Mary’s face clouded over and for just a moment I saw something dark and broken there.
“Mary, what were you doing in the barn?”
“Gathering eggs,” she said after a long minute. Then she smiled. “Do you want to know where they are? I’ll tell you, but you have to promise not to tell anyone else where I am, okay? I’m safe here.”
“Eggs? You have her eggs?”
She nodded and ran a hand through her hair, sending a small cascade of feathers down over the bough of the tree, down to where Harrison and Prue waited patiently below.
“I took them,” she said. “To keep them safe.”
“To keep them safe? From what?”
“If a man is angry enough to break a bird into a million pieces, what do you think he could do with her eggs?”
“Where are they?”
“In my bedroom. Under that floorboard in my closet.”She wiped at her cheeks as if she were crying, but her eyes were dry. “Eggs are so fragile, Georgina.”
Around us the tree swayed gently in the breeze and a few drops of rain were blown into Mary’s safe haven. She put her hand in her hair and pulled out one feather. It wasn’t white anymore. They were getting darker.
“Who killed her?” I asked.
She made a motion, and I held my hands out flat as she placed a feather in my palm.
But just like the other feather on the widow’s walk, this one only rested for a moment before it caught on a sudden gust—
And blew away.
And Mary leaned forward and whispered in my ear—
In a voice that sounded exactly like a birdsong—
In a voice that made it unavoidable, that thing I’d known for so long already—
My sister was turning into a bird.
And just like my namesake—the Georgina who came before me—there would be no magic I could use to save her.
III.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we—
Of many far wiser than we—
once more from “Annabel Lee”
by Edgar Allan Poe
Evil Man
Irealized halfway down the tree that our birthday was tomorrow.
In that post-Annabella world, it was hard to keep track of time. Days seemed to melt together. It could have been weeks that Mary and I were stuck up in that tree, weeks more before I reached the bottom and started walking back to the inn with Harrison and Prue.
The waters were so high that we were forced to overturn Prue’s beach umbrella and use it as a makeshift boat. We paddled with our hands, ineffective scoops of water that propelled us forward at a snail’s pace. The island was covered in water. The cliffs to our right had become a waterfall to the ocean. We steered clear of them; I didn’t know if the magic would hold now or if we would plummet to our deaths below.
