We start walking, our paces slow and even. We’re arm’s-length apart, except for me and Roya. The two of us keep our fingers linked. Her palm is soft against mine. It’s the only thing I want to pay attention to, the only thing I want to talk about: me and Roya, Roya and me, look, we’re a We, are you all seeing this? But there’s something else that needs to be said, and I need to say it while we’re all alone together.
I squeeze Roya’s hand the way she just squeezed mine, because that’s something we get to do now.
And then I tell them all that Josh’s heart has disappeared.
Paulie’s eyes are on the uneven ground in front of her. “Could someone have taken it? Nico, maybe?”
“Why would they?” I ask. “The bag was in the same place I left it. No, I think … I think it just disappeared. When, uh. When Roya and I got rid of her last piece.”
“What do we do now?” Marcelina whispers, and no one answers. We follow a trail of stirred soil deep into the woods, far from the ongoing searches. We pass through a thick section of twisting black oaks that look like something out of a scary story. I duck under a low-hanging branch and get trailing moss in my hair. I’ve never seen trailing moss before, except in documentaries about bayous and horror movies about haunted houses in the Deep South. Paulie ducks between two of the trees and disappears into shadow. I’m pulling moss out of my hair and looking at Paulie’s retreating form, about to follow her, when a shadow detaches itself from the trunk of an oak just a few feet away from her.
“Paulie,” I hiss.
“What?” she whispers back. I point to the shadow, and Paulie freezes.
It’s the coyote.
Her ears are low, almost flat. She’s staring at me, her yellow eyes wide with alarm. I try to send her calm and comfort and certainty that we won’t do harm, that we’ve just stumbled across her path by accident. I try not to distract myself with prayers that she’s not going to panic and hurt Paulie or me.
Because she might hurt us. She’s an animal, a creature. She’s not a dog and she’s not a person and she has teeth that are made to tear into soft flesh like mine. And if she’s scared of us, she’ll do what she thinks she has to do in order to survive.
But then, impossibly, she takes a step toward me. It’s slow, hesitant—her paw hovers a few inches above the ground before she lets it fall. Her eyes are locked on mine. Paulie is looking at me too, and I shake my head, hoping that she’ll understand what I mean: don’t do anything.
The coyote doesn’t bite me. She approaches, impossibly slow, and pushes the top of her head into my palm.
Strange smell meat found yours come follow come now meat strange new come
Before I can answer—before I can really even begin to understand—the coyote turns and starts to walk slowly between the trees. She slinks with her tail low, glancing behind her.
It’s not that I don’t have a choice, but—what else am I going to do? Of course I follow her. As I pass Paulie, I have just enough time to whisper, “Follow me. Not too close.”
Paulie’s face is frozen with something between fear and disbelief, but there’s no time to explain. By the time I turn back to the coyote, the dappled shade of the trees has almost swallowed her up.
I follow ten feet back, my fingers still warm from where Roya was holding my hand before. I’m just close enough to see Paulie’s movement. She turns to look at me occasionally, the line of her back taut. I can just hear Paulie, Maryam, Marcelina, and Iris following, another twenty feet between us. They don’t talk. Good. Human voices might be too much right now, might make the coyote panic. All of this is too much right now, I think, and I have to bite back a hysterical laugh.
We go just far enough from the trail that I know we didn’t stumble across the coyote by accident. It feels impossible, but—she came to find us. To find me.
She finally stops in front of a fallen tree, one that’s overgrown with weeds and fungus. She looks behind me to the girls, her ears flat, her tail low.
She doesn’t run, but she’s close to it.
I put my hand out and manage to brush her head with my fingertips. Friend friend friend friend packmate ally friend—I’m saying everything I know how to say to calm her, but there are too many people here and they’re all too close to her. She’s got her lip lifted at me, showing a few teeth that don’t look as sharp as I know they’d feel. There’s blood caked on her muzzle.
She jerks her head from under my hand, and I flinch, but she isn’t snapping at me. Instead, she lowers her nose to the overgrown weeds in front of the fallen tree.
It’s hard to make out shapes in the uneven light that falls through the trees. I recognize the leg first.
“Oh my god.” I say it out loud without thinking, lifting my hands to my mouth, and the sound of my voice is the last straw for the coyote. She takes off into the trees, loping lower than she would if she wasn’t already trying to hide from us. She’s fast—not as fast as she’d be out in the open, but still faster than my best sprint. She moves through the woods like a stiff breeze, and then she’s gone.
My friends are still too far away to see what I’m seeing. I’m alone.
It’s just me and the body.
It’s just me and Josh.
22.
HE’S WHOLE.
He’s here.
Josh is right here, in the woods in front of me,
