Page 129 of Bone Year

“They must be trained to defend the village.”

“These people would be better off barricading their front doors and waiting for the twisted creatures to pass.” Draven stalks to the second window, his eyes scanning the rooftops. “Out there, they’re just getting picked off.”

That must be why the village is so deserted. These people don’t have any real help. One of the other men has a dagger out. The third has a bow drawn and is sweeping it slowly across the dark sky. They keep looking up. Something is up there that I can’t see.

The bell tolls again, and I wince.

The man with the bow lifts the weapon higher, and then something whips against the dark above the rooftops, a shape too big to be a bird and too fast to be anything that should be in the sky.

It folds, collapsing in on itself in midair and becoming a sharper shape, dropping toward the men in the square so fast that my breath stops in my chest.

“Oh fuck!”

I’m running before I’ve given it much thought.

I’m out the door and into the cold. Snow swirls thick across the square. My boots sink into the powder up to the shin. The dark thing is dropping out of the sky toward Tomas’s father, and there’s nothing I can do but run.

It strikes him before I’m halfway across the square.

I see it for one second, wings spread wide, longer than a man is tall, the membrane between them stretched so thin I can see the gray of the sky through it. A body that shouldn’t be that long. A tail whipping in a long boneless curl that ends in something hooked. And the head is upside down.

Holy hell. The fucking head is upside down. The beak is opening at me from below, and inside the beak is a tongue, long and ribbed.

Then it’s on him.

The strike knocks Tomas’s father onto his stomach in the snow. The creature lifts off in the same motion and disappears back into the snowfall above the rooftops, wings beating with the sound of the wind.

The other two men shout. The bowman wheels around firing into the sky, and the arrow goes nowhere. The man with the dagger drops into a crouch over Tomas’s father, his eyes everywhere at once.

“Godsdamnit, Rose.”

Draven passes me before I’ve registered him, blade out, his other hand raised toward the sky in a gesture I don’t understand.

Noctis bolts past me on my left. He skids to a stop near the men, snarls once at the sky, and then hurls himself into the tree line beyond the cottage.

I’m at Tomas’s father in three more strides. I drop to my knees in the snow beside him.

It’s so bad.

His coat is ripped from shoulder blade to hip in three long parallel tears. The blood is steaming in the snow around him in pulses, which means his heart is still pumping, and the cuts are deep enough that I can see something pale underneath. Bone, maybe rib, I can’t tell yet and don’t have time. He’s wheezing, face down, one cheek pressed into the snow, and there is a noxious smell coming off the wound.

The spineback’s spines were in the wound. I remember learning about this creature in Professor Nestor’s class. Translucent wings, covered in barbed spines, and they hunt in pairs.

Fuck.

I can see the barbed spines that broke off in the parted muscle, three or four shards each the length of my finger, and around each shard the skin has started to do something I do not have a word for. A faint blue-black ring is spreading outward from each piece of bone…corruption.

I reach for his shoulder to move him.

“Don’t,” he gasps into the snow, and the sound of his own voice makes him cry out from the pain.

“I know. I’m sorry. I have to look. Can you hear me? Stay with me. Where’s Tomas?”

“I told him to stay inside with his mother.” His voice is gravel. “Heard the bell. Came out to…to draw it off the houses.”

“You did well.” I’m reaching into my pack already. My hands have started to shake but are still moving.

Above us, somewhere I cannot see, something shrieks.