by S. L. Huang
“Then why does she need that walking stick, hmm? When you’re that age you’re always sick. She’s too stubborn, that woman. Stubborn and rude. Always has been. Do you know what she said to me back when your father first introduced me?”
“No,” said Rosa.
“The very first afternoon we met, she got right in my face about politics. No manners, that woman. I told her—I was just making small talk—and all I said was that if a man chooses to become a rat then why isn’t that a sure sign of his guilt? And she got all contrary about me judging rats. Rats! Like anyone abides vermin if they don’t have to.”
Rosa didn’t answer.
“Here’s the basket. Now, don’t leave the path, don’t talk to anyone—are you sure you can get there alone?”
Rosa didn’t point out that she’d been running away to her grandmother’s since she was four. Her mother insisted on pretending it didn’t happen, and if Rosa reminded her then she’d also be reminded of the night before, and Rosa didn’t want to disturb a Good Mood. Good Moods meant Rosa didn’t get hit.
“Remember, don’t speak to anyone. Don’t go anywhere else. Only to your grandmother’s. You promise?”
“I promise,” Rosa said, and took the basket. Abuelita’s bread and cured meats were tastier than her mother’s, but she didn’t point it out.
The woods were muted and still tonight, no wind rustling the branches. Rosa trundled down the well-worn path, the route she could have followed in her sleep. Twilight crept through the trees, graying the colors into shadow and light. Rosa was three-quarters of the way to her grandmother’s when a quiet padding rustled the leaves behind her.
She spun, her red cloak whirling.
The shadows were deep enough that her eyes couldn’t penetrate them. She strained her vision into the dimness.
Nothing.
“Don’t be afraid,” said a voice.
Rosa jumped and stumbled backward.
An enormous wolf emerged out of the bushes, his gray fur so long and thick it looked like armor. His yellow eyes focused on her, calm and intelligent.
Rosa stopped her feet and straightened her spine. She was not going to be her mother.
“Hello, sir,” Rosa said to the wolf, very politely.
“Hello.” The wolf stopped a few paces from her. It was so big. Rosa’s heart thumped against her ribs. It’s not going to eat you. It—he—he’s a grundwirgen. He’s not a wild animal. He won’t attack.
Don’t be your mother.
“I’m new to these parts,” the wolf said. His voice was very deep, and with an odd overpronunciation on some words. Different mouth, Rosa supposed. A mouth so full of long, white fangs and a long, pink tongue. “I wondered if you could direct me into town.”
Rosa let out a quick breath of relief before she could stop herself. Don’t be your mother. He only wants directions. A gentleman.
“Go back that way,” Rosa instructed him, pointing back the way she had come. “When the path opens up from the forest into a meadow, go right. There’s a fence. Go down the fence…”
The more Rosa spoke, the more mixed up her directions felt—she was used to running fleet-footed through the forest, not describing which tree marked the fork in the path where you had to turn left because turning right brought you up to the top of the mountain which would take you two days to climb so you definitely didn’t want to turn right unless you wanted to spend two days climbing a mountain …
The wolf had sat down on his haunches, his large, fluffy tail lying upon the leaves, and he stared at her unblinkingly as she recited. It was unnerving. Don’t be your mother; grundwirgen interact differently, that’s all, Rosa reminded herself, but she kept getting confused, needing to backtrack, until her descriptions muddled themselves still more.
“Thank you,” the wolf said, when she faltered into silence, not sure she had been helpful at all. “You are a very kind little girl. Very kind. Where are you off to tonight?”
“My grandmother’s,” Rosa answered politely.
“Oh! Does she live around here?”
“Only a little ways in that direction,” Rosa said, pointing.
“I did not know this part of the woods housed many people.”
“Not many,” Rosa said. “We have some neighbors, but they’re not near. It’s nicer out here than in town. More space.” Town was too dirty, Rosa’s grandmother always said. Dirty and loud and full of rude people. Abuelita preferred to be able to step out onto the hunting trails and breathe in the nature of the woods. “It’s quieter here. No one to be nosy, my grandmother says.”
The wolf dipped his head. “Thank you, little girl. You’ve been most helpful.”
“You’re welcome,” Rosa said. Her chest puffed a little in pride. She was not her mother. She’d just had a perfectly polite conversation with a very nice wolf. She was a good person.
The wolf uncurled himself and turned on silent paws to pad back through the forest the way Rosa had come. She watched him disappear into the shadows. He seemed to veer off the path at the last minute, just before she lost sight of him, and Rosa’s heart twisted in anxiety that she had misdirected him. She hadn’t been very clear.
Hopefully he wouldn’t become lost again. And if he did, hopefully he would know she hadn’t done it on purpose, that she’d tried her level best to tell him the way to go, that she wasn’t like her mother …
It was dark enough now that it was becoming hard to see. Rosa shook herself and started back on the path to her grandmother’s, her feet moving a little faster. A chill wind had picked up now, and Rosa pulled the red hood of the cloak up and tugged it close, drawing the edges tight.
She was a good person. A good person. Not like her mother at all.
Rosa quickened her pace. By the time she spotted the golden windows of the cottage beckoning her in, the trees were mere black-on-black outlines around her.
The cottage door was ajar. A narrow slice of light slashed the darkness.
That was odd.
Rosa pushed at it. “Abuelita?”
“Come in, little girl,” said a voice.
The voice was pitched high and feminine like it meant to be her grandmother’s, but it was wrong, different, too far off and with an odd overpronunciation swallowing the edges of the words.
Rosa could have run. She should have run.
She burst into the cottage. “Abuelita!”
The wolf sat on the floor by the fire. He looked up at her with those yellow eyes and licked scarlet off his fangs. Then he leapt.
He was so fast. Rosa threw the basket at his face and sprinted—but not back out, she dashed sideways, toward the door to her grandmother’s bedroom. She hardly knew what she was doing. “Abuelita!” she screamed, the cry tearing out incoherent. “Abuelita!”
The wolf landed on silent paws and his haunches bunched as he leapt at her again, a growl in his throat, that gray fur rising on his back in a spiky peak.
Rosa couldn’t make it to the far wall. She skidded around against the hearth. A pot bubbled there, unwatched—the dinner her abuelita had been making. The fire tongs had fallen, dropped, halfway in the embers. Rosa grabbed the end, ignoring the searing pain in her hands, and whipped around, the red cloak blossoming around her. She brandished the tongs—the other end was cherry-hot, glowing and warping the air. “Get away from us!” she shrieked. “Get away!”
The wolf snapped at her and then lurched back, snarling, the smell of singed fur sharp in the small space. Rosa scrambled backward against the wall—the tongs were cooling, the other end dimming to a grayish orange. She groped a hand out against the wood, looking for another weapon, for anything to defend herself with.
The wall was wet with droplets of red.
Rosa’s hands stung, pain shooting up her arms as her blistered fingers slipped. The wolf paced close, his monstrous coat of fur standing up so tall on his back that it made his silhouette into a horrifying demon. His lips pulled back from a white-and-red mouth, his yellow eyes fixed
on her. Near enough that her face felt the hot reek of his breath.
The tongs were almost cool.
Her grandmother’s hunting rifle. It was in the chest in the corner—if Rosa could get there. She backed toward it as fast as she dared, waving the tongs wildly before her. The wolf waited, his tail twitching from side to side, waiting for her weapon to stop being a weapon so he could finish his meal.
“Why are you doing this?” Rosa wasn’t sure why she said it. Or how. Her mouth barely managed the shape of words.
“Wild animals have to eat,” responded the grundwirgen, licking his muzzle.
“But you’re not a wild animal! You’re not—you’re not!” The grundwirgen were just like people, just like people, just like—
“How we are treated is what we become. You will learn, little girl. When you humans want me to be feral so badly, it is the easiest thing in the world to satisfy you.” The edges of his mouth drew back farther. Whether he meant it as a terrifying smile or a threat didn’t matter. His teeth were enormous, curved, and very sharp.
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 sturd
y 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.
The bears didn’t seem to be in any hurry. The initial, reflexive question she’d always been taught to ask—animals or grundwirgen?—was immediately answered by the fact that the two huge ones sat in chairs in the girl’s cottage. Rosa’s jaw clenched. Had they devoured her parents already, taken their places to terrify her?
The girl was backed up against the chimney. The smaller bear waddled on its hind legs, toward her and away, its mouth moving in what had to be human speech, but Rosa was too far away to hear it.
The blond girl screwed up her face and screamed again.
Abuelita. Had she screamed, in her cottage? Rosa had not come. No one had.
But three grundwirgen, and one cartridge! If she shot one, maybe the other two would run? Or would they take the girl hostage? Be so enraged they’d rip her to shreds?
The small bear—well, smaller than the other two—was waving its paws at the girl, its claws curved and sharp. Taunting her. It waddled back toward its friends, then back toward her.
Rosa didn’t have much time. Unless they were full from the girl’s parents, the bears might stop taunting and start eating anytime.
The small bear went back and forth again—talking to the other two, turning back to the girl.
Wait.
Rosa moved before she had thought it all the way through. If she scrambled to the other side of the tree—branch cracking, bark scraping, her boots slipped and she almost fell, no, catch on the trunk, pull over—yes! The two seated bears lined up in her sights perfectly, the outlines of their snouted heads overlapping.
Now all she needed to do was wait for the third bear to wander back.
Would one cartridge be powerful enough? It would fly through the first animal, surely. But three?
She’d have to aim for their heads, not the huge furred slabs of bone and muscle that were their bodies. Three heads, one shot.