27

Adelaide dodges the log as it soars across the room, fire sailing past the old man’s head.

It lands with a clatter at her front door, smoldering and flickering. The dogs scamper away from the opening to yap at her cabin from afar, their bodies retreating into the night.

River reaches into the fireplace for another piece of burning wood and the stack collapses, casting debris and a plume of fire into the small room.

The old man raises the shotgun toward the girl.

Adelaide advances quickly, thrusting the knife forward, and into his chest.

She had expected it to be like cutting chicken, or an apple. Smooth and exacting. Little resistance. She had imagined the knife would slide right through his flesh, and sever his heart, his lungs.

But men are not apples.

The blade lands higher than she had planned, just below his armpit, skipping across bone, snagging skin, and spinning out of her grasp. It tumbles through the air, the descent as idle as the snow falling outside her window.

Adelaide has delivered little more than a scratch.

The old man buckles, hollers, and spins toward her. His knuckles land across her jaw, and Adelaide drops to the floor, the smell of lantern fluid filling her lungs.

The old man points to Adelaide, scolding. “You did this, you goddamned witch.”

He aims the shotgun at River’s feet.

River holds aloft her log of fire.

The man pulls the trigger.

There is a click.

River jolts as if she has been hit. Adelaide jolts as if she has been hit.

But no bullets were fired. Only a click.

He tries again.

Click.

Adelaide sees the barrel now. It is dented, bent, the buckshot unchambered. Outside, Brother #1 had smashed it against the ground, the trees. So much rage. So much madness.

The old man freezes, appraising his damaged weapon, as River launches her burning log.

It hits the old man’s shoulder and rolls away—across the living room, past the sofa, and into the wreckage of the broken side table.

The puddle of lantern fluid erupts into flame.

Adelaide stares at the small blaze in her cabin and looks to River. The girl wears an expression that Adelaide has seen once before—when River braved the mirror for the first time. An expression of nonbelief, of not trusting her own eyes. Adelaide understands that feeling—she’s known it well these last few weeks.

The fire grows quickly, feeding, burgeoning, and River screams as somewhere outside, the wild woman howls.

The dogs yelp and bark, maddened by the sound, and Adelaide runs to River, scooping the girl into her arms as the old man stands tall, surrounded by flames.

He lumbers about her cabin, growing, growing, as the fire rages. His skin is maroon and black against the brilliance of it.

The flames spill into her kitchen, pool against her cupboards. A cloud hovers in her home like a swarm of locusts, and it, too, is growing, growing.

Hounds wail at her front door.

The smoke clogs Adelaide’s lungs, and she presses River’s face to her chest to protect her. They must escape. Together. The bedroom window has offered release once tonight. It will do so again.

Adelaide takes a step toward the bedroom.

“Go on now,” the old man says. “Go on and see what’s waitin’ for ya.”

Adelaide wishes she could carry River far from this place. Her face is bruised, her ribs likely broken, her shins are bleeding, and there’s a gaping hole in her thigh leaving dark puddles in her wake. She has denied the pain in her body for too long and can fight it no more.

But the bedroom door is right there. Right there!

“I told you, I ain’t leavin’ till I get what I came for, animal bitch or not,” the old man says. “You’ve made it difficult, but I’ll make it real easy for you. Your choice, I s’pose.” He spits on her floor.

The old man grasps the sofa and thrusts it toward Adelaide and River. Just a little.

A warning.

Adelaide places her foot on the sofa and shoves it away. It sails to the other side of the living room. Beneath the floorboard that pulls away from the nails, the chain jangles. A warning of her own.

Yes-yes-yes.

Adelaide drops River to the floor and throws herself atop the floorboard, prying up the board and gathering the heavy chain into her arms. The teeth. The jaws. The trap.

The old man lunges forward. “Oh no, you—”

But Adelaide is practically a professional now, and she has the trap set before the old man can take another step. She thrusts it at him, and he backs away, hands in the air.

The smoke grows thicker in the cabin. River coughs, and throws her hands around Adelaide’s leg, burying her face in her skirt.

This is over now. It is time to go.

With the trap held out before her, Adelaide shuffles backward, pulling the child into her bedroom and toward the window promising oxygen and freedom.

Something collapses in her kitchen, and sparks erupt into the living room.

The old man watches as Adelaide and River collapse against the bedroom window. He doesn’t approach.

Maybe he’s letting them go.

The old man whistles and her bedroom is suddenly engulfed by the sound of barking dogs. The hounds are right outside the bedroom window now, blocking their exit, and Adelaide understands why the man wasn’t concerned with their retreat.

The flames lick the door frame of the bedroom.

From the living room, his voice. “You can come on out here, right now. Hand that girl over, and you can leave through the front door, while you still have one. I’ll leave you be, you have my word. Or you can both burn alive in that bedroom.”

The hounds are thunderous behind them. The fire is hot before them.

“My dogs ain’t so reasonable. Best decide quick.”

Adelaide grips the trap tighter.

She looks down at River, and in her eyes she sees a child who believes she is about to die. Adelaide wants to save her from this feeling. A child should never believe such things. But here they sit, beneath a window that offers no escape, surrounded by fire consuming inch by inch of her sanctuary, the air becoming thicker with every billow of smoke.

Adelaide feels it, too—the inescapability of death. But she cannot give into it. She clashes against it, refuses to accept it. Because once she believes it—once she truly believes it—she will stop fighting, too.

The front door is wide open, barren.

The fire in Adelaide’s living room grows larger, and she can no longer see the old man. But he must be somewhere.

Adelaide stands. The trap in her hand has grown so heavy, weighing a hundred pounds—now a thousand—and she struggles to hold it upright. But this may be their only chance, and she must take it before the flames consume her cabin completely.

She stumbles toward the bedroom door, halting when she spots the old man by the fireplace.

He whistles, and a fury of hounds surge from the back of her cabin to the front, raging anew through the opening of the front door.

The old man points to Adelaide and whistles once more. The dogs test the front steps but do not enter. They jump up and down, strings of saliva flashing like falling stars in the light of the fireplace. The man bellows at them and points again, but the dogs cannot take their eyes off the flames. Away from River. And they refuse to enter the burning cabin.

The old man’s face transforms into something brutal and tyrannous.

Adelaide retreats from the doorway, but he approaches quickly, closing the gap between them. The trap trembles in her hand, its teeth sharp and ready.

The trap wants to close. It wants to snap shut, destroy, kill.

Get off my property! Get off my goddamned property!

She cannot allow him to enter. He cannot come in. He cannot be inside her bedroom. Not again.

Adelaide loosens her grip on River. The girl clamors to stay attached, but Adelaide pushes her back, against the window.

Adelaide holds the trap above her head like a hammer. Like an axe.

The old man stands outside the fire. His face glows, bright yellow flames dancing in the pools of his eyes.

If Adelaide waits any longer, he will enter her bedroom. Her aim would be better if she allowed him closer, but she cannot risk it. Surely she has earned a small triumph after all she’s been through, all she’s lost.

Just one accurate throw.

Adelaide aims for his face, his neck, but as soon as the trap leaves her grasp, she knows she’s made a mistake. She had not considered the heavy chain, dangling down and snaking across her floor. The resistance of it overpowers her, and the trap, once aloft and determined, now falters. Adelaide shuts her eyes. She cannot watch.

The old man screams, and tumbles back into the living room, landing hard against the floor, yelping at the trap latched to his pant leg. He is hit, but the metal jaws don’t clamp through bone and muscle—only skin and fabric.

Adelaide rushes to River, trembling beneath the window.

“Stand up!” Adelaide screams at River, and the girl obeys as if these are words she has practiced.

Something bangs against the bedroom window and Adelaide jumps. Teeth and eyes, tongues and claws. The dogs snarl, blanketing the glass with foam.

The flames breach the bedroom.

Adelaide is tall enough to jump over them, but River is not. Just past the wall of flame, the front door gapes open, offering reprieve in the cool, dark air beyond.

Adelaide watches the old man wrestle the trap from his pant leg. He hollers, but Adelaide cannot hear his words over the roar of the fire.

The room grows hotter, the air dense. Adelaide coughs. River coughs. Time is running out.

Adelaide dives for her closet, grabbing everything large, everything thick. Dresses, coats, bedsheets. Her body collapses under the weight of it all, too injured and exhausted to retrieve any more.

She cloaks River in all of it. Adelaide ties something around the girl’s head, bundling it beneath her neck. She wraps something else around her shoulders, tying the ends into a knot at the girl’s throat. It may be a bedsheet or it may be a dress. Adelaide does not know. She has stopped recognizing anything as her own. Nothing matters but River. Only River.

Behind their heads, the bedroom window explodes, and the end of the chain strikes Adelaide as the trap crashes through the glass. She clutches her jaw as the hounds erupt with renewed fury, scratching and digging at the splintering window frame.

And then the old man steps toward the threshold, over the fire, and into Adelaide’s bedroom.

It has happened once again.

His pant leg is torn, and blood courses freely from a gash on his shin. His eyes rage alongside the flames, and he is no longer a father, a grandfather, a farmer, a hunter. Not old or frail or consumed with sorrow. Adelaide had been hoping for mercy, awaiting a shred of benevolence. But beyond that familiar, dark bewitchment, his eyes are empty. The old man is truly the monster that has lived in her mind all the years, and nothing more.

He snatches Adelaide’s ankle, and she kicks him away, pushing herself farther against the wall. He draws closer, reaches for her again.

The old man spits through his teeth. “I ain’t tryin’ to hurt you, witch.”

A dark shape leaps over Adelaide—a petite figure draped in coats and bedsheets.

River chirps into the air, frightened sounds, panicked sounds, as she waddles closer to the fire, toward the living room and the open door beyond.

The old man moves toward River, and Adelaide throws herself forward, but pain cripples her, bends her in half, and she can only watch as River toddles closer to the fire.

Escaping.

Leaving Adelaide behind.

River dashes through the flames, a tail of fabric sparking in her wake.

She stands in the living room, screeching sounds into the night—sounds like breaking china, like screeching lambs, and Adelaide wants to say, Stop, don’t go, wait for me. But the girl does not look back.

Adelaide doesn’t realize the dogs have left her bedroom window until she sees them beyond her front door once again. They whine, growl, as a girl bundled in smoking fabric draws closer.

River stops in the living room and howls through the open door. Somewhere outside, the wild woman howls. The dogs whimper and circle one another in the doorway.

Adelaide needs to run. She needs to snatch the girl and leave this place, together. Always together. But first, she must stand.

It is a challenge, and her limbs are slow to submit.

River does not see the old man step over the flames and reach for her, but Adelaide does. She tries to scream but her throat is clogged with smoke, and she crawls forward, retching against the floor.

The old man’s arms are crooked and outstretched, his body misshapen and disfigured in the light. By time. Isolation. Some people shouldn’t live in the woods, secluded from the rest of the world. Some people become indulgent and self-important. Or they become something else altogether.

The old man grabs the girl, and the dogs whoop.

River wails.

The wild woman wails.

Adelaide wails.

The old man lifts the child from the floor, and she kicks the air, her legs landing on nothing.

Adelaide lunges toward the bedroom door but the flames are higher now, and the heat singes her skin, her eyebrows. Behind her, a shard of glass falls from the frame, detonating against the floor. The dogs leave their post at the front door to circle back to her bedroom window, hungry for the source of the sound.

River sinks her teeth into the old man’s hand, and he screams, dropping the girl and cradling his wrist.

River rolls across the floor, tangled in fabric still smoking at the ends. She slips from the mass of clothes and bedsheets to stand naked in the living room. She looks back at Adelaide and pauses, mouth stained red, an arc of flame traveling the wall behind her.

The front door gapes open, abandoned and offering release, but River waits for her.

She waits for her.

Adelaide considers wrapping a blanket around herself as well, but there is no more time. There is never enough time. The clock in her bedroom ticks away, scorning every second she’s already lost. It mocks her now, more than ever. Tick-tick-tick. She hears the old man’s voice in the sound. The voices of his sons.

Witch-witch-witch.

Adelaide leaps through the bedroom doorway. Her skirt billows through the flames, just as River’s had, but instead of singeing the edges, Adelaide’s skirt erupts into an inferno as the fire ignites the lantern fluid soaked through the fabric.

Adelaide stumbles, collapsing on top of the old man, her weight forcing him to the floor. His head hits the wood and he spits a tooth from his mouth.

His expression is one of rage as he stares at Adelaide atop him.

And then it is a look of panic as he begins to burn.

Adelaide and the old man—burning, screaming, smoke spiraling and sheeting against their bodies.

River—flailing, shouting something. Something.

Three dogs at the bedroom window—howling through broken glass, bloody noses, crazed eyes.

Something snaps high above, like a tree branch. Or the beam of a cabin roof.

All around her, the smell of burning hair, burning skin, burning muscle.

Outside, a wild woman—running, moaning.

Inside, a witch—cursing, clinging.

And a child—wanting to run and stay, all at the same time, torn between her two mothers.

Adelaide cannot go with River. She knows this now.

Somewhere outside is a basket with clothing that will never be worn and food that will never be eaten. There is a butter-yellow knitted cap that will sink into the forest floor with the next snowfall. And a piece of paper bearing the name of a woman who will never know she nearly found an old lady and a little girl on her doorstep this night. If only they’d left sooner. If only they’d been faster.

The old man is still strong after all these years, but Adelaide is stronger. Perhaps it is her anger that gives her an edge. Perhaps it is River. Adelaide is younger than the man, and taller. It did not help her all those years ago, but her legs wrap around him now with ease, even as he beats his fists upon her back.

The flames engulf her legs, sparking against his pants, and he screams as Adelaide fastens her body against his, inching him toward her bedroom window, farthest from the front door. Farthest from River.

To a place where the dogs can see.