cave beneath the upturned truck bed, her arms sinking elbow deep in the snow. Clara dived headlong into a drift, and squeezed her body out from under the truck.
Before she could catch her breath, the passenger-side door crunched open into the other side of the ditch as Kelan struggled to get out. Clara scrambled up the steep slope, grabbing hold of long grasses poking through the snow.
When she reached the top the road lay empty in either direction. Run. She had to run before shock settled in. Under her skin, the lanugo, the long ago. Her wolf self. If she stopped even once, she would not be able to get going again.
Across the road she spotted a small drop down to the frozen river and across it a span of woods that led to the opposite hill. Home and the promise of safety lay no more than a half mile away. Earth and sky one in the swirling storm light.
Clara set off, crossing the iced-over river as wind skirred snow along the glassy surface. She could hear him behind her, screaming words the wind tore from his mouth, but she forced herself to keep moving. She had lost all sensation in her feet, the numbness spreading into the rest of her body as she waded through deeper drifts where pale, thin birch trees thrust from the snow. There was something human about their peeling skin, their upraised arms. Her mother, urging her on. In the wind she heard another sound as well, an echoing call. They were here, the coyotes, bounding through high drifts, fluid as phantoms among the trees. Run with us.
When she turned, she saw her own bloody footprints in the dark; Kelan had closed the distance, lugging the shotgun from the cab.
Clara pushed on through the bramble into a clearing. In the midst stood a run-down cabin leaning crookedly on its foundation. It was lit from within, warm and beckoning, the door banging open and shut in the wind. The sheriff’s cruiser parked behind it, the roof humped with snow.
She shouted, not knowing what or why.
When no answer came, Clara limped toward the cabin, crossed the clearing. She climbed up on the stoop, recovering her breath, caught the swinging door, and stepped inside. The smell in the room so strong it burned in her nose, stung her eyes. Something chemical. She wiped her eyes and looked for a weapon.
She spotted the soiled mattress first, centered on the wood floor, a menagerie of impossible animals around it. What looked like red paint splashed underneath it, an uneven pentagram. A kerosene lantern, hissing quietly, cast flickering light over the scene. The sheriff himself slumped in the corner, his uniform soaked with dried black blood. An eyeless boar’s head topped where his skull should have been, the jaws wrenched open to show the terrible teeth. BEHOLD THE NEW CREATION scrawled in the same red paint on the wooden boards behind him.
Clara reeled away. The place had been made for her. This bed. This was where Kelan wanted to take her all along, the tableau he made for her. Please, God. But with the prayer, the thought that there was no God here. She was in a place where God would not come.
Her leg muscles had stiffened, but Clara managed to limp outside. Kelan stood waiting in the clearing, not more than fifteen feet away, his breath smoking. “Look at me. Look at what you did.” He grimaced, fingered the glistening open flap of skin on his cheek.
“I can fix it,” she promised. “Let me help you.”
“Go back inside,” he said. He stood in the center of the meadow, shuddering. He looked near collapse himself, but he had the strength to raise his gun, cut off her only path of escape.
“No,” she said. If she was going to die, it might as well be here, where she could feel the snow on her skin. Out in the open, among the trees where her spirit might run free. Not in there.
Kelan cursed. “I can tell you things,” he said. He wove back and forth as he came closer. His voice rising and then falling, pleading with her and then berating. “About the devil. I knew him. I lived with him.” He told her about the woman in the woods. An adulterer. A slut. Filthy like all women. His father and Sheriff Steve killed her and her lover and took the baby. Didn’t Clara know that? Didn’t she know who she was? The