I want to believe the twitch at the corner of her mouth is a sign her resolve is softening, that the deep breath she takes means I am getting through to her.
“What choice do I have?” she finally replies.
I exhale and head for the door. “I’ll be back,” I tell her. “Just sit tight.”
“Piers,” she calls.
I glance back.
“Hunt well.”
The last thing I see before locking the door behind me is the wry smile crowning her face, savage and proud.
THECROWLAKEtrail was Regis’s idea. It isn’t a big tourist draw, thanks to it being a flat hike less than four miles long and bordering one of the smaller lakes. Anyone visiting the mountains will head for the myriad Instagrammable options that pepper thisregion like buckshot. They’ll probably never even notice Crow Lake on their map. But that’s why it’s perfect for him. It’s the kind of quiet, easy, out-of-the-way spot he loves. That, and it’s close to me. Taking Kathy Miller in the back parking lot of a local bar was unadvisedly risky, out of character, but that’s my fault. He’s stalking me like a heat-seeking missile. Regis thinks, given the chance, he’d gladly keep to the recesses, the cover of wilderness. He just needs the two to come together. Me and this morning, this trail, are precisely that moment.
Of course, he doesn’t know I’m the one he wants, the one with the power to silence Aunt Esther’s laughter in his mind—he thinks.In a way, he’s right. I have every intention of shutting Aunt Esther up for him, just not in the way he’s expecting. But I can’t do that if I can’t figure out who he is. Hunting a ghost is proving impossible, and the last thing I need is another man like Henry getting the jump on me. I’m petrified to face him, after everything Henry put me through. Looking a darker, more mature version of my husband in the eye is not my idea of a pleasant afternoon. But I’m tired of waiting for him to show up for coffee and a waffle while other women, better women, die.
I make my way down the silent slip of trail between the trees, sniffling, wiping my nose hastily with the back of my hand. “Regis?” I whisper, but there’s no response. I’m early, I realize. I shouldn’t be here for another thirty minutes. The fight with Myrtle sent me springing this way too soon, before I’d checked the time, before I’d even fed. In response, my stomach gurgles, a searing hunger awakening in me. I swallow it down.
He feels close, so close, closer than he’s ever been. He’s coming for me. I can feel his pulse quickening at the notion, at his nearness. A flash of leaves and limbs crosses behind my eyes. He’s out here somewhere, stalking. My allure must be working on overdrive thanks to Regis’s good luck charm. I reach into my pocket and feel for it, pull it out to make sure it’s there, silky inside my fist—the green-winged teal feather. The only thing we have that the Strangler has touched. It ties me to him like electric wire. Ifeel his presence in it, humming, and my body—no, mymagic—responds with a crackle inside me. As if the man himself is touching me.
I think of Myrtle locked in her cabin, tied to her couch, and grimace. This feather is probably as much to blame as anything else for my reaction to our quarrel. My whole body is on high alert, senses sharpened to a razor edge, radiating with the need for action. It’s unthinkable to have hit her with that oar, to have made her a hostage in her own home. I remind myself that I acted out of desperation, that when I left she was rooting for me, and I can fix everything. With the Strangler dead, the venery will be happy, and Myrtle will be safe. I’ll send Regis away. I’ll talk sense into Myrtle. I’ll make them all see.
But I can’t do what I came here to do if I don’t feed. I need to forage something toxic off this trail before Regis gets here, or worse, the Strangler. I sit on the bench facing the lake and stare out across the surface of the water, smooth and contained like a spill, watching the ducks on the other side. I probably walked half a mile already. I could keep going, but I’m not stupid. Getting too far in, too isolated before Regis is here to back me up, would only put me in peril. I don’t want to give our common foe any ideas, not before I’ve fed.
A smell, musty and sour, finds me like the steam coming off a fresh-baked pie. I practically drool in my lap and twist around trying to locate it. When I can’t see the source, I get up and stumble blindly into the trees, pushing switches out of my way as I scour the earth like a chicken looking for worms. The lake shines through the brush to my right, but its beauty is lost on me. Even my original intention in coming here, the plan I had with Regis, shifts, relegated to a place of lesser importance. We were supposed to meet at the trailhead. But only one thought consumes me now—finding the source of that heavenly smell.
I am close to giving up when I spot the red cap through the moss, winging up like a saucer of blood, stemmed in white. I fall to my knees before it and breathe deep. It takes all my self-controlnot to bend down and lick the cap like a Popsicle. It’s another sickener mushroom—Russula emetica—known for its nauseating effects on the stomach of anyone foolish enough to eat one. Not typically deadly, but my nose tells me it would be in my system, that my magic would heighten its effects with such acuity my mark would be dead in a matter of hours. I’d prefer something fast acting, but beggars cannot be choosers, and I can’t resist the cravings anymore. I pluck the mushroom from the ground and hold it under my nose, then take my first bite. Everything inside me dilates—my veins, my pupils, my chakras. I feel a charge of energy course through me, hot and cold at once, and I chew greedily, swallowing before I am finished so I can rush into another bite.
This is different from the feedings of my childhood, lazy summer nights under the moon. This is ecstasy, the rush of a divine high. I lose all sense of time and place, the lake fading to nothing, the trees stretching to oblivion. I nearly forget myself, the Piers I am used to less important, less significant than the witch inside me, the drop of faery blood I carry far outmatching the gallon of my own. I merge with the mushroom, with the forest, with the magic. Cells and roots and streams all running into each other like lengths of yarn, knitting into a landscape, unrecognizable but achingly familiar, here and nowhere. There is only this feeling and its source and the hunt it calls me to.
When the last bite is swallowed, I scatter the leaves searching for another. There has to bemore.That is what I’m here for. That is what I want. And then something swells in me, like air, a life force, and I am lifted from the ground, buzzing inside with a kind of desire I’ve never known before, as wanton as sex, as vital as thirst. He feels so close now, so near, that he’s practically inside me. I crush the feather in my pocket.Come,my soul sings to him, my destiny, my allure.Come now.
I’m getting to my feet, brushing off my knees, when I hear a crunch. I spin and duck, crouching low as an animal, peering through the brush to see a pair of legs walk briskly by, a long hiker’s pole beside them. My nightmare lances through me, of thehiker who was Henry, and I recall Regis telling me the Strangler uses a stick of some kind to control his victims in their bind, tightening the garrote until they perish. A hiking stick, I realize, would make a sturdy, inconspicuous choice.
I tumble forward, trying not to make too much noise, until I am squarely on the trail. But the man is already paces ahead and not slowing down. A burn rips me from lip to loin, and I nearly groan as I stumble forward, increasing my speed until I am matching him step for step. He’s tall, but not large, the right build. His arms are pale and thin, sleeves short even in the brisk cool. They aren’t explicitly hairy, another tip-off, and the hair on his head is short, hidden under a wool beanie. Wool is fibrous, a choice that could shed evidence, but our killer takes his time, cleaning up at the scene. He doesn’t move like an inexperienced hiker, but then again, this trail is easy on a bad day. There is a wedding band on one hand. Does our killer have a wife? Not likely. Though it would make a perfect ruse.
I speed up, not wanting to lose him. But I misjudge my steps and soon I’m practically breathing down his neck. He doesn’t seem to notice. My heat, my steps, magically cloaked even in his proximity. Another flash of forest flickers behind my eyes, the sweet relief he feels at being so close, but it confuses me, like an image laid over this one, not quite syncing up. I take a deep breath, but only smell tobacco and citrus, the notes of a lingering deodorant or body spray instead of the stench of death, the iron tang of blood, the sweet croon of rot. I cool inside, the intensity ebbing, the high of my feed dropping like a fever in an ice bath. For a moment, I can’t understand it. The sensation disorients me, brings me back to where I am,whoI am. Regis… I was supposed to meet Regis. But the sickener courses through me, and the man ahead is so close. My dream looms large in the forest beside me, everything such a perfect match, from his shirt to his pace to the tip of his hiking pole. That can’t have been coincidence. I have to know.
I am reaching out when I hear his voice shout, “Acacia! No!”
Regis, I become aware, is behind me. This is all wrong. I was supposed to wait for him. To pick a place inside the trees—a bench—where he could lie low, keep a visual on me, have his gun ready in case. We were supposed to do this together. But I botched it.
Myrtle…Oh, Myrtle. Please forgive me.
I want to turn to him, to apologize, to explain, but the man is right in front of me, and my fingers are inches from contact, and I canfeelthe Strangler like a second skin intersecting with my own. This must be him.
“Piers!” I hear Regis call as I clamp down on the man’s shoulder. The touch… The touch should tell me everything. But it is empty, like gripping sand. It runs through my fingers, this moment, and vanishes.
This isn’t right.
Henry.His name is like a beat of my heart. Just one, the last, before he gets his happy ending.
He spins around, and my other arm raises instinctively to block the blow from the pole, but it is a blow that does not come. The man’s face is wrong. It is not Henry’s, not long and pale and taut with hate. And even though I’ve never seen the Saranac Strangler, it is not his either—I know this to be true. His five-o’clock shadow and bushy eyebrows don’t add up, the streaks of gray in his mustache, the panicked bulge of his eyes, the flare of his nostrils. He looks stricken, as though I’ve beat him, taken my fist to his face instead of grabbing his shoulder. He is afraid, I register a second later. Ofme.
Suddenly Regis is beside me, his gun gripped with two hands, his legs powerfully spread.
The man nearly swoons with fear. “P-p-please, don’t shoot. Don’t hurt me!” He pulls his wallet from a pocket and tosses it at my feet. “Take whatever you want. Take it all! I have a wife, a family.”
