Near the carcass, the rotting leaves are slick and almost mushy underfoot. The corpse is a deer’s, as it turns out—the antlers fractured and useless, one black eye staring sightlessly toward the dusk sky.
“Can coyotes do that?” I breathe.
“Maybe,” Ellis says. “But this is probably a wolf kill.” Her fingers press against the back of my neck. They’re gloved, but it’s still enough to send a soft shiver rolling down my spine. “How long ago do you think it died?”
I crouch down in the bracken and take off my gloves to trail bare fingers along the deer’s flank. The fur is cool, but my hand comes away sticky.
I turn and show her. “The blood’s still warm.”
“Less than ten hours, then,” she says. “Be careful. Wolves might still be in the area.”
The air feels thinner as we move on. I don’t glance behind me. I know I should be afraid of the wolf, or wolves, that killed that deer, but instead my mind keeps circling the memory of Alex’s ghost in the woods, a slim white figure darting between shadows. As certain as I’d felt earlier tonight that she wasn’t here, it’s harder to believe that as the forest darkens. Even the branches seem to take on new form, like bony fingers reaching for flesh.
I straighten my shoulders and keep my gaze ahead. I want to seem ready. I can’t afford to show fear where Ellis can see.
“We should try now,” Ellis says after we’ve walked another five minutes past the kill site. “I’ll set up the call.”
We kneel down in a cradle of oak roots, close enough that our shoulders brush; I feel it every time Ellis breathes. We’ve placed the call fifteen feet away, a tiny electronic speaker that plays the sound of a rabbit in distress—squealing, screaming for mercy.
The way Ellis’s rabbit might have squealed when Ellis wrung its neck.
I glance sidelong at her, quick and surreptitious, but if she is thinking about that winter it doesn’t show on her face.
We stay there, frozen still, until my legs start to ache and my body goes cold. The dark pitches deeper now—my eyes adjust slowly—and the frozen ground is hard against my knees.
The recorded rabbit screeches, a terrible sound that tightens something in my gut like a twisting wire. The sound goes on and on and on, until that’s all I can hear. Not even my own breath, not even my heartbeat.
Then I see it.
The coyote creeps in slow, padding across the fallen leaves in unnatural silence. Every couple of feet it pauses and glances around. At least twice I swear it sees us, those yellow eyes glinting through the shallow light and fixing right at the hollow of our tree.
Next to me Ellis doesn’t move, barely seems to breathe. Her finger is steady on the trigger.
I’m not the one who has to shoot the creature, but my hands are sweaty all the same. I stare through the shadow at the coyote as it sniffs at something on the ground: innocent, oblivious.
All at once I don’t want her to do it. I can’t let her.
“Ellis—”
She glances sidelong at me, one brow lifted. I extend my hand, and she hesitates, then gives me the gun.
It’s heavy against my shoulder, heavier than I expect. The grip of it is polished wood, chilly on my cheek as I brace the rifle and put the coyote in my crosshairs.
The creature still hasn’t noticed we’re here; it nudges its nose at a pile of leaves near the call, searching for its prey. I wet my lips and curl my finger around the trigger.
Ellis’s hand touches my shoulder, so lightly, a barely-there presence that nevertheless sends a shudder down my spine.
I shoot.
The crack of my gunshot ricochets off the watching woods, a flock of birds exploding from a nearby bush and scattering toward the sky. I startle and fall back against the tree trunk, the gun dropping into my lap as the coyote drops to the ground. Ellis loses her grip on me when I fall, but a grin sharpens her mouth—and in a moment she’s gone, moving forward across the decaying leaves. I’m frozen in place for several long seconds, the rifle’s kick still quaking through me—or so it feels like, at least. But then I force myself to my feet and clamber along behind her.
I won’t be weak. I can’t be afraid anymore.
The coyote’s still alive when we get to it. Its torso shudders with every breath, a black spot blooming quick on its fur. The eyes roll in their sockets, as if the beast thinks it can find escape from some quarter, might still have a chance at living.
Ellis braces her gun over one shoulder and inspects it critically. “That’s a kill shot,” she states at last. “It won’t live much longer.”