Run, Kat, Run and Encantado Dreams (Mortality Bites: Publisher's Pack Book 4)

by Ramy Vance

  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 grabbed 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.

  “It’s OK,” Justin said, hand on the door’s handle. “I’m part of the Army cadets.”

  I blinked. The Army? Did he mean the World Army? I mean, he had asked me what I thought about that World Army training poster over a week back, but it had seemed like an offhanded thing. He hadn’t mentioned actually joining them in all the times I’d seen him since.

  The World Army, from what I knew about it, didn’t favor Others. It was, in fact, Otherist in the extreme. Had Justin actually signed up with them? But I didn’t have time to ask, because he had already slipped through the door.

  I started after him, emerging onto the sidewalk at a jog. “Wait up.”

  Justin stopped. “It’s not safe, Isa.”

  “They’re gone.” Though I could still hear that scream echoing deep in my head—the sound of death. The memory of it sent a shiver through me, and I went up to Justin’s side. “Besides, safe or not, you’re not going anywhere without me.”

  He sighed, nodded. “OK.”

  We continued down the street together, the whole of which was lit with feathers like icicles glittering in the night. People were starting to appear from the buildings they had ducked inside, their eyes wide, faces upturned. But only the moon greeted us now, a white orb low in the sky.

  When we had walked three blocks, something caught my eye down an alley. I stopped us. “Wait,” I said, squinting. “Is that a person?”

  Justin and I stood at the mouth of the alley, the whole of which was lit by nothing but the moon. And that was enough to make out the dark edges of what sat slumped against the edge of a metal trash receptacle.

  As we neared, my hand went to my mouth.

  A young blond man lay before us, a hole where his heart should have been.

  Chapter 14

  Twenty minutes later, the police arrived. Justin had called them, introducing himself on the phone as a “cadet,” though my mind slipped past that unpleasant fact and returned at once to the far more immediate fact of the murder scene. The death.

  Justin and I stood six feet apart on the sidewalk, each of us talking to a police officer. And though we’d backed out around the corner from the alley where the young man lay, I couldn’t stop glancing at the hard edge of the building as though I might glimpse him. As though I might see again that spot of brick wall visible through the center of his body.

  Even with closed eyes, I still saw the agony on his face.

  We had been the first ones to discover him, but we didn’t know anything more than what we’d seen: a body against a wall. Since then, he’d been surrounded by yellow tape, a white cloth slipped over his body.

  The officer, who’d introduced himself as Tremblay, asked me about the birds that had attacked—apparently not a single death had occurred as a result of the flock—and the metal feathers they’d shot off. The one Justin had retrieved for me was still tucked into my coat.

  “Based on what you saw, do you believe they’re monsters?” Tremblay asked. He glanced up from his notepad, those perfectly human eyes studying me. He bore a certain crow-footed kindness around the eyes, a little paunch, some wispy white hair near his ears.

  “I believe they’re Others,” I said. “They weren’t like any regular bird.”

  “Right.” His pen moved across the paper. And I realized that he didn’t make any distinction between monsters and Others. It was as though I’d said only, “Yes.”

  “The reason why I think they’re Others and not monsters,” I added, “is because they didn’t kill or badly injure anyone when they could easily have done so.”

  Tremblay’s eyes lifted to me. “You don’t think they killed that boy in the alley?”

  I thought back to the razor beaks, the massive talons, the way they’d dived and flocked and shot those feathers off. Those were hunters—birds of prey. If they’d wanted to, they could have killed at least a half-dozen people in the street and injured as many more.

  Besides, ripping out just the heart? That was a monstrous thing.

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think they killed him.”

  Tremblay studied the information he’d written on his pad. “And you’re a biology student at McGill, you said?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you human?”

  This line of questioning seemed … pointed. And then it occurred to me: we were the first two onto the scene. We were more than sources of information. Justin and I were potential suspects.

  “I’m an Other,” I said, lowering my voice. My eyes drifted toward Justin, who appeared as cool as ever, gesturing and nodding and buzzing with rapport with the officer he’d just met.

  I felt Tremblay stiffen next to me. If everything about him hadn’t screamed human before, his reaction to finding out my Other status was about as human as it got. “Other? What species?”

  “Encantado. From Brazil.”

  “What’s that?”

  “We’re a … an aquatic species. Our natural form is somewhere between a mermaid and a dolphin.”

  “So why don’t you look like a mermaid-dolphin?” And all at once, those crow’s feet didn’t seem so kind.

  “I’m a shapeshifter.” I realized how bad this sounded. “It’s in our nature to shapeshift into humans.”

  “Huh,” Tremblay finally said. More scratching of that pen on his pad. “When did you arrive in Canada?”

  “One and a half years ago, to attend McGill.”

  “So, recently. How is your English so good?”

  Had he really just asked me that? If I were braver—maybe if I still looked like Katrina, whom I had spent a week masquerading as—I would have flashed him a look. As it was, I only lifted my chin to say, “I’ve been alive five hundred years. I speak eight languages.”

  Tremblay kept taking notes, as though speaking to a semi-ancient, octolingual being didn’t even merit a raised eyebrow. Three, then five seconds elapsed as Justin and the other officer chattered away. Things seemed to be going much better for him.

  “Do you have identification?” I heard Tremblay ask me.

  I fished both my Canadian ID card and passport out of my purse, tried to keep my hand from shaking as I passed them over. It was the cold, I wanted to tell him. Try spending hundreds of years in a rainforest and then acclimate to Canadian winters. But I found myself saying as little as possible—a protective measure I’d developed around authority figures. And people whom I believed didn’t mean well.

  And I was starting to suspect Tremblay really didn’t mean me well.

  He opened the passport, stared. Swapped the ID card to the fore, stared at that. Ten seconds later, he extended both back. “What about your Other ID?”

  Merda, my fingers were shaking even more. “Other ID?”

  “A new Other requirement,” he said, a certain strain of victory echoing in that baritone voice. “All Others in Canada have to carry them, per the World Government.”

  “Since when?” I said, my rare temper flaring. This was a ridiculous encroachment on Other rights, and I was about to tell him so at great length, in both English and Portuguese, when Justin appeared from nowhere, his warm hand enfolding mine.

  “Officer,” he said, “I couldn’t help but overhear you mentioning the Other ID. I’m a new cadet here on campus, and as it happens, we were just briefed about the ID today.”

  “Oh?” Tremblay said. He loo
ked displeased about Justin’s intrusion, but of course, he’d pooled in so swiftly and easily that it felt only natural for him to be a part of the conversation. I recognized it at once: the halo effect coupled with unblinking daring.

  “One of the interesting details we learned: since it just went into effect this month, all Others who entered Canada before January have until July to obtain their ID.”

  “You’re a cadet, you say?”

  Justin nodded, that boyish half-smirk appearing on his face. I stared between him and Tremblay, whose crow’s feet deepened just a few degrees. GoneGodDamn, why couldn’t I do a boyish half-smirk?

  “It’s good you found the poor kid,” Tremblay said, nodding toward the murder scene around the corner. “We need more citizens like you.”

  And like that, our suspiciousness washed off us as simply as dirt in the shower. But if anything, I felt dirtier than before.

  Shame doesn’t wash off so easily.

  ↔

  Afterward, Justin stood close to me, and I stepped into his arms. We hugged, and as we did, I felt my phone buzz three times in my purse. “That’s a campus alert,” he murmured by my ear.

  “How do you know?”

  “We were briefed on that. Three short vibrations mean an alert.”

  I nodded, wondering what else he’d been “briefed” on as l lifted my phone out of my purse. Well, he was right. CAMPUS ALERT, the text read. STUDENT MURDERED NEAR CAMPUS, SITUATION STILL RESOLVING. STAY INDOORS UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE.

  “What’s going on?” I whispered. The birds, the murder. Even Professor Allman’s call about my grant funding and “meeting in his office” had seemed mysterious, foreboding. I remembered my happiness of a few hours ago as a simple, faraway thing.

  “Whatever it is,” Justin said, “I think we should get indoors. One of the officers offered to give us a ride back. We should take it.”

  “OK,” I said, even though the last thing I wanted was to ride with Tremblay, or any other officer. But I felt numbed through.

  We climbed into the car and the officer who’d spoken with Justin started toward my dormitory in silence. After a few minutes, Justin’s hand squeezed mine. “It was an Other who killed that guy, wasn’t it?” He was talking to the officer.