Target Practice

by Seanan McGuire

  Thomas sobered. “Well, ma’am, you may have the advantage on me. Aside from a few cousins on assignment in Germany and Finland, I’m the only Price I’ve met.”

  Enid blinked. “Your parents?”

  “I never knew them. I was brought up in the libraries. There was a pen in my hand before I knew that some people had skies overhead, and not ceilings painted with frescos of angels and monsters. We are a doomed lineage, which may be part of why the Covenant was so eager to ship me off. Can’t exactly resurrect an entire family from one man, no matter how hard you might try, and once I die, all our assets go to the Covenant to use as they see fit.”

  Enid blinked again. “I hope you order a lot of very rare books and bill them to your family’s accounts.”

  “Oh, believe me, I do.” Thomas opened the jar next to the icebox and withdrew a hardboiled egg, which he rolled down the counter to the tailypo. “I don’t know yet what my plans are for the future. Honestly, I haven’t really had the chance to make any. But at the moment, I have no intention of betraying anyone. It seems…untidy, and like a waste of time that could be better spent exploring the woods.”

  “Alice is best guide you could possibly have for that,” Enid assured him.

  Thomas snorted. “So I’ve noticed. She led a dire boar straight to my door this afternoon, and—Mrs. Healy? Is something wrong?”

  Enid, who had gone rigid in her seat, gingerly set her virtually untouched mug of tea down on the edge of the table. “Is that how she ripped the knees out of her jeans?” she asked.

  “Well, yes. I assumed you knew.”

  “No. She got sent to her room by her father before I could find out what had happened.” Enid stood. “Do you have guns?”

  Thomas blinked. “I’m going to try not to be offended by that question.”

  “Good, because I need an answer,” she said. “Do you have guns? Large, boar-hunting guns?”

  “I have an elephant rifle. Why?”

  “Because Alice got sent to her room, and her father didn’t ask her what she’d seen.” Enid looked at him grimly. “She’s upset, she’s not being listened to, and she’s Alice. What do you think the chances are that she’s still in her room?”

  Thomas was silent for a moment before he said, “I’ll go get that rifle, shall I?”

  “Please,” said Enid. “And hurry.”

  It was late enough in the afternoon that the light filtering down through the trees was dim and getting dimmer, creating an artificial sort of twilight. Alice moved through the trees as quickly as she dared, careful to set her feet on the clearest patches of ground. She didn’t want to make any noise that might tell her quarry she was coming.

  Sneaking out of her room hadn’t been hard. It never was. She had a window; she had a drainpipe; she had no concern about skinning her palms, especially when they were already scraped up. It wasn’t like she was planning to start holding hands with boys any time soon. All the boys in Buckley were stupid. They dared each other to go into the woods, and then they acted all surprised when some of them didn’t come back. That, or they made up stories about things they’d seen in the swamp, trying to sound all brave, when really, they just sounded more like cowards than ever.

  Getting her grandfather’s shotgun hadn’t been hard either. He’d been inside, watching the chicken that Grandma was making for dinner, and her father had been in the study. All she’d needed to do was avoid the windows as she made her way to the barn and took it down from the rack. It was already loaded, and while she wasn’t the best shot, the weight of it was reassuring against her shoulder. She wasn’t going to be caught by surprise a second time.

  Dire boars weren’t native to North America. Killing one would let them find out what it was eating, where it was nesting, all of the things they needed to know so that they could make informed decisions about what to do with the rest of them. There would definitely be more than one. There was always more than one. It wasn’t right to kill things that belonged in the ecosystem, but killing the boar would be putting the forest right, not making it wrong. And maybe then her father would believe she could take care of herself. Maybe then he would trust her, and understand that this was what she wanted—this, and only this, forever. This was her forest. This was her town. Trying to take those things away from her wasn’t going to work. It was just going to make her fight harder for what she knew was hers.

  The frickens croaked merrily away overhead, signaling safety, or at least something like it. She knew better than to count on the frickens, since sometimes they didn’t think things were dangerous just because those things weren’t dangerous to them, but they were useful all the same. They didn’t like big things, like the boars. Or dead things, like the corpses that sometimes shambled out of the deep swamp, looking for…she wasn’t quite sure. She’d never stopped running long enough for them to catch her.

  Alice Healy moved through the wood, and everything around her was green, and quiet, and very, very dangerous.

  Enid and Thomas stopped at the edge of the wood, looking into its shadowy depths with appropriate caution. Thomas spoke first.

  “She might not be in there.”

  “True.”

  “She might have decided to take a nap rather than dwelling on the unfairness of it all.”

  “Also true.”

  Thomas sighed. “But she didn’t do that, did she?”

  “No. Probably not.”

  “She’s out there in the woods, alone, looking for the dire boar.”

  “Almost certainly.”

  “She’s going to get herself killed.”

  “Again, almost certainly.” Enid tightened her grip on her borrowed rifle. “Follow me.”

  It wasn’t hard to follow the boar’s trail through the wood. Alice might be adept at moving between the trees without doing any real damage, but the dire boar was considerably less interested in minimizing its impact on the environment. It had crashed its way through the foliage, leaving broken branches and trampled brush in its wake.

  “Good lord,” murmured Thomas. “It’s a miracle she made it out of the woods.”

  “Healy luck,” said Enid. “Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad, but it’s always exciting. This looks like the exit—it was chasing her here. Even if it took another route back to its lair, we should wind up there if we follow it. With the added bonus of the boar having already frightened off most of the things that would think we looked tasty.”

  “This country is a cornucopia of delights,” said Thomas.

  “At least you have us.” Enid glanced at him before returning her attention to the path ahead of them. “When we came here, we were foreigners with no support, no friends, no one to tell us how anything worked—it was like being exiled on Mars. I broke down crying the first time I saw an igneous scorpion. It was all too much. I wanted to go home.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “Oh, a lot of reasons. I don’t know how much you know about our exit from the Covenant, but I did my best to knock Pembroke Cunningham’s ah, personal parts into his throat when he grabbed me on my way out the door. So there was that. And we had already made the decision to cut ties. I left my children with the Covenant. Do you know what that takes? For a mother to leave her children behind?”

  Thomas was quiet for a moment. “No,” he said finally. “I have no conception of what that would be like. I left no one behind when I left home. Honestly, I’m not sure most of my peers would notice if I switched sides tomorrow. I’m just a name on a roster to them. No one would mourn me.”

  “I think about them every day. Charles and Ada. Back then, I thought about them every hour. It would have been so easy to go back, with or without my husband. To say we’d been wrong about everything, to beg forgiveness—and we would probably have received it, even after what we’d done. We hadn’t hurt anyone, hadn’t helped any monsters escape from justice. We’d just been misled. It could happen to anyone. If we had been willing to repent, the Covenant would have made
it all go away. Sometimes I still wonder why we didn’t.” Enid smiled, the expression grayed out by the shadows around them. “But then there was Jonathan, and I watched him playing with the mice, not knowing that he was supposed to hate them for being ‘unnatural,’ and I thought, this boy. We can raise this boy without any of our prejudices. We can let him have the world, the whole world, and never need to kill anything for the sin of being born. So we stayed. And then we stayed a little longer. And eventually, it was too late to go back, if we had ever really wanted to. We learned the land. The land learned us. We settled. We grew roots. This is our home now. The only home Jonathan and Alice have ever known.”

  “I can’t quite imagine her in the Covenant’s halls,” Thomas admitted. “She’d cause a chain reaction that destroyed the place inside of a week.”

  “That’s my granddaughter,” said Enid fondly. “She’s a good girl, honestly. She tries hard. She just has more enthusiasm than skill, at times, and little sense of self-preservation.”

  “She hasn’t gotten herself killed yet, so she assumes she never will,” said Thomas.

  “Exactly,” said Enid.

  The trail of broken and shattered trees lead them deeper and deeper into the wood, until even Enid wasn’t quite sure where they were. Alice might have known. Alice spent more time in the woods than was good for her. The ground here looked chewed, like it had been rooted up over and over again. They were getting close to where the boars lived.

  She was starting to feel like this might be all right—they could reach the boars before Alice did, set a boundary, and watch for her wayward granddaughter—when the unmistakable bark of a shotgun spoke from up ahead, followed by the enraged squeal of a pig the size of a mature Guernsey bull. Thomas broke into a run. Enid was only half a step behind him.

  For a man who didn’t have much familiarity with the woods, Thomas covered ground with remarkable speed. He broke through the trees into the boars’ clearing just as the shotgun boomed again, with Enid close on his heels. Both of them took aim and fired at the sow, which was charging the tree where Alice had taken cover. The other boar was already down, a hole clean through the center of its skull.

  Four bullets later, the sow was down. Enid didn’t wait to see if there was a third dire boar. She shoved her rifle into Thomas’s arms and went stalking across the clearing, fury radiating from every pore. Alice—showing more common sense than she had hitherto been heir to—stayed in her tree.

  “Alice Enid Healy have you no sense,” demanded Enid, glaring up the tree at her granddaughter. “You could have been killed!”

  “But I wasn’t,” said Alice smartly. “I found the boar. I killed it before it could kill me.”

  “Oh, and how were you planning to handle its mate? You have to think, girl! You have to plan!”

  “Mrs. Healy.” Thomas touched Enid’s elbow, pointing to the tree. “Look.”

  Enid looked. There was a smear of blood there, too high to have come from the boar, and too red to be anything but fresh. She paled, squinting upward at Alice once again.

  “Are you hurt?”

  “Just a little,” said Alice, and swung down from the tree one-armed. She had to: her left arm dangled by her side, the shoulder clearly dislocated. There was a cut through the left thigh of her jeans where the boar’s tusks had caught her. She was bleeding. Not copiously enough for the boar to have severed an artery, but enough to worry her grandmother. “I’m fine.”

  “No,” said Enid. “You’re not. Mr. Price?”

  “On it.” Thomas handed her back the rifles before stepping over to Alice. “Please forgive me,” he said, and swept her off her feet, hefting her against his chest.

  “For what?” asked Alice bemusedly. Then she closed her eyes, and passed out.

  It took almost an hour to get out of the woods and back to the old Parrish Place. It was slower when carrying an unconscious teenage girl, especially since the smell of blood had a tendency to attract the nastier things that lived in the underbrush. It took another hour to wake Alice up, bandage her wounds, and feed her enough sugared lemonade for Enid to pronounce her fit to travel. Alice spent most of that time petting the tailypo, which hid eggshells in her hair and chittered at her.

  After Enid had Alice safely settled in the truck she turned to Thomas and said, “Thank you.”

  “Think nothing of it.” He looked past her to Alice, who had put her head against the rolled-up window and closed her eyes. “Please. Is she going to be all right?”

  “She’s sturdy,” said Enid. “Jonathan’s likely to be more traumatized than she is. Still, I appreciate the help. I’m going to make sure he understands that you’re a friend to this family, at least for now.”

  “At least for now,” Thomas agreed. “When she’s feeling better, can you ask her to be more careful? Please? I’m not sure how much of this my nerves can take.”

  Enid laughed. “Ask her yourself,” she said. “You’re likely to get a better answer than I do. Good day, Mr. Price.”

  “Good day, Mrs. Healy.” He stayed where he was, watching as Enid walked back to the truck, climbed into the driver’s seat, and drove away. Then, because he couldn’t think of anything better to do, he turned to study the remains of the porch swing.

  Maybe it was time to repair the thing after all.

  Enid leaned over and shook Alice by the shoulder. “Wake up,” she said. “We’re home.”

  “Already?” Alice lifted her head, blinking blearily. “I don’t feel so good.”

  “That’s because you’ve lost a lot of blood,” said Enid. “Come on.”

  Slowly, she led her granddaughter up the walkway to the front door. Carefully, she pushed it open. And then she hollered, “Jonathan Healy you get out here right now!”

  “Mother?” Jonathan’s head emerged from the study. His eyes widened. “Alice!” The rest of him emerged already running. “What happened? If that Price fellow hurt her, I’ll—”

  “He saved her, Johnny,” said Enid. Her arm around Alice’s waist was the only thing keeping the girl on her feet. “She’d be dead and eaten if not for him, and no thanks to you. We can’t keep her out of those woods. You’re going to let me train her. Starting today. I know that isn’t what you want, and frankly, I don’t care anymore. You can’t change the kind of girl she is. All you can do is get her killed trying. Do I make myself clear?”

  Jonathan stared for a long moment before he nodded. “Yes,” he said. “You do.”

  “Good. Now go summon Mary. I’m going to need her to keep Alice in bed while the rest of us go back to the woods to recover two dead dire boars. Tell your father the chicken will have to wait.” She started toward the stairs, dragging Alice along with her. Jonathan watched them go, not saying a word.

  Sometimes there wasn’t anything to say.

  Alice woke hours later to an empty house and the distant sound of mice cheering the end of the night’s catechisms. She rolled over, wincing as the motion tugged at the stitches in her leg.

  “Go back to sleep,” said the ghost of Mary Dunlavy, pressing a cool hand to Alice’s forehead. “You’re not dead yet, and there’s nothing here can hurt you while I’m sitting by your side.”

  “Okay, Mary,” said Alice, with calm obedience, and rolled back over, and went back to sleep.