Bad Blood

by Carly Anne West

  “Here, let me,” says Trinity charitably, and I don’t argue.

  She picks her way around the weeds growing up in the cracks between the cinder-block walls and the open field that’s exposed through a break in the wall. We duck through the hole and into the field, and from there, a different kind of wall stretches before us: one made entirely of the tallest trees I’ve ever seen.

  “Perfect home for a half-human-half-bird hybrid, huh?” says Enzo, and I’m rethinking what I believed was a silent thanks from before. He’s definitely enjoying my fear now.

  Trinity takes us to an opening, if you can call it that. It’s an overgrown footpath that was at some point cleared of its brush. That’s not the case anymore, though. Thorny blackberry vines and what I’m nearly positive is poison ivy crisscross the path.

  “You know the old ‘leaves of three’ saying, right?” says Trinity.

  “Yep, ‘leaves of three, leave ’em be or you’ll be a swollen itchy red mess for weeks and all your friends will laugh at you.’ That’s how it goes, right?” I say, still staring at the vines.

  “Precisely,” she says, and takes a tiny leap over the first tangle of growth and into the immediate darkness of the forest.

  Enzo follows her, and he lands with a little yelp I’m sure he didn’t mean for anyone to hear. I’m last, and I practically have to do a gymnastic tuck jump to get over the clump of death plants, and when I fall safely on the other side, I let out an even louder yelp than Enzo did.

  “Nice landing,” says Enzo.

  We pick our way through the woods in silence to start with, training most of our attention on the plants to avoid. After a while, though, we seem to have caught a rhythm, and the path appears to have widened just enough for us to walk normally instead of tightrope-style. It feels like we’ve been walking for some time, but we were moving pretty slowly at first, so who knows.

  “So, Forest Protectors,” I say.

  “We don’t really have to talk about that right now, do we?” says Enzo.

  “Has anyone ever actually seen one of these things?” I say.

  “Depends who you ask,” Trinity says. “It’s always somebody who knows somebody who saw one once.”

  Weirdly, I’m a little disappointed. So much about this town is wacky, I was sort of hoping they’d be a little more original than dragging around an urban legend about a mysterious local creature. They get points for originality, though. Man-bird combo is one I’ve never heard before. And apparently there’s a whole flock of them.

  “Then there’s the nests, of course,” says Enzo, and this stops me for a second.

  “Sorry, nests?”

  “I don’t know if you can call them nests as much as habitats,” says Trinity. “I think because people have mostly found them in the trees, they just refer to them as nests.”

  “In the trees?”

  “Yeah,” Enzo says. “Pretty high up, too. It even got the university’s attention. They sent some bird scientists out here, what’re they called?”

  “Ornithologists,” says Trinity without turning.

  “Right, those. Anyway, they sent bird doctors out or whatever, and they studied the nests, and none of them could figure out what would make a nest that big.”

  “Um … how about weirdos trying to scare a town into believing there are bird people in the woods?” I say, but I know I sound a little desperate because now we’re talking about actual scientists who don’t have answers.

  “Yeah, they considered that,” says Trinity. “But there was some animal rights organization that got involved at that point, and they prevented the scientists from removing the nests from where they’d been found. Without being able to study them in a lab, the ornithologists sort of dropped it.”

  “Dropped it?” I say. “That feels a little unscientific.”

  “Or people just stopped talking about it. I don’t know,” says Trinity, distracted. “Hey, I thought I was taking us in the direction of the factory, but—”

  “But what?” I ask, feeling more on edge than when we started this little journey I insisted on.

  “None of this looks familiar,” she says.

  “What’s ‘familiar’?” says Enzo. “It’s just a bunch of trees. It all looks the same.”

  I think Enzo and I are competing for most uptight. He might be in the lead.

  “Things have changed a lot since the last time I was here,” says Trinity, and now even she sounds a little worried.

  None of us, though, is prepared for the distant rumble of thunder that ripples through the sky.

  “I’m not the only one who heard that, right?” I say.

  “Nope,” says Enzo.

  “It’s okay,” says Trinity. “We don’t really need to worry until we see ligh—”

  A bolt of lightning illuminates the sky that’s suddenly roiling with heavy gray clouds.

  “We should go,” she says, her tone shifting in the space of a second.

  Fat drops begin to fall from above, tapping the tops of the leaves at first, but the tree canopy only protects us for a minute. Soon, the rain begins breaking through.

  “Okay, we’re turning around!” says Trinity, officially losing her cool.

  We spin in the opposite direction, and Enzo, who was in the middle, cuts to the front of the line, giving us a running start.

  The leaves are quickly growing slick, and the dirt beneath our feet is a river of mud within minutes. We move fast, no longer careful of the plants or the vines, no longer picking our way through. Instead, we crash around, dodging low-hanging branches and the buckets of rain suddenly pummeling us.

  When we reach a fork in the path that I don’t remember facing on the way into the woods, we all stop.

  “Which way?” Trinity says, looking straight at Enzo.

  “How should I know?”

  “You’re kidding, right?” she says, not laughing.

  But neither is Enzo. “Why would I be kidding?”

  “Because you’re the one who was leaving the trail,” she says.

  “Says who?” Enzo squeaks, having to raise his voice over the thunder.

  “Why would I be doing it? I was navigating!” says Trinity.

  They turn to me.

  “Really? I can still barely find my way back to my house from school!”

  “Great,” says Trinity, slapping her arms at her sides. “I’m starting to understand how those kids got stuck out here, and I don’t think it had anything to do with Forest Protectors. They were just as dumb as we are.”

  But as the wind begins to kick up, choosing a direction—any direction—takes on a new urgency.

  “I say right,” Enzo hollers over the wind.

  “Right it is!” I say, and we lean into the wind and the rain, vines still doing their best to scrape our shins.

  All at once, I’m aware of a new sound, one even more worrying than the thunder and the wind. Suddenly, there’s a low groan coming from behind us … or maybe from the side. It’s impossible to place, but one thing is certain: The sound isn’t human.

  “Guys?” I say, and the other two stop, turning to see my expression before hearing the sound themselves.

  “MOVE!” Trinity screams, pushing Enzo. I back away in the other direction, my foot slipping on a pile of leaves as I tumble backward and down a steep embankment.

  I tumble just long enough to see the tree come down, its skinny trunk unable to withstand the violent winds of the storm.

  Then I hit a skid and roll, somersaulting and feeling the jagged edge of something rake a long scratch down my back.

  When I land, I’m on my stomach, facedown in the mud, fully unprotected by the tree line. I’ve come to a stop at the bottom of the hill and into a clearing.

  I come to my senses a little too slowly, and I spring to my feet searching for the falling tree above. Luckily, it must have hit the ground higher up, or I would have been about a thousand years too late to miss being squashed.

  Which reminds me …
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  “Enzo! Trinity!” I yell, but I can hardly hear my own voice over the wind, let alone expect them to hear me. Dread coats my stomach as I consider where the tree might have landed—if it could have landed on them.

  “They got out of the way,” I say to myself. “They got out of the way in time.”

  But I don’t know that for sure, and even though the scrape on my back is burning and I have mud up my nose, I peer through the rain for any way out of the forest: an overgrown path, the hint of a signpost, anything.

  Then, at the far end of the clearing, I see my first evidence of civilization since we entered the forest. It looks to be a wooden pole about hip height. I run across the clearing, feeling weirdly exposed away from the trees. When I reach the pole, I see it marks what was likely once a path, though this path is even more obscured than the one at the top of the embankment.

  “I’ve never wanted a machete more,” I say to myself, and I have to laugh because when have I ever wanted a machete?

  I form my hand into a little blade, my thumb tucked against my palm, and push my way through the overgrown trail, resigning myself to the curse of three leaves.

  I expect to find myself in another clearing at the end of the path. What I don’t expect is a relay tower.

  “What?”

  It’s almost as if someone planted seeds, and a relay tower sprouted up in the middle of the forest. I can’t see the top of it from where I stand, but I can see the wall of a small outbuilding in its shadow. I follow the wall, high grass pressing against it and eroding the wood near the foundation. The wind is so strong now, it’s blowing the rain sideways, flickering in my ear and shooting into my eyes. I put my head down as much as I can so I can still see where I’m going, but mostly, I’m holding on to the wall for guidance.

  Then my hand finds the end of the wall, and I turn with it, walking a few more steps before finally finding a surface that’s metal.

  It’s the knob of a door.

  “Could I be this lucky?” I say, and of course not. It’s locked.

  You could just …

  “No,” I tell the voice in my head that would love nothing more than to turn me into a full-blown vandal. “I’m not a criminal.”

  Oh no? Then why do you still carry your lockpicks everywhere?

  And really, is it that much different than picking locks in our apartment building in Germany? In our new house in Raven Brooks?

  The rain has soaked through my clothes. I can feel the kit pressing against me in my pocket.

  “It’s breaking and entering,” I say to the voice.

  You’re right. Death by pneumonia or bird people is way better.

  But it isn’t the voice that convinces me to slide the kit from my back pocket and fumble the pick out of the slot and into the keyhole.

  It’s the sound of a single footfall landing on a twig somewhere nearby.

  Somehow, the footstep cut through all the crashing of the storm, just to let me know it was nearby. Just to let me know I was being followed.

  “Enzo?” I call, but either I’m not loud enough or it’s not Enzo.

  My hands shake as I twitch the pick in the lock, clumsily searching for the catch while I listen for another footfall. It doesn’t take long before I do.

  My hands shake harder, and I drop the pick I was using in the grass.

  “Get it together,” I say under my breath, casting a quick glance over my shoulder. I can’t tell if the trees are moving from the wind or from …

  Forest Protectors.

  “Shut up,” I tell myself and pull a different pick from the kit—any pick, it doesn’t matter. I’d jam a screwdriver in there at this point. Whatever it takes to break the lock off.

  By some miracle, I feel the catch despite all my gracelessness. I practically fall through the metal door, but when I turn to lock it from the inside, I see that I’ve done exactly what I feared and broken the lock.

  The building is dark and small, and I have to slide my hands along the wall on the inside just like I did on the outside. I thought it would be better to get out of the rain, but the sudden silence is unnerving.

  Except it’s not exactly silent because I can still hear the wind from outside slamming against the building, making the internal workings of this place moan under the strain. It gives off the impression that the whole place is alive.

  That’s maybe the worst thought you’ve ever had, Aaron. Nice work.

  I should be taking it slower than I am, but I’m not about to stay near the door with the broken lock and wait to see if whatever was in the forest manages to find its way in.

  I press both my hands to the wall now, desperate for another doorknob or at least a light switch.

  The floor is slick and uneven, and the air is cold, even colder because I’m completely soaked. My shirt and my pants are holding tight to me like they’re terrified, too. I’m shaking all over, and whether it’s from the cold or abject terror, I’m having a hard time walking under all this trembling.

  After another few minutes of stumbling every three feet, I make myself stop, pressing against the wall and balling my hands into fists just so I can hold still long enough to take a few deep breaths. I haven’t heard the door open yet, but I’m sure I would have heard it in this small place, so all I need to do is hang out here and wait for the worst of the storm to pass.

  Then you can sprint home like your life depends on it. Because it just mi—

  “Don’t,” I scold the incredibly unhelpful voice in my head.

  Then, after one more deep breath, I lean to my right and, my back still pressed against the cold wall, prepare to move farther down what I can only guess is some sort of corridor, when all at once, I fall through an opening in the wall.

  Instead of stumbling into emptiness, my arm catches what feels like a table leg, and I buckle over something else that finds my middle, knocking the wind out of me before I finally trip and land on the floor.

  Graceful as always.

  Groaning, I find my way back to my feet and stare around the room until my eyes have a chance to adjust to the new level of darkness in here. I risk another step, and almost immediately, my foot kicks something over that sounds like it could be made of metal.

  Crouching, I hook my fingers around a handle and feel my way to the bottom of a camping lantern. A stash of battery-operated lanterns was one of the few treasures Mya and I found in the storage crevices of our apartment building in Germany. I assume the landlord kept them in case of power outages, but Mya and I used them for basically everything other than emergencies. We lighted forts with them in our rooms and placed them strategically throughout the apartment, pretending to be agents of international espionage. We rolled them under our beds when we couldn’t sleep and read or drew instead.

  I feel for the tiny key dial and turn it, watching as the yellow glow from the lantern floods a spot on the floor. When I hold it up, I quickly realize I’m in an office full of abandoned furniture, filing cabinets, and various sharp objects and gadgets for which I couldn’t begin to guess a use.

  What’s weirder is that it’s like the storm that’s raging outside right now somehow made its way in here years ago, because this place is covered in dust and broken parts. File folders are torn apart and dumped into a mottled pile in a corner. Wooden chairs that once probably stood around a small table in the corner of the room are snapped into pieces, their jagged edges pointing to the ceiling. The desk I whacked my arm on still stands stoically in the middle of the room near the door, but everything on top of it has been torn apart, water damaged, or crumpled beyond recognition. A filing cabinet lies on its side along the opposite wall, its drawers emptied and sticking out like tongues.

  Then there’s what remains on the walls: a painting of some sort of country setting, all green smears of bushes and fields dotted with poppies. There’s a worn topographic map of what I’m guessing must be the city limits of Raven Brooks and maybe more. There’s a chalkboard whose writings have long since been
erased.

  There’s a side-by-side frame holding two degrees from the university: one for Roger A. and one for Adelle R. Peterson.

  “No way,” I whisper, because it couldn’t possibly be that I’ve managed to stumble straight into an office that used to be occupied by my Very Important grandparents who no one will talk about.

  If the university degrees weren’t enough to convince me, though, the overturned picture on top of the desk is.

  It’s yellowed and dislodged from its broken frame, curling at the edges without protection behind the glass. There’s no mistaking it’s them—despite the wedding attire, they wear almost identical expressions in the picture that hangs in their house. The house that’s now ours.

  I’m just about to go back to wondering what the heck this building is when I hear the sound I’d almost forgotten to fear: the door.

  It creaks on its hinge exactly the way it did after I picked the lock and slammed it shut, right before I realized I’d broken the lock off.

  Now I hear it shut again. I hear the footsteps that follow.

  Whatever feeling had returned to my body after I warmed up drains out of me now, and it takes everything I have to overcome the paralysis that’s set in. There’s exactly one hiding place in this room: behind the overturned table in the far corner.

  Which would mean I’m literally cornered.

  Panic leaves me undecided for too long, and all at once, the footsteps have gained speed, traveling down the dark corridor at an alarming rate. I don’t have any choice but to stay in the office and hide.

  Practically leaping over the table, I crouch behind it, remembering too late that I left the lantern glowing in the middle of the room.

  When the footsteps come to a stop, they’re just outside the office.

  There’s only one reason someone would be here—whoever is here saw me come in. Whoever is here followed me.

  My heart pounds hard enough to hurt my chest, and for a second, the room grows dark and I think maybe the lantern went out. Then I realize it isn’t the room that’s gone black. It’s my vision. My eyes are shut tight.

  A footfall echoes inside the room where I struggle to stay conscious, but I might as well pass out. If a bird person is about to kill me, maybe it would make the pecking hurt less.