Chapter 21
Chapter
When I woke the next morning, it was to the smell of clean, cold mud.
I lifted my cheek from where it was pressed to the ground, dragging my own hand to my face to feel the imprint of the grass in my flesh.
My clothes were soaked through, my jeans so heavy they might’ve been made of stone.
When I wiped my nose, my fingers came away flecked with black.
I only vaguely remembered my search the previous night.
There had been too many times when I realized I’d been asleep on my feet and had to retrace my steps.
The rain had never stopped, and when I was deaf from its sound and blind from the dark and numb from the cold, I’d kept going because I could not accept that I’d lost her.
But I hadn’t found her.
I laid my head back on the wet, crushed grass and shut my eyes, wishing unconsciousness would take me again. But instead, I felt the thing that had woken me—a quick, sharp pain on the back of my ankle. I yanked my leg up instinctively, rolling onto my side, then stopped dead, staring.
The fawn stared back at me through eyelashes clumped with gore. Her face was stained a dark, rusty red almost up to her ears. Her little nose and top lip were marked with scratches.
I raised my hand slowly, as if she were something truly wild and not the domesticated horror I’d created. She butted me softly, and my palm came away smeared with tacky blood.
“What happened to you?” I whispered.
She blinked oddly, more of a wince than anything, and rocked back on her heels. Her lips curled up and her back arched. I reached for her in terror, convinced she’d found her way home just to die in front of me.
She coughed. It was an awful sound, a wretched, strangled gurgling that I felt in my own throat, and then something wet and hot landed in my outstretched hands.
I recognized it by smell before sight: a clot of bone and cartilage, strung with fibers of muscle.
The bones were small, but larger than the baby squirrels had been—larger than an adult squirrel, and brittle rather than soft.
I suddenly recognized the scratches on her nose for defensive wounds.
She had moved on to bigger, older prey, prey that had fought back and been eaten nonetheless.
“You’re learning so quickly,” I murmured, wiping the clotted blood out of her eyelashes with my sleeve.
She had escalated even faster than I imagined, but at least she had killed to eat.
My prey would sit at the bottom of the pond for innumerable years if it wasn’t found, not even feeding fish, and worst of all, I didn’t know if Zeke’s dream would die with him.
It could be taken up by Evelyn, or the town council, or even Rachel.
I wondered if she would try to foist it on her son.
Adults loved to use children for their own aims, and I had no doubt Burrsville would wholeheartedly embrace him as their totem in the shadow of his dead father.
Murdered father.
I got to my feet slowly, my body feeling every single one of my many years, the fawn leaping in a sprightly circle as if to mock me.
My magic lurked like a thready pulse in the deepest reaches of my being, weak and unsteady, but I still needed it.
I’d given myself a fighting chance, but the fight was just beginning.
I took the fawn inside, where she refused her bottle. I washed her face with a warm towel, and she went to her usual spot in my flannel and laid down as if nothing had happened. I made sure to shut the door tightly behind myself as I left.
As soon as I’d fed the animals and cleaned the cages out in the barn, I went down the driveway to where the pastor’s body spent most of yesterday.
The grass had greened overnight with the rain, and the blood that had pooled in the driveway was gone, at least to my eyes.
I went into the tree line, stepping carefully and searching the ground, but even the brush here seemed to be thicker and greener than it had been yesterday, and I could barely make out where I’d placed the body.
I saw no drag marks in the grass, nor tracks from the four-wheeler—it was as if last night never happened at all, the entire nightmare washed away.
I spent the next hours pacing through the meadow and the forest, not daring to believe my luck.
Even the long meadow grass had sprung back up where I’d driven over it, the vivid stalks showing only the barest signs of damage.
I found only a few hints of tire track in the woods, and even the boat pulled up on the shore of the pond looked like it had been there for years, untouched.
I began to wonder if it really was a dream, some remnant of the belladonna visited upon me in my helplessness.
That fragile hope was shattered when Chief Broder arrived.
I was down by the gate again, finishing the hinge additions I’d been working on the day before.
I saw the white flash of his squad car through the trees just before it pulled in, and I had mere seconds to steel myself, my hands going white-knuckled around the wrench that still reeked of bleach.
He was early, much earlier than I thought he’d be.
The gate was closed, and the car came to a halt a few inches shy of it. The chief got out, hiked his belt over his paunch, and took his time walking around the car.
“Afternoon, Tess.”
“Hey, Chief.” I paused my work long enough to acknowledge him, but that was all. I did not stop tightening the bolt on the hinge and I did not move to open the gate.
He stuck his thumbs into his belt and cast a critical eye over the gate. “Looks like you’re preparing for war, here.”
I shrugged. “Hopefully not. Just want to protect what’s mine.”
“Oh?”
“Somebody tried to take it down the other day. Rammed it in.”
“News to me. You didn’t report it?”
I gave him a thin smile. “I’m sure Burrsville PD has bigger things to worry about.”
“Yeah, speaking of that—”
The tension that seized my body made the wrench slip. There was a loud clang as it rang against a perpendicular bar, pinching my finger between, and I hissed a curse.
“You all right there?”
“Fine.”
“Okay. Well, yeah, speaking of better things to do, we got a call this morning from the Kinsey family.”
“Doesn’t ring a bell.”
“Cute little family. Dad, Chris, is a teacher. He and his wife got two little girls, hair blond as yours, just about.”
He paused for a beat, as if waiting for something. My impatience rose, but I shoved it down, said nothing. This felt like bait.
“Called us this morning because they found their cat in the yard, gutted like a fish.”
“Mm,” I said, thinking of the shape and size of the bones the fawn had coughed into my hand. “Coyote?”
“Well, that is the likely suspect. I don’t have to tell you how many cats get snatched up by coyotes every year.”
“But?”
“But I’ve never known one to leave a carcass behind. This cat was…” He grimaced, made a scattering motion. “All over the lawn.”
“So you think it was a person?”
“I think it was your damn fawn.”
I stopped and stared at him, incredulous that he would voice the thought. Even knowing it was the truth, it sounded insane to my ears. He came straight up to the bars, jammed an accusing finger through the gap.
“Don’t you look at me like that. They saw it. They saw it.”
“How do you expect me to believe you? Especially when she was locked in my house the entire fucking night? Not out in the barn, not out in some pen—in my house.”
“I am not the one who has to prove himself!” he shouted. “I am the chief of police! You prove yourself to me!”
The wrench felt so warm in my grasp, so eager. Is one not enough? I thought, but I knew the answer.
“Where is your warrant?” I asked simply, the words a cool counterpoint to the hot metal in my hand, the taste of hot metal in my mouth. “That’s all you need.”
“You and your goddamn warrants.”
“I didn’t write the law.”
“No, but you sure know your way around it.”
It would’ve been so easy. If I’d agreed to open the gate, he would’ve walked straight in, charged up the driveway, given me a clean shot at the back of his fat head. It would’ve been for the best.
But I did not open it.
He chuckled mirthlessly, turning as if he would walk away. When he reached the cruiser’s door, he turned back.
“I’m not sure why I’m bothering to ask, because you’ll just lie, but you haven’t seen Pastor Zeke in the past day or two, have you?”
“I have.”
“Oh? When?”
“He came by yesterday afternoon. We had a conversation just like you and I were having now.” I rattled the gate to make my point. “He wanted to talk about the sanctuary.”
“What about, in particular?”
“Told me I should be prepared to sell my land for the good of the town.”
“Sounds like you disagree.”
“Sounds like you agree.”
“Well, my opinion doesn’t factor in here.”
“You sure about that?”
His eyes narrowed. “Pretty sure. So he said you ought to sell. Then what?”
“I told him I have no intention of selling. I’ve lived here my entire life, and I’m not going anywhere.” I watched him carefully as I said it, waiting for a glimmer in his pig eyes, wondering if he knew about the deed now stuffed under my mattress. “He got pretty pissy, and I told him to leave.”
“He threaten you?” he asked, an obligatory question.
“Not in so many words. Just said he was disappointed and he’d find a way to change my mind. Then he left.”
“Which way did he go?”
I pointed west, the way I’d taken the truck yesterday. “Tore off in that direction. Surprised he didn’t leave any rubber on the road. What is this about, anyway?”
Broder ignored the question. “Would you say he was driving erratically?”
It was so tempting to say yes. Tempting to color the account a little more, to say I could smell the booze on him, but I resisted. He wouldn’t have believed it anyway; he would’ve only heard an attempt to smear his newest friend and savior.
“Erratically, I don’t know. Aggressively, sure. Did he get into an accident or something?”