Page 19 of A Killing Cold

No, I’m not, I think. “I work in a bookstore and I quote Joyce,” I remind him.

He fixes me with sharp eyes. They’re blue, like Connor’s, but they have more gray to them. “You might seem it. But there’s something entirely different under the skin, isn’t there?” he asks. He doesn’t wait for an answer. “Your parents,” he says. “Were they good people? God-fearing?”

“God-fearing, yes. I don’t know about good,” I say, a bit surprised to have that question asked here. Connor’s not the least bit religious that I can tell, though he has mentioned going to church as a kid. But Magnus is from another generation.

He grunts, like this answer doesn’t shock him. “You understand—a family like ours, we have to know who it is we’re welcoming in. What kind of stock you come from. You can’t escape what’s in your blood.”

“They aren’t my blood,” I remind him. “I was adopted.”

He pauses. Flicks his knife. Spatters mar wooden boards already years deep with stains. “And your birth parents?”

“No idea. It was a closed adoption,” I say.

He looks at me, his gaze intent. I shift uncomfortably under his scrutiny. “You should get back inside,” he says at last. He reaches out his hand. I set the knife into it, knowing there’s been some kind of test here, not knowing how I fared. I’m at the door of the shed before he speaks again.

“You’ll come hunting with me. Thursday. Last day for it until after Christmas,” he says.

I nod, feeling for the first time since I stepped into the shed the cold numbing my fingertips, my ears, the end of my nose. My eyes water with it, and the smell of the enclosed place. Magnus is done with me.

I head back out into the snow.

7

Inside, I start to thaw and my skin begins to sting and burn. Somehow it’s always worse than the cold, those first few moments out of it. In my thick wool socks, my footsteps are all but silent. I’m nearly to the kitchen doorway when the thread of conversation within snaps into focus.

“What do you think?” Louise is asking. I still instinctively, even my breath going quiet.

“She seems sweet.” Alexis.

“That doesn’t mean anything,” Rose replies, and my heart sinks.

Louise, tone practical: “What do you think he’s told her?”

“Nothing,” Rose says as my thoughts tilt wildly in confusion. “He wouldn’t tell her anything.”

A skeptical noise from Louise. “Alexis?”

The moment of silence that follows is suffused with reluctance. “I don’t think—” Alexis begins, and then down the hall a door shuts. The conversation in the kitchen cuts off cleanly.

“We can talk about this later,” Louise declares. “Alexis, give your mother the nutmeg if you’re just going to stand there.”

Alexis steps around the counter and into view. She looks toward me, startled—and screams.

Louise and Rose move rapidly to see what Alexis is staring at. “Good Lord,” Louise says, and Rose contributes a less restrained “Jesus Christ.” I look down at my hands, gore-scabbed, blood in the creases. Despite standing back from the slop of guts I must have gotten splashed, because the soft cream of my cabled sweater is liberally spattered with it. Rose crosses to me and puts a thumb to my cheek; it comes away bloody.

“Shit. Sorry, I was outside and Magnus—” I begin.

“Is he hurt?” Alarm in Alexis’s voice.

“She means he’s out there butchering a deer,” Louise says, a hint of contempt running like a seam of tar through her voice.

“I’ll go get cleaned up,” I say quickly. I must look like I stepped off the set of a horror movie.

“Not here,” Louise says. “You’ll need more than a quick washup in the sink. Go back to your cabin. Leave the clothes on the doorstep, I’ll have Irina collect them. Wemightbe able to salvage them.”

I mutter something—I’m not even sure what—and flee. Behind me I hear Alexis again—Holy shit—and the scrabble of conversation pitched too low for me to make out.

My skin feels like it’s on fire as I make my way back around the pond. The blood on my sweater is like a scarlet flag, and I swear even out here in the woods I can feel eyes on me.

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