The backs of Rosa’s knees hit the chest, and she almost fell. She brandished one hand behind her, seeking the hasps, pushing at the top.
“You won’t be able to hide from me in there, little girl. A dog like me can chew through leather, didn’t you know?”
Rosa plunged her arm in, and her fingers closed around the polished wood of the gun.
Time slowed as she heaved it out in one huge move, the tongs clattering to the floor as she brought the barrel around and caught it against her other hand. It was so big, and heavy; she’d never fired it without either her grandmother’s help or being braced on the ground. She was completely off balance and didn’t even look at the sights, her finger tightening the moment the muzzle crossed the monstrous gray form of the wolf.
He had time to bridle at the sight of the rifle, claws skidding on the floor as he attempted to arch back and spin away, but the gun fired with an earth-shattering roar, mule-kicking Rosa in the shoulder, and he twisted and collapsed with a whine very much like a puppy’s.
He tried to get up again, scrabbling for the still-open door, for the freedom of the night, blood pouring thick and black from the hole torn in his hide. But Rosa worked the lever on the rifle and fired again, and again, and again and again until the trigger clicked down on nothing.
The final few slugs had only impacted a corpse. The wolf lay in the middle of her grandmother’s living room, a massive and deformed mess of fur and blood.
Rosa’s shoes bumped against it. She’d been moving forward as she fired.
Her throat was raw. She’d been screaming, too.
Her breath heaved in her chest, and she was shaking, her grip so tight on her grandmother’s rifle she couldn’t pry it loose, and what had just happened, and where was her grandmother?
Her face clogged, her eyes blurring. Heaving sobs took her, collapsed her. She clung to the rifle. “Abuelita!” she cried. “Abuelita…”
She backed up until she hit the wall again. Smeared an arm across her face until the sleeve of the red cloak was sopping with wet.
She didn’t have the strength to stand anymore. Instead she crawled, still dragging the rifle with her like it was a security blanket, the empty rifle, and she should have found more cartridges for it, they were in the trunk, too, but she couldn’t turn and go back now, and where was her grandmother where was her grandmother—
The door to the bedroom was open. Rosa crawled inside and found her.
* * *
“I fled then,” Rosa said as she and Hou Yi hiked into the late afternoon sun. The terrain had grown more rocky now, slowing their pace and making the tracking harder, but Feng Meng was still making no attempts to hide himself. Baiting them.
“How old were you?” Hou Yi asked.
“Eight years old. I took my grandmother’s rifle and ran. I hugged it at night while I lay on the ground and cried, and I repeated to myself that my mother had been right about the grundwirgen until the tears stopped.”
She spoke very evenly.
Hou Yi pondered. Then she said, “Killing. It changes a person.”
“Yes,” Rosa said.
They walked in silence for a few minutes.
“When I stopped crying, I decided it was a crusade,” Rosa said. “Or maybe deciding that is why I stopped crying. I was no longer the girl; I was the rifle. I would be an angel of justice and vengeance. I would hunt.”
“You wanted to save people.”
“I think saving people was the excuse. I wanted to feel powerful. I wanted to feel like nothing could ever hurt me again.”
She had wanted to kill.
“I almost failed from the beginning,” Rosa continued. If only she had. What might have been different? No, she would never undo it, no matter what she had done, because what would have become of Mei then? She would never undo it. But she could regret, and mourn, and condemn. “I was starving to death. Sick. Out of ammunition. And the grundwirgen I so wanted to bring to justice, the ones I imagined devouring families every night while I slept … I could not find them. Grundwirgen are not so common in the West.”
“Because of your people’s prejudice?”
“I don’t know,” Rosa answered. “That’s not supposed to be. We were always taught, everyone always says, grundwirgen are the same as people. But my mother was not alone in her sentiments.”
“In the West do you harbor such feelings against any use of sorcery?”
The “you” stung, even if it applied. Not all of us, Rosa wanted to defend, but how could she say so, when she wasn’t even in that number?
“Magic is not so—everyday, for us,” she said with an effort. “I’m not sure what the answer would be.” Here, Rosa had seen flying children’s toys, and human women with horns, and people conjuring water by the side of the road, all as if it was of little import. Certain things still shocked and amazed here, but she was at a loss to figure out where that line was in the minds of the common folk.
Hou Yi stopped walking. Rosa thought for a moment she had lost the trail, but then she said, “Flower. You need not tell this story, if you don’t wish to revisit these memories. It is all right.”
Rosa squinted into the sun. Its brightness made her eyes prickle with tears.
“I haven’t yet told you about Goldie.”
* * *
Light. Square windows of light through the pitch-black forest, wavering in Rosa’s vision. A house.
Hunger and cold and weakness had so hollowed her out that she plunged toward it with an animalistic need, groping through the heavy brush.
Maybe they would give her something to eat. Maybe they would let her lie inside their door. Maybe she could curl against the wall outside next to the chimney and the heat from the fire would bleed through the wood and they wouldn’t see her there to chase her off with a hoe until morning.
The outline of the cottage wept and wobbled, now its own sturdy shape, now the welcoming silhouette of Abuela’s house, promising warmth, and food, and snug protection from the least harm. All she had to do was reach it.
Rosa fetched up against a tree, panting. Walking was … so much work.
Someone inside the house screamed.
Fire flooded Rosa’s veins, fountaining in her, sparking her nerve endings to life. Something crashed inside the cottage.
She couldn’t see inside from here. She needed a vantage point.
She ran, heaving and coughing but ignoring it. There, a low fork in a tree, not twenty yards away from the window. She scrambled up, one hand staying squeezed around the rifle as if fused to it.
One cartridge. She had one cartridge left.
The bark scratched at her palm, scraped through her ragged clothes and the skin that stretched empty over her bones. Rosa made herself steady on the branch and pushed her back against the hardness of the trunk, drawing her feet up to brace against the branches on either side and anchor herself solid. The rifle came up in her hands, her elbows sturdy against her knees as her grandmother had taught her.
A scream echoed through the woods again; at the same time Rosa registered a pretty blond girl through the window, her own age, opening her mouth to cry out.
And advancing on her—bears.
Three of them.
Three bears, and Rosa only had one cartridge left.