by Ramy Vance
Birds of prey were birds of prey. I knew they liked man-meat, but it seemed pig meat worked just as well. Before they got too close, I grabbed up the bag and jogged ten feet, plunging my hand in again and again, littering the ground with meat as I went.
As the first swooped down behind me, it let a screech so awful I ducked my head, my whole body freezing. I would probably have permanent tinnitus after this was all over.
Keep going. Keep going, Isabella. I forced myself to straighten, to continue on as I reached into the bag for more meat. I trailed it along the ground, not looking back.
At any moment one could swoop in and end me with its beak or talons, but I knew from Empusa’s file that they had a directive: don’t kill humans. Of course, I didn’t know how well it applied to Others with a human illusion, or how effective it was in the face of an Other whose hands were covered in pig gore.
So far they hadn’t come for me, and I kept moving deeper into the forest with their terrible noises following behind.
After three minutes, I heard a different call. It sounded like terror.
I spun around, my eyes following the uneven flight of one of the stymphalian birds as it careened over the tree line. It called out, dropped a few feet and swerved to miss a few branches before it crashed headlong into the trunk of a tree.
The tree shuddered as its black body dropped straight down the length of the trunk and landed on the ground in a crash of leaves. And for a moment, silence enveloped the forest.
I didn’t move; I couldn’t. The whole scene felt so quiet, so surreal, that I wondered if I had dreamed all of this in the same way I’d dreamed of El Lobizon so many nights afterward. Every time waking up, every time immobile in my bed with my heart hammering.
A rumble started through the forest, growing in volume and intensity. Not the birds, because after a few seconds, they too chimed in, landing on the branches around their dead flockmate to cast their faces skyward and call toward the sky.
A second later, another stymphalian bird dropped, hit the ground with an inelegant thud. The rumble rose from a baritone to an alto, and then to a soprano howling that went on and on.
I turned, my hand still full of pig. There he stood: the hunter. El Lobizon, his canines gleaming in the new moonlight as he howled into the sky not fifty feet from me.
You see, I had expected Empusa. A woman missing maybe a leg, or an arm. Maybe her face would be covered in blood or her eyes wouldn’t close. She would hop or walk toward me, and I would keep spreading the poisoned meat onto the ground because she could not hurt me.
When this moment came, I’d planned to talk myself out of fear. I’d planned to carry on a conversation with myself that would be so casual I would somehow trick my brain and nervous system into believing what was occurring around me shouldn’t incur mortal terror. I wasn’t at risk of death.
But I hadn’t expected El Lobizon.
All at once, I remembered again what the museum placard had said. Empusa is a shapeshifter who plays on your fears, often taking the form of that which frightens you the most.
El Lobizon the hunter, the wolf, frightened me the most.
I opened my mouth, but I couldn’t make the words come.
It’s Empusa, not the hunter.
It’s not El Lobizon, Isa. Focus on what you know about Empusa.
It wasn’t in her directive to hurt a woman. And her power was tied in with the birds, which were dropping one by one. But not fast enough—at least forty birds still remained—because the massive wolf before me lowered its face, those golden eyes shifting to me and lips rising into a snarl that I knew meant my death.
I was killing her. When it came to her directive, all bets were off. Empusa would end me if she could.
El Lobizon began stalking toward me, enormous paws setting divots the size of my entire body into the ground. I couldn’t help but look down at those claws, surveying the left forepaw. Five claws—not four. Which meant Empusa didn’t know my secret.
El Lobizon soon set into a run, and still I was stuck to the spot where I stood.
She can hurt you, even if she’s not the real hunter. She can still kill you.
Forty feet.
Move, Isa.
Twenty feet.
Move, move, move!
Ten feet.
Move or die!
As Empusa reached me, I threw myself out of the way, those enormous jaws snapping in my wake. I hit the ground hard, rolling twice before a tree trunk stopped me.
Yes, she could hurt me. She could kill me.
I raised my head; behind us, another bird fell. Not fast enough. The poison I’d concocted had been potent enough to bring down elephants, but apparently stymphalian birds were tougher than that.
So many still remained. And they were now flying toward me, protecting their mistress. What I’d read in that manila folder in Serena Russo’s office had explained so much about the birds’ behavior.
Somehow, the World Army had fractured Empusa’s power and siphoned it into the entire flock of birds, with whom she bore an invisible connection. That meant she could control them like a hive mother.
It also meant their fate was her fate. If they were poisoned, she was poisoned.
I flicked my gaze back to where Empusa had been, but the forest was empty. I pushed myself halfway up, scanning the darkening forest. I caught a glimpse of a tail disappearing behind a tree trunk, but no wolf appeared on the other side.
Instead, a woman emerged. She ran on her hands and feet, faster even than a dog or a wolf—more like the girl from The Ring on uppers.
And she was coming toward me.
CHAPTER 24
I was alone. Completely, stupidly alone.
Behind me, avian death. Ahead, monster death. Empusa ran at me with a mop of black, matted hair, the mouth of her pale face open wide as her slender arms pulled her through the forest.
I had nowhere to run. And I was going to die covered in pig blood.
I thought of Aimee, back there in our dorm, probably cozy in her checkered pajamas. Of Justin, in the O3 house, practicing his cute-yet-terrifying World Army salute. Both of them wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place, because they were smart. They had common sense.
I was the oldest of the three of us, and I had none, apparently.
And I thought: This was a mistake. This was a terrible plan.
But as Empusa came toward me, someone pulled me to my feet. No—not someone.
Me.
I had pulled me to my feet. I was reaching into my backpack and yanking out El Lobizon’s claw. I had wrapped its edge in leather, gripped the makeshift hilt in my fist and leaned toward Empusa.
For the first time in five hundred years, I understood that you couldn’t always escape using glamour or guise. That sometimes you had to fight. I was no fighter, but I also wasn’t going to go down easy.
“Monte de merda!” I yelled, gesturing with my free hand.
Empusa didn’t stop. She didn’t slow. Instead, she let a violent hiss as she barreled toward me.
Well, that phrase had worked on catcalling assholes back in Brazil.
A stymphalian bird swooped down behind me, and I felt something yank hard on my hair. Damn bird was trying to stop me from running—not that its plan worked. I pulled hard as I kept moving, the roots of my hair tearing away in a patch of red tendrils. It flew another twenty feet before it rose in an arc and nosedived straight into the leaves with a thwump!
I glanced over my shoulder and ducked just in time to avoid two more birds making a pass. Four feathers thwacked! like bulletfire into the tree trunk beside me.
When I turned back, Empusa was in front of me.
She swerved left before she reached me, and I realized she was predicting the direction I’d jumped last time. I tried to dive right, but an iron vise gripped my ankle and dragged me across the leaves and up into the air.
She held me up like she was inspecting a feral, swinging cat. From this view, she looked even
uglier. But GoneGodDamn was she strong.
Around us, the forest burst into stymphalian cries, the birds swooping closer, my hair blowing around my head as their wings beat hard.
Her free hand reached out, the fingers tipped with three-inch long claws. Even as I could scent her weakening, it was a measured, confident reach—an assured kill.
Wait for it, Isa. Wait.
The hand came closer, revealed in the moments when my hair wasn’t blown in front of my eyes. She was going for my heart.
Right for the heart.
When she’d come to within two inches, I raised the claw and swiped it across her wrist. A small cut, but El Lobizon’s claws didn’t need to cut deep. It stopped her hand at once. As her black blood seeped from the cut, it began to smoke.
Her magic began seeping out of her wrist like air from a balloon.
She could shapeshift into El Lobizon, but evidently she didn’t know his power: the nullification of magic. Those claws were an Other’s worst nightmare.
She hissed so loudly I dropped the feather. But she didn’t drop me.
Instead, her wounded hand jerked toward me with impossible speed.
GoneGods be good—I was going to die after all.
I closed my eyes. And for a second, I went somewhere else.
I rewound to the moment I’d met Justin.
When you’ve lived hundreds of years, you become a daydreamer, a thinker. If you don’t, you go crazy—immortal life is just too long to live with human freneticism. And you gain an incredible capacity to disappear inside yourself. To remember the moments of your life with cinematic clarity.
If I was going to die remembering one moment, I wanted it to be when I met Justin. Not as Kat—not when I’d pretended to be his girlfriend walking toward him in the dining hall.
No, just as Isabella. Just as me, a mortal.
“What are you doing?” he’d asked.
I glanced up from where I sat in front of my microscope, squinting at the halo of fluorescent light behind his head. That was the first time we met: his shadowed head under the ceiling light, the two of us unknown to each other.
“Studying DNA,” I said. “Are you supposed to be in here?”
He half-smirked and leaned on the counter beside me. “Probably not.”
Now his face became real, and I understood he was the same guy I’d seen so many times in our dorm, walking with the five-foot-nothing freshman called Katrina Darling. Black-haired, blue-eyed, a little swagger. The same one I’d ascribed so many fantasies to: his coolness, how dashing he’d be if I were in trouble, the way he pushed his hair behind his ear.
Those blue eyes moved like the sea in front of me, and I almost forgot my annoyance at him touching the workstation I kept ultra clean. At him being here in the first place. Jaguar, I thought for the first time. Kingdom: Animalia. Genus: Panthera. Class: Mammalia. Species: P. onca.
“Are you a researcher?” I asked.
He laughed. A totally genuine, unaffected laugh right from his belly. “No—I’m just a guy who’s lost.”
That humility surprised me.
I stood. “Where do you need to be?”
He extended a crumpled slip of paper—a class schedule. “Room 114B.”
“Oh.” I led him out of the lab. “That’s an easy mistake to make. This is 114R, which is the research area adjacent to 114.”
He smiled. “My mistake.”
As we came into the hall, another guy who’d been standing there raised his eyes. He looked nervous, and avoided meeting my gaze. But he’d clearly been waiting for Justin.
“It’s 114B, man,” Justin said as he passed him pack the slip of crumpled paper.
The other guy booked it for 114B, and Justin started down the hall in the opposite direction.
I turned after Justin. “Hey.”
He glanced over his shoulder.
I pointed behind me. “Your class is that way.”
“It’s all good. Thanks for your help.” He passed down the hallway, and I stared after him.
What was that all about?
Later, I would learn that Justin wasn’t even enrolled in the class in room 114B. It was nervous guy who’d been waiting in the hallway. He had a severe stutter and social anxiety, and Justin—a passerby—was just helping him out.
Now, months later, I knew for certain that my fantasies about Justin weren’t all true. But he was kind. And if five hundred years had taught me anything, it was to keep the kind ones close.
↔
Empusa’s claws touched my jacket, and just when I thought this was it, a voice cried out. I knew that voice.
“Isabella!”
I opened my eyes, which blurred with tears. I wasn’t alone.
A thud vibrated through my ankle, and Empusa dropped me with another world-splitting scream. I hit the ground so hard I wasn’t sure if I’d been hit or she had, but when I looked up, an arrow stuck like a sign marker out the side of her head.
Another followed, the lethal arrowhead disappearing into her chest.
I turned my face left, blinking hard at the flurry of motion before me. The birds floated, circled, flapped, screeched. They dropped with arrows protruding from their bodies. They fell with their wings cleft by swords.
In the center stood a group of humans, their weapons gleaming in the quarter-light.
The World Army cadets.
As I thought it, one of them emerged from the fray with a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other. His face was shadowed by the fresh moonlight, a white halo behind him, but I didn’t need to see his features to know who he was.
“Isabella—move!” he yelled.
I rolled off my back and dug my hands into the leaves as my feet sought purchase, pulling myself away from Empusa without one look back. Every fiber of me ached toward Justin, who was anchoring his next arrow in the heavy-duty bow.
Since when does he know archery?
Don’t ask questions, dummy—just move!
I finally got my feet under me, running toward him. He seemed to be aiming straight at me, but I knew he was focused past me. Even so, just before he loosed the arrow with a whistle, I strafed left.
Hey, he may have been good enough to hit Empusa twice, but I knew he hadn’t been practicing archery for more than about a month. I wasn’t about to risk it.
When I reached his side, I spun around behind him. “I got her with El Lobizon’s claw,” I breathed. “The birds are poisoned.”
“I know.” Justin nocked his next arrow.
I stared at the back of his head. Had he been watching me? Did he know what I’d done with the meat and the claw? But there wasn’t time to wonder, because ahead of us, Empusa had dropped to all fours, her mouth wide open in a hiss. Three arrows stuck out of her at odd angles, and a thin stream of black blood issued from each of them.
But she still hadn’t fallen. GoneGodDamn she was powerful.
“That’s her attack stance,” I said. “She’s about to come at us.”
“Not with an arrow in her face, she isn’t.” Justin drew the bowstring taut, and as Empusa launched into motion—well, I knew what I would be seeing in my nightmares for the rest of my mortal life—he let the arrow go.
It flew through the air in a perfect line, and like a perfect half-court shot, the glinting arrowhead disappeared into her mouth.
Just as Justin had predicted, her head jerked back, and her upper body with it. She slid ten feet across the ground before stopping in a heap, the arrow in her mouth jutting vertical into the air.
It was the perfect shot. A shot worthy of Paris the Trojan prince, or Katniss Everdeen. A shot that one in a thousand expert archers could make, and Justin had made it. Easily. That shouldn’t be possible, I thought, remembering the coin that he’d caught mid-air. I was both worried about Justin’s sudden abilities and grateful that he had them.
Before us, Empusa didn’t move.
Behind us, a whoop went up. We turned in time to see the rest of the birds drop
to the ground in a pile around the World Army soldiers, who stood in the middle of what looked like a frozen forest. Around them, feathers glinted like icicles in the trees.
“That was ... Woah.” Justin dropped his bow to reach for me. I only realized when his hands went around me that my legs had given out like matchsticks.
I wanted to hug him. To tell him how crazy and stupid and reckless that was. To ask him when the hell he had learned to shoot like that.
But my autonomic system had taken over, and my lungs pressed air in and out with mechanical persistence. I had never hyperventilated before, and even as I realized what was happening, it was still a new, completely mortal thing. As a biologist I knew how much actual control mortals had over their bodies (much less than we liked to think), but it was still terrifying to experience.
“It’s OK, Isa.” Justin’s warm hands slid over me, his body a weighted blanket pressing around me. How was he so good at this?
“I—“ I tried between breaths. “I—“
“I know,” he said. “I know.”
So I stopped trying, allowed myself to be enveloped. To be held and comforted. And soon enough my breathing slowed, normalized. I raised my eyes, found Justin looking down at me.
The same look as the first time we met.
“Back away from the creature,” came Sergeant Johnson’s voice from ahead. “Police are on their way.” He stepped past Justin and me, staring down at Empusa.
The two of us stood together, passing into the crowd of cadets, all of whom stared on.
“We got it good,” Johnson said, circling at a safe distance. “We got it good, boys.”
It.
Empusa had been a female. A she. She was a murderer who had deserved death, but I also knew what had been inside that file. Her directive. Empusa had been a pawn of the World Army. I felt sure, had she not been tasked with mayhem, the outcome of her release into Montreal could have been different. Better.
Which made this scene—her dead in the dirt, all the stymphalian birds hacked to pieces—almost too tragic to bear.
“Let’s go,” I whispered to Justin.
I expected him to want to stay, and I’d end up leaving alone or with him only after some cajoling. To his credit, he squeezed my shoulder and we stepped away from the crowd.