I yank her arm. “Myrtle. What’s your theory?”
“Your husband.” It comes out like a huff, like she’s pushed him through her nostrils.
“Henry?” I step back, wanting the shadows, the dapple of light, to camouflage me. As if speaking his name has brought him here, to this hallowed place, infecting it. “What does he have to do with any of this?”
She puts her hands out, trying to calm me, but her fingers spread like webs, and I flinch away. “Hear me out, Piers. What if you didn’t choose him? What if youcalledhim? What if your power, strong as it is, was still trying to work through the drugs and the ignorance? What if he was never supposed to be your husband but your mark?”
I grip the sides of my head, shaking it. It’s a thought I’ve already had, but when it arises it distorts everything I know. All my memories, my feelings, the suffering I endured. It somehow becomes worse,wrong,in a way I can’t tolerate. As if I did it to myself. “I don’t want to talk about this. I don’t want to talk abouthim.”
The trees elongate, suddenly menacing, beasts with leaves. The air gathers close, rushing into my mouth and nose, an invisible swarm of molecules. Why did I come here? This forest will suffocate me.
“It would mean your class is an uncommonly dangerous one. Not just domestic abusers—killers.” Her fingers clench the air. “Stranglers.”
There is a long pause between heartbeats where my chest flattens out like pie dough, something rolling over me. The feeling in the clearing at Beth Ann’s surfaces, foreign and familiar—his,mine—when the twig broke.
“Piers!” Myrtle is in front of me, shaking. “Are you all right? Piers?”
I realize I am clutching my chest, that I’ve stopped breathing. My eyes meet hers and I inhale. The woods stream into me, powerful and antiseptic like medicine. My lungs burn with life. “It’s me.”
She blinks, eyes round and bright like an owl. To our left, a flutter catches the air. A ruby-crowned kinglet alights nearby. His red patch makes him look scalped.
“It’s me,” I say, turning to her. “That’s why he’s here, isn’t it?”
“Who?”
But she knows. I see it written in the veins of her eye, gliding behind the fissures of her iris like a doe in a thicket.
“The Saranac Strangler.”
Her arms drop to her sides.
“I’m the reason Beth Ann is dead.” I have committed the venery’s ultimate sin. I have killed an innocent.
“No.” She puts her fingertips to my mouth. “No, you mustn’t say that. He was here. She was alone. It was too easy.”
“But he came for me? Didn’t he?Idrew him to Crow Lake. My allure.” There is a high-pitched buzz between my ears, the onset of tinnitus, like mosquitoes in the brain. For a second, I think I might pass out.
Myrtle toes the ground, looking everywhere but at me. She couldn’t act more guilty if she tried. “That’s my suspicion, yes. Your allure was probably working on him before you ever started eating pokeweed in Charleston, moving him in the direction you would take rather than the one you were in. It’s a funny thing—our magic. It often knows us better than we know ourselves.”
I feel Henry’s fingers curling around my throat, stripping me of the safety of the trees, the miles between us. The Strangler may be a different person, but he’s the same man I left behind. Andhe’s here.For me.My insides quake with panic. The longer he is here, the longer I endure him, our connection like twine laid across the forest, the closer Henry feels. I have a sudden urge to shake him off like a dog with a tick.
I hold out my hand. “Give me the yellow wart.”
“What? No.” The shock sits crooked on her face, like it doesn’t quite fit.
I tear off into the brush. I’ll find more.
“Where are you going?” She chases after me, plucking at my jacket. “Piers, stop!”
“I’m going to kill him.” It’s the only way I can be free. A hemlock branch palms me. I smell bracken, a break in the trees. Somewhere a marsh is idling, spotted with geese. I can sense it all. “Two birds with one stone. He can’t hurt anyone else because of me, and I’ll get the venery off my back.” And I won’t feel Henry’s shadow stretching across five states to persecute me.
She forces me around. “You’re not ready.”
“I have to be.” I can’t let another woman die in my place. I can’t let Henry win. Even if I’m terrified. I try to brush her off.
“Don’t be rash!” she hisses, her grip tightening like talons on my wrist. “You can’t let your fear guide you, Piers. Not anymore. You must let the witch guide you now. And the witch is fearless.She is power and she is cunning. She is instinctive, not impulsive.”
I inhale sharply, unsure if I can manage that.
