We crept up Main Street, stepping over debris and a monarch of moss. We slunk around a windowless bus in the middle of the street; its side read, “The Most Powerful Network On The Globe, We’re More Connected Than Ever!” I tried to do as the orca matriarch had advised—be brave, digest uncertainty, tame fear. Dee avoided deep pools of stagnant green water and kept her wings retracted to avoid mold and rust, that chemical conquistador.
Where were the crows?
I looked up at Migisi on Dee’s arm, ivory head darting like a faulty windup mechanism. Flickering panic in her eyes told me she had only just arrived here too. She had no idea what we were facing.
The center of Edmonds had a traffic circle and a desiccated fountain, Jackson Pollock-ed with moss and mold. I looked for answers in the trees but knew better than to call out. When Aura is silent, it’s silent for good reason, but this desolation was bone-chilling.
Spooked, Dee started to run. She was a gazelle, leaping over the mangled bodies of motorbikes. Migisi skimmed the air above Dee’s shoulder; I was in a cage of fingers. We ran and ran, alongside homes once prized for their proximity to Puget Sound, with sagging shingles like sloughed scales. And as we passed our allies—overgrown trees—my gut told me something was wrong with them.
And Aura remained utterly silent.
Dee, absorbed with every inch of her new world, was the first to spot signs of a life. She slowed to catch her breath, bending over a blackberry bush crossing a residential street. Dee coiled a leaf up to her nose. She had found a beautiful candy-striped leafhopper, shaped like a miniature shoehorn, belted with glowing blues and reds. The insect’s head was a muted yellow. She stared with a terrorized eye. An eye that saw us as winged and limbed demons.
I craned forward to speak to the insect; I saw her legs coil, readying. Migisi let out one sharp warning. The candy-striped leafhopper stayed put. She understood not to mess with Migisi, lest her colorful little body be Benihana-ed into a small mound of glitter.
“Why is Aura silent?” I whispered to the cupcake-colored insect.
Frothy liquid waste bubbled from her abdomen, settling like spawn onto the leaf below her. Ah, the call of nature…
“Shhhhh,” she hissed. “They’re in the trees.”
I darted my head to search the crowns. Migisi lifted her zero-bullshit gaze from blue and red stripes to the haunted trees. And the candy-striped leafhopper, who didn’t trust anyone and so had survived thus far, leapt deep into the spiraling talons of the blackberry bush. Migisi, enraged, hopped from Dee’s arm to take her aggression out on an ancient carton of semi-skimmed milk. When she was done, it was essentially confetti. While we’d been at sea, I guess she’d really been through some shit.
Dee thrust her arm out, summoning Migisi’s talons. We took off, our eyes in the trees. What had the leafhopper been so afraid of? I swear to you that what I saw next was real.2 I saw a tree trunk move. A flicker of movement. Not in the crown, but the trunk of the tree. Jumping Jamba Juice. I tried to remember anything from when Big Jim expertly self-diagnosed on WebMD—did I have yellow fever, scurvy, chlamydia? Was there some hallucinogen in the air? Is that why there were no birds here? I did feel sick to my stomach, and it had been ages since my last fish head. Maybe I was losing my mind. Burning the last fumes of sanity.
I jerked my head, urging us to keep moving, eyes on everything. Shit—for now, we had broad daylight on our side. But come nightfall? Then what?
A bouquet of decay suddenly filled our faces. The smell sat in our mouths, pooling like blood. Migisi lifted to inspect, the first time since we’d reunited that she seemed able to leave us. We followed to find her perched on a rusted shopping cart. She presided over plagues of plastic bags, something’s scattered teeth, a Squatty Potty, and a jar of Belizean hot sauce. Migisi’s eagle eyes scanned an oozy mass of liquid that smeared the road. Grayish slime. Small, indistinguishable lumps suspended in goo. Red ribboning snaked in between the gray slime. Surely, blood. And something else. It looked like frog spawn lying on a mountain of mud. The spawn of a freakishly large frog, I was sure of it. One rogue frog embryo lay close to me, between a burst of black knapweed and a junk-mail catalog papier-mâché mess. Dee’s frown summed up our confusion. I hopped closer to examine the amphibian embryo. They were not frog spawn.
They were eyes. MoFo eyes. All of them.
The world spun. Tree limbs seemed to swipe at me, my legs like burnt twigs. That horrible memory of Big Jim in our Ravenna yard with the shitty little smug-faced gnome I’d been trying to put out of commission. An image, clear as a glass squid, of Big Jim’s icy-blue eyeball as it tumbled right the fuck from his head. Dennis, with his angel-wing ears and his airborne jowls, thundering after the eyeball. Big Jim’s very last words: “What the fuck?”
The memory was too much. The pain unbearable. I was exhausted from constantly wishing the world could be better. I fluttered my gular, mouth gulping in air. Dee pulled me tighter to her. We had to get to Bothell, and fast. How else could I keep Dee from all this horror? Keep her eyeballs in their natural habitat? Keep her from becoming what every other member of her entire species had become?
A sound finally spoke to us. The crisp snap of a twig underfoot. Three heads—crow, MoFo, raptor—shot to the tree line behind us. The snarl of overgrowth let us down, hiding horrors. But we knew with the sense and savvy of prey animals; we knew. We were being hunted.
And the hunter was here.
Dee used her magic wand of a finger to point out the one who’d come for us. And there, in between blackberry brambles, I saw an eye. Not a human eye, not like the ones gathered in a nightmarish heap of slimy trash where we stood, but a spherical orb still attached to its host. The eye stared, unblinking.
Dee raised her finger again, slowly trailing that pearly, half-moon nail. It hovered on another pair of glowing eyes. Her finger trailed once again to where the blackberry bush wrestled a great skeleton of English ivy. There, in among a war of green, was another pair of pupils, dark and terrifying as the ocean at night.
Three. Three sets of eyes. Three brothers. And a great, thorny dragon of a bush whose body hid stripes of black and orange.
Footnotes
1Technically that’s what those tusks are—an elongated cry for orthodontic work.
2I’ll also remind you that I had, regrettably, not had a drop of whiskey or so much as one fermented berry in a long time.
Chapter 14
S.T.
Edmonds, Washington, USA
Nobody moved. Nobody blinked. Nobody chanced a breath or thought. The solitary eye—the first Dee had spotted—shone with recognition. It knew it had been seen. A glowing ember, it emerged with its partner. Their habitat—a massive striped head—burst through brush. Gnarled, anarchic limbs of bramblebush clawed at black and orange, scratching to hold on to the creature as if trying to help us. They couldn’t. There isn’t much that can hold back an adult male tiger.
He had changed since I last saw him, grown into his colossal face and body. His coat was heavier, stripes smoldering. Gray scars ran like long-dried rivers, eeling along his cheek and broad nose. Even a tiger had battled to survive a city changed. A growl, the rumble of an idling chain saw, clambered from his throat. It sucked the warmth from the air. From Dee’s arm, Migisi stretched her full wingspan to give Dee great dark wings. And Dee’s face? I couldn’t see it; I was wrapped in her wondrous fingers, ransacking my corvid-MoFo mind to stop the claws of a tiger. Claws and fangs that are drawn to the delicate skin of a neck, to the percussive crunch of a windpipe. And if you know cats, you know that they cannot be bargained with. Cats obey no one. Where prey is concerned, they are puppets, strung into violence by invisible masters. The other two pairs of eyes stayed hidden. For now.
The cumbrous cat that stood several feet in front of Dee roared, a cloud-parting roll of thunder that quivered soil. Migisi was airborne now, flicking out the night-black switchblades of her feet.
A weapon. Fire. A distraction. A stampede.
My mind was like Dennis, rubbery nose sweeping the ground, gangly legs propelling his hunt for an answer. And I remembered that Dennis and I had been in this situation with these tigers before; we’d called for help, and the UW Bothell murder had come, pelting the tigers with a rainfall of debris from the sky. Where were they all now? I stole a glance at pale scoliotic trees, but there was nothing. Aura remained disconnected.
Dee, my nestling, opened her mouth wide. She heaved out a roar, a furious bellow from her guts thrown back in the face of the big cat. There was no fear in her voice, not a tremble in the fingers that cradled me. She flung me to the cracked cement of the Edmonds sidewalk behind her—a protective move. I ruffled, shot to my feet, and looked up to the back of her powerful legs, their slight squat. Dee stood tree tall and ready to take on a cat that weighed six of her.
The other tigers didn’t stay hidden any longer.
Flash fast, two eyes burst from the bushes. A blur of orange and black flew at me in great leaps. Claws like hot scythes clamped down on my skin and then I was flung upward, suddenly higher and higher, until I was hovering above Dee’s Angora rabbit–head and the flame-licked jungle cat in front of her. The second cat, the one that had charged me all those years ago at the Woodland Park Zoo, was below us, baring flesh-shredding teeth and a raw pink tongue. His sabered claws swung at the air, at me, furious to have missed my black body. I cawed at Migisi.
“Put me down!” I squirmed and thrashed, but when a bald eagle decides to snatch you in her talons, there is jack cheese you can do about it—just ask any salmon you know. And so we were far above my darling Dee, watching her standoff with a Malayan tiger in aerial view. The third tiger emerged sloth slow. He was somewhere in between the sizes of his brothers, approaching his largest sibling. The behemoth brother spun to snarl and swat at his striped sibling—a quick flurry of fire.
He’d found Dee first. She was his.
Dee used this territorial altercation of claws to snatch up a fallen branch. I called out to her in the famous unrelenting corvid alarm, the loudest call I knew. I didn’t know what was out there, but I no longer cared. I screamed, daring a bigger predator to come for us, to take on these Malayan brothers.
“Caw, caw, caw, caw, caw, caw, caw, caw, caw!”
And then a terrible realization. Dee’s branch was rotten; I could see it. It wouldn’t host a bushtit, never mind stave off Panthera tigris. But she knew this. She knew trees better than the creamy contours of her own skin. She held out that branch to look bigger. She spread her wingspan—a great owl, an eagle—to show them how tough she was. She roared again, flashing teeth and tongue. She puffed her shoulders, leaning in to fight.
The largest tiger placed a paw toward Dee. I screamed from my soul. Dee lifted the rotten branch and pointed it directly at the tiger. The third brother’s curiosity was piqued. He gave up swiping at the broken black bird and the eagle in the sky. He circled back to the second brother. All three tigers now faced the end of the branch stump with unblinking fascination. All three tigers facing down Dee.
“Migisi! Fucking help!” I squawked, pleading with her to drop me and go to Dee’s aid. My pipe cleaner legs started to quake. Migisi tightened her talons on my wings. She would not see us both die here. The biggest cat placed a paw closer, his whiskers flinching.
“Go for his eyes, Dee! The eyes!” I shrieked, scanning for tools below. But I could read Dee’s body better than any book, and I saw all the telltale signs that she wasn’t listening to me. She’d tuned out the whole world. Dee was a tiger now. She lunged to poke the tiger’s nose. A head jerk. He wrinkled his lips, lifting his whiskers. A sharp snarl, flashing of long fangs. Dee snarled back. The tiger opened his jaw, cavern of pink and black, angling his teeth down to bite the branch.
“NO!” yelled Dee in perfect English. “DON’T TOUCH.”
Three striped heads shot up. Migisi flinched. The hair along the back of three tigers rippled into tight shivers. The biggest brother let out a long, melancholy moan. His brothers paced behind him. He chuffed. Dee chuffed right back at him. And then—Migisi flapping great gusts—I got a bird’s-eye view of the largest tiger as he swiped the white fur of his cheek against the butt of the rotting branch.
“Don’t touch!” commanded Dee in the dying language I’d taught her. “Never touch!”
The second and third tigers couldn’t help themselves. They trotted up to her, muscling one another to get close. One rubbed his face against her side. Bicep flexed, she prodded him with the stick.
“No!” she said, her voice thunder. “Mine tree!”
I couldn’t. Believe it. The tigers—frickin’ cats, I will remind you—obeyed her. Backing up, moaning in submission. Blood would not spill from her throat today, near-extinct sounds would. The once-captive brothers had been raised at the Woodland Park Zoo and hadn’t heard the roar of a MoFo in a very long time. Cats hold on to memories like prey in their paws. Their lives had been touched by the magic of MoFos. They’d been curious and found the last one, and, much like this droopy-winged crow, they had fallen under her soft-skinned spell. A trio of lovesick kittens. Tigers don’t purr, but I watched them squint their eyes, chuff, rub their scent glands, and behave like obsequious butt badgers. The brothers fawned over Dee, but she kept them at bay with her body language, a crumbling, rotten branch, and instincts more evolved than I’d ever imagined.
It was unreal.
Dee had never seen a tiger before, only heard about them in my stories. I hadn’t realized she’d been listening to it all—the stories of a very handsome crow and warnings about the world delivered by bees, or the loamy message of a mushroom. She knew if she’d have shown fear, she’d have been dinner. Dee reached her fingers out like charmed snakes. She ran them along the head of the largest tiger, while he chuffed and behaved like a house mouser on catnip. But Dee kept those shoulders and that branch up. A branch that I now remembered was reminiscent of the target sticks these tigers had been trained with at the Woodland Park Zoo.
The third tiger tried to get close to Dee. He kept his reflective orbs on me, primal urges lurking in their lenses. Cats can never be fully trusted; they wear a call to violence as well as that tongue-lashed coat.
“We know you,” came a startling voice. The larger tiger tore his attention from Dee, allowing his brothers to thrust their hulking bodies forward to rub against her feeble branch. His amber eyes bore into me, where Migisi had placed us safely on a middle branch of a Pacific dogwood.
Oh, you fucking speak, I thought to myself, further proving that cats are just fuzzy middle fingers.
“You do,” I said.
“Is this the last Keeper?” he asked, his voice an earthquake’s early rumble. Keeper, like zookeeper. I was right; he had never forgotten his former life, but if there was empathy in his voice, I heard none of it.
“Yes,” I told him. “And if you so much as bruise her, I will make a limited-edition poncho out of you.” Migisi threw a sharp note into the air. Migisi had my fucking back.
The tiger let out a rumbling chuckle. “I like her smell. Now my will keep her.”
“‘My’ will not keep her,” I said calmly from a ghostly branch. “I am The One Who Keeps.”
This didn’t seem to register. Or he just gave a negligible number of shits. The third tiger, the smallest—which is relative because he was still the size of Nargatha’s 3060 Series Meditub™—leapt toward the base of the tree, thrusting onto hind legs. He vomited blood-boiling roars, raking his switchblade claws down bark.
“My brother wants to open you,” said the largest tiger.
“Jesus,” I said.
“He remembers.” The smallest brother remembered once leaping at me as I fell from a tree at the Woodland Park Zoo all those years ago, back when I still had the privilege of flight. He remembered the crisp, lemony scent of the defect in my wing, a primal calling. A scent subpoena.
I got plucky with the biggest cat. “Tell teeny tiger I’m sorry that the only thing that’s shorte
r than his temper is his legs.”
The tiger who wanted to snack on my impressively toned thighs roared louder. But my focus was on how the biggest tiger was in charge, how he kept snapping his head back to Dee. Curiosity and fond memories had caught these tigers by their stripy tails. The big brother snarled, and the tiger on two legs backed down, trotting away from the base of my tree.
I stared that big cat down, black eye to amber. “You remember how they used to be, the Keepers. And you’ve had to fight The Changed Ones.” The tiger kept his burning gaze on me, but for a moment, a hint of exhaustion, frustration, something flickered in those burning eyes.
“We are together stronger than just my,” he said.
“What is out there?” I asked.
“Death,” he said with a snarl. Fucking cats. It was then I had to make a quick decision. We could escape these homicidal fur balls and their paper-shredder personalities, and we’d have to chance it to UW Bothell alone. But the brothers’ scars told stories; they’d been here at ground zero for over a decade. They knew exactly what was lurking in the shadows.
I flashed back to an image of my salmon-cheeked nestling before her beautiful feet could carry her, of gingerly tucking beakfuls of blackberries into her smile.
I flashed back to an image of a horrible thing—not crab, not MoFo—and how it tore after my nestling, blood and destruction in its eyes.
“If you get us to UW Bothell safely,” I said to him, “you can keep her.”
Migisi protested in a patter of piccolo notes. She was already having an epically shitty day, and here I was, inviting the mutant orange ambassador of a species that had waged genocide on us egg layers to skip along on a suicide mission. Casually offering to trade our most precious possession. I shot her a look, a sort of “trust me” look, and she took her feelings out on the upper tree trunk, chunks of bark flying like welding sparks.
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