Page 89 of Rot In Knotty Pieces

But the memory that slams me back into my body are the dead birds.

I explode into movement, struggling free of the alphas. I grab my clothes and pull them on. Yanking hard while I mutter, repeating what I’ve seen with suddenly clear sight.

“Kestrel?” Roseland snaps, grabbing at me. I dance out of his way. “Kest?”

I hiss at them and pull on Rolly’s jumper. There’s not much time, I can’t let them stop me. I snatch up a torch they keep by the front door and launch out into the night, ignoring their demands for me to wait. I have to know.

Am I right? Am I wrong?

I forgot to put shoes on, and the bitterly cold temperatures have me gasping, but I ignore the cold and the pain.

I shine the torch, scanning the side of the road, back and forth. Wild animals would have taken the bodies. It’s unlikely they will still remain. I step into the wet grass and shine the torch. Nothing, maybe a bit further…

The raven is lying on its back, legs curled up, eye sockets empty.

Doesn’t mean anything. Not yet.

Of course, it does. You know what this means.

I walk deeper, frightened now. All the peace of the last week, those happy, boring, agonizing, ordinary moments that have been fraught with the growing unease of not being able to explain what’s going on suddenly peels away, leaving me with the cold hard reality of my life.

Father is here.

“Kestrel!”

I ignore Blaze and continue into the tree line. I think I would be less scared walking into a cemetery. The trees are tall and clumped close together. Their shadows are everywhere, and the moonlight barely penetrates, but it pushes through enough just to make sure the darkness dances.

My breath slips from between my lips in a white cloud and every muscle in my body aches.

I want the life we got to pretend we were living. I want those bonds. To belong. To have them.

Raven rises in me, and for once, I don’t fight her.

“If we bond, and he takes us, he takes them too,” she whispers. “Are they strong enough? Because that’s the gamble.”

The devastation of that one sentence in my head almost brings me to my knees. Of course. I didn’t think that far ahead.

“You’re onto something here. We have all been feeling it. Go deeper. He’ll have left a message for us.”

I force my feet to keep moving, one step after another.

Deep inside us, Dove starts to scream. Raven and I ignore her, focusing instead on the problem in front of us.

One step, then another. The grass is cold and covered in frost. The wind is blowing hard, freezing me.

Roseland and Blaze are searching for us. I want to call out, though Raven doesn’t stop me. She doesn’t like it, so I don’t.

We keep walking through the trees until we find a massive old monster, an ancient tree that is different from the others. It’s got as many branches as it has roots, and they all twist and curl over each other as they spread out. It’s a sprawling, massive tree that holds this majesty.

It’s exactly the kind of thing he’d like to ruin. Father is nothing if not dramatic. He will go put bodies in newly built apartments. In buildings scheduled for demolition. On playgrounds. On monuments.

I walk closer, lifting the torch’s beam to the branches, searching one after another. I know there’s something here; I can smell the blood and decay.

I skirt around the tree slowly, moving in a wide circle until I find the body. It’s the elderly man who was missing. He’s been dumped on the branch like a jaguar would leave an antelope carcass. His head is tilted back, eyes open and staring, mouth wide. The rest of his limbs are tangled around the branches, keeping him from falling. Feathers are glued to the branch and his body as if they are falling from him.

Roseland approaches first, Sage a minute behind him. He stares at the body and gently takes the torch from me as he moves closer, peering up at it from different angles.

Now that we’ve found it, we collapse in on ourselves. The pain and sickness returns, the loneliness, the fear.