by Melle Amade
It’s a feeling. Let it pass. Feelings always pass. I can’t act on it
I. Can’t. Act. On. It.
His eyes overpower me and draw me into his darkness. I want to look away, but I can’t. “I have to go home,” I gasp the words out.
“Stay,” he says, not letting my hand go. He bends forward and presses his mouth, full and warm, against mine. Oh, wow. I’m hungry and hurting and this… this…
I lean into him.
It’s dark.
I sink.
I’m being pulled away from myself and it tears at me.
“Oh.” I gasp for breath as I pull back. “I – I can’t.” I shake my head, but barrel on with the truth. “I can’t.”
“I’m–I’m sorry.”
“Don’t. Just–”
His breath escapes like the last gust of a dying storm. “I’ll drive you home,” he says releasing my hand.
“I would like to fly,” I whisper, because the truth is I need to shed my skin, to be something else, to release the shackles that I find in this body. To rise above the world and not be in it. To not be tied down by all of this hurt and love and struggle.
I want to be free.
He smiles and nods running a gentle finger down my cheek, making my skin burn. “I get it,” he says. “It’s hard not to fly, isn’t it? Life seems so slow on the ground. So, micro-focused on things that don’t matter. When I’m in the air it’s like I can see the whole world and none of it matters as much as we think it does down here.”
“It’s four dimensional,” I say. “That’s what I was thinking the other day. I can go up, down, sideways… well, okay, I’m not really good at that… still I can go any direction, but wherever my physical body is going, it’s like my spirit is already there, leading the way.”
His head is cocked to the side and he’s listening intently.
“Yes,” he whispers. “That’s exactly it. Life on the ground is linear. Up there it’s more. Come.” He stands up and holds out his hand with a smile. “I’ll escort you home.”
He opens the window and we’re bathed in the moonlight that drops down on us from the dark blue sky.
My heart is already flying high with the promise of the night wind ruffling my feathers. I smile as he leaps into the air, transforming and soaring up into the sky in a single movement.
I leap after him, wanting to be in the air, flying, soaring, free.
And my body shrinks, wings outstretch and I’m being lifted by the winds. Aiden in front of me heading higher and higher into the night sky. I take a quick glance at my wings, just to make sure, but I can’t see them. At least, not very easily.
They are as black as the night.
A raucous caw escapes from my throat and I beat my wings flying upwards to join Aiden. We float in circles around each other sharing a moment that he and Zan can’t share. A moment that can truly be ours without breaking any bonds of friendship or relationship. I hold it and savor it and make it my own. Just for now. Just for me. This moment. The thermals come up the canyon and lift us higher and higher away from the earth.
Aiden shrieks in delight and I answer him with a loud call. Our bodies sail around each other, circling as we rise. Then suddenly we’re darting downwards, chasing to earth, diving side-by-side. Wind rushes through my feathers, our wing tips touch, but it doesn’t throw us off. The world is ours and we are in control, racing down to the mist that covers the earth.
I’m terrified, but follow Aiden’s lead, doing exactly what he does. I copy the tilt of his head and wings and we are in unison lifting up as we get to the tops of the trees that poke out of the mist. My heart races in my chest and we both shriek with delight as we fly like bullets down the canyon towards my house. We don’t slow down until we get there.
I land and shift, exhilarated, and hit the ground on my feet with only a minor stumble. My arms fly up in victory as Aiden circles over my house. He lets out a screech as he returns to the skies and back to the manor. I watch him disappear into the night grateful to have him in my life, in whatever capacity that is.
Then the day hits me. Whatever last bit of energy I had that got me through the interview, the binding spell, the death of Zaragoza, and Aiden is gone. I trudge into the house and sink into my bed.
Zan texts me first thing in the morning and tells me to come to Roman’s house. I hate the stab of guilt I feel when I first see her text. Aiden and I will never tell her. I can pretend it never happened. But it can’t change the fact that it did.
“Are you okay?” I type nervously.
“Yeah. It’s about your dad.”
I’m up and out of the house in minutes.
Roman’s parents live in some sort of a container house, like a ‘recycling the planet one house at a time’ kind of thing. He says it was built in a factory in Colorado, brought out here to soak up the rays of the sun, and process them and everything else like rainwater and tree droppings into something useful. I don’t know, but it’s eco-as-all-get-out friendly. Mostly I love where it’s located, nestled in an alcove with the canyon rising slightly behind it and nothing but wilderness behind. But now that I know they’re frogs, I’m sure they picked this property because of the small creek that runs along the top of the canyon and then drops down the cliff. It lands in a small pool right in their yard.
The rectangular house is all glass along one side, facing the natural pool of water. Trees rise above and around the house, and it has a wide-open deck that connects the pool to the house. It’s so simple. His parents live in the single bedroom with the kitchen located in one container. It’s connected by a breezeway to another container, which is Roman’s room. Since the destruction of the Sanctuary, it’s become his new laboratory.
I fly to his house as a raven. It’s a freedom I haven’t experienced before. Now, just so long as no humans see me shift, I can fly places.
Zan sits in Roman’s room. I can see them through the glass. Zan is gesticulating through the air and pointing at something on Roman’s desk. He’s quietly watching her go through her explanation, his glasses nestled in his hair, eyes slowly blinking as he nods. Whatever she’s saying makes sense to him, which means there’s a pretty good chance it’s right.
“Hey,” I say as I enter, trying to gauge them both. Roman’s eyes flash a bit worriedly to me. “You guys okay?”
Roman blinks long and slow. “Yesterday was pretty difficult.”
I swallow. “Yeah. Zan? You-” I stop myself before I ask her if she’s okay. What a dumb thing to ask. She was closer to Zaragoza than the rest of us. The thought of his death brings an avalanche of ice over me. El Oso had no right.
“What do you know about Australia?” Zan asks.
My gaze darts to Roman. He just shakes his head. “Huh?”
“She’s been up all night,” Roman says.
“Doing what?”
“Researching Passiefs,” Roman raises his eyebrows.
“Passiefs don’t matter anymore,” I say to her.
“That’s what I told her.” Roman shrugs. “But everyone processes grief differently.”
“What do you know about Australia?” Zan asks me again. She has dark circles under her eyes and an intensity that makes her look a bit manic. Roman gestures with his hand that maybe I should just answer the question. Okay. I get it. Zan’s going to through herself into a research topic to keep herself occupied.
“It’s an island south of Asia where my father comes from.” I go along.
“I mean its history,” Zan says.
My gaze shifts to the corner of the room as I try to remember everything I know, which sadly, doesn’t feel like all that much. “It’s a commonwealth country. They speak English. It was settled by the English. There’s Aborigines and a lot of desert. People live on the fringes of the island.” I stare at Zan, suddenly ignorant about Australian geography and history even though they’re my father’s people. “That’s all I got. Why don’t you just tell me what you want me to know?”
“Australia was a penal colony,” she sounds like she’s making a class presentation. “The Brits started it in 1788 and decided it would be a good place to move all the convicts of their society.”
“Are you saying my father’s a criminal?” I ask.
Zan shakes her head. “No, but how long has your family been there?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Come on, Zan. You know how much my father talks about his family: zero. Nothing. I don’t even know if I have any family there anymore.”
“Okay, okay,” she says. “Sorry. I didn’t really… I’m not trying to annoy you. Listen, there’s a story I was tracking in one of the books while we were looking for the binding spell.” She pauses, her eyes misting up, but she breathes into the pain. “It goes from book to book, and one of the last places it’s mentioned, these shifters were in England. It was a group of dogs trying to get rid of this other group of Passiefs. And in most of the books, it says the Passiefs were killed. But there’s another account I found where it says the Passiefs went missing, a clan of maybe about five to ten people. They all just disappeared.”
“Well, if someone was trying to kill me off and annihilate my family, I think I’d disappear too,” I say.
“It was 1788 in England,” Roman says, as if it should mean something.
“Okay.” I’m not quite putting the pieces together.
“It was the same year they founded the penal colony in Australia.” Zan connects the dots for me.
“So, you think a colony of doves got on the ship and went to Australia?” It’s a little far-fetched that it would have anything to do with me.
“I looked up the records of the prisoner ships,” Zan says.
“Of course you did,” I say.
“It’s only three or four ships.” Zan shrugs, as if that’s normal. “There are people that all have the same last name. One is this boy who stole a piece of bread –”
“Someone got shipped to Australia for stealing a piece of bread?!”
“Another is a father who was sent out of debtors’ prison. And then another is the woman who was sent off for doing something mild. They all ended up on the same ship, and they all have the same last name. And then, if you look across the last names of the people on the ships, there’s people from the same family across the ships that went to Australia.”
“And nobody figured it out.” Roman’s proud gaze is on Zan. “The authorities didn’t. The Order didn’t. Basically, families were immigrating.”
“There was a single massive migration. All the ships went within three days of each other,” Zan explains. “It was a pretty drastic measure. There was no way back. It’s not like you got on the plane, went to Australia, decided you didn’t like it, and got to come back. They spent three months at sea, and many of the prisoners died.”
“Though, probably not the Passiefs,” Roman says. “As shifters, they’d be stronger than most. Then, once they got there, they were dropped off on a barren island. Nothing but a few houses. Things were wild.”
“The point is,” says Zan, “if someone did that by choice, it would’ve had to have been for a pretty good reason. Soldiers did it for promotion. I think the doves did it for escape.”
“Australia’s a huge, desolate place,” Roman says. “I’m guessing the doves disappeared into it.”
“So, you think my dad’s a dove, and that’s how that clan of Passiefs managed to survive?” I can’t help but laugh. “My dad is awesome, but a shifter? Come on, get serious.”
“It’s the only plausible solution I’ve come to,” she says. “We always kinda figured you’re a nuvervel because you have mixed blood, but this would explain how that happened.”
“Zan, seriously?” I ask. “I mean, come on. You know my dad almost as well as I do. Do you think he’s a dove? Even if he was a shifter he’d be like a kangaroo or a wombat. There’s no way he’s a dove.”
“There’s absolutely no other possible explanation,” Roman says. “The bloodhound has done it.”
“We thought maybe your mom carried two strains of shifter, a recessive gene, or something. But there is no evidence that has ever happened. The only evidence states nuvervels are produced by two parents being two different animals. Look.” Zan starts throwing books around, one on top of another, on top of another, on top of another. “Guild of the witch.” She points at a medieval drawing of a woman in black with a black cat on one side and a raven on her shoulder. “Burned at the stake in 1210. Everyone said she could turn into both a raven and a cat. She would fly the skies at night until she saw somebody to attack, then she’d attack them as a panther.”
“That’s just a story,” I say.
“No,” says Zan. “It’s recorded here in a shifter book. She was a shifter, Shae, and she was burned at the stake but not because the humans got ahold of her. She was burned at the stake by shifters. They thought she was an abomination to shifter-kind, so they burned her. Mom was a cat. Dad was a raven.”
“How did they even survive?” I ask.
“They must have known the binding spell,” Roman says. “We didn’t make it up. We found it.”
“But-”
“Here’s a man,” Zan interrupts. “I’ve traced his lineage back. His father was a dog from England and mother a raven from Ireland. Two parents, two different species.”
“There’s another that could shift into a horse and a swan. Her name was Florabelle, and she lived during the Renaissance,” says Roman.
I glance down at the book. There’s a picture of a red-haired woman lying underwater, her eyes looking up.
“I traced her genealogy back to a shifter father who was a horse from Austria and a mother who was a swan from Germany. Again, two different shifters, two different species. There’s not even one in all these books that didn’t trace back to their actual parents being two different types of shifters. I’ve found twenty.”
“In two thousand years, you’ve found twenty?” I ask.
“It was only a thousand years.” Zan nods, rifling through the books before making eye contact with me. “But yeah. There haven’t been very many of you. Or at least not very many recorded. Shae, what I’m trying to tell you is your dad’s a shifter.”
“And we think he knows how to shift,” Roman says.
“You guys are smoking something.”
“How else could he get away from Vasquez up on the mountain?” Zan asks. “We have to ask him about it.”
“If he’s a shifter…” I say the words very, very slowly because I’m still trying to figure out exactly what it would mean. “If he’s a shifter, then maybe there’s a good reason he hasn’t wanted to talk about it.”
15
I stand in the silence of my living room, staring at the cross-stitch of Noah’s Ark that is the one thing Dad has left from his life in Australia. His continual story about the dove and the raven and the ark… was he trying to tell me something without saying it? I trace a finger in the crevice between the weathered frame and the canvas.
How could I have missed it?
I’ve never seen the cross-stitch off the wall. Even when they renovated the living room. They removed the wallpaper, scrubbed and painted the wall, so quickly when no one was home and the cross-stitch was down and back up while I was at school.
My hands tremble as I reach up and grip the picture frame.
The raven and dove.
How could I have missed it?
I lift the cross-stitch off the hook and take it down from the wall. I hold it at arms-length and twist it around. The back is covered with paper. I run my hand along the paper fixed to the back of the frame. It’s sealed tight and neat. But there’s something odd. I can smell it. I press my fingers against the paper.
“Put the cross-stitch back.” Dad’s voice stops me cold.
I grip the very thing he told me to never touch, the sacred cross-stitch. Clutching it to my chest I stare at Dad. He’s on the other side of the room, framed by the green light of the kitchen
. From the dark interior of the living room, it’s hard to see his face, but I can sense his sunburst smile is not there.
“Hang it back up,” he says. There’s a hard line running through his voice.
“Okay,” I whisper, hooking the cross-stitch back up on the wall. But as it clicks into place, so does my clarity. I turn and level my gaze at him.
“You’re a dove,” I say. “A Passief.”
Dad steps fully into the living room and walks over to the cross-stitch. He straightens the frame slightly and brushes some imaginary dust off the top with the cloth he dishtowel that’s hanging over his shoulder. The dim light casts dark shadows under his eyes as he turns around to face me.
“They’re all dead,” he says.
I open my mouth to say something, but I’m at a loss. There’s such a faraway look in Dad’s eyes, I place my hand on his arm.
“Who?” I murmur.
“The rest of our people,” he says. “The doves.”
“I thought you said we had family in Australia, Dad,” I say.
“We do, but not our immediate family, not our clan. I thought I was the last Dove, until you were born.” He swallows as his gaze falls on me.
“You knew I was born a shifter?” My face is tight, but my world is crumbling.
“No.” Dad’s shoulders slump, as if this is a conversation he knew he was going to have to have, but that he’d been avoiding. “In the dove clan, we refer to the Bloedhart ceremony as your birthday, when you were born. So, you know, when you did the Bloedhart, that’s when I knew you were a dove.”
“Why didn’t you tell me, Dad?” I ask. “Well, I know why you didn’t tell me before I became a shifter, but why didn’t you talk to me after you knew?”
“Because,” he says, “I didn’t want you infected with the disease I have.”
“Being a dove is not a disease!”
He puts his hands on my shoulder. “No, it’s not,” he gazes into my eyes. “It is definitely not. But hatred is. And I didn’t want you to know how much I hated the Order. After the revolt, I knew it was just a matter of time before they showed up to make sure everyone was back in line.”
