He crossed his arms. “So you’re going to keep going?”
“You know I am. I’ll go back there a hundred times if I have to.”
I didn’t finish as he started moving down the line of the wall.
“Dax, you know we don’t have a choice,” I said as I followed him. He didn’t acknowledge me or say a word, but he stopped when I grabbed his arm.
Sometimes when he looked at me the way he did now, the air between us seemed to charge. I couldn’t say if it was a good thing or a bad thing, but it was an intense thing. It was like the electric feel of air on a stormy night and you could hear the distant rumble of thunder, and a bolt of lightning would shoot down at any second. Part of me felt so alive, and another part of me wanted to hide from the storm.
“Dax, you know I’m right in doing what I’m doing. How many times are we going to fight about this? What is your problem with this? Is it that you don’t trust me? Or you don’t think I’m capable?”
One of the workers from the wall looked like they were about to walk over, and Dax shot him a glance that had him U-turning it. How did he do that so easily?
“Neither,” he said, seeing the remnants of the face the worker had just seen. Now it made sense.
“Then what is it?” I asked, refusing to U-turn it too.
“My gut tells me there’s something wrong.” He was staring at me as if to dare me to tell him his gut was wrong.
“And my gut is telling me I need to do this, and it’s my gut on the line. You know I can handle this, and you’ll help me do it because we don’t have a choice.” I looked at the wall where we’d stopped and saw that no one had gotten to it yet, a pile of supplies in front of it. “Well? You got some gloves for me or what?”
* * *
I wiped an arm across my brow, knowing I’d probably left a mud streak and not caring as I eyed up the wire I’d just added to the top of the fence, feeling pretty darn proud of how much I’d gotten done so far.
I jumped down and grabbed the canteen of water I’d brought back with me after lunch.
One of the guys who’d been working on the same area with me this morning walked a couple steps over and looked over my work.
“Nice job,” he said, nodding as he looked.
“Thanks.”
I took a swig from my canteen as I caught sight of Dax approaching. He’d been heading over to the southern portion last time I’d seen him.
He stopped beside me and took in our progress. “Looks good.”
“Thanks.” I walked over to a large rock where most of us were resting our canteens so I could get back to it.
“Hang on to that. I need you for another job,” he said.
“Sure.” Canteen in hand, I fell in step beside him. “What is it?”
“I need you to meet someone.”
I looked around the lawn as we got closer to the center of the farm. There wasn’t anyone but regulars floating around, and I’d met all of them. “Who is it? Are they in the house? I need a couple of minutes to clean up.”
“He’s in the forest and he isn’t going to care about a little dirt,” he said.
My pants were more brown than the black they’d been this morning, but I ignored that as a crazy idea took precedence. Who wouldn’t he have just brought here? “Why is he waiting in the forest?”
He stopped about ten feet from the gate of the farm and turned to me. “Because that’s where he’s lived for the last twenty years.”
He continued to walk, and I kept pace as my brain chased its tail like a dog, refusing to grasp such a crazy idea.
We walked off the farm and didn’t stop until we were deep into the woods, where the trees grew so close their roots intertwined and the sky was a puzzle of leaves. I kept wondering who I was going to see as I followed him, but I wasn’t sure why I wasn’t asking. The words wanted to form but the idea seemed so crazy that I had a hard time letting them loose. How could it be? You didn’t introduce a beast.
I’d never met another beast, not officially, like a hey, how are you? But maybe the ones that had sniffed me had considered that an official greeting? I’d read somewhere that animals sniffed their hellos. Maybe I’d been introducing myself to all the beasts I’d met and not even known.
We turned a corner around something that was either a small tree or a very large bush, and my steps stuttered out. It wasn’t a beast. It was a man standing there. Was the beast somewhere else? I scoured the area before my eyes landed back on the man. The stranger was taking me in as intently as I was eyeing him up. Shaggy brown hair, decent enough features, there was nothing that really caught your eye, but something familiar struck me.
“Is that your shirt?” I asked, as one and one were adding up.
“He needed clothes. He doesn’t own any. Hasn’t for a while now.”
“Why does he have no clothes?” It couldn’t be, could it? The last time I’d heard anything about beasts, Dax was the only one who could shift back and forth. How could this be?
Dax looked at me, his eyes knowing. “Now who’s asking questions they know the answers to?”
Dax took a step closer to the man and urged me to follow him. “Come say hello. He needs the practice.”
I took a small step. “Hello?”
“Bart, say hello.”
Bart? The big, bad beast’s name was Bart? Of course, I kept that thought to myself. Wouldn’t want to insult his beastliness or anything and get off on the wrong paw.
Bart’s jaw flexed a couple of times before a scratchy and awkward-sounding “hello” came out. It sounded like two words.
“You going to fill me in?” I asked Dax, keeping my voice calm and even, as if Bart were a toddler who might break into a fit at any moment.
“Bart is a beast.”
I glanced back to Dax. “But he’s human? I thought that couldn’t happen…mostly, anyway.” I kept glancing back over to Bart, expecting fur to sprout and red eyes to glow at any moment.
“First time he’s been human in decades,” Dax said, patting Bart on the back.
“How?” I asked.
Dax didn’t answer right away, and I got the gist that there was a silent communication that was passing between them, but I didn’t read half-beast talk well enough to know what it was. Dax nodded to something deeper into the forest and Bart took off seconds later.
I watched Bart, sure he was about to turn beast, but he was out of sight before it happened.
Dax walked back to me. “It’s hard for him to stay human for too long. He needs to shift back often.”
“How did it happen at all?”
“Remember when I gathered up the herd? The day we went to the Skinners’ fortress? When I’m in beast form, I can communicate with them. It’s not full-fledged talking, but more of a sharing of images and thoughts to a limited degree. I felt a certain inquisitiveness in some of them, as if they were getting a glimpse of a story they used to know and wanted to hear again.
“When you’re in beast form it’s very easy to forget your humanity. It’s not so much that they chose to be a beast. They just forgot there was a choice. So I figured if I sought one out, gave him some reminders, it might work.” He shrugged. “It did. He’s the first.”
“The first what? Beast you changed back?”
“That and the first of our army.” His smile was subtle but strong. “This is how we’re going to win.”
An army of beasts, and not just one for show or a ravaging horde no one could control. A true army. “Will he help us? Can you get more?”
“He will. The Dark Walkers have been hunting them too.”
“How many do you think we can get?”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure if they’ll all be able to change back and forth at will, and if they can, how long they’ll be able to hold it.”
He’d come up with a brilliant plan. I was ready to jump up and down, and yet he stood there reserved. “But if you have them fighting with us, who cares if they can hold human form?”
“Newco’s force is the largest army left in North America. If they come, they’ll send what they think is needed to wipe us out. One of the crucial aspects here is to make sure they underestimate our fighting power. If we can take out Newco’s first attack, break up their numbers, they might not have enough people left for a second wave. That hinges on them not sending their full force the first time.”
“But if this works, it could save us.” And I needed to buy him time to get more beasts, so many that it wouldn’t matter if Newco sent thousands of men.
“Now all we’ve got to do is be able to pass him off as a normal human,” Dax said, looking at where Bart had run off into the forest.
I was going to need to buy him a lot of time.
Chapter 19
Dax stopped just as we entered the gate to the farm. “I won’t be back tonight.”
He didn’t need to tell me where he’d been going. I could guess that now. I just hoped there were enough beasts out there to pull this off.
He also didn’t need to warn me it was going to take all night, because it had been. But it would be nice if he could tell me he wanted to be there.
“What?” he asked.
“I didn’t say anything.”
“No, but you look like you want to.” He was staring at me in a way that made me think he knew what words I’d wanted to say as well.
“Nope.”
“You sure?” he asked.
What was going on here? Did he know I was waiting for him to try and have sex with me? That I was thinking about it right now?
“Maybe if you talk out whatever is on your mind, you’ll feel better,” he added.
Holy shit, as Fudge would say. Was he was holding sex hostage for talk? Had he been toying with me this whole time? Why did we need to talk about it so bad? Why couldn’t we just have it? Well, I wasn’t having any of this. “No. I definitely do not want to talk.”
The gall of him, trying to lure words out for sex. What did he even want to talk about? Why was talking necessary? He obviously thought so, though, because this was his second attempt at it.
I crossed my arms and dug in. Absolutely no talking. That was when I noticed Bookie behind Dax, about a hundred yards away. I watched as Bookie was looking around. The moment no one was watching him, he started waving to me. The motion wasn’t quite frantic, but there was nothing calm about it either.
“Dal?”
Shit. Dax had said something, but damn if I knew what. I looked at his face, wishing I could read minds and not just isolated memories.
“Did you hear me?”
“Of course I did. That sounds good,” I said to Dax, trying to keep my eyes fixed on him, but it was hard, as they were pulled away by more frantic motioning by Bookie. I wanted to hold up a hand and tell him to give me a moment, but this was obviously top-secret stuff.
Eyes narrowed, Dax shook his head. “Go see what Bookie wants. And don’t get into trouble.” He was still shaking his head as he walked away.
He was clearly annoyed with me, but I didn’t have time to worry about it as I beelined it to Bookie.
“Where’ve you been?” Bookie asked as soon as I got to his side.
“Just taking a walk through the—”
“Forget it. Doesn’t matter,” he said, and grabbed my arm so he could pull me with him. “It’s Bird Tuesday.”
“What?”
“Bird. Tuesday. Every first Tuesday in autumn, everyone gets a hen or a rooster.”
We didn’t stop until we were behind the bushes next to the butcher’s cottage.
“What are we—”
He held up a finger in front of his lips as the butcher walked out, grabbed one of the too-trusting hens from the yard, and walked back in. If you were a chicken, nothing good came from going into that house. Didn’t they ever notice their friends never came back? If I were a hen, I’d at least make a run for it, squawk, or put up some kind of fight.
“I still don’t understand this Bird Tuesday thing.”
“It’s a way to thin the herd before winter. Hens stop laying, and we don’t need a lot of roosters. Less feed needed. Come spring, we fatten up the numbers again.”
“But if they give you a free bird, why are we hiding like we’re about to steal one?”
“Because we are. We live in Dax’s house and Fudge gets the birds for us. If we disappear with a bird, it’s going to raise questions. Do you want to tell them what we’re doing?”
He made a good point. I tugged at him a little so his toes weren’t peeping out so much from the bush.
“You think a hen is going to work the same as a person?” I asked.
“I think a hen is all we’ve got, unless you want to find some more people to kill. You’re the one who said you didn’t like doing that, in spite of how it might’ve appeared.”
“I can’t help it if I’m good at it. It’s not like you’ll go kill someone.”
“Then a hen it is.”
“I think we at least go for the rooster.”
When he turned back to me, there was an obvious question in his expression.
“What if it was a boy thing?” I asked.
“Oh, yeah, gotcha.” He pointed his finger at me. “Good call.”
“Where’s the bag? You did bring one, right?” I asked, imagining running through the farm with a stolen dead rooster flopping around in my grasp.
He pulled a brown sack from his back pocket and held it up.
I reached for it but he pulled it back.
“Give me the bag.”
“I can do it.”
“I can get in there quicker and you know it.” If I couldn’t catch a dead rooster at least better than Bookie, who supposedly had no magic, I should just hang it up altogether.
“Fine.” He held the bag out to me, but he wasn’t happy about it.
We watched though the open door as the butcher killed another bird.
“Get that one, since it’ll be the freshest,” he said.
“But they’ve all got broken necks. Do you think that’s a problem?”
“Dead is dead.”
I set my aim for the top rooster and waited for the butcher to leave the house to go collect his next victim. He wiped his hands on his apron. The second he walked out the door, I zoomed into action and was beside the pile of birds.
I tried to finagle the thing into the bag without touching it, but it was taking longer than the minute I had. Finally, I grabbed the thing by its feet and stuffed it in, trying to not do any more damage than had already been done to it. After all, there might be a point of no return, even with magic.
What if we needed to do it a few times? I reached out and grabbed a few more, just in case, not as picky this time about the sex.
Birds in hand, neither of us wasted any time heading to the shed that held the bikes.
“How many did you get?” he said, pulling open the bag I was holding.
“We might need practice birds.”
“Good point.
“I think we should go to the same place I buried you,” I said. “If we’re going to do this then I think we do it as close to the way it happened the first time. Then scatter some other ones around.”
“We won’t make it back by dinner if we do that. Where’s Dax?” he asked.
After what happened last time Bookie and I went out on our own, I wasn’t sure how well our latest plan would be received. Then there was the bag of birds we’d have to explain. But we’d hit the jackpot as far as timing. “Dax just left, and he’s going to be gone for a bit.”
* * *
We didn’t get to the site until the middle of the night. It was better that way. Harder to see the grave that Bookie had been buried in.
“What did you do when you got here?” he asked.
Oh shit. Wasn’t sure how he was going to take this, as he seemed to be somewhat sensitive over the whole death conversation. I mean, I’d been emotionally distressed. Hope he hadn’t expected some sort of serv
ice? I coughed some dust out of my throat and then answered, “Um, well, I kinda just dug a hole.”
“That’s it?”
I knew he was going to be mad about that. “I cried the whole time, though.”
He took a moment before he came to his verdict. “Okay. That’s enough, I guess.” Bookie grabbed the small shovel we’d brought off the bike and handed it to me. “I’d help you, but I think it should be you.”
I took the shovel, thinking the same thing.
I walked over to where Bookie’s grave had been filled in. Rocky must’ve sent someone out here at some point to do it. As weird as it was, I stuck the shovel dead center.
“In my exact spot?”
I looked over my shoulder at Bookie’s shocked face. “You just said yourself it should be the same as I did it for you.”
“I know, but I just figured… I don’t know.”
“Bookie, spit it out.”
“That’s my grave,” he said, pointing. “Couldn’t you bury it a few feet over or something? It just feels wrong.”
I looked down at the dirt and then the rest of the area. “I get what you’re saying, but we need to make sure this has every chance of working. I need to know if it was a fluke, you, something I did, or what.”
He shoved both hands in his pockets.
“Bookie?”
“Okay. Fine. Take my grave for the rooster.”
I dug out a chunk of earth and then another one, afraid to look over at Bookie just in case he started carrying on about it being his spot.
I placed down the shovel, grabbed the first bird I touched, which I thought was a rooster, and tossed it in the hole. I covered it up as quickly as I could because the whole thing was freaking me out a bit. I stood, looking down at the small grave.
“What else did you do?”
“That’s it.”
He sighed kind of loudly but didn’t say anything else.
“Come on, let’s go bury some more birds.”
Chapter 20
The bike was still warm in the shed the next day when Dax strode through the gate. I nudged Bookie in the arm with my elbow. My hand was full with a chicken leg, a pre-dinner snack that was much needed after a breakfast and lunch of jerky.
The Magic Page 13