It’s really too bad for him—and his ego—that I am the Witch of Wild Creatures.
He’s still naming people when I murmur toward the window, “All right, babes. Now’s a good time as any.”
He interrupts himself with a harsh, frightened “What the fuck?” as the first crow flies in, the tips of her wings grazing his head on her way to land on my shoulder.
“Did you just see that?” he asks me, his voice shrill as he stares just to my left, into the black-bead eyes of the bird hanging out next to my face.
Ignoring him, I say the next words slow and firm. “I need you to make me a promise.” Another crow swoops in, circling the room, his wingspan so wide and strong that he brings a brush of strong wind with every flap.
“There are fucking birds in here!” Grayson shrieks from where he’s now retreated: the corner of the bed, holding a Laura Ashley embroidered throw pillow over his head.
Another crow flies in, its shrieks so loud that Grayson and I both wince. “Geez Louise, Harriet,” I murmur, and she lands on my other shoulder, grumbling over my admonishment. “I know, love. You’re powerful and can’t be contained.”
“Are you—” Grayson’s pillow is lowered, his eye peeking over its edge in disbelief. “Are you seriously talking to—”
He can’t finish his sentence, because the rest of this murder of crows flies in. I stretch out my arm where a couple more land. The others swoop all around his head, their caws muffling his screams. “Make it stop!” he finally begs me.
“You haven’t promised me yet.” I pout a little and put one of my hands on my hip and stick it out.
“Promised you what? No, fuck it. It doesn’t matter. Whatever you want, I promise. Just make these things go away.” His voice is choked. “I’ll do anything. God.”
He’s folded so quickly. Boring, really. “Okay, yeah. So, tell your team—the one you’re taking one for by planning on sleeping with me, which isn’t happening by the way, in case you needed that clarified—that if anyone tries to trick me, or prank me, or fuck with me ever again, these crows willeat them aliveat my command.”
It’s not true. I’d never command such a thing, and moreover, that’s not how my powers work. No animal is my servant. They are their own creatures, just like I am my own creature. The crows are here not because I called them, but because we are friends, and they sensed my distress. (And also, crows really like fucking things up and freaking humans out. Even, and maybe especially even, me.)
But the truth didn’t matter when he and all his little asshole bully friends made their plans to humiliate me. So the truth doesn’t matter now.
“I promise!” he yells under the rain of long, ink-black feathers as the crows swirl around and around like a spiral of wraiths.
As soon as his words are out, I nod at my friends, their black eyes as furious as I feel. One by one, they fly out the window, returning to the neighbor’s roof in a clatter of claws and caws.
It takes Grayson a good eight seconds to dress and fifteen more to run down the stairs. I sigh when the slam of the front door makes my own bedroom door rattle on its hinge.
When I look out my window, there is a single crow—Leonora,I’ve named her—swooping down at his face one last time as he wails and jumps inside his Tesla. The tires squeal as he backs out and races away. The slithering smoke from the rubber burning against the asphalt is now the only sign that he was ever here to start with.
I close my eyes, lie back in bed, and sigh, the iridescent teal and purple feathers now surrounding me as though I’d sewn them across my comforter.
I think again of pinecones and their thorns. In order to protect myself—protect my sensitive and aching heart—I must be sharper. Thornier.
If I’m always going to be the town freak, no matter what?
Well. I better just lean into it.
2
When I was sixteen yearsold, I fell eighty feet off the side of a cliff while hiking at Cranberry Falls State Park. My sister Teal had jumped up on the wooden rail we’d just been hiking alongside, and dared me to do the same.
I remember how crisp the air was, as though it had sharpened into a blade sometime between morning and afternoon. How dark it had gotten when we’d hiked deeper and deeper into the woods, the canopy overhead coloring us in shades of green and gray shadows like we had stepped into a monochromatic painting. I remember stepping up with my long legs, staring down at the railing under my feet, thinking that it hadn’t seemed quite so wobbly when Teal was just on it.
And then there was the slip. The look of panic and horror on Teal’s face. Me, opening my mouth to reassure her—we weren’t that close to the edge. Or so I’d thought.
I don’t remember what happened after that. I can only imagine it, based on the firsthand accounts: that of Teal, obviously. That of my sister Sage, who found me eight years later, in thesame woods. And that of my great-aunt Nadia, who keeps the oral records of our ancestral tales—specifically the ones involving the old gods.
The old gods are supposed to be humanoid and immortal, well,gods, and they live in the most wild of places—places thick with trees, thick with creatures, thick with spirits. Nadia says our matriarchs moved here, to the Virginia coast, specifically to Cranberry, because they had sensed that this land was still wild enough that it felt like the sort the old gods would inhabit. When I’d asked her if the gods of our ancestors had come to Virginia first, or followed us here after we’d migrated, Nadia just gave me her annoying, warm,knowingsmile and said simply: “Both.”
Anyway, all this to say that, now my own story—my falling—has been added to the family lore of the old gods. Because after I fell, those old gods picked me up—or maybe levitated me, or perhaps pushed me as though I were a rolling pin—to an ancient oak tree, where they cared for me as though I were Sleeping Beauty in a long,longslumber.
Believe it or not, that wasn’t the worst part of the ordeal.
