A Lesson in Vengeance(73)

Then I see it.

The coyote creeps in slow, padding across the fallen leaves in unnatural silence. Every couple of feet it pauses and glances around. At least twice I swear it sees us, those yellow eyes glinting through the shallow light and fixing right at the hollow of our tree.

Next to me Ellis doesn’t move, barely seems to breathe. Her finger is steady on the trigger.

I’m not the one who has to shoot the creature, but my hands are sweaty all the same. I stare through the shadow at the coyote as it sniffs at something on the ground: innocent, oblivious.

All at once I don’t want her to do it. I can’t let her.

“Ellis—”

She glances sidelong at me, one brow lifted. I extend my hand, and she hesitates, then gives me the gun.

It’s heavy against my shoulder, heavier than I expect. The grip of it is polished wood, chilly on my cheek as I brace the rifle and put the coyote in my crosshairs.

The creature still hasn’t noticed we’re here; it nudges its nose at a pile of leaves near the call, searching for its prey. I wet my lips and curl my finger around the trigger.

Ellis’s hand touches my shoulder, so lightly, a barely-there presence that nevertheless sends a shudder down my spine.

I shoot.

The crack of my gunshot ricochets off the watching woods, a flock of birds exploding from a nearby bush and scattering toward the sky. I startle and fall back against the tree trunk, the gun dropping into my lap as the coyote drops to the ground. Ellis loses her grip on me when I fall, but a grin sharpens her mouth—and in a moment she’s gone, moving forward across the decaying leaves. I’m frozen in place for several long seconds, the rifle’s kick still quaking through me—or so it feels like, at least. But then I force myself to my feet and clamber along behind her.

I won’t be weak. I can’t be afraid anymore.

The coyote’s still alive when we get to it. Its torso shudders with every breath, a black spot blooming quick on its fur. The eyes roll in their sockets, as if the beast thinks it can find escape from some quarter, might still have a chance at living.

Ellis braces her gun over one shoulder and inspects it critically. “That’s a kill shot,” she states at last. “It won’t live much longer.”

Up close, the coyote isn’t nearly as threatening as my imagination had made it out to be. It’s smaller than I expected, about the same size as Alex’s shepherd-husky mix and similar in features. Its black nose is almost delicate somehow, whiskers quivering as its breath starts to slow.

Ellis quivers too—a very slight tremor to her hands, detectable only because I notice everything about her. It’s so easy for Ellis to pretend disaffection, as if our childhood traumas don’t trickle like rainwater through the bricks of our lives. As if she doesn’t care.

But I know Ellis better than that now.

She crouches down next to the body and swipes her gloved fingers through the bloody mess at its chest. “Come here.”

I obey. What else is there to do but obey? And Ellis rises, one hand tipping my face toward the light as the other paints the coyote’s blood in a quick line across my cheek.

“It’s an old English tradition,” she says as I take in shallow breaths and fight the abrupt urge to touch my face. “For those new to the hunt.”

I grimace and wipe the blood off my cheek as soon as Ellis’s hand falls away. She laughs.

“What?” Ellis says. “Isn’t this the Dalloway way—all weird and bloody?”

“I’m sure I don’t know what you mean.”

She gives me a conspiratorial grin and tugs off one glove to lick her thumb. “You missed a spot.”

Her damp finger scrubs away the last of the blood, lingers perhaps a beat too long. I still feel her touch even after she moves away to examine the coyote again. Its eyes track her approach, half-lidded and half-alert. But already its pupils are clouding, its fangs matte and dull instead of slick with spit.

Nausea roils up in the back of my throat, and I turn away, retreating a safe distance to huddle down at the root of a sugar maple. I don’t know what Ellis is doing with the coyote’s body, and I don’t care. The gun lies discarded in the leaves, two feet to my left; overhead, the sky beyond the cover of trees is starry and vast. My world is a globe forty feet in diameter, spinning and spinning and spinning.

One would have thought Alex would have died on impact, after she fell from that cliff. But she didn’t. I stood there frozen for a long moment, watching her struggle, black lake water sluicing over her face and filling her mouth. And by the time I made it to the shore, she was already gone, her body sinking into the low current, her lungs heavy with fluid and dragging her down.

I know she died. But…

What if she hadn’t? What if she’d survived—half-drowned in the cold air, her bones shattered. Could she have dragged herself out of the water and away from the rocks, into the woods, still drunk? Would she have wandered through the dark, living off mushrooms and tree bark? Would she have stayed there, watching me, waiting for the chance at revenge?

Maybe what I think is her ghost isn’t that at all, but is instead some arcane shade of what Alex might have been, a zombie crawling through its half-life and seeking its creator.

“The coyote is dead,” Ellis says.

I look up. I hadn’t heard her coming back, but she’s here now, crouched on the ground in front of me. My whole body feels stiff and weak, as if I haven’t moved in years.