Dee didn’t love to be indoors, but she had no choice. By using Detective Shit Turd’s superpowers of deduction, I could tell Third Place Books used to be a bookstore. Now, it was home to those who sew silks. Pigeons had left abstract impressionist murals in alabaster shit. Brave troops of mushrooms bloomed here and there in the drippy, dank, and damp. Raccoons had perfumed the place in pee, molesting everything with their creepy miniature wizard hands, those bank robber–faced bunions. The bookstore’s Honey Bear Bakery had long been ransacked. Something had been dragged across the floor, leaving a gruesome red S trail. The books, much like their authors, were no longer upright. They were littered everywhere. Pages had been torn to make nests, munched upon by ravenous insects (it appeared that a Very Hungry Caterpillar had literally gorged on his eponymous classic). But, somehow, it still held a quiet magic. I felt crepitating genius that flared from the minds of MoFos, now secretly sequestered across the crisp leaves of broken-backed books. It gave me hope that they were still alive in the pages of those books, woven into words.
Dee crawled under a table, pushing aside a delightful tableau of rat droppings. The rodent’s equally delightful skeleton (at the time of his demise, I suspect he’d been winning a lively game of Twister) sat near us, among a colorful cemetery of building blocks and a copy of the book Why Mommy Drinks, which seemed like it was winking at me. Fatigue weighed on her like waterlogged boots. She placed me on the tiles. She picked up a piece of moss something had tracked in, rubbing it for comfort. We waited. The screams got louder and louder, and then—thank our lucky Fritos—they started to wane, as terrible creatures shrieked about finding the running She One in the language of hawks. Then—more sounds. Close. So close.
Tap tap tap.
Tap tap tap.
Oh, for Starbucks’s sake, we’re not alone.
Footnotes
1Except toilet paper. In the midst of their pandemic panic, American MoFos hoarded unfathomable mountains of toilet paper. It has never been clear why they needed so much, and I imagined them salivating over their stockpiles like Smaug, if he’d had irritable bowel syndrome.
2A hyrax looks like an inflated animatronic guinea pig but is actually an African rock-climbing mammal who is somehow most closely related to the elephant.
Chapter 22
S.T.
Third Place Books, Lake Forest Park, Washington, USA
Dee looked down at me. Her eyebrows lifted like two flannel moth caterpillar jump-rope champions in perfect tandem, and I knew we were both hoping it was our adventure eagle.
Tap. Pause. Tap. Pause. Tap tap tap tap tap.
The tapping continued, emanating from behind a counter with a sign above it that said “Sell Us Your Used Books.” The curious crow in her just couldn’t handle it.
“Gisi?” It was how she said Migisi’s name when she chose to use MoFo words.
I stomped my foot, furious at Dee for giving away our location.
There was a thick, sticky pause. A voice bounced back to us, “Gisi?” identically to the way Dee said it. Dee shuffled backward on the floor, shocked, shuffle shuffle until her back was up against an old trash can. Every cell of me wanted to believe Dee was not the last. But if I was honest, even if a healthy MoFo stood up behind that counter, I wasn’t ready to share her.
Dee was mine.
Both of us were choking on our curiosity, but I couldn’t risk anything happening to Dee and I didn’t know where Migisi was, and we’d planned to get Dee to Whidbey Island. I’d decided the island was our best chance because Dennis and I found a note a long time ago that said: Cash, canned food, flashlights, water. Find H. Find Sarah. Find a way to Whidbey. Maybe we could make a home there, underneath ghastly streets where scarlet eyes prowled. That’s what Ghubari said the pregnant MoFos had done when the changes happened—they’d burrowed underground like rabbits. That’s what Dee’s family had done with the very best intentions, cutting themselves off from everything. And that’s what we would do.
I gestured toward an escape route—the top of the escalator.
“Gisi?” came the terrifying echo again. Dee’s cold fingers wrapped me in a safety shell. I lifted into the air as she stood.
SLAM!
Dee spun to see a book’s pages flutter after its plummet from the sky. Above the book, perched on old pipes that slithered along the ceiling, was a big black bird.
My nestling let out a soft rattle. The bird mimicked her. Dee used the crow sounds for what the bird was, and the bird responded in crow. Though it was no crow. The raven let out a crawk, ruffling the leonine mane of feathers around its neck.
Dee pointed up at the raven. “Asshole!” she said, and I coughed to shush her. I had perhaps been a bit too vocal with my disdain for ravens. But wouldn’t you have been, if you were constantly compared to a bird who was revered for his larger size and allegedly bigger brain? I was always mistaken for a raven when out with Big Jim. MoFos would approach me, behaving as if they were about to rub eyeballs with a unicorn, only to discover a herpes-stricken donkey. Crows are the pleather to raven’s leather. Ravens get to be creepy cool, crows are just seen as Creepy McCreepertons. Ravens are shy forest dwellers, good with secrets, and where’s the fun in that? Seems selfish not to share them, if you ask me. They’re more in tune with the melodies of the wildest woods, and some say, the afterworld. The great black bird stared down from the top of old pipes.
“What do you want?” I asked.
The raven ruffled again and lifted his contour feathers. This asshole was really rubbing those larger wings in my beak.
“Isn’t the question what do you want?” asked the raven. His voice was deep and rough, the sound of a stone. Ravens speak many languages—forest, river, sky.
“Great. A raven with riddles, what a fucking cliché,” I said.
“What do they call you?” asked the raven.
“Turd,” I said, puffing up while envisioning a Tom Ford suit, an Aston Martin, and a martini shaken like a San Franciscan bartender. “Shit Turd.”
“Alright Turd Shit Turd—”
“No, it’s just—”
“What do they call her?”
Dee was staring at his sleek beak bristles, mane, and the cloaking wings with boogly eyes, and I didn’t like how this trouser sprout was giving my nestling the old bank-camera eyes.
“Why are you here? This doesn’t seem like a raven haven,” I asked.
The raven didn’t answer; he was studying Dee, wings still splayed.
“Hey!” I said, hopping on the spot. “Did you hear what I said?” This guy was swiftly becoming a turmeric stain on the tie of my existence.
Dee stepped lightly toward the raven, one arm extended. She was offering him her piece of moss. It was a clever move, to be so utterly surrounded by crow treasures—socks, greeting cards, and those delightful novelty candles in the shape of cacti—but to offer a forest bird an olive branch from his world. But fuck all that sentimental shit; this was a nightmare.
The raven let out clicks and notes like a bell ringing underwater. He eyed Dee, his mind a bustling ant farm. And then he let out a call I hadn’t heard in a long time. It was painfully familiar, a tune that used to haunt subways, hotels, streets, and homes.
“Duh duhduhduhduhduhduhduh.”
A cell phone jingle.
He repeated it. My beak flopped open, tongue rolled across the floor like a toilet roll gone rogue. And then he watched Dee, ink-black head craned forward.
Dee opened her beak and called back: “Duh duhduhduhduhduhduhduh.”
“She is not Hollowed,” said the beautiful bird.
“Of course not, you coprophagous spoon!” I spat. “How dare you test her! She is the most magnificent and dignified creature you will ever lay your eyes on!” We both turned our black beaks to Dee, who was peeing all over the floor.
“Flaming Fritos, Dee! No! How in the name of Pete Carroll is your bladder not empty by now? Bad, Dee!”
The raven watched, seemingly undisturbe
d by Dee’s regressed house-training. “The One Who Keeps The Last Human,” the raven said to me. “She is a strong one, your little bird.”
“She can snap a neck like the head of a myrtle spurge.”
“Yes, we’ve seen her.”
“We?” Oh no. If I possessed the privilege of sweating, I would have done a great deal of it. From within a fallen Jenga tower of broken tables and chairs rose a being. Dee gasped. Another raven whipped the air with its wings, eyes on Dee. It had the same hawk-sized body as the raven on the pipes, the same letter-opener bill and ruff of mane feathers. Its wings were the velvet drapes of an old opera house. But this raven was as white as cream. Dee squealed with joy. The ravens of Toksook Bay had become nothing but shadows as they hid from Dee, afraid of the flightless body that had changed the world. Neither of us had ever seen a white raven. Kraai once told me fireside stories about how the white ravens of Vancouver Island loved to communicate with the busy beings of Web, that mysterious and wondrous world below the soil. Some crows believe the white raven is a ghost, a chalk-winged guide along the river of prophecy.
“What do you want from us?” I spat.
“We’ve been summoned,” said the white raven. “All of us.”
“There’s been a lot of fucking summoning, hasn’t there?!”
And then I felt every feather of my body rise. All of us. I hopped in a circle, scanning the bookstore. We were completely surrounded, and I wanted to punch myself in the cloaca for not realizing this would happen. Ravens are criminally cunning. Ravens are blade-beaked mimics. And ravens are also known for something else. They are the eyes in the sky to another.
Many call them The Wolfbirds.
And all around us, in between bookshelves and among the chaos of clutter, were the glowing eyes of wolves.
Erect ears swiveled like searching satellites on fulvous heads, peering from upturned tables. A jet-black wolf—enormous and imposing—stood at the top of the motionless escalator. There were wolves at every exit, on every counter, beside stacks of books—more than I could count.
I looked up at the black raven and unleashed a corvid insult at him that roughly translates as “I hope your anus is set on fire and your wings get caught in a high-powered ceiling fan.” It didn’t seem to faze him, that avian traitor. The white raven landed gently on top of a sign that said “Information” with a giant question mark. Fuck yeah, I had questions, starting with “How does it feel to be a weak-winged cheat? A snail-hearted snitch?”
She didn’t have time to answer me. A body vaulted up the escalator, mouths of the many heads that sprouted from its skin gaping. All its eyes widened, and the heads gyrated. The Changed One had tracked us. It locked all eyes on me. I knew this look. I’d seen it in bars and doctors’ offices, many restaurants and grocery stores, and most especially from Tiffany S. from Tinder.
You do not belong here, it said.
And then my arteries dried up. The creature’s horrible mouths slit into a gesture I knew, a gesture that is not from the animal kingdom.
It was grinning.
A chorus of lupine growls shook the bookstore. The Changed One’s horrible crop of eyes landed on Dee and it let out a predator’s victorious bellow. Then came its vicious scramble, the twitchy scuttle of a tick. It was coming for Dee. I hopped in front of her, puffing out my wings.
“Run, Dee! Run!” I hissed.
Wild as rapids, a pack of wolves lunged for the Changed One’s warped torso. Wolves—bonded by bloodline—sank their canines into too many heads and tore the thing apart. It was a seasoned kill. A choreography of decapitation.
The warrior wolves dispersed again, taking up strategic positions between the bookshelves. I had not yet caught my breath when all the wolves who had snuck up on us like a fanged blizzard turned toward the bookstore’s entrance near the Honey Bear Bakery. Wolves standing in the yawn of glassless doors stepped aside. Four winter-white wolves padded into the bookstore. Their tongues released small saliva drips, breath clouding icily. When my nestling reflected in their shining eyes, they froze. And I can assure you, nothing is more intense than the gaze of a wolf.
So, this is how it would end for us. Not with the horrors of what MoFos had become, but with the wolf superpack that had grown much larger than when we had fought it in Bothell Landing, when we had unleashed a motley crew of mutts to drive the wolves from our territory. And they would remember, these winter-white sisters, once of the Woodland Park Zoo. Now, having dispatched the Changed One that had come for their kill, they would exact revenge on the limp-winged crow and his nestling. Dee was a two-legged warrior, and she may have been able to take on that Changed One, but she was no match for a wolf pack. And this one had a vendetta. It was all my fault.
“You don’t have long,” came a whisper of wet, a voice like the braiding rustle of a creek after rain. Wolves speak in the language of rivers, in fluid riparian sounds that carve out the shape of their thoughts. A white wolf padded forward. Her pack—wolves of silver, brown, black, white—kept their smoldering eyes on her pale glow. Three white sisters padded beside her, her equal in grace and power. White paws dipped into a slippery spill of red. They neared Dee, then stopped, the fur along their spines lifting.
Dee dropped to the ground. She rolled on her back like a schnoodle luxuriating in a putrid duck carcass.
“Dee!” I yelled. “Get up!” She ignored me. I pecked at her arms. She brushed me aside, keeping her eyes on the filthy tiles. I lost my temper then. If we were going to die, I needed it to be dignified. I needed the wolves and their unctuous raven lunatics to know what it was going to cost our world.
“Dee, for fuck’s sake! Get up! Listen to me for once!” I screeched. And then to the ravens and the wolves, “You dipshits, you will answer for this! I am The One Who Keeps! The blood of the last human on earth will be on your paws, and you will answer to Onida and to the Great Sky King!” There is no Sky King, I made that up. I was very distressed.
The inky raven let out a low croaking. “We were summoned here—”
“Oh my god with the fucking summoning! The truth is that you just do whatever these mangy mutts tell you without a thought about the big picture.”
“No, Crow. Open your understanding. We know who you are.”
The white raven ruffled her mane, which was infuriatingly beautiful and stupid. What does a bird need a mane for? Honestly. “You are The One Who Keeps. We were summoned here by her.” She gestured toward the floor. I stared at Dee, who had stopped rolling and was looking at me with that expression again, belly exposed, that desperate longing tugging on her face.
“What do you mean, she summoned you?” I asked, anger rising in my throat.
“She marked the boundaries of the wolf pack. She called them to her.”
I looked at the four white wolves, beautiful as the moon, deadly as its tide. And I remembered that wolves keep other animals out of their territory by marking a chemical fence of urine and scat. Like our mind maps, but less sanitary. And then I thought about how, as we’d run, Dee had squatted and pissed all over the place—and goddammit, summoning them is exactly what she’d done. Dee had been leaving a calling card for a wolf pack I had no idea she’d known was there. She’d been biofencing. How did she know how to delineate territory using urine, or summon wasps, or talk to a tree? All I wanted was to instill a little culture and refinement in her! All I wanted was for her to pick up a book or brush the oversize dust bunny on her noggin or recite a poem or paint her goddamned fingernails and fart discreetly. Dee had called the predators to us. She’d trapped us in a wolf den.
“Goddammit, Dee!” I screeched, stomping in a tight circle, my legs marching in obscenely high steps. “What are we supposed to do now? Beat them to death with The Joy of Cooking?!”
Her eyes lowered, face reddening.
“Bad, Dee! Terrible, Dee!” I issued a violent kick to a crispy copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People.
“Fear,” said the white wolf, a wolf who had been
raised by MoFos. “I smell none of it from her. She is fearless, this night child.”
“Night child?! What does she mean, night child?!” I squawked at Dee. “You’ve been leaving the sanctuary? Sneaking around at night? Dee, no! Danger, Dee! Danger, everywhere!” The feathers on top of my head were puffed like an oversize Russian ushanka, and I was three hops beyond furious but not blind to the body language in the bookstore. The white wolves were curious, tails held high. The other wolves were crouching, light on their feet, their eyes as wide and shiny as parking garage mirrors. The fear came from them. They were frightened of the MoFo in the room. Wolves are moon howlers who live on legend and story. The ones who had never seen a MoFo had no doubt been listening nightly to howls about the boogey monster. And here she was, standing tall, beckoning them to her. What animal has had a more contentious relationship with MoFos than the wolf?
“What does she want from us?” asked another of the white sisters, a front paw lifted.
“Yes,” the ravens croaked in perfect chorus. “What does the last human want?”
I looked at Dee, madder than a pissed-on pigeon. “Well?”
Dee studied the hulking lupine bodies among a bounty of books. And before she could respond, the shelves shuddered with low growls. The wolves bared flashes of white fangs. A hideous yowling shot through the windows, arrowing through our bodies.
One of the white sisters turned her muzzle to me. “They’re here. RUN!”
Ravens, black and white, sliced through the bookstore. “This way! Now!” they called. Before I could process what was happening, a blur of silver fur flashed and blazed around book mountains as the wolves leapt into action. Moon howlers move with the power of water; now I felt a dam burst around me. Dee snatched me and bolted toward the entrance of Third Place Books, guided by the wedged tails of two ravens.
The world bounced up and down. Suddenly the air had a cruel crystal bite and I heard the crunch of thawing snow under speeding mukluks.
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