Packs of Yellow Eyes

Fiction by Abigail F. Taylor

I

They came through the mountain pass in droves. Heavy oxen pulled covered wagons, with their heads hung low, like strange ships cutting through the burnt red earth. First, there was too much heat. Then, fingers of rain swept the sky, drumming the canvas coverings, plit-plit-plit. Settlers linked themselves into circles and made camp. In a breath, there were sod houses, barns raised. Cattle and horses were turned out to gnash apart the sparse grass and sage that dotted along the horizon. 

The first coyote they saw came over the ridge. She tilted her nose to inhale the pale, earthy scent of chickens. Dusk settled along the ridge and blanketed the horizon, turning blue and black almost everything except for the slippery shine of the coyote's eyes. 

The settlers took no chances. They tucked pellets of strychnine into rough cuts of meat and set the traps out into the field. They waited. 

Coyotes gorged themselves and, within the hour, shriveled and twisted into heaps of fur, muscles twisting into stone. They drowned in the pale pink fluid that rose from their lungs and dribbled out of their mouths. An agonizing, brutal hour passed, and the creatures died begging. Later, men removed the heads and paws and stuck them on fences surrounding the young fields of corn and cotton. The mutilated pieces served as a warning: All who once belonged here are not welcome. 

Eventually, there were no more coyotes, but Lottie still remembered the lonesome yipping that haunted her childhood. Her father, it was said, went out into the sage to track down the biggest coyote, one that walked on two legs when the shadows were in their longest stretches. He never came home. His body was never found. Although—and she never told this to anyone—Lottie saw her father slinking through the morning mists or whenever the fog curled low to the ground. He was naked and hollow and vanished from sight if she ever looked directly. She only saw him fleetingly through the heavy bend of her eyelids. 

When Lottie was still a child, she mentioned what she saw to her mother. Only once and in the deepest part of the night, when secrets felt safer to be told. It was in the long stretch of winter, the wind rattled the latch on the windows, and they were curled into each other on top of the oven. 

“Mama,” Lottie whispered into the blanket, and then a little louder, “Mama.”

Her mother’s accent, a lilting slant of vowels and snapping consonants, came warm and damp against Lottie’s neck.“What is it, rypka?”

“I’ve seen Papa outside sometimes. Far out in the distance. At dusk or first in the morning.” The way she stumbled around the words and swallowed at the dry swath of her tongue, Lottie knew she sounded foolish. 

“You’ve seen a haint,” her mother answered stiffly, using the American word to describe ghosts and evil spirits that roamed the untamed parts of the earth. 

“No, Mama. Not like that,” Lottie tried again and angled her face away from the rattling shutters that spread needles of moonlight across the packed dirt floor. “I’ve seen Papa. Or maybe a domovoy that looks like Papa. I’m not afraid of it. Of him.”

Her mother didn’t answer at first. The tiny home filled with the crackling of stovewood beneath them and the whistling wind that brought with it fog and a bitter cold that froze the combs off their roosters. Lottie thought that her mother had fallen asleep, but then felt the pain whispered into the exposed parts of her skin. “Papa is dead, rypka. Sleep now.” 

Lottie didn’t bring it up again, but she began to sneak out to the far edges of the property with an egg, a bit of bread, and a splash of cream and set it out for the thing shaped like her father. She spoke into the shadows each time she placed down an offering, “I’m sorry that you’re dead.”

As she grew older, Lottie became less certain if she was speaking to her father’s spirit or the coyotes he helped kill. 

II

In the ten years since the settlement of Broken Blade, the lean-tos, sod huts, and tent saloons evolved into respectable buildings with crisp lettering on the storefronts. Wooden pathways were laid down for respectable women and gentlemen to walk when the roads eroded during monsoon seasons. The church, proud and white at the top of the main street, acted as the social club and municipal court. The barber shared space with the saloon, and the company store was the only place to receive notices of sewing circles and the latest news from the larger cities closer to the railroads. 

It was here that a formal invitation first appeared. Gold filigree lettering rose off the heavy cardstock and caught the glow of the lamplight that Glen Hempstead carried with him each morning when he opened the store in the pre-dawn hours. He marveled at the sudden appearance, transfixed by the ornate penmanship, the expensive paper, and the silver dollar tucked into an envelope beside the notice. It was more than enough to pay for the letter’s central position on the board. His thick fingers floated near the top corner of the page, ever so carefully, as though he worried it might prick his finger and draw blood. He’d never seen such paper the color of ivory and with fibers so thick it might have been cut from the hem of the holy father’s robes.

He withdrew his hand, tucked the silver dollar into his breast pocket, then opened the store. Throughout the day, people came to read the notice and ask Glen Hempstead who might have sent it. “It seems that it arrived with the fairies!” he chuckled, cycling through similar phrases until midday when the preacher’s wife read it aloud to her youngest child, and Glen understood the message at last.

The People of Broken Blade Are Cordially Invited

To Monsieur Hazariah Roan’s Hacienda 

The 13th of October 1837 

In Celebration of Life

No R.S.V.P. needed

Arrive at seven o’clock in front of the church, 

an escort will take you the rest of the way.

Blessings and Gratitude, 

Monsieur Roan

“What do you make of that?” Lottie asked Glen when she arrived late in the day to exchange a sack of roasted pecans and rabbit skins for the head of a garden hoe. 

“It sounds like a party,” he replied after a deep clearing of his wet throat. He tallied up the goods in his notebook. 

“But who is invited? And will there be dancing?”

“I suppose everyone. It didn’t say otherwise, and if it’s a celebration of life, then there must be dancing.”

“Well, there’s never been any Monsieur Roan in the church records,” said the preacher’s wife. She placed a small box of arsenic next to her other dry goods, paying no mind to the children tugging at the folds of her walking skirts. “I do wish you would order more of that strychnine like you used to give us. I think the field mice have built up an immunity to arsenic.”

“Poison is poison,” said Glen, nudging her things aside while he finished with Lottie. “Perhaps the mon-sewer is a Methodist and attends church elsewhere.” 

The preacher’s wife gave a prim little sniff. “Well, I wouldn’t know anything about those Methodists.”  

Lottie’s dark eyes shone and she said, “Then I suppose I should buy a yellow ribbon for my hair if it’s to be my first real dancing party. How much would it cost?”

Glen itched his ear. Like so many other people in recent years, what Lottie brought in for trade wasn’t enough to put a dent into the credit she and her mother owed the company store. Never mind the frivolity of a ribbon. Glen felt sorry for them, the way their father was dragged off and never found. He took down a spool of yellow satin and cut her a length. Glen didn’t mark it down in his ledger because he didn’t want the preacher’s wife, eagle-eyed for gossip, to go around town disparaging him and his little act of charity. 

“Will you go, Mr. Hempsted?” Lottie asked, carefully folding the ribbon and placing it in her bag. Glen chewed his cheek and nodded. He wished he was young enough to ask Lottie to take a turn dancing with him, but he supposed he’d still enjoy the festivities. He couldn’t think of a single person who would miss out on such an invitation. A monsieur with a proper hacienda no less! No one this far west had ever experienced such sprawling wealth. All that, and the social constructions of genteel society, had been shucked free the moment a man hitched himself to the wagon train. 

Glen had a suit, which he’d worn to his sister’s wedding and then later her funeral when she died of consumption. She and her husband were buried back in the nondescript hills of Tennessee, the wagon train moving on from their remains within the hour. Glen had covered them with earth and then buried his suit beneath a sachet of lavender and naphthalene. Still, it was the only suit he had, and it would have to do. 

“I suppose if he’s new to the area, this Monsieur,” said the preacher’s wife, shuffling her items in front of Lottie’s once more. “Then it is our Christian duty to welcome him to our town.” She gave Lottie a sneaky little glance, then spoke to Glen as though they were sharing a well-aged inside joke. “If he’s not taken, I imagine he’ll be the type to look for a dowry and at any little thing who makes more of an effort in their appearance. Ribbons and bows are so gauche.” 

Glen didn’t know what that word meant, but he saw the way Lottie’s big, brown eyes swam before she turned and walked out with her neck forced long and her head angled high. So, when the preacher’s wife asked for a stick of candy for the children, Glen gave her the dusty ones from the back of the jaw and watched her jumble them in with the dry goods and box of poison without speaking another word to her.

On the evening of the party, he closed the general store early so that he could have time to bathe, shave, and brush his clothes clean. Glen was not the only man wearing a suit that was perhaps too small or too baggy in the seat. His shoes shone, and he recalled how to tie a four-in-hand knot. The women had done away with their rugged and faded prairie skirts. Now, they wore elegant dresses of tulle and silk, petticoats that fanned out their hips, and thin strings of jewels. Some even wore scented powders to soften their sunburnt faces and slashed alluring bright paint across their lips and eyes. He noticed Lottie wore her new ribbon in her freshly curled hair and was glad for it. 

Although the entire town had been invited, Glen saw no children. The youngest were Lottie and her friends, around fifteen or eighteen, and they giggled behind their silk fans, spoke in hushed whispers that there might be gentlemen farmers at the party, and one of them might walk away with the promise of a husband. Since the sign had been posted, many rumors spread about the Roan Hacienda. 

“It’s always been there.”

“My uncle went through last month to sell a head of cattle to the Buchel farm, and he said he never saw hide or hair of nothing but grass.”

“Your uncle’s a drunk! He probably walked eighty miles south of here before he realized he was in the wrong direction.”

“Well, I heard they’re French. Come in to stake claims while the land price is still low, but they’ve got property over in Europe. You know the type.”

“I heard it’s just him and a brother, orphans, that fell to fortune after their relation died and left the house in the will.”

“Naw, it ain’t like that. They’s got that tycoon money. Their father’s got a coal mine in London.”

“Well, what I found out the other day while walking with Mrs. McAvery —”

Glen stood at one end of the church, just outside the ring of lamplight, squinting through the frost of his breath that rose before him. The idle gossip hadn’t changed much for the course of a week, and it was giving him a headache. The moon rose above the post oaks. Sparse clouds spread through it as though a wet brush had dragged itself across the weighty pearl face. There was the faintest blush of pink as the last shake of sunlight dipped below the far horizon.

At seven o’clock, a silence fell among the crowd, and the watch in his waistcoat ticked loudly, chasing the pulse in his puffy, old veins. Then, shapes began to appear from the darkness, and he thought of the fairies and wicked haints that his grandmother had once warned him about when he was a boy. 

They fluttered out of tree bark, the way moths revealed themselves to the flickering lamplight. Woody brown exteriors camouflaged into the trees and tall grass, unfurled into radiant oranges and reds, purples and greens, blues so dark they were like obsidian. A breath of color, like gossamer wings, disappeared into their narrow backs. They were footmen in satin masks, adorned in jewels, and possessed a thinness that did not deny the strength in their arms. Their iridescent skin shimmered in the spotlight of the pale moon, and they opened the door of a large hansom that had not been there a moment before. Behind him, the preacher’s wife let out a shuddering gasp, but she was the first to take the offered gloved hand. 

III

The flagstones were scrubbed so clean that they shone like marble. Wide brass chandeliers hung from the branches of cedar trees at the center of the courtyard, and the iron gates, draped in laurels and paper lanterns, were propped open, with a servant on either side of the entry to announce the guests’ arrival.

Hazariah Roan, his elder brother, Luther, and a smattering of favored cousins sat at the head table in ornately carved chairs. Before them were dressed pheasants and geese, jellied eel, roasted and seasoned vegetables, and tiered cakes delicately decorated with honey and saffron, chocolate ganache, and lemon drizzle. There were casks of wine that stayed cool and would never sour, bursting with an array of radiant flavors as the sparkling liquid hit the tongue. The air smelt of honeysuckle perfume, warmed butter and bread, and pinion burning in the lanterns. The rush of cicadas singing in the trees was drowned out by dhol drums, trumpets, and castanets played by the band, whose dark faces were painted like flower-infested skulls. 

Hazariah watched as the people of Broken Blade filed in line to accept the silk and paper mache masks handed out by the servants. He took notice of who practiced their etiquette and who stumbled in, slack-jawed at the opulence of the evening. His golden eyes pierced through the slits of his mask, and he turned to speak in an undertone to his brother. 

Luther lounged in a fawn-colored suit accented with a bright green pocket handkerchief and ascot. His ivory mask covered his mouth, and there were shocks of poison emerald cutting across the high-pointed features of the mask’s devilish design. Out of the shadow of the design, his sharp gaze sparked like flint and steel. His voice rumbled deep, “Tonight, I am Eustache Dauger.” 

Hazariah rolled his eyes. Luther spent far too much time and money purchasing the publications of Jean Dumont, but he supposed one must need a hobby or two when one had such a terribly long life. Hazariah’s thin, wide mouth tilted upward. “And has the man in the iron mask chosen his bride?”

“The night is young, but I’ll sniff her out.” Luther leaned into him. “I know what that old windsnap promised you in exchange for his sad, little life. I’ll leave her alone…unless she chooses otherwise.”  

“Have you seen him?” asked Hazariah, hunting the crowd swelling in the courtyard. They were all such beautiful creatures full of thorns. Luther tipped his head to the eastern alcoves, and Hazariah followed his gaze. The old man was in the shadows with the other, less favored members of the family. Hungry and waiting. Grin spreading, Hazariah flicked a gloved hand to the servants, and they descended into the gathering with flutes of wine. Once everyone had a glass, he stood, and the band quieted. For a moment, there was only the whispering cicadas and the warm crackling fire. 

“Tonight is a celebration of life!” Hazariah did not need to speak loudly. The acoustics in the courtyard carried him to the far corners. He felt the old stiffness in the side of his jaw and neck, the way his right arm ached when he lifted it. For once, he was glad the pains were present, lest the party allow him to forget the real reason for hosting it. 

“Ten years ago today, my family was on the brink of destruction. We were cast out, starving and poor. No longer are we the unwanted dregs. Now, we are kings! So, we toast and welcome you, our good neighbors —” To his right, a soft, derisive snort escaped Luther. “To celebrate a prosperous return! Eat. Drink. Our home is your home.” 

Luther’s laugh rumbled in his broad chest. “Clever dog.” 

“How long do we have before it sets in?” Hazariah touched the glass to his mouth and watched. 

Luther considered the crowd, head tilted, as he took in the air and all the heady, human smells that wafted through the pinon. “A few hours.”

Hazariah returned his undrunk wine to its place at the table and fixed the cuff of his gloves. “Let’s dance.” 

IV

Lottie touched the front of her mask. The man at the door had given her the hooked beak of an egret. Its white feathers tickled her cheeks, and she thought of her mother back home, muttering about the frivolity of dances, goading Lottie to attend and make a fool of herself. 

“Sad, thin girl. Do you think this is a story? Do you dream that some cattle rustling prince will take you from this place? Ha! And when you come home, sore and tired, do not ask me for pity. You’re too old for these things. Tomorrow, you will work just as you have done, and that will be the end of that.” 

Lottie shook herself free of the guilt her mother tried to stitch into her. Tonight, she will have her stories. She floated behind a few of her friends. They were all wearing animal masks, as well, and some fitted better than others, both in size and personality. Nerves caused Lottie to not drink from the wine flute, but she was happy to have a small distraction so it didn’t look like she was aimlessly roaming–even if that was exactly what she was doing.

Glen Hempstead asked Lottie for a dance. He was a friend of her father’s and kind to her and her mother in these difficult times. It only seemed fair. They took a spin or two, shuffling awkwardly to a rhythm neither could quite match. Glen’s mask, she noticed, was human and ribboned with veins of pearl paint that almost looked like a sickness. Or a lightning strike. When the song ended, he bowed with a flourish and a welcomed laugh from Lottie. He moved on to speak with one of the old crowd, whom she noticed was also wearing a human face. So was the preacher’s wife and several of her mother’s social acquaintances. The shapes of these masks were exaggerated and pulled, licks of striking color shooting from the eye and mouth holes. Lottie was glad she wasn’t given one of them. She thought the animal designs were sleeker and prettier. 

She moved from the dancefloor, searching for her friends, but they were all engaged with each other or the sandy-haired family members of their host. So, she found herself lingering by the edge of the stage. The lights that dangled from the sprawling cedar tree reminded her of varnish on wedding cakes, and the buttoned candies and sugared fruits lined on the table were like toys she’d once seen in pictures of a New York City department store. She felt very small and insignificant, surrounded by such luxury.

 She watched the woman sing and clack the castanets as she belted out a Spanish love song. Her skirts kicked up in layers of decadent frills, exposing her brown legs all the way up to the thigh. Scandalous. Captivating. Her bare feet were painted red, and the skull drawn across her high, pointed features drew Lottie in with its dangerous beauty. 

“Would you like to dance?” 

Lottie turned to the baritone voice behind her and couldn’t quite meet the eyes of her host. He wore a charcoal suit, and half of his face was covered in a black mask that extended into the massive horns of a ram. His brown, almost gray, hair curled around the mask, and she had an insane urge to brush the strands away from his covered brow. She had never met anyone with a gaze so arresting, so devastating.

When she didn’t speak, he stepped forward. There was a slight hitch in his step, but it seemed curious and charming rather than something to be pitied. He removed the wine glass from her hand and set it inside the base of a potted plant. His gloved fingers were warm against hers. She was ashamed that her hands weren’t covered like a fine lady's and that her dress wasn’t as shapely or up to style, as some of her girlfriends’. 

“You are Loretta Kozlov?” He asked with a disarming grin.

She was about to ask how he knew her name but remembered that each guest was announced at the door. The feathers of her borrowed mask fluttered with her breath. “Lottie.”  

“Hazariah,” he held her fingers and bowed his ram’s head over the pale shine of her knuckles. 

“That’s a very old name.”

“An old name for an old family,” He agreed. “Do you know how to dance?”

“I think so.” 

Heat dripped down the back of her neck, and the pungent air laid a thin fog on her brain. Her limbs felt loose—like she could dance as well as any snow queens her mother used to speak about before her father’s death trapped her inside a bitter, frothing shell. 

“Would you like to dance then?” Hazariah asked with his deep voice and corked grin. Lottie nodded, heart fluttering, and gasped at the brush of his fingers against her waist. A man was touching her there! Not just any man, but the young owner of this ranch. Kings, he had said. Lottie’s lungs swelled with a liquid heat. She ignored the eyes on her as she was led to the dance floor. She delighted in the way his rough hand cupped the slight curve of her hip, and his fingers brushed against the palm of her other hand as he held it aloft. 

“Are you enjoying yourself?” he asked, and she looked at him now, drunk in the core of his iridescent eyes.

“How did your footmen appear like that?” she asked instead. “Like moths.”

Hazariah’s lips peeled across the locked, square jaw with a cunning twist, and his head lowered to the curve of her ear. “Like magic.”

“Yes,” she whispered. Her body pressed against his, and the woodsmoke, pinion, and sage filled her. There was another scent, too, something unnamable and darker, drenched in an earthy quality that pushed the hot gold in her lungs down to the base of her spine. The backs of her knees ached, and she felt herself falling away as though she were an observer in a dream. The dhol drum overtook the rhythm of her heartbeat, and she was transfixed by the warm churning of the evening, vaguely aware that shapes began to change and drift away as the moon began to crest over the red clay shingles of the hacienda. 

“Can I take off your mask?” she asked, the hand on his shoulder drifting up to twist itself around the string hidden in his brown curls. He captured her hand and pressed his mouth against the tender flesh of her wrist. She felt his teeth tease at the blue veins just below the surface of her skin. Lottie thought of how owls sometimes danced along the high winds before floating down, delicate as peach blossoms, only to snatch the unsuspecting voles hidden in the dead leaves. She sucked in her trembling lip.

“Soon,” he mumbled. His stubble scratched, sending shockwaves to disrupt her inner liquid heat. 

“But I don’t know you,” she insisted. She hardly knew anyone, really. What could she say of her neighbors who lived so far apart from each other, staking out their farms and ranches, their little cookie-box homes planted into the red earth, as though living in the same postal code was enough to know someone? None of them had ever pressed their lips to her arm nor stared at her in a way that she desired to be hunted. 

Yet, here stood Hazariah Roan, guiding her in a dance as though she were a thousand pinpricks of light, and he was shaking her loose for display. She deserved to at least see his face. 

“In the morning, you will know me,” he said, and she believed him but did not understand. “My family’s watched you put out the bread and the cream. We’ve seen you search for your father. We know your heart, Lottie. Tonight, you will see us. All of us.” 

He spoke like this was a game, and she was meant to pick up the clues in the things he said. Lottie opened her mouth to speak, to pry, to beg for clarity, but the music stopped. The brass horns left echoes in the growing dark. Hazariah released Lottie bit by bit, and she became unspooled. Her insides cooled to a dull ashen glow. 

There were other people around them. When had they arrived, and how long had they danced side by side? Lottie’s skin was sticky and so cold, that steam rose off it. Luther Roan stood before them all in his ivory costume. 

“There are some of you who will not make it to the gates tonight. Those of you who poisoned our food and water, who salted the land when we were still a part of it, will meet the same savage end. Who cut off the hands and scalps of my ancestors and ran us from our homes? Our good neighbors.” He raised a flute of wine in Hazariah’s direction. “Tonight, you have enjoyed your last supper. Those of you who were too young to remember or take an active part in the slaughter have an opportunity to survive. Oh, you will be hunted, just as my brothers and I were hunted. Still, you have a chance.”

Behind Lottie, the heavy doors of the courtyard swung open, but she couldn’t pull her eyes away from the man standing on the stage nor dislodge herself from the one beside her. “Hazariah?” She whispered while searching for her friends tangled in the crowd. “What does he mean?”

A great, singular wave of shrieking filled the heady night air. The older men and women staggered, clawing at their masks only to reveal the burning, bubbling skin beneath. Their arms and jaws stiffened. They choked on their tongues and a vile pink sludge that frothed along the edges of their melting mouths. On the stage, Luther’s mask, molted in ivory and gold, cracked apart. His sharp, cunning features elongated and reshaped in the bright shaft of moonlight.

Hazariah spun Lottie toward the gates. His eyes held a stark and mischievous craving. His voice was hot in her ear. “Run.” 

V

The stitching of Luther’s clothing split as his body stretched, snapped, and twisted. His rib cage broke free from the cloth bindings that flattened his chest, the only unfortunate piece of what Luther deemed a remarkable body. “After all,” he’d say, wrapping his torso tight each morning. “Not even God was perfect.” Fat and muscle popped, snapping from crackling bone. Coarse gray hair burst from human flesh, which fell away like ticker tape. 

Hazariah’s change was faster, nearly bloodless, the way his skin shucked off like corn husk. He was raw. He hungered. The ram’s head fell free of his reformed skull, and everywhere, members of his clan clawed their clothes as they sprouted fangs and long, ropey bodies. Another scream, male this time, shook loose the cobwebs of his brain. His senses sharpened, and the scent of the woman – his woman – danced over the crooked and mutilated corpses of the ones that deserved their doses of strychnine. 

Luther gave a delighted yip and butted his head against the singer with the castanets. She and the other band members had undergone the novice’s transformation. The painted markings of skulls and fingerbones marred the thick fur. Blood and grime clung to the thickened claws. A young boy darted by, slipping on the abandoned powdered wigs. The trumpet player, now animal, sank his teeth into the boy’s jugular before he hit the ground. 

Hazariah’s claws clacked against cobblestones. He leaned his snout into the egret mask, inhaling Lottie Kozlov's sweetgrass and lavender scent. The servants howled, jaws wet and dribbling with bloody tendons. The muscles in his neck tightened as he let out an answering bray, and two hundred coyotes thundered into the misty blue night. 

And what could be said that would match anything so freeing as lungs full of crisp air? It is a shapeless, worryless crackle of the spirit entertaining with the call of the moon. 

Hunt. Hunt. Hunt. 

Breath came up from the hunting party, wet and smokey. The family diverted through the trees and the rolling, red hills. The game was easy. Humans ran like foolish rabbits, jumping and squirming, unable to find cover because they had burned away the bramble when they first came and marred the earth with their uniformity. Petticoats and circle skirts snagged. Pants tore, and waistcoats lost their pearl bright buttons. Ribbons from the masks of paper mache and silk animals drifted lazily in the sky. Shoes were lost. Someone begged for mercy. Hazariah could hear it squeaking out into the still air. 

Beg. Beg. Beg. 

Tooth and claw against bone and sinew. 

And where were they when the coyotes begged for peace? Nowhere. Nowhere at all.

Hazariah flicked his tail, pushed his nose into the dirt, and followed the trail of sweetgrass and lavender through the blood. Luther howled. The rest responded with their delighted braying deep into the well of blackness. Coyotes took back the night. 

One. By one. By one. 

VI

Fog rolled off the low-slung hills, and dew came up from the ground to dapple her skin. At first, eyes screwed shut and stuttering in her breaths, Lottie thought she might still be in bed, that her mother stole all the blankets in the night and forgot to place another log in the stove. But the mourning dove cooed, soft and brown, into the pale dawn. She realized she was out in the grass. The wetness that dappled her skin was not dew but blood. Fear choked her, and she did not want to open her eyes to see what lay around her. 

Lottie curled her toes in, scratching the base of her tattered skirt. Her hands reached out to search her face for injury, but there were only feathers clinging to the sweat of her brow. Slowly, she opened her eyes, and there were men standing among the far trees. No. Not men. Just one. A lonely, hunched little figure splattered in dried gore. 

“Papa?” 

He came to her, dropping on all fours, though his body did not shift into the gruesome creature that had claimed him during the night. His hair was grown out, and there were bits stuck in his teeth, but the shape of his eyes was warm and still. She remembered those eyes and the curve of his hand, an old injury from the Chuguev uprising. Before he met Mama. Before they were promised an allotment in America. Before Lottie. 

“I watched over you, just in case,” he murmured. His voice was rougher than it had been, ill-used. She shrank back, certain that he was a trick. A ghost. An abomination pretending to be her father. He lifted his hand and rubbed the crusting blood from her temple. “You fell when you ran. Roan found you, and I thought, maybe —”

“You were dead,” she said to him, drawing her knees close. 

He shook his head. “No. Only changed.”

“Then why didn’t you come back?” Tears flashed hot in her eyes, and when he reached out to comfort her, Lottie threw a fistful of dirt into his face and scrambled further backward until her foot snagged on a root, and she fell against a dying post oak. “Why didn’t you come back?”

Her father sneezed out the dirt, shook his head, and stepped sideways. Away from her. Cautious. Worried. She saw a twisted scar running down his neck and bare torso, red like beetroot and painful to look at. 

“You never came home.”

“I did, I did! Didn’t you see me? Isn’t that why you put the bread and the milk out? I thought you knew.” His little body shrank into itself. “I thought you understood.”

“Why?” Lottie choked. “The door was always open! We were always waiting.” 

She tucked her face into her scraped knees. The petticoats rushed against the raw burns on her cheeks, and she wished she weren’t wearing such a foolish frock, that she still had that mask to hide behind and pretend she could not see him. “We needed you.”

“I was there. A man loves his family…” He hesitated but leaned his forehead into hers. “But the land takes claim of his heart, and he cannot run from it.” 

“What happens now?”  Lottie asked, knuckling the tears off her nose.

He caught her eyes with his own sad, dejected stare. “You come with me. Roan is waiting. Or you run and hope that we don’t catch you.”

“What about Mama? The others who didn’t come to the party?”

He shrugged a bony shoulder. 

“These men – ”

“Coyotes.”

“And women. They’ll kill all of us.”

“Not all.”

“Mama will die if I don’t go with you.”

“You lived because I promised Roan to you. He’s in want of a wife.”

Lottie swallowed and followed her father’s gaze back in the direction of her home. There, just past the strip of morning light, her mother was waking, taking kernels of feed to the chickens, sweeping beetles out of the cabin. Alone now and forever. Alive just the same.

Lottie pushed herself to her feet. She dusted her skirts clean and followed her father, who was naked and unashamed, through the untamed land. She followed him to the back entrance of the hacienda, red in the bright morning, alluring with the ivy that trailed up its face. The string of tea candles still twinkled in the trees. 

There, by the gate, Glen Hempstead’s severed hands and head swung in the barbed wire. Lottie shrieked and turned into her father. He wrapped his arm around her trembling body as she wept into him, “Why? Glen! Glen! He was a good man to us!”

He waited until the shock ran out of her, leaving her weak, kneaded, and numb. Then he smoothed down her hair and said, “Oh my darling, rypka. Good men are capable of terrible things.” 

A moth descended, unfolding herself from her barklike exterior, and presented Lottie’s father with a turquoise sarape with pink fish stitched through it. He wrapped it around his scarred hips. “Hazariah wants to speak with you, but go with Constance first.” 

He went to the right through an open-air corridor. Constance, the moth woman, looked at Lottie. She arched her long, feathering eyebrows. 

Lottie asked, “Are you really magic?” 

Constance responded by taking her hands and kissing them.

VII

Hazariah slept through the morning and didn’t crawl out of his goose feather bed until church bells struck two. He sat on the edge of the mattress, kneading his fist into his right leg. The dull, persistent ache that spread from his shoulder to his jaw never left, not even when he was transformed. But he was one of the lucky ones–only the briefest exposure to strychnine passed on through his mother while she nursed him. 

“God, these people,” he murmured, tonguing at the remains of the evening from his teeth. Intruders. Savages. 

He dressed in a loose linen shirt, waistcoat, and trousers that were far better suited for the summer months, but the animal inside him rolled deep, stretching itself in preparation for a second night in the moon’s sway. He hated this human form. He could feel it dying and longed for the day when he would be coyote again. 

Lottie waited for him in the receiving room. There were others, too. Some friends. All were young and didn’t have a direct hand in the slaughter of coyotes, merely profiting off of their parents' ‘good deeds.’ They wore fresh, simple clothes the color of wet clay and ash. Their skin was pink from scrubbing away the evening’s hunt and smelled of hibiscus and honey. Hazariah knew which ones Luther let live. Big and burly through the shoulders. Good for recruitment. For hunting. For breeding. We do what we can to survive.

Lottie stood, her small hands bunched into fists. She didn’t beg for her life or demand an explanation. She asked, unexpectedly, quiet and measured, “What did you do to my father?”

From the butler’s pantry across the room, Luther swaggered in. A decanter of brandy held loosely in fingers that still hook into claws. His body was constantly on the verge of liberating itself. “We showed him mercy. That’s a fair deal more than any of you ever did for us.”

“Not so,” Hazariah’s lips twisted to point in Lottie’s direction. She alone was drawn to something outside of herself. She left offerings, and she spoke into the night. The moon had called to her like it had called to her father. Like attracts like. 

“Just the same,” Luther relented. “You in this room have been given an opportunity. A chance at a second life. A better life.”

“You sound like one of those nutty tent preachers,” a boy said, huddled on the couch. 

Luther shrugged and set the decanter down on the table in the center of the receiving room. “We are what we are. The land provides for us in ways that it will never do for you. That’s why your fathers fought so hard to dig and toil, to poison what belongs here. You cannot tame a wild thing, and God never pities what is natural and what belongs. Thus endeth the lesson.” 

Hazariah smirked and rolled his neck loose. Luther settled himself onto the calfskin loveseat, draping his arms around two of the boys. A girl with downy curls and a slight hook in her lip stood and pressed herself against Lottie. “You mean you’ll eat us like you did my aunt and uncle?” 

Hazariah remembered seeing the girl abandon Lottie to sneak away with a footman. Some people were drawn to the unspoken dangers of strange men and dark corners. He asked her, “Would you like that? Would you like to be free?”

“We aren’t cannibals,” Luther's teeth were sharp, gums bloody. He pressed his nose into the soft cheek of the boy on his right, offering a snuffle of grunting affection with his aquiline nose. “We’re cursed to look like you until we can put the world back to order. Eye for eye. Tooth for tooth.”

“We have another ball tonight,” Hazariah explained, his golden eyes locked on Lottie. The tang of fear cut through the soap. “And you’ll be given a second chance to run. With them or with us.” 

“What if we don’t want either?” Lottie asked, and the scent of fear shifted to a throbbing pulse of adrenaline. 

Hazariah frowned. “Then go home to your mother. Go home to skinning squirrels and picking half-rotten pecans off the ground, hoping you can survive another winter. Optimism is a lovely thing –”

“It’s a slow death,” Luther cut in. “Optimism…what did that ever do for any of us? It’s wishful thinking. Now hope? Therein lies a passionate trust.” 

“The lesson is over, Luther,” Hazariah barked. “They can go home to toil. Let them live with the sins of their elders.” 

“I annoyed him,” Luther pouted and leaned in to snuffle the boy on his right again, laughing as he cringed at the heat of Luther’s breath. “He’s always telling me to never play with food.”

“You belong, or you don’t. That’s all there is,” said Hazariah, reaching forward and lifting Luther out of the loveseat by the scruff of his neck. They left the survivors, footsteps echoing down the stone corridors. They spoke to each other in ways that only brothers could. Breath and touch and looks. The discussion elevated in the receiving room, aching and panicked. 

“But it’s magic, and we’ll be alive.” 

“There are no more crops.” 

“We sold the last of our sheep. So did you.”

“Nothing yields. It’s all dried out.”  

Hazariah heard Lottie say, “My mother always warned me never to trust a man who was hairy on the inside.”

VIII 

The caravan from Crow Cave arrived at six o’clock that evening. Lottie stood beside her father in the alcove with the others. He wore a simple black mask made of leather, and the burgundy coattails hid any blood splatter from the night before. She whispered, “Does it hurt?”

“To be the best version of yourself?” he asked. His ruined hand found the base of her neck and rubbed his thumb into the cool, dampened skin. “Of course, it hurts.”

Lottie took a steadying breath. Her ears rang, and she hardly heard the band as it struck up the first song. Tonight, she wore the head of a ram. The horns were heavy, and Hazariah found her again, hovering with an untouched flute of wine in her hands. This time, he wore the face of a desert hare, his suit the color of a fawn. 

“Will you dance with me?” he asked.

She watched the veins in his neck pulse and asked, the same way she asked her father not long before, “Does it hurt?”

He held out his hand. She remembered a cousin who thought he heard the sound of rushing water and plunged his arm deep into a rattlesnake nest. He died between sobs. Hazariah said, “Sometimes the most painful things are the most beautiful.” 

Lottie slipped her fingers into his.

IX - How Coyote Made the Night Sky

The night was an unbearable black. So, Creator asked man and woman to help put the stars into the heavens. He gifted them each arrows of fire and told them to do good work. Man and woman were new to their bodies and busy discovering the length of their bones, the taste of salt on their tongues, and the silt of the earth spreading beneath their toes. 

They touched each other in the inky black. She breathed into his mouth. He marveled at the silken strands of her hair as it pooled between his fingertips. The arrows, wrapped so carefully in their blanket, danced across their bloodied thighs and desperate tongues as they fell into each other. Again and again came the exploration of the soul, ignited by the earthbound stars.  

Old Coyote had followed man and woman into the sage. He had waited and watched, hoping that they might take each arrow and fashion the likeness of himself and his friends into the night sky. As the hours stretched on, he realized that humans, so taken with the look and feel of themselves, would never get the job done. It angered him that they would forget their promise to Creator. So, Coyote crept low on his belly and stole the heavy blanket off their naked bodies. He shook the bundle of arrows free, tossing them all in one great effort into the air. 

The stars stuck against the black, sprawling and dancing into the far corners of the horizon. Some clashed into each other, causing sparks to cascade back to earth, while others spun further away until they were only dull whispers in the distance. Coyote laughed and took the people in his arms. 

“Now we have done good work!” 

X

She had lost Lottie to the wilds. 

Mothers always know there will be a day when their child vanishes into someone strange and unfamiliar. It doesn’t make the coming and going any easier. If she were to look at Lottie now, she might see her as a river: the same body ever swift, ever moving, and not quite as familiar as it first seemed. Lottie was gone. Her husband was gone. Both were taken by those tricky prairie wolves that skulked like haints in the shadows. 

In the evening, when dusk settled in such a way that confused the shapes of the trees, she brought a bowl of cream and a loaf of bread out to the edge of the property. She sank on her knees, ever-aging into grinding old stones, and she waited to see her child and husband flit through the corners of her eyes. She knew better than to look directly. She whispered, “God of spirits and flesh, give rest to the souls of the departed.” 

Sometimes, the old hens produced an egg or two, and she put those out as well, offering what she could, sorry there couldn’t be more. She had known it was wrong to harm those sad, lonely creatures. Still, she’d done nothing to stop the men from scalping the fur and to get prize money from the sawed-off paws. For her idleness, she was alone. The land takes back. 

At night, she curled under a blanket too big now that she had no one to share it with. She talked to her daughter. She talked to her husband. She told them that there was a witch in the woods whose house had the feet of a bird. She told them to never trust a windfall apple and wondered if they would ever find themselves again. In the winter, she listened to their voices calling calling calling in the gusts of frosty air. 

She hoped they were happy.