She reached again into the sack and pulled out the handkerchief, the rope, and the knife. The items were laid next to the rabbit. She contemplated them as she rubbed her arms.
Finally, she knelt next to the rabbit and placed it flat on its belly. She pinched the hide near the neck and made a cut, then pulled with one hand toward the rear and with the other toward the head. The skin began to tear and separate.
It had always amazed her, when she performed this task in the kitchen under her mother’s watchful eye, how easily the skin would slide away, like tissue paper being ripped, revealing muscle and fat, a sharp reminder of the frailty of all living creatures.
This time, she trembled so much she feared she’d be unable to complete the skinning, yet at last she removed the entire hide and the exposed corpse lay before her.
Alba wiped her hands with the handkerchief and stood up. She hung the oil lamp from the branch of a tree that practically dipped its roots into the river. Then she picked up the rope and rested her hand on her brother’s pistol, which was tucked in the gun belt around her waist. The belt had also belonged to Tadeo. She’dnever had a gun belt of her own, but then, she’d never had a pistol. When her brother or Valentín took her target shooting, she used their weapons. She didn’t hunt.
Would it be different from shooting a target? she wondered. How easily did a bullet pierce flesh rather than a tin can? Could a bullet that had not been blessed kill a witch?
Valentín was dead and she had no one to mentor her through this task. All she knew about trapping a witch was murmurs and half-forgotten tales, which might be wrong even if she had been able to remember them clearly. All she had was what Valentín had spoken, and he was dead.
She had nothing else, nothing but that pistol and the rope and the skinned rabbit. But she’d made up her mind that day; she’d loaded the gun and promised herself she would not return home until the witch was dead.
Alba had never wondered about the source of her portents. To her, they seemed like the mole on her neck, simply a part of her. Now she felt that whatever quality allowed the portents to manifest also gave her an instinctive clue to what words to say and how to proceed.
She cleared her throat and spoke. “I bring you an offering of flesh and blood!” she yelled.
She stepped away from the rabbit’s corpse and clutched the rope. She waited.
The tree under which she stood was a few paces from the river, so that in case of an attack she might jump into its current and swim away. There was no guarantee the water would shield her from harm, and yet it was the one escape route she’d mapped. Besides, she knew this area, knew the riverbank. Tadeo and Alba had skipped stones there, jumped rope, drawn figures in the mud with a stick.
The feeble light of the moon drifted between the branches of the tree and the wind stirred her hair, tugged at her skirt, but no bloodthirsty creature sought her.
She rested her back against the trunk of the tree and waited some more.
A cry made her quickly raise her head. It was the strange cry she’d heard once before, outside her window, almost a growl, and it seemed to come from far away, though when it rang out again, it sounded dangerously close.
Something was approaching fast.
She brushed a hand against her lips and looked around, trying to discern any movement in the distance. The night yielded no clues as to the source of the noise. The wind toyed with the grasses by the river; it rustled the cattails softly. A leaf fell from the tree and lodged in Alba’s hair.
Then she saw it, slipping into the edge of the clearing. It was asif a ripple sliced through the blackness of the night, as if someone had thrown a pebble into the dark and the dark had awoken. Forward slid a shadow and the shadow was a thing that had the body and the head of an enormous dog, with a long snout and pointed ears.
As the thing inched closer to the dead rabbit, sniffing and hissing, it seemed to drag with it a veil of shadows, so that she could not see it clearly even as she noticed certain details of its anatomy. She saw the line of feathers running down its bony spine, the talons like those of an owl, the slick skin of an eel, for this was a creature of impossibility, neither mammal nor bird but something in between that moved with the gliding smoothness of a snake.
The creature began to bite into the rabbit’s carcass, and she heard the sharp snapping of a bone, the slobbering of a rabid, ravenous animal.
Her heart beat madly and for one moment she considered jumping into the river, letting the current carry her.Follow the plan, simply follow it.
She tied a knot and spoke.
“I bind you with earth,” she said, her hands working quickly as she spoke. “I bind you with water. I bind you with fire. I bind you with air.”
It was when she tied the fourth knot that the thing in the clearing threw back its head and she noticed its eyes: they were of a glowing green and there was an emptiness to them, as if the skullof the creature had been hollowed out and a candle placed inside it.
“I bind you with earth,” she said, beginning the sequence again and tying the fifth knot.
The monster kept chewing. Blood dripped from the creature’s mouth onto the ground. When she tied the seventh knot it growled and flashed its teeth, growing restless. Its feathers shifted; it arched its back and spat out whatever was left of the carcass it had been gnawing. Its ears lay back flat against its skull.
“I bind you with air,” she said, and tied the eighth knot.
It began moving toward her. Slowly. It lowered and raised its head, and when she tied the ninth knot and spoke the ninth phraseit let out a screech that was the sound of a knife being sharpened, metallic, strident.
The creature opened its mouth and out slipped its long, forked tongue, and then it fixed its unearthly green eyes on Alba. She felt as though it was grinning.
Alba took a step back, her fingers working the tenth knot.
