Wilder Girls - Rory Power Page 0,55

leads the way as we head out into the pines. Trees clustered close, needles a carpet of green rot, wet and sweet. Even though the island’s changed, even though I’m the one who’s been out in the wildwood since it turned strange and cruel, I think she still knows it best. We’re all Raxter girls, but not like Reese.

Sometimes she’d tell us about the island. About the secret places she’d found—the beaches you could only get to at low tide, the trails through the spindlegrass. She’d tell us about her father waking her up in the middle of the night and taking her down to the rocky shore, to see the waves glaze the stone with a bioluminescent glow, a cool white like the light of her hair. Those first few days back at school after summer break she’d stare out the window, still freckled and tanned, a look in her eyes like she was trapped.

If only it were like that for me out here. Instead, everywhere I look, there’s something to be scared of. Every noise an animal coming up behind us. I shoulder the shotgun and remind myself I only have two shots to take.

We’re in deep enough that I can’t see the fence if I look back. Above us, the canopy letting only the barest stripes of moon through. I want to ask Reese to take off her hood, to let the light off her hair show me the path, but we can’t risk being seen by Welch, or by whoever she’s heading to meet. So I stick close to her, trust that her eyes are making more sense of the dark than mine.

In the distance a branch cracks, and we stop, press ourselves behind a pine and wait. Welch, maybe. Or something else, something worse. My heart racing, nerves alight. Whatever it is, we’re safer in the dark than I was that day on Boat Shift. We must be.

“Hey,” Reese whispers. She’s crouched low, leaning around the tree trunk. “I think it’s okay.”

What could be okay out here? “Really?”

“Yeah.” She stands up, beckons to me. “It’s just some deer.”

I peer around her shoulder, and there, ambling toward us through a patch of moonlight, a pair of bucks. From here they look fine, almost normal, but up close, I know I’d see their veins raised out of their skin like patterns of lace. And I know if we sliced them open, their flesh would twitch like it’s still living.

When I was on Gun Shift we’d shoot them like the other animals, like anything that got too close. To be safe, that was what Welch told us. But they are only deer, and I always wondered what they could really do.

“Let’s go,” Reese whispers. “They look harmless.”

I shake my head. “Not until they pass.”

“Fine,” she says too loud, and their heads swing around, considering the shadows with eyes washed over white. I hold my breath. Maybe they’re blind.

We’re not that lucky. One of the deer takes a hesitant step toward us, and as it opens its mouth, I gasp. Incisors long and gleaming wet, sharp like a coyote’s.

“The gun,” Reese says, trying to sound calm, but she’s hitting my arm, dragging me out in front of her. The deer cocks its head. “Shit, Hetty, get the gun.”

“Someone might hear the shot.”

She scrambles back. “It was your idea.”

Just like on the roof, I think. Like I always used to do. The shotgun snug against my shoulder. My eye squinting through the sight. Even in the dark it’s not a hard shot, but the deer’s moving now, coming closer, and I only have the two shells.

“Reese,” I say. “We should’ve stolen more ammo.”

“What?”

I take the shot. The recoil sends me stumbling back, but I hit home, the shell striking deep into the deer’s flank. It wails, back legs collapsing, and behind it the second deer darts a few yards into the trees, fur bristled and raised.

The deer thrashes weakly, crumpling with a whimper as the wound begins to ooze, blood pooling thick on the frost-covered ground. I step closer to its prone body, and it lifts its head. I swear it’s looking right at me.

“What do you think?” Reese asks. “Put it out of its misery?”

“No,” I say. There’s no room to feel bad. If I feel that, I have to feel everything else.

We continue on into the gloom. When I look over my shoulder, the second deer is back in the moonlit clearing, standing over the