*
The path was a slim red dirt line looping through patchy forest up here in the hills. In the dark, with the moon sinking rapidly in the west, it held different dangers than the winding desert roads below. Only the wind in Ursula’s nose, chasing and testing her, told them where to go when the trees blocked even the stars overhead. An owl hooted, three low beats. They flinched.
“We won’t die tonight,” Ursula said. Because that’s what the owl’s call meant on a night like this: an omen of death.
Maybe we won’t, Jaila thought, and then froze. Though she hadn’t opened her mouth, she had heard it, a voice not quite her own murmuring with the leaves and the wind.
“Did you say something?” Ursula asked.
Jaila’s mouth was burning again. She shook her head. After a moment Ursula shrugged and started again down the path. They continued for an hour like that, using roots and outcropping rock for handholds as the path got steeper. Jaila had to stop twice to catch her breath. She had a pack with a bottle of water still half filled, though she couldn’t remember where she had bought it. She offered it to Ursula, who took a swig and then let Jaila drink the rest. It had been too long; Jaila could see it in Ursula’s eyes. That pity and impatience, as though she were truly a foreigner.
“I’m trying,” Jaila snapped, unthinking. Her words lashed out like a whip and sizzled in the air between them. They smelled of sulfur and burning rubber.
“What did you say?”
Jaila realized that she’d spoken in the other language, the one that Ursula didn’t understand. She pulled out other words, placed them gently on the tip of her tongue, and let them fall with lazy sparks to the dirt and dry leaves at their feet. “Harder than I remember.”
A wind blew between the two of them, blew the sparks into the air where they were extinguished like fireflies. Ursula’s nostrils flared wide. “I smell it,” she said. “It’s down the slope there. The body.”
Jaila’s heart started pounding, fast enough to break. Ursula put her hand on Jaila’s shoulder.
“The body of the coyote,” Ursula whispered.
Jaila nodded fast. “Not him,” she said, and this time the words that slipped out were in the other language, the one that the trees and the rocks and the wind and the rain spoke up in these hills. Their fire was pure and blue and smelled of rain.
Ursula frowned at it. “How long have you been able to do that, Jaila?”
But Jaila didn’t say anything, because Jaila didn’t know. She followed Ursula as she veered from the path. In the dark Jaila would have stumbled straight over the edge of the decline, but Ursula hauled her back by the collar.
“Wait here,” she said. “I’ll go down.”
Ursula secured her machete in its scabbard on her belt and clambered over the edge. Her head quickly disappeared from view. Jaila waited. She wanted to join her friend and not let her face whatever was down there alone, but she knew that she’d never be able to scale the cliff safely in the dark. Ursula and the boy had always been better in the hills than Jaila. The wind rushed past her, spinning the leaves in circles. The owl hooted again, closer now. And then another animal, maybe a dog, growled softly just behind her. She spun around. The trees were quiet; even the mosquitoes seemed to be sleeping. She was alone.
The dog—or whatever it was—growled again. The sound came from deeper in the woods, farther from the path. She couldn’t see it for the shadows.
“Ursula?” she tried to call, but fear had banked the flame in her mouth. Her voice was the heavy smoke of wet kindling, and the wind blew it away before it could reach her friend. The animal shrieked, and now she recognized it for what she had feared: a coyote. And she was alone, undefended in its territory, with her back to a ravine. She couldn’t see well enough to run, so she unslung her pack from her shoulder and searched inside. She couldn’t remember how she got it any more than she could remember how she found herself on the road back to her most beloved home. Maybe it had a light or a gun or— Her hand wrapped around the hilt of a knife. She’d have been better off with a machete, but a knife was good; a knife she knew how to handle. The coyote howled. She wondered if it was alone; she wondered if it just meant to threaten her off or attack her. It howled again; from below them, as though from the middle of the rock itself, a howl answered. The two calls twined into a song, not as inhuman as it ought to be. Like horns at a funeral playing in mournful diminished fifths. And then, for a moment, like boys at four in the morning drinking Victorias and listening to sad ballads, a cry of pleasurable despair.
His name slipped from between her lips. She didn’t mean for it to. But she was staring into the dark of the woods, holding a knife, and she wanted so much for him to be there that she couldn’t hold it back.
She thought it was a bomb at first. It lit the trees, the hills, the cliff where Ursula had disappeared. Birds screeched and flew away, squirrels and moles and snakes scrambled from the underbrush. The closest leaves caught fire, which spread down the branches. She froze, staring at the damage she’d unintentionally caused. Where was Ursula? She couldn’t hear her friend anymore. She didn’t dare call out. The fire was high now, burning the hairs on her arms with its heat. Her lips, though . . . Her lips felt as cool as the bottom of a well.
A coyote walked from the fire. He was large, his head nearly to her hip, with a blond triangle of fur by his neck and a drooping right eye cut by an old scar. He bared his teeth. The knife fell from her grip and speared the earth by her foot. Ashes were raining around them like fat snowflakes; she had dreamed of snow once, back in the days when they had all loved one another.
The coyote nodded once and then turned around and left the circle of the burning trees.
She chased after him. She wanted to call out, but she knew the woods might not survive it. She’d go back to the cliff, she’d find Ursula later. Ursula would agree. She couldn’t let him go this time. Not if it really was—
She leaped over the thought just as she leaped over the roots and overturned trees in her path. The coyote kept just ahead, fast but not so fast that she couldn’t follow. Periodically, he’d stop to look back at her and jerk his head as though to say, Faster, string bean. Did you forget how to run while you were away?
They were climbing the hill, where the trees gave way to outcropping rocks and scraggly shrubs. She wasn’t sure where because he had left the path, and all she saw were stars and sky and dark blobs of trees in the distance.