How It Is

by T. S. Joyce

  “And what happened?”

  “Cyrus Bane ended the entire Murder by himself. Killed every last crow. All that remained was me and my mother, who’d been left behind to wait for my father’s return.”

  This was a lot. Cora wrung her hands as her mind swirled around what all she’d just learned. “Would your father have killed the babies?” she whispered.

  “Yes.”

  Her stomach dropped to the floor.

  “I’ve thought about it so much. Too much. What would I have done different?”

  “Would you have killed the babies?” she asked, terrified of his answer.

  He inhaled deep. “I don’t know. I follow rules and that was the rule—no ending their lives until they took life. I hate the Banes. Hate them. I spent my whole life watching them, waiting for them to mess up, and when it came time to fulfill my duty as the new king of this Murder, I showed mercy to Moore Bane on the day he made his first kills.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he did a job we couldn’t do. Cyrus Bane had grown powerful with the destruction of my father’s Murder, and the lives he took after he lost control of his bear. The female, Ellsie Bane, took life too and lost control, and the Murder I was building was young and we were fighting our own dominance wars, figuring out the pecking order back in those years. We weren’t strong enough to end the pair. Moore Bane ended them for us.”

  “Oh my gosh, he killed his parents?”

  “Yes. Not out of anger either. They’d killed a hiker and let him see the body. Me and my crows were up in the tree branches watching it all. Moore seemed like a protector from very early on. When his parents charged him, he fought back. And he won.”

  “Or he lost in so many awful ways,” she whispered. Parents were supposed to protect their children, not force them into a bloody fight like that. She’d been lucky with her parents. Both of them.

  Krome’s eyes filled with a surprised sadness. “That’s how I felt, too. It was my right to kill him. It would’ve been vengeance. I was angry my whole life at them stealing my father away from me, but that night, I watched the agony in Moore’s face as he laid in those woods, bleeding, staring at the bears he’d just killed. His own parents. He hadn’t asked for that fate, just like I hadn’t asked for mine. So I showed mercy. I made the three Banes take a blood oath that night—The Oath of Bane. They could live if they swore to never touch a human, never pair up, never let anyone know what they were. All they had to do was let their line end, and the war would be done. They could live their lives in peace.”

  “They broke the rules?”

  Krome nodded. “They all three have human mates now. They have the potential to produce a set of nine cubs between them on just the first round of reproduction.”

  “Will you kill them when you are better?” she asked.

  “Yes.” The finality in his tone made her sad for some reason she couldn’t understand. He was in an awful position, but she’d wished his answer was different.

  “Have they taken life other than the parents?”

  Krome grew quiet and thoughtful. “No. We went after Moore’s mate to initiate the war, and she kept him from killing any of us. The other mates kept the other Banes from killing. They only maimed us.” His wings twitched behind him, and the raven-black feathers made a rustling sound against the wall and floor.

  This was so complicated. There wasn’t a wrong or right side.

  “Do you think they’re evil?” she asked.

  “No. It’s not an evil problem. It’s a weakness problem. The human sides never keep control of the bears. There is a prophesy with my people that there will be a Great War, and one side will go extinct. There will be none left. Not one.”

  “Maybe you already had the war,” she whispered.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe the bear shifters of old don’t exist anymore. If their mates can control their murder instincts, maybe none of the bad ones are left.”

  Krome frowned and stared at her with those troubled, pitch black eyes. “I think it’s time for you to sleep.”

  And just like that, the conversation was done. She could see the shut down in his eyes. He thought she didn’t understand, but she did. Cyrus and Ellsie Bane had tried to stay good, and the crow war had pushed them over the edge. The Bane brothers were trying, and a crow war had pushed Moore into doing something terrible to Krome. This war would solve nothing, and had already caused so much pain and irreversible damage. Clearly, Krome needed space to think. She knew this, and so she nodded and climbed back into his bed. “Good night, Krome.”

  He didn’t reply. He only stared blankly, like he was lost in his own mind. Krome had been surrounded by prophecies and the vengeance of his people, the rules, the charge to protect humans and crows alike…but sometimes, if a life revolved around one idea, it grew hard to see another point of view. It grew hard to have understanding.

  “Krome?” she murmured. “Someday, if someone ever came for your babies, I hope you would lose control to keep them safe, too.”

  Three breaths of silence, and then he softly said, “Goodnight, Cora.”

  Chapter Six

  Krome’s wings stretched out as a draft of cold air current brushed his flight feathers. Beneath him, the world seemed so far away. All of his problems were down there. Up here? Up here was nothing but peace.

  He could see Auxor Bane’s cabin. The bear shifter was outside with his mate, working on his tow truck. He could hear them talking about a call he’d just gotten to come clear a few downed trees off the road near town. His tow truck wasn’t starting. Nothing interesting happening there, so Krome aimed for Auxor’s brother’s house. Brick lived on the next mountain over, and was changed into his bear. The grizzly was walking through the woods with a little crow sitting atop the meaty hump between Brick’s shoulder blades. The young crow belonged to Krome’s Murder, but Brick had paired up with Tucker’s mother. The Murder was at risk of losing that little crow. Young ones were hard to come by. The Crow Blooded didn’t breed easily.

  At Brick’s cabin, his mate Trinity was cleaning caked mud off of work boots on the front porch. She was humming to herself. Humans did that when they were happy, he’d come to realize.

  Krome let off a caw, and she jerked her gaze to the sky. It was good to let them know the crows were still around.

  Moore was a different beast altogether.

  He and his mate were inside his cabin a few mountains over, but Moore Bane sauntered outside and stood in the snowy front yard before Krome even got a caw off. That one would be a problem. He could sense the crows now.

  Krome circled, too high for the shifter’s reach, and studied him. Moore looked identical to his brothers, except he had a big scar down his face. His eyes were the color of ice, and his glare just as cold. His face stretched into a slow, empty smile as he tracked Krome’s flight.

  “How are you flying without wings,” the monster asked.

  What? He had wings. That’s why he was up here. Krome darted a glance to the side, but he didn’t see his feathers stretched out. He didn’t see anything behind him.

  Panic seized him as he desperately tried to flap wings that didn’t exist anymore. He plummeted to earth, and he could see it so clearly—the hunger in Moore’s eyes as he held his hands out to catch Krome.

  Krome gasped and opened his eyes. There was a light blinding him, and he winced, shielding his sensitive eyes. Where was he?

  His body felt numb around the edges and wasn’t working right. Even his arm over his eyes was hard to control.

  Flying had been a dream. He always dreamed of the sky.

  “It’s okay,” a soft voice said. Cora. “I’m here.” Something touched his hand and he flinched away.

  “Where am I?” His throat felt like sandpaper.

  “Bron, move that light away,” Cora murmured.

  The light aimed away from him, and his eyes adjusted. Cora was standing over him, her hazel eyes searching his. There was an IV on a
stand, and a tube ran from it to a needle in his arm.

  “What happened?” he demanded as he sat up.

  The pain at the movement caught him by surprise and he grunted and doubled over. His wings were stiff. Pinned to him somehow. Aching.

  “Don’t you mess up my hard work,” Cora griped. “Lay back down.”

  Feeling trapped, Krome yanked the needle from the vein at his inner elbow and tossed the IV tube away from him. He was in the basement, but it looked drastically different. The ping pong table had been shoved into a corner, and the space had been transformed into a medical room. The table he laid on was like a stretcher, and a table near him was lined with scalpels and surgical sutures and bloody gauze, along with a hundred other things that added to the chaos of the room. Bron and Laken were cleaning up the table, chucking supplies into a box, while some of the other crows were mopping up a huge mess of blood on the other side of the gurney he sat on.

  And then it hit his groggy mind. She’d done it. Cora had done it already—the surgery. She must’ve drugged him before he woke up this morning.

  He nearly knocked the gurney over sliding off it, and in a rush, he stumbled into a small bathroom near the discarded ping pong table.

  “Ridiculous man!” Cora yelled, following directly behind him. “You are supposed to stay still!”

  “Did it work?” he asked desperately. He stood in front of the mirror and flinched at what he saw in that reflection. His skin was pale, and a sheen of sweat painted his face. Dark circles under his black eyes aged him. His features were sunken in, and he’d lost more weight than he’d realized since the war.

  But…

  His wings were still there.

  He tried to move them, but couldn’t. He turned to the side and studied the black bandages that were wound tightly around them, keeping them perfectly still. “I don’t like it. I don’t like it. I can’t move,” he told her.

  “You shouldn’t move them. They can’t heal if you keep fucking around, Krome. Get your ass back in that bed. Now.” There was steel in her tone he’d never heard before. It made him want to obey her. Him. A king of the Crow Blooded. Obey a human?

  He lifted his chin higher and crossed his arms.

  “Be stubborn all you want, but this isn’t me trying to order you around for fun. This is me trying to save your wings.”

  Her gaze was locked on him and there was a fierce protectiveness there. He liked that grit in her.

  “How long was I out?”

  She sighed tiredly. “Six hours.”

  “They hurt,” he said.

  “Well that’s to be expected. I had to rebreak them one by one, and place them as they healed. Your bones heal instantly. Did you know that?”

  “I had a guess.”

  “Well, it was a little stressful. If I didn’t get them positioned right fast enough, I had to start over. You had fourteen breaks, Krome.”

  He swallowed hard as the nausea washed through his stomach. She meant fourteen re-breaks.

  She sighed, and ran her hand down his arm comfortingly. She looked exhausted, and worried, and her scrubs were covered in blood. His blood. She was the toughest human he’d ever met.

  “I didn’t wake up,” he told her.

  “Thank God. That was my big fear through that ordeal. Bron helped a lot.”

  “Yeah, I’ll never fuckin’ eat chicken wings again,” Bron called from the other room.

  Krome huffed a laugh. A laugh. God, how long had it been since he’d done that?

  A peek out the door and Bron was still clearing the medical supplies off the table. He looked pale as a ghost.

  “They did good,” she whispered to him.

  A sense of pride filled him. He wasn’t big on positive reinforcement with his people. That showed weakness, but today was a special occasion. Even if they hadn’t saved his flight, they had done their best.

  Krome nodded to the boys. Laken looked troubled, and Bron sighed in relief.

  “You need to eat,” Cora advised him. “Eat and rest.”

  “How long do I have to wear the bandages?” he asked.

  “Three days.”

  “You said my bones healed instantly. I need to change. I have to fly—”

  “I don’t know if you can fly yet—”

  “I have to try—”

  “Krome.” Cora’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes were pleading with him. “Today was hard. It was really fucking hard. There was no time to stitch you before you healed on your own. You should’ve had a hundred stitches, but you have none. Only skin that is healing. Don’t push too soon and make me relive today again.”

  He swallowed hard. She looked tired. She sounded tired. She’d gone through so much to help him. The least he could do was listen to her orders, even if putting off the change would prolong the hurt in his body.

  “I could eat.”

  Cora huffed a breath and leaned heavily back on the wall of the bathroom. She offered him a shallow smile. “What do you feel like?”

  “Whatever you want. You’ll join me.” He did an about-face before she could deny him and strode through the room as steadily as he could. The meds were still making him feel two-shots-of-whiskey-in.

  “Where are you going?” she called behind him.

  “Bed, like you told me.”

  Sure, he knew she’d meant this bed down here, but he wanted the safety of his nest. “Laken, make sure Ms. Peterson has access to her phone. She has earned our trust.”

  One glance to the side, and Laken was leaning on a blood-soaked mop, his black eyes tracking Krome. “She’s human,” he said simply.

  Two words in that harsh tone, and Krome knew exactly what he meant.

  Careful, King. Even if she did her job, she’s only human and doesn’t belong here.

  He was going to have to bring the Murder back in line as soon as his wings were unbound and he could choose a form again.

  Bloodshed was the only way to solidify his place on the throne. He’d been too weak for too long.

  Krome hesitated at the stairs. He didn’t know why, but he couldn’t pull himself any farther away from Cora. Not when Laken had just warned against her. He tried to move his feet, but couldn’t.

  With a frown, he turned to her. She hovered in the open doorway of the bathroom. “You need rest, too. Come with me.”

  “I need to help clean up—”

  “The boys can clean up.”

  Cora looked down at her blood-soaked scrubs, and then nodded. “Okay.” As she passed Laken and Bron, she told them, “You boys did well today.”

  And with every step she took toward him, the tension in his body eased a little more.

  Whatever that meant, he was too tired to dwell on it now, but Cora was doing something to his body that had never happened before.

  Now, human or not, she felt like one of his people.

  Chapter Seven

  Cora stared at her mom’s number on the glowing screen of her phone.

  She could ask for help. She could tell her mom she was kidnapped. Mom probably wouldn’t have noticed her gone by now. They didn’t meet for lunch until Fridays, and today was Thursday. And they didn’t usually talk but a few times a week because Cora was always busy at the avian clinic.

  She could call for help.

  But…

  Other than the kidnapping in the first place, she hadn’t been treated badly. She’d been given a bed, and chicken nuggets, and then there was Krome…she didn’t want to bring the law down on him. He hadn’t kidnapped her. He’d been delirious with pain, and when she thought about it, she understood why Bron and Laken had brought her here. They could’ve been a little less forceful about it and made it her choice, but Krome’s people had grown desperate watching their king in pain like that.

  Cora wrapped the oversize T-shirt Krome had given her around herself even tighter. It was cold out here on the front porch, and she was only wearing the shirt and a pair of his black sweatpants that she’d had to roll at the wai
st three times.

  She could call for help. Call for rescue and be sleeping in her own bed, in her own home, soon.

  Cora stalled and made a call to the other surgeon in her clinic, Myrna. Cora was supposed to have these two days off anyway, and no one from the clinic had called to check on her, which meant Laken and Bron had probably closed up when they kidnapped her. But they would definitely notice if she didn’t show up tomorrow. She called in some sick days for the first time in forever, and then connected the call to her mother. Mom picked up on the third ring.

  “Don’t tell me you’re cancelling on lunch. I found us a new place to go to. It’s downtown and has a Bloody Mary bar. You get to choose your own flavor of bacon garnishes.”

  God, it was good to hear her mom’s voice. Cora huffed a laugh. “Hello, mother.”

  “Hello, daughter. How’s things?”

  “Uuuuum…” She took a quick glance behind her at the front windows of Krome’s house. Inside, Krome was definitely not listening to doctor’s orders, and was cooking in the kitchen instead of resting in bed. “Everything’s good. Listen, I needed to ask you a favor.”

  “The name and number of Brian Flannigan,” Mom guessed.

  “Oh good lord, stop trying to hook me up with him.”

  “He’s a doctor.”

  “Yes and I’m a veterinary surgeon and we both work insane hours and would never see each other, even if I thought he was remotely my type.”

  “Oh, so you don’t like handsome, successful, sensitive men? That’s not your type?”

  “No, actually my type is ruggedly hot, dark, powerful, mysterious men.” With tattoos and black eyes and wings and a growly voice.