Kestrel
You know when something is wrong if you listen to your instincts. I’ve been listening so hard and so long that I can feel it long before I step out of the cabin. But the minute I step through that door, I know there is something dangerous out there, something familiar.
I want to be wrong. So badly.
I don’t know if it can see me, but I can feel it in the hostility of the forest, the way it’s holding its silence. The animals are quiet like some big trauma has happened, the birds are gone or hiding, even the insects don’t seem as loud. A predator is lurking out here.
There’s the faintest hint of something in the air that doesn’t belong, a scent I know too well to ignore, but one I can’t accurately describe. It’s foul, and it’s a more visceral reaction. Like my hindbrain just reacts into fear and stops me from thinking clearly.
My brain feeds me horrors and whispers the name of who has done this, but still, I shove it back, needing evidence, needing proof before I have to give up this life I’ve stolen for myself.
Please be wrong.
I slip away, following the forest into the darker, thicker area. Following that stench like its breadcrumbs. The trees grow thinner here, but in thicker density, bushes grow taller than a person, and light is almost non-existent.
My legs tremble and ache, but I force myself to keep going because I need proof.
Raptor pushes in and scans for threats. For a moment, I get the horrible sensation that I am unable to move, that I am a puppet locked inside my mind, but then she gives back control and fades. Her wariness is worse than the loudest scream.
Merle would say to go back to the alphas and convince everyone to run, I’m sure of it. But we can’t run forever.
But I need to know what the message is.
It takes me another hour, and when I suddenly turn a corner, I’m upon it. It’s so grotesque, and yet, despite the fact that it absolutely should not be here, it’s blending into the world already.
For seconds, I can’t see him. All I can see is the grotesque flapping of his flayed skin. The hooks that have him suspended in midair. The careful arrangement of feathers on the ground.
Then I look at his face. Dead, maybe twelve hours. He suffered before he died. Recognition bleeds in slowly.
He was someone who helped me. Gave me clothes and food. A bus ticket. A sleeping bag. He was so kind. In a world full of monsters, I found an angel.
This is the price of kindness.
He’s been hung between two trees by the skin of his back, but feathers have been glued to him with blood.
Black ones. The most concentrated is around a circular hole in his chest. It looks like someone’s just punched through his torso and scooped out his insides.
His eyes have been taken out and instead sitting in those empty, horrifying sockets are two dead birds. One blackbird and one robin.
My head spins and aches fiercely. A brain splitting headache that has me bending over, gasping as memories slam into me. Things that rise and vanish, hit and linger, and others that drag me back into the screaming void where I don’t want to be.
I can’t remember.
I don’t want to remember.
There’s something scary in the dark in my mind. Behind the door. Behind the lock. There’s something so frightening I had to break to get away.
“Don’t look at it!” Jay hisses. “Don’t look, Kestrel. Walk away from that dark place. It’s not the time. Where are you? What do you see?”
I look up and see the branches he’s arranged so they look like wings, the broken hands and fingers that have been wrapped in wire to look like claws.
“There’s a bird. A man who looks like a bird. In the forest. He helped us. Oh, God, this is our fault.”
Merle keens in my head. In the back of my mind, like a soundtrack that never stops, I hear a child start to howl in terror.
“Focus!” Jay coaches. “Focus right here. We’re here. Don’t falter.”
Raptor and Raven join me, and the three of us brace against the memory, pushing it back, forcing it gone.
“His knees and legs are tied together. The skin won’t hold forever, it will peel and he will fall, curled up like a fetus in the forest, likely never to be found again,” I whisper the words in a shaky voice.
Father always did like his kills to be dramatic, everything is about the art. The push of human endurance and how, at the end of the day, we’re all just like animals.
He likes birds.
That’s why he named us Merle.
A common blackbird. A nothing bird. One that will sing when he demands it. Sing or scream. To be kept in a cage.
To sing.
Except I don’t know how to sing, all I know how to do is scream.
My hand climbs up slowly to my shoulder, where the edge of a scar wraps around onto my collarbone.
I screamed for a long time that day.
It was the last time he had me. After that, somehow we got away, but I don’t remember exactly what happened.
All I know is that a cop, this devastatingly beautiful hero detective, came out of nowhere and saved us.
For one second, our eyes met, and then he screamed to run, and Merle stole our body and saved us while he lay dying.
I have loved him from that moment, and just thinking of Rose is like a light, a bracing, wondrous light, and I’m back on firm ground, and my mind has stopped shaking.
No, that’s not when I got the scar…it was before that. A jigsaw piece falls into place, and a memory opens.
It was five years ago. Father was angry. I hadn’t done the job. He hit me once and threw me into the room. In the dark. I was bleeding, and it was all I could smell. It was so cold.
So dark.
It went forever. I thought he’d forgotten us.
I remember that when I woke up, I was in that dark place, and Raven was there.
Whispering that she’d take care of us now.
An alter that was newly revealed, telling me it was safe, but that I had to take the pain so that she could save us.
It took me a moment, but I could feel the others, distantly, in the dark, screaming. So, I took it.
It was months before I came back.
When I did, I was in a city in a soup kitchen, and I was weak and hungry. I was free of the dark. I had no idea how we got there, but I was free, and the wound was just a scar.
Did I really believe that I was free, though?
No, but I’d hoped.
One can always hope.
Father never lets go of his bird. My singing is the only thing that makes him happy when he’s sad.
I grip my head, willing the thoughts to stop.
I back away further and further until I’m out of sight. He knows I’m here. He’ll come after my alphas. That thought freezes all of us.
No, we won’t let him take them from us.
I turn and sprint back the way I came, putting as much space between me and the message as I can.
It takes me too long.
Far too long, and when I see them, I am cold, and I can’t pretend. I don’t have it in me.
So, Merle comes to the front, taking over as I slide into the back, shaking inside and out because I forgot that there was never anywhere we could hide that he wouldn’t find us.
And he’s here.
What are we going to do?