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THE SIX-WINGwas written beneath it in shaky handwriting. And beneath:It took them.
My hands were trembling, my heart beating fast as a bird’s in my chest, as I held the map up for the others to see. The creature from the church. The creature from my dreams.
“This is what you saw?” Abby asked, taking the map from me. I could only nod. And then I twisted back to the drawer, a metallic taste in my mouth. There had to be more here. An explanation for how the monster from my dreams was replicated in ink on a madman’s map. There—something at the back of the drawer.
My hand closed around a hard object the size of my palm. A bird’s skull, the bone strangely blackened, easily double the size of the others along the wall. I frowned at it. A strange sensation gnawed its way down my spine. Like a vibration, the hum of a ship’s engine as you stand on the deck.
“Sophia?” Abby said.
A black liquid trickled from one gaping eye, oozing slowly down the contours of the bone. I touched it with my fingertip and found it was slippery, cold. Abby said my name again, but I heard it only distantly. Strange darts of light shivered through the air. My breath slipped from my lips in a cloud.
“It’s happening a—” Liam said, but it was like listening to voices from underwater.
“What—” I began, looking up, and then the room exploded into a flurry of wings. Birds careened, screaming, around me.Wings struck my face. Claws raked at my neck. I caught glimpses of the frantic bodies: doubled limbs, twisted spines, skulls with no eyes or too many. Birds flopped and writhed on the ground, or crashed into the walls. Screamed and screamed and screamed.
And I was alone.
“Liam! Abby!” I yelled, but they were gone. I charged for the door, the skull still clutched in one hand, and dived through. I slammed it shut behind me, putting my whole weight on it, and caught one white-winged bird. I felt the crunch and pop of its hollow ribs between the door and its frame. With the hand that clutched the skull, I shoved the twitching thing back through and latched the door. Bodies thumped against the other side, the screeching muffled now but unending.
I backed away, breath coming in short, sharp gasps that couldn’t seem to fill up my lungs. My stomach lurched and roiled, all acid and revulsion. My shoulder blades smacked against the wall, and it was then I realized the hall was dark. The lights overhead were out. And there was no sign of either Liam or Abby.
I had to remind myself to breathe. Convince myself to think things through, instead of picking a direction and running until I couldn’t anymore.
This wasn’t right. Neither was a room full of dead birds coming violently to life. I crept forward down the hall. Ahead of me, a door banged, again and again, the seconds in between punctuated by the whistle of a strong wind. I followed the sound.
I came around the corner. The door—one of the side doors—flew open again with another bang, then rebounded to almost shut. It couldn’t close all the way because someone was standingthere—a man in a bright green windbreaker. The door hit his shoulders; the wind shoved it open.
I took a step closer, opening my mouth to call out to him, ask if he needed help—and the words shriveled in my throat as I drew close enough to see him in more detail.
The man’s back was pulp. Blood and spurs of smashed bone. Strips of his rain shell and the T-shirt beneath stuck to the door, tacked in place by dried blood, and the flesh beneath had been beaten by the repeated slamming of the door until it was the color and texture of a rotten plum. The back of his head was caved in, glistening with brain matter and bits of skull. With each impact his lips worked to shape words, his eyes blinking hard as if trying to wake himself.
“Puh... puh... puh,” he said, a moldy syllable squashed between his blistered lips.
I gave myself one quailing moment of fear, of revulsion. And then I seized my horror, my hesitation, and flung them away. I couldn’t stand there and do nothing. I couldn’t let fear stop me from helping someone who needed it.
I crossed the last five steps and caught the door in mid-swing. For a moment we stood there, my fingers wrapped around the edge of the door. I closed my throat up, teeth clenched. I shunted my revulsion and fear into the void, and let cold calm take its place.
I’d had to call 911 once before. Some kids had gotten drunk and wrapped their car around a telephone pole. One of them shot through the windshield like a javelin and landed on the lawn, all crooked-limbed and limp. I’d gotten to my front door in time tosee his friends bailing out, running. No one else was home and there was only me, walking across the lawn with bare feet, the dew cold and the boy’s blood blistering hot. The woman on the phone was the calmest person I’d ever talked to. She’d started out trying to calm me down, but quickly realized she didn’t have to. She gave me directions without any frills.Make sure his airway is clear. Put pressure around the cut on his arm. Talk to him.
When the ambulance showed up, she told me I should consider a career as a 911 operator, that I was cool under pressure. When I told the story to my foster mother later, she gave me a look I knew well. Theis there something wrong with you?look.
Wrong or not, it was useful. “I’m going to go get help,” I said now, remembering the exact tone of voice that woman on the phone had used. “Come inside.”
I put my hand on his arm. I needed to get him out of the doorway to keep him from getting hurt any more than he already was—though how he was still standing, how he was stillalive, I had no idea.
When my hand touched his arm, his head twisted around to look at me. He was white, with a reddish beard and brown hair. He looked familiar somehow, but I didn’t think he was one of the locals I’d encountered. “Puh,” he said. Then, “Please. Don’t. Please. Don’t touch me. What are you doing? What are you—what are—”
He rushed forward, away from me, stumbling and running out of the building and toward the steep hillside on the west side of the island, only to stop, stock-still, at the top of it and fling his arms outward with a bestial howl.
Beyond him, the sky was wracked with storms. They masked the horizon as far as I could see, lightning flashing within the clouds with the quick and steady tempo of a heartbeat. The thunder rumbled and cracked like massive planks of wood splintering and straining.
The wind blasted my face. In the distance, another howling voice answered the man, and then another voice, an inhuman keening shriek that came from across the water. From Belaya Skala. The man looked back toward me with a triumphant grin. And then he stepped back, and plunged over the edge.
I raced back inside and slammed the door shut. The birds were screaming again, trapped in that room. I was still clutching the skull. I could feel that there was something carved into the dome of its head, so I forced my fingers open and read: ????????.*
My bones vibrated, the harsh thrum of an engine—
I opened my eyes and stared into the shocked gaze of my reflection in the window, and the thrumming vibration slammed to a halt.
