“Yes, but not from the dissection. Touch them.”
He looked to the birds, then back to Valentina.
“Really?”
“Yes. Just for a moment.”
Green licked his lips and summoned courage.
Reaching out, he rested two fingertips on the cardinal’s prominent exposed sternum.
It was ice-cold, smooth, and dry.
“It’s cold…That makes sense, right? Dead things are cold.”
“Dead things are the temperature of their surroundings. What is the temperature in this room?”
He understood.
He stepped closer to the table and this time rested his entire palm against the cardinal. He placed his other palm over the body of an adjacent chickadee. It was like resting his hands on a snowbank.
“They’re…frozen,” he said.
“Correct. And yet, it is nearly eighty-four degrees Fahrenheit inthis room and has been for several hours. The birds show no sign of thawing.”
Green took his hands from the birds and rubbed them together to banish the chill.
“Is that why they didn’t decompose?”
“I expect so.”
“And…the people who have died?”
“I have put in an information request to the rangers. They have ways of finding out what the local police know, though it will take time. It is also quite possible that if the bodies were transported from the outdoors to some form of refrigeration, the temperature anomalies might not have been discovered.”
Green felt sweat run from his hairline down his cheek and wiped his face on his sleeve.
The cardinal’s eye, a glassy black pearl, reflected the rectangular fluorescent light above the table.
He sensed a rebuke in that eye, in those fragile, unbroken bones gleaming from the center of that blossom of red feathers.
“What about other injuries,” he asked. “What else is damaged?”
“Other than their temperature, the birds appear normal. There is no other sign of lethal injury.”
A wolf’s skull spoke from a fading dream.
Whose work is this?
The horned wolf stood like a statue just behind his eyes.
Is this how I would kill, not-man? Frozen songbirds?
Green gritted his teeth.
“As I recall,” Valentina said, “you mentioned some feeling of localized cold when you first saw the glass fawn, correct?”
He recalled the numbness that came with the glowing deer, that first night in his car, the way his breath fogged the window. It hadn’t seemed important before, not when such minor details sat in the shadow of what followed moments after.
