15. Merle
Merle
Isee the blackbird and roll to my feet, smiling as it hops further away. It flies to a bush and sits there before standing up and calling to its mate. I was named after the blackbird. He said I was common and plain. Nothing special, but he would turn me into a weapon.
What? Where did that come from?
My skin breaks out in prickles, and the happiness leaches out of me, leaving just an icy shell and a sense of impending doom. I stare at the birds as they hop from branch to branch before they suddenly spread their wings and disappear.
My heart’s beating too fast, and I can see spots. I wrap my arms around myself. Where are my alphas? Where is Pix?
I wandered too far from the nest. Why did I come so far?
The memories sink their claws in, growing stronger, until I can feel the wrongness.
Until there are two worlds superimposed over each other.
I try to shove them aside, but I can’t. The blackbirds reappear, and I stumble after them, following them as they lead me further and further away from the nest.
I have to know. There’s something screaming inside me, and I have to know what it is.
I had parents, a mother. Everyone has them. Why don’t I ever think about them? Why don’t I know what they look like? What happened to my parents?
The question freezes everything inside me, ripping open a wound I didn’t know was there. I’m scared now, more scared than I’ve ever been. In my head, Dove starts to scream.
A woman lies on the ground, her eyes open and unseeing, her throat slit. The flash of that horrifying image slams into my memory, and I freeze like a wild animal caught by a predator, sweating, shaking, hunted. I don’t know if it’s a real memory or not. It’s not mine, I shouldn’t have it.
A man with a bird skull mask looms in the dark, watching.
Is this real?
I’m breathing hard, my fingernails have bitten into my upper arms, and I’m bleeding. Did he kill my family? Did he steal me from my family? Is this Father?
He reaches out his other arm, reaching past me.
I explode out of that memory darkness, pacing the clearing. The blackbird is long gone. My alters have come, I can feel them in my mind, watching through our eyes, remembering, seeing what I’m thinking, seeing it all. What is going on?
Help. I need help. I just have to get back to the alphas.
“Give me control!” Kestrel shouts.
I whirl, turning in a circle, hyperventilating. He grabs a wrist, a pale wrist, and squeezes. I cry out, staring at how huge his hand is in the black glove and the red he leaves all over the pale skin.
No! No! No! No!
It’s not my hand. It’s not MY HAND.
“MERLE!” Jay screams. “Let go!”
I can’t. I have to remember. It’s right there. It’s important. The world is burning. Our world is burning.
He’s got no eyes. Just a white, filthy skull on black fabric. No face. Nothing human. Just a bird skull. He is death.
“You can call me Father.”
I howl, spinning around and around. Gripping my head. The memories keep coming. I’m breaking. Breaking.
I can’t stay…
Everything in me freezes. All of us freeze.
One single bird grabs my mind and rips us open.
A little robin sits on a branch and looks at us. It’s got a startling blue colour on its head and back and a white belly. It’s not really here, I know that, but it looks real. So real. It tilts its head to the side.
It trills.
The silence is the quiet in the world before the bomb goes off. I explode. I shatter. My mind in fragments, tears asunder.
The man wakes me from my sleep. No, it’s not him that woke me, it’s the creak of the floorboards as he shifted his weight.
A sound that shouldn’t be there, one that broke through my childish dreams. He’s standing in the bedroom door, staring at me with a monster on his face.
It looks like a skull, but it’s the wrong shape.
He’s dressed all in black. The night light in the hallway is on, but he’s between us and mummy and daddy, who are asleep in their room.
I scoot up in bed, my back hitting the white bed frame, the shock of the cold startling me out of sleep and fully into wakefulness. I don’t know why I know he’s a bad man, but I know.
When he flexes his hand, I scream. I don’t mean to or intend to, but I’m terrified, and the movement is so on purpose, so angry and dangerous that the sound just bursts out of me.
I throw myself off my bed and scramble across the shaggy rug on the floor.
The familiar smells and safe room are strange and scary now.
Nothing feels safe. I leap into the identical bed opposite mine.
She is silent, sitting up, staring at the monster in our bedroom with huge eyes that look just like mine. I take her hand, squeezing too tight.
I can smell pee, and the bed gets wet and hot before it turns really cold. I do not take my eyes off the bad man or the way he’s turned and is watching us with his big black holes where his eyes should be.
“DADDY!” I scream. “Mummy! Help!”
Dad scrambles. I can hear the sounds he makes as he runs through the house. Mum is right behind him. They shout, calling out, but I can’t make out the words. The relief of knowing they are on their way is enough to take off the sharp edge of terror. Mummy and Daddy will save us. I know they will.
“Daddy will come,” I tell my twin, repeating it several times, just to make myself feel better.
He whirls, rushing out of our room, releasing us from his spell and disappears into the house. Maybe he’s left?
My sister is silent, diamond tears glittering on her cheeks. She looks like a ghost. She hasn’t said anything, nor has she moved. I turn and shake her, but she just makes a strangled gasping sound.
Mummy gets to our room and points to the closet. “Hide, girls.”
I grab my sister and pull her to the closet and shove her in, then I sit slightly in front and pull the door shut, but not all the way. Mum turns and hits him when he shoves her into the room. She crashes to the ground but bounces up, screaming at him. She attacks again. He pulls out a knife.
I’m scared now, really scared. Before, I knew our parents would win, but now I don’t know. He is so big, and Mum is small.
His knife flashes out, and she cries out, slamming into the wall, leaving a smear of blood on the white. She runs at him. He whips around, punching her in the face. She’s dazed, blood streaming from her nose. He grabs her hair and drags that knife across her neck.
I’m screaming.
I’m screaming for all of us. My sister still hasn’t made a sound.
There’s blood. So much blood. Mum falls to the floor. She doesn’t move. Her eyes are open and staring right at us, but she doesn’t blink, she doesn’t breathe. She doesn’t come to me when I scream for her. When I shriek.
There’s just nothingness where there was so much.
“Mummy,” my twin whispers.
I echo her call. All the screams in me silenced as fear grips my throat in a vice. I silently beg her to get up, even though I know she won’t. The monster is gone, he’s fighting with Daddy. I can hear Dad shouting.
For long minutes, all that exists is the body and the metallic scent of blood in the dark room that was filled with childhood dreams.
Then I hear a sound that sends chills through me. A sound that has me sobbing without knowing why. I hear a sound of a person, like they are gurgling liquid, like how we play with our milk and straws when we blow bubbles, but this time, it sounds deeper, louder. It sounds bad.
The house goes completely silent, and I press my hand to my mouth and muffle any sounds that might try to escape. The monster ate our parents.
The monster is coming back. I can see his dark form getting larger as he blocks out the night light, until he’s back in the entrance of the room, staring at the closet where we are hiding.
He takes forever to walk across the space, then he shoves open the door and stares at us.
He’s got no eyes, but I can feel it. When he reaches down, he grabs my wrist, and then my sister’s, in a hold that is so strong I know I will never break it.
He drags us out of the closet and through the blood around our mother.
I look back, staring until I can’t see her anymore. I don’t see my dad ever again. He drags us out of the house and tosses us in the boot of a car. Before he closes it, he says one thing.
It’s the first thing to make him human, to make him less like a monster.
It makes him scarier than any monster.
“You can call me Father.”
“Merle, let go,” Kestrel sobs. “Let go.”
“Fucking hell,” Raptor screams. “Raven, help us!”
Raven slams into us and tries to wrest control from me, but I can’t give it up. I can’t.
Robin. Oh, god.
My sister.
How did I forget her?
I open my mouth and scream, the sound exploding into the forest and shattering the silence.
“Merle, please!” Raven begs, but I ignore her.
I’m spinning, falling, lost in memories, twirling into the darkness of our forgotten past. I don’t want to remember, but how can I not? How did we forget her?
I’m in the shackles, held against the wall. My wrists are bleeding and raw from struggling to get free, and my back is a mass of ripped skin from the whipping. The worst part is that I’m so used to the pain that it’s not the problem.
No, what is the problem is how hungry and thirsty I am. I’m going insane from the need to drink. At one stage, blood ran down my arm from my wrist, and I lapped it up, just to get some liquid. It tasted gross, but it was something wet.
Robin is lying on the table again. It’s his favourite way of punishing us. One on the cold steel walls and one on the table. We get to watch each other, suffer together, and learn from our mistakes so we don’t make them again.
She hasn’t eaten in too long. Neither of us has, but Robin refused food all last week. She’s thin and weak, and the fight, the fire she normally has, is gone. I think this time, he forgot about us, maybe he died. Perhaps he was called away. No, he will come back. We’re not going to die.