Chapter 2 #2
He plunged me into the pond. It would’ve been kinder for my head to hit a rock, but there was nothing beneath me except cold mud and silt.
We were still in the shallows, and it seemed impossible that I would drown when there was barely an inch of water over my face.
I could still see his lips pulled back over his teeth and the lines of furious tension in his brow. The sky and the air were so near.
I am not the one who should die, I thought. The prey dies.
I kicked with all my strength. I tore his wrists apart until I could taste the copper of his blood in the water. I screamed a wordless, banshee scream of rage.
But my strength and my violence and my screams were not enough. When I opened my mouth again, there were no bubbles. The water itself turned black, and I no longer felt the nearness of the air or the cold mud beneath my head.
I would do anything to live, I thought. I was desperate, and the devil heard me.
When I awoke the morning after Mabon, it was still dark, and my head ached from the wine.
I went to the bathroom, splashed cool water over my dry eyes, and scrubbed myself with a washcloth until my neck was raw and red.
It had been decades since I allowed a man to put his hands on me, and yet I couldn’t slough off the feeling of weakness.
I found myself needing a change of scenery and some distance from my own house.
The sun was just starting to come up as I left.
There was not even dew this morning, and the late-flowering plants were a riot of desperate, glorious color even as their leaves curled in the heat.
It was deceiving, this last gasp before the long sleep; if I hadn’t known what was coming, I might have thought it a second spring.
I drove partway down the long hill into the valley, but turned off before I reached the bottom, where I would’ve found the little knot of houses and stores that made up Burrsville proper.
Instead, I stuck to the back roads, passing farms and hunting cabins, anonymous little shacks and dilapidated remains—places that would’ve never seen an animal control officer if I hadn’t driven by.
I didn’t know how common it was for wildlife rehabilitators to serve as animal control, but I did know how common it was for people to conflate them.
There was no overlap in the licensing, and in most places, animal control dealt mostly with domestic animals.
Here, though, there was only me, and with my particular skill set, I’d found the two professions complemented nicely.
I drove deeper into the hills. I knew by heart where the Burrsville boundary line was, and at its southernmost point was one of the old, massive roses that served as my wards.
The ancient rambler was out of bloom at that point, and the abandoned grain silo that supported it was barely visible beneath the clusters of glossy leaves and rosehips.
It had been months since I had tended to it, and I pulled into the long-unused driveway that ran to the silo, the tires finding the old ruts like tracks.
As I closed the door behind me, a long string of geese trailed overhead. A breeze stirred my hair, cooling the sweat on the back of my neck, and brought me the scent of hot, dry earth and the rich wood rot of the crumbling silo. The rose rustled as if in greeting.
In the summer, the rose was a mass of ballerina pink, and the wind carried its scent for miles. Now it dripped with crimson rosehips, and I reached out to brush my thumb over the shining surface of a single one. The strange, spiderlike remains of the bloom’s sepals tickled my fingers.
My choice of roses to anchor and amplify my magic—rather than trees hundreds of years older—might seem strange to another witch, but here at the roots of the Appalachian Mountains, the land had a mind and power of its own, and that included the trees.
At the beginning, I had tried to coax the most ancient beeches and oaks into my service, but their cooperation was erratic at best. Reaching out to them was unnerving, grown deep as they were in soil and rock that was half as old as time itself; always I sensed that I touched the edges of some great, unknowable thing.
These roses I had raised from the tiniest cuttings, as close to me as sisters, and when I called, they answered without fail.
Out of long habit, I checked the rose for signs of disease and pruned back any rubbing canes. Some of the leaves were tinged with yellow, and they felt papery and dry. The soil at the base crumbled to dust in my fingers. We needed rain.
“Soon,” I promised the rose.
I returned to the truck and drove on, taking the seasonal tracks into the loneliest corners of the town.
This part of Burrsville looked like it barely belonged to civilization.
The only human structure within a mile of my rose’s silo was a double-wide with tarp covering half the roof, dozens of bags of bottles and cans heaped up on the porch.
The next one was a squat, wooden building, unpainted so I nearly missed it in the trees, with a single neon word in its lone window: Beer.
Inexplicably, there were already half a dozen motorcycles parked in front of it.
It was hard to say I loved Burrsville when its people so often irritated and confused me, but it wasn’t a matter of love, not really.
It wasn’t even that my body was anchored to the pond where I’d left my soul behind—although that was true enough.
Burrsville had grown roots in me, and I in it, and with each decade that passed, those roots grew thicker and more tangled.
I hated and loved the place, as I hated and loved myself, and I had long ago accepted the contours of these ancient, glacial slopes as my own boundaries. I could not exist without it.
A dark shape appeared on the road in front of me, breaking me from my reverie.
I pulled over, yanked on my gloves, and grabbed my shovel and contractor bag out of the back.
When most people thought of animal control, they probably imagined dramatic rescues of abused dogs or raids on cat hoarders’ homes.
In reality, that almost never happened, and a far bigger part of my job was picking up roadkill.
As I approached, I saw this one was at least a couple days old.
It was a possum, once, struck by a car and then run over a few more times, all the color gone out of the flattened organs, the blood cooked to a dark stain on the old asphalt by the unrelenting sun.
These ones weren’t so bad; they scooped up easily on a flat shovel, and almost no part of them was recognizable as something that was once alive. Others were harder.
The sun was beginning to gain height through the trees, and I knew I’d need to head back soon for the next round of feeding, but I went on a little longer.
I collected the remains of a raccoon, then another possum.
Neither of them was usable either, but as I neared the bottom of the valley, I found her.
Only her hind legs were on the shoulder of the road, which meant I could, if I wanted to, leave her—she wasn’t obstructing traffic, and there wasn’t a house as far as I could see, which meant no one to complain about the stink or the unsightliness.
But something drew me to pull the truck over and lured me out of the safety of the cab.
The smell was the first thing I noticed; it wasn’t yet the stench of rot, but the copper-and-earth smell of fresh blood and deep-body organs. In the unseasonable heat, it seemed to cling to the air, coating my teeth and tongue.
The second thing was the silence. That was what made me pause, made the hair prick up on the back of my neck.
There was no sound at all: not the near-constant squabble of starlings that I’d learned to tune out, not the faraway growl of a lawnmower, not the rustle of treetop leaves in the gentle air currents.
I felt for my magic intuitively, wondering if this place was still under my influence, and yes, it was there, a humming silver thread in my mind.
I set my shoulders and approached the body, the gentle scrape of my boots on gravel sounding like trespass in the otherwise immovable silence.
At first I thought I must be imagining the smell, because the long, golden-brown line of her back was whole and unmarred.
Coyotes and other predators usually ate from the hind end, as it was dense with muscle and fat, but everything, from her white-bottomed tail to the tips of her long, graceful ears, looked intact.
I glanced up and down the corridor of trees, not sure what I was looking for but unable to shake the feeling of wrongness. There were still no signs of life, implicit or actual; not so much as a mailbox or the shadow of a bird winging overhead.
I returned my attention to the body, studying the limp stretch of the legs behind her, the position of the neck.
That’s what killed her, I thought, noting the angle of the neck, the uneven surface in the fur that indicated bones trying to poke through.
Probably hit the side of a car and rolled over the top.
That, however, didn’t explain the smell. I walked around the body, stepping off the shoulder of the road and into the tall grass to get a better look.
The doe’s stomach was blown open, a ragged hole gaping in her soft white belly.
Shreds of flesh hung from the wound, and the grass before it was trampled down, wet and shining with pinkish tissue.
Gray loops of entrails bulged in the gap, whether pulled or pressed there by their own weight, I didn’t know.
And away through the grass, down into the ditch and then back up before disappearing into the woods, crawled a narrow trail of slick, gleaming fluid.