“The body was found on an altar. None of the accounts dispute that fact.”
Ellis shrugs. “Sure. But that doesn’t mean the magic was real. Just that Margery wanted to make it look like it was real.”
The explanation feels half-baked to me. I can’t put my finger on why at first, but then: “We’ve gotten to the part of your method writing where you need to kill something?”
But Ellis just smiles and shakes her head. “Not remotely. You already heard I killed that rabbit, after all. This is for you, Felicity. This is the central part of the Dalloway story, as close to the heart of the so-called witches as you can get. But you don’t have to perform a ritual to pull a trigger.”
“I know that,” I snap.
“Knowing isn’t the same thing as knowing. You know up here.” Ellis taps her temple with one finger. “But you don’t know in here.” She presses that same hand over her chest. “You’ve tied those girls to magic so closely in your head that the knots will never unravel on their own. That’s why we’re doing this, Felicity—that’s the whole point of the Night Migrations. You need to walk in their shoes without magic. You need to see them as humans: as fallible and impulsive and mundane as anybody else.”
Maybe she’s right. She’s been right about enough so far. So much of this has been in my head, the product of fear and some kind of chemical imbalance in my brain. I’m not sure I want to see the Dalloway witches as human, though. I want them to be like me.
But when Ellis starts off toward the woods, I follow.
According to her, coyotes are best hunted in the last hours of daylight. The sun is already dipping low toward the horizon by the time we step under tree cover, the gold light glinting off the lake and burnishing auburn in Ellis’s hair. I let her walk in front of me. It’s not that I don’t trust her; I just feel better when I can keep my eyes on the gun.
“I saw a few traps out here last time. Watch your step,” Ellis says as we step into the shadow of the woods, her rifle cradled in the crook of one elbow.
My gaze tracks the ground, but all I see is dead leaves.
Ellis had told me, as we set out from the church, that our first goal was to cover as much ground as possible. Apparently coyotes move quickly and don’t often linger in one place for long—and in the woods, our call won’t travel far. We won’t spend more than ten or fifteen minutes in any one position before moving on.
We don’t speak much once the trees have closed behind us. Silence reigns, broken only by the chattering of birds as we move beneath their nests. I feel the cold more completely now that we’re in shadow. I clench my hands in their leather gloves and pull my scarf tighter around my neck. Ellis’s cheeks are flushed, the only sign she feels the same.
We’ve been out for twenty minutes or so when Ellis stops all of a sudden, reaching one hand back to catch my arm. She gestures, and I look.
Tracks in the dirt: fat paw prints with widely spaced toes, perfect enough to publish in a textbook. We’ve found the coyote’s hunting territory. Ellis shoots me a quick grin, her face half shadowed under the brim of her flat cap, and starts off along the trail.
The forest falls quieter the deeper we go. The birds no longer signal our arrival; perhaps they sense the presence of a greater predator than us. The shadows thicken, stretching out like slim fingers, then lacing together until their shade rises like tidewater underfoot. I keep my gaze on Ellis’s back; her shoulder blades shift visibly beneath her jacket, and for some reason I can’t stop staring at them, the slow steady movement of her body through the brush.
Or maybe it’s not that I can’t stop watching Ellis. I find myself wary of looking away, certain that if I turn my eyes out toward the forest I’d find something else gazing back at me.
“Wait,” Ellis says, throwing out one arm. I almost run into her but stop myself just in time.
“What is it?” I ask, but she doesn’t need to answer—I see it a split second later.
Past where Ellis stands, about ten feet away and half concealed by the shadow of a fallen log, lies the mess of a kill.
A deer, I think, although it somehow seems too massive to be a deer, white bones gleaming where they thrust spearlike from the gore of tattered flesh and organ. Here and there the remnants of tawny fur ripple in the slow breeze.
It’s grotesque. I take a half step closer, the scent of blood like copper in the air. Ellis doesn’t hold me back, but she does lift her gun up to her shoulder, ready if anything should dart out from between the trees.