Bird Magics

by JC Andrijeski

  The sounds grew louder and louder still, until the first wave of sounds began to rock the ground, trembling it so violently that Fark flapped his wings to reach back into the sky. The rumbling didn’t stop, so he left the place above the rivers of cement and metal cars and returned to the circle of white buildings and the green courtyard behind the tall cement-block fence.

  Fark looked for his mate.

  He could not find her.

  The grayish snow continued to fall. It had fallen for days.

  Fark did not feel well. Every day, it seemed, Fark felt worse.

  Jaak had flown north. He heard from the hawks and the starlings that the snow was less up north, and his mate wished to leave, too. But Fark’s mate laid her eggs early that year, and they could not leave them. They took turns foraging in the hard ground, digging up the corpses of beetles and worms. Bringing back snakes and rodents when they found them, even the occasional squirrel, if small enough.

  Fark did not like squirrel, but the little ones must eat.

  Fark watched the grayish snow fall, covering the last of the grass in the courtyard by the white, square buildings near blackened, dead-looking trees. The path was gray, too. The crumbling red brick branch above the circle of buildings no longer belched steam from early in the morning until late at night.

  The courtyard was quiet. For weeks no, no one had come.

  Most of the monkeys had moved on. Before that, the monkeys had been in a panic. For weeks following those bright lights, there had been explosions down below, monkeys waving metal in their paws, cawing loudly, smoke exploding from between their fingers. They would push and pull other monkeys around. Before he left, Jaak showed Fark a field where many of the monkeys lay, end upon end, smelling of death.

  Fark had chosen not to return to that field.

  Still, he could not avoid watching the monkeys run and scamper and caw below. He saw them wave those exploding gray metal tubes, saw them fall down, covered in red and smelling of monkey shit and blood.

  Now, only one remained in the white, square buildings facing the fenced courtyard. Fark watched it through the window, for hours sometimes, hoping it might help him to understand. He saw it, a female, hunched in a chair, wrapped in one of those materials so good for nests.

  He chittered less now, and found himself cawing for no reason.

  His mate was sick.

  He sat on a high branch in one of the blackened trees, watching the sky turn overhead, the clouds moving in a pattern of gray, morphing shapes and silence. He didn’t notice the other crow approach until it was nearly upon him.

  When it half-crashed into him as it landed, he could hardly avoid seeing it.

  Cawing madly, Fark rose into the air to escape the other bird, hopping up to a higher branch, beating his long, black wings.

  Then he saw the blueish spot on the bird’s beak, and realized he knew it.

  The bird’s feathers looked mangy. The glassy look in its eyes had changed, leaving them fatigued, rather than tired.

  The berries were gone.

  “Morning, Fark,” Ulak said.

  “Morning,” Fark said in response.

  For a moment, the two of them only stood there, looking down through the soot-blackened branches, shaking their heads slightly at the smoky aroma coming from the ground. A sick, itchy feeling came with it, mixed with a tiredness that Fark tried to ignore.

  “How’s the mate?” he asked politely.

  Ulak’s black eye dimmed.

  Fark clacked softly in sympathy.

  “This is my fault,” Ulak said.

  Fark turned his head, tilting it so he could fix his black eye on that of the other crow. “Your fault?” he said. “You made the white lights?” He chortled a little, fluttering his wings to show the ridiculousness of this. “No. No, no.”

  “The curse,” Ulak said miserably. “I used bird magics.”

  “Bird magics...” Fark said, clacking louder and shaking his head.

  “You remember!” Ulak said. “I wanted the monkeys to go away. I thought there’d be more trees. I liked the quiet...”

  “Bird magics...” Fark mumbled again, ruffling his feathers.

  “There’s always a price,” Ulak muttered. “I should have known. I saw it before...with Trakk, remember?”

  “Price?” Fark said, tilting his head to stare at him once more.

  Ulak clacked miserably in agreement. “You saw. Last time.”

  Fark stood on the perch. He glanced through the glass wall, saw the monkey coughing into a white square piece of cloth. When they took the cloth away, it was covered in bright red blood. Fark shook his head in disgust, although he was too far away to smell it.

  “It was too steep,” he told Ulak. “Your price.”

  He tried to make it a joke, but couldn’t quite do it.

  Ulak didn’t answer, bobbing his head a little as he jumped from one foot to the other nervously, pecking the wood between his toes. Bald patches stood out in his feathers, enough that Fark could tell it must be difficult for him to fly. He would be joining his mate soon, he thought, in the Greater Sky Above. Fark felt the weight on him, too, the loss of his mate.

  He decided not to try any more jokes.

  The crows didn’t move for a long time. They watched the courtyard as the gray snow continued to drift down from a seething sky. Neither made a sound, not even a clacking of beaks, for what felt like a long time.

  Being a crow, Fark knew how unusual that was.

  Continue reading with ALLIE’S WAR, AN URBAN FANTASY: EPISODE 1

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  THE ALLIE’S WAR SERIES is a dark, unique and gritty urban fantasy romance involving a young woman grappling with her role in bringing about the end of one world and the start of a new one. Follow Allie Taylor and her antihero partner in crime, Dehgoies Revik, as they fight terrifying enemies and one another in a passionate story spanning centuries, and filled unpredictable twists.

  THE ALIEN APOCALYPSE SERIES is a dystopian new adult romance about a tough girl named Jet Tetsuo who grew up on Earth following an alien invasion. Forced into living among her conquerors, she must learn to navigate a treacherous world full of enemies who pose as friends, even as she becomes their most famous fighter in the Rings, their modern day version of the coliseum where she must fight just to survive.

  More Books by JC Andrijeski

  “Seeking Truth Through Made-Up Worlds”

  ~ Also from White Sun Press ~

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  ALLIE’S WAR, AN URBAN FANTASY: EPISODE 1

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  www.jcandrijeski.com

  Prologue

  MISTAKE

  “Put it down!” A voice yelled. “On the ground! Right now!”

  I blinked in confusion, staring at the bottle in my hand. The jagged end of broken glass looked like something out of a cartoon, or an old gangster movie.

  Blood ran down the inside of my arm, not all of it mine. My muscles locked, bunched up with adrenaline.

  Someone must have called the police. The young guy in front of me didn’t have his gun out, but his hand held the holster menacingly, and his uniform brought a flush of panic, starting somewhere in my lower belly.

  The other fire that had burned there—irrationally bright only seconds before—abruptly sobered. Without taking so much as a breath, I dropped the broken bottle, holding up my hands in a gesture of surrender.

  I’ve never been a tough chick. I’d never done any
thing remotely like this before...but I knew enough to know that my combat boots, smudged make-up and punky, bleached-calico hair weren’t winning me any points with the men in blue. I looked around at the swath of cleared space around the bar.

  “Hands up!” the cop yelled.

  “They’re up!” I said.

  He walked up, grabbing one of my wrists. He spun me around so I faced the bar. I felt cool metal hit my wrist as my chest thudded into the lacquered wood.

  “You have any weapons?” the young policeman asked. He cuffed me, then patted me down. “Don’t fucking move!” he yelled, when I turned to look at him.

  “No weapons!” I was shouting I realized, scared out of my wits.

  All the while, my mind churned useless facts. People got shot doing stupid shit like this. More cops got shot in domestic disputes than during any other kind of call, which likely explained why the young cop’s hands shook as he cuffed me.

  My eyes swept the oddly bright space until they lit on the person who had inspired all this drama, and that flame of irrational feeling ripped once more through my chest cavity, making it difficult to breathe, to think straight.

  Jaden, my now ex-boyfriend, stood like a store mannequin, his eyes as wide as saucers in a pale face. He gripped the upper arm of his date, a voluptuous girl in a red vinyl dress, as if to steady himself. I looked at her, and the rage came back, intense enough to scare me. Breathing harder, I leaned against the wood, closing my eyes, trying to crush my own chest.

  Feeling ripped through my center, animal-like—almost painful.

  In my defense, I’d only heard about them that night, and the fact that their affair started three months earlier, while I’d been blissfully happy, thinking Jaden and I were mutually in love. According to his bass player, she’d started hanging out with them after shows, eventually winning him over with flattery, pouty lips and enormous tits.

  She was babbling something to him and her friends now, half-hysterical, her arm bleeding profusely from where I’d slashed at her with the bottle, her red-painted lips another dark wound on her face.

  I stared at them both, thinking, this can’t be real. It can’t be. This isn’t me.

  But it was.

  1

  MR. MONOCHROME

  So yeah, I got arrested that September, and it pretty much changed everything.

  Forever and ever...in my life, at least.

  Why did it change everything, you might be wondering?

  Well, not for the reasons you’re probably thinking.

  Okay, yeah, it was really humiliating. I got thrown in jail for two nights. The cops treated me like some kind of PCP-smoking weirdo and wouldn’t let me call my mom for twenty-four hours. My mom flipped out. My brother Jon really flipped out. My friends all flipped out. I got a psych eval, as mandated by the state of California for all new violent offenders with no previous criminal records. I got a blood test...again. I had to pee in a jar.

  Then, after all of that, I had to do community service. I couldn’t leave town. Worse, I had to check in with the authorities, and yes, wear a shiny new GPS bracelet that was even more awkward to explain when I finally got back to my job at Lucky Cat diner.

  Who thankfully, by some miracle, hadn’t fired me.

  None of that was the real issue, either, though.

  The real problem, as they explained to me much, much later in time, was that I made myself visible. That little freak-out of mine with Jaden and the broken bottle and the bimbo band groupie was like sending up a great, big, noisy flare, one that got all the wrong people looking in my direction.

  Why is that, you might be wondering?

  Well, it’s simple. See, what I did was only crazy if you’re human.

  If you’re not human, I was later to discover, it’s pretty much run-of-the-mill normal.

  I tried not to fidget as I stared around the courthouse room.

  I should be used to being in this place. I wasn’t. Nor did I really want to be.

  I hoped I wouldn’t be called last. That desk jockey I spoke to promised me he’d try to get me put at the top of the list, but I was pretty sure he’d just been angling for my number. I still needed to stop by my mom's place before work, and the clock was ticking.

  Just as I was starting to wonder if I should call my manager, Tom, and give him a head’s up that I’d be late again, the court clerk appeared in the narrow doorway on the other side of the low wall, wearing a portable monitor. He cleared his throat, and the sound echoed in the featureless room, a bland, institutional-looking space clearly designed to make us feel like rats in a cage, or maybe just numbers instead of names. The four off-white walls were broken only in a few places, by that pony wall that served almost like a balcony, and a one-way window above the two sets of double-doors at the back of the room.

  A row of scuffed up wooden benches held most of us waiting on the clerk, with a few extra people perched on cheap-looking folding chairs that stood against the walls to the right and the left of me. The off-white linoleum had stains I didn’t want to know about.

  I watched as the court clerk unfurled the monitor from around his wrist and spread it out on the podium-like table in front of him. He squinted at it for a few seconds, then drew on it with a finger, probably going through the list of our names.

  Meaning, the ex-convicts’ names. Meaning people like me.

  The thought still boggled my mind.

  The clerk looked up at all of us a few seconds later. He squinted at us, too.

  I wondered if he needed eye surgery, or if it was some kind of facial tic.

  Finally, he motioned at me.

  “Verify identification,” he said, indicating the small podium that stood across from him.

  I walked up to that same podium, feeling suddenly like I should have dressed better for this. It was just a monthly check-in to make sure I hadn’t run off, or found some way to put my GPS tracker on my dog. I’d done six or seven of these already, but this time, I was nervous for some reason. I’d never seen this guy before, so maybe that was it. The last guy was more laid back.

  He was also quicker about it, jamming through the list without a lot of bureaucratic grandstanding. When this new guy made another pointed gesture towards the microphone, I cleared my throat.

  “Alyson May Taylor,” I said.

  "You go by Alyson?"

  I cleared my throat again. "Allie."

  “Place of residence?”

  “2119 Fillmore Street, San Francisco.”

  “Race cat?”

  I held up my arm, showing him the “H” tattoo on my inner arm.

  “Speak into the microphone, please.”

  “Human,” I said.

  “Birth parents?”

  I hesitated. “Unknown.”

  The man’s eyebrows went up, changing the shape of his thick face. The elongated skin pushed up the short bangs framing his square cheeks, confirming he’d had some kind of cosmetic surgery to tighten his skin. It struck me that he looked a bit like a cartoon pig.

  “I’m adopted,” I clarified.

  “No registered birth family?” the man said. He leaned closer, staring at me with an open, and somewhat morbid-seeming curiosity.

  “No, sir. I was found.”

  “Found?”

  “Yes, sir. Under a bridge.” A little flustered, I amended, “...Overpass. Registered as a ward of the state, January 13, 1984. Status transferred August 19, 1984. Adopted. Carl and Mia Taylor. Birth parents unknown.” I hesitated after my usual litany, feeling every eye in the room on me now. “My blood’s been verified. About a hundred times now, sir...”

  The clerk continued to frown at me.

  I glanced around at all the other house-arrest criminals, like me, who sat on the scuffed benches or on metal chairs in the white, featureless room. Some of them were probably coming down off more deadly forms of domestic violence charges, statutory rape, petty larceny, drug dealing, assault, identity theft...God knew what else.

  Bu
t I’m the freak, because of something I had no control over. Something that happened before I’d worn diapers. Well, that and the occasional homicidal freakout regarding cheating boyfriends...apparently that was a thing of mine now, too.

  The thought made me feel tired.

  My grandmother warned me once that nothing in life is ever secure. No matter how stable, boring or predictable the different components of your life may seem...everything can be gone with a single bad decision. In my case, it was a very bad decision.

  One I still couldn't quite believe I'd made.

  Now, not only had I lost my boyfriend of six years, in about the most permanent way I could have managed it, I'd made myself into a violent criminal.

  I wasn't the only one in shock at what I'd done. My brother still couldn't believe it. He didn't come out and say anything––well, at least not now that he’d finished giving me the third degree and going through my apartment looking for drugs––but I could still see it in his face. He just couldn't believe I'd done something that, well...crazy.

  My mom, as per usual, was pretty much in denial. She fluctuated between blaming the alcohol (I hadn't been drunk) and saying everyone just kind of lost their shit now and then, that I should just learn from it and not do it again.

  Yeah, great advice, mom.

  The thing is, I’d been pretty sure me and Jaden would get married at some point, have kids, do the whole domestic thing...so when I found out I’d been replaced by the newer, sluttier model, I didn’t take it very well.

  I kind of went nuts, I guess.

  Looking back on it now, it felt almost like I’d become a different person. A person I didn't like very much, truthfully.

  Now I had a tracker on me. One of those GPS numbers I had to wear on my wrist, and occasionally explain to customers at the diner where I worked. According to the State of California, I wasn’t going anywhere for awhile.