The snare was clean work, if Emory said so himself.
Soft nylon cord it wouldn’t cut even if she thrashed anchored to a sapling six feet back from the split stump where the coyote always settled.
He’d spent an hour on it the night before in his room, looking up humane relocation techniques on forums for wildlife rehabbers, and the consensus was clear: a calm catch, a short carry in a crate, a release somewhere with better ground and no ancient blood-drinking trees.
Simple.
Logical.
Good for both of them.
He laid the lure a gutted rabbit he’d bought off a guy in the senior parking lot who bow-hunted, which had been its own kind of weird transaction at the base of the stump, just past where the loop sat hidden under a thin scatter of leaves.
The clearing over the Nemeton had its usual shut acoustic, sound going flat as if every window had closed at once, and Emory worked fast and quiet.
She wasn’t here yet.
He could smell that much.
No bay laurel, no iron, no warm animal musk layered into the cold groundwater scent of the sunk earth.
He tied off the trigger line and stepped back, hands dusty, jaw set.
It was a good plan.
She’d take the bait, the loop would catch a back leg gently, he’d tested the give and he’d be right here to calm her down, get her into the crate he’d borrowed from the back of the vet clinic, and drive her out to the nature preserve on the east side of town.
Better hunting there.
No Nemeton.
No wolf-smelling teenager showing up every few days to spook her off her own ground.
Win for her.
Win for him.
He’d checked the box twice.
He settled into a low squat behind a stand of young cedar and waited, arms on his knees, breathing slow.
The Hum under his sternum was there, low and interested, a faint flutter he’d learned to read as the crowd leaning in.
They wanted this.
They wanted him close to the coyote again, doing something, making progress, and he told himself that wasn’t why he was here.
He was here because sharing the Nemeton with a territorial predator was unsustainable and someone had to be the adult about it.
The fact that the Whispers had been pushing a wordless lean he couldn’t source, a pressure toward her that felt like his own thought until he tried to grab it didn’t mean the plan was wrong.
It just meant he had to be careful.
Had to make sure this was his idea, not theirs.
Except he couldn’t tell anymore.
That was the thing sitting cold in his gut as the woods darkened and the ridge went violet overhead.
He couldn’t tell where his logic ended and their want began.
She came in from the deer-run just past sunset, low and fluid, yellow eyes catching the last of the light.
She paused at the clearing’s edge, nose up, testing the air, and Emory’s chest went tight because she was wild-beautiful all function, no waste, a life pared to territory and survival and the next kill.
And he was about to put her in a box.
She moved toward the stump.
Slow.
Wary.
Her ears swiveled and her head dropped and she scented the rabbit, and Emory could see the exact moment she committed the bunching in her hindquarters, the single forward step that put her back paw square in the hidden loop.
The snare pulled.
She went off like a firecracker.
A yelp high, sharp, wrong and then thrashing, the kind of full-body panic that said trap in a language older than words.
Emory was up and moving before he thought about it, hands out, voice low and useless.
“Hey.
Hey, it’s okay, you’re okay, I’ve got you”
She wheeled on him, teeth bared, and the sound she made wasn’t a growl.
It was a scream.
Human-shaped.
The fear in it landed wrong in Emory’s chest, too big, too coherent, the terror of something that understood what a cage meant and had spent years making sure it never happened again.
He froze.
The coyote twisted, snapping at the cord, at her own leg, at the air, and Emory saw it clearly now how her eyes weren’t just animal-scared but aware, the recognition in them, the betrayal.
She knew what he’d done.
She knew he’d planned it.
And the panic rolling off her wasn’t a coyote’s startle reflex.
It was a girl’s.
“Okay,” Emory said, quiet, dropping to a crouch.
“Okay, I’m sorry.
I’m”
He reached for the trigger line and she lunged at him, all teeth, close enough that he felt the snap of her jaw missing his wrist by an inch.
He jerked back, pulse hammering, and grabbed the cord instead, yanking the slip-knot free in one pull.
The loop went slack.
The coyote tore herself out of it and ran.
No hesitation. Get faster updates on g.com.
No backward look.
She bolted across the clearing, favoring the back leg, and vanished into the dark tree-line on the far side, and the woods swallowed her so completely it was like she’d never been there at all.
Emory stayed on his knees in the dirt, the limp snare in his hands, the rabbit gutted and untouched at the base of the stump.
The Hum cooled.
Not all at once it never went cold, not entirely but the warmth bled out of it in a slow drain, and he felt the crowd pull back, disappointed, the same way they had when he’d walked away from her the first time.
They didn’t want her gone.
They wanted her close.
And he’d just made sure she’d never come close again.
Emory let out a breath that wanted to be a laugh and came out flat.
He looked down at the snare, at the soft nylon cord he’d chosen because it wouldn’t cut, at the careful knots and the borrowed crate still sitting by the cedar, and he understood with a sick cold clarity exactly what he’d done.
Without asking, he’d decided he knew what was best for her.
Reached in.
Treated a living creature like a logistics problem, and she’d felt the trap close and known known that he was just one more person who wanted to handle her for her own good.
He did to her what the Feed did to him.
He made himself sit with that instead of flinching from it.
Emory sat back on his heels and covered his face with one hand, the cord still tangled in the other, and the clearing over the Nemeton stayed silent and flat and empty.
No coyote.
No second chance.
Just the buried heartwood under the split stump, faintly warm, faintly faster than it had been a month ago, the town’s curse ticking up one more notch because he kept coming back here to scrape power off the bark and couldn’t leave well enough alone.
He’d lost her.
Worse he’d lost the fragile truce underneath it, the one where she didn’t run and he didn’t push and they’d split the same woods like two wary tenants who’d agreed not to be each other’s problem.
That truce was ash now.
He’d burned it himself, with a soft snare and good intentions and a planner’s reflex misfiring on the one creature in Beacon Hills that refused to be planned for.
Emory stood slowly, coiling the cord, and looked at the empty sink of earth where she usually curled, nose to tail, against the stump.
“Yeah,” he said to no one.
“That’s on me.”
The woods didn’t answer.
He picked up the rabbit, left the crate, and walked back the way he’d come, the Hum a dull idle under his ribs and his hands smelling like nylon and fur and the iron-dust scent of an animal’s fear.
Behind him the Nemeton sat in its buried clearing, old and patient and awake, and the coyote was gone into the dark Preserve, rubbing a snare-burn from her back leg, and Emory knew without being told that the next time he came to the tree she wouldn’t be there.
She’d make sure of it.
He’d taught her that he was a thing that trapped, and wild things didn’t forget.