by Ramy Vance
“Ele não é meu namorado,” I chided, leaning to see past her. There he stood in the doorway: the man I’d fallen not-so-secretly in love with, tall and black-haired and staring right at me with a look in his eyes I’d seen before.
Admiration. Desire. Affection.
And he was looking at me, plain Isabella. I looked like myself now—at least, the Isabella I’d been when I came to McGill: red-haired, green-eyed, freckled and average height.
It was an amazing feeling.
But the better feeling—the one I’d never expected—was to care so much about a man who knew I was an encantado and looked at me like that anyway. I felt like a deer caught in a pair of headlamps. In the best way.
Except something in Justin’s expression suggested trouble, despite the half-smile he’d conjured. He coughed, one hand sweeping through the air. “You two are going to set off the smoke alarm.”
“It’s been a good night,” Aimee said. “And it’s about to get muito quente.”
Now I felt myself blushing, especially when Justin’s lips curled. “This is an unexpected surprise. You’re two hours early.”
“Are you here for beijos?” Aimee grinning up at him. “Muitos beijos?”
What are beijos?” Justin asked.
“Aimee,” I rasped, “shut up.”
He ruffled his hand through his hair. “Sorry to surprise you.” He stepped into the room, letting the door shut behind him. “It’s just, I’m not sure if it’s a good idea for you to be out alone at night.”
I made a face. Was Justin a secret chauvinist? “I’ll have you know that I’m perfectly capable—”
My phone began vibrating in my hand. Aimee’s did the same on her desk. I lifted mine. CAMPUS ALERT, the screen read. UNCOMMON CONCENTRATION OF BIRDS FLOCKING ON CAMPUS. DO NOT AGGRAVATE OR INTERACT WITH FLOCKS.
“Uh,” Aimee said from her desk. “What?”
“Yeah, it’s kind of weird,” Justin said. “And in my experience, when things get weird, they get dangerous.”
“This is a joke.” I crossed to the window. Outside, the setting sun streaked through the clouds and an otherwise bare sky. No birds. “It’s the middle of winter—they shouldn’t be flocking at all. It’s not the students who should be concerned … it’s bird conservationists.”
“Maybe it’s best if we don’t go out tonight,” Justin said. “To be safe.”
I kept staring out the window, and I realized that I hadn’t left my dorm all week except to attend class. I’d spent the whole time vaguely traumatized, paranoid about what had happened.
But it’s in the past.
“No.” I turned. “I want to go out tonight. To celebrate.”
Justin’s eyebrows went up.
I half-smiled. “My research just got a huge grant.”
Justin threw his hands up, and so did Aimee, and the two of them came at me at once and despite my objections, I was soon enveloped by four human arms. “That’s amazing,” Justin said. “All right, the two of you get on your coats.”
“No way,” Aimee said. “I’m not getting in the middle of this.”
I shot her a glare. “Aimee, we’re not—”
“Dating?” She scoffed, broke away and dropped back onto the bed. “Whatever. That’s why you two are still pressed against each other.”
I glanced down; Justin’s arms were wrapped low around my waist, and mine were clasped at the back of his neck. I stepped back, and I sensed his unwillingness to let me go, even though I knew he was conflicted about Katrina and me.
The thing is, throughout history we encantados have been great “breaker-uppers.” In fact, you could call us the royalty of broken relationships. This time, I was trying to be better than that. I wanted to do this right.
But then I saw that leopard’s grin spread across his features, and I thought, Better, but I’m not going for sainthood.
“I need to get ready. My eyes slowly tracked up to Justin’s; sometimes gazing at him felt like looking into the sun. “Meet me at the street corner like we talked about?”
“Are you sure?”
I set one finger at the center of his chest, and he swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing hard. The encantado effect. “Don’t worry—I know how to take care of myself.”
CHAPTER 13
A s I walked to St. Catherine Street to meet up with Justin, I crossed by the river.
The surface bore a thick layer of ice. Atop it rested a foot of untouched snow.
I stood for a few minutes at its edge, hands in my pockets, and stared at the spot where I’d broken through a week ago. As several hundred years of immortality had taught me, nature worked fast. You couldn’t even tell, much less have guessed—if you weren’t me, Justin or my roommate Aimee—what lay beneath.
The hunter. El Lobizon.
He’d frozen there, claws outstretched toward me in his last moment of majesty. When it warmed, would he be washed away with the breaking ice? Or perhaps he’d vanished already, disappeared into the ether from which he’d been summoned.
Either way, I had returned to this spot every day since. I felt somehow dutybound to keep vigil. And I’d kept a token from our battle: his massive claw, which rested in my purse. Hey, a dagger that can also nullify magic? Way better than a mace.
But the claw was more than that, I thought as I walked toward our meeting spot downtown. It also represented the first time in my life I hadn’t run away. And as I stood at the corner of St. Catherine under the streetlamp, that knowledge warmed me despite the frigid January air.
“You’re awfully cute with red hair.”
Delicious pride filled me; I knew that voice was referring to me, Isabella Ramirez, and no one else. My lips curled, and I spun on my heels, shrugging with my hands deep in my coat pockets. “You’re lucky you’re so cute, or else I’d be supremely irritated by your lateness.”
There stood Justin Truly. Every time I heard that voice, spotted those blue eyes and black hair, I wondered at how the gods could have justified gracing one man with so much charm before they left.
“Hey,” he said, palms going up, “I was the one who came by your dorm extra early.”
“And unexpectedly.”
We came together on the sidewalk, he staring down and I up until our bodies nearly touched. My hands didn’t leave my pockets. “Tell me meeting here wasn’t worth it.”
I knew from the look in his eyes how I appeared to him: a beautiful stranger standing on the street. And it was this string of tension—the little surprises, the unexpectedness—that would make the culmination of what was happening between us explosive. Eventually. When the time was right.
He nodded once, eyes unwavering. “It was worth it.”
I stepped beside him, sliding my hand through the crook of his arm. “I hope you like greasy spoons.”
“What, like a diner? Are we … going steady? Like two teenagers from the fifties?”
“I’ll have you know, that was a particularly good decade.” We started down the sidewalk, the setting sun pale on us through the clouds. I still hadn’t seen any dangerous flocks of birds since we’d received a campus alert about them earlier that afternoon. “And no, we’re not going steady. We’re celebrating my research getting funded,” I deflected.
I knew what he was asking, but Justin was with Katrina—who still hadn’t appeared since the semester began—and he and I were dancing around this thing between us, unwilling to name it and equally unwilling to ignore it.
After all, a week ago I’d hoodwinked him into thinking I was his absentee girlfriend, Kat—which is a long story. But the gist is: if you were an encantado with the ability to look like anyone, and your love interest’s girlfriend hadn’t shown her face in weeks, wouldn’t you burn two months off the end of your life to look like her for a while?
We’d sort of gotten past it, but we still had to get to know each other better now that I looked like me. Well, he had to get to know me better—the real Isabella. And he had to choose between Kat
and me.
“Justin,” I said, “what we’re doing isn’t as innocent as you make it out to be.”
We passed a few other groups of pedestrians, turned at a cross street that would take us toward the restaurant I’d picked. As soon as we did, the street noise grew.
“I don’t know what you mean,” Justin said. But he avoided meeting my eyes for the first time since we’d met up.
“You asked me if we’re going steady. You can’t fool a 500-year-old encantado—I know all the signs.”
He pretended to be distracted by a storefront display of candles. “Signs of what?”
“Of when a man is considering cheating on his significant other.”
He slowly unhooked his arm from mine. That was never good. “I’m not a cheater,” he said in a low, testy voice.
I stepped ahead of him, turned so we were facing. When I put my hands on his arms, he stopped and looked down at me. “I know that,” I said. “But all this time we’re spending together … it’s only going to hurt your relationship with Kat.”
He took a deep breath. “My relationship with Kat is pretty hurt already.”
“What do you mean?”
“We had a big falling out before winter break. I haven’t even talked to her since then, and I don’t know if she wants to be with me or not. And then you showed up.”
“Which is why you were asking me why I hadn’t called or texted when I showed up in the dining hall that day, pretending to be Kat.”
He nodded.
It was all making more sense now.
“You and she need to talk,” I said.
“We will—once I can get in touch with her.”
“And you need to decide who you want to be with.”
Some small, egocentric part of me hoped he’d say, “You. I want to be with you.” But the larger part of me was glad when he said, “I will. I won’t keep you in the dark—I promise.”
Because that was what rational, responsible people did. Even if they sometimes made the irresponsible choice to hang out with women they were clearly attracted to.
“OK,” I said. “So do you want to go to this diner? As friends.”
He smiled at me. “You’re the best-looking friend I’ve ever had. Every guy we’ve passed has been staring.” He said it so smoothly I couldn’t help but laugh, and the thought occurred to me that I hadn’t gone a day without seeing his face since that night we’d jumped into the river, and maybe I didn’t want to.
“It’s an encantado thing,” I said as we resumed walking. “Besides, the women we passed certainly weren’t staring at me.”
Before we reached the curb, Justin’s body tensed, and he slowed us. “Isa,” he said, “what is that?”
“What is what?” I began.
Then I saw it. Correct that: everyone on the sidewalk saw it. And just as the first street lamp illuminated, the screaming started.
↔
ABOVE US, the sky churned black. Black with birds.
Darting, diving, sparks spraying from their bodies like flint on tinder. Together, their screeching radiated into the center of my brain, and my hands clapped to my ears. But the damage had already been done; my ears rang, my head pounded, and I vaguely recognized one of them breaking off from the flock, diving toward us talons-first, enormous wings outstretched.
Justin yanked me back, the air displacing in front of my face as I stumbled. A quick thwack thwack sounded to our left, and the little compact car parked on the curb rocked on its frame. Two impossibly unbroken feathers were sunk halfway into the passenger-side door.
The 100% metal door.
The bird circled back around, rejoining the swirling mass. The screeching continued, but by now it was muffled by the awful ringing in my head.
Justin pulled me to him, and we fell against the brick wall of a building. “Are you OK?”
I blinked up at him. He sounded so far away. “That bird just shot metal feathers at me.”
As a native of the Brazilian rainforests, I could identify just about any bird in South America with one glance. And I’d carried that interest with me to Canada; I’d spent many hours in the library studying bird species native to North America, not least because Professor Allman loved the creatures of that continent, too. We’d spent hours chatting about different species.
So I was kind of obsessed with birds, OK? Hundreds of years spent in nature will have that effect.
But I had no idea what I’d just seen. They were avian creatures, but it was like we’d stepped onto the set of a Hitchcock film. Above us, a thick flock of them obscured the sky, their metallic wings glinting in the light as they dove at the fleeing pedestrians.
Half a block away, a man raised his arm against one of the dive-bombers, and it shredded his coat from wrist to shoulder with its beak.
Elsewhere, people sprinted to get indoors as feathers peppered the cars like hail and stop signs and the brick facades of the buildings. And even brick wasn’t strong enough to withstand the feathers, which hit the stone and remained jutting at whatever angle they had been launched from.
And Justin? He was on his phone.
“St. Catherine Street,” he was saying. I could barely hear his voice over all the noise. “An entire flock of birds. Metal feathers. They seem to be Others.”
“Who the hell are you talking to?” I said. “Because now isn’t the best time.”
Justin ignored me. “Yes, sir. I’ll take care.” When he hung up, he stepped in front of me, shielding me with his body. “We have to get out of here—now.”
“Exactly what I was thinking.” But first, I spun toward the lacerated car.
“Isa, what are you doing?”
I knelt by the wings lodged into the door, raising my fingers to the top one. It reflected the chaos behind me, glimmered under the artificial lamp above us. I just barely brushed my finger over its edge; it felt like a perfectly sharpened knife.
The feathers really were made of metal.
Justin’s hands clamped around my sides, pulling me up. “I’m sorry to say we don’t have time for that, Biologist.”
I resisted, grabbing the door’s latch. As I did, the car’s alarm went off, adding to the cacophony on the street. “Wait! I need one of these feathers,” I said. “Help me get it out.”
He gave me a look I was starting to become familiar with: pure exasperation. But then he yanked off his coat. “I’ll get it,” he said. “Just get behind the car.”
I did as he said, ducking in front of its hood. I watched as, with amazing quickness, he wrapped the coat around the lodged feather, set one boot against the door, and yanked it straight out. The golden tip came free like a dagger, and Justin the hero out of some Arthurian legend.
Then the window shattered next to him—a trio of deadly feathers launched by one of the diving birds—and I was brought back to the reality of our situation. We were just a human and an Other, and I had put him at enormous risk.
When he dashed around the car and dropped next to me, he passed the feather over, still wrapped in his coat. “Why do you need this, anyway?” he yelled over all the noise.
I glanced up at the sky; the flock had shifted. Where a minute ago it had circled a block away, it seemed to be moving in our direction. “I’ll tell you later,” I yelled back, bundling it under my arm and grabbing his hand. I pointed at a bookstore just across the street from us, only about twenty feet away. When our eyes met, he nodded.
The two of us leapt up, running across the street with our hands still locked. He moved faster, of course—one of the few times I regretted choosing a five-foot-three illusion—and I nearly tripped to keep up with him.
The screeching hadn’t stopped, but by now, it had become part of my world. I couldn’t hear anything else—not our footsteps or my own breathing. Only the cries of birds and people.
I certainly loved books, but right now that little bookstore with its twinkle lights looked like an oasis in a desert. We made the sidewalk, and as Justin grabbe
d the handle and the door belled, I heard a scream unlike any I’d heard since the fracas began. It came from far away, and it didn’t sound like a bird or a human.
And the thought hit me as we slipped through the door and into the bookshop:
If death were a sound, I’ve just heard it.
The door belled once more as it closed behind us, and we were enveloped by silence. Four people stood not far off, one of them the man whose coat sleeve had been shorn from wrist to armpit. It now hung like a drapery off his body, and he cradled his arm to him as he stared at us.
No—past us. At the scene outside.
“Get away from the windows,” he said, and Justin and I ducked by instinct as we made for the nearest of the tall bookcases.
“Are you OK?” I heard Justin ask him.
“I’m fine. It just got my jacket.”
And in my daze, some part of me processed the curiousness of such a thing as I watched the streets empty ahead of the flock. Clearly those weren’t normal birds—I still held a metal feather under my arm, after all—and the one I had seen attack the man next to us could easily have destroyed him with one well-shot feather. Or its beak.
But it hadn’t.
And over the next minute, Justin and I and the other four stood there and watched through the picture window as the flock slowly dissipated. Like a sudden storm, violent and intense, before it tapered to nothing.
To silence.
Outside, only the single car alarm I had set off still blared.
“Where in the world did they all come from?” a woman said. She stood behind the counter, palms on its edge.
“I don’t know,” the man with the shredded jacket began. “My wife and I were walking down the street, and there was an awful screeching. And then they just … appeared all at once.”
Justin squeezed my arm before he started toward the door. “They’ve cleared. We should check to see if anyone’s hurt.”
My hand went out in his wake; I already missed his closeness.
“You shouldn’t. They could still be out there,” the woman behind the counter said.