Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
The Wild
I woke with a start, screeches and cackles coming at me from all directions, determined to break my head in two. The sun shone hot on my face, and every inch of me itched.
My left eye opened, but nothing made sense.
While I had slept, the world had been saturated in colors I had never seen before, a rainbow of made-up hues.
Bright pinks and purples, yellows, and an iridescent glaze coated my surroundings.
The forms beyond the colors made even less sense: everything looked oversized, a cartoon wonderland, like I had drunk the potion that shrunk Alice.
Drugs then. That could be the only explanation.
A six-foot crow approached me, but instead of walking like a man in a crow costume, it hopped, as if it weighed nothing, much less two hundred or so pounds.
He hopped five feet into the air, landing lightly, barely making a sound.
Then he tipped his head, leaning over to get a good look at me, one large, shiny, black eye blinking in curiosity.
Man, that was the most amazing costume I had ever seen.
Every larger-than-life feather glistened in the sun, the black so glossy it sparkled with all the hidden colors of an oil slick.
I had never seen so many shades of black either: blue-blacks, indigo-blacks, some purple, violescent, and a bunch of shades I had no names for.
I tried to sit up, to lean in closer, and get a better look.
Except my body didn’t want to bend. None of my muscles moved the way they had the last twenty-nine years.
Looking down to see what was wrong, I found myself in a matching crow costume.
Only I couldn’t move my arms and legs inside the mess of feathers.
The feathers were one thing. The real problem, though, was my legs.
They were half the width of my normal legs, jet black, and scaly.
They looked exactly like bird legs, down to the giant talons, if that was even what they were called, peeling off each giant claw.
My new feet clenched into balls, the tips scraping my new skin.
What was happening?
I bent to get a better look at them, but my position on the ground was awkward.
I couldn’t get my head close enough to get a good understanding of what I was seeing.
When I stretched an arm out, I realized this entire drug trip had gone off the rails.
Not only did I have convincing black bird legs and feet in place of my usual ones, but instead of arms, I had wings.
Long, dark, fully feathered wings. With this realization came another one: I could feel each feather where it connected to my skin.
Not just the long feathers that lay in complex patterns on my wing, but the soft, downy ones underneath.
Except for my feet, I was covered head to tail in them, small ones that barely registered to the longest, currently brushed the wrong way in my tail.
Everything itched. The smallest feathers coating my face itched, like a million ants attached to my skin.
My distress had me rolling on the ground until, somehow, I managed to get upright, balancing awkwardly on eight talons.
Instinctively, I shook all my feathers until they rested in their proper spots, still present but no longer uncomfortably so.
Making their presence known as more of a soft pulse than an annoying, scratch-me-now demand.
I had a hard time getting a full breath through my beak, panic threatening to take what was left of my sanity.
I swiveled my head to get a look at my surroundings, flashes of the night before returning when I climbed the godforsaken driveway and met the monster who drugged me.
The world looked completely different. Yesterday’s barren moonscape scattered with rocks had transformed into a wide expanse littered with boulders.
The usual muted grays and browns had a richness I had never noticed before, even if the sizes were all wrong.
I stood close to a wall ten times taller than the one I’d seen the night before, taller than any wall I’d ever seen, as I tried my best to take it in and make sense of it.
“Caw!” screamed the six-foot crow, loud enough for me to jump, landing with a wobble back on my new feet.
“What?” I tried to ask him, only my mouth refused to form the same sounds as it had for the last twenty-nine years. What came out sounded like a shriek.
With another curious look, he took to the air, hoisting his big body into the sky with seemingly little effort.
My body longed to copy his, to see if I could flap these new wings and join him in the sky, but before I could do anything stupid, I stopped myself.
If this was truly a bad trip, then I needed to get all thoughts of flying out of my head.
He landed next to me again, a swooshing sound the only notice that he was back. He hopped close and then away, clearly trying to tell me something. Above us, a good hundred feet up, the trees were taller than any I had ever seen, and they were covered in crows, all screaming at me.
When he took to the air again, my muscles contracted, as if ready for flight, but what I saw next froze me in place.
A giant bird, the size of a small house, flew straight for me, talons so large they could easily snag me in their cruel grasp and tear me into pieces.
Massive white wings, spread up and backward, flapped as if in slow motion.
An owl, my brain registered, even as the crow noises heightened beyond deafening volume.
The owl continued its trajectory, growing larger by the second, and with the massive wall at my back, I had no options and mere seconds before impact.
Two things happened at once. First, the crow who had been at my side until now flew at the owl, pushing it slightly off course.
At the same time, my body, freed from my overthinking brain, reacted by instinct, propelling me up and away.
Without the attacking crow, the owl could have corrected course, but he gave me enough room to escape.
My wings and feet coordinated to form a mixed flight-hop scenario.
It could not have been graceful, but it did get me across the courtyard to a copse of trees.
Beneath the trees were brambles, thick, thorny vines covered in berries the size of softballs.
I hopped inside, tunneling in deeper until I filled the smallest space.
The vines, thick as human arms, studded with hand-sized spikes, framed my vision.
The giant thorns pressed against me, but my feathers kept me unharmed.
My heartbeat slowed eventually, as my brain ran circles inside my bird-head, until I was forced to acknowledge the impossible.
This was not a bad trip. No one had slipped me a tab of acid and left me out in the woods for my thoughts to run wild.
The monster/man I had seen last night had been real, not simply a local legend or a nightmare pulled from my overactive imagination.
He had actually risen out of a boulder and transformed me into a bird. A crow, if my reasoning was right.
Thinking of the monster altered my already teetering reality.
A tug deep inside my gut pulled me in his direction.
Despite my immediate danger, I had a strong desire to see what he looked like during the day.
Had he turned back into a giant boulder?
Sleeping during the day and transforming trespassers at night?
A considerable amount of guilt sat in my stomach.
This situation sucked, but I had brought it upon myself.
I should’ve confirmed the directions and paid a little more for a better rental car, even though I was expected to pay my own expenses.
The guilt faded some, replaced by naked curiosity.
Something my uncle told me many times would get me into trouble, but I had learned to use it to my advantage.
Most of the time. No, getting close to him was stupid, possibly suicidal.
I needed a plan to get as far from here as possible and figure out a way to turn back to my old self.
Logic insisted, if I were truly a crow, then I should be able to fly. I had flown a little in my escape from the owl, who was still out there, looking for an easy breakfast. But I couldn’t stay hidden in the brambles for the rest of my life, even if the large berries smelled enticing.
Movement caught my eye, black feathers signaling it was safe, or safe enough.
The big crow had saved me, so he wasn’t likely to lead me into peril after risking his own life.
I scooted forward, getting the feel for gripping the branches with my new feet, while at the same time adjusting to the circular view I now had of the world.
I could see all around me, the only blind spot between my shoulders.
I flexed them, surprised to find them bulky, all those feathers disguising powerful bones and muscles.
The crow waited for me in a small clearing, taking flight as soon as I emerged.
My savior landed on one of the lower branches, and I wanted to follow.
It wasn’t safe down here on the ground. I opened my arms, no, wings, experimentally.
I had never taken the time to think about flight before.
The birds made it look so easy. But it wasn’t.
It was all about airflow and wing adjustment, feathers tilted in the proper directions.
I pranced back and forth from foot to foot, wanting to scream.
I didn’t know how to fly. I wasn’t a bird, dammit.
Except I was. I wouldn’t be alive for long if I didn’t figure this out.