A Murder of Crows: Seventeen Tales of Monsters and the Macabre

by DeAnna Knippling

  “The girl’s family had one of the knives, as a keepsake from the East. She cut him down.”

  “And then what?” I said. “Did you have Felix kill her, too?”

  Felix squatted down at the Edge and watched his dragon crunch up the last of its meal. “Against the rules,” he said.

  I snorted. “What do you even need babies for?”

  Felix paced back and forth, flattening the dry grass that stretched between worlds. “To keep the link with the human world open.”

  “So, if I don’t do this, you’ll lose contact with the human world, and I’ll never see you again?”

  “Nah. There are lots of people like you. Dozens. All over the world. We’d just get someone else to do it.” Felix started kicking the hot ashes over the Edge. He stuck a boot under one of the logs, lifted it, and pitched it over the edge. It scattered sparks on the way down.

  I took a running kick at the skull and punted it over the Edge, which was probably the best thing that had happened to me all day. “Then get someone else to do it.”

  “It would be embarrassing,” Chamberlain said. Then, to Felix: “Do the next one.”

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Somebody who’s destined to be your lover in the future,” Felix said. “It’s not hard to find out.”

  “So? I’ll find another lover.”

  Felix ignored me. “I’m tired of waiting, Chamberlain. You promised.”

  “Very well,” Chamberlain said.

  Felix whistled, and the prairie dragon jumped up the cliff, spreading its dirty yellow wings for balance.

  “Do I have to tie you on again?” Felix asked.

  I shrugged. “If I let you kill him in front of me, will you let me go?”

  “Sure,” Felix said, too easily. He leaped and landed gracefully. I climbed up the dragon’s ankle and knee and pulled myself up into the saddle behind him. The dragon’s skin was covered with what felt like horsehair, and I couldn’t help petting it a few times after I strapped myself in. It snorted and took off.

  —

  “What’s it like?” I asked Felix. “Being such an asshole? You’re either going to kill somebody, or you’re going to bully me into stealing a kid. And then it’s going to die anyway, as far as its parents are concerned. It’s going to dry up and die after a week or two. Do you know what it’s like being here? As a human?”

  He shrugged. “At least it’ll be warm.”

  I ignored him. “You promised me. When I was a kid, you promised me that if there was ever a chance for me to get out, you’d help me.”

  “I did,” he said.

  “And then you brought me back!” I screamed into his ear. We kept flying.

  We didn’t have to go too far, only a couple of hours into the prairie. It was full dark by the time we landed, in the middle of nowhere, under a streetlight that didn’t have a street. As we slid off, the dragon nickered and trotted into the dark, folding its wings close to its body so it could creep up quietly on whatever it was hunting. The Wild Women howled on a nearby hill, their silhouettes against the moon, coyote muzzles and naked breasts.

  We let ourselves in the old wooden gate as quietly as we could and approached the house. The place looked pretty nice, with vinyl siding and a sidewalk and cut grass inside the gate. As a fairy, I’d crept up on a hundred places like this, pulling pranks on them more out of boredom than anything else. Usually with Felix to help me.

  “We been here before?” I asked. “Playing lost boys?”

  “Nah.” Felix pointed over the door, where a horseshoe hung, points up, and then to a bottle of beer just outside the doorway. “They keep to the old ways, mostly, so Chamberlain had us leave them alone. They didn’t do the window, though, so we can still get in.”

  I bent down to pick up the beer, and Felix stopped me. “One way or another, it’s going to hurt them,” he said. “You can’t come here with me and drink their beer. That’s not how it works.”

  “I’m not going to hurt anybody,” I said.

  “Then take it on our way out,” he said.

  I put the beer down. We circled the house; as we went around the corner, a collie-mix dog ran out of a doghouse and barked at us, sounding tougher than she felt.

  Felix squatted in the grass and whistled her over, beckoning with his fingers.

  “Leave her alone,” I said.

  “I don’t like dogs,” he said.

  “You know I always wanted a dog.” An old argument.

  Felix stroked the dog’s head, then grabbed her under the chin. He crushed a piece of dried leaf in the dog’s eyes, and she sighed and sank onto her belly. “She’s asleep.” He pointed to a window on the upper floor with a dim glow from behind some thin curtains. He rose halfway, then looked at me. “Aren’t you coming?”

  I hissed, “I can’t fly anymore, you dumbass.”

  Felix swooped behind me and grabbed me under the arms, which wasn’t fun. He lifted me up to the window ledge and waved the tips of his fingers. The curtain slid sideways, and I looked inside.

  It was a kid, of course. A little kid in a crib. I couldn’t tell whether it was a boy or a girl; the room looked kind of yellow and had elephants all over. “Put me down.”

  Felix lowered me back on the ground, and I swung my arms around to get the kinks out. “It’s just a baby,” I said.

  “Take it, or I’ll kill it,” Felix said.

  “I thought we were friends.”

  He shook his head. “If we don’t steal another one soon, we’ll lose the connection. And we’ll all die if we’re cut off from the mortals. No mortals, no spirit. You know that.”

  “Don’t I get time to decide?”

  “If you were one of us, yeah, you could have time to decide. But we don’t have a living changeling anymore, so no. It has to be done by dawn. If you’re not going to do it, then I gotta fly to the Summerlands and find a changeling who will before then.”

  Felix reached under his fake-band t-shirt and pulled, hard. There was a tearing and sucking sound, and then he pulled a knife from under his shirt, a knife made out of his own breastbone. Those things are almost impossible to keep from striking true, as long as your heart’s in it. Felix turned the knife back and forth; it glistened clear fairy blood, which he wiped on his pants.

  “I thought you were my friend,” I repeated.

  “You gotta do what you gotta do.” Felix floated back up to the window, slashed through the screen, and pried at the window with the tip of the knife.

  I ran. I ran to the door and tried the handle: we were out in the middle of nowhere, so it wasn’t locked, and I was mortal, so I could pass under the iron. I ran through the house, yelling, “The baby! He’s coming for the baby!” A couple of scared faces looked at me as I spotted the stairs.

  I slammed into the railing and pulled myself up four stairs at a time. There were a bunch of doors, but then the baby cried, and I knew which one I wanted.

  I threw open the door. Felix had the baby by the scruff of its neck and the breastbone knife at its stomach.

  “Put it down,” I said.

  He pushed in the knife tip, and blood stained the baby’s white one-piece and ran down its leg. The baby screamed.

  “I’ll do it,” I said, offering my hands face-out. “Put it down.”

  Felix lowered the knife. The baby screamed. Felix wrinkled his nose and handed it to me. Its diaper felt ice-cold and stank like shit.

  I felt the change coming on. It wasn’t much of a change, and I’d felt it before. The baby hadn’t though. It screamed as its heart stopped beating and its blood turned to living ice.

  “Who?” Felix said. “You have to name someone to take its place.”

  I shook my head. “Nobody. Let’s just go.”

  The parents had shaken off their shock and were running up the stairs.

  Felix grabbed my arm that wasn’t wrapped around the baby and put my hand on his chest. “Me,” he said.

  “You?” I asked, but the
magic must have taken it for an answer, and Felix started to shrink. His face wrinkled up like a dried apple skin and he collapsed on the floor as his bones shrank. His band t-shirt and jeans turned into rags and a wet, shit-packed diaper.

  I ducked out the window and closed it behind me as the parents ran into the room. They pulled back the covers in the crib and shrieked at the empty sheets, but Felix wailed at them from the floor. The mother picked him up and held him tight, then held him away from her chest. She said, “It’s your turn, Jack.” The father made a face and carried the baby to a changing table, where he pulled out a couple of wipes and a diaper.

  I knew my hands were cold, but I couldn’t feel them.

  The parents would make sure Felix stayed warm, for the little time he had left. It was the food; a fairy could never live on mortal food.

  All I had to do was hand the baby over to Chamberlain and be done with it, be human again. I’d get on the dragon, cross the Edge, and fly back to football practice and business calculus and getting ready for my real life.

  Then it hit me that I didn’t know anything about the baby, its name, its gender, who its parents were, nothing. I slipped inside the window over the kitchen sink while the parents were fussing around upstairs and found out.

  I wrote down their names and the address on the back of an envelope. “But,” I said, “While you’re with me, your name is Felix.”

  * * * * *

  I finished the story, watching the darkness in the crib. Nothing moved…nothing breathed. And yet I could feel the presence of whatever was in that small, dark place, with its embroidered cushions lining the sides. The angels’ faces on the blanket seemed wicked now, as though they were fallen angels, now whispering evil into the hearts of the one who laid in the crib.

  That was the moment I finally believed that the girl’s baby brother had been traded for something else. Why did you do it? A longer life, youthful beauty? The perfect slave? The girl’s heart?

  Protection from the monster you had summoned below?

  I flew back to the place I had left the girl and what was left of my flock, but they were gone.

  I circled the dumping ground, looking for the others. As my gyres widened, I saw movement: the girl, dragging her blanket over the snow, sweeping the thin white dusting off the ground behind her, leaving darker earth behind. She was surrounded by metal and machines, the antithesis of the kind of magic that you do. You can’t find her here, I thought. That’s what’s protected her. Until now.

  But I had gone straight from the girl, to the house, and back again; there was no telling. My guts squirmed like worms in a corpse, and I couldn’t resist looking back over my shoulder, even when it seemed that I would dash myself into the ground.

  The daylight was thin, thinner than milk, as thin as a pale sheet of wind-whipped ice over a bottomless pond. The wind seemed to have settled, although it would dash itself at small drifts of snow here and there, disbursing them with small devils that tossed the snow into corners and crannies, then chased it off over the higher tops of the gullies and onto the endless fields.

  The girl was walking toward the truck, wending through the narrow bottoms of the trash-filled gullies, still clutching the white-streaked pink blanket around her.

  Her face was as pale as the sky.

  On one shoulder was Facunde; on the other was Ibarrazzo. Old Loyolo was nowhere to be seen. I circled overhead, then landed between the girl and the truck. She didn’t stop. She saw me; the skin between her eyebrows pinched together, her lips turned down, and she kept walking.

  Her feet stepped higher, though, as if she intended to step on me, if necessary, in order to pass. I waited until the last moment—then flew up in front of her, beating my wings in her face.

  She pushed me aside, bent forward, and yanked on the handle of the door.

  It groaned and lurched, its bottom edge burying itself in the dirt: the entire truck had tilted a little. The glass had been broken, and it was scattered on the ground around and under the girl’s feet.

  The inside of the truck smelled of harshness that burned in the back of my throat, even from my perch on a sagging cardboard box on the ground opposite the truck. A slow, black rain of dust was sifting from the wires at the top of the cab where the seat had been and piling on the ground in shimmering black mounds. A waver like that of the sun on a hot piece of metal rose above the truck. The snow had melted from between the axles.

  A long, low moan echoed from the darkness above the wires, and more dust fell, hissing on the roof of the truck.

  “Machado…Machado,” the voice called. It was Old Loyolo’s. Almost. “Is the monster coming?”

  “Could be,” I said. “The babe’s been traded away for something dark. I know that.”

  “So there is nothing good left in that house.” Its voice came from a story, it came from nightmares. It was rough and hollow, as though it had come disembodied from his throat and had gone wandering around the underside of the truck, touching wires, scraping off rust.

  “No,” I said. “Nothing good is left in that house but for a jar of jam or two, and we don’t have hands to open it with anyway.”

  “Good,” Old Loyolo said, or something not very like Loyolo anymore. “Good.”

  Something dark and crow-shaped dropped out of the wires onto the shit-layered roof of the truck cab, kicking up black dust as it landed. Its claws were as black as its feathers, and no light reflected from its wings or its eyes. It was not a thing. It was a kind of shadow cast by something else.

  “Loyolo,” I cawed, with grief. Ibarrazzo echoed me, a moan that was almost madness.

  The shadow chuckled, a sound like a distant rumble of spoiled summer thunder. “No,” it said. “Guess again.”

  “The Crouga, then.”

  “Close enough.”

  I hopped to the ground and squinted, trying to get a better look at it in the darkness of the truck cab. The clouds had thinned, seeming to make the shadows even darker, but not so dark that I could not see that its form seemed to flatten as I turned one eye at it, then another. A shadow indeed. “You’re wearing his skin?”

  “The memory of it. The taste.”

  The girl was reaching her hand out for it, her fingers clenched, her wrist bent.

  “Stop!”

  She hesitated, then stretched out her hand. The Crouga hopped onto it, digging its claws into her skin.

  “Ouch!” She bit her lips.

  “Just a little cut, so that I can find my way,” the Crouga said, that deep voice still rumbling.

  “You’re lying,” the girl said.

  “Yes, of course.” The Crouga rustled its black wings. “I am, at the very least, not telling you the entire truth. Why should I? Now let’s go, my little flock, and see what mischief we can get up to, that the old one traded his life for.” It twisted its head a little, and seemed to peer up at the girl’s eyes. “And what do you think about all this? We’ll be killing your mother, you know.”

  “I know. She killed my Papa and my baby brother.”

  “That’s still not a good reason to kill someone, you know. Revenge. Half the world’s tragedies come out of that one idea, revenge. More than half. You’re sure?”

  She nodded.

  “It’s good to be sure. Back soon, little love.”

  As one, the Crouga and we three crows took flight. I felt as though my wings had been jerked out of their sockets, as though I were a puppet.

  The wind—or some other power—carried us across the garbage, to the fields; and from the fields, to the yard of your big white house. The four of us—that is, the three of us and the Crouga—landed on a tree that looked at the front door. In the house, the lights inside were out, the chimney cold. It was in the fat part of the morning, when the air was still, and if I held myself perfectly still on my branch, I could almost pretend for a moment or two that I was warm.

  The Crouga sniffed at the air. “It smells of fairies.”

  Facunde snorted. “Fai
ries.”

  The Crouga flicked its beak at Facunde. “You know so much about fairies, then? Do you have all their stories memorized? Know the Seven Houses, do you, all the way to the House of Aeons? You’re a brave one, that’s for sure. Even I’m not stupid enough to tangle with the Houses. It’s bad enough that they have a darkling huddled upstairs, let alone that witch. The only reason I’m doing this is that she threw me out, you know. Tried to pass me off to a baby. After all I’d done for her. No, I’m only here to collect what’s mine. You’ll have to deal with the darkling. And good luck with that, o scoffer-at-fairies.”

  The Crouga crouched, then sprang off the branch, flying straight for the house like a swarm of leaves. It cast no shadow, and the glint of sunlight off the windows seemed to twist around it, reflecting indirectly onto the powered snow below. I tried to follow it, but I couldn’t move my feet; they felt as though they were tied with black, sticky string.

  In a moment, the Crouga had swept around the house and returned to the branch.

  “They are within,” it said. “The witch is exhausted from the summoning and in her bed, fast asleep with the door shut. The darkling is prowling the hallway, trying to find a way to get through the door, but she was too clever for that and put up wards. As soon as she wakes, she’ll send it out for your flock and to do whatever with the girl.”

  “Whatever?”

  It flipped a wing. “Kill her, drink her blood and bring it back, squeeze her up into a bead. Might bind her as an apprentice, might cut open her skull and put in a bunch of honey to make her sweeter, brew her up for a couple of years with mushrooms in her lungs, that kind of various horrible thing. You only need a darkling if you need something that doesn’t care what you do around it.”

  I looked at the house.

  Facunde cleared her throat. She was on the other side of the Crouga, so that I had to lean forward to see her. “So…you will kill the mother. How do we kill the darkling?”

  “You don’t,” the Crouga said. “You just keep it entertained until I’m done with the witch. And then it ought to disperse, contract over.”

  “Ought to.”

  It clicked its beak again. “It’s a fairy. Who knows? It could decide you have a pretty throat and decide to look at it from the inside out. Just keep it from going in the room, that’s all. If the witch wakes up and get her hands on it, we’re all done for.”