“I’m tired, Mam,” he returned. His ribs had healed, but not his heart.
“You still angry?” she asked, as she did most days.
“More like … jealous,” he said, voice gravely serious. “Bridget said you got super-strength. Will I get that, too?”
“Shh! I’m putting my babes to sleep,” Feral reprimanded from his spot by the fire.
“I am stronger than I was before,” whispered Vern. “So strong I don’t know what to do with it.”
“How do I know you won’t crush me again?” Howling asked, curious, not afraid, his concern appearing to be predominantly intellectual.
“Because I been practicing.” Daily, she went outside and explored the ranges and forms of her new body. Gogo threw volleyballs at her. At first Vern couldn’t catch them without smashing all the air out of them, busting the hide. Now she could, but it took all her concentration. Soon it would become second nature to have a light hand.
“And you don’t got to get near me if you don’t want to,” said Vern. “No hugs. No holding hands. No kisses. No nuzzles.”
“But I like all those things.”
“Then we can do it. And I will be careful. I promise.”
Howling got up to play with his sibling. He was the Gogo to Feral’s Mam. His words.
Vern wanted to live in this scene forever, to suspend herself in its quiet glory, so unlike the rest of her life, but already the moment was ruined. A shadow crossed the room, ephemeral and large. It swallowed the room with its mass.
Vern saw the edge of a haunting, a creature twisted as vine. It was the antlered beast. The mirror of Vern’s future.
It spoke a promise. “Found you, Vern,” it said, and laughed.
It wasn’t long before Vern heard the rumble of an engine.
PART THREE
KINGDOM ANIMALIA
21
VERN RAIDED THE KITCHEN drawers and gave her children two knives each. “Strike without hesitation,” she said. Carrying the children on either side of her hips, she ran to Bridget’s bedroom. She lifted Howling to the shelf at the top of the closet inside, then Feral. “Here!” she said, handing them blankets to cover themselves.
“Who’s coming, Mam?” asked Feral.
“Shh!’ said Howling, already in hiding mode.
“Listen to Howl,” Vern said. “Be quiet. Don’t say nothing, nothing, unless you hear me, okay? Or Bridget, Gogo. Nobody else. Promise it. Now.”
“Promise,” whispered Feral.
“Promise,” said Howling.
When they were obscured under the blankets and out of sight at the top of the closet, Vern shut the door and ran to Gogo’s room, rolling under the bed. She pulled herself up to the underside and clung so no one would see if they casually glanced under.
“Calm,” she whispered to herself, “be fucking calm, you foolish girl.”
Eyes squeezed shut, she waited. The hum of the engine increased, then stopped altogether. A car door slammed.
Don’t fuck this up, don’t fuck this up, Vern mouthed. She was stronger and faster than anybody knew. She would destroy them, if need be.
Vern opened her eyes at the sound of a knock on the door. She hadn’t thought these the kind of folks to ask before entering. Found you, the creature had said. Who had it sent after her? Vern’s heart sped as the raps continued, her teeth fastened into her bottom lip to force herself quiet.
Somewhere, glass broke. A window? Next, footsteps. Whoever it was must’ve thought nobody was home. Neither Gogo’s nor Bridget’s trucks were outside.
“Heel,” a woman said quietly, calmly, in a Southern accent, and Vern dug her fingers harder into the metal underside of the bed frame. “I said heel.”
Vern’s skin erupted in goose pimples as she listened for the hound the intruder was ordering around—the tapping of nails against the wood floor or heavy panting—but the only sound beyond the stranger herself was a rasping. Someone drawing labored breaths through a throat ravaged by sickness.
“You feel her?” the intruder asked from the living room.
Growling erupted from the intruder’s companion, an animal Vern could not identify by sound.
Vern’s head pulsed, bloated by an influx of images. Though her eyes were still slammed shut under the bed, she could see. A room. A sofa. A rocking chair. A woodstove. She was seeing the inside of the cabin’s living room through another’s eyes.
The beastly husk of the intruder’s animal increased in volume until Vern could swear she felt it against her ear, a claw scraping the skin.