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It danced just out of reach, taunting her with its ability to make her dangle herself halfway out of a second-story window.
“Sonofa—” she growled, gripping the windowsill with her left hand while stretching her right arm out as far as she could. The branch was still just out of reach. Exhausted and desperate, Bunny pushed herself to stretch another few inches farther out of the window.
Her fingers finally clasped the branch and she wasted no time, giving the whole thing a good twist-and-pull motion that made short work of the bare wood. It snapped and popped, and then with another yank, the branch came free. She dropped it into the yard below, with a mental promise she’d dispose of it in the morning.
Well. Later in the morning, anyway.
Thank fuck for that.
She turned away and was about to close the window when a flurry of black feathers assaulted her.
Her cheek burned suddenly, and she yelled as she lifted her arms to fend off whatever was trying to get into the house through her bedroom window.
“Caw!”
But the abnormally large raven pushed past her, wings flapping as though it was being chased by something that went bump in the night. Bunny backed off in a panic, her hand coming up to touch her cheek gingerly. When she pulled her fingertips away, bright red blood shone in the moonlight.
The raven rounded the room, dive-bombing Bunny on its way past.
“Argh!”
She ducked just in time to avoid the second flash of talons, leaving the bird to crash into the things on top of the dresser by the window. A picture frame toppled from the dresser, landing on the floor with a loud crash that was accompanied by the sound of shattering glass. But the raven didn’t seem satisfied with such low-level destruction.
It landed on Bunny’s bed, where it began to peck viciously at her pillow. After a couple of seconds, it tore through both the pillowcase and the pillow itself, ripping white feathers out through the gash it had made. The sight chilled Bunny to the bone, because her mind instantly substituted the white feathers she was seeing for bloodied entrails.
“Get out!” she yelled angrily, flapping her arms threateningly as she stalked toward the demonic bird.
“Caw!”
The bird took flight just before she reached it, sailing straight out of the window now that the way was clear for it to do so.
Bunny blinked, breathing hard, as some of the soft down from her pillow drifted to rest on the carpet amongst the broken glass from the frame. She bent to turn it over, examining the yellowed edges of the old photo the Major family had posed for on a rare vacation together.
Her father and brother had hardly changed, except in the fact that they were both older now. Ben had morphed into a man that could have been Marshall’s twin rather than his son, with the green eyes and brown hair common throughout generations of Majors. She was standing in front of her mother, the blonde-haired and blue-eyed anomaly. But the thing that struck her most about this image, after having almost ignored it for years on the peripheral of her life, was the look on her mother’s face.
Connie was smiling, but it was a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. Bunny frowned, lifting the frame up to the moonlight so she could look more closely. She was right; there was no warmth in Connie Major’s eyes at all, and the smile wasn’t so much a smile as it was a knowing upturn of the lips. Bunny took a deep breath, eyes boring into the photo, when something in the light caught her attention.
A pale turquoise glow was etched across one of the pieces of broken glass that remained in the frame. It had the same sort of incandescent glow that Bunny had seen around the women ready for ensoulment, and it almost made her do a double-take. It stretched in a line from one side of the glass shard to the other, disappearing abruptly at the shattered edge.
Suddenly re-energized, Bunny bent to look at the glass on her bedroom carpet. She exhaled a long, shaky breath as she noticed that some of the other shattered pieces of glass bore the strange glowing lines, too. When she realized what that meant, she allowed herself a sardonic half-smile. It was a good thing she’d always had a penchant for jigsaw puzzles. But first things first.
Bunny marched over to the window and, with one eye open in case the demon raven decided to take another run at her, she pulled the window closed and latched it securely. Then it was time to get down to work.
Fitting together shards of broken glass wasn’t exactly what she had envisioned for her evening but given how unpleasant her conversation with her father had been, she couldn’t say she was surprised this is how the night had turned out. She slid into her sneakers and shuffled as close to the glass as she could, carefully picking out the glowing pieces and laying them on the top of her bed before she went to get the dustpan and brush for the rest of it.
Once she was sure she wasn’t going to step on anything she shouldn’t, Bunny started trying to fit the broken pieces together. Some were obvious, others not so much. She was just starting to give up hope of ever actually managing to work it out when she got two of the smaller pieces into place.
604821
Random numbers in her mom’s handwriting. Why was Bunny was only seeing it now? She turned a piece of glass over in her hand, noticing that the glass with specks of dust on it—that had faced the room—wasn’t glowing at all. Okay, then, so it was the celestial form of invisible ink.
Why on earth would her mom have written a bunch of random numbers on the glass of this photo? Had she meant for Bunny to find it, or was she trying to keep it safe from someone else? Bunny reached for her cell phone on the nightstand, bending to snap a picture of the jigsaw-ed glass. Then she collected up each piece and laid them carefully on her desk, deciding she would find a box for them in the morning.
