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A long rustling shhirrk-sruuffshh sounded from just outside. Squinting, she thought she could see what looked like a set of long, thin, black-gloved fingers trying to reach under the sill.
With a quick step forward, Isobel yanked down on the shade. It rushed upward with a loud snap. Something screeched. Blackness, like spattering ink, spread across her window. With a short scream, she fell back. She hurled the trophy toward the window, missing the glass by inches, knocking a dent into the wall.
An angry flurry of dark feathers splayed against the glass, followed by the tap of a pointed beak and a low, grating croak.
“Stupid bird!” Isobel shouted, her heart pounding so hard that she could feel her pulse thudding in her temples. She pulled herself up from the floor, a stinging bite of rug burn chafing the back of her thigh. She ignored it, rushing to pluck two pink throw pillows from her bed. She chucked one right after the other at the window. The huge beast of a bird gave one giant flap of its black wings. It let out a squawk when the first pillow hit, and then, after the second, it swooped off into the darkness.
Isobel yanked the shade down again, pulling the lace curtains closed.
She made her way back to her bed. Fighting the shivers, she grabbed her robe along the way, throwing it back on over her pajamas. She chucked her dryer off her bed and onto the floor, swiping up her phone.
She paced. The view screen of her phone read 8:52 in electric blue. Cutting it close to nine, she thought. Well, he’d just have to deal.
Isobel punched in the number. The dial tone rang once . . . twice . . . three times. She’d give it one more—
“Yeah?”
Isobel blinked in surprise. She hadn’t expected him to answer. “Yeah, hey,” she said, trying to sound businesslike.
“Hey,” he said, but she could hear the underlying question in his tone: Why dost thou, O simplest of mortals, summon me from my grave?
All right, then, she’d get right to it. “Listen,” she said, “I need to talk to you. You weren’t in the park tonight, were you?” Okay, maybe that sounded a bit more accusatory than she’d meant it to. She winced but decided to wait and see how he reacted.
Nothing from the other end. Didn’t he even breathe? Jeez.
She let the quiet fizz of no response go until it reached the point of making her uncomfortable. “If it was you,” she said, breaking the silence, “then I don’t think it was funny, but I think you should just tell me.” There. She’d said it. It was better to make sure that it hadn’t been him first before she started spouting off about invisible pursuers, right?
She found herself waiting through another long stretch of silent phone-buzz before, finally, she heard him draw a breath to speak. “I don’t know what kind of acid you dropped between six thirty and now,” he said, “but I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”
“The park,” she said, though with less oomph. She was starting to think that maybe there had been a better way to go about this. She hadn’t been trying to say it had been him. She was only trying to figure out if it had.
“What about the park?” he said, impatient.
“Someone chased me,” she blurted.
“And you think it was me.”
Uh-oh. Isobel folded her free arm across her chest, linking it with her other at the elbow. Head down, she began to pace again. “I didn’t say that.”
“You insinuated it.”
Isobel cringed, hating to hear her own words turned around on her.
“I—”
“First of all,” he said without giving her a chance to finish, “if you were in the park by yourself tonight, you should realize that was stupid.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“Consider yourself welcome. Secondly,” he continued, “you really must be on something to assume that I would follow you, let alone chase you. I’m sorry, but my existence isn’t that sad.”
Ouch.
“Okay, listen. I’m sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I didn’t mean to accuse you. That wasn’t why I called.”
“But you did accuse me.” His tone dissolved into a patronizing drone. “And why else would you call? Certainly not to chat, I hope.”
Well, this had all gone straight to hell in a fat, flaming rocket.
