by Lily Velez
Before I could process his words, Connor was already dragging me up the stairs, an iron grip on my upper arm. I struggled against him, but he was immovable.
“Let me go!”
“We’re trying to bloody help you,” he shot back, pulling me along the second level of the cottage, eyes fixed on the ceiling to locate the attic.
He yanked on the chain to the attic’s hatch door and quickly unfolded its ladder. “Climb.”
I hesitated. “What about my dad? He’s unprotected.”
“The sluagh aren’t going to attack your father again.”
“They’re the ones who attacked him? A bunch of birds?”
Connor bracketed his hands on my arms and pushed me into the ladder. “Climb!”
I would’ve argued further except the front door below suddenly burst open, a whoosh of wind racing into the house along with the deafening wing-beating of what had to be dozens upon dozens of birds.
I raced up the ladder.
Once inside the attic, I patted down the walls to find a light switch. A single overhead bulb flickered for a few seconds before fully illuminating the space, critters scrambling back to their dark crevices at the first sign of light. It smelled like decaying wood and old clothes up here. It was also freezing, a fact made no better by the reality that I was still in wet clothes, the fabric like ice against my skin.
As Connor ascended the ladder, I rummaged through the few boxes scattered about the attic. I’d hoped to find something I could wield as a weapon. Ideally a baseball bat. Unfortunately, it seemed my dad really was as unathletic as they came. I’d have to make due with a heavy, old-fashioned lamp.
There was a crash from the ground level, and the fluttering of wings grew louder, closer.
Connor hauled himself over the edge of the hatch door and then turned around to pull the staircase back up.
It was too late.
A rush of black surged through the doorway, throwing Connor onto his back. The birds rocketed upwards, forming a terrifying cyclone of shadows that kept getting bigger and bigger. It was as if a nightmare were materializing before my very eyes. Feathers flew in every direction as the cyclone grew taller, reaching the attic’s ceiling.
Then, like bullets fired from a rifle, the ravens shot toward me one by one. I swung the lamp at the first bird, barely dodged the second, and recovered in hardly enough time to strike a third. No sooner had I righted myself, a dozen more had taken the place of their fallen brethren and clawed at my hair or snapped at my skin, drawing blood. I swatted at them, but they kept coming at me in an unrelenting assault.
It was like being in the middle of a funnel of talons, beaks, and feathers. One bird flew right up to my face, lunging at my eyes with a snap. I backhanded it before it could get any closer. Its own eyes had been red. Unmistakably red.
Connor finally managed to fend off his own gang of ravens. “Get out of here!” he yelled over the cacophony surrounding us.
The problem was the legion of birds was blocking my escape. Then I spotted a window on the opposite end of the attic and ran for it. I heaved it up on whining hinges and climbed out, my heart faltering when my foot nearly slipped on a wet roof shingle. After slamming the window shut, I slowly stood and cautiously made my way across the roof. There was a trellis on one side of the cottage that I could use to descend.
The wind shrieked as it soared past me. I focused on putting one foot in front of the other, my arms held out on either side of me for stability. From this height, out the corner of my eye, I saw Jack contending with birds by the SUV. How many of them were there?
Glass shattered. I carefully rotated my body to see the source.
I wish I hadn’t.
Behind me, ravens were bleeding out the attic window like plumes of toxic vapor and coming right for me.
I quickened my steps, wobbling as I tried to strike a balance between speed and safety. The roof shingles were slick, and rain streaked down my face, getting into my eyes. When I was just steps away from the trellis, my foot slid out from under me. I landed hard on the roof and skidded down its slope. Fast. There wasn’t even breath in my lungs for a proper scream. I tried clawing at the roof, but I only managed to scrape my palms as I continued to fall. Seconds later, I cleared the edge and was in the air. The ground was coming at me at breakneck speeds. I closed my eyes tight and braced for impact.
And then I wasn’t falling anymore. Some kind of force like a burst of wind blew up against me and stopped my descent.
I opened my eyes. The merciless ground was still waiting for me, but I wasn’t getting any closer to it. Then I realized why. I was suspended in midair!
And Jack Connelly, now only yards away, had his palm stretched out toward me as if he were the reason why.
He was the reason why, I realized with wide-eyed disbelief.
At Jack’s hand movement, the force of air gradually lowered me to the ground feet first. My knees almost gave out. No sooner had the moment passed, the ravens from the attic sped toward me like torpedoes.
Jack made a sweeping motion with his arms, like a baseball umpire calling ‘safe.’ The instant his hands shot outward, every last bird around us exploded into feathers and black smoke.
“Scarlet,” he called out, “run!”
He didn’t have to tell me twice. I bolted into the nearby woods and took cover behind a tree, my heart pounding so hard I thought it’d give out any second. I needed to catch my breath. I leaned over, planting my hands on my knees, and tried to steady my breathing.
Letty-Bean, you don’t have to be afraid.
Letty-Bean. It was my mom’s nickname for me, created from the second syllable of my name: let. My mom had called me that for as long as I could remember, back when I still played with tea sets and stuffed animals.
The words brought me back to a hospital room, my mom before me frail, pale, and shriveled up. Medical machines surrounded us, beeping nonstop.
“Oh, Letty-Bean,” my mom had said that day, when the doctors had given their final prognosis. Nothing was working, they’d said. The cancer was too aggressive; they’d done all they could. My mom had weakly reached for my hand, hers ice cold. There were small tubes coming out of its veins. An orange band dwarfed her wrist, smelling like something between baby powder and antiseptic. “You don’t have to be afraid.” She’d meant the words to be comforting, but they’d only made me cry despite how hard I’d tried to be strong for her.
Now I heard those words again. You don’t have to be afraid. Back then, my mom’s voice had been soft and coarse. Now the voice that spoke was strong, crystal-clear, soothing. And…real.
It wasn’t coming from inside my head. It was coming from behind me, spoken aloud.
I spun around.
And then I scrambled back against the tree in shock.
Before me stood my mom. But not as the woman I had last seen. This rendition of my mom was radiant. Strong, healthy. Her hair—her hair had grown back!—was its typical cinnamon brown. Thick, lush, and cascading just past her shoulders, where it slightly curled at the ends. There was blush on her cheeks and a vibrant light in her eyes.
“M-mom?” I stared at her, my throat suddenly parched as if lined with sandpaper.
“It’s me,” she said. Her voice was musical, loving. Her smile was like sunshine.
“But how? How is this happening?”
She held out a hand to me. “Come with me, baby. It’s okay. I can help you. I can protect you. Let me take you away from here.”
There was a blinding light all around her. At the hospital chapel, there’d been little prayer cards available with saints on one side, an aura of gold surrounding them. My mom looked like one of those saints now.
I looked down to her outstretched hand. It had been months. Nearly four, to be exact. Four grueling, painful, heart-rending months. Though I had my pictures and my videos, which I turned to on nights when the heartache was particularly unbearable, it was nothing like my mom’s actual physical presence. N
othing would ever be like that.
I wasn’t sure what was happening right now. I didn’t know how it was happening either. But I reached my hand forward, reached for my mom’s fingertips, simply wanting to touch her skin again.
As I did, ribbons of black cloud started to surround me like mist. They filled my nose with a heady fragrance. At once, I felt light and airy, as if all my worries had been washed away, as if nothing else in the world mattered. My eyelids grew heavy. I was so tired…
Five deafening gunshots blasted into the air. My mom’s form vanished like a snuffed out candle.
“No!” The scream that left my mouth was the sound of a tortured soul. I stared in horror and then faced the culprit. It was Jack, striding in my direction, eyes still fixed on the point where my mom had been standing, gun still aimed if she chose to reappear. In his black coat, he looked like a specter of darkness.
“Are you insane?” I yelled at him over the rain.
“Whatever you saw, it was only an illusion.”
“No,” I said, shaking my head. It couldn’t have been. It was real. It had to be. I needed it to be. “My mom was right there.”
“That wasn’t your mother.”
“I think I’d know my own mother if I saw her.”
“He’s lying, Scarlet. Of course I’m real.”
I whirled around. My mom had reappeared. She extended her hand toward me, still wanting to help me.
“Mom!” I moved toward her, but the gunshots came again, and just when I was about to turn on Jack in a rage, my mom’s image suddenly devolved into a shrieking, horrifying, demonic thing. In her place stood an emaciated creature with desiccated skin, razor-sharp fangs, and eyes as red as blood.
This thing, this thing that had been wearing my mom’s face, snarled and lunged for me, teeth bared, but Jack sent one more bullet into its face, and it exploded into shadows and dust and feathers.
I sank to my knees, lightheaded, drained, out of breath.
Jack knelt beside me, a gentle hand to my back.
Feathers still floated in the air. We were surrounded by them. They stuck to our arms, to our faces. Shaking all over, I rushed to brush them off me, not wanting anything to do with whatever that thing had been.
“Scarlet, are you all right?”
No, I was far from all right. My head was spinning. I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Something was happening to me, I knew, but I couldn’t get the words past my tongue.
“Scarlet?”
The last thing I remembered was slumping against Jack’s body. Then my eyes were filled with nothing but black.
13
When I finally awoke, it was to the sound of birdsong. My eyes reluctantly peeled open. Pillars of sunlight slanted through the window, lace curtains ballooning out in the breeze.
I blinked once, twice. When my vision focused, I stared at the sight opposite me. An unfamiliar, antique dresser with a three-panel mirror on top displayed my reflection. I lounged on the white sheets of a large canopy bed, sheer fabric tied back to each of its four posts.
I bolted upright. Then immediately regretted it as my head swam dizzily. Once the spell passed, I swung my bare feet over the edge of the mattress and stood. The freezing floorboards creaked in protest.
Beyond the window, there was nothing but rolling green fields topped by mist. I was at least three levels high, and there was not a soul in sight across the property. Where was I? How had I gotten here?
As if in answer, a deluge of memories overcame me like a tsunami. My dad motionless on the office floor, the Connellys materializing, the mob of ravens Lucas had called the sluagh, my mom…
My heart sank at that last one. She’d looked so real. It had been the realest experience I’d had of her since her death, far more affecting than a simple photograph or a ten-second clip on my phone of her blowing out birthday candles.
And it had been devastating to discover I’d only been interacting with…with what exactly? Red eyes glowed in my mind. Gunshots exploded between my ears. The flashes of memory came to me in a muddled haze. The last thing I could vividly recall was overwhelming dizziness. After that, nothing.
Unfortunately, my surroundings didn’t offer much in the way of clues. I was in the same clothes I’d been wearing when the sluagh had attacked, though they were miraculously dry now, but I definitely wasn’t in the same house.
I cracked open the bedroom door, frowning at the bandages on my palms, and looked up and down the hallway. I was completely alone. The corridor was long, seemingly unending, and dimly lit. The top half of its walls was covered in old-fashioned wallpaper. The bottom half boasted gleaming, cherry oak paneling.
At the end of the hall was a grand spiral staircase, the kind with two, curved arms branching off the center. Above, a giant chandelier dripped from a towering ceiling. This wasn’t just any ordinary home. It was an estate.
I descended the stairs. The ground level was decorated tastefully with furniture from another era and rugs so thick your feet sank into them with each step. There were portraits in gilded frames on the wall, some of landscapes and some of people, the latter a bit unsettling if only because it felt like the subject’s eyes were following you as you passed. A fireplace was lit in a quiet nook, the flames snapping and popping, but I couldn’t shake the sense that the estate had a feeling of emptiness about it, as if it wasn’t quite lived in. As if it were a tomb.
As I furthered along, light conversation leaked out of a nearby room. I followed the voices but stopped short of actually entering the space. Instead, I peeked through the crack between the open door and the wall.
The Connelly boys were there, speaking with a man who sat behind a large, claw-foot desk. The room was a library, two-levels high with rolling ladders and balconies. I’d never seen so many books in a person’s home library. The spines made up a multi-colored tapestry that wove all around the room.
“You know the rules about bringing outsiders here,” the man behind the desk said.
“We couldn’t just leave her in Rosalyn Bay,” Jack replied.
“Yes, we could’ve.” Connor. I narrowed my eyes at his backside.
“Your brother’s right,” the man said. “We know nothing about the girl. I’m sorry to hear of her circumstances, but you should’ve never gotten yourselves involved. In doing so, you’ve only endangered yourselves.”
“A risk I was willing to take,” Jack said. “She plays a part in all this. I know it. Even if she knows nothing about our world, she isn’t Sightless. How else would she have been able to banish that demon?”
“I still don’t understand why a demon approached you in the first place,” Connor said. “What did it want? What did it say to you?”
“Nothing of consequence,” Jack replied easily.
I drew up short at that. The demon—oh God, was I actually using that word?—had definitely said plenty of things of consequence.
That’s it, isn’t it? They don’t know. You haven’t told them what you’ve done.
Jack was lying. The question was why…and about what exactly?
“Scarlet was attacked last night same as all the others,” Jack went on, addressing the man again. “She’s clearly one of us, and now she’s directly involved in what’s been happening to our people. The Seer’s message is coming true.”
The man let out a heavy sigh. “Jack, we’ve been through this enough times, haven’t we? You’re making connections where there are none to be made. How can you truly believe this girl is the missing element in your quest to help Maurice? There’s no reason why she would be, especially when, by your own account, she knows nothing of our world. Who is this Seer into whom you’ve put so much trust? I have half a mind to speak with them myself.”
“Does it matter? The signs are clear. Somehow, Scarlet is instrumental in helping us. I know she is.”
I switched my weight from one foot to the other to get more comfortable, but when I did, a floorboard creaked. Oops. The man and the brothers whipped their
heads in my direction.
Seeing no point in continuing to hide, I stepped out from behind the door to reveal myself.
The man frowned at me, clearly unhappy by my eavesdropping. “Jack,” he said, “see to your guest, please.”
“Where’s my dad?”
Jack and I had just exited the estate—he offered me a spare pair of rain boots on our way out—and we were now walking toward a wet grove of moss-covered trees, twigs snapping underfoot upon the squishy ground. There was a feeling of oldness about the trees, as if their leaves, which dripped rainwater at a languid pace, held timeless secrets. Overhead, birds tossed chirps back and forth in riveting dialogue, but other than that, the place was entirely still.
“We brought him to a hospital on the outskirts of Rosalyn Bay. He’s stable, and he’s being monitored around the clock.”
“Stable? Does that mean he’s woken up?”
“The situation’s a bit more complicated than that.”
I took a deep breath, willing the tightness in my chest to go away. “Meaning?”
“As you now know, your father was attacked by the sluagh last night. If they hadn’t shown up themselves, we could’ve guessed it from the west-facing window in his office. The sluagh only ever enter a home from the west. They’re also the ones who attacked my grandfather, and they’re responsible for a number of other similar incidents throughout Ireland over the past four weeks. Your father’s case, however, is unique in that he’s the only known survivor of their attacks.”
It should’ve bolstered my spirits, but it only made me feel queasy. “Why did they spare him?”
“Trust me, it wasn’t their intention. The sluagh are soul thieves. When they attack, it generally means certain death for their victims, as a body can’t exist without its soul. Not unless certain measures are taken.”
“What kind of measures?”
He weighed his words before answering. “Did your father ever mention which student had given him that tea for his cold?”
I missed a breath. “It was you?”
