"Thing is, Ray, I like you," he said. His voice was muffled, like he had a bad cold, but his tone of voice was as though they were having a normal conversation, as though his nose wasn't pushed to one side and spewing blood. "Which is why you're not dead. Yet." He grabbed hold of his nose and forced it back into shape, giving no indication of how much just touching it must have hurt. "You want to tell me what this is all about?"
Ray hesitated.
"I'm not asking," Cody told him.
He motioned Ray into the opposite seat with the barrel of the .45. When Ray had brushed off the vinyl and sat down, the gun disappeared back into its shoulder holster. Cody looked around the restaurant.
"Show's over, folks," he said.
Nervously, the two men who'd been sitting at the table nearby returned to their seats. At the counter and other tables, the customers turned away. The woman at the register had a phone in her hand. When Cody's gaze lit on her, she slowly cradled the receiver and stepped away to fuss with a coffeepot. A murmur of conversation arose once more, but everyone was studiously ignoring them.
"I'm waiting," Cody said, turning back to Ray.
"You didn't tell me she's my granddaughter."
"You didn't ask."
Ray gripped the edges of the table, knuckles going white.
"Don't do anything stupid," Cody told him.
"Why'd you involve her in this?"
"Because she's perfect. You know how rare a canid-corbae breed is?"
Ray had to take a steadying breath. "We're talking about my family."
"Oh, like you've ever paid any attention to her before this morning."
"I didn't know she even existed before this morning."
Cody wiped the last drip of blood from under his nose. Wadding up the bloodied napkin, he tossed it onto the table and settled back in his seat. Ray waited—there was nothing else he could do—as Cody pulled out a pack of cigarettes, shook one free, lit up.
"Who told you about this anyway?" Cody asked.
"Jack."
Cody laughed. "That old fart tell you anything else interesting?"
"That you've called the cuckoos in on this."
"And that's a problem? We've got no beef with them. Only the corbae need to worry about them, and I don't see you sprouting black feathers all of a sudden."
Ray could only shake his head. Bringing in cuckoos was like asking a school of piranha to help you find a ring you dropped in the river while you and your friends were still standing around in the water, looking for it yourself.
"She's got corbae blood," he said.
Cody took a long drag and blew a stream of smoke up to the ceiling. He was oblivious to the surreptitious glances they were still getting from the diner's other customers.
"You have to learn to relax," he said. "Relax and trust me. Your little girl's not in any danger."
All Ray could do was shake his head. "Do you have any idea what could happen to all of us if they get hold of Raven's pot?"
"It's not going to happen."
"How you figure that?"
Cody flicked his cigarette toward the ashtray. Most of the ash fell on the tabletop.
"Because I've got everything under control," he said.
"Like you have every other time? Or is this going to be the exception?"
Cody shook his head, put on a sad look. "This isn't like you, Ray. Since when did you get so negative?"
Ray stood up.
"I don't remember saying we were finished our conversation," Cody told him.
"So shoot me."
"Did you ever think that maybe I was trying to help her?" Cody said as Ray started to walk away.
Ray paused and looked around, but Cody was still facing the other side of the booth, cigarette smoke trailing up along his cheek. Ray moved back until he was standing beside the table.
"Help her how?" he asked.
Cody turned to look at him. "The Morgans never liked her people."
So Jack was right about that, too, Ray thought. Cody had brought in more than one family of cuckoos. The Couteaus were bad enough, but the Morgans had a longtime grudge against the corbae, Jack in particular, which made it even more dangerous for his granddaughter, seeing how she was also Jack's daughter.
"We're her people," he said. "She's almost full-blooded."
"I mean her human people."
"What's that got to do with—"
Cody cut him off. "Plus she's got more corbae than canid in her. Lot of strikes against her—do you see where I'm going with this?"
Ray shook his head.
"Pay attention, Ray. Now I don't know why Chloë's brought your little girl into the middle of all this, but the only way to keep her safe is to let the Morgans know she's on our side. That she's working for us."
Ray sighed. Cody was the master of justification and like any explanation he ever made, this had a certain ring of truth about it. The problem was, he wasn't prepared to believe Cody anymore.
"Tell them she's out of this," he said.
Cody made a helpless gesture with his hands. "You know I can't do that. When it comes to them, you're either on their side or you're expendable. And considering the serious strikes your girl's got going against her—I'm talking about how they see things, now—she doesn't even have to get in the way. They'll do her for the fun of it."
"Then you better figure out a way to convince them otherwise," Ray told him.
"I thought we were friends."
"You don't have any friends," Ray said. "Only people you use. Funny. It took a corbae to help me figure that out."
He walked away from the table again, half-expecting a bullet in the back, but Cody let him go. Ray didn't know whether to feel relieved or not. He was still alive, but maybe the only reason he was still alive was that Cody couldn't be bothered to kill him. In the grand scheme of how Cody looked at the world, maybe Ray wasn't enough of a threat.
Or maybe he was going to let his new allies do the job for him.
Ray didn't plan to stick around and find out. Soon as he got on the road, he was going to pick up his granddaughter and get them both as far away from this place as he could, as fast as he could. Considering the large population of corbae living here, and with at least two families of cuckoos now on its streets, the city was about to turn into a war zone.
3.
"Did you know you talk in your sleep?"
Kerry woke bleary-eyed to find one of the crow girls sitting cross-legged on the floor by the head of her futon, the girl's dark birdlike eyes peering down at her with great interest. Maida or Zia? Kerry still couldn't tell them apart, and being woken from such a deep sleep didn't help. Her head was full of a fog that was only slowly clearing.
"Which one are you?" she asked.
"Maida, silly. Your friend—remember?"
The crow girl's good humor brimmed over with such infectiousness that Kerry automatically found herself grinning back at her.
"Does that mean Zia's not my friend?" she joked.
Maida shrugged. "I don't know. I just saw you first, that's all."
Kerry sat up to put her head level with her uninvited guest's, feeling more awake now. She liked these girls, though that didn't mean she wanted them to have free run of her apartment. Only how did you explain the idea of privacy to someone who had no concept of it?
"What are you doing here?" she asked.
"Waiting for you to wake up. You are such a sleepyhead. It's almost ten. Everybody else has been up for hours and they're all busybusybusy."
"I guess I needed to sleep in."
Maida immediately looked unhappy. "Did I wake you? I didn't mean to wake you. I was just sitting here being ever so quiet."
"You didn't wake me," Kerry assured her.
"Rory says we're not supposed to wake people unless it's an emergency, like if we really need some jelly beans and he's gone and hidden them and we can't find them no matter how hard we look."
"That's what Rory calls an emergency?"
"No. But we do."
Kerry had to laugh.
"I need some tea," she said and pushed aside the comforter so that she could get up. "How about you?"
"Will it be sweet?"
"As sweet as you like it."
"I like it very sweet," Maida said, trailing after her into the kitchen. "I like it more sugar than tea."
"Have a sweet tooth, do you? Maybe I should just give you a cup of sugar and not bother with the tea."
Maida got up on one of the kitchen chairs and perched there like a bird, sitting on her heels.
"That would be good," she said.
Kerry filled her saucepan and put it on the stove. From a cupboard above the sink she brought down two tins and two mugs. She took a tea bag out of one tin and placed it in her own cup. Glancing at Maida, who was watching her with an expectant expression, she filled the other mug from the sugar tin and brought it over to the table. Maida lifted it to her mouth and licked some of the sugar out.
"Mmm," she said. "Just the way I like it. Not too hot and not too cold."
"Are you hungry?" Kerry asked, going back to the cupboard to get some bread.
"No."
"Well, I'm having toast."
"I'll just watch and have my very delicious tea," Maida told her.
Kerry turned from the counter to find the crow girl regarding her guilelessly, as though there wasn't anything in the least odd about licking sugar from a mug and calling it tea. Kerry could only shake her head.
"I feel like Alice after she fell down the rabbit hole," she said.
"Who's Alice?" Maida wanted to know. "She must have been very small. To fall down a rabbit hole, I mean."
"It didn't happen for real. It's just a story from a book."
"But still … she'd have to have been small."
"Sometimes she was small," Kerry told her, "and sometimes she was big. As big as a house. She had all sorts of adventures—playing croquet with a pack of cards, meeting a talking tortoise." She had to stop and think about that for a moment. "Or was that in the other book?"
"I know some tortoise people," Maida said. "I could introduce you to Sleepy Joe—he lives right here in town. One time Zia got into a face-pulling contest with a tortoise boy that went on for days and days and days."
Kerry's water was boiling. She took it from the stove, turned off the burner, and poured the hot water over her tea bag.
"What do you mean by tortoise people?" she asked as she returned the saucepan to the top of the stove. When Maida didn't answer, she looked around to find the crow girl regarding her with confusion.
"That's just what he is," Maida said. "You know, the way Zia and I are crows."
"Oh, I get it."
They had a friend who pretended to be a tortoise. For a moment there, Kerry had thought she was being serious. Turning back to the counter, she took out a couple of slices of bread and put them in the toaster.
"You sure you don't want some toast to go with your … um, tea?" she asked.
"I'm sure. This is very filling."
Kerry didn't doubt that a whole cup of sugar would be very filling.
"So what was I saying in my sleep?" she asked as she joined Maida at the table.
Maida shrugged. "Nothing much. I thought you were telling me not to give you some sort of a pill and I told you I didn't have any to give, but then I figured out you were talking to someone in your dreams."
A dream from her old world. She was having them almost every night. She'd probably always have them.
"What sort of pill was it?" Maida asked. "In your dream, I mean."
"Something to make me feel normal."
"They have pills that can do that?"
"It depends on how you define 'normal,' " Kerry told her.
"Sometimes we wonder what it's like to feel normal," Maida said. "You know, like all the people you see out on the streets or sitting in their little boxy homes."
Kerry gave her a curious glance. Were the crow girls supposed to be on some sort of medication? That might explain how they looked to be almost Kerry's own age, but acted so young.
"But then," Maida went on, "we see how boring they are and we're happy to be the way we are."
Was that how she should approach her own life? Kerry wondered. Stop trying to fit and just see where the hallucinations took her?
"You know what else you do?" Maida said.
Kerry shook her head.
"Sometimes you grind your teeth."
That called up a partial memory. Hadn't she dreamt that someone had told her to stop doing that … was it last night? It was. And the more she thought about it, the more she was sure she'd dreamt it, not this morning, but much earlier than that, just when she was falling asleep.
Kerry frowned. "How long were you sitting by my bed?"
"Oh, hours and hours."
Kerry looked at her, troubled. The issue of her privacy lay between them again. She'd been enjoying Maida's company so much that she'd forgotten the need to address this bad habit of the twins. She didn't like the idea of anyone, even when they were as sweet as the crow girls, wandering about her apartment whenever they felt like it. Going through her things, few though they were. Sitting beside her bed and watching her sleep.
"You shouldn't do that," she said. "It's not right to sneak into people's houses uninvited and spy on them."
"Why not?"
It was yesterday morning all over again. The question appeared to spring from an innocence so profound, Kerry didn't know how she could even begin to explain.
She settled on, "It's just not polite. Would you like it if people did that to you?"
"People do it all the time," Maida said. "They're always poking about in our nests or cutting down our trees."
Kerry sighed. "You're not a real bird."
She felt like her therapist back in Long Beach as soon as the words came out, could almost hear the woman's tight voice. These things you're seeing, Kerry, you do understand that they're not real, don't you? Her therapist hadn't been big on self-discovery, preferring to tell Kerry what she was supposed to be thinking and feeling.
"I know that," Maida said.
"Good," Kerry told her. The toast popped up and she went to get it. Returning to the table, she went on, "Playacting can be fun, but if you—"
"I'm a corbae."
The interruption took Kerry off-guard. "A what?"
"A corbae," Maida repeated. "We were here first," she explained patiently. "You know, long before Cody stirred you out of the pot."
Kerry shook her head. "I have no idea what you're talking about."
"But you have lots of the old blood in you."
Something froze inside Kerry and she was remembering her grandmother talking to her one day while they sat out on the porch of the old farmhouse.
We've got an old blood, she'd said. We've been walking this land for a long time. You can see it in our eyes and our skin.
Kerry had always thought she meant that they were descended from Indians.
"What do you mean by … old blood?" she asked.
"Fox from your mother, jackdaw from your father. Didn't you know?"
"No. I … what does it mean?"
Maida laughed. "It doesn't mean anything except that's who you are."
Kerry's toast lay forgotten on her plate, cold. She looked across the table at the small girl perched on the other chair and seemed to see the true foreignness of her for the first time.
"So you really … are a crow?" she found herself asking.
"Nonono. I already told you. I'm a corbae and that makes me older than any old crow. But I can look like a crow when I want to."
"When you want to," Kerry repeated.
"Sure," Maida said. "And since you've got lots of old blood in you, oh ever so lots, you can probably change your skin, too." Then she started to giggle. "But what would you be? A black fox with wings? A red crow with a big bushy tail?" She couldn't control her giggles. "Oh, this is too funny."
But
Kerry didn't find it funny at all. Because the more she listened to Maida prattle on, the less she could believe the girl was real. Which meant Kerry was just imagining she was here, saying all these confusing things. Imagining crow girls the way she imagined she had a—
"What's so very wrong?" Maida asked, giggles replaced with a sudden concern.
Kerry couldn't look at her. She stared at her cold toast, trying to regain her equilibrium, but the plate and the table appeared to recede, slipping further and further away from her range of vision, the more she tried to focus on them.
"I … I should never have come here," she said in a small, tight voice.
She tried to hang on to now, to being here, in this place, but it was too hard.
"I should never have left. I was safe there. They were right. I can't take care of myself. I just can't …"
She was dimly aware of Maida hopping up onto the table, the table teetering precariously under her weight, then the crow girl was sitting in her lap, blocking her view. She had a moment's respite from the horribly disconcerting view of the receding table. Her gaze was so close to Maida's that the crow girl's deep, dark eyes were all she could see. But she could still feel the world falling away around them, dissolving into whirling shadows. The world was falling away, and molecule by molecule, she was falling away with it.
Maida put two fingers to her lips and licked them, then put them against Kerry's brow. Light flared in Kerry's eyes, banishing the shadows, drawing all the fragments of herself and the world back together again. It happened with such a suddenness that for a moment Kerry couldn't breathe.
"Do you feel better now?" Maida asked.
Kerry could feel the crow girl's sweet breath on her face when Maida spoke. She seemed to weigh next to nothing, sitting there on her lap, hands on Kerry's shoulders now, brow furrowed, gaze peering worriedly into Kerry's eyes. Kerry couldn't imagine why she'd thought the girl was another hallucination, why she'd let herself get carried away as she had. Maida had so much physical presence it was impossible to think of her as anything but real and here.
And when she stopped to think about it, she wasn't alone in seeing and interacting with Maida—Maida and Zia, both. Rory knew they existed. As did Annie. So the girl on her lap was real. But Maida being real didn't explain how she'd been able to stop Kerry's panic attack with no more than a touch of her fingers. Kerry could still feel the light Maida had woken inside her. All the hurt and lost and scared pieces of her clustered like moths around the bright and comforting warmth of that light and were transformed so that she felt strong.
Someplace to Be Flying Page 24
