Chapter 12
Chapter
A hex bag had never failed me, and once I successfully placed it, I expected to feel elated, or perhaps at least satisfied, but instead, fear settled over me like a fever.
The risk of a hex bag was someone finding it, and once it started doing its work—whether it manifested as nightmares or hallucinations or sickness—people usually started looking for answers.
Even if they didn’t believe the craft had any power or know its exact intentions, it would never be mistaken for some innocent little charm.
I imagined Zeke pacing through his basement, wondering what I had been doing down there, and my stomach turned like earth before a plow.
My mother and grandmother had lived in fear, constantly watchful and wary of the moods and rumors of the town.
My grandfather died when my mother was not even a year old, and no sooner had he been buried than every farmer and banker and would-be landowner started to drop by, doffing their hats and leaning against the doorframe and trying to determine if my grandmother was more open to remarrying or selling the land.
My own father was gone before he ever knew I existed, a traveling insurance salesman whose route never took him through Burrsville again after that first and fateful time.
After I was born, the manner of men dropping by changed, becoming pastors and priests and any man who fancied himself a moral leader in the town, rapping loudly on the door to bluster about the inevitable result of having no man in the house and trying to intimidate my grandmother—and then, eventually, my mother—into selling the land.
They fended all of them off, through wine laced with potions or charms carved above the door lintel, all made more dangerous by the fact that the people at the time looked askance at a simple bunch of dried flowers.
Suspicions fueled by boredom spread like wildfire, and the sparks had to be stamped out quickly.
I had grown up steeped in their fear, but once I’d sold my soul to the devil, I became determined not to live the way they had. My mother forbade me from making the wards, but she was already weak and sick then, and I began the work behind her back. She still had her suspicions.
“It wouldn’t do what you want anyway,” she’d told me too many times to count, a blanket wrapped around her despite the summer heat, her cheeks sunken and her eyes hollow. “You can’t control a whole town.”
But I didn’t want to control the town; I simply created a safety net for myself, a way to ward off danger, and it had worked—until the pastor came.
Now all that fear had come swimming up from the depths of my psyche, and I found myself wondering what else he was capable of, how determined he was to entrench himself here, and whether the hex bag would do its work or simply strengthen his resolve against me.
I moved the fawn to the barn the following day.
I no longer trusted the kinship I’d felt with her; sentiment had landed us in this murky no-man’s-land between pet and patient.
Either she was an animal with a physical abnormality, an animal who had to learn to live as an animal, or she was the devil’s puppet, a pawn for some unknown purpose, and I had to put her down.
I’d never been so lax, so undecided before, and I knew it was because I saw myself every time I looked at her.
It was the same day that the calls began to come in.
First it was a Canada goose caught in a trailing end of barbed wire, then a baby squirrel on someone’s porch, then a raccoon in a garage.
Miraculously, none of them needed to be brought in for rehabilitation; the goose had minor cuts I treated on-site; I was able to find the squirrel nest and return the young one to it; and the raccoon was just a raccoon going after the Girl Scout cookies the husband hid in the garage.
Although none of them resulted in an added rehabilitative burden, having to run out on as many calls in a day as I normally got in a week disrupted the entire flow of my routine, and I knew it was only the beginning.
Unless I could get rid of the pastor and restore a bit of protective magic to Burrsville, it was only a matter of time before I was as overwhelmed as any other rehabilitator.
Worse, the weather spell I’d worked had yet to show any results, and the scarcer water became, the more risks animals would take to seek it out.
With winter coming, I was already short on time, but I put off repairing the log chinking in the cabin to prepare the rest of the existing stalls and pens in the barn.
Since only a few were ever in use, the rest had filled with detritus over the years—boxes of blankets and towels people donated, lawnmower parts I swore I would fix and never did, an ancient four-wheeler I could usually resurrect on the rare occasion I needed it.
The fawn watched me shuffle things out of the stalls from her new pen, nose twitching and eyes bright with curiosity.
Occasionally, the fox to her right would make a noise that drew her attention, but the interior walls were solid wood, and without being able to see him, she quickly went back to watching me.
I avoided her gaze and yet felt worse for doing it, my hand still sore beneath its bandage.
It wasn’t her fault, and I shouldn’t have been reacting so emotionally; it was beginning to feel like I could do nothing right with her.
I thought back to Chief Broder pacing on the other side of my gate, insisting that the fawn was a danger to the public.
When I asked myself if she was, the only answer I had was not yet, but it was irresponsible of me to let the issue lie.
I knew why I was avoiding it—I was tired of pretending I was here to serve people instead of animals.
That was the purpose of a wildlife rehabilitator, to keep wild animals out of the hands of the public, but that wasn’t my purpose.
I’d come to hate people’s inability to share space, resented the many little lives I’d had to end for the sake of people’s health and safety.
When the stalls were empty and swept out, another round of the endless feedings and cleanings of the baby squirrels had been completed, and I’d made a small dent in the ever-growing pile of apples on my counter needing to be canned and stored, I went down to the library.
The signal strength on the hill, while enough to make calls and get off a basic search, wasn’t strong enough for what I needed now, and my laptop was an ancient thing, taking half an hour just to boot up.
I didn’t have the patience for that today.
Millie Kreutz was the longtime librarian, and she jerked at the sound of the door, her waist-length gray-blond hair swinging. “Oh, hi, Tess!” she said brightly. Her smile had yellowed somewhat since she first arrived in Burrsville, but it was as welcoming as ever.
“Hi, Millie,” I answered, trying to match her energy and not show my dismay at the library’s new home.
It was my first time being there, and there was something manic about it—books were racked and stacked on every possible surface, sometimes multiple rows deep, and wherever there might’ve been a free half inch of space, there were pamphlets for story hours that would see no children, book clubs that would see no adults.
It felt less like a library than a foxhole, a final holdout against a town’s determined descent into ignorance.
I couldn’t bear to ask how she was doing; I could see the strain in her face, feel it thrumming through the entire place.
This will be me, I thought. This was how I’d end up if I couldn’t find a way to get rid of the pastor—guarding a tiny corner of space out of nothing but grim spite, knowing I wouldn’t be able to change a thing when they finally decided to run me out of town entirely.
“Can you point me toward the latest book you have on whitetail behavior?” I asked. “And I’ll need to use a computer, if that’s okay.”
It looked like there was only one computer left in the place besides Millie’s, but thanks to the popularity of hunting in Burrsville, the library always had a solid collection of books on whitetails.
She brought me a stack as the computer was booting up, tapping one dusty-pink fingernail on the top one.
“This is the newest we have, but this one”—she rearranged the stack—“is considered the bible. Might be worth comparing the two. Is there something in particular you’re looking up?”
I hesitated. As far as I knew, Millie didn’t have Georgie’s penchant for gossip, but in such a small town, it felt safest to assume that anything I told her would make the rounds.
“Abnormal teeth development,” I said finally. “Pretty boring.”
“Okay, well, if you need anything else, you know where to find me.”
Other than a few one-off lines about deer becoming omnivorous when food was especially scarce, none of the books mentioned anything about eating meat.
I turned to the encyclopedia of diseases, reading through them carefully for any mention of teeth abnormalities, biting, or even vampirism, but nothing I saw felt like it could be the answer.
Biting itself was a normal behavior; it was the way she’d bitten me that was abnormal, especially for a grazing animal.
Even predators didn’t bite that way unless they were intending to maim.
You’re trying to find a natural cause for an unnatural thing, the voice in my head said. You’re not going to find one.