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’msureI 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.
Ellis’s lips curve into a frown. “Are you all right?” she says, a softer edge rounding her tone. Her gloved hand tilts my chin up so that I have to meet her gaze. “Felicity. Tell me you’re okay.”
The darkness around us is now absolute. I can barely make out Ellis’s features, can’t even tell the color of her eyes. They’re pale like glass butalive,flickering with light. Or maybe I’m just dizzy, exhausted, half-frozen. She cups my cheek.
I exhale. My breath shudders out of me to cloud in the wintry air. “I’m okay.”
“Are you sure?”
I nod. Ellis’s teeth catch her lower lip for a moment, but then she stands, offering a hand to pull me up. She tugs me away from the coyote’s carcass and into a streak of moonlight that filters through the forest canopy.
I must be mad, truly mad—as if killing that coyote knocked my brain off-kilter—because I find myself deliriously thinking how beautiful Ellis is. Her skin is pewter in this light, all her color reduced to myriad shades of gray, like a black-and-white photo given life.
“I can’t believe I killed it,” I say.
“I can’t believe you killed it, either,” Ellis admits. Her hand is on my waist, steadying me as I stagger over fallen branches. “You didn’t have to.”
“I had to.” I don’t know how to explain it to her, not fully. I don’t even know how to explain it to myself. But I couldn’t…After everything, after the story Quinn told me about Ellis and her rabbit…I couldn’t let her pull the trigger. I couldn’t make her do that again.
Or maybe I just needed to know if I was capable of it. If I had that dark streak inside me, running black and cold enough to take a life.
It turns out I do.
“Come on,” Ellis says. She laces her fingers together with mine. “Let’s go back.”
I don’t remember much of the trip out of the woods and up to the house.
What I do remember is Ellis’s hand gripping mine the entire time, the taste of sweat on my lips. The common room light is on when we ascend from the garden up to the house proper, but we evade Quinn entirely. Instead Ellis takes the steps two at a time; I go behind like a pale shadow, my bared hand cold as it trails along the banister.
She goes to her room, and I follow.
