The Taker by Alma Katsu

heard my brother ask in a voice heavy with sleep. “There’s the cattle to feed—”
    “I’ll go with you, Father,” I called down from the loft, pulling on my clothing hastily. My heart was already beating so hard that it would be impossible to remain in the house and wait for news of what had happened. I had to go with my father.
    A snow had fallen in the night, the first of the season, and I tried to clear my mind as I walked behind Father, concentrating only on stepping into the footsteps he made in the fresh snow. My breath hung in the crisp air and a drop of mucus beaded on the tip of my nose.
    Sitting in the hollow before us was the Jacobses’ farm, a brown saltbox on the broad expanse of white snow. People had begun to congregate, distant small dark shapes against the snow, and more were coming to the farm from every direction, on foot and on horseback; the sight made my heart start to race again.
    “We’re going to the Jacobses’?” I asked of my father’s back.
    “Yes, Lanore.” A taciturn reply, with his customary economy of words.
    I could barely contain my anxiety. “What do you think has happened?”
    “I expect we’ll find out,” he said patiently.
    There was a representative present from every family—except the St. Andrews, but they lived at the farthest reach of town and could scarcely have heard the shot—everyone in mismatching layers of dress: dressing gowns, uneven hems of a nightshirt peeking out from beneath a coat, hair uncombed. I followed my father through the small crowd until we’d nudged our way to the front door, where Jeremiah kneeled in the muddied, chopped snow. He’d obviously shoved himself hastily into breeches, boots unlaced on his feet, and a quilt draped over his shoulders. His ancient blunderbuss, the gun that had fired the alarm, leaned against the clapboard siding. His great ugly face contorted in agony, his eyes red, his lips cracked and bleeding. He was usually such an emotionless man that the sight was unnerving.
    Pastor Gilbert pushed his way to the front, then crouched low sohe could speak softly into Jeremiah’s ear. “What is it, Jeremiah? Why did you sound the alarm?”
    “She’s missing, Pastor …”
    “Missing?”
    “Sophia, Pastor. She’s gone.”
    The hush of his voice sent a wave of murmurs through the crowd, everyone whispering to the person on either side of them, except for me and my father.
    “Gone?” Gilbert placed his hands on Jeremiah’s cheeks, cradling his face. “What do you mean, she is gone?”
    “She is gone, or someone has taken her. When I awoke, she was not in our home. Not in the farmyard, not in the barn. Her cloak is gone but her other things are still here.”
    Hearing that Sophia—angry, perhaps feeling she had naught to lose—had not revealed my visit to Jeremiah eased a tightness in my chest that I hadn’t realized was there. At that moment, may God forgive me, I was worried not so much for a woman wandering bereft in the great woods as I was for my own part in her undoing.
    Gilbert shook his white head. “Jeremiah, surely she has just stepped out for a bit, a walk perhaps. She will be home soon and sorry to have caused her husband worry.” But even as he spoke, we all knew he was mistaken. No one went walking for recreation in weather this cold, first thing in the morning.
    “Calm yourself, Jeremiah. Let us take you inside, to warm yourself before you get a bone chill … Stay here with Mrs. Gilbert and Miss Hibbins, they’ll see to you while the rest of us search for Sophia—won’t we, neighbors?” Gilbert said with false enthusiasm as he helped the big man to his feet and turned to the rest of us. Speculation passed in the sideways glances of husband to wife, neighbor to neighbor—so the new bride has left her husband?—but no one had the heart to do anything but take up the pastor’s suggestion. The two women escorted Jeremiah, stumbling and dazed, into his house and the rest of us broke up into