A Lesson in Vengeance(72)

But when Ellis starts off toward the woods, I follow.

According to her, coyotes are best hunted in the last hours of daylight. The sun is already dipping low toward the horizon by the time we step under tree cover, the gold light glinting off the lake and burnishing auburn in Ellis’s hair. I let her walk in front of me. It’s not that I don’t trust her; I just feel better when I can keep my eyes on the gun.

“I saw a few traps out here last time. Watch your step,” Ellis says as we step into the shadow of the woods, her rifle cradled in the crook of one elbow.

My gaze tracks the ground, but all I see is dead leaves.

Ellis had told me, as we set out from the church, that our first goal was to cover as much ground as possible. Apparently coyotes move quickly and don’t often linger in one place for long—and in the woods, our call won’t travel far. We won’t spend more than ten or fifteen minutes in any one position before moving on.

We don’t speak much once the trees have closed behind us. Silence reigns, broken only by the chattering of birds as we move beneath their nests. I feel the cold more completely now that we’re in shadow. I clench my hands in their leather gloves and pull my scarf tighter around my neck. Ellis’s cheeks are flushed, the only sign she feels the same.

We’ve been out for twenty minutes or so when Ellis stops all of a sudden, reaching one hand back to catch my arm. She gestures, and I look.

Tracks in the dirt: fat paw prints with widely spaced toes, perfect enough to publish in a textbook. We’ve found the coyote’s hunting territory. Ellis shoots me a quick grin, her face half shadowed under the brim of her flat cap, and starts off along the trail.

The forest falls quieter the deeper we go. The birds no longer signal our arrival; perhaps they sense the presence of a greater predator than us. The shadows thicken, stretching out like slim fingers, then lacing together until their shade rises like tidewater underfoot. I keep my gaze on Ellis’s back; her shoulder blades shift visibly beneath her jacket, and for some reason I can’t stop staring at them, the slow steady movement of her body through the brush.

Or maybe it’s not that I can’t stop watching Ellis. I find myself wary of looking away, certain that if I turn my eyes out toward the forest I’d find something else gazing back at me.

“Wait,” Ellis says, throwing out one arm. I almost run into her but stop myself just in time.

“What is it?” I ask, but she doesn’t need to answer—I see it a split second later.

Past where Ellis stands, about ten feet away and half concealed by the shadow of a fallen log, lies the mess of a kill.

A deer, I think, although it somehow seems too massive to be a deer, white bones gleaming where they thrust spearlike from the gore of tattered flesh and organ. Here and there the remnants of tawny fur ripple in the slow breeze.

It’s grotesque. I take a half step closer, the scent of blood like copper in the air. Ellis doesn’t hold me back, but she does lift her gun up to her shoulder, ready if anything should dart out from between the trees.

Near the carcass, the rotting leaves are slick and almost mushy underfoot. The corpse is a deer’s, as it turns out—the antlers fractured and useless, one black eye staring sightlessly toward the dusk sky.

“Can coyotes do that?” I breathe.

“Maybe,” Ellis says. “But this is probably a wolf kill.” Her fingers press against the back of my neck. They’re gloved, but it’s still enough to send a soft shiver rolling down my spine. “How long ago do you think it died?”

I crouch down in the bracken and take off my gloves to trail bare fingers along the deer’s flank. The fur is cool, but my hand comes away sticky.

I turn and show her. “The blood’s still warm.”

“Less than ten hours, then,” she says. “Be careful. Wolves might still be in the area.”

The air feels thinner as we move on. I don’t glance behind me. I know I should be afraid of the wolf, or wolves, that killed that deer, but instead my mind keeps circling the memory of Alex’s ghost in the woods, a slim white figure darting between shadows. As certain as I’d felt earlier tonight that she wasn’t here, it’s harder to believe that as the forest darkens. Even the branches seem to take on new form, like bony fingers reaching for flesh.

I straighten my shoulders and keep my gaze ahead. I want to seem ready. I can’t afford to show fear where Ellis can see.

“We should try now,” Ellis says after we’ve walked another five minutes past the kill site. “I’ll set up the call.”

We kneel down in a cradle of oak roots, close enough that our shoulders brush; I feel it every time Ellis breathes. We’ve placed the call fifteen feet away, a tiny electronic speaker that plays the sound of a rabbit in distress—squealing, screaming for mercy.

The way Ellis’s rabbit might have squealed when Ellis wrung its neck.

I glance sidelong at her, quick and surreptitious, but if she is thinking about that winter it doesn’t show on her face.

We stay there, frozen still, until my legs start to ache and my body goes cold. The dark pitches deeper now—my eyes adjust slowly—and the frozen ground is hard against my knees.

The recorded rabbit screeches, a terrible sound that tightens something in my gut like a twisting wire. The sound goes on and on and on, until that’s all I can hear. Not even my own breath, not even my heartbeat.