She shakes my arm. “Listen to me. He is not killing because of you. He would be doing that anyway. He is only killingherebecause of you. Which is fortunate, whether you’re smart enough to see it or not.” She lets go of me, certain I won’t stalk off again. “You wouldn’t even know where to find him.”
Part of my bottom lip sucks in. I pick at a spot of lichen on the slender trunk next to me.
She steps so close I feel her breath on my face. The stale coffee of the café. I suddenly long for its warm, orange lights and cedar tables. “Would you?”
“Something…happened,” I admit. I tell her about being at Beth Ann’s place, leaving Regis out of it.
She grips her elbows, walks a few steps away. With her back to me, she says, “The hunt has begun, then.”
“So, I’ll be okay? I mean, with your guidance I can get him before the venery comes for me, right?”
She turns to me. “He’s dangerous, Piers. Practiced. Experienced in ways that you aren’t. This isn’t Henry, the man you left behind. This is Henry ten, twenty years from now. A man who’s gone from toying to executing. Who has made killing his life’s work. A master ofle jeu sombre, the dark game.He won’t be easy to take down. Not in six weeks, not in a year.”
I peer at her. “You don’t believe I can do it.”
“I don’t believe anyone else can,” she replies.
Suddenly Bart comes crashing through the darkness, tearing up the earth as he lopes toward us. There’s a fresh scratch on his face beneath one eye, a new battle scar from a match with a fox or a raccoon. He grins from ear to ear, tongue lolling, unaware he is the loser.
Myrtle reaches down to rub his head. “What mischief have you been up to, huh? Come on, Ed’ll have a coronary if I let anything happen to you.” She turns to go, the dog at her heels.
“Myrtle!”
She stops and angles toward me, face hidden behind her hair.
“If you’re right, if my allure called Henry to me, but I didn’t know it, then what happens now?”
Her face turns to me slowly, the dark curtain of hair hiding one eye.
“Will it call him again?” My heart is peppering my chest with adrenaline, pumping panic through my veins. The idea of Henry in these woods frightens me more than the Strangler ever could, and that’s already turning my guts to jelly. It would make no sense to someone else, but IknowHenry. The way the Strangler kills is clean, orderly, violent but efficient. Henry is not interested inefficiency. Henry likes to draw it out. He lives for the suffering. Maybe he hasn’t taken the final step to committing murder like the Strangler has, but what lives in him is even darker, deadlier. I’ve seen it.
“I don’t know,” she says. “We’ve never had a witch spare a mark before.”
22Feeding
I hear her in the night, scratching like a rat through the kitchen cabinetry. At first, I try to roll over and ignore it, but after a couple of softly muttered curses, I throw the covers back and walk to the kitchen. When I flip on the light, she blinks at me like a wide-eyed baby doll, all lashes and surprise.
“What are you doing up?”
“I was going to ask you the same thing.” I take in the room, every cabinet door standing open, the fridge light spilling onto the floor as condiment bottles begin to sweat. Her long nightshirt in blue and green plaid sags forward from bending over. Her braid has begun unraveling. “Looking for something?”
She purses her lips.
“In the dark?”
She turns away, contemplating how much to tell me. Finally, she says, “Poet’s daffodil. Azalea brought me some bulbs when she came for the conclave, but I can’t remember where I put them.” Her shoulders hang off her spine in despair. “I must have left them in the shelter.” Her eyes dart to the windows, thick with night.
I close the refrigerator unceremoniously. “You’re feeding.” It hits me like a splash of lemon in a cut, the sting of truth, of knowing that she is more than the kind old woman who’s taken me in, the granny in the woods. She is deadly. She has killed and will kill again.
She watches me close each cabinet door, resignation lowering over her like a theater curtain. “Yes.”
“Since when?” I sit at the little table.
“I first felt the hunger this morning,” she admits.
I nod. “Our lesson in the woods, that wasn’t for my benefit, then?”
She sighs, a world of feeling slipping out on her exhale. “Yes, of course. But also, I was searching.”
