Feral Youth

“Where are we?” Jaila asked. She was gripping Ursula’s hand so tightly it had to hurt, but Ursula didn’t complain.

“Haven’t you figured it out?” Ursula said with that familiar curve of her lips, one a lip plug could do nothing to disguise. “We’re in between.”

“In between what?”

“Worlds. Our world and the gods’ world. Your world and my world. Real worlds and unreal worlds and almost-real worlds. He never talked to you about it?”

Now Jaila got bitter, and it threaded her flame with a sickly green. “He said dangerous things like that weren’t for sweet girls like me.”

Ursula snorted again, but this time Jaila kept her balance. “Machista fool,” she said.

Jaila laughed, and burning flower broke apart on the gleaming black behind them. A thousand rivulets swarmed and gathered until they outlined a coyote walking in the dark. It limped. As more lines converged, Jaila could see some kind of spear lodged in its side. It panted, glanced behind itself, continued down the path. It seemed to wind closer, or at least the coyote got bigger, near enough for them to see the blood matted to the fur by its hip and in front of its neck. It looked up and yipped.

They shouldn’t have been able to hear it. They hadn’t heard the other strange visions in the slick, but the coyote’s call came at them as though from underwater. It approached them and howled. Jaila leaned forward. Its eyes were clouded with pain, but they bored into hers, yellow and fierce with recognition. It wanted to tell her something. It had come back to tell her something.

“Tizoc?” she said.

It rushed from her lips with a roar that deafened her, with a shine that blinded her, with a heat that seared her skin. It poured onto the slick, poured until the fire burned a little bit of it away.

The coyote stepped through.

*

The coyote wheezed from the pain in his side. He was real, or real enough for his fur to smell like blood, for his breath to stink of river water.

The fur by his right eye was cut by an old scar, from when the three of them had gone to the river to fish and he’d waded in too deep and been carried out by the strong current of the late rainy season. They’d waited in an overcrowded emergency room for hours while blood soaked the rag he held there, and Jaila had shivered with alternating waves of horror at the misery of the place, and jolts of pleasure at being so near to him.

It was around that time that he found a chamán with a bad reputation from a few towns over—not respected but feared—who taught him how to find his nagual, to become a coyote. He drifted away from them then—became less Tizoc, the older brother and truest unspoken love, and more Tizoc, the sicario who did unspeakable things in the desert and came back with another tattoo and a habit for first-harvest cane liquor. He spent some nights on his knees, clutching the icon of San Judas Tadeo to his chest while he cried over a pain he swore was an enemy poisoning his soul.

You’re poisoning your soul, Jaila had wanted to tell him, but she had never dared. All her words had burned out around him, had fallen out of her mouth, as white as wood ash, and dusted his perfectly polished hand-tooled leather boots.

Go back to bed, Jaila, he’d growl at her. You don’t belong here. You shouldn’t be out at night. And he’d look at her, and she would know: he no longer trusted himself.

He hadn’t been dangerous before. He pretended it was his power, his nagual, his wild coyote that made him dangerous now. Even Ursula had tried to believe that for a while, before they found the photos on his phone. Dead men with their throats ripped out, faces slack, eyes wide with terror. One of the men clutched an icon of the Virgen de Guadalupe, now drenched and wrinkled with his blood. Oh, a coyote had done it, that much was true. But it was not the coyote that was dangerous.

It was the man.

Jaila had left not long after. She had left, or she had been dragged away—it depended on your perspective. Ursula had screamed at her, at the end—Why don’t you fight? Why don’t you tell them you don’t want to go? But Jaila was choking with ashes, with fear and regret. At what he had become, at what would happen to them all if they stayed here in the desert and the hills, invoking the bounty of Mother Earth with flowers and candles and the blood of dead turkeys. Maybe she had believed him when he said that she didn’t belong here, where the earth spoke in the only words that had ever felt at home in her mouth.

She had tried to come back when she heard the news of him, when the wind whispered that he had disappeared. But they had stopped her. Just when she had decided to fight, they had stopped her.

So how had she found herself here, on the road back home at sunset, with water in her bag and a flame in her mouth?

“Is it you?” she asked the coyote now. “You brought me here?”

“Jaila,” Ursula said, urgent. “Jaila, don’t talk to him. He can’t be real. Do you see that spearhead in his side? It’s like something out of a museum. . . .”

He tilted his head and snorted a little. He lifted a bloody paw and smeared her arm with it.

Dead men don’t do magic.

Ursula stiffened against her. “What did you say?”

“Nothing. I just heard—”

“Heard what?”

“Him,” Jaila whispered, and the flame didn’t burn her anymore; it just gave her light and kept her warm.

You brought yourself here, the coyote said.

“Did you hear that?” Jaila asked.

Ursula looked at her and the coyote, then closed her eyes and exhaled. The wind bucked, tossed them high and dropped them low—in this in-between place, everything seemed to go in two directions at once—and Jaila grabbed the two of them, her two greatest loves, and held on.

The wind steadied again. “Will you let go a little?” Ursula said, muffled against Jaila’s shoulder, in the language of their sisterhood, their friendship, the language that had always connected one little outsider girl to these people and this land. They hadn’t spoken it before now.

Jaila released her. They were both covered in the coyote’s blood. His eyelids were sinking and then opening, as though he were about to pass out. Ursula gazed down at him, her eyes fierce and almost as yellow as the coyote’s in the lingering light of Jaila’s words. “And tell him he was a fool and a murderer, and he broke his sister’s heart, too—not just yours, Jaila; he broke mine too.”

“He can hear you,” Jaila said quietly. “And he’s not dead. Look! We have to get back to the woods, find where his human body is, and take him to the hospital. He’ll survive if we hurry. . . .”

They both turned to her. She fell back against the cushion of the wind, made dizzy by the familiarity of it: the brother and the sister turning those uncannily similar gazes upon her in the moment they realized that they understood something that Jaila, the perennial outsider, didn’t.

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