Calliope ran to the bathroom, stuffing the letter into her shirt as she ran. At the frosted glass of the window, where she’d witnessed a crow break its neck that morning, the leering black and white spotted face she’d wanted to believe a delusion, stared back at her with protruding, toad-like eyes. Its white hair long and jetting in the wind, as if wind-shoved into the window, flattening its ghastly face against the glass. Coiled around its neck, a moss-green snake. The Suuke’s eyes darted toward Calliope frozen in the bathroom doorway, inches from a half-dressed Eunjoo squatting petrified on the bathroom rug beside the backpack. The girl had stopped screaming and they both stared at the demon from Eunjoo’s Coyote story, gripped, unmoving. The glint of a knife broke Calliope’s trance. The Suuke scraped the curved machete blade against the window like an icepick, pounding into the thick, knobbed handle, and the glass began to crackle. She grabbed the girl, turned the lock on the handle with shaky hands, for the few seconds it might buy them, and slammed the door shut.

In the hallway, Calliope lifted the barefoot girl and propped her on her belly, then ran to Chance beside the fireplace, his rifle aimed at the shattered glass of the blown-out vaulted windows facing the backyard, a breach in the whole wall. Semicircle around him throughout the living room and kitchen, a grim mise-en-scène: Amy with Susana’s gun, Mara with her rifle, and Buick with a butcher knife from Tía’s drawer, all intent on the gaping aperture where the window had ruptured, and where, outside the frame on the snowscaped vegetable garden, the second Suuke kneeled, hunched over, head bowed as if in prayer.

Was it hurt? There was no blood. Only white snow surrounding. What was it waiting for?

Chance steadied his gaze on the kneeling Suuke, whispered slantwise to Calliope, “Mujer, get back in the bedroom, lock the door.”

Calliope whispered, “There’s another Suuke back there.”

He jerked his head to the side, looked at her, his eyes twitching nervously, belying his otherwise stoic composure. He flashed a covert gaze toward the front door, and she calculated silently with him how long it would take her to get there.

His lips sealed tight as a ventriloquist’s, he whispered, “There’s a truck where the old man was buried. Key’s in the ignition.”

She glanced back at the Suuke, its head bowed.

“Why isn’t it moving?” she asked

“I don’t know. Can you carry the girl?”

Calliope nodded, despite the painful weight compressing her lower back and belly; she struggled to keep from careening forward, her center of gravity askew.