As the Crow Flies

by Rysa Walker

Love. Desire. Loss. Grief.

  Daisy’s grip on his hand tightens. Her mouth hangs open, eyes wide. She’s hearing something too, although the word doesn’t exactly convey the sensation.

  This is why you fascinate Raum. Why he will listen to you—attend to you—when my words do not reach him. He listened to the boy and pulled all of you in from his orbit. To see what made you tick. To fix your broken parts. Then the fool child stumbled in himself and broke the walls, broke the entire—

  “Chase,” Daisy says aloud. “You mean Chase. Is he okay?”

  Zophiel ignores the interruption. Her words-that-aren’t-just-words come faster now, tripping over each other, rising in pitch and frenzy.

  —world. Andras feeds on your misery and your fear. The boy cannot fix it alone, and you cannot help him if you see no further than your own pain. If he breaks free, the worlds will suffer, every city, every nation, every realm. The Seventy-Two will crumble. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold…the darkness drops again…

  Something screeches, even louder than Zophiel’s words. Tucker pulls Daisy toward him, and they cover their ears instinctively to block the noise, even though most of it seems to be coming from inside their heads.

  The black void behind Zophiel erupts into a shrieking whirlwind of feathers and claws. They crash into the ball of light, and tiny shards of amber fill the sky as it shatters.

  Tucker tries to shield Daisy as they run for the car. Crows dive and rip at his back, but the attack ends as quickly as it began. By the time they reach the car, the birds are soaring upward, their attention drawn elsewhere.

  Crows continue to fly out of the void, although in smaller numbers now. They join the group above, which is no longer circling aimlessly. Instead, the birds cluster together into a tight knot and pivot toward the Grimshaw house.

  “That’s where Chase is,” Daisy says. “We have to help him.”

  Tucker opens the door. Daisy climbs in, but he goes around to the back and pops the trunk.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I need supplies.”

  A flash of orange and white shoots out from behind the car when the trunk opens, but it only makes it as far as the ditch beside the road. It’s the cat from last night, and it appears to be injured. Tucker takes a few steps toward it, but the creature hisses, narrowing its eyes.

  Its very amber eyes.

  And then it’s gone.

  Six

  JULIE

  Julie glances at the girl in the passenger seat, still in costume as a sexed-up version of Sandy from Grease. “Sure you don’t want to go back inside and change clothes? That leather doesn’t look very comfortable.”

  The question is both somewhat sincere—the outfit really doesn’t look comfortable—but also because she’s curious about what Dani will say now that the others are gone. Curious whether she’d brave the birds circling the place. Are the birds a danger to Dani? For that matter, are they an actual danger to any of them?

  Dani raises an eyebrow in response to her question. “Does my sexy costume offend the preacher lady?”

  “Not at all,” Julie says, turning the key. “Just thought I’d give you the option.”

  “We can both cut the shit now that Daisy is gone. Although I’ve a good mind to change the story I gave her. I wonder what she’d think about you if she knew that you abandoned me at the high school.”

  Well, that answers that, Julie thinks as she pulls away from the curb. Whatever Dani is, she remembers what happened earlier. So they can, as the girl so eloquently put it, cut the shit.

  The bravado that Julie felt when she told Tucker she’d be fine with Dani is beginning to fade. “How much of what you said earlier was true?” she asks. “Did you really see Marybeth at the bonfire?”

  “Yes.”

  Julie can’t tell if the words are a lie. Of course, she probably wouldn’t have been able to tell if Dani was telling the truth back before everything went crazy.

  “Do you think she went home?”

  “Aric said he was driving her home. That’s all I know.”

  Julie is tempted to push further. To ask Dani why she was in different clothes at the high school. To ask what she remembers. Whether she recalls being stabbed by the cheer squad from hell or running from that damned scarecrow.

  But maybe that’s something she should raise when they reconvene at Tucker’s place. As much as Julie doesn’t want to have that conversation in front of Daisy, she’s not sure it’s fair to keep her in the dark.

  Also, there’s safety in numbers. Based on the conversation back at Tucker’s place, Luke’s wife and Tucker’s fellow officer turned into some sort of monster. Would the same thing happen if she pushed Dani for answers? She could easily see Dani morphing into one of those decaying cheerleaders.

  “You’re going the wrong way,” Dani says.

  “No. We’re going to drive by my place first. Chase might have gone there, since it’s fairly close to their trailer.”

  “Suit yourself,” Dani says, slouching down in the seat and closing her eyes.

  Five minutes later, Julie pulls up in front of her house, although it’s hard to recognize it as the same place she left the day before. It doesn’t look like anyone has lived there in years. The strangest thing, though, is the area beyond her house. It’s located only fifty yards or so from a sign that reads You are Now Entering Haddonwood. There’s a copse of trees a bit further down the road, before it curves around to follow the river.

  Now, however, there’s nothing but blackness beyond the sign. That blackness makes her want to pop the car into reverse and head back to the center of town as fast as possible. What if it begins to spill into the town limits and swallows her up? But she forces herself to pull into the drive. She has to check. Chase could be inside.

  The front door is unlocked, and when she pushes it open, she finds the rooms vacant. She feels a brief pang, wondering what happened to all of the things she’d accumulated over the years. A lot of it was junk that she’ll never miss, but there were a few items, such as her grandmother’s quilt, that can never be replaced.

  Chase isn’t there, so she heads back to the car.

  Dani continues to snooze, or more likely pretends to, as Julie pulls back onto the road and heads back toward Sycamore Acres. The sky seems to clear up a bit as she drives, and she realizes it’s because most of the birds that had clouded the sky have now congregated into a denser mass, hovering over the Grimshaw house.

  When she pulls into Sycamore Acres, her jaw drops. Yesterday, there were more than a dozen mobile homes on the lot. Today, the blackness has gobbled up all but two of them. Or, to be completely accurate, all but one and a half, since the back half of Ralph and Aileen Rey’s trailer no longer exists.

  She can’t bring herself to go inside, so she simply pulls up and honks the horn. Once, twice, three times. Dani groans in annoyance. Julie waits and then honks again.

  “He’s not there,” Dani mumbles. “Quit honking the damn horn. Ben was right. Chase is at Grimshaw.”

  Julie doesn’t ask if Dani actually knows this for a fact, since any answer she gets from the girl is likely to be a lie anyway. She just heads toward Scott’s house, on the other side of town. The center of Haddonwood now looks, quite literally, like a ghost town. Its lone traffic light hangs off-kilter, the fountain is dry, and Julie half expects a tumbleweed to come rolling through the intersection.

  A few minutes later, they pull up in front of the Jenkins’s house. “Do you want to wait here?” Julie asks.

  “Why would I do that?” Dani, who is suddenly wide awake, gives her a smug little smile. “You’re the one who’s afraid of Mr. Jenkins. Not me.”

  “I was thinking more of the birds.”

  Six crows are perched along the edge of the small porch. Three more sit atop the BMW. The rest of them now seem to be part of the giant funnel cloud that has engulfed the Grimshaw house.

  “I’m not worried about the birds,” Dani says. “Are you?
”

  Julie actually is worried, but she gets out anyway. Six black feathered heads follow them as they approach the house.

  Dani wrinkles her nose and sidesteps the rotten pumpkin at the base of the porch. It looks like it’s been there for days, maybe even weeks, but the light inside is still burning.

  The door opens as soon as Julie raises her hand to knock. Scott moves into the doorway and glares out at her. His hazel eyes are a little more bloodshot than usual, possibly due to a lack of sleep, but he’s not the white-eyed creature Tucker described. The only thing that has changed since she saw Scott last night is the crisscross of scratches on his cheeks and neck.

  “If you’re here to apologize,” he says, “don’t bother. I’ll be reporting this to the deacons—no, in fact, I think I’ll be reporting this to the entire congregation on Sunday. I’ve been patient with your heretical teaching, hoping that God would remove the scales from your eyes as he did with Saul in Damascus so that you might see the light. But you are too far gone. Leaving me to walk back to town was inexcusable.”

  “I’m not here to argue with you, Scott. Dani asked me to drive her over so she could check on Marybeth. Make sure she got back home safely.”

  Dani rolls her eyes slightly, but Scott’s attention remains on Julie.

  “She never came in. I’ve been up all night waiting for her. She’s probably with that worthless Rey boy. I warned her. I told her he was trouble—”

  “She’s not with Ben Rey. Dani said Aric Conner drove her home.”

  “Well, I don’t know that for certain,” Dani says with a little smirk. “She said he was driving her home. Maybe she and Aric got a room at the Pinewood instead.”

  Scott’s eyes bulge, and his mouth opens, but he can’t quite seem to find the words.

  Julie is torn between a grudging admiration at Dani’s ability to get under the guy’s skin and worry that Scott is going to pop a blood vessel. That worry is probably stupid, given that she watched him vanish into thin air last night. He can’t possibly be real. But then neither can Dani.

  Something furry brushes past Julie’s ankles. She looks down to see an orange cat, its fur matted with blood. Scott recoils as soon as he sees the creature, pressing his back against the grandfather clock. “Get it out! Get that thing out of here.”

  The cat hisses as it passes in front of him and then burrows between the sofa and the wall. Julie could probably have reached the cat before it was fully hidden—the poor thing is limping badly and panting, as if it’s just run a marathon. But she remembers what Tucker said about the cat attacking Scott. Had Scott injured it in their struggle? She doubts that the cat could be much help in its current state, given how slowly it’s moving, but an ally is an ally.

  Dani crosses to the other side of the room and begins to tug at the corner of the couch. Julie runs toward her, yelling for her to leave the animal alone. Then a loud caw fills the room, and one of the crows swoops through the open door. It collides with Scott, who startles, slamming one elbow against the glass window of the compartment that houses the clock’s pendulum. The window shatters from the impact as Scott’s body absorbs the crow.

  He’s no longer cowering against the broken clock. Now he’s coming straight toward her.

  “Get out of here, Dani!” Julie backs through the swinging door that leads into the kitchen. She pulls the pepper spray from her pocket as she stumbles toward the wooden island in the middle of the room.

  Scott bursts into the kitchen right behind her. She extends her arm and presses the spray with her thumb, aiming directly for those eerie white eyes. The chemical spews from the small tube a lot faster than Julie expects and hits the target dead on, but he lashes out like a snake, knocking the canister from Julie’s grip.

  Howling, Scott swipes at his eyes with one hand while blindly searching for her with the other. Residue from the spray is making her own eyes water. She needs to get out. But he’s between her and the door, so she turns instead to search for a weapon.

  Scott’s hand connects with the center of her back, and she falls forward into the kitchen island. Her arms flail, knocking ceramic canisters and a wooden knife block to the floor. Knives scatter across the tiles, their blades gleaming beneath the bright light.

  “Bitch.” The words come from Scott’s mouth, but the voice isn’t his. It’s deeper, more guttural, and yet she can also hear a tinny screech in the background.

  Julie lands on the floor among the knives. She grabs the largest one she can find, then crawls behind the island and pulls herself to her feet.

  Scott’s eyes are still squinted half shut, with tears streaming over the angry red claw marks on his cheeks. Even through the narrow slits, she can see that the pupils are stark white.

  “Do it,” the thing says, taking a step toward her. “You know you want to. Just fucking do it.”

  Julie tightens her grip on the knife. She does want to.

  And then he charges straight at her.

  She screams, raising the knife high and bringing it down toward his chest. Her aim is off, though, and the blade sinks into his shoulder.

  Julie expects the Scott-thing to cry out, but instead he drops to his knees. Raising her arm, she prepares to strike again if he grabs for her.

  But he doesn’t. Instead, he smiles and winks one white eye. Then the crow flies up from the center of Scott’s torso, swooping to the top of the kitchen cabinets. Jenkins slumps into a bloody heap on the kitchen floor just as the door behind him opens.

  “Julie?”

  Bill Gray stands in the doorway, with Dani just behind him.

  “Oh my God. Bill!” Julie’s hand loosens on the knife, and it clatters to the floor. She rushes past Scott and into Bill’s arms, pressing her face into his shirt. It’s him. He’s solid, real. Her hands tremble as they run quickly over his shoulders, neck, and chest. It’s him.

  Bill stares into Julie’s eyes for a moment and then pushes her back. He’s no longer looking at her but at the body on the floor. Snatching a kitchen towel from the counter, he yells for Dani to call 911.

  The crow is still perched on the kitchen cabinets, watching. It squawks once and then flies out of the kitchen, through the open front door, and into the morning.

  “What the hell happened?” Bill asks, pressing the towel against Scott’s shoulder to slow the bleeding. The man moans and then falls silent.

  “He…attacked me.” Julie’s knees weaken, and she sinks to the floor. She can hear Dani in the other room, talking to someone on the phone. “Everything…it’s all been crazy, Bill. Where have you been?”

  “In Atlanta?” He gives her an odd look. “I came back early because Dani left a message. She said she was worried about you.”

  Julie looks beyond him, into the living room, and catches Dani’s eye. A sly smile spreads slowly across the girl’s face.

  What in God’s name is going on?

  As Bill reaches down to check Scott’s pulse, Julie hears a soft mewing sound next to her. She glances down to see the orange cat, with its odd amber eyes, as the cat crawls onto her lap.

  Into her lap.

  Into her, vanishing exactly as the crow did when it entered Scott.

  Julie can still see Bill, kneeling down next to Scott, holding a blood-soaked towel to the other man’s shoulder. Can still see Dani on the phone, the knives on the floor, and shards of ceramic scattered everywhere.

  She can still see all of these things, but the entire world is now suffused in a soft amber glow.

  Seven

  DAISY

  Daisy watches as Tucker shoves two canisters of some sort into his jacket pocket. Then he hands her the other items he grabbed from the trunk—a bright-orange emergency blanket and a gas mask.

  “What are these for?”

  “If we’re heading up there, we’re going to need protection from those damn crows.”

  “Good point. They tore your shirt. You’re bleeding.”

  “You are, too,” he says as he gets a cl
ear look at her face for the first time.

  Daisy tugs down the passenger-side mirror as he drives away. Her hair is much darker than Tippi Hedren’s was in The Birds. But she now has a cut in the exact same spot just below her hairline. She dabs at it with her sleeve. “Well, at least there’s no need to hunt for bandages. It will probably be healed by the time we reach the Grimshaw house. Why the gas mask, though?”

  “Smoke grenades. The blanket will block the worst of it, but one of us is going to need to see in order to navigate…and the mask will protect our eyes.”

  “Will the smoke clear the crows out?” Daisy asks.

  “I have absolutely no idea,” he admits with a slight grimace. “These were the only three things in my trunk that seemed like they might work.”

  “I’m impressed, actually. I didn’t know you had this whole MacGyver side.” She glances back over her shoulder at the black hole, which vanishes as Tucker rounds the corner. “Although I do wish you’d had another weapon of some sort back there.”

  “There’s a stake in the backseat,” he says. “Not exactly high powered, but it came in handy for me last night.”

  She laughs nervously, but then lowers the bucket seat as far as possible so that she can reach the jagged chunk of wood. It’s not much, but something about its weight feels comforting.

  “Sure you don’t have any salt back there? Garlic? Holy water?”

  “Nope. Just the stake.”

  They drive silently for a moment, and then she asks, “Did you understand any of what she was…saying?”

  “No,” Tucker admits. “You?”

  “Not really. It was overwhelming. Like she was screaming inside my brain. The center cannot hold part was familiar, though. I remember that from something.”

  “From a movie?” Tucker asks.

  “I think it was from lit class. A poem, maybe?”

  “Well, once we get Chase out of there, we’ll go back, and you can ask her.” He fills her in about the cat’s hasty exit into the woods. “I was tempted to go after it. But if the cat was really this Zophiel…”