The Wood Wife by Terri Windling (the false prince TXT) 📕

down by their legs and wire their mouths shut. Terror makes them pump adrenaline into their systems. Then you cut the bladder from the live animal and use the scent of it as ‘passion’ bait. Works like a charm.”

Maggie stared at Lillian. “And John used to do that?” She felt distinctly sick.

Lillian looked up and shook her head. “The day he found out what coyote bait was made from he resigned from PRC. Went back to school and studied wildlife behavior. And became the kind of man I’d want to marry.” She wrapped fresh gauze around the ringtail’s leg and taped it firmly. “There we go. Pretty as a picture. Let’s put the little fellow back in his bed.”

She picked him up gently, nested in the towel. Maggie stared at the creature. She saw human arms; small human hands; bony little legs, one crushed and bandaged. The pointed face had a ringtail’s eyes, a human chin and cactus spines instead of hair.

Lillian seemed to find nothing amiss with the creature in her arms, but she stared at Maggie. “What is it? What’s wrong?”

Maggie swallowed, searching for her voice. She could see the creature both ways—as a ringtail cat, and as something else from Cooper’s poems, or Anna’s paintings, or the lands of a surrealist’s dreams.

“Actually,” she said, her voice husky, “I came over here to tell you and John that there was a man shooting at coyotes in the wash, right near my house. He was after that skinny one-eyed fellow, but I don’t think he actually hit him.”

“Tell me what happened,” Lillian said. Her voice was clipped and angry. Maggie did so, following the older woman outside to put the ringtail back into its cage. Then Lillian turned to Maggie, eyes narrowed. “That’s the one who shot Cody. Same description. Same nasty disposition. I want you to tell John about this. It sounds like it’s time to call the sheriff.”

“He told me there’s no law against shooting coyotes.”

“He was bluffing you. He’s got no right to shoot a gun in this canyon at all. Not even in the wash.”

“I was hoping that you’d say that,” Maggie told her, relieved.

“Doesn’t mean that’ll stop him.”

“But at least we can report him to the cops.”

“Darn right we can,” said Lillian decisively. “It’s even conceivable that he had something to do with Cooper’s death. Cooper wouldn’t have reacted kindly if he’d caught him shooting coyotes either.”

Maggie swallowed. “That hadn’t occurred to me.”

“It might not be connected at all, of course. But I think we should mention it to the sheriff’s office. And about the time that those hunting dogs went and made a mess of Cooper’s house. The sheriff will put more enthusiasm into looking for a murder suspect than for a poacher. The point here is to scare this guy off, keep him out of the canyon.”

“Whatever happened with that sample of animal scat John took? Did the lab confirm that it was from dogs?”

Lillian frowned. “Now that was peculiar. I reckon Fox didn’t get a proper sample after all. The lab technician told John there was only leaf mold in the container. But it must have been dogs. What else could it have been, making that kind of mischief?” She turned, shading her eyes from the sun, and looked the younger woman up and down. “Maggie, why don’t you come back to the house and I’ll rustle up something to eat. I don’t know when John’s going to get back and, darlin’, you look tuckered out.”

“Thanks,” said Maggie gratefully. “I’d rather wait here than go home right now.”

“Let me just finish up the feeding here. You go sit down. Go on.”

Maggie sat down heavily on a bale of hay as the old woman tended to her other animals. While she worked, Maggie peered into the surrounding runs—but the animals there were just animals, and nothing more mysterious than that. The bobcat kittens had gotten quite large, wrestling each other in their small fenced yard. The cast had come off of the kit fox’s foot. The antelope had gone back to the wild and a pregnant mule deer was in his run now, one leg thickly bandaged. Maggie looked down to the end of the row where Cody’s run stood empty.

“Still no Cody?” she asked Lillian.

“We’ve seen her, twice,” Lillian replied as she filled up the eagle’s water trough. “She’s let us know that she’s still around, but she’s not going to come back now. I reckon that even with that bad leg, she’s happier in the wild.”

“Provided we can keep that fool with the gun away from her,” Maggie muttered.

“Amen to that,” said Lillian. “Cody was with that one-eyed coyote both times that we spotted her—as well as that other female she runs with. John thinks Cody and One-Eye have mated, and that’s why she left us so suddenly.”

Maggie swallowed. Was Pepe running with Cody? And did that mean Cody was one of them too? Her eyes widened suddenly, thinking about Pepe Hernandez and the Foxxe sisters. Cody had disappeared about the same time that Fox had told her his sisters had come home. Angela walked with a limp, as Cody did. Isabella could be the second female. Was she totally loco now, or were the Foxxe sisters like Crow, like Pepe, like Thumper? And if they were, then what did that say about Johnny Foxxe himself?

She pulled her hat brim down against the sun, watching Lillian in the kit fox’s cage. She remembered what Lillian had said about the painting of Crow, naming him Mr. Foxxe, the father of María Rosa’s children. Yet Johnny Foxxe was a man of flesh and blood; Maggie would stake her life on that. He had none of the glamour of the otherworld around him, not like Crow or Thumper, or even his two sisters. And he’d seemed as baffled by the painting of Crow as Maggie herself had been.

Was it even possible for a creature like Crow to father children on a human woman?