by Annie Bellet
“What happened to his twin?” I asked after a moment, when it seemed she wasn’t going to continue on her own.
“She wasn’t Crow. She was exiled.” Pearl kept her eyes down, not meeting mine.
“Not Afraid was Crow?” I asked, thinking of Carlos telling me that he was sure the man who had captured them was not a shifter.
“Yes, but Buttercup was not Crow. She wasn’t even shifter, but one of the rare normal human births. She was exiled, sent away to live with missionaries as we usually did then with those who were not People. But Sky Heart wouldn’t tell Not Afraid where he had sent his twin, and he wouldn’t let Not Afraid leave to find her. They were very angry with each other. Not Afraid seemed insane with rage. They fought and it shook the forest. Sky Heart and Shishishiel had no choice but to kill him.”
She looked up then, but her eyes stared past me, right into her memories. I realized I had no idea how old my mother was. Older than I’d thought. I wondered what I would remember in a century or three, what events would stick and what would fade into fog and be lost to me forever.
Buck up, kid, I told myself. I doubt Samir will let you live that long.
I closed my eyes and sank lower in the tub. At least I had some information. Carlos had said it was a man and not a shifter. Maybe it was a descendant of the twin. If she had harbored a grudge for her whole life and had children, it was possible she could have passed that grudge on to them and one grandchild or great grandchild had come to collect.
Which didn’t explain the spirit, except that the grandchild or whatever was clearly possessed by it. Or working with it. Either way was scary enough, given what the spirit had been able to accomplish through the intermediary.
I must have drifted off. The bath water grew tepid and when I opened my eyes, my mother was gone. I had wanted to ask her more about my birth father, but the moment seemed to have slipped away.
I managed to pull on clothes, wrap a towel around my head, and get as far as the uncomfortable couch. This time it was Em who appeared, holding out a knit blanket.
“Mom said you would want to sleep, if the bath didn’t drown you.”
“I’m sure those were her exact words,” I said and was rewarded with a sheepish smile.
I sprawled onto the couch and crashed hard.
It was dark when I awoke to the smell of coffee and pancakes. Though it was after midnight, Jasper and Pearl invited me to stay and eat something since they had leftovers, but I wanted to go check on Carlos and Alek. Okay, I’ll admit, I wanted to get out of that house before any more memories stormed in and gave me unwanted feels. After the day I’d had, I wasn’t up to sitting down and having family dinner.
“I don’t suppose there is cell phone reception out here?” I asked them before I stepped out the door. I hadn’t emailed or texted Harper like I said I would and I knew she’d be annoyed and worried by now.
“No,” Jasper said. “Sorry. No cell, no internet. We live our own lives up here.”
I managed to swallow about fifty snide comments I could think of in response to that and stepped out the door.
It was a warm night with a light breeze. The big house was all dark and I figured Sky Heart was probably still sulking in the trees. Or standing in a dark room watching his little cult empire crumble from behind tinted glass.
The couch may have felt like it was covered in hide and stuffed with rocks, but sleep had done wonders for my body. I pulled up a thread of magic, just to test how it would feel. No headache, that was good. No talisman. That was bad. It was harder to focus without it and I knew I’d be limited in the kinds of spells I could do without my D20. Maybe it was a crutch, but I missed it. Still, the power was there when I reached for it, so maybe I didn’t need the crutch.
Which didn’t mean I wasn’t going to go get it back as soon as it was daylight.
A faint glow out in the trees to the west caught my eye as I walked across the gravel circle toward Alek’s trailer. It was pale and flickering blue, not a light like would come from one of the cabins or trailers in the camp. I remembered the boundary stone from the morning and thought that might be about where it was placed.
Mentally berating myself as the stupid horror movie victim who goes off unarmed into the words to investigate the weird thing instead of ignoring it and heading toward people and safety, I changed course and walked toward the flickering light. Horror movie victims aren’t generally nearly immortal with the ability to cast Fireball. So, you know, I had that going for me.
The boundary stone wasn’t the thing glowing. The light flickered just beyond it, hovering like a will-o-the-wisp among the dark sword ferns and spiky broken branches. I stopped at the stone and peered into the dark.
“Not Afraid?” I called out softly. “Talk to me.” Worth a shot and somewhat better than calling out the old cliché “who’s there!” right before I get eaten by something big and ugly.
“She is not Crow, but she is here,” a young male voice responded, the words faint. I realized he was speaking in the Siouan language that the Apsaalooké, the Native American Crow tribe, used. It was the language some of the elders at Three Feathers had spoken when I was little and didn’t want me to understand what they were saying. Their efforts had been useless, since even as a small child I had understood languages I shouldn’t have known. It was yet another thing that had set me apart.
“I am not a crow person,” I called out in the Crow tongue. “Talk to me, tell me what you want, why you are doing this. Is it for Buttercup?” I added the last part as a guess, hoping to get a reaction.
Not Afraid seemed to materialize from the darkness, only feet away from me. He was very young, not much older than Emerald, and I wondered why Carlos hadn’t mentioned that. Perhaps he hadn’t seen him clearly. Not Afraid’s face was gaunt, his hair ragged and shorn close to the scalp. He wore leather clothing that had seen better days and looked like something out of a Cowboys versus Indians movie. His eyes glowed faintly in the dark with a blue-white sheen over their dark irises and it sent a shiver down my spine. The spirit was definitely a part of him, either by possession or by him working some spell to control it.
I wondered if he even knew who was controlling whom anymore.
“Tell me,” I said again. “Please.” Knowing what he wanted might give me an idea of what kind of spirit it was, which would lead, I hoped, to a way to get rid of it. A young, angry boy we could handle. It was the supernatural that was fucking everything up.
“You want the truth?” he asked, his head cocking to the side like a bird’s. “Come with me.”
Oh, sure. That was going to happen.
“You hit me in the head,” I pointed out. “Why should I trust you?”
“You were sent away?” he asked. “When you did not become Crow.”
It was almost more a statement than a question. It worried me but I shoved away the nagging feeling that something was weird about that. Everything was weird, what was one more bit to chew over later going to hurt?
“Yes,” I said. “I was sent away, told to never come back. Kicked out of my own home. They said I was dead to them.” I let some of my own anger and resentment show. Building rapport. Goren and Eames would be proud.
“You were lucky,” he said. “I will show you the truth. Follow.”
“Give me back my necklace,” I said.
Without hesitation, he pulled the chain out from under his tunic and tossed my talisman to me. It glittered in the odd flickering blue light and I managed to catch it. Damn but it felt good to have the heavy silver D20 settle into place against my skin. I summoned my magic for a second, letting it flow through me and my talisman. Everything felt normal.
“Now you follow,” he said.
I cast a glance back toward the cabins and Alek’s trailer. I couldn’t see it from here, the trees and darkness enfolding me, but I knew what Alek would say about taking this kind of risk. In my mind I saw Redtail’s body, his chest ripped open, his ribs protruding. If taking this
risk meant stopping that from happening again, it was worth it. No one else was going to die.
Except maybe Not Afraid.
I turned back to him, keeping hold of a thread of my magic so I had it easily available, and nodded for him to lead the way. Then I stepped beyond the boundary stone.
Moving through woods in daylight was enough of a pain in the ass. Walking through them at night was just plain crazy. I’d been working on some spells to augment myself during my training with Alek and my gaming buddies. One of those spells was darkvision. It didn’t work quite the way I had hoped, at least not yet, and it wasn’t easy to maintain, but I didn’t want to cast a light until we were further away from the camp.
Ideally, the spell would have enabled me to see like it was daylight, only in black and white. The reality was more like an odd amber glow limning objects near me, making solid things shadowed and dark while their edges shimmered. It was good enough for me to follow Not Afraid without falling on my face or running into trees, but not much use beyond that. I couldn’t move quickly, but Not Afraid patiently waited every time I stumbled or had to disentangle myself from a blackberry vine or dead branch.
He moved confidently through the woods, not making a sound. I couldn’t tell if that was because he was just that good or if something seriously supernatural was going on. It had occurred to me that he might be a ghost, but then he would have been bound by the same general rules as a spirit and unable to affect the physical world this much without serious help from someone corporeal. I noticed that ferns and brush moved as he passed. So he had some solidity. I mentally checked off the box labeled “preternaturally quiet” and left it at that.
I couldn’t tell what direction we were going. Only faint patches of stars glinted through the thick tree branches and I didn’t spare much time for staring upward. With my darkvision running, light wasn’t a pleasant thing to look at. Even the flickering blue in Not Afraid’s eyes was disorienting any time I met his gaze as he waited for me to catch up.
After what felt like hours, I heard running water. A few minutes later, I could smell the stream and the air shifted to feeling more open. The forest fell away in an abrupt line and a wide, rocky ravine spread out below me. My vision wouldn’t let me see too deeply into it, but amber light limned a field of boulders. To my right loomed a huge cliff, the top lost to the clash between the slowly brightening sky and my night vision.
The sky was turning from black to the dull grey of false dawn. It was enough that my normal vision could start to pick out details, I thought, so I dropped the night vision. I kept a hold on my magic, not trusting my companion or the spirit not to fuck with me.
The cliff rose a good hundred feet up from the floor of the ravine, the top outlined against the grey sky. The heavily sloping field was mostly rockfall but overgrown, as though the rocks had tumbled down a long time ago and nature was filling in the cracks. Boulders dotted the terrain like the bodies of sleeping beasts half covered in dew-speckled grass blankets. Down the hill to my left cut a creek, its cheery burble at odds with the mostly silent morning. Even the birds weren’t speaking.
The rocky field had the same eerie stillness I associate with graveyards, and it unnerved me. Places can have their own power, their own energy. Sometimes from ley lines and other earthly sources of power. Sometimes from events like earth quakes or eruptions. Sometimes from people, though it would be rare for a wilderness spot like this to take on power from humans. I had a sense that we were close to whatever Not Afraid wanted to show me.
Wolf materialized beside me and growled, her hackles up, her eyes fixed on the cliff. She didn’t appear to like this place any better than I.
“What is it?” I whispered to her. She looked at me with her starry-night eyes and growled again. I took a step forward, moving out of the trees, but she stayed put, swinging her head from side to side, her growl fading into a whine.
“Fine,” I muttered. “Stay here then.”
Not Afraid let me take in the surroundings, ignoring that I was apparently talking to myself, and then started picking his way across the rocks toward the cliff face. I followed, looking around me warily as the shadows deepened and the sky grew lighter.
Not Afraid reached the base of the cliff and waited for me there. I clambered up beside him to where it leveled out somewhat. The cliff face itself was pitted and gouged by the elements, too steep for vegetation to take hold. White streaks ran down the rocks like tears and something about the place made me shiver as I stared upward.
The bottom of the cliff was missing. Time and water had hollowed out the base into a low cave deep enough I couldn’t see to the back, though something deep within seemed to move. I refused to peer too closely. I had had enough of dark places for a long while after the mine. Stalactites hung from the roof at the mouth of the cave, giving it the appearance of a gaping mouth waiting to crunch down. The area in front of the mouth had been dug away into a rough pit. The pit was still in shadow but there seemed to be bare branches stacked in it.
I gripped my D20 and called up light, sending it like a flare over the pit.
Not branches. Bones. Hundreds of bones in piles with more poking out from the earth beneath. The skulls were obviously human and I counted a dozen before I made myself stop.
“What is this place,” I whispered. It felt wrong to speak loudly in the face of so much death. Perhaps this was just a burial site? I doubted it. The graveyard where the People buried their dead was back behind the big house and I knew there were graves there that were hundreds of years old, so this wasn’t some ancient site for the Three Feathers tribe.
“This is where the fledglings who don’t turn into crow go to die.” Not Afraid came up beside me, his eyes fixed on the grim piles only a few feet below us. “Blood Mother and I are trying to find which bones are whose, but it is not easy. Most of the spirits here do not want to talk to us.”
“Blood Mother?” I looked sideways at him. He was close enough I should have been able to feel heat coming off his skin, to smell his sweat. I might as well have been standing here alone.
“She is with me,” he said. “She will be avenged.”
He was talking about the spirit, I realized. A spirit of vengeance.
“Buttercup?” I guessed.
“She died here,” he said, biting off the words like they hurt to say aloud. “I have only Blood Mother now.”
“Did you kill these people?” I said, letting the identity of the spirit go for the moment.
He laughed, and the chill in my bones grew stronger.
“She does not see!” he cried, throwing his arms wide. His fingertips brushed my arm, cold but solid. “She will not believe, even here.”
“Tell me,” I said, turning to face him. “Tell me what this is.”
I had a feeling already. I knew but didn’t want to know.
“Sky Heart,” he screamed at me and I felt his breath sting my cheek, cold and smelling of dust and death. Another sign he wasn’t a ghost at least. “This is where he would bring them, the ones who did not change. The ones who changed but not into crow. He calls this ‘the final flight.’ But we call it the cliff of many tears.”
“He throws them off the cliff,” I said, taking a step back, unable to hold my ground in the face of so much rage and grief. “These are children.”
I looked back at the pit; my light ball had died, forgotten by me in my horror, but the rising sun now cast light now into it, enough light that I could make out the bones for what they were.
“If they did not change and fly, they died. If they did not die, because they were other than crow, he would come down and finish them. This is why I hunt the People. Eventually the coward Sky Heart will have to face me. This time he will die.”
“But I was only exiled. I wasn’t killed. Is this still going on?” I hadn’t been thrown off a cliff. Not that it would have killed me, nor would any other means aside from having my heart eaten by another sorcerer. Perhaps Sky Heart knew that, knew some
how that he couldn’t kill me.
“Do the others know?” I thought of my mother, of her confusion over what was happening, over why Not Afraid had killed Sky Heart’s wife a century ago. Over her insistence, decades earlier, that Jasper be the one to drive me away from the ranch, that he make sure the new family picked me up.
“It does not matter,” he said. “They let it happen. They must pay.”
“It matters to me,” I said, though even as I did I questioned why I was trying to split hairs, to assign guilt. How does one process murder on this scale? Sky Heart, if what Not Afraid was telling me was true, was a serial killer. But Not Afraid had plenty of blood on his hands.
He’d let the fledglings live. Let Carlos live. Gone out of his way to make sure they were fed and unharmed.
Heartless killer with a drama streak out for vengeance. I had to keep that in mind. As well as the spirit, this Blood Mother. She had proven tricky, full of illusions in the forest.
I shook my head. “I cannot let you keep killing,” I said. “Somehow this has to end.”
Cold blue light flared in Not Afraid’s eyes but he shrieked and violently shook his head.
“Let me show her,” he said. The light flickered and he reached for me.
“What are you doing?” I took another step back and nearly fell over a rock. I gathered power in my hands, ready to unleash a blast of force at him.
“Do not fight it, please,” he said. “Let us show you what happened.”
Universe help me, I let go of my magic and he took my hands in his icy cold fingers. A wave of power rushed up through me.
For a moment I was two people, myself standing at the base of the cliff, clinging to a man who should be dead, and also a girl in a blue gingham dress at the top of the cliff, my hair loose and whipping around my face.
Then the vision settled and I was just the girl. Buttercup.