“You wanted to help and now you are actively antagonizing me? Did you forget the few rules by which I asked you to abide?”
She leaned on the back of a chair. Her breathing had become more labored.
“No. I thought…I thought I had discovered something useful.”
She glowered.
“And did you?”
Green sighed.
“Not really. Maybe? It’s hard to say.”
“Do you have any idea what you risked going up there?”
“I mean, I kind of riled up the Crow King, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Valentina raised her brows and shook her head.
“You are…a remarkable…infuriating individual. Do you know that?”
“If it helps, he said he likes your style. I mean, that was the general sense of it, I think.”
Valentina knuckled frost from her lashes.
“Mr. Green, if you knew half of what I knew about that creature…”
“Well, I don’t know. I don’t know because you didn’t tell me. You were awfully quick to lecture me on openness yesterday. Can’t help notice you didn’t mention the giant crow living above your camp when I told you my story of falling in front of the bus, ya know, the story with a giant crow in it? Remember?”
She sighed.
“I was bound by certain promises. And, odd as it may sound, theentity you met above the library was not at the top of my list of suspects for the time-bending black bird you described. That creature typically disdains direct intervention.”
She motioned for him to sit and joined him. Green told her of his experience with Catskill and his previous encounter with the Crow King newly deciphered with the wolf’s help.
Valentina looked at the ceiling, then back at her apprentice.
She looked exhausted.
“That crow…That creature is monumentally dangerous. Elementally dangerous. I have had dealings with it in the past and we have something of a formal arrangement now. It is…one of the protections of the camp I mentioned earlier.”
She shook her head.
“You should be reading journals and going on tiny outings to study glass mice and shadow flies. Not this.”
“I’m…sorry? I guess?”
“You know,” she said, “there is an old, long-debunked theory that supposed cryptonaturalists create the cryptids they observe, that their interest manifests the reality. It’s the ‘spontaneous generation’ of antiquated cryptozoology theories. It’s absurd and yet you make me revisit it. You are an engine of coincidence.”
“Uh, point of fact, it’syourroof. And that bird isyourpal.”
“Bird? Pal? Think again, Mr. Green. The Crow King is a bird the way Everest is a rock and troubling alliances do not pals make. You should remember that.”
Valentina looked terrible. Her face was waxen and she kept raising trembling fingers to rub the frost from her eyes.
“Do we have a plan for tonight?”
“Yes. I am afraid we do. Can you feel your connection with the wolf?”
