Page 20 of The Devil Knows Her Name

Still, I couldn’t get too close. Through the trees, I caught the gleam of sun on the water, and that was enough to start a cold sweat down my neck. I paused, set down the carrier, and took a deep breath. Behind me, I heard the now-familiar sound of the fawn settling herself in the brush.

When my nerves had calmed, I opened the carrier and took a few steps back. Everyone loved dramatic videos of animals being released, running across open fields or beaches, but it was rarely so picturesque. Some animals took half an hour or more to feel comfortable enough to come out, and often they dashed for the nearest clump of bushes. Once I had a possum who would only go five feet before scuttling back into the carrier; it had taken him two hours to finally leave for good.

The raccoon took his time. I settled into a squat, elbows resting comfortably on my knees and a patch of sunlight warming my back. For all the peace I strove to create, I got very few moments of rest, and I took them where I could. It was some fifteen minutes before he emerged, peering around the edge of the carrier with his nose and whiskers twitching, eyes shining like glass beads. I remained still, and at last he shot off into the undergrowth, ringed tail disappearing into a clump of ferns.

And that was it—as unceremonious as ever. I stood up and stepped forward to collect the carrier, and that was when I heard the splash.

I heard a splash whenever I came this close to the pond, as though it were mocking me. But this sound went straight to my heart like poison, and I whirled around. My eyes searched the brush for the fawn, trying to discern the camouflage, pick out her shape, but they didn’t. She wasn’t there.

I ran forward, clumsy, panicked, stumbling in the loam and the roots. My heart clogged my throat and the pond loomed in my periphery, a sheet of black glass. I didn’t dare look directly at it, so my gaze darted around the edges, frantically seeking.

The fawn was struggling in the shadows, down on her knees in the mud, the copper of her coat like a broken blood vessel in a dark eye. It was one of the few places where the bank sloped into shallows rather than plunging into sheer, frigid depths. I scrambled toward her, my boots sliding and my knees weak with fear. There was a high-pitched shrieking sound in my ears, and belatedly, I realized my breath was coming in a whine.

I’d nearly reached her when I tripped on a clump of reeds. The sight of the water rushing up toward my face almost did me in, and it was only the fawn’s cry of distress that kept me present in my body. I yanked my hands free of the sucking mud and got my arms around her, but the pond wanted us both. The slimy bottom shifted beneath my knees as if there were a riptide, dragging me back by inches toward the depths.

Almost blind with fear, I heaved the fawn over my shoulder. Her sharp little hooves kicked against me and tore my shirt to ribbons. With my free hand, I reached out and seized a ream of cattails, squeezing until their razor edges sliced into my palm. Just as I got one foot on solid ground, the roots betrayed me, ripping free in a shower of mud and water.

The instant of falling was interminable. The pond opened like a maw at my back, ready to swallow me into its icy recesses. My heart seized in my chest.

Not again, I thought. Not like this.

A hand grasped mine, hard enough to bruise the bones. I was yanked forward, free of the clutching mud and the hungry depths, and he caught me—caught us both—against his chest.

“Trying to reenact our meet-cute, Tess?” the devil asked.

The molten fear in me turned instantly to fury, and I shoved him back with my free arm. “It’s not funny.”

It was a deeply stupid thing to do, letting my temper get the better of me, but he allowed me to push him away, which meant he was still in good humor. I dropped to my knees and set the fawn down to check her for injuries. Her legs and belly were black with mud, her sides heaving. Her little mouth gaped open, all those uncanny teeth on display.

I ran my hand through the slime coating her legs, but I didn’t feel any breaks, and no blood rose to the surface. I couldn’t count out a muscle pull or strain, but that wouldn’t reveal itself until later. She was obviously stressed, and that made two of us, especially with the pond still looming behind us.

I glanced up at the devil and saw I’d left a full, bloody handprint on his shirt. The hand I used to grab the cattails was still bleeding freely, and now that my adrenaline was fading, I felt the sting in my palm.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“Just came to collect my pet.”

My hand froze over the fawn’s ribs. The panicked drum of her heart matched my own, but my mind was moving twice as fast. I had never once considered she was the devil’s creature; it smacked of exactly the religious dogma I despised, the kind of mania that had led people to string up cats alongside their owners. It was the sort of thing Broder would suggest, the superstition of cretins.

And yet.

The devil must’ve seen the cold shock in my face, because he threw back his head and laughed. “I’m only joking, of course. I didn’t have anything to do with this little one’s appearance. But I can see she’s your favorite, and I confess, I’m jealous.”

I stood slowly, covered in muck up to my elbows. The fawn leaned against my legs, still trembling. The devil’s laughter did not reassure me; perhaps the only thing he loved more than a lie was a painful truth. He could be lying that she was his, or lying that she was not his. I would never get a straight answer out of him, and to ask for one would only make it worse. He wanted me to doubt, to second-guess everything she did and everything I did in response, and now that the seed was planted, there was nothing I could do to keep its roots from growing.

“So,” I said, ignoring both possibilities, “why are you here?”

“Why not here?”

“Because you could be walking the Grand Canyon or the beaches of Iceland, or, I don’t know, fucking Rome—”

“Rome has been fucked enough times, I think.”

“—anywhere in the world. You must have thousands of other little concubines to call on. You could go anywhere, eat anything, do anything, and instead you come here and walk this little spit of land and drink my shitty coffee. I drive through town and I see you sitting on a park bench with some old fart or smoking a joint with the dropouts behind the strip mall. Why?”

The devil was silent for a long moment, looking out over the pond. Finally, he said, “You traded me your soul to live, Tess, and you choose to live here. You traded your soul to drink your coffee and walk this land, and you’re so in love with it that you never even seem to think of the Grand Canyon or Iceland or Rome. You thought it was worth that much, and you don’t know why I spend my time here?”

I glared at him, hiding my discomfort behind anger; I had never told the devil I was bound to the land, that the pond had extracted its own price for denying it a body. I didn’t want him to pity me, or worse, offer yet another deal to free me. “So that’s it, then? Because I wanted it? Because it’s mine? Because it has value to me, you want it for yourself?”