Believing in Blue

by Maggie Morton

  Wren’s mood fell a little at the thought. Done with both her food and the book, she paid and got up, making sure to leave a good tip and thank the waitress as she left. The sun might have still been out when she headed back down the street, but Wren’s mood was starting to cloud over.

  Near the end of the street, she spotted a house she hadn’t noticed there before. An older, redheaded woman in a long crimson dress was sitting outside the small, one-story house smoking a dark-brown cigarette, and she narrowed her eyes at Wren as she began to walk past. “Hey, girlie, you look like you’d benefit from having your tea leaves read. I’m having a good day, so I’ll read them for you, for no charge, if you’ll just follow me inside.” The woman rose from the chair, dropping her cigarette and grinding it out with a gray boot. As Wren made eye contact with the mysterious-looking female, she felt almost as if she were being pulled toward the woman and her offer of a free reading.

  “I guess I could come inside,” Wren said, beginning to head toward the house’s front door.

  “Wonderful! Follow me, girlie, and watch your step.” The woman went up to the doorway and then turned back for a moment. “The hallway’s uneven, you see. Don’t want to trip and hurt yourself.”

  Wren followed her, the woman’s slow gait and swishing skirts moving in a hypnotic way as she led Wren down the house’s long entryway. The hallway ended at a small door, and the doorknob looked to Wren as if it were coated with rust. But that might have just been a trick of the low light and lack of windows. The woman turned the knob and opened the door, and its creak sounded vaguely familiar, almost like the cawing of a crow.

  Or a raven.

  Wren shook her head at the thought and, instead, began to examine the room. It had three round windows, but they were all quite dirty, and so the space wasn’t much brighter than the hallway had been. She saw a lumpy couch in one corner and a crooked, darkly hued painting of a castle that hung a few feet above it. In the middle of the room sat two metal chairs and a cloth-covered table, which held a black crystal ball, along with a steaming teapot and two mugs. Wren could smell the tea from there—it was the only appealing thing in the entire room, its scent floral and rich, like nestling your nose within a fresh, full-bloomed rose.

  “Have a seat, please, and I hope the mess doesn’t bother you. I’m always trying to keep up with it, yet it never lets me catch up.” Wren couldn’t see any mess, as the room didn’t hold anything besides the couch and the table and chairs, but she didn’t mention this to the psychic. There was also what might have been a mirror in the far corner, but if it was, its surface was tilted toward the wall, and Wren didn’t want to annoy the woman by asking her about it. Besides, what did it matter whether it was a mirror or not?

  She sat down on the closest chair to the door, and the woman moved the other until it was only a few inches away from Wren’s, her movements graceful as she slid it into place and then sat down. She lifted the teapot and poured a small serving into each of their cups, the tea a rich, ruddy brown as it flowed from the spout. Wren lifted the cup to her lips, blowing on it softly, then took a small swallow. She’d been hoping that its taste would match its scent, but the tea was rather bitter, more like a black tea that had been forgotten about for twenty minutes too long.

  “Sorry about its taste,” the woman said, but she didn’t drink anything from the cup she had poured herself. “I like my tea strong, and bitter tea is better for readings. More tea leaves, you see.”

  “Ah.” Wren felt a subtle tension tightening her shoulders as she took her second sip, and it only grew with each mouthful of the overly strong brew. The woman had poured so little tea into her cup that after about a minute, she was done, and she placed the almost-empty cup back on the table. The pull that had led her to enter this woman’s house almost seemed like it was reversing itself, now pulling her back toward the outdoors, back toward the brightness of the sunny day. But Wren wanted to have her fortune read, even if it was just going to be a lie. She wasn’t fanciful enough to believe in things like tea leaves telling your future, even if she now believed in winged people and magic. And since she now believed in those things, did that mean that fortunetelling was possible as well?

  “So, let’s see…let’s see what’s in your future,” the woman said, interrupting Wren’s thoughts. She grabbed Wren’s cup off the table and held it close to her face, squinting at its contents. “I see…I see a young woman in your future, more beautiful than you’ve ever seen. And…I see red…red…red!” The woman flung back her head, and her irises spun upward, and now Wren could see that her whites were filled with spiderweb-thin veins that matched her repeated word. “Blue feathers, all falling, falling, falling down, and you will have to choose, between woman and man, between true and false, between the wrong and the right. Choose Red! You must choose Red!”

  But Wren heard a voice in her head then, a voice that drowned out the last of the woman’s words, telling her, Run, Wren, run! Instead of staying in her chair another second, she heeded the voice, because she could feel through and through that she wasn’t meant to be there, and that it wasn’t safe for her to stay another second.

  Wren’s chair fell to the floor behind her with a clatter as she jumped up, dashing to the room’s door and slamming it open. She heard fast footsteps following her down the hall and through the cottage’s front door, but she didn’t look back, or slow down, until she was about half a block from the house. Then she paused to catch her breath, and she heard a voice behind her call out, “Wait, Wren, I haven’t told you the most important part! Wait!”

  But she didn’t wait. She ran for as long as her breath allowed, not stopping until she’d left the woman and her home far behind. She realized only when she had stopped running, right outside a used-book store, that somehow, the creepy fortuneteller had known her first name.

  Chapter Ten

  Because bookstores always made Wren feel safe, she opened the large front door and went inside. In the back of her head she also thought she didn’t want that woman, whoever she was, knowing where she lived.

  Unless the woman already did.

  But the comforting scent of shelf after shelf of used books calmed Wren quickly, and she lost herself in the store, leaving all thoughts of anything other than the beckoning of the many rows and uneven towers of books back at the building’s front door. Her house might have been what she thought of as “home,” but books had long been her true home, and this bookstore held more comfort than the house she lived in could ever provide.

  Wren walked down the rows of novels, seeing a few favorites here and there, and wandered down another few rows—memoir, history, and self-help—until she came across a section on birds. One particular book caught her eye: Ravens in Winter by Bernd Heinrich. Without even glancing inside the book, she decided to buy it. It was only once she was handing her cash to the balding man at the register that she decided to give the book to Sia. Hopefully it would come across as a joke, but deep down, Wren knew this gift she had chosen for her teacher meant something more to her than that.

  She wandered around the area surrounding the bookstore for another hour or so, before deciding that she’d have to go home eventually, considering that she didn’t want to end up sleeping on the street. She would have loved to spend the night in that wonderful bookstore, but she figured the owner might have disagreed with her about it being a good idea. After a moment of hesitation in front of it, she followed the street until she reached her own neighborhood, and with one final glance over her shoulder to make sure no redheaded soothsayers were lurking behind her, she went down her street and up her front steps.

  Her mom was sleeping on the couch in front of the TV, a glass with what looked like diluted blood-orange soda on the floor near her dangling arm. Wren moved it to the table next to the couch, making sure to put a coaster down first, and took the stairs much slower than she had that morning. Her nerves were acting up again, but after a few minutes of pacing and glancing out her bedroom windo
w’s curtains, she decided that she was being silly, and the woman couldn’t possibly have followed her all the way there.

  At least, she sure hoped not.

  The book she’d purchased didn’t contain anything about blue or red ravens, or a city named Azyr, but as Wren read the first few chapters, she learned many things about this world’s much more ordinary ravens. Not too ordinary, though, as they seemed to be far more intelligent than she ever would have guessed.

  Wren put down the book after about an hour of reading, because thoughts of the future had started to draw her attention away from all the interesting facts about ravens. But one thought in particular never seemed to go away fully: would she ever get to return to her home world? Then came another penetrating thought, right on the coattails of all her other worries.

  How was she going to get her mom…her stepmom…how was she going to get Denise out to the clearing, so she could take her through the portal with her? There was no way she would come along if Wren just asked; Denise barely left the house anymore, and she obviously wouldn’t be up for a stroll in the woods in the middle of the night. Her mom tended to pass out around ten or eleven most evenings. With that thought, Wren began to form a plan.

  What if…what if she turned up the heat in the living room that night, maybe set it for eighty, or eighty-five? It would probably be a warm night again, so the combination of the indoor heat with the already warm outdoors might make her mom woozy enough to get her out to the clearing. The few times her mom had been awake until midnight, she’d been pretty out of it, sloppy and slurring and more awkward than ever. So maybe, just maybe, Wren could get her to the woods and to her secret spot under these conditions. It was better than nothing, and in fact, she decided, it just might work. For the first time in a while, Wren paid herself a compliment, proud of herself for coming up with such a good plan in such a short period of time.

  But then, just like a hungry, circling shark, the first worry came back to Wren. She went downstairs after deciding to brew some chamomile tea, because as this worry swam closer and closer, its sharp teeth looked as though they wouldn’t let go willingly.

  While the tea steeped, Wren ran over the same thoughts again and again. She didn’t want to leave everyone but her mom behind, even if “everyone” only consisted of Nicole and one other person, her aunt Mary from her stepmom’s side. By the time she’d finished her tea, drinking it before the water had much of a chance to cool, she had managed to reach two conclusions.

  First, she would have to ask Sia about this: would she ever be able to come back? And she could take care of the second with a phone call to her aunt. She dialed the familiar number and smiled when Mary answered after only two rings.

  “Hello? That you, sweetie?”

  “If by ‘sweetie’ you mean Wren, yeah. Hi, Mary!”

  “Hi, Wren. It’s great to hear from you. How was graduation? So sorry I couldn’t make it, but my back is only just recovering from that slipped disc two weeks back.”

  “I know, and I’m really glad you’re recovering so soon.” Wren tapped her foot as she waited to see if her aunt would notice her failure to answer Mary’s question.

  She was in luck. “Me, too, Wren, you betcha. So, what’s up?”

  “I was hoping I could come by for a visit, maybe tomorrow, if you’re free? I have some really important stuff to tell you, about my dad.” The words were out before Wren could stop them, but she realized it was okay and that Mary deserved to know she’d be leaving town.

  “Wow, Wren. Does that mean you’ve finally heard from your long-lost pop?” Her aunt sounded surprised, perhaps even startled. Wren couldn’t blame her. She’d been shocked to hear from her dad, too, although Wren’s surprise came with a lot more knowledge than she was willing to share with Mary, even as close as she and her aunt were.

  “Yeah. I heard from Torien a few days ago.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned. You simply must come over, in that case. I’ll make lunch. Just bring yourself and whatever you can tell me about this sudden reappearance of your father. I can’t wait to see you, and I can hardly wait to hear what you have to say about your dad, too. When’s good for you?”

  “Noon tomorrow? Would that work?”

  “I think so. Okay, Wren. I’ll see you then. Ciao!”

  Wren hung up the phone, her head full of an intense brew of swirling, disparate emotions. She felt excited about seeing her aunt and about seeing Sia again that night; worried about getting her mom to the clearing; and concerned whether she’d ever set foot on Earth again, or ever see Nicole, or Mary, even once, after she had left with Sia. Finally, she found herself thinking one of her most common questions. Would she even be able to learn how to fly? She had only two nights left to learn, after all, and then it was either fly or fall (presumably, to her death) once she reached the Winged’s world.

  Her poor head could hardly contain all these various thoughts, and she was starting to get a bit of a headache. So she went with what she thought was the wisest plan possible and walked upstairs to take a nap.

  Chapter Eleven

  The moon was even fuller that night, and it was the warmest night yet that month, so Wren had foregone her usual cover-up over her wing-shirt, risking someone seeing her chopped-up top. They would probably think it was just some weird teenage fashion attempt, not a clothing alteration made out of sheer necessity.

  “Wren!” Sia called out when she entered the clearing. Her teacher was sitting cross-legged or, more accurately, flying cross-legged, because she was a good three feet off the ground. “I think tonight is the night, Wren, I just know it. You ready to take on that big bad sky, do some dips and dives, some loop-de-loops? You ready to show gravity who’s boss?”

  “I…I guess.” Wren found she smiled far more frequently when she was around Sia, and she was smiling even now after seeing Sia for only a very short time.

  It was also only a very short time until the portal to Azyr would be opened, and so Wren tried harder tonight than she had on any previous night. This time it was three hours before she gave up, and Sia looked almost as exhausted as Wren felt.

  They’d even tried some visualization. “See yourself in the sky, Wren. You’re weightless, only your strong wings keeping you in the air, and you’re way up, so high, miles upon miles above the ground.”

  “That’s…that’s kind of scaring me, Sia,” Wren had told her.

  Back in the present, Sia was clearly doing her best to reassure a crestfallen Wren. “Well, you obviously tried really hard. I think tomorrow night will definitely be the night.” Sia didn’t have to add the words, “because it has to be.” That fact was just as obvious left unspoken as if it hadn’t been. “Why don’t you sit down? Maybe something’s bothering you.” Sia went over to the rock and sat down, patting the space beside her. “It kind of seems…well, I may be wrong, but it kind of seems like you’re only partially here, especially when you’re trying to fly. Maybe there’s something about what’s in the back…or front…of your mind that’s keeping you on the ground.”

  “I’m too tired to try anymore tonight, anyway.” Wren sat down next to Sia, their bodies only inches apart. She wanted, so badly, to place her hand on Sia’s thigh, to kiss Sia. She also wanted to leave the clearing. Anything was better than telling this young woman with the kind smile on her face the truth.

  “Hey, I won’t judge what you tell me, I swear. I just want to get you into the sky, where you belong.”

  “I…I’ve never told anyone this before, you should know.” Wren paused, and then she decided it was time. It was time to tell someone, and despite the short time she’d known Sia, she trusted her, more than she’d trusted anyone she’d ever known. “My stepdad, he’s a really bad person. When my mom…when Denise was abandoned by my real dad, Torien, she fell apart. She loved him, deeply, strongly, and so he left an unfillable hole in her, and that lasted for years. Finally, I talked her into moving on, when I was only twelve, mind you. And so she did, around the time
I turned thirteen, with Tim. He seemed nice enough at first, really generous, warm, sweet, and he showered my mom with presents, me as well.”

  Wren took in the gentle look on Sia’s face as she spoke, and she knew then that she’d made the right decision. So she continued. “About a year later, late one night while I was studying, they had a huge fight. Their bedroom was too far down the hallway for me to make out what was being yelled back and forth, but I could tell my mom Denise was really holding her own. The next day, Tim was gone, and my mom told me he wasn’t coming back.

  “But that wound up being a huge lie, because after a month, my mom went out to dinner with him. Apparently, something he told her, or maybe a few somethings, struck the right note with her, because after that dinner, he convinced my mom to quit her job, and we moved in with him into his huge, fancy house.

  “At first…at first, everything was fine. He was back to his usual generous habits and was openly affectionate toward Denise. But then, after a few months, the fighting started. Only, this time, my mom didn’t yell back. One night, I came downstairs for dinner, but instead of it being fixed, Mom was almost passed out on the couch, the drunkest I’d ever seen anyone, and she begged me to make it myself, because Tim would be home soon, and he would be furious if it wasn’t on the table.

  “It was then that I had to take over everything my mom had done in the past. Cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping a lot of the time. You better believe it was challenging getting the groceries home with no car and no bicycle, as Torien left right when he was in the middle of teaching me, and Denise never had the time to finish what he’d left unfinished.

  “After that night, my mom was drunk every night. Some were worse than others, usually when there had been a lot of muffled yelling and screaming coming down the hallway to my room. I was still holding out hope that Torien would swoop down and rescue us, but that letter, it took way, way too long to get here. I feel…I feel broken, from the way Tim treated my mom.”