“She didn’t just break the effect that the Behaim asshole Rose is marrying said was supposed to remain unbreakable, did she?” Peter asked.
“No,” Tiff said. “Not exactly. I’m pretty sure it’s only broken here.”
“In her domain,” I said. I tried to keep Corvidae within range of a lunge, in case I needed to stab him, while keeping one eye on Mara.
We’d nearly run out of time. I could stall, buy time, but her ultimatum had forced me to make a call.
“Mara!” Peter called out.
“Whelp,” she responded, voice almost drowned out by the noise of the forest and the wind in our ears.
“You’re doing it all wrong,” he said.
“I am not interested in your perspective.”
“Blake had the right idea. You want to get revenge? Bloodshed? Letting Blake live is the best way to do it! He’s a maniac!”
“One that is fighting to salvage this town,” Mara said. “I’ll stop that here.”
“Wake up!” Peter said, raising his voice. “One town? Have you not paid the slightest bit of attention to the Thorburn family? We’re fucked up. How does someone as immortal as you are not see the long term implications of letting us live? We’re the worst, most artificial, broken human beings you’ll find around here!”
“You’re asking for clemency, based on the fact that you’re everything I despise?”
“Yes! Exactly yes!”
Refuge in audacity?
Refuge in repugnancy?
“I wish I’d gone with Rose’s group,” Tiff said, under her breath.
“If you really hate modern humanity, if you hate everything we represent, you should be encouraging us to spread, to do our screwed-up thing to this cancerous non-humanity that’s filling the world. Do you know how many lives Roxanne here is going to ruin as she grows up?”
Roxanne shot him a dirty look.
“Roxanne and I legitimately thought Blake was going to murder us in cold blood. That’s how fucked up we are, as a family. Let us live, we continue to fuck up the other families, screw with or kill Johannes, and Jacob’s Bell becomes worse for all the people you hate. You win, and it’s easy, and it poses no risk at all to you.”
“If I let this argument sway me, I would become what I despise.”
“Artificial? The wrong kind of humanity?” Peter asked. “Fuck that. You’d be exemplifying what you are. Continuing to exist, working against humanity. Even if it’s by letting certain humans live to poison the rest.”
“Mm,” Mara said. “You’ve challenged your own argument.”
“Hm?” Peter asked, his stride broken.
“You call humanity a cancer. But poison, applied carefully, can kill cancer.”
Peter recovered instantly. “Hate to break it to you, but we’re not careful in the slightest. We’re a reckless, fractious, senseless, sad family, and as far as I can tell, it’s a miracle we haven’t destroyed ourselves yet.”
“It’s due to your grandmother that you haven’t destroyed yourselves,” Mara spoke. “She is the careful element I do not trust, in all this. By killing and slaying each of you, I will work against whatever plan she has set.”
“Fuck,” Peter said, on his heels. He glanced at me, then Roxanne, and bounced right back. “Fuck you. You’re wrong. You lose power when someone calls you on bullshit, don’t you? Well you’re wrong, you old bitch. Humans exist to evolve, to adapt, to improve, and sitting here like some wart on a dick, doing the same thing every day? You’re less human than the sparrow, or the flesh-eating mermaid!”
Crone Mara remained where she was. She reached out and touched a branch.
A crack and the branch she’d been tending before our conversation now broke.
The crack seemed to echo through the woods, in the same moment the wind died.
Like a gunshot, almost, reaching across her territory, the sound bouncing off trees that happened to be in the right place, against stones, skipping over the surface of water like flat, balanced stones.
The sound reached its intended audience. The birds returned.
Rising from the trees in the distance, they were a vague fog of black against an overcast black, speckled with stars and black-gray clouds.
Their cries filled the air. More noise, joining the wind and the movement of the trees.
The effect was subtle, but it quickly became apparent what she was doing.
The snow reflected what light there was back toward the sky, giving us something to go by in this dim light, but as the sky was swallowed by a mass of birds, even that light disappeared.
“Roxanne,” Peter’s voice sounded so terribly far away, as acoustics failed. His voice sounded even further away as he finished his statement, his request. “Help.”
A bird tore past me, striking me. I folded my wings back, to reduce the chance that they might get torn.
“Practice,” Tiff said. “Simple actions, made into powerful ones with tens of thousands of years of repetition. Train a bird, tune a sound…”
“This is how she operates?” Evan asked.
“No,” Tiff said. Her voice came from another space, as if she were moving. I hadn’t heard the footsteps. “She’s a blood hag. She’ll have Other powers, and practitioner powers. This is just what someone can pull off if they just happen to be immortal and very patient.”
A match flared to life. I could see Peter and Roxanne, together, Peter holding his jacket up as a shield.
A bird flying by snuffed the light.
“Shit!” I heard a voice.
The match fire appeared once more. I wasn’t looking at the pair so much as I was looking out for trouble.
I could see Green Eyes, raised up off the ground, one arm against a tree, cheek bulging, eye wide, mouth filled with crow, straight hair draped over the other half of her face.
Behind her, I saw Corvidae, holding a knife.
I moved faster than I’d ever moved, wings stirring to life, thrusting me forward even as my legs shoved off the ground. Not flying, not running, but a lunge, covering ten or so feet.
The light went out, snuffed out by another moving bird. I heard a cry of pain, and suspected someone had tried to shield against the birds with their body, and been hurt for their trouble.
I was forced to move against Corvidae with no light at all.
“Down, Green!” I shouted.
She went down. In the doing, she placed herself where I very nearly tripped over her.
My wing struck at the knife. The Hyena stabbed at where Corvidae stood. Where he had to stand, given the direction of the thrust.
A hand on my wrist arrested my swing. An iron grip, from a very small figure.
Forward momentum kept me moving, and I’d been moving fast. The perils of being a lightweight, a man of twigs, branches, hollow bones and feathers. I landed on my back in snow, and the hand released me.
The cawing of crows filled the air now. The buzzards were larger, but not nearly so noisy. There were other birds, too.
The flame came on and went in a fraction of a second.
I heard someone curse at the failure.
But the image I’d seen was burned into my mind’s eye. Corvidae and Crone Mara, standing practically shoulder to shoulder.
She’d saved him. He hadn’t even moved from the point I was stabbing at. Another inch or two, and I’d have cut him.