Someplace to Be Flying

by Charles de Lint

  "What did you do?" she asked.

  Maida slipped from her lap and skipped back to her perch on the opposite chair.

  "Happy magic," she said. "You were turning all dark and coming apart so I called up a light to glue you back into place."

  "Just like that."

  Maida nodded. "Quickquick seemed best."

  "But magic … ?"

  "Is it the wrong word?" Maida asked.

  "It's not that. It's just … it all seems so impossible."

  "Then call it medicine."

  "I don't know," Kerry said. "It doesn't feel like any medicine I ever took before." She raised a hand to her forehead. "It really does feel like a light, shining inside me. How did you put it there?"

  Maida laughed. "You're so funny! I didn't put it there. Nobody can do that—not even Raven."

  "But—"

  "It was always there. I just made it a little brighter so that you could find it."

  Kerry regarded her for a long moment. It was so strange to see the world as calmly as she did at the moment, without the edge that was usually present.

  "Always?" she said.

  Maida nodded.

  "How can I make sure I don't lose it again?" she asked.

  "You can't. But paying attention to it helps. Crazy Crow says that's a magic all in itself. Paying attention, I mean. It's like touching a piece of the long ago."

  Kerry didn't think she was ever going to be able to make sense out of Maida's convoluted logic. Every time the crow girl explained something, Kerry only felt more confused. But she wanted to understand.

  "What's the long ago?" she asked.

  "You know, where the forever trees grow. The place we first stepped into from the medicine lands. Remember?"

  Kerry shook her head. "I wasn't there."

  "Oh. I forgot. Do you ever forget things?"

  "Sometimes not as much as I'd like to."

  "I know just what you mean," Maida said. "When your head gets all filled up with this and that, it feels like there's hardly room for anything new to come in, doesn't it?"

  "I suppose."

  Though that hadn't been at all what Kerry had meant. "Sometimes," Maida said, "I scrunch my eyes and try to forget as much as I can so that everything seems new and strange again. Do you ever do that?"

  Again, Kerry shook her head.

  "You should try it. It's fun." Maida paused. "But you don't ever really forget anything, you know. It's always hiding away somewhere, in some little corner, and pops out just when you're not expecting it at all. But that can be fun, too." She held out her empty mug. "Can I have more tea?"

  Kerry blinked at the sudden switch in topic. Then she focused on the proffered mug. The "tea" was all gone except for a few grains of sugar left on the rim.

  "You … um, drank it all already?" she said.

  "It was only one cup."

  Kerry hesitated, then went to the counter and filled the mug up with sugar again.

  "Thanks," Maida said. "Your toast's gone all cold."

  "I'll put some more on."

  "Don't throw that away," Maida said as Kerry was about to toss out the cold toast. "We can feed it to the little cousins down the street. They're very fond of toast, you know. It doesn't matter how hard or cold it's gone."

  Kerry laid the toast on the counter and put a couple of slices of fresh bread in the toaster. Pouring out her cold tea in the sink, she made herself a fresh mug.

  "So these cousins," she said. "They're corbae, too?"

  "Oh, no. They're just birds."

  "Are there many corbae here?"

  "Oh, ever so many. Jolene calls it the City of Crows because there's so many of us living here. There's me and Zia and Annie and—"

  "Annie's a crow girl, too?"

  Maida laughed. "As if. She's a jay—couldn't you tell?"

  "No. I … what about Rory?"

  "He's like you. He has the blood, but doesn't know it." Then Maida grinned. "Except I told you, so now you do know it, don't you?"

  "You weren't serious, were you?"

  She remembered Maida telling her she'd gotten fox blood from her mother, jackdaw from her father, but she couldn't imagine it in either of them.

  "I'm always ever so very serious," Maida said, licking at her "tea." She had a white dusting of sugar in either corner of her mouth and on her lower lip. "Can't you tell?"

  Kerry smiled. "Not really."

  She had a sip of her own, liquid, tea. When the toast popped, she fetched it from the toaster and brought it back to the table.

  "I don't understand what you mean about my parents having had animal blood," she said as she buttered her toast.

  "What's not to understand?"

  Everything, Kerry thought.

  She spread jam on her toast and took a bite.

  "Well, for starters," she said when she'd swallowed, "how does animal blood show itself? Or does it even show itself? I mean, I have red hair, so is that from this fox blood?"

  Maida nodded.

  "But my mother didn't have red hair."

  "Yes, she did. I'm remembering that particularly well."

  "You knew my mother, too?"

  "Didn't I?" Maida asked, looking as bewildered as Kerry felt.

  Kerry shook her head. This was far too confusing for her.

  "I don't know," she said.

  Maida put her mug down on the table and hopped down to the floor.

  "We should go ask Zia," she said. "Maybe she remembers. And then we could go feed the cousins your old toast."

  Sure, Kerry thought. Why not? The day was already so off-kilter that she might as well simply give up and go with the flow.

  She plucked at the oversized T-shirt she was wearing as a nightie.

  "Let me finish my breakfast and get dressed first," she said.

  Fifteen minutes later the pair of them came down the stairs, Maida in the lead, carrying the toast in a paper bag. The door to Rory's apartment was open and Kerry had the sudden urge to talk to him about all of this. Maybe he could make some sense out of it. But as soon as she paused by the door, Maida was tugging on her arm.

  "Come on," she said. "They're being ever so too serious in there."

  Before Kerry could ask who was being so serious, Maida had pulled her onto the porch, down the stairs, and out onto the lawn. Sticking the paper bag under her arm, Maida cupped her hands and called for Zia. With both of them looking up into the trees for the other crow girl, neither paid much attention to the Ford Escort that pulled up to the curb. It wasn't until the tall red-haired man got out of the car and spoke her name that Kerry turned to look at him.

  "Yes?" she said.

  He gave Maida a wary glance before returning his attention to her.

  "Look," he said. "I know how this is going to sound, but you have to come with me."

  Kerry shook her head and backed toward the house. "I don't think so."

  "I don't know what they've told you, but the longer you stay here, the more danger you're in."

  "You stay back," she said as he took a step toward her.

  He immediately stopped moving forward and held his hands out to her palms up, face earnest, conciliatory.

  "It's not what you're thinking," he said. "I'm here to help you."

  "Yeah, right."

  The oddest thing about all of this, Kerry realized, was that she was dealing with the situation instead of dissolving into a panic attack, the way she'd normally react to something this stressful.

  "I don't even know who you are and you expect me to—"

  "That's Ray," Maida said.

  Kerry turned to look at her. The crow girl seemed different. Taller, perhaps. Her features sharper. Her usual good humor swallowed by a great stillness.

  "You know him?" she said.

  Maida nodded. "He's your grandfather."

  "My …"

  "But don't get your hopes up," the crow girl went on. "It's not likely he's here for a family reunion. Whenever he's sniffing around, Cody's not
far behind, and that only means trouble."

  "You stay out of this," Ray told her.

  The smile Maida gave him in return was sweet and dangerous and utterly out of keeping with what Kerry thought she knew of the girl's character.

  "Or what?" Maida said, her voice deceptively soft.

  At that moment Zia dropped from the trees to land on the hood of Ray's car. She, too, seemed changed. She radiated confidence and danger as she perched there, sitting on her heels.

  "Mmm, what?" she asked.

  There were undercurrents of tension present that Kerry couldn't begin to fathom. She sensed history lying between the crow girls and the red-haired man, not entirely based on animosity, but a lack of trust was definitely involved.

  "Will somebody explain what's going on here?" she asked.

  "I'm not with Cody on this one," Ray said.

  That made the crow girls laugh.

  "Who's Cody?" Kerry tried, but no one was paying attention to her.

  Ray sighed. "I was hoping it wouldn't come to this," he said and reached under his jacket.

  4.

  Rory knew he should have been working on the Tender Hearts earring order, but he'd gotten sidetracked by a dream he'd had that morning of Kerry sleeping in the backseat of a junked car, a fox curled up beside her, an enormous blackbird perched on the top of the seat behind her head. The residual memory of the dream put a design combining the two animals into his head that was too fascinating to ignore, a tangle of feather and fur, sharp beak and pointy fox muzzle. He wasn't sure if he wanted it to be a pendant or a matched set of earrings. It would work either way.

  He sat at his kitchen table, sketching the various possibilities, music from a CD he'd borrowed from Annie coming from the speakers atop his cupboards. The group was called Afro Celt Sound System. An apt name, he decided as he listened to its blend of African and Celtic musicians playing their traditional instruments over a bed of trance dance-music rhythms. It was during a break between cuts that he heard the sharp rapping at his door.

  Speak of the devil, he thought as he got up to answer it.

  It had to be Kerry because neither Annie nor the crow girls ever bothered to knock.

  "I had the weirdest dream about you last night," he started to say as he opened the door to the smell of anise.

  His voice trailed off when he found Chloë standing in the hall. Tall, dark-eyed, the fountain of her hair only barely contained with a black ribbon. It wasn't always easy to reconcile the schoolmistress figure she cut at such close proximity with the woman who could so often be seen perched on the peak of the house.

  "Did you now," she said, a trace of amusement in her voice.

  Rory flushed. "I thought you were somebody else," he told her, almost mumbling. He stood a little straighter and cleared his throat. "Do you want to come in? I've got coffee on."

  He made the invitation out of habit. In the nine years he'd lived here, Chloë had never been farther into the apartment than the front hall. But she surprised him this morning.

  "Coffee would be pleasant," she said.

  He stood aside and she stepped by him, trailing her anise. Rory was never sure if it was a perfume, or if that was simply the way she smelled. Following her into the kitchen, he cleared some space at the table and then poured her a coffee while she sat down.

  There was an embarrassing moment of silence that seemed to stretch on for far too long. Rory felt he should say something, but his mind had never been more blank than it was at the moment. He couldn't have been more surprised to have her sitting here than if it had been Brandon knocking on his door this morning. Brandon, who barely seemed to register that there was anything in the world besides music.

  "So," he began and immediately regretted speaking since "so" was about as far as he could take the thought.

  Chloë smiled. "Yes, this is a bit awkward, isn't it?

  "Not at all," Rory said, but then gave up. "Well, a bit. We've never really talked much."

  "It's not your doing. I've gotten far too spare with words in the last few years—at least so Annie says."

  "I wouldn't—"

  "So I'll come straight to the point and spare both of us any further inconvenience. Do you remember, I believe it was this spring, when I asked you to clean out the attic?"

  Did he? Even with Annie's and Lily's help, it had still taken them the better part of two days, but what a garage sale they'd had. Better yet, Chloë had let them split the proceeds three ways. Life had been good that month.

  "Sure," he said, wondering where she was going with this. He hoped she wasn't looking for a cut of the profits at this late a date.

  "I've been searching for an object that I believe might have inadvertently found its way into one of the boxes you removed. A small black tin, about so large." She indicated a shape about the size of a small hardcover book. "It was filled with small black pebbles. Do you remember it?"

  Rory nodded. "I've still got the pebbles—well, most of them. I tried cutting a couple to set in a bracelet, but it didn't work out."

  She leaned forward, obviously interested. "What happened?"

  "It was the weirdest thing. As soon as I started to cut them, they just turned to powder. But the stones are so hard you can bounce them off the sidewalk and they won't break. They don't even get marked. It doesn't make any sense. I keep meaning to bring them around to this lapidarian I know to see if she can identify them, but I never seem to get around to it. What kind of stone are they?"

  "I don't believe I know the proper name."

  Just that. Not, I've heard them called this or that.

  "Look," Rory said. "I'm sorry about this. I had no idea you still wanted them."

  "Not to worry."

  "Because I still have the rest of them."

  "The stones aren't my concern," she said. "It was the tin in which they were stored that I was hoping to retrieve. Do you still have it?"

  Rory shook his head.

  "Do you know where it might be?"

  He closed his eyes, trying to picture the tin.

  "It wasn't much," he said. "Old and pretty battered, right?"

  She nodded. "But of great … sentimental value."

  "Sure. I know the feeling. But I don't—no, wait a minute. I think Kit has it. Or at least she took it. She was going to use it in her camera bag to hold her film canisters."

  "Kit?"

  Rory laughed. "Oh, sorry. I mean, Lily—Lily Carson. I started calling her Kit for a joke one day—you know, as in Kit Carson—and it kind of stuck."

  "I see."

  Though it was pretty obvious to Rory that she didn't really. Or if she did, she didn't think it was all that funny.

  "Do you want me to see if she's still got it?" he asked.

  "If it wouldn't be too much trouble."

  "No trouble at all. She's out of town for the long weekend, but I'll give her a call tomorrow."

  "I would really appreciate it." She looked as if she were about to rise from the table, but she put a finger on one of his sketches, a stylistic intertwining of a fox head with the head and wings of a crow. "This is an interesting design. What made you think of it?"

  "Remember I was talking about a dream when you came to the door?"

  Amusement touched her lips again.

  "Well, I had this dream of Kerry last night. She was sleeping in this junked-out old car, see, and there was a fox and some kind of blackbird—a crow or a raven—sort of watching over her, like protectors. Or maybe like totems. Anyway, when I woke up I couldn't get this image out of my head, so I've been playing with it ever since."

  Chloë was nodding as he spoke. "Do you often dream of people you know being accompanied by some sort of animal companion?"

  "Not really. But everybody's got an affinity to some animal or other, don't you think? And I guess I tend to pick up on that sometimes. Especially when I'm doing commissions. It's one of the first things I ask, because I prefer to deal with images from the natural world than with pure des
ign. You know, birds, animals, trees, flowers." He paused and smiled. "I guess I'm going on a little."

  "No," Chloë said. "I find it very interesting." But she glanced at her watch. "However, I do have a few things I must still attend to today."

  "Oh, sure. I understand. I'll let you know as soon as I've talked to Lily."

  "Thank you. I appreciate it."

  She stood up and Rory followed her to the hallway where another awkward silence fell between them. Rory was about to just say good-bye and make his retreat when he glanced out the door. Chloë's gaze followed his.

  Not quite able to believe what he was seeing—this was Stanton Street, after all, in the heart of Lower Crowsea—Rory watched a tall, red-haired stranger standing on their walk pull a handgun out from under his sports jacket. He felt Chloë tense beside him.

  "Damn him for meddling," she muttered, then started for the porch.

  5.

  Ray hadn't wanted it to play out this way, but the presence of the crow girls left him no choice. Logic had no place in their lexicon, or if it did, it traveled its own road through their twisty thinking. There was no reasoning with them—never had been.

  "Let's everybody just take it easy," he said.

  From under his jacket he pulled his own .45—the one he should have put to the back of Cody's head instead of trying to settle things without weapons. His didn't have pearl handles, but the barrel was as long, and he held it as steadily as Cody had held his.

  "I know this looks bad," he said, addressing Kerry, "but I swear to you, I won't hurt you. Only you have to get in the car."

  There was a whisper of movement at his back and he stepped quickly to one side, where he could keep an eye on them all—crow girls and Kerry. Zia was now halfway between her perch on the hood of his rental and where he was standing, casually cleaning her nails with the point of a switchblade. She raised her eyebrows as the muzzle of his .45 swung in her direction. Maida hadn't moved, but she watched him intently, eyes narrowed to slits.