My sister has always lived by the dogwood tree, but her cabin is no longer her own. I return to it nightly, and every night there is less of her than there was the night before.
The woods are constant and unchanging. I go to see my sister. I stray from the path. I am found by the beasts that prowl the darkness, hungry for warm meat.
The cycle repeats like the seasons.
I go to see my sister.
There has long been a wolf in the woods. I feel her presence every duskfall, a shadow flitting between the trees, eyes gold like fireflies. When I leave the safety of my village, her breath is hot on the nape of my neck, teeth an inch from closing on tender flesh.
The woods are dark and deep. The trees grow close together like sisters standing hand-in-hand, ferns and blackberries clustered around their trunks and crowding up against the footpaths, reaching to clutch at my cloak as I pass. Aspens watch with round unblinking eyes peeling from papery bark, pale as corpses amid the firs. Birdsong shivers from their branches; insects click and whir in my wake. My footsteps fall silent against the hardpacked soil. The woods smell rich and earthy, fresh shoots mingling with decay.
A dry branch cracks like a pistol shot and I freeze, deerlike, as song drifts through the thicket: an out-of-place rumbling baritone. The woods are the wolf’s, and she sings crisp and clear and silver.
Deep and dark in the forest,
Deadly and deep in the forest,
You weep for your love in the forest,
Beneath the full moon’s glow.
But your love has no voice in the forest,
Has no hands nor tongue in the forest,
And though you weep for your love in the forest,
She never can answer your woe.
Trespasser. I wish to see who is so bold as to abandon the path. I have known such boldness, and the wolf left her mark on me before I went slinking home. She’s followed me ever since, and though she sings to me, she has never sounded human.
Gathering my skirts and cloak in both hands, I follow the lyrics under sweeping branches and around fallen trunks until I stand in the shadow of a great dead hawthorn.
A doe hangs by her heels from the tree, her soft brown eyes blank in death, graceful legs gone stiff, muscles hard and cold. She is open from throat to pelvis, her belly spilling a flood of ropey viscera to the pine-needled floor. She stares at me as the man who killed her skins her inch by inch, every stroke of his knife keeping rhythm to his song.
He spots me when the hawthorn-shadow shifts.
“Good evening, Miss. That’s a pretty cloak you’re wearing. Too pretty to be wandering the woods, I think.”
“My sister made it for me.”
“Not your sister in the cabin by the dogwood? She made my coat. A fine seamstress. A fine young lady.”
She spun the heavy wool of my cloak with her own hands, dyed it crimson, and embroidered the hem with runes in gold silk floss to keep me safe, though never safe enough. A defter hand with a needle or a finer artist of beading and embroidery, I’ve never met, and never will again.
“A shame she lives so far from town.”
“Is it?”
“These woods are wild, Miss, and full of wild things.”
“I’m not afraid of the wolf.”
He smiles. His teeth are tombstone-grey and his beard bristles, blood-matted. I recognise him from the stories our mother told us as little girls. I recognise him—
“Wilder things than wolves here, Miss.”
His knife is buried deep in the doe as he talks to me, like she’s no more than a convenient sheath. Her dead eyes shine with tears and fury from the disrespect.
“The wolf doesn’t like hunters so deep in her woods. You shouldn’t be here.”
“Her woods? I’ve been hunting here a long time. If I see the wolf, I’ll kill her and take her pelt for my mantle.”
Run, says the doe with the mouth of a girl, fawn-brown skin and long dark hair trailing tangled to the ground, hands lopped off sudden at the wrists. In the mulch of fallen leaves, her fingers curl delicate and dead, soil and skin under her nails. Intestines loop out where he split her open, purple-red and reeking, buzzing with flies.
The huntsman smiles like a graveyard and I run.
The path is far away and the wolf’s breath is hot against my neck, her loping legs silent as I crash gracelessly through the brush.
“He’s waiting,” she tells me. “He’s waiting for you to run further ahead before he gives chase. He’s not following you yet, not like I am.”
I’ve never been afraid of the woods before.
I’ve been afraid of the woods all my life.
“Stay with me, I’ll keep you safe from him. Once a beast has tasted human flesh, it’s so hard to go back. And you’re sweeter than most, you know.”
Branches sting my face, nettles tear my hands. I curl my fingers into fists and duck my head, swallowing bitter panic that catches dry in my throat.
“He can outrun you. He’ll catch you before you reach your village. Stay with me in the woods.”
The ground turns from ferns and moss to dirt again. I’m back on the path, running faster now, lungs aching, tongue cleaved to my palate.
The wolf snaps at my cloak, teeth closing on the wool, and I stumble. “Don’t go to your sister’s cabin. He knows the way.”
I can find my sister’s cabin without sight or conscious thought, but when the white-flowered dogwood appears through the darkening gloom, it is unrecognisable. Though her cabin looks as it always has, it’s a stranger to me, as if the forest has spirited away that which I know and left a doppelgänger in its place. The wolf paces in a tight circle, a growl crackling in her throat. She takes my hand between her teeth to pull me away but I hold my ground as uncertainty steals over me like a second skin.
Like a sleepwalker, I approach. No lights illuminate the windows; no smoke curls from the chimney to ward off the spring-damp night. When I touch my fingers to the door it swings open, unlocked, and the air envelops me like a nightmare.
My sister is not here, her cabin is not her own. Her worktable is in disarray, cloth streaked over the floor like ribbons pulled from their spools, her collection of embroidery floss scattered like wildflower petals trampled underfoot. Her sewing machine alone stands solid, a silent witness, needle poised and quivering as if it would transcribe all that it has seen.
And on the floor amid her cloths and threads, my sister—doe-eyed, dead. Her torso skinned, flesh and muscle peeled back to expose the organs, glistening and wet. The huntsman put his hands inside her, sinking deep into her guts until they overflowed.
I wilt against the doorframe, shock turning my legs to water. I’ve seen this before in a dream or a memory, the same actions repeating as inexorably as the seasons. I try to break the cycle, but I make the same choices every time, knowledge withheld until a second too late. I go to see my sister. I stray from the path—
“Foolish girl.” The wolf sounds sad. “I told you not to come here.”
I don’t ask her why a man would do this. There is no answer she can give that I will ever understand. I will replace my sister’s eyes with glass beads and sew her shut with embroidery thread before I bury her under the dogwood. She will be beautiful again when I lay her to rest.
But there will be no rest while the huntsman roams.
I have room for either fear or fury.
“I will stay with you in the woods,” I whisper to the wolf, “if you help me kill the huntsman.”
Her teeth bite my lips as she licks into my mouth, her hands tangle rough in my hair, her body presses to mine, hot and muscular through the layers of my clothes. She tastes like blood and saffron and she smells like a wild animal, coarse-furred, too dense to run my fingers through. I kiss her back like a desperate thing, hungry for revenge.
I swore we wouldn’t do this again. That the first taste she had of me would be her last. But the woods are deep and dark, and I will give myself to the wolf if she will lend me her teeth and claws and night-vision eyes to kill this man. Maybe this time, it will be enough.
Pulling my cloak from my shoulders, she drags me down, one knee between my thighs, her body covering mine. Her hands seek bare skin beneath my clothes as she kisses my mouth, my face, my jaw, like she means to devour me. Tipping my head back, I offer my throat as she works one hand under my heavy skirts. Surrounded by my sister’s meat, we entwine. Death hangs heavy in the air, coating the back of my tongue and the insides of my nostrils, choking-thick.
With my skirts pushed aside, she reaches between my legs, and I gasp in a lungful of blood-flavoured air. Her teeth carve a biting smile against my throat before she marks a trail of biting kisses down my body until she can get her mouth where she wants it, like she’s dying of thirst. Her tongue is long and clever; I can almost forget the huntsman is coming. Even as the horror of the night presses in, my back arches off the floor, thighs trembling. The fear only heightens my arousal, drowning me in it.
When she bites down, her teeth grind against my pubic bones like a knife on a whetstone. I dig blunt nails into my own belly, past fat and muscle, head thrown back with a silent throat-wrenching cry. The pain is hot, flooding my body where it crashes into pleasure and for an instant, I hang suspended in the cosmos, the glittering tapestry of the night sky cradling me like a grave.
With shaking hands, I push my fingers into my open wounds and peel my skin back from my bones, like tearing a hangnail too far past the cuticle where instead of thinning and stripping away scant skin, the flesh tears deeper and thicker until raw tendons are exposed and the knucklebone is bare. So I peel the flesh away from my breastbone and my ribs, meat hanging off me like the tatters of a ruined dress.
The pain is delicious.
The wolf slides one hand deep into my guts, wet and slippery, and the full-body thrill is enough to finally shake me apart, gasping. Oversensitive, I arch under her, sweat-drenched.
I could come a hundred times with her hands inside me, but I fall back into my body like a bird shot down. In distant horror I look at the ruin I’ve made of my body.
“Sweet thing,” my wolf growls, her muzzle dripping blood. “Stop trembling. This will only kill you if you let it.”
With both hands, she hooks her claws between my ribs and cracks me open like breaking the bars of a cage to let loose the creature within. I reach out from behind the ribs of my carcass to be born anew. Shaking the blood from my fur, I lick my chops.
Ravenous, I turn to my own corpse—pale and delicate with only the thinnest of hides to protect me, no weapons to defend against those who would do me harm—and consume the rich organ meats that shiver, glimmering, exposed to the open air. The huntsman cannot have me as he had my sister. My wolf watches with a pleased, hungry smile, and when I go to her, she licks the blood from my teeth.
A pistol shot, no cracking branch this time, splits the night.
My wolf falls like her legs have been cut from under her.
The huntsman pins me to the floorboards with a spear like a butterfly on a board, and as in a nightmare, I can’t tear my gaze away from what I know is coming. Taking a handful of my wolf’s fur, he stands over her shoulders and wrenches her head back to place his knife against the inside of her top lip. When she bares her teeth, he slices into the plum-pink flesh of her gums, peeling her face away from her skull.
“I told you I would take her pelt,” he says to me as he skins her alive.
She thrashes as he separates hide from muscle. Her face is a twitching mess of raw nerves, teeth exposed to the roots as she snaps at him, eyes lidless and rolling.
I chew at the spear pinning me through my shoulder blades, splinters stabbing my tongue and in between my teeth, gnawing frantically until I’m bloody-gummed. A steel trap would have been easier; I could have chewed off my own foot to slip free, but the spear is too strong for my jaws that have never crunched bone before. Clumsy with rage, I watch as he pulls her skin past her shoulders, over her ribs, his knife hacking at the seam between pelt and flesh that should never exist.
When he’s done, she is a red and naked thing. He throws her bloody pelt around his shoulders like a usurper king, his hands gloved in her blood as they were in my sister’s.
The last spear-splinter snaps between my jaws and I drag myself off it, lungs heaving, bloody drool dripping from my maw to spatter the floorboards like a curse. The huntsman turns to me as if, in his bloodlust, he’d forgotten I was here.
“You looked so pretty in your red cloak, Miss. Let me give you a new one.”
As he grins at me, skull-like, my wolf snaps her jaws closed around his ankle. In his moment of distraction, I lunge, knocking him to the floor.
His blood gurgles through his airways and spurts from the messy wounds I tear. I gnaw him open as he chokes; I wrench his beating heart from his chest; I shred his liver and kidneys while they’re still warm. His eyes track my every movement as I chew his organs open-mouthed before dropping them back into his body, denying him the dignity of consumption. My sister’s hands, he cut off at the wrists so she couldn’t spell her killer’s name in blood. I bite his fingers down to the knuckles. My sister’s tongue, he cut out at the root so she couldn’t whisper her killer’s name into the gloaming. I saw through his tongue with the razor-edge of my claws.
Hurting him does not bring my sister back or unearth his sprawling graveyard of butchered girls. But it does bring a sense of satisfaction that feels worth the cost of my humanity.
When he cannot so much as scream his suffering, I lift my wolf’s bloody pelt from his undeserving shoulders. She hasn’t released his ankle, clamped tight as if in death. Her raw muscles are sticky to the touch, blood drying in the open air even as her heart pumps it afresh.
“This will only kill you if you let it,” I tell her quietly, and wrap her fur around her where it belongs.
My sister was a beautiful seamstress. I have neither her skill nor patience, but as there is no one else to do it, I take up her needle and thread to darn the tears the huntsman left. I sew my wolf closed with thick red thread the colour of raspberries. The bullet wound that felled her, I fill in with gold stitches. The scars she bears are now rich silk, soft and ribbed, interrupting the thickness of her coat. Though she knows violence as all wild things do, I think she has never been victim to such premeditated cruelty. She is silent as I tend to her, still under my hands.
But not as still and silent as my sister.
My sister, whose injuries are terrible. I use every last inch of her thread to close them. Over her right breast, I embroider the sun, red and gold, in all its glory; over her left, the crescent moon, silver and blue; and over her ribs, a sea of stars. The cosmos glitter with little glass beads painstakingly sewed into her skin. To try to stuff her organs back inside would make a mockery of her, so I fill that cavity with a cashmere scarf and pull the ruined remnants of her skin closed over it. I embroider the earth over her stomach, green and blue and alive. The dried herbs she hangs in bunches from her rafters, I place behind her teeth and in between the exposed bones of her wrists where her tongue and hands should be, sweet scents to mask her death.
Lastly, I tend to her staring eyes, irises splintered and broken, whites filled with dark blood, and gently push them from their sockets. The maggots will not have them. In their place, I give her glass marbles that will last forever, shining bright when she has been worn to bones.
Together my wolf and I commend my sister to the dogwood-earth, and when we pile the dirt back on atop her grave, our blood mingles with it.
The huntsman, we do not bury.
The huntsman, we do not carefully stitch shut.
We immortalise no part of him, we give him no respect. Standing over his bloody heap, we kiss open-mouthed as the spring night caresses us, damp with decay. I promised my wolf a life together and she will have me, two shadows flitting side by side through the nightwoods.
But every twilight I return to my sister’s cabin to witness the huntsman slowly rotting into the floorboards. I cannot shake his song from my head, nor the fear that yet again, my choices were not enough to break the churning cycle of the seasons. One day I will look out through the trees and see him leering back at me once more, my red cloak wrapped around his shoulders, his knife buried in another girl.
