!
A shotgun blast ripped through the night.
The sound shattered the fragile shift like glass.
Margaret didn't flinch.
The slaves did.
Heads snapped toward the tree line.
From the darkness emerged field hands and neighboring landowners, boots heavy in the soil, guns raised, faces grim and resolute.
Another shotgun cocked.
Metal clicked.
Final.
The air changed. Possibility drained out of the field like blood from a wound. The circle loosened. Hope collapsed.
They stepped back.
Slowly.
Fear poured back in not as sudden panic, but as remembered knowledge.
Margaret rose to her feet. Her breathing slowed. Her spine straightened. Blood dripping from her fingers.
"Put it out," she said again.
Quieter now.
Steadier.
Her eyes swept the crowd no longer hysterical, but cold.
"Now." this time They moved.