I caught a glimpse behind us. The ravens levitated like magical things, watching us get smaller. They dove back into the bookstore, tethered by an ancient bond with the wolves.
Dee didn’t look back, couldn’t afford to see what might, at any second, burst from dark windows.
Chapter 23
S.T.
Lake Forest Park, Washington, USA
Dee veered off Bothell Way and along the tree-flanked Burke-Gilman Trail. She ran until her lungs rattled. Dee dropped underneath the dark bodies of young poplars and Douglas firs. Something was haunting about their sepia color, as if they’d been trapped in a Victorian photograph by black magic. I’d read about these trees in Nargatha’s copy of the Seattle Times. Wrapped in the cloak of night, a MoFo had snuck toward the gentle giants. The MoFo drilled holes into bark skin, pouring herbicide into the trees’ wounds. Murder by poison. The motive? The MoFo wanted a better view of Lake Washington. These trees were replacements for the slain who once watched over the lake like old woodland wizards, granting the wishes of the living with every exhale. The horror of it added to my swelling fury, the poison in my own old wounds, and the pain of the past. I was pretty fucking livid as I hopped from Dee’s reddened fingers, steam absconding from my nostrils. Still panting in cold clouds, she pointed up at a crispy brown Douglas fir.
“No! Look at me! Look at me, Dee!” I yelled at her. “Focus!”
Dee kept her eyes up at the crowns, let out a scratchy sound. Crow for “friend.”
“Listen to me! Listen, Dee! You never listen!” I was fuming, a Shit Turd flambé. “You’re too busy launching us right into danger’s mouth! Chasing after caribou! Peeing for predators! Sneaking off into the night! Recklessly alerting Changed Ones to our whereabouts at every turn when you know damn well how to be stealthy! Stop trying to be something you’re not! If you don’t listen to me, how the fuck can I keep you alive?” I hopped in front of Dee’s crouched body and puffed my head feathers so she knew I meant business. A small figure fluttered from the sepia Douglas needles. Pressa. She had followed us. Where were Migisi and the rest of the help I needed? I didn’t have time to acknowledge Pressa as she touched down on a mound of snow. I was consumed.
Pressa’s voice was soft, the fluttering of a flag. “S.T., I—”
“Wait, Pressa,” I snapped, turning to Dee. For Dee’s entire life, everything I’d ever done was to keep her alive; why couldn’t she fucking see that? Animalistic anger inside me had incubated long enough. I had encased it in a hard sweep of shell, but it wouldn’t hold any longer. It was about to hatch—teeth, talons, and all.
“Dee!” I screeched. “Enough is enough!” Dee frowned. Pressa darted her head, trying to make sense of the scene.
“This is not a playground! You cannot tear around calling on predators and dispatching things like some sort of monster!”
“Assholes!” Dee excitedly referred to the ravens. “Woolwes!” she said, appealing to me with MoFo language, her words like the babbling banter of a chicken.
“What do you know about wolves, Dee? Nothing. You know nothing at all!” As my nestling grew, the wolf packs around Toksook Bay had all been warned. “Come near her and she’ll skin you alive!” I’d told the most hunted animal in American history. They never came anywhere near our cabin. It became a refuge for caribou.
Dee snatched up a hubcap, freeing a dusting of snow. She placed it on top of her head, bared all her teeth, and raised her eyebrows comically—a pretty convincing impression of either Orange or Jim Carrey.
“Put that down! There’s fucking nothing funny about this!” I snatched a small stone peeking out from the snow and spat it on the ground for emphasis.
Dee dropped the hubcap and let out a small rattle, an appeal to Pressa, who opened her beak. I cut her off—
“No, Dee! Look at me! Only me! It’s time you fucking start listening to me! I’ve had enough! I’m trying to keep you alive and at every single turn you behave badly! Destruction! Monkeying around! Peeing all over the place! Calling on predators! YOU ARE NOT AND WILL NEVER BE AN ANIMAL. YOU ARE A MOFO AND YOU BETTER START ACTING LIKE IT! YOU’RE GOING TO GET SOMEONE KILLED AGAIN!” The next words tumbled from my throat, free from their tinny cage, years of pent-up emotion bouncing off the bark of inchoate trees.
“You’re a fucking disappointment.”
Dee flinched, darting her head, listening to Aura in case I’d attracted attention. And this made me even angrier, that she still wasn’t listening, that she moved her head like a bird, as if her eyes were perched on the sides of her head. She had to understand what was at stake here. That acting on animal instincts would get her killed. If I had broken Dennis’s habits, then he would never have chased after a UPS truck and my heart would still be in one piece.
Dee kept her shining eyes on Pressa, her brow stitched tight. Her cheeks blooming crocosmia red. She clenched her jaw, her nostrils flaring like wings of a feeding butterfly. Her lower lip trembled. She padded away from me to sulk under a young poplar tree. She parted a frosting of snow with her fingers, unveiling a monarch of moss. She made the heartbreaking cries of burrowing owlets. She called for Kuupa and Oomingmak in owl and ox. She was the last of a species who needed to learn how to be human before she made one more mukluk print in the snow.
A great force struck my side. I slammed against the buttressing roots of a silent Douglas fir. I opened my eyes. Pressa was on top of me, a flurry of feathers, screeching as her feet raked at my chest.
“Pressa?” I screamed my surprise. “Ouch!”
Her assault was a never-ending flurry.
“Hulk Hogan!”1 I squawked. I shielded myself with my wings and struggled to get away, and just when I thought I’d have to burrow underground to escape her, she stopped. She stood over me, gular bouncing like a frantic fruit fly.
“Are you done?” she yelled. “Look at me!”
“I’m looking at you, Pressa!”
She walloped me with her wing. Crows are capable of great violence.
“What’s wrong with you! You’ve lost your damn mind!” I screeched.
Pressa snatched two foot-fulls of snow, launched into the air above me, and pelted me with them.
“What is your problem?!” I shrieked, stealing a glance at Dee, who had blocked out the bickering crows, focusing on the spongy fleece of moss.
“What is my problem?” she asked, from above. “My problem?”
“Why are you assaulting me?”
“‘What’s my problem,’ he says! I don’t have a problem, Shit Turd; you have a problem—and until you get your beak out of the suet feeder, so to speak, you don’t get to leave this area.”
“What in the Frosted Flakes are you talking about?”
She did another very rude and nasal impersonation of me. I hoped it was very inaccurate. “‘What’s my problem!’ Wake up! Why do you think I’m here?”
“I don’t—”
“You have no clue! You didn’t even acknowledge me because you are completely blind. I came here to save you from yourself! I flew after you because, though Kraai might grant your every wish and enable your flighty ideas, I’m not going to stand by while you make another deadly mistake. Marching off by yourself to hide from the entire beautiful blue! No feathered may return to the egg, S.T.! You can’t hide like Big Jim with pizza and internment—”
“Internet—”
“Beak down and listen! The code of murder, S.T.! We are stronger together! Think back on everything that’s happened to you, how you’ve stayed alive! You had help. We all worked together. You don’t stand a chance racing out into the jaws of the jungle with no one. You’re hollering out for help on Aura and what you’ve been completely oblivious to is that the trees are all dead! Look at them! Look around you! Look!”
She was right. They were silent. Evergreen needles everbrown. Sepia bodies, hollow husks. Their throats ripped out. The bark beetle creatures—The Masticators—were ravaging our gentle giants. Dee had known before I had, her head h
ung low in respect for a cemetery—a forest of the dead.
“Trees have been talking to you, S.T., helping you, singing to you, and you’ve listened when it suited you! TREES! And where were you when they were screaming? Everyone is trying to help you, S.T., and here you are, running away from us all.” Her whole body fluffed and puffed until she was an airborne sea urchin. “That MoFo is the last of her kind and you’re so busy yelling at her to be something she’s not that you broke her.” Pressa landed. She jumped in place, her wings batting the air like tennis rackets. Hopping mad. And suddenly, as if her anger was a spell, hot air rising, she lifted again, suspended above me.
“Everything Dee does is for you! She tries so hard to gain your approval and you yell at her, pick on her, and tell her she’s a disappointment? She cannot change who she is, S.T.! How do you not get this? You, a bird who only ever wanted to be a MoFo, can’t see that she’s in your reversed predicament, that all she wants to be is a crow! All her movements and sounds and the way she looks at you—my god, S.T., the way she looks at you! Your hollow little MoFo brain is missing all of it! Why do you think Dee is sitting over there, lost and alone? Because you crushed her. I just watched you crush your own egg. She’s trying so hard not to be herself, and that means you have clipped your nestling’s wings. Now Dee doesn’t know how to be in the world, has no one to identify with, and the being she loves more than life itself is disgusted with what she has become. What a lonely, lonely life. Congratulations, S.T., you’ve raised a caged bird.”
“I’ve never been disgusted with Dee! I just want her to rise to her full potential! I love her!”
“When have you told her that?”
That shut me up. My heart sank, a stone.
Big Jim told me he loved me every time he drank whiskey, which was very, very often. He never once tried to make me into something I wasn’t. I remembered him swanning around A Very Taki Tiki Bar, his crow on his shoulder, glacial-blue eyes alight with pride. How he’d answer the endless questions MoFos asked about me in a tuba voice. He was proud of me when he showed off the trick where I’d shell a peanut and offer it to a lady MoFo, or when I’d swear like a substitute teacher, but he was just as proud of me when I ate worms in the grass. Sometimes, when his sweat-filled nights diluted into foggy mornings, I’d find him in our dew-beaded yard with the early birds, his big palms filled with wiggly pink spaghetti strands he’d collected for me himself.
“She never listens to me!” I whined to Pressa.
“She’s your nestling! My life for an earthworm, S.T., I have eleven sons and they never listen to a single squawk I have to say. Get over yourself. And the eagle who has given you everything insisted I come after—”
“What’s wrong with Migisi?” My rib cage constricted. “Where is she?”
Pressa walloped me with a rock the shape of Texas. “Migisi—you whipworm—is losing her mind because she can’t keep up with you; she’s tired because she’s about to lay eggs, but you haven’t noticed because you’re stuck in Shit Turd Kingdom, stuck in a MoFo mind where everything is about the past and the future. Wake up, Shit Turd!”
A mind stuck in the past or the future. It was very MoFo, I thought.
“Eggs! When?” I screeched, remembering how tired Migisi had been lately and when we’d met up with her on a sliver of Edmonds beach after our great Echo journey. I had never asked her if she was okay. I’d just expected her to ferry me all over the Pacific Northwest willy-nilly, to be our eyes in the sky. To just up and be an adventure eagle. “Is she alright? Is she safe?!”
“Are any of us?! You have a lot of making up to do, S.T. You’re not the only one who has problems.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, deflating. “Dee is my—”
“NO!” she screamed. “Dee is not yours! What MoFo reasoning to think you own her! Dee is a wild thing, and once a wild thing is owned, its spirit is no longer free, no longer true to itself. When you’re owned, you’re stripped of your autonomy, your unique, original essence. She’s perfect just as she is, and she doesn’t belong to anyone but herself—say that she’s yours one more time and I swear on my salmonberry stash, I’ll—”
“You’re right. You’re right!” I bobbed my head at her. “You’re right about it all.”
Pressa’s voice calmed, each word a wispy cloud. “It is not your job to change her. It is your job to love her.”
I looked over at Dee, sifting through ivory powder to free the green beneath. She was humming gently, a song especially for the ravaged tree above her. A poem popped into my head.
He who binds himself to a joy
Does the winged life destroy
He who kisses the joy as it flies
Lives in eternity’s sunrise
I’d never understood it before, but ol’ Billy Blake was right.
“She’s not mine, and I haven’t done a good job of showing her how special she is. That she’s the reason my heart beats.”
Pressa touched back down to the ground. Her wings tucked back into her sides. Dee was still lost to the world of bryophytes—moss, hornworts, and liverworts. Crows squabbled all the time, and I suppose since I was constantly picking on Dee, it was background noise to her.
“Imagine the pain and loneliness she feels. We’ve seen our kind die, we’ve suffered together. But always together. None of us have been The Last, The Only.” We looked at Dee, curled under a tree trunk, humming her sad and gentle song. “You taught me a lot about MoFos, S.T., and I’m as enamored as you are, but as the wise poet once said, ‘Oh, you’re a loaded gun, oh, there’s nowhere to run.’”
“Bon Jovi,” I said, inspired.
“And that’s why I’m here, S.T. You are that gun and you cannot run away and hide.”
She was so right. How had I been so wrong? I looked back over to Dee. She was gone.
“Dee?” I called.
Pressa and I hopped over to where she had sat, curled up and disgraced. Mukluk prints painted a portrait of movement away from the trees. We followed them until they disappeared, suddenly swallowed up by ash gray of pavement and road. An abandoned street. The street’s silence hammered inside my head. Anger and shame were kicked aside by terror.
“Dee?” I called out. “Dee?”
“Dee?” Pressa called out.
“Pressa, what have I done?”
“Keep looking, S.T., I’ll search from the sky!” She shot into the air and looped above, scanning for the last MoFo on earth. I was sick with worry and the lung-scorching fumes of regret. Where would she go? She had left the trees, walking toward the road, toward tired buildings and urban decay—so unlike Dee. I read signs for a yoga studio, a coffee shop, a place that sold discounted tires. And the next storefront sign I saw shook my bones.
“Pressa!” I yelled. “Down here!”
She dropped from the sky. We stood in front of a dilapidated shop, its sign showcasing the most terrifying words I’d seen in an age: Phones & More. I already knew—a Corvus knowing—Dee had gone inside. I’d forced her to go against her better nature. We raced into the store and froze.
The shop’s guts had been ravaged by hundreds of twisted hands. Blood-smeared surfaces, smashed desks, floors tattooed with claw marks. Dee stood in the middle of a mountain of broken plastic. On the wall behind her were the remains of a poster. It was faded, but there was no mistaking its advertisement—MoFo lady laughing, a cell phone pressed tightly to her head. My gular fluttered.
Dee had a cell phone in her hand.
I don’t know how she’d found it among this rubble, but she had. Fuck it. She had. My neck feathers spiked.
Its screen was intact.
Pressa was suddenly by my side. Would it turn on after all this time? Did it have to turn on for Dee to be snatched by its spell? I had no answers. Just everything to lose. Dee had never been near one of these before. And now she held a bomb, a gun pointed at her face, an infected needle whose virus hungered for her species. And it was all my fault. Dee held up the cell phone to show m
e, her eyes seeking approval.
“Don’t. Move.” I told her. Pressa’s breathing hitched. Dee’s eyes flicked to the cell phone in her hand.
“No!” I said. “Look at me, Dee! Look at S.T.!”
Dee frowned in confusion. Pressa let out warning caws. Danger, she told Dee in five piercing notes.
“Dee is MoFo!” Dee said, lifting the cell phone up into the air, her plastic smile mimicking the MoFo lady on the poster.
“Put it down, Dee. This is not who you are. Walk out of here with us. Slowly, Dee. Very slowly. Don’t touch; never touch. Danger.”
I started to back up gingerly, willing her to follow. Dee looked at me long and hard, suspicion shining in her eyes. Slowly, she lowered the old cell phone in her hand. She chucked it onto a tangled nest of phone chargers.
“This way, Dee. Very, very carefully. Come out here. Follow S.T.”
She padded gently from Phones & More. I had so much to say, so much relief billowing from me, I could barely stand. But before I got the chance to utter a caw, something else happened.
The screech was an amplified raking of nails. Dee pivoted. Pressa’s head bobbed. We waited, sure we’d misheard. But there it was again, a sour scream from the forest. Dee and I shared a sharp glance. Dee snatched me from the ground and into a coop of fingers. We knew this call. It was woven carefully into the strings of our hearts.
“Wait! Hold on!” Pressa’s protests were dampened by Doppler as we sped across the road.
Dee ran, and we channeled our inner orcas. We found ourselves in a clearing, ringed by a necklace of trees. We listened for the siren screech. The distress call of an owl. Where was she? Dee called out to her, hooting the “Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you?” calls of a barred owl.
“Friend!” she assured the mewling night hunter in its own tongue. And then silence. Dee tried once more, soft as silk. And the screech came back, arrowing through the trees. I searched every snowy branch. It came again, Dee flinching at the distress of a beloved bird.
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