Page 74 of When We Were Magic
I follow ten feet back, my fingers still warm from where Roya was holding my hand before. I’m just close enough to see Paulie’s movement. She turns to look at me occasionally, the line of her back taut. I can just hear Paulie, Maryam, Marcelina, and Iris following, another twenty feet between us. They don’t talk. Good. Human voices might be too much right now, might make the coyote panic.All of this is too much right now,I think, and I have to bite back a hysterical laugh.
We go just far enough from the trail that I know we didn’t stumble across the coyote by accident. It feels impossible, but—she came to find us. To find me.
She finally stops in front of a fallen tree, one that’s overgrown with weeds and fungus. She looks behind me to the girls, her ears flat, her tail low.
She doesn’t run, but she’s close to it.
I put my hand out and manage to brush her head with my fingertips.Friend friend friend friend packmate ally friend—I’m saying everything I know how to say to calm her, but there are too many people here and they’re all too close to her. She’s got her lip lifted at me, showing a few teeth that don’t look as sharp as I know they’d feel. There’s blood caked on her muzzle.
She jerks her head from under my hand, and I flinch, but she isn’t snapping at me. Instead, she lowers her nose to the overgrown weeds in front of the fallen tree.
It’s hard to make out shapes in the uneven light that falls through the trees. I recognize the leg first.
“Oh my god.” I say it out loud without thinking, lifting my hands to my mouth, and the sound of my voice is the last straw for the coyote. She takes off into the trees, loping lower than she would if she wasn’t already trying to hide from us. She’s fast—not as fast as she’d be out in the open, but still faster than my best sprint. She moves through the woods like a stiff breeze, and then she’s gone.
My friends are still too far away to see what I’m seeing. I’m alone.
It’s just me and the body.
It’s just me and Josh.
22.
HE’S WHOLE.
He’s here.
Josh is right here, in the woods in front of me, naked, sprawled out in the weeds. I fall to my knees and reach for him, press my hands to his chest, to his face. He’s—oh god, he’s warm.
“I think he’s still alive!” I shout it at the top of my lungs, and I don’t hear my friends come running because of the static in my ears, a high steady rush of panic. I don’t hear them come running, but then they’re there, and Roya is next to me again, pressing her fingers to the skin under Josh’s jaw, and then to his wrist, and then to the inside of his thigh.
“No.” She shakes her head. “There’s no pulse, but—”
“But he’s warm,” Iris says, and she’s across from us, touching Josh too. Everyone is touching him. Iris’s hands start to flicker with uncontrolled light—she still hasn’t figured out how to manage her magic without looking at it. “He’s warm, maybe we can—”
“Don’t,” Maryam warns. “Don’t try to heal him—remember what happened last time? And besides, you can’t—”
“But we have to—” Marcelina starts, and before she can finish, Roya and Iris have locked eyes and shifted positions. Iris cups Josh’s head, pushing his jaw forward and gripping the base of his skull. Roya laces her fingers together and presses the heels of her hands into Josh’s sternum, presses hard and rhythmic, again and again, counting under her breath.
His arm flops around with each compression, and I look for the birthmark that I didn’t notice when I was on top of him in his bedroom after prom. But then I realize I’m looking at the wrong arm.
The other one’s missing, torn off at the shoulder. I remember the blood on the coyote’s muzzle. Did she know she was helping us, or was she just taking her percentage?
I’m frozen. I’m useless. I’m not doing anything. They’re trying to bring him back, doing CPR like—like they’ve practiced a hundred times, like they learned just in case, and I’m just sitting here thinking about a missing arm. I’m not doing anything.I have to do something.
After a minute, they switch places. Iris mutters, “Do we do breaths? I can’t remember, they changed it,” and Roya says, “Don’t worry about it, just take over,” and then Iris is doing compressions. As she presses down, something in Josh’s chest makes a crackling noise.
“Hey,” Roya says, looking me in the eyes. “Call my mom.”
“But—” I hesitate, but she keeps her eyes locked on mineas she holds Josh by the head, and I nod. “Right. Right, yeah.” I take my phone out of my pocket and make the call.
As soon as Roya’s mom picks up, I start talking. “We found him, we found Josh, we’re doing CPR, he’s here—”
“Where?” she interrupts.
“Where?” I repeat, realizing I have no fucking clue where we are. “Um, we’re—it’s a little off the path, it’s—”
“Are you with people? Do they know where the trail is?” Her voice is calm, direct, and I want to lean into it. She knows what to do. Someone knows what to do.
