You must. You can’t allow a terror to shelter inside your own skull.
His hand fell to his side, reaching for the acorn. Instead, his palmfound the wolf, hard and cold as stone, but rippling like water. He left his hand on the wolf’s shoulder.
Together.
The Green of memory seemed to trip on nothing, then flail onto the crosswalk.
A man with graying dreadlocks gasped and reached for him, too late.
There was the bus, a heartbeat away, scuffed chrome and tinted windows, a toothpaste ad smiling joylessly above a line of rolling tires.
The Green lying on the pavement said nothing.
The Green standing beside the wolf on the sidewalk screamed as the tires met his prostrate form and the bus bounced six inches.
Then, everything went still.
All around, the world was frozen. Pedestrians balanced impossibly in mid-step. The man with the dreadlocks was caught trapped in a backward fall as if seated on an invisible chair. Passing traffic transformed into a parking lot.
A great sable shape swooped up and through the motionless bus, perching on the No Parking sign.
The crow had changed. It was more vivid now than in past memory, electric blue eyes and a silver sheen that danced across its dark feathers. It was bigger than a man and its outstretched wings shadowed the entire sidewalk. A foot above its head hovered a dingy patch of nothing in the shape of a seven-pointed star.
The Crow King.The wolf’s understanding was Green’s understanding.A master among corvid kind. A thing of time and memory. Subtlety and understanding. Trades and tricks. Formidable.Not to be trusted.
There was something writhing and inexplicable struggling in the crow’s beak. Green recognized it as his own. It was the moment of his death, plucked out of time, food for a strange monarch on a timeless street.
The crow tipped back his nickel-gray beak and, with a rapid stabbing motion, swallowed the grim moment whole. The recent death fought on the way down.
Green was no longer beneath the bus.
He was standing, struggling for breath, looking about him with wide, frantic eyes.
Time began to thaw, breaking loose, sluggish as melting river ice.
The newly re-alive Green looked up at the crow.
The crow cocked its head and regarded the man.
“You see us? Already?” the crow said in a deep, croaking voice. “We are perceived?”
The Green of memory heard only deep, mocking caws.
The Green accompanied by the wolf heard meaning in the speech.
The Crow King’s voice was a dirge.
Tears streamed down both Greens’ cheeks.
The crow ruffled his feathers and seemed to sigh with his entire body.
“Ah, our young and old associate. You know what was taken then? If you know, it cannot grow back. Absurd and troublesome. As usual.”
The crow shook its head.
“Disagreeable. A trade then. A proper trade.”
The great bird’s beak dipped beneath a wing and tossed something toward Green.
