The shirt tied around Goober’s leg was saturated with crimson blood by the time they made it out of the woods. Woodrow was panicking. A dying child lied limp over his shoulder, his breaths becoming weaker by the second, and neither Chuck nor Bill Jones were anywhere to be seen. Had another Hexenwolf stopped them on their way out? He didn’t have time to wait for them and find out. They could take care of themselves, but the boy wasn’t in any condition to bring himself to the hospital. So he tore off into town with a child on his back and smears of blood on his bare chest.

  He hustled down a street without a sidewalk. Cars whizzed past him and honked their horns; he returned the greeting with a middle finger. Someone walked towards him — a woman with a raggedy little dog on a leash that did its damndest to pull her along. When she saw Woodrow and Goober, she turned and ran, but Woodrow shouted after her.

  “Ma’am! Which way’s the hospital?” he pleaded. But she only responded with shrieks that faded with her into the horizon.

  “Shit.” The boy was whiter than a Confederate ghost, and now took in breaths in short, irregular bursts. Even if they knew where the hospital was, Woodrow didn’t reckon the boy would live long enough to see it — he had minutes left to live at the most.

  Woodrow fell to his knees and laid Goober down on the grass next to the road. The boy was heavy and Woodrow’s body was giving out. They were all out of options. Goober was going to bleed out in a neighborhood he’d never seen, with a man he barely knew, for no good reason. They should have just given him to the group homes. No matter how bad it might have been, it had to have been better than this. The turning points of Woodrow’s life played in his head like a reel of film — all of the women that came and left his life, all of the friendships that withered and died, all of the opportunities that he wasted — and he wondered if he had ever made a single good decision in his life.

  His lungs could not take in enough oxygen. He’d run too hard, too far. Blackness crept around the edges of his vision until he lost consciousness.

  He blinked and he was suddenly on a tile floor. Heavy drops of rain beat against the roof, but he didn’t remember seeing a single cloud in the sky before. He was still shirtless, but the blood that had stuck to his chest and back were gone, and there was a quilt draped over his body. Looking up he saw the front door of a house and the white linoleum countertops of a well-used kitchen.

  “Sorry, sugar, but we couldn’t drag your big self all the way to the bedroom.”

  An old woman came from nowhere and stood over him. Her sweater was decorated with specks of blood and she smiled at him. With her rosy cheeks and kind eyes, Woodrow couldn’t imagine she meant him any harm.

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  “You alright?” she asked.

  Woodrow had to think about his answer. He decided that he felt fine, all things considered.

  “Yes ma’am, I think so,” he replied.

  “Good.” She took a wooden spoon out of a drawer and smacked him on the forehead with it.

  “What in God’s name is wrong with you, bringin’ that boy to hunt a wolf?! Coulda got him killed! Yourself too!” She smacked him again, hitting his ear this time. It stung like a piss after visiting a whorehouse, but Woodrow took the punishment without protest.

  “Ma’am,” he said once she finally lowered her weapon, “how’d you know he was bit by a wolf?”

  “He told me.”

  Hearing those words perked Woodrow up enough that he sprang up from the floor. He kicked the quilt off of his feet and went down the hallway into a bedroom. Goober splayed out casually on top of a worn mattress with his leg wound exposed to the open air. It still looked as fresh as the moment he got it. The blood wasn’t coagulated, but it didn’t flow down his leg either; it just pooled in the crater where the muscle used to be and didn’t move any farther, even when he tried to stand up to greet Woodrow.

  “Woah, woah, take it easy,” Woodrow said. “You were damn near dead a little bit ago.”

  “I’m feelin’ pretty good now though,” Goober smiled and fell back down onto the bed. “‘Cept I can’t walk, I guess.”

  Woodrow was used to peculiar sights — he was one himself, after all — but the way the bright, liquid blood flowed and shifted on the boy’s leg without breaking free mesmerized him. He was fixated on it, almost like he was in a trance, so that he didn’t notice when the old lady walked up behind him.

  “He’s healin’ up fast, but it’s gonna be awhile before he can walk right again — if he ever can,” she said. “That wolf got a mouthful out of him, I tell you what.”

  “He got me good, but I got ‘em better,” Goober said.

  Woodrow was still fixated on the not-quite-open wound.

  “That your doin’?” he asked. She looked at him with bewilderment.

  “‘Course. You see any other grannies around here?”

  “It was amazing,” Goober said with more emotion than Woodrow had ever heard from him. “She got her book out, said a few words, and it just… stopped bleeding.”

  “Y’all act like you’ve never seen bloodstoppin’ before,” Granny chuckled.

  “Can’t say I have,” Woodrow conceded. “How’d you do it?”

  Her face became solemn in an instant.

  “If I told you, I’d never beable to do it again,” she said in a low, gravelly tone.

  “Uhhhhh… alrighty then,” Woodrow said. “Didn’t mean to press.”

  “Oh, it’s alright,” her jovial expression returned. “Now, the boy here was out for a few hours, but you were out all night and then some. I reckon you’re about starved.” She tapped Woodrow’s belly with the spoon that was still in her hand. “Want me to whip up some corn muffins?”

  She was right. Woodrow was hollowed out and he was eager to stuff himself full of cornmeal and lard.

  “More ‘n just about anything,” he said. Granny belly-laughed.

  “Y’all sit tight right here and I’ll get to it.”

  “Wait.” Woodrow blurted out before she could get too far away, “You got a phone? There were two more of us out in the woods, and I don’t know where they’ve gone off to.”

  “Well, sure. In the den.”

  “Thank you, ma’am.”

  He went out to the den, picked up the landline, and sat down on a pea-green sofa. Bill Jones never carried a cellphone — he said they were just fancy tracking devices for the government — but fortunately, Chuck did. Woodrow called him and explained everything that happened, and told them where to find him. The boys pulled up within fifteen minutes.

  “Lord, there really are three of you,” Granny said when they came knocking on the door. “Come on in.” She peeked over Chuck’s shoulder and saw the barrels of several guns poking out of the truck bed. “I think y’all’re gonna need to explain some things to me.”