Page 7 of The Devil Knows Her Name

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.

I stood there looking for a long time, trying to think around the swelling thunder of my heart in my ears, trying not to acknowledge the roil of unease in my stomach. Whatever did this was not a person; I would’ve expected the wound to be clean-edged and sharp for that, and even if some wild hill-man wandered down here and tore her open with his hands, his trail would’ve been clearer.

It must’ve been a smaller carnivore, I reasoned. Weasels, maybe a fisher. They weren’t common around here, but I saw one or two of them each year. It would’ve been unusual for them to tackle this carcass, their prey normally being chipmunks and squirrels, perhaps birds, but all carnivores were opportunists. It would’ve explained the concentrated area of damage.

I stepped a little closer, leaned over to get a better look at the edges of the wound. The doe was very fresh, an hour dead or less, and normally, I would’ve taken her back with me. When I had carnivores in rehab, they needed meat, and not just the cuts at the grocery store—they needed organs, eyes, brain. Finding fresh roadkill was a boon.

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I didn’t want to touch this doe, let alone take her back and feed her to the animals in my care. I leaned closer, looking for signs of fungus or disease, and it was only when I found myself waving my hand instinctively in front of my face that I realized what particular sound was missing.

The hum of black flies, a noise so ubiquitous at roadkill sites I didn’t even notice it anymore, was absent. There was not a single fly on the body—not crawling across her liquid brown eyes, not hovering around the cavernous wound, not wriggling through the slick and spattered grass.

The unease in the back of my mind scraped tight, the shriek of a violin bow across strings. I drew back, only intending to go as far as the road, but suddenly I was running, desperate to get away from the smell, making an undignified scramble back to the safety of the truck. I slammed the door behind me and rolled up the windows, panting hard. My lungs ached, as if I’d been breathing bleach.

I gripped the steering wheel, staring through the windshield and trying to calm myself. From here, all I could see of the doe was her hind legs trailed out onto the shoulder of the road. I kept waiting for calm, for my skin to stop prickling, but instead my anxiety deepened to a strange and icy horror, creeping through my blood like a killing frost. I threw the truck into drive and screeched around in a U-turn, leaving the doe where she lay.

Arriving home, I had to get out of the truck to close the gate behind myself. The bolt slid back into its housing with a solid, reassuring clunk, and I took a moment to lean my forehead against the cool bars, closing my eyes and inhaling deeply.

Here, safely behind my own boundaries, the iron smell of death was finally replaced by the scent of goldenrod and sun-warmed grass. The sensation of wrongness faded. It had chased me all the way back, and I kept glancing in my rearview mirror as if I expected to see her there, staggering behind me with her guts dragging. Now, ensconced in the layers of magic I’d built up over the years, I was secure, but what still didn’t come was the feeling of foolishness, that I’d somehow overreacted, whipped myself into a superstitious little frenzy. If anything, I was all the more certain that I was right, and the wrong thing was out there, in Burrsville.

Whether true or not, it didn’t change the fact that I had six baby squirrels waiting on their next feeding and a dozen other chores to do besides. I hurried back up to the house, pausing only to dispose of the roadkill I’d collected, and went inside to make up a batch of formula.

The squirrels were only three weeks old, and they’d need to be fed every couple of hours for at least another week. After that, their eyes would open, timing of the feedings would be less critical, and I could begin to supplement with solid food. But for the time being, it was more of this—painstakingly feeding formula microliter by microliter from an eye dropper, watching their tiny bodies carefully for signs of bloat or discomfort.

Many rehabbers opted for tube feeding as a default, hoping to decrease the chance of animals becoming too familiar with humans. Our true purpose, after all, was to keep people safe from animals, which was a hard and unexpected lesson that accounted for most of the dropouts from rehabilitation licensing programs. The day-to-day tasks might be feeding and cleaning cages and stitching up wounds, but the overall mission was to keep wild animals out of the hands of the public. Imprinting on humans was one thing I didn’t have to worry about; I’d developed my own little glamour charm to appear to the young animals as their own species, and I was so practiced at it that it barely took any concentration.

When I’d finished with the squirrels, I refreshed the raccoon’s water. He chittered and swiped playfully at my hand as I reached inside; he’d be ready to release soon.

“Maybe time to move you to the barn tonight,” I said, catching his little nailed hand gently on my forefinger. “You need to get ready to go back.”

For now, though, I left the rehab room and pulled my boots back on. Autumn was always a flurry of preparation for winter, and there were apples, squashes, and late potatoes that needed harvesting, enclosure repairs to make in the barn, patches I had to put on the roof, and a laundry list of less crucial chores that required my attention at some point. The weather had been unseasonably hot and dry, defying my ambient magic and turning the cornfields that surrounded my property to powdery dust; I would have to call up a storm before a stray spark turned it all to ash. The task pressing at me most urgently, though, was to check the boundaries of the sanctuary.

I went down the porch steps and through the yard, past the gentle cut flowers and my beds of tame vegetables, and out the gate into the wilds of the meadow. By this time in the year, the grass came to my thighs, its varying greens turned to bronze and interspersed with bursts of color from goldenrod and bee balm and bellflower. I didn’t cut it, didn’t touch it except to pull the most unwanted invasive plants. Seed heads rattled and burst as I pushed past, and milkweed sap left white streaks across my sleeves. I went carefully, out of habit; in late spring and early summer, it was full of pheasant and hermit thrush nests, and there were always rabbits, groundhogs, and skunks tunneling their way through the undergrowth.

All around me, the forest rose huge and dark. Seen from above, the transition from meadow to forest looked like an ocean, sandbar dropping away to cold, mysterious depths, and on the ground, the feeling was much the same. It was old-growth forest, a precious, hundred-acre jewel of land almost untouched by the human need for housing and crops. The trees here were old and tall, strong already and made stronger by my magic. They were wild, and they couldn’t always be trusted.

The grass, cowed by the shadow of the trees, gave way to luxuriously curling ferns and tangled shrubs. The smell here was my delight, richer than that of the meadow—deep loam and creeping moss, limbs that rotted and grew carpets of mushrooms, fallen fruit that turned to wine in its own skin. In the spring, the forest floor was carpeted by hellebore and foam flower, and now the bright, red-orange berries of jack-in-the-pulpit peeked through the dark earth. I loved the forest in all its seasons, and there were many days I longed to abandon the cabin, shed the skin of my neighborly self, and live as a feral thing in the depths of the woods. Today, when anxiety trailed me like a haunt, was one such day.

I headed west, to where the devil noticed I’d expanded the border, reclaiming some of the farmland that hemmed in from all sides. This was where I was most vulnerable, where the wards were fresh and the magic not so deeply rooted as in other places.

My feet, having tread this ground thousands of times, found the deer path of their own accord. It would’ve been so easy to relax, simply marvel at the early afternoon sun dappling the ground in gilded droplets, at the leaves of the ash trees already tinged with lemon yellow, at the flash and glimmer of bird wings as they swooped from branch to branch. Instead, I kept all my senses open and attuned. It was never wise to let your guard down in a wild place, but today I wanted more than watchfulness. I was searching for something, some clue that nature had fallen out of balance, some sign of the wrongness I felt looking down at the doe.

The forest was humming with life, vibrant with abundance; no matter what happened in the world outside, the magic made it so. If the rest of the region suffered from drought, I could draw in rain clouds. If crops were hit by blight or fungus, it did not find its way here. Prey would always be prey, and the circle of life would always include death, but pups and kits would never starve here. Adults would never be reduced to skin and bones to keep their litters alive. There were hollows and burrows aplenty, and deep in the woods, the winter wind was never so cruel.

When I reached my vulnerable new border, I found everything just as I’d left it—the young trees, mere sticks at a year old, stretched eager and green toward the sunlight. The blackberries and wild grapes I’d planted to accompany them wouldn’t produce fruit until next year at least, but their foliage was glossy with health. I bent down, pressed my hand to the base of one of the trees, and felt the warmth in the soil. These trees were planted in the ashes of last year’s Yule log, and deep in their roots was a charm of my making, knotted three times with my own hair. It joined them to the other trees I’d planted here, to the roses at the borders of the town, to the table decorations and potted plants I’d gifted to my friends, and they were all joined to me. Each one created a tether like a silver line of spider silk, and through them I could feel when something was not quite right, and where.

I sensed nothing amiss here on my own land, but the doe was an anomaly. I wished I could protect the whole of Burrsville with the same rigor I’d given my sanctuary, but as I’d told the devil, I simply wasn’t strong enough to manage it all.