“Raise your hoods- protect your faces!” one of the Knights was hollering the words, top-of-his-lungs shouting to be heard over the birds. “Flash- fucking birds– Flashlights!”
They’d come prepared. Beautiful, beautiful people.
I’d have liked to think that if we hadn’t been coming from a ruined house, if circumstances were reversed, we’d be just the same.
Flashlights flared on. Too little light for me to spot Mara.
Even that little amount of light was soon quenched. Just as they’d gone after the matches, the birds attacked the people holding the flashlights.
One flashlight dropped to the snow, and was attacked there. The birds that dogpiled the little device drove it down deeper into snow. Snow lit from beneath, a glowing blob of light, with the dark silhouettes of birds moving over top of it, diving at it, walking over it, pecking.
“They’re attacking the light sources! And anyone who tries to communicate!”
Stimuli, response.
Light? Attack. Noise? Attack.
I had to holler the words. The good thing was, I technically had no lung capacity.
“Don’t move! Silence! Lights out! Freeze!” I called out. “Help Teddy, but stay quiet!”
It took time for them to accept it, to play along. Long seconds. I didn’t flap, but chose instead to glide. I let the wings catch the air currents, let Evan buoy me up, and traced a lazy circle around the clearing. I let myself rise, to break my momentum, then dove, to maintain it. A slow, steady spiral. I only hoped that I’d hit ground before I hit a tree.
The voices and shouts stopped, after the lights were off and we were no longer crunching through snow. Not silence, but I could hear one set of footsteps now that the only bird cries were distant ones. A shuffling sound.
I turned, dropping one wing while raising the other.
A fair bit of noise. A good pace?
The only people in that direction were my cousins. Maybe the satyr or maenad.
Picking off the weakest first? Going after Peter because he’d taunted her? Or going after the combatants?
Her cabin was in that direction. Retreating to a place where she was stronger? Picking up a weapon?
Too many questions.
The biggest was the question as to where she was, precisely.
My senses were strained to their limits, hoping for a glimmer, a shadow moving against a background of shadow, a clearer noise.
Well, when in doubt-
“Mara!” I screamed the word.
“Not Mara!” Peter shouted back.
“Not Mara!” Roxanne echoed him.
“No Mara!” I heard another voice nearby. Green Eyes. “She’s not here! I don’t smell her!”
I turned, as the crows descended to punish us for shouting.
I heard the others trudging away.
“Guard them,” I told Green Eyes. “Keep them safe?”
“Yeah,” she said.
I heard Peter mutter something under his breath. Foxes and henhouses.
Fuck. They’d been the only ones moving, after I’d shouted the warning.
That meant Mara had to have frozen, along with everyone else. Waiting until she had clearance to move, taking full advantage of the darkness and her intimate knowledge of the terrain.
But where? Why? I was losing track of it all.
Mara had, last I’d seen, been in the middle of the clearing, near the fallen trees. That was her starting point, moving initially under the cover of darkness and the noise the birds were making, responding to our lights and voices.
I tried to draw a mental picture. Rose had come in at the Easternmost edge of the clearing, near where I’d had the others stop. To Mara’s right. Her contingent would be thereabouts. Rose had circled the crone, and was a distance from the rest. Isolated.
Nothing I could do about that.
My group had moved across the clearing, and was opposite the other group, to Mara’s left. My cousins and Green Eyes had broken away and moved further away, further from Rose and the others. They’d covered a lot of ground, but Peter wasn’t shy about running from situations where he couldn’t fight.
The satyr and maenad, going by what I’d glimpsed earlier, had started to approach Mara up until the warning had been given about her ability to kill with a touch. They were further behind. I wasn’t sure if they’d continued to approach or started to retreat, but I had to place them somewhere between my cousins and the center of the clearing.
Corvidae was further still. He’d been told to stay still and he had. He’d already been at the rear of the group.
Corvidae as her first target?
I felt a chill.
Trust your instincts, I thought.
I’d been warned about it, but it had been tainted advice.
My chest ached when I thought about that. The lie, the danger in that lie. Not to trust my instincts.
In terms of being both Blake and the monster, my instincts were my best bet, here. They were all I had to go on, my senses stripped away from me.
I felt angry, and used that anger to bolster my strength as I flapped my wings, rising, then dropped. Corvidae wasn’t the obvious choice, but he had a way of complicating things. In terms of tools an exceptionally experienced individual like Mara might use, Corvidae… he felt like the worst possibility.
I landed in deeper snow. My legs protested, and wood creaked and snapped. Still, all in all, the rough landing in snow made less noise than I might have thought.
Blind, I moved forward. I had only the light that had fallen into the snow to go by, but I had always been fairly good at judging distances, whether I was noticing a hallway with wonky dimensions, or building displays for my friends.
I’d intentionally dropped to the ground early. Birds attacked me as I crunched through the snow, more with every few steps, as I was one of the only sources of sound.
“No!” I heard someone cry out, off in the direction of the others.
Teddy, I thought.
I hesitated, waiting for confirmation, for warning that it might be Mara.
The birds that had been harassing me flew off in the direction of the scream, the summary sobbing.
Insult to injury.
I resumed moving, my wings held out, the tips tracing the snow.
We were collectively blind. I had to feel my way.
I reached a point close to where Corvidae had been, and I found tracks with one wingtip, disturbed snow.
Mara could have appeared before me in an instant. Touched me.
What could a hag as old as humanity’s presence in North America be doing, with all of her opponents blind and unwitting?
I thought of the guardian we’d run into, and quickened my pace, my footsteps falling in the tracks she’d left in snow, taking me away from the center of the clearing, toward the woods at the edge.
“Blood,” Evan whispered. He’d perched on my shoulder. “I smell blood.”
I sniffed.
I could smell something. I hesitated to call it blood.
I felt out with one wingtip, until I touched something small. My first thought was that it was fluffy, some small animal.
Bending down, pulling my arm free so it was no longer a component of my wing, I touched it, stroking feathers.
Wings splayed, legs in the air. My hand traveled the length of its body, getting slick with blood, traced the line of the beak.
Corvidae? She had killed him?
Or was it a decoy?
If it wasn’t, he’d moved by some other mechanism. Becoming a crow, getting carried?
Then why this? To mislead?