When at last the sun rose, the girls were all asleep, and everyone was fully dressed once again, Rose took over watching over Jackson despite his grumbling and grousing, and Malik gestured for Ainslie to follow him outside.
She followed him without argument, and they took a detour by the barn so Malik could grab a shovel and hand a second one to Ainslie, and she knew with sudden clarity what they were going to be doing.
Silently, she followed him into the woods a short way, until they reached the point that Malik had dropped Maria’s body the night before. Ainslie tried not to look, but there wasn’t much of a choice. Even so, she did her best to keep her back to the body as she and Malik began to dig.
In between shovels of dirt, Ainslie explained what had happened the night before. She explained about finding the car and the run back to the barn, hearing Paisley howl—the same howl that had brought Rose and Malik back to the yard—and the sight they had discovered when they got back.
She explained how Maria had a catch-pole and was trying to lasso Paisley with it without much success, how Andy tackled her, and how she beat Maria over the head with the rock to keep her from going after Andy. And she explained the missing pieces of the puzzle she had managed to put together about Maria’s intent.
And afterwards, Malik seemed… surprised, upset, but not that surprised. Not as surprised as Ainslie thought he should have been, considering someone he had known for years evidently was willing to capture, kill, and skin his daughters for their animal pelts.
When she pointed that out, Malik sighed slowly and began to explain.
“There are people known as hunters,” he explained quietly. “People who have decided that it’s their job to get rid of people like me and my family for being what we are. It doesn’t pay anything on its own, so sometimes they try to make some under-the-table money off of it instead. And since they don’t really look at us and see us as human beings, I guess they don’t really think much of skinning us like animals. Even if they’ve known us for years.”
“Why did it take her so long to do anything?” Ainslie wondered. Her arms were beginning to ache from digging, but at least it was a decent distraction from everything else that was trying to press on her thoughts just then.
“She probably refrained from doing anything until she had a client to make it worthwhile, and that client wanted a wolf pelt. At a guess, Maria knew that my mother-in-law was too big for her to have a chance at killing.”
They lapsed into silence after that as they dug and as Ainslie tried to wrap her mind around the idea that someone might want to kill the family she had come to love, simply for monetary gain. She couldn’t get it to fit in any logical capacity no matter what angle she tried to come at it from, and soon enough she gave up on the endeavor.
By the time the hole was big enough, it felt as if they had been digging for half the day, though as she looked up at the sky between the bare branches, it looked as if it was still plausibly breakfast time. Ainslie stepped back as Malik dumped the body into the hole, and when they began shoveling dirt back into it, it went much quicker.
“Will anyone report her missing?” Ainslie wondered eventually, as she followed Malik back towards the house. If the entire family was going to need to uproot and move somewhere off the radar, she would appreciate knowing in advance. She would go with them, of course, but she would appreciate having time to pack and say goodbye to Carrie.
He shook his head slowly after a moment of thought. “Probably not,” he replied. “She doesn’t have any family that I’m aware of, and from everything I’ve heard, hunters tend to mostly socialize with other hunters.”
“So, if one of them goes missing, basically their entire social circle knows why,” Ainslie guessed. True enough, she didn’t know much about were-animals or their lives, but she could still put the pieces together when they were laid out in front of her.
“And knows they can’t really report it,” Malik confirmed. “As far as the law is concerned, were-animals don’t exist, so the law tends to just look at them as murderers.”
“They are murderers,” Ainslie pointed out, her tone sharp and insistent.
Obviously, Malik didn’t argue that point. It wasn’t as if he was going to suddenly try to argue that he and his family didn’t count as real people. It was patently ridiculous and everyone knew it.
They didn’t say much else before they got back to the house. Ainslie made a beeline for the shower once she was inside, and once she was clean and dressed once again, she headed for the nearest comfortable, horizontal surface and fell asleep. Discomfort or not, she was exhausted.
Just as expected, though, she didn’t sleep particularly well. She dreamed, over and over again, of the sound of bone cracking under a stone’s weight. It was a wet, meaty crunch, and it replayed in Ainslie’s mind over and over.
She woke up every so often as Paisley or Lily cried in shifts, but they were always quiet again before Ainslie could even get up. Each time, she simply rolled over again and closed her eyes once more. By the time Malik woke her up to tell her they were getting in the car and heading home, she hardly felt like she had slept at all. She couldn’t imagine how everyone else felt.