Chapter 19 #3
Another of the buzzards flew from the roof to his arm.
“Selena was your daughter. This gift is for you,” he said.
The wolf twisted in the air. “Wait, no. Please. I was following orders.”
“Do you think that’s an excuse, wolf?”
“We all follow the orders of our leaders,” Greer said. “You’re an alpha—you understand that. You have to understand.”
I crawled toward the porch, away from the birds and wolves. I had a feeling things were about to get a lot bloodier, and I was already covered with the stuff.
“I do.” Alpha Tomas straightened, his wings picking up speed as he changed position. “Shifters follow the orders of our leaders.”
“Exactly,” Greer said with greedy hopefulness.
“And yet we are all still responsible for our individual actions. It’s unfair, but we choose who to follow.” He craned his neck again, as if examining Greer from every angle might give him new information. It was a very birdlike mannerism. “You could’ve fled your pack. You chose to stay.”
The buzzard on his arm squawked impatiently. I’d never seen an angry bird outside a video game, but the shifter was plainly pissed.
“Patience,” Alpha Tomas whispered in a voice like a song. He looked at me. “These other two trespassers on our territory—do they belong to you, Alpha Lennox? Do you claim them?”
“Please,” Helen whispered.
Stephen said nothing. He didn’t even look my way.
“These wolves are strangers to the La Paloma Pack,” I said. “All three.”
Stephen grunted in pain. Helen’s cries were mournful, something you’d hear at a funeral. Greer shrieked, cursed my name.
None of it changed my mind. They’d made their beds. Now it was time for them to die in them.
The buzzard alpha nodded, and the birds on the roof descended on the Yarnells.
The wolves’ bodies wriggled on the hard-packed dirt—blood, bone, and fur bristling over bulging flesh.
The impact of their expulsion from the pack must’ve hit them harder than I’d thought.
It was as if their bodies didn’t remember how to properly shift.
There was a flurry of wing flaps and a cacophony of screeches.
Then came the screams.
I liked to think I was a decent human, a moral person, but there was something in the Yarnells’ cries that was satisfying. It felt as if the balance between good and evil had tilted back toward the good side.
Greer cursed and spat and bucked as he watched the wake attack the couple. In minutes, birds began peeling away from the group, winging back up to the roof where they cleaned their beaks and rearranged their blood-soaked feathers.
The wolf stared down at the picked-clean skeletons of his friends.
“Mercy. I beg your mercy … please.” Tears, saliva, and snot rolled down Greer’s face and dribbled off his chin as he begged for his life. Unlike the Yarnells, he didn’t attempt to shift. It was as if even his wolf knew the situation was hopeless.
“Mercy can only be given by the mother of the slain.” He nodded to Liza, who turned her small head and stared directly into Greer’s eyes.
Don’t do this,” he begged, his voice cracking. “I have a family. Kids.”
“I once had a child, too. Selena was my family and you murdered her.”
“It wasn’t my fault,” he screamed.
Liza turned her back on him. She leapt off the alpha’s arm and bolted toward the sun. The mother bird flew upward, until I could barely make out her tiny form in the clear blue sky.
A mighty squawk rent the sky, answered by dozens more—far more voices than birds on the roof. The hidden chorus bled out from the cemetery trees. They keened and cawed and shrieked until the din grew so deafening, I couldn’t even hear my own grunting breaths.
Gradually, the birds fell silent, until the only sounds were the mother bird’s war cry and Greer’s guttural, fear-glazed screams.
As she rocketed toward her target, Liza shifted into something else—not hybrid or buzzard, but something so old and foreign humans no longer remembered the name.
Prehistoric—not a dinosaur, but something akin to an eel with wings, a creature birthed in the years immediately after life crawled out of the primordial broth.
She was so unfathomable I found her difficult to focus on.
The bird that had kept Brock Greer suspended in midair tossed the man over his head and flew off. Greer traveled upward a few feet and then fell.
Liza streaked through the sky and struck when Greer was halfway to the ground, the force driving her strange body deep into his chest. The next thing I registered was her emerging from his back in buzzard form.
Brock hit the ground with a terrible clapping sound.
Amazingly, the hit he’d taken from Liza had slowed his descent to the extent that he’d survived the thirty-foot fall.
He lay in the dirt a few feet away from me and stared up at the sky, eyes bulging, mouth opening and closing in shock, hands and feet flexing and releasing.
After a graceful aerial pirouette, Liza landed next to her alpha. Clutched in her hooked beak was the still-beating heart of the wolf who’d murdered her daughter.