Harvey shook her head. Crows, owls, a pigeon in the corner—these were not animals who coexisted. They couldn’t. She knew that. So how were they, here? Anne murmured to the crow, her red-and-grey hair glinting under the domed safe-lights. Her voice sounded like nothing Harvey had ever heard before.
The woman looked up and caught her staring. The return glance was more of a glare. After a moment, Anne slipped back into the hall and closed the door. The bedroom on the other side of the hall was empty and pristine except for a daybed and a desk. She gestured to it.
“That’ll be yours. Don’t touch the door to the aviary. They aren’t fond of strangers,” she said.
“All right,” Harvey agreed.
“I want to talk to you about your owl,” she said.
The tone was less than welcoming. Harvey wondered why anyone would ever come to this woman for advice. She was too sharp, too rude, too unreadable. Maybe her usual “students” liked the mysterious and aloof bullshit, but Harvey was losing her sanity by inches, and she needed real concrete help. The seething frustration that sprung up in her chest soothed her with its familiar tension.
“I can go,” she said. “I’ll find someone else.”
“That owl isn’t a bird,” Anne said. She gestured for Harvey to sit on the couch again. She did, mollified. “Real birds can’t do what you’re saying it’s done. They don’t care. They want to eat, mate, and have comfortable places to rest. They don’t follow people. Not even pet birds do that.”
“So am I hallucinating?” she asked.
“Has anyone else seen it?” Anne countered.
“Yes,” she said.
“Then no,” she answered with an edge. “Who did you piss off recently? Who passed on still angry at you?”
The question stopped her breath in her throat like a stone. She coughed, again and again, then cleared her throat with a rasping noise.
“You’re saying it’s a ghost?”
“You don’t believe in the spirit, do you,” Anne said.
“No,” she answered. “Electrical impulses, yes. Souls, no.”
“Then explain your owl,” she said.
Harvey wound her fingers together and squeezed until her knuckles turned white and sparked pain up her arms. She knew the brown of its feathers, the dappled golden brown of honey, of a girl’s hair wrapped in her fists and streaked with bright, wet color.
“What does it want?” she asked.
“To hazard a guess—you,” Anne said.
Harvey jerked, looking up. Anne was already turning away to clear the mugs from the table. She bit back the urge to say no shit and took a calming breath. The blizzard outside was howling now, sheets of snow pounding down onto the ground. It wasn’t letting up, and she was trapped.
“I knew that,” she said. “What can I do to make it go away?”
“Remember what you did to make it angry, and make up for that.”
She snapped her mouth shut and ground her teeth. “I can’t talk to a bird.”
“Have you tried?” she asked.
The conversation ended there because the older woman left the room, wandering down the hall. Harvey heard a door open and close. She wondered if Anne had gone to her aviary to be with her impossible menagerie. She clenched and unclenched her fists.
***
The house creaked with the pressure of the storm. Harvey sat on the couch until the fire went out, fiddling with her cell phone and drawing in her notebook, nonsense swirls. Anne Caulfield was a liar and a terrible hostess. She hadn’t come back to talk, hadn’t offered any food or even shown her where the bathroom was, though she’d found it on her own. She heard a door slam once, maybe to the yard and woods out back.
The dread-spiders had come back with relatives and associates. Her whole body was one knot, waiting for something to happen, but nothing quite did. The stone in her throat had migrated to her belly. Someone you’ve wronged, her mind kept repeating sibilantly. Then came the flash of memory, the brown and gold and red, a wet nasal cry echoing in her ears and chaotic struggling flesh under her fingers, curved to grip and squeeze.
The house was wrong. It was all wrong. The isolation, the storm, the birds cooing and rustling down the hall as if gossiping; all of the pressures lumped into one thing: trap. She had been trapped. The certainty of it locked her to the couch, her eyes longingly tracing the vague shapes of the outside in the dark. There must be a foot of snow. She would die of hypothermia out there.
True dark came like a blanket draped over the world. The door in the kitchen banged again. Harvey twisted to see Anne come inside, brushing snow from her clothes and thumping around in huge rubber snow boots.
The woman’s face was closed off, her red hair a frizzy damp halo. There was something fearsome in her eyes. Harvey reigned in her legs’ urge to make for the front door and run until she couldn’t run anymore. Her instincts would not stop shrieking at her to leave, to run, to hide. There would be no help from this quarter.
“It’s late,” Anne said. “I’m going to bed. They should plow the road in the morning and you’ll be able to leave.”
Harvey only nodded. The woman walked down the hall into the dark.
After a long, silent moment, Harvey made her way stiffly to the guest bedroom and closed the door, locking it for good measure. The sheets she slid between fully clothed were cold as ice and just as crisp, starched to sharpness. She kept her eyes open. The aviary across the hall made a thousand tiny inescapable sounds that grated on her ears. A sort of madness settled on her. Anne was up to something. She knew it. The nature-loving bitch was plotting, scheming. But sitting up in bed, her hands fisted in the covers , the notion seemed insane. She lay back down and tried to settle. She was just stressed and angry and ready to lash out—those were not new things. Would she really attack a woman in her own home, her own bed, for a bad attitude? She buried her face in the cover and sighed.
There were footsteps in the hallway. She froze. They meandered past her door without stopping and her muscles slowly unkinked. She heard other sounds, scuffling and clinking like a refrigerator raid, late-night. That relaxed her. A door closed.
Against the odds, she had begun to drift to sleep when a strange noise pulled her up from her half-dreams. The lock to her door clicked open visibly in the twilight of the moon streaming through the windows and she sat up in a rush. The door swung open. The hall was dark but she saw the yellow eyes and let out a low moan, scrabbling off the bed and pressing her back to the wall.
The owl hooted at her and ruffled its wings from its perch on Anne Caulfield’s arm. Her up-tilted face was that of a vengeful deity. Harvey fumbled for anything she could throw on the desk and came up empty, her hands bare and useless. Her heart raced to a thundering beat. An icy sweat prickled down her back.
“I suspected as much,” the woman said.
The owl on her arm hooted again, blinking. Its heart-shaped face wasn’t able to smile, but Harvey knew it was mocking her. It had to be. It shifted its monstrous talons carefully on Anne’s arm.
“I wonder—” Anne said. “Did you come here because you knew it was time to pay the piper, or because you honestly didn’t believe I would be able to talk to this beautiful girl and know what you did?”
“What?” Harvey sputtered through her fear.
“I didn’t think you were that good a person,” Anne sneered.
Words were shriveled hard things in Harvey’s mouth, ashen in flavor. She had no excuses because there was a terrible knowledge in her captors’ eyes, yellow and human brown.
“Leah,” she pleaded.
The owl flew at her, talons first; she raised her hands in front of her face and screamed. The knife-edged claws ripped along her forearms, biting easily through cloth and flesh. Heavy wings buffeted her head as the owl screeched, its talons losing purchase as she collapsed to the floor. The sound of it rang in her ears. The owl landed next to her with a heavy thud, its head bobbing in anger, a low hiss coming from its break. It blin
ked rapidly. Harvey rolled onto her stomach and moved to stagger to her feet, panting, but her blood-wet hands slipped on the floor and she landed in a heap.
“Fair trade,” Anne said.
Harvey caught a last glimpse of her lounging in the doorway with a smile on her face. Then, the owl was her whole vision, and the girl that was the owl with her bruised throat and the water of the lake still streaming from her hair. Harvey didn’t say she was sorry. Feathers slid through her fingers like liquid as she pushed against the owl that was everywhere, the owl that was the world, the owl that was sinking now inside her chest like a second heart.
The morning was bright and shatteringly white with its coating of snow. Anne walked the bandaged, wobbly young woman to the door. Her eyes were golden-brown where they had been hazel. Her mouth formed soft cooing answers as easily as it did words. The owl-girl who had once been Harvey smiled beatifically at her and flung herself into a clumsy hug.
“You’ll learn to wear the body soon,” Anne murmured into the shell of her ear.
“Fair’s fair,” the owl-girl who was Leah murmured back. “How did you learn to speak to birds?”
“I know how to listen,” she answered.
“Harvey was a bad listener,” she said.
“I noticed.”
“Did you know when she came, what she’d done to me?” the owl-girl asked.
“No,” she said. “But I knew when I saw you in the trees. You’re not my first hungry ghost.”
“You’re a nice woman,” the new Leah said.
She fidgeted, smoothing fingers down her aching arms and playing with the thick bandages. This bare-fleshed body and its attendant pains—it had been so long it was nearly a new sensation. A thick silence settled between them. She looked up from under her eyelids, head bobbing low and birdlike for a brief moment.
“You can stay awhile if you need to adjust,” Anne offered.
“All right,” she said. Her smile was tentative and fresh. “Until we can clear her car—my car—out.”
“I’ll make tea.”
The owl-girl tested her human hands by taking Anne’s arm and drawing her into another embrace. The flannel was luxuriously soft under fingertips that felt as sensitive as a baby’s. She let out a humming sound and the older woman hugged her back, the press of a hand on the back of her neck a warm caress. Her found-life was full to bursting with possibilities.
Though Smoke Shall Hide the Sun, by Brit Mandelo
“So,” said the man lounging on a folding chair in the center of the room. “What would make a lady like yourself want to join the army?”
“I’m not a lady,” I said.
Shadows cast by moonlight and dull fluorescents filled the empty warehouse, slithering over the cracked concrete floor. I'd driven for three hours straight after finishing my last job to make it to the nearest neutral meeting place. It was a half-occupied steel town that hadn't been absorbed into an Other territory and had no government ties, either. Another thirty minutes in either direction put us squarely over the boundaries of one territory or another, and they didn't appreciate having a hunter on their turf unless they'd hired me themselves.
The echoing space all around us made our meeting seem isolated, though I had no doubt there were cameras in convenient places and support soldiers ready to burst inside. Neutral ground or not, they'd arrived first, and it wouldn’t do to have a monster eat their cohort if things became unruly in our first face-to-face.
“Fine, what would make a vampire like yourself want to join the army—better?” He quirked a small, irritated smile. “I try to be polite and not call everybody out by species.”
“First, I was under the impression that this wasn’t technically the army. Second, you must have listened to my phone interviews,” I said. “You know why I’m willing to compete for a military contract.”
“Why don't you remind me?” he suggested. His expression seemed arrogant, but he kept his eyes safely on my chin.
I stalked closer. He leaned back in his chair so that when I stopped in front of him, our boots nearly touching, he still had some distance. Up close, I could see that his short-cropped brown hair held the faintest hint of curl. The thin line of his pressed-together lips detracted from his face but I was sure that when he relaxed he would be handsome. He was younger than I'd anticipated; not a wrinkle anywhere on his cheeks or around his eyes. If not for the status separating us and the fact that I wanted this job, he would have made a good snack.
Thinking of a meal made me notice my sluggish pulse, limping along at a slow, uneven rhythm. I needed to feed myself soon. Were I sated, I might not have noticed the rich smell of his flesh under the hint of cigarette smoke and aftershave.
“You contacted me first, and now you’re playing games?” I asked.
“I didn't set this meeting up, the big guys did. I don't know much about you.“ He lifted his hand between us to offer it to me, posture stiff. The slouch had disappeared. “My name’s Cal. You must be Hilde.”
I clasped his hand. When he loosened his grip as if to let go I held on and pressed my fingertips to his wrist, feeling his quickening pulse. He lifted his eyes to me, finally, and they held the heat of anger. I smiled wide enough to flash fang. He was a soldier and likely also a competent hunter, but I was treating him like food. The insult telegraphed where he stood with me, for now—a rude little upstart.
“It’s not just you who wants to vet your potential team-mate personally,” I said.
“You don’t trust I can keep up our end of the bargain?”
I locked my hand around his arm. He yanked against my grip. Tension ran up to his chest, bunching the muscles hidden under his fatigues, but his strength alone wasn’t enough to free him.
“The original offer implied that you were Other. I haven’t ever had a human partner. They can’t keep up,” I said.
“Oh, yeah?” he said, a dark excitement flashing across his face. “Well, none of them can keep up with me, either.”
I had no chance to ask what he meant. Flames flared to life around our entwined hands. I shrieked in surprise and instinctive, uncontrollable terror, jerking away so hard I stumbled back several steps. My skin was unmarked but I'd felt the heat. He kept the ring of fire braceleting his own wrist, his palm open and stare haughty. As he stood, the dancing heat grew, spread, until it stormed in a nimbus of blues and oranges around his body, though it never touched him.
“Think you can get through this, vampire?” he asked. The inferno flickered and spun, arcing off of his body in coils of flame that disappeared in the air. “I can melt bullets. One body is really not a challenge in comparison.”
I inhaled a measured breath to calm myself. Breathing wasn't a necessity unless I wanted to speak, but it was comforting. “Can you use it at a distance?”
Behind me, a fluorescent bulb shattered with a crash. I looked over my shoulder. Another cloud of nearly white flame wreathed one of the light fixtures hanging from the bare metal bones of the ceiling for a brief second, though it disappeared as quickly as it had leapt to life. He cut his power and the show ceased abruptly, leaving him standing pale and un-singed with a faint sheen of sweat on his brow. The chair behind him, on the other hand, was scorched.
”Quite the show,“ I said.
“So, you still think I can’t keep up with you?” he asked.
”Your point is proven,“ I said as I sketched a half-sarcastic bow in his direction. His lips twitched as if repressing a smile and his stance relaxed ever so slightly. Minuscule reactions, but he hadn't quite hidden them. He was pleased that he'd impressed me. “If we're going to continue, I'd like to hear in your words what this contract has to offer me. The recruiter was specific that they wanted an Other. Why? It's—unorthodox.”
Truthfully the curiosity was devouring me. The government and Others alike only hired hunters of the supernatural on a contract-to-contract basis, when there was unrest or dangerous elements that required our expertise. Long-term employment was unh
eard of. Ideally, we lived on neutral ground; we paid tithe to no Other leaders and didn't interact with the territories except on a professional basis, even if they tried to wrangle us under their power on occasion. All I'd had to do to become a hunter was escape my old territory and declare myself ready for business—it was as simple, and yet as difficult, as breaking all my political and personal ties.
“It was somebody else's idea. Higher up than I have clearance for. I got the news through my, uh, commanding officer that they had a job for me.“ Those words fit in his mouth like marbles. He paused, a shadow of a grimace flickering over his face. I didn't comment. ”Basically, the way I see it, we’re building a team that can go into the Other territories that need… restructuring.“
”Don't you think that's their business?“ I asked.
”No, I mean the ones that are getting so out of control they're starting to draw the mundanes' attention, and the territory leaders are part of the problem, not fixing it. Hunters can only handle the kills, so someone else needs to tackle the politics that come after. Why not us? You must be pretty well-adjusted if you got this interview, and I'd like to think I am.”
“What you mean is that you’ve encountered too many upheavals an execution can’t fix,” I said. Perhaps that should have been a sign that they needed to keep their noses out of supernatural business, but they’d never learn. “And you can't ask a glorified assassin to stay on hand and rule afterwards. Even if they agreed, most of them wouldn't know how to do it.“
That had never been a problem before the humans started policing us better than we did ourselves, but they had a vested interest in creating the occasional coup. An Other would never hire a hunter to take out the leader of a rival territory—they would do it themselves to claim the land. It came down to the fact that, while both sides cared most about secrecy, the mundanes seemed to be a bit more concerned with crime. After all, victims of supernatural violence so often tended to be human, and a few human deaths here or there weren't a huge concern to an Other community—but they were to the official authorities.
Anthology of Speculative Fiction, Volume Two Page 472