Huntress

ONE

Maggie was too young to remember life before the Big Death, but she had a brain for books, access to books, a great deal of uninterrupted time on her hands with which to enjoy those books—and so had, over the years, pieced together a history of the world that she knew was, in part, fiction—but that, like most good lies, rang true. Not that anyone else was privy to her secret history: Maggie knew better than to draw attention to her eccentricities. It was enough that she ran the junkyard for Olo Enclave, and lived alone, and was twenty years old without a husband or prospect.

She had been on her own for years. Her junkyard lay on the outskirts of Olo, which bordered what had been, and still was, the Ohio River. It was settlement number six on the government grid—six out of several thousand, scattered across the former United States—located smack-dab in the new territory of Inohkyten, an acronym of the states thrown together after the Big Death: Indiana, Ohio, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Other territories had their own odd collective names, but when folks in Olo talked about the rest of the country, they just called those places what they had become: South, North, East, or West, with the Rockies, the Dakotas, and Alaska thrown in, all on their own.

It was spring when the motorcycle man came looking for Maggie. Blue sky morning, with the dew glittering like diamond drops on the tips of the green grass, and the cardinals and magpies lilting full-throated on the naked branches of the oaks and maples, which threatened any day now to burst bud-first with leaves. Maggie, in the old barn workshop, had a clear view of the meadow. Junkyard business stayed on the other side of the building, but when Maggie worked the foundry and tinkered with her machines, she liked a bit of the world in front of her: the old world, the world she figured had almost reclaimed itself less than two decades past; a world that undoubtedly would swallow humanity, again.

That very morning, Maggie was experimenting with clay flowerpots, which she had found years ago while scavenging for scrap in the burned-out garage of a home less than ten miles south. Up until now she had used the pots—in vain—to grow miniature roses and small pepper plants. But as no seed she touched ever seemed to reach the sprout stage, there was no loss in finding other ways to take advantage of the unique shape and material of a flowerpot—such as turning it into a furnace for smelting brass.

So far, success. Just some brick to stand the pot upon, a long copper pipe fitted through the hole in the bottom—at the end of which Maggie tied the balloon of an old turkey baster to make the draught—and voilà (a word that she had appropriated from the tattered pages of her dictionary, and that seemed to fit her mood, most days). Charcoal was burning, the heat was intense, and the scrap of brass pipe she had tossed inside was quite obviously melting.

I am, she thought cheerfully, a clever girl.

Outside, the gate bell jingled. Maggie thought about not answering—brass was much more interesting than flesh and blood—but out here, folks would come inside anyway and start poking around until they found her. She never liked that much. Her grandfather hadn’t, either. Territory was a precious thing, especially now. And word of mouth carried far. You had to keep reminding people of what was yours, until the knowing went so deep that it twined and twisted into the fabric of a place. Until it became part of your identity. Something no person could ever steal.

The bell rang again. Maggie maneuvered an old steel lid on top of the flowerpot foundry, caging the raging heat, and walked quickly through the barn. She shed her gloves, goggles, and a heavy leather apron along the way, running her fingers through her short-cropped hair, and picked up one of the old sledgehammers hanging neatly against the wall. She slung the tool over her shoulder, and ambled out of the barn into the yard.

A man stood just inside the gate, fingering the string of steel bells hanging from the barbed wire wound around the old wooden rails. Maggie stopped in her tracks when she saw him, and not simply because he was a stranger. He was big and lean, dressed in black dusty leather that matched his eyes and long hair. He wore no shirt beneath his open jacket, and his skin was impossibly pale. Colder than ice, she thought. Cold as the winter sun, or the river at dawn. His presence cut her senses, and for one moment Maggie knew him, in the same way that she had known her grandfather was dead before ever seeing his body: with certainty, and dread, and vast terrible loneliness.

The man looked at her sideways, tilting his head just so, away from the bells; an odd, graceful movement that affected only his head, so that the rest of him remained perfectly still. He had a piercing gaze, sharper than anyone Maggie had ever met; sharp like a hook in her gut, drawing her toward him. She wanted to take a step, more than anything, almost as much as breathing. But she was good at holding her breath, and did so now as she forced herself to stay rooted in one spot, sweat trickling between her shoulder blades and down her breasts. Her eyes burned from holding his gaze. She felt naked. But after a moment, the strange compulsion to walk toward the stranger eased, and she allowed herself to breathe again.

The man frowned. “You are the fixer?”

“You have something broken?” Maggie asked, surprised at how calm her voice sounded. Her hand felt broken, fiercely aching from squeezing the handle of the sledgehammer.

His frown deepened. “On the road, yes.”

Maggie hesitated. “Show me.”

He had to think about it, which only made her more uncomfortable. She imagined her sledgehammer swinging toward his perfect face; her heels dug in and she was ready, ready, ready for anything. Maggie had not yet found cause to kill a man, but she had scared away several of them since her grandfather’s death. She had a feeling that this one would not take a fright all that easily.

But work was work, and when strangers showed up on her doorstep needing a fixing, it never seemed right to tell them to go away. The nearest Enclave was over a day’s walk to the south, across the river. This was the only junkyard in the region to service all those folks looking for spare and rare parts—and she could not, in good conscience, tell anyone desperate enough to make the journey to mosey the hell off her spread.

So Maggie waited, clear-eyed and tense, until the man finally backed away, around the gate. She followed at a safe distance, walking down the short, overgrown drive toward the cracked paved road. Watching him carefully. Finding it hard to determine his age. He had flawless skin, as though he had never spent a day beneath the sun, and he was effortlessly graceful—footsteps light as air. He did not move like the men from Olo or other Enclaves, whose feet seemed to be part of the earth; and as solid. Watching him made her afraid, but she spied a glint of silver through the young oaks, and then passed around the bend and saw the machine that the man had brought to be fixed.

It was a motorcycle. Maggie had never seen one in real life; only in bits and pieces, wreckage, bent scrap; and in pictures from magazines. Like comparing paintings to fossils. But this was real. Onyx, obsidian, made of night; metal polished and shining like some reckless mirage of the past. For the second time since the man’s arrival, Maggie stopped breathing. She would never breathe again, if it would keep the machine genuine, and whole.

“Oh, my,” she said, unable to look away—knees locked, heart racing. Aware, dimly, that she deserved what she got if the stranger decided to take advantage of her distraction with a good wallop over her head.

He remained near the motorcycle, though, regarding her with a thoughtfulness that continued to unnerve. Sunlight splashed against his hair and clothing, but only served to make him seem more like a shadow.

“It is a small problem,” he said, his voice a slow rumble; a rubbing purr against the air. “A torn tire, and nothing more. But I am … far from my tools.”

Far from home, she imagined he would say instead. Far from everything known.

“You need a replacement,” she replied, finally looking past the dazzle of chrome to find the ripped tread, so badly torn that there was little doubt he had lost most of the tire while moving at some considerable speed. “I have something.”

“And is it right?” asked the man. “Will you serve me well?”

An odd question—or perhaps just odd phrasing—but it irritated Maggie, and before she could stop herself, she replied tartly, “If you plan on paying.”

A cold smile touched his mouth, and though the road was bright, the sky blue, and the morning sun shining, the light seemed to dim around him for just a moment; and the spring chill worsened with a snarl of wind.

He reached inside his jacket and then held out his hand. Small flecks of color sparkled against his gloved palm: rubies, emeralds, diamonds. Gemstones. Or plastic. No way to know for certain, though Maggie couldn’t imagine anyone parting with the real thing. Not for a tire.

Maggie did not touch the jewels, afraid that doing so would constitute a sealed bargain. She studied them from a distance, marveling at their glitter, but finally shook her head.

“I have no use for them,” she told the man.

“Then, what?” he asked dangerously. “What do you want?”

“My life,” she said, without thinking—and froze in embarrassment, and fear. But the words slipped off her tongue, and could not be taken back. Part of her wanted to say them again, louder. My life. Do not take my life.

Maggie thought he might. She thought he would be able to, if he wanted, no matter how fast she moved, or how hard she fought. He had a way about him.

A cold gleam filled his eyes. “I heard of you. Miles away, I heard of you. The woman who fixes machines. But you are more than that, I think.”

“Am I?” asked Maggie carefully. “Where did you come from, that you heard such things?”

But the man did not answer her. He hid away the gems inside his leather coat, and inclined his head so that his long hair fell around his pale face, sharpening and hiding his features until he resembled a fox more than a man—nothing but a pointed chin, high cheekbones, and eyes that glinted golden. Maggie found herself unable to look away from his eyes, and though he studied nothing but her face, she felt as if he was all over her, touching her body in places she did not want to be touched.

“Your life,” he said. “I believe that will be an interesting trade.”

And then he moved—blindingly quick—and kissed her mouth. Maggie could not fight him. He was too strong. His lips were cold as ice—so cold, dunking her face into a raging winter river might have felt warmer—and in one dizzying moment it seemed as if all the air in her lungs was sucked away, and she was drowning. She screamed, but heard her voice only in her head. She tasted blood.

The man let go. Maggie fell, hitting the road with a grunt, sledgehammer clattering. She stayed on the ground, sprawled on her side, unable to move or lift her head. Paralyzed, drained into boneless exhaustion, trapped; and when warmth oozed unexpectedly through her lower stomach, followed by a stroke of blinding pleasure, she still could not react beyond a startled, sharp inhalation.

Her vision blurred, back-scuffed boots edged close to her face, and a pale hand touched the pavement. Hair brushed her burning cheek.

“Rest,” he whispered.

Maggie growled, furious, struggling to move. Her pinky twitched, but that was all, and a terrible feeling of helplessness cut through her anger. Fear filled her, growing until she could barely remember her own name. He had poisoned her, Maggie thought, heart hammering. Poison on his lips. Poison somewhere.

The man walked away without a backward glance, and was gone a long time: until the sun rose to midday, and she glimpsed turkey vultures winging high overhead. He returned lugging a tire and some of her tools. Everything exactly as she would have chosen.

He worked quickly to fix his motorcycle, ignoring her efforts to move, and only when he was done, and she was propped up on her elbows, sweating and nauseous, did he look down at her from astride his machine. Shadow rider, shadow steed.

He tossed her lug wrench into the grass beside her. “You have your life. For now. But you waste it in this place, little one. You waste more than you realize.”

Maggie gave him the most hateful stare she could muster, which only made him smile.

“Kit with claws,” he murmured. “We will see if we cannot make you a lioness.”

And then he did something with his feet and hands—kicked and twisted—and the motorcycle roared to life with a wild, deafening, thunderous growl; a glorious, wicked sound that fell through Maggie’s bones into her blood, and burned her heart with envy. A black cloud erupted from a chrome pipe, and the man threw back his head, laughing. Maggie’s fingers dug into the cracked pavement, reaching for the sledgehammer.

“I am Irdu,” he told her, baring his white teeth, which suddenly appeared quite sharp. “Remember that.”

His tires squealed with magnificent power, engine roaring, and then he was gone—the growls of the motorcycle drowning Maggie’s own sounds of frustration. And yet she watched that machine fly down the road—watched it for as long as she could—and even when it disappeared, its sleek metal body felt more real than the man; like freedom and thunder, and all the perfect beauty that humankind had once held at its fingertips, and taken for granted, and lost in blood.

But where did he get the gasoline? Maggie wondered suddenly.

She was still lying there, thinking about that, when the Junk Woman found her.

TWO

The Junk Woman was the oldest woman Maggie had ever known—well ripened, well done, and well wrinkled at the ancient age of seventy-three. She was a “crusty broad” (her words) who had once, long ago, driven a massive sixteen-wheeler across the country, hauling freight for a corporation that made toilet paper and diapers. She had been in Mexico during the first outbreak of the hanta-bola pox—gone into the hills to find herself (and maybe some gold treasure her daddy had told her about)—and by the time she’d come out, the world had changed.

Maggie heard the mules first, the steady clip-clop of their hooves on the old road; and then the jangle of loose metal and bells, and the creak of the axles beneath the wagon. A loud voice sang out about darlings and Clementines, and then the melody shifted into a hearty braying rendition of “A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall,” which Maggie was convinced should have stayed dead with the other 70 percent of humanity.

But a thrill of relief passed through her, wild and heady, and she managed to finally sit up as the wagon came into view. Her head hurt, and she spit into the grass, trying to rid her mouth of the taste of blood and ash, and dirty ice. She fumbled for the sledgehammer and the lug wrench, and ignored the tattered remains of the torn motorcycle tire, which the man had tossed aside with no reverence whatsoever.

A horn squawked—a fat sound, repeated in three short bursts—followed by a hoarse, “Haylooo, Maggie!”

Maggie raised her hand, waving weakly as the old woman stood up in the wagon, reins held tight in her brown leathery hands. She wore patched denim overalls, and a puffy black coat made of synthetic cloth that was leaking its stuffing at the elbows. A green knit cap covered her head, and two long white braids framed a fine-boned face that might have been pretty once, but had been hardened by sun and wind, and death. Silver glinted against her throat; a bundle of shark’s teeth, capped in the precious metal and dangling from a thick chain.

Maggie’s gaze skimmed over the flatbed wagon with its large rubber wheels, and salvaged junk glinting through holes in the bolted tarp. Unable to help herself, even now, from wondering what treasures might be hidden beneath. Crazy, her granddaddy would have said, and Maggie would have agreed. She forced a lopsided smile as the Junk Woman reined in the team of mules, popped the wagon brake, and hopped down off the rig and came running.

“Hell,” muttered the old woman, stopping short to shield her eyes and stare. “Tell me the motherfucker who did this to you is missing his nuts.”

“Not quite,” said Maggie dryly. “Nice to see you, Trace.”

She grunted, and slapped her hand around Maggie’s wrist, hauling backward. It took a couple tries, but the younger woman finally rocked upward onto her feet, swaying unsteadily.

Trace slung her sinewy arm around Maggie’s waist. “You hurt? Broken?”

“Just my pride,” she replied, comforted by the solid, strong warmth of familiar arms. “I thought there were weeks left before you’d come back up this way.”

Again, the old woman grunted. She could hold an entire conversation without saying a word, just by the tilt of her eyebrows and the small soft sounds her throat produced.

Words are worthless for everything that matters, she had once told Maggie. But a little bit of silence can say it all. And what Maggie was hearing now in Trace’s silence was nothing short of uneasiness.

The old woman eyed the sledgehammer, and the other scattered tools. “Let me get you to the house. I’ll come back for those.”

Maggie almost protested, but she shut her mouth when Trace shot her a sharp look, focusing instead on her footing, as she carefully walked up the drive to the junkyard gate. The short distance made her breathless, and she swallowed hard against the bad taste in her mouth. When she was eight, her granddaddy had traded big for a case of old-time Coca-Cola, and for more than a year the two of them had stretched out that fizzy sugar water. Maggie wished she had some now.

She wanted to sit down in the dirt, maybe close her eyes and rest a spell, but once they were on the other side of the gate, bells chiming along the barbed wire, Trace said, “Tell me.”

“There was a motorcycle,” Maggie replied.

Trace blinked, turning slowly to stare, her expression curiously empty. After waiting in vain for the old woman to say something—anything—Maggie went on from start to finish, fighting to keep the tremble in her knees from spreading to her voice.

She left out the kiss, though. She did not share the man’s name, either—or what he had said to her. It was too embarrassing, and more than she wanted to say out loud.

In the end, Trace did little more than grunt, her gaze downcast and thoughtful as she fingered the shark teeth hanging around her neck.

“Well?” asked Maggie, leaning her elbows against the rails of the fence. “Don’t you have anything to say?”

“You’re lucky to be alive,” replied the old woman. “And if you see that man again, don’t go lusting after his motorcycle ’fore you bust his brains in with that hammer of yours.”

Maggie shook her head. “You should have seen that machine.”

Trace rolled her eyes. “Seen ’em plenty, ’fore you were born. Rode ’em once or twice. Just a way of getting around, Maggie Greene. Nothing worth losing your life over. And,” she added, “leave it to you to care more about metal than about losing your life to a dangerous man.”

“I am what I am,” Maggie replied, which was something her granddaddy had been fond of saying.

And that’s all I am, he would have added.

Trace frowned, tugging one of her thick white braids. Her dark eyes glinted, as though sparked with sunlight. “Long dark hair, you say? Lily white skin, like a corpse?”

“Cold like one, too,” Maggie said, before she could stop herself.

Trace’s gaze snapped up. “Didn’t say he touched you.”

Heat warmed Maggie’s face. “Briefly. It’s how I got … knocked down.”

Anger flittered through the old woman’s gaze. “And he came here … looking just for you.”

“Yes,” Maggie said uneasily, and pushed herself away from the fence. “Come on, I’m fine. And if he comes back, I’ll be ready.”

Trace yanked her braid even harder, her other hand tightening around the shark teeth. Maggie tried not to squirm under her sharp gaze, which suddenly felt more intimidating than any strange motorcycle man.

“We’ll see,” the old woman said ominously, and raked her gaze down Maggie’s body. “You’ve lost weight. Promised your granddaddy I would make sure you stayed strong, and here you are, wasting away.”

Maggie blinked, struggling with the change of subject. “You gained some, looks like.”

Trace grunted. “Found a gentleman down South. Old Mississippi, if you can imagine it on that antique map of yours. He lives near the coast, in Arbo Enclave. Fat, sassy man who makes the meanest, hottest gumbo I ever found.” She paused. “I think you should come with me, next trip down. You’d like him. And you’d like it there.”

Maggie looked down at her boots. “I wish you’d stop asking me to leave home.”

“Gah.” Trace waved her hand, turning in a slow circle to survey the junkyard. “Young people need to see a bit of the world. You, Maggie, you see it all up here, with your books.” She tapped her head with one long brown finger. “But words aren’t living.”

“I’m happy,” she protested.

“You’re a hard girl to bring down,” Trace agreed. “But think about it. You come with me, it’s not permanent. Just a season, on the road.”

It was a familiar speech, but there was an urgency in her voice that was different, and that made the hairs on Maggie’s arms rise.

“Trace,” she said carefully, “forgetting, for a moment, what just happened … is there something else wrong you’re not telling?”

The old woman’s expression turned grave and quiet. Maggie stood very still, watching her. The last time she had seen this look had been months after her grandfather’s funeral, when Trace had returned from her road trip and discovered that her friend was dead.

“Things are changing,” she finally said quietly. “I can taste it. Life was bad after the Big Death, but folks with common sense stepped in and life smoothed out into something I never expected. Peaceful, Maggie. We got peace in place of death.”

“You’re saying that’s no longer the case?”

Trace gave her a sharp worried look. “I’m saying I’ve heard rumors, strange ones, and I don’t know—”

She never finished. A bundle of black feathers tumbled from the sky, landing roughly on her shoulder. Maggie jumped backward, alarmed, but Trace, aside from a slight flinch and the raising of her eyebrows, seemed none too surprised by the creature suddenly perched on her.

Maggie stared. “You have a crow on your shoulder.”

The bird tilted its head, meeting her gaze. Trace shrugged—carefully. “He found me near one of the old city forests, not long ’fore I entered Tennessee. I think he was lonely.”

Maggie made a small, non-committal sound—because that was what one did when old women said that crows were lonely. Although, there was something about the bird that seemed odd—and not just because it had attached itself to a human, out of the blue. She stepped closer, peering at the crow, and felt herself examined in turn, sharply. Maybe too sharply. She felt dizzy, her vision blurring. Again, blurring.

“Maggie,” Trace said, touching her shoulder. “Maggie, girl. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” she mumbled, blinking hard. Her dizziness faded. So did her blurred eyesight, though the morning sunlight suddenly seemed too bright, glaring against the old junk and metal heaped around the yard. Everything hurt to look at: the gutted rusting cars, the iron rails, oil drums filled with the detritus of decades past, toasters, hair dryers, television sets, and cell phones. The useful components had already been removed, and what remained suddenly looked less like poetry to Maggie (poetry being the myths that people created) and more like trash.

It unsettled Maggie to feel that way; and it saddened her, too. She liked fiddling with relics from the past. She liked making up stories about objects that had been treasured not so long ago. It made her feel closer to her parents, long dead from the hanta-bola pox. Made her feel close to her granddaddy, too, who had happened to be looking after her when her folks got caught up in the city outbreaks. He had been gone now for five years, taken by the influenza.

“Come on,” Trace said gently. “You head in. I’ll take care of my babies, but after that, I’ve got a surprise for you.”

Maggie said nothing, just started walking through the junkyard to the old farmhouse. She looked back once, watching Trace stride down the drive to the road, and saw the crow perched now on the gate, staring back at Maggie. It had a peculiar gaze. She felt assessed and judged all in the same moment, and it made her skin crawl—but in a different way than it felt with the motorcycle man. She was not afraid of the crow. His presence seemed to tickle memories in her brain. Like dreams, forgotten.

Secret histories, whispered a small voice in her mind.

Maggie went into the house and shut the door.

Her grandfather had been a junk man, but only because he had trouble throwing things away. Maggie had a similar problem, but she drew the line at dirty toothbrushes, used floss, underwear past its prime (though nowadays, with cloth at a premium, you would have had to go without it, if you got too picky), and other items that tended to accumulate mold or germs, or were just plain unsightly to behold. Her grandfather, bless him, had not been so discerning, and after he died, it had taken Maggie three years to clean out the house. The problem was twofold: Some things, no matter how disgusting, had sentimental value; and as for the things that could be tossed, there was no good place to put them, so they had to be burned, buried, or stored elsewhere.

The kitchen was clean, though. So was her bedroom. And now there was a much wider path that led through the house to the stairs, and even to the musty couch in the living room, which was only half-covered in books and old newspapers, and glossy magazines with pictures of places, things, and people that Maggie would never have believed or imagined had she not seen them for herself, on the page.

She fixed breakfast for Trace. Eggs were something she had plenty of—animals thrived under her care, unlike plants—and she had made a small business for herself on the side creating odd little toys for children, as well as fixing machinery, whenever she could. Enough to trade for butter and meat, and for some much-needed gardening help from several local teens whom Maggie had taught to read.

She went into the cellar to cut some ham for them both—a special treat—and by the time she returned to the kitchen, Trace was already there, boots off, washing her hands under the pump in the sink. Maggie was grateful that the crow had remained outside.

The old woman was quiet while she ate, and Maggie could not help but notice how her gaze roved from the door to the windows, and flicked back to her, again and again, as though—like the damn bird—she was taking her measure.

“What?” Maggie finally asked, sorely tempted to lick her plate.

Trace looked down at her own plate, pushed her thumb against a small shred of egg her fork could not pick up, and placed it in her mouth.

“Rumors. Rumors about men.” Uneasiness filled the old woman’s eyes. “A gang of men who travel from Enclave to Enclave, stealing women, sometimes men. Just a handful, here and there.”

“They take only people?”

“What food they can carry—but the living seem to take priority. And ’fore you ask, I don’t know where they go with ’em, if they go far at all.”

Maggie had read stories about this kind of thing in her books, and in magazines, too—stories about wars where lives were worth more in slavery and in death than in freedom. “You think the man who came here this morning is one of them?”

Trace watched her carefully, tugging the shark teeth hanging around her neck. “Been told they ride motorcycles. Old-time muscle machines. A friend of a friend saw ’em from a distance, out west ’round Oklahoma. He knows what a motorcycle looks like.”

And now so did Maggie. Chills rushed through her. She could certainly believe that Irdu might be a kidnapper, and a thief. Though he had not, in the end, hurt her. Or stolen her belongings. He had kept his word, in a rough manner.

“It doesn’t make sense,” Maggie said. “I’ve been trying to figure it ever since he left. Motorcycles take fuel. Only the government has access to that, and most solar cells aren’t good enough to power a vehicle. Not so that it moves faster than a horse or bicycle, anyway.”

“You trust what you saw, and I trust what I was told,” replied the old woman solemnly. “ ’Sides, you’re forgetting something. There is gasoline available. Lots of it.”

“No,” Maggie replied automatically. But as Trace’s meaning became clear, the very thing that Maggie had been trying not to consider reared its ugly, horrifying head. “You’re crazy.”

“It’s been long enough.”

“There are still bones there.”

“Viruses don’t live in bones,” Trace replied. “I don’t think.”

Maggie suddenly felt ill. “The government would have opened up the cities if it was safe.”

“There’s barely a government at all. And after almost twenty years of farting around and letting the forests grow in, and the infrastructure crumble, it would be easier, and cheaper, for ’em to start over somewhere else.” Trace leaned forward, drumming her knuckles on the table. “There’s gas there, Maggie. Gas in the old cities. Who knows what else?”

Maggie hardly heard the old woman. She had been only a child, but she had lost her parents to the hanta-bola pox, and most everyone knew what that was like: to lose someone, maybe everyone, and not in a good, clean way, but in the virus way, which had been spread by breathing and by touch—the virus penetrating into cells, removing skin with neat efficiency, coring people like apples until they flushed their guts and blood. No cure. No time. Death occurred in two days. And almost everyone had started dying at once.

Murder, survivors said. Terrorists.

But the scale of the crime still baffled, and haunted. Not just America had suffered, but everyone everywhere. Maggie still had old newspapers from those days, before they quit printing. Europe, Asia, South America, Africa—no one had been spared. And for folks who had survived, there was still famine and lawlessness, and other diseases, to contend with.

The idea that men had returned to the city forests, slipping through the lockdown barricades to make homes among the dead—possibly catching the disease, only to spread it, again—was horrifying.

The idea that one of those men had kissed her …

“No one’s doing anything?” she asked, wondering how much time she had before her breakfast reappeared upon the floor.

“No one is admitting anything,” replied Trace. “Duck their heads like turtles in a shell. Just you wait. It’ll happen here, too. No one wants to be responsible for causing a panic.”

“We should warn someone anyway.”

“No.” Trace shook her head, fingering her necklace. “Folks don’t believe the bad news until it hits ’em. And once it does, they’ll be looking to spread blame.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Maggie protested. “What’s right—”

“What’s right isn’t the same as what’s real,” interrupted the old woman tersely. “Even if you warn ’em, it’ll change nothing.”

Maggie didn’t say anything else but gritted her teeth and began to clear the table. Trace caught her wrist. “I just want you to be prepared, that’s all. But I guess you are now.”

The young woman nodded carefully, ill with unease. “More than one motorcycle, you said?”

“Listen for thunder and lions growling.” Trace smiled grimly. “You hear that on a clear day—any day—you head for the hills.”

But that, Maggie later discovered, was easier said than done.

THREE

The crow hung around for two weeks after Trace left. The old woman had a timetable, a set route of junkyards and Enclaves that needed someone who could haul away all those undesirable fixings that no one knew what to do with. Fools, Maggie’s grandfather had once said. A thing, even an old rundown thing, always had a purpose to it. And if a person waited long enough, they would eventually find out what that was.

If the crow had a purpose, he refused to share it with Maggie. Instead, she found herself working long hours in the workshop with that bird perched on chairs and shelves, or the edge of her cold flowerpot furnace, watching her, watching the meadow, watching the things she put together. She’d been bothered at first—a lot—but by the end of the first week, she had gotten used to the bird’s company, and by the end of the second, she had to admit that she would miss his sharp little face if he ever decided to take off and find more interesting company.

And she needed a friend now.

It was another clear blue morning when she packed her nylon backpack and headed into town. She rode her new bicycle—Trace’s surprise, hauled all the way up from Mississippi. It was a clever little thing the color of a robin’s egg, which generated its own electricity every time she pedaled. Not a motorcycle, but almost as fine, and Maggie could kick down the stands attached to its tires and ride it in place inside her workshop to charge her old reclaimed batteries. She had done so every morning and evening to make enough juice to hook up her granddaddy’s music box with its silver mirrored discs. She couldn’t play many songs, not for long, but it was something special to sit and savor voices that had not been heard for almost twenty years: Gladys Knight, Glen Campbell, Sting, and Vince Gill. She had never heard anything so pretty.

Maggie this morning had toys to trade: puppets made of metal and leather scrap, with wire strings attached to the arms and legs; and whirly-gig fans built from carefully cut fragments of tin sheeting that whistled like ghosts in the wind. She could feel them poking her spine as she rode her bicycle, but it was a good discomfort. She had made something; little somethings that might not be food or clothing but that would still be important to someone, somewhere.

The crow came with her into town. He flew above her head, chasing the breeze, silent as her own shadow while she pedaled down the old paved road and over the rolling hills still naked from winter. She passed farms, and was barked at in a friendly manner by both sheep dogs and small children, as she tried to enjoy the early sunlight and the scent of spring.

She tried, too, not to think about Trace alone on the long road, where men might be prowling. And she tried not to think about the motorcycle man and his frightening eyes and dangerous touch. But that was impossible.

Out on her bicycle, alone, all she could think of was that encounter. Night had become insufferable; her dreams, full of thunder and chrome, and faces, pale and wild as lightning, that passed through her mind: men, smiling; men, heads thrown back to pray to the night; men, with mouths filled only with darkness.

You waste more than you realize, Maggie would hear whispered in the shadows, and then she’d bury her head under the covers, trying not to listen as other voices murmured—voices she had drummed away as a child, and hidden deep. She had forgotten what it was like to hear things that others could not—nonsensical sounds, incomprehensible chattering, soft as the wind and the new buds of leaves bursting from the branches of the trees.

She had known when her parents died. Screamed and screamed, clawing at herself. Her granddaddy had been forced to tie her down. Trace had been there, too—the old woman sitting with her, two days straight. Maggie remembered, when she let herself. She could still feel the aching pull of her parents slipping away—and Trace, holding her back, keeping her from joining them.

She remembered what it felt like to die, and not be dead, and how Trace had breathed for her, breathed heat into her mouth, into her body, and made things better.

Or maybe that was her imagination. Holding both truths and lies, like the history she had spun for the world—a secret malleable thing, much of it fantasy—where humankind had traveled once in cars and planes, while in millennia past, flown upon the backs of dragons like storybooks claimed. Or the sphinx, somewhere in the world now stone, moving its slow thighs, in the words of Yeats, gazing upon the world with pitiless eyes.

Sunlight burned. By the time Maggie reached the old highway, she was not the only one on the road. Bicycles were everywhere, along with horse-drawn wagons and small buggies. She recognized all the faces. Folks were bundled up in patched pants and old ragged coats, or hand-knit sweaters fraying at the edges. Refugees had been assigned to different Enclaves by the government, or come to Olo on their own and been accepted by the town council. Maggie remembered playing with the new children her age, some of whom had not been able to speak English at the time.

Having familiar people around soothed Maggie’s nerves, just a little—though the closer she got to town, the more her heart ached and her belly hurt.

Dread, she named it. The same kind that she had felt climbing the stairs to her granddaddy’s bedroom, listening to his silence—after a week of constant coughing and fever—even after she had called his name, and knowing, knowing, what she would find. Knowing, and going to him anyway.

Just as she was going to town today.

Farmland began making way for clusters of homes, and Maggie heard a lone fiddle playing a mournful tune somewhere out of sight. Ahead, the crow landed on the road in front of her, and began cawing, urgently. He had never made a sound, not one that she had heard, but his voice was strident, and he hopped up and down, his wings flapping and his feathers ruffled until he was almost twice his normal size. Maggie stared into his glittering eyes, and her vision blurred so badly that she almost turned her bike over.

One of the men riding nearby aimed for the crow and tried to run it down—Otis Farlowe, his bicycle basket brimming with potatoes. The bird squawked impatiently and flew out of the way.

“I remember when my dad used to shoot those things,” grumbled the middle-aged farmer, slowing his bike to ride alongside Maggie. “Now we got no bullets to waste.”

She nodded, tight-lipped, and glanced up at the sky to search for the crow. He was nowhere in sight.

The road curved around a residential street filled with homes that had been white twenty years ago, but now were gray and battered; though the yards were neat, with not a thing out of place, and the children playing outside looked bright-eyed and freshly scrubbed. She tried to smile at them, but her stomach felt sick. All she could do was stare at the pavement directly ahead of her front tire, and stay upright.

Because of that, it took Maggie a moment to realize Otis had been talking to her.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “what was that?”

Otis smiled, tugging down the brim of his ancient cap. “Head in the clouds, Maggie. World is gonna pass you by.”

And then he pointed up the road. “I was saying that something seems to be going on in town.”

Maggie looked. Main Street was in the distance, a narrow strip of brick buildings and wood-slate awnings covering sidewalks loaded with wares. This time of year, after a long winter, the pickings were limited to nonperishables traded from other Enclaves; or potatoes, cabbages, and jars of preserved fruits and vegetables. Most of the shops in town belonged to the Amish, who had done well during the outbreak—and done even better, afterwards. Partially because they knew how to survive without the old modern fixings, but mostly because they helped each other out.

Maggie could see many of them now, the women clothed in simple dresses and black shawls, while the men stood about in their work clothes: dark trousers, and dark blue and purple shirts, sleeves rolled up to their elbows. Wide-brimmed hats covered their heads. They, and others, stood at the side of the road, watching a man who watched them, in turn.

Just one man, sitting on a motorcycle.

Maggie stopped pedaling, stopped steering, stopped breathing. All she could see was that man. For a moment she thought it was Irdu, but then she saw that a blue flame had been painted against the side of the motorcycle, which made her look more closely at the man. His hair was also long and dark, but he wore faded black jeans instead of leather, and he had a dark feather knotted into a thin braid that hung past his thin face. Other feathers fluttered against his back, forming a long, draping cape, black as ink. Silver flashed at his throat. He wore no shirt, and his skin was so blindingly white, he would have appeared sickly had his body not rippled with lean, hard muscles. His dark eyes, his slow-burning gaze, roved over the crowd—and found Maggie in moments.

The man smiled faintly. Maggie’s heart lurched. Very far away, a crow cawed—a stark, bitter sound, cold and lonely—and the man looked away to stare with a sharp glance, into the sky. Maggie clung to the crow’s voice, to his angry despair, and found the strength to pedal her bicycle off the street, down a narrow lane between two old homes. No one paid attention. Everyone watched the man as though compelled—as if he was the only thing in the world that existed. She felt it, too, but as with Irdu, she held her breath and stayed steady, strong.

The moment she was behind one of the buildings, with the man out of sight, Maggie slumped against the handlebars and gulped for air. Wings fluttered. She glanced up in time to see the crow swoop close, and managed not to flinch as it landed on her shoulder. The bird was heavier than she had expected, but comfortingly warm, and it stroked her hair with its beak for one brief moment, as if it, too, needed soothing.

“Mister Crow,” she whispered, forgetting for a moment that the bird was just a bird. “What just happened?”

The crow made a clicking sound, deep in its throat, and hopped from her shoulder to the ground. Maggie climbed off her bicycle, holding on to the handlebars for balance. Her knees were weak, but she forced herself to inch closer to the street, listening as a single voice floated, soft and insistent. The crow pecked at her ankle, and then snatched at the frayed hem of her old patched jeans, tugging backward. Maggie ignored him. She knew for a fact there was more than one of those men—just how many was the problem.

Maggie peered around the corner of the building. Edward Stoll, Amish patriarch and owner of Stoll’s General Store, was scratching his long grey beard as he watched the man on the motorcycle. “Stranger, you’ve been sitting there for some time now with nary a word. Think you might share your thoughts with the rest of us? We won’t bite,” he added, smiling faintly, though Maggie heard the tremor of concern in his voice.

He was not the only one who seemed unsettled. Otis stood nearby, his large arms folded over his chest, frowning. Other men, too, were gathered in clusters, trying to look strong, but coming up short against the robber man, who, in his stillness and silence, radiated a terrible natural menace that was, in its own way, utterly alluring. Maggie still felt the pull, and saw that the other women in the crowd did as well. Young and old, all of them staring in fear, but the kind of fear that kept the pulse fluttering high and sweet, with a breathlessness indistinguishable from wonder.

The crow slammed his beak into Maggie’s ankle, drawing blood. She flinched, giving him a dirty look, but the pain helped her focus. She looked at the people gathered, more and more arriving by the minute, because it was morning and this was where business got done. Word would have gotten around by now. Not much happened in Olo. Not many strangers arrived, riding machines that should have been impossible to fuel. Everyone would come see. Everyone was coming.

In the distance, she heard a rumble; low, like thunder, and so deep and sonorous, she felt the sound in her blood.

Not a scout, she realized. Bait.

Maggie choked, frozen, and the roars ripped louder, wild and raw with throbbing heat. Folks started turning, looking around with frowns and whispers, and she fought for her voice, for movement, for anything but the paralysis sinking in her bones.

Move, screamed the voice in her mind. Move now.

The crow fluttered up to her shoulder, placed his beak inside her ear, and shrieked. Maggie cried out, knocking him away, but she found herself able to move, and screamed, “Run!”

No one did. Men and women she had known her entire life stared at her like she was crazy. Maggie stumbled into the street, grabbing Otis’s arm. She swung the farmer around, searching his eyes, aware of the motorcycle man sitting straighter, staring holes into the back of her head.

“Please,” she begged him, “Otis—”

Behind her, the motorcycle kicked to life: a magnificent, mechanical snarl that cut through Maggie like an ax. She flinched around that sound—that beautiful sound—and glanced over her shoulder. She saw all of him in a flash—denim and muscle and steel, feathers fluttering wildly—and watched in terrified wonder as the motorcycle’s tires squealed, burning rubber, lunging toward her.

Men and women scattered. Otis grabbed Maggie’s arm, trying to push her aside, but her legs locked as the motorcycle accelerated—and she finally saw what had been flashing in the sunlight around the man’s neck.

Shark teeth, capped in silver, hanging from a chain.

Maggie’s vision narrowed. Blood roared in her ears. A dark blur fell from the sky like a hammer, slamming into the side of the man’s head. He fell sideways and the motorcycle skidded, trapping him beneath. The crow began screeching, beating his wings with furious energy against the air.

She started to run—running was all she wanted to do—but lurched to a stop after several steps, teetering and looking over her shoulder at the trapped man, who was shoving viciously at the motorcycle that had fallen on his leg. Maggie ran back to him, bent low to the ground. His head was turned away from her, and the sounds of her shoes on the pavement were drowned out by cries and shouts.

He turned to look at her just as she reached him, and she saw his eyes were the same as Irdu’s: black, and filled with glints of gold. He snarled at her, but the crow swooped, shrieking, and under a flurry of black feathers, she reached down and snatched the necklace off his neck. The man’s hand flashed. His fingers snagged her wrist, his grip so tight, it felt as though he was crushing bone. A strange lassitude flooded her—a split-second desire to lie down and give up—but Maggie focused, and reached into her back pocket for a switchblade.

She stabbed his arm—hesitating for one brief second before sinking the knife into his flesh. Wincing, even as the blade went deep and grated off bone. The man made no sound, but instead writhed, baring his teeth—sharp white teeth.

His fingers loosened and she slipped free, falling on her backside. The switchblade remained in his arm, and the crow flew at her, cawing wildly. Beyond the bird, the man continued to stare, his gaze burning through her with power. But not the same power as Irdu’s. Weaker, different, like the heat of sunlight in winter and in summer.

“Stay,” hissed the man, wrenching the switchblade from his bleeding arm. “Stay.”

Maggie did not stay. She scrabbled to her feet, turned, and ran. Shark teeth dug into her palm. She barely saw the faces that stared at her, or heard their voices calling out. She wanted to tell them to run, but her throat choked, and she could not stop. Her legs refused to slow.

She raced back to her bicycle, leaped onto the seat, and began pedaling hard. No direction at first; just steering across lawns and narrow streets, heading in a straight line out of town. Somewhere near, engines roared, and a bitter acrid scent filled the air. Burning gasoline, she thought, and suddenly glimpsed leather-clad men between the houses, all of them headed toward the center of town.

They were already nearby, she thought grimly. And you knew. You knew they might be coming and warned no one.

Behind her, screams filled the air, but all she could see were shark teeth, dangling and glittering. Trace’s good luck charm. She never took it off. Maggie tossed the necklace over her head to keep it safe. It was heavier than she expected, the chain cold. She rubbed her palm against her stinging eyes, and pedaled harder.

The crow flew overhead. At the edge of town she rode through the old graveyard, heading straight from the walking trails into a farmer’s bordering land. Maggie threw her bike over the fence, followed awkwardly, and started pushing. Halfway across the pasture she heard the ripping roar of motorcycles, and dropped down into the scrubby grass. She could see the road from where she crouched, and glimpsed chrome flashing.

Maggie flattened herself even more, but not enough to keep her from watching as thirteen motorcycles rumbled out of town. At least five of the men held women in front of them, dresses and shawls fluttering. They only seemed conscious: none were struggling, just sitting upright, eyes open and staring blindly. The man who had worn Trace’s necklace was easy to find—he was the only one without a shirt—and the feathery cape flowed behind him like wings. Blood flowed down his pale arm.

Irdu led the pack. Maggie was certain of it. He turned his head to look in her direction, and she knew his face, even from a distance. She recognized his motorcycle, the only one that was unadorned.

She watched the men until they rode out of sight, and when they were gone, the growls of their motorcycles fading, she rolled on her back and stared at a sky that was not quite as blue and a sun not as warm, and wiped her eyes and nose, trying not to cry.

The crow landed beside her, making small throaty noises.

Maggie rolled on her side, staring into his dark eyes, and clutched the jangling shark teeth in one hand, and then pressed them against her flushed cheek.

“What do you know?” she asked him, certain now that he was no ordinary crow versed well enough in myths and fairytales of magic that she could believe in odd things. In a world where most everyone had died, it seemed to her that odd was the new normal, and that normal was in the eyes of the beholder … as the old saying went.

The crow, of course, said nothing. But words were in there, crow words, ticking around his brain. Maggie knew it. She could almost hear them, and stroked his chest with the back of her trembling hand. “A necklace doesn’t mean much. She might be alive.”

Or not. But the might be was stronger. So was Trace. She had survived the Big Death and the chaos that followed, and was still sharp and whole and healthy. Robber men and their motorcycles were nothing. Nothing.

And if she told herself that long enough, she thought she just might believe it.

Maggie did not go back to town. She could not bear it. She traveled cross-country toward home, pushing her bicycle among cattle and horses, and through idle fields waiting for their spring plowing. She walked through the forest, hauling her bicycle up and down the barren hills, and though she sweated and her muscles ached, she did not notice. All she could think of was the old woman. The shark teeth remained cold against her skin.

It took her all day to return home. Sunlight was almost gone. The air still smelled acrid and there were wheel marks in the dirt of the yard. Maggie leaned her bicycle inside the barn, surveying her workshop: half-finished toys and other items she tinkered with, her tools, decades of junk stacked and neatly organized. Her sledgehammer was the only thing out of place. She found it on the bench. A message had been written into the handle, in a thick black ink that Maggie had not seen in years.

A test of truth. Find us, if you can. You know why.

Maggie closed her eyes, pressing her brow against the cold, hard steel. She took the sledgehammer with her into the house and laid it on the table; then cooked a big meal. She fried up all the ham and boiled eggs. She made corn bread. She ate only a little and wrapped the rest, along with some clothes and a blanket.

Maggie strapped on her tool belt, and slid the sledgehammer into place. She went outside and set her chickens loose.

And then, carefully, Maggie locked her house, loaded her things onto her bicycle, and rode under the cover of darkness away from the junkyard. She headed north, because that was where Trace had gone, and the direction that Irdu had been leading his men. Fistfuls of stars glittered, rivers of stars, and the night was cool and quiet.

Maggie listened for thunder.

FOUR

For the first two days, Maggie rode only at night, resting during the day off the road, inside the forest. She had been surprised twice by the motorcycle men, in broad daylight, and though she was quite certain that traveling at night provided little, if any, protection at all, it made her feel better. She could see well in the dark, and the crow rode upon her shoulder as she pedaled silently down the long road, listening to the tread of her tires, the wind, and the thrush of branches beneath the glittering stars.

She met no other travelers at night, though she passed the skeletons of old towns, fallen into rubble. If folks lived there, they did so quietly—and Maggie did not linger. Enclaves might be full of busybodies and gossip, and folks who rubbed you the wrong way, but there was something to be said for familiar faces and community, and knowing you had a place in the world.

Fixer, Maggie reminded herself, trying to bolster her courage. You fix things. You’ll fix this.

“I don’t suppose you have a plan?” Maggie asked the crow.

Not one you want to hear, she imagined his reply, masculine but soft.

And because Maggie was more than willing to indulge her imagination, she replied, “Try me.”

The crow fluttered his wings, giving her a sharp look, but she attributed it to a deep crack in the pavement that made the bicycle bump up and down. After steering around clumps of weeds, and a lonely hubcap that Maggie very much wanted to salvage, she imagined a quiet male voice whisper, You must trick them. You must be them.

“I’m not anything like them,” Maggie protested.

But the crow remained silent, even when she reached up and poked him gently in the chest. He merely rocked a bit on her shoulder, and then rubbed his head against her ear.

It was near dawn when Maggie stopped to rest, venturing far off the road into the woods. She did not want to get off her bicycle. She was ready now, because of the crow, to go on the road during the day. A little faith, some trust, an idea that he would warn her if danger was close; all these things that should have been impossible she accepted, if with some trepidation—and desperation.

I just need to know, Maggie kept telling herself, feeling her stomach sore with hunger and fear. Alive or dead, I need to know for certain what happened to Trace.

But her body refused her. She could not go another mile without sleep.

The redbud trees were blooming so thick in the undergrowth that in the predawn light, they seemed less like trees and more like a vast pink mist, delicate and rosy. Maggie brushed her fingers against the soft clumps of blooms and left her bicycle leaning against one of the stout little trees, then she unfolded her blanket and spread it over the dead leaves.

She unbuckled her tool belt, and pulled the sledgehammer free, laying it on the blanket beside her. She ran her fingers over the message, and then through her hair, rubbing her scalp, searching for unusual bumps. It was too cool yet for ticks, probably, but if she stayed out in these woods much longer it would be a problem. She had cut her hair short for that reason, and because it was hard to keep long hair clean and out of the way.

Maggie ate her last boiled egg, and shared small chunks of cornbread with the crow, giving him the very last piece in her handkerchief. The crow tilted his head, picked up the cornbread, and dropped it back into her hand.

Maggie sighed, stroked his little head, and split the piece in half. She ate one chunk of it, and this time, he pecked away at the other.

“You’re not normal,” she said to him, as he ate. “I get that. But why stick with me?”

The crow did not stop tearing at the cornbread, though inside her head Maggie heard a soft voice whisper, You are not so normal either.

Obviously, thought Maggie, scowling—stretching out on her blanket and trying to roll herself up into a warm ball. She adjusted the shark teeth necklace so it did not poke her skin. “And?”

This is a new world. He stopped pecking at crumbs and gave her a long look that was uncanny and keen. A world where girls may speak to birds, and where birds might be more than feather and bone.

“I’m imagining this,” she told him, eyes drifting shut. “I’m indulging voices in my head because I’m lonely.”

The world has become a lonelier place, he replied, hopping close. Some of us miss the humans.

“And some prey on them,” Maggie mumbled, half-asleep, not quite certain what was coming out of her mouth.

She hardly felt the crow touch her cheek, and was barely awake enough to appreciate the surprising softness of his beak as it rested near her lips.

There are some who prey on us all, he whispered, and that was all Maggie heard before drifting deep into sleep.

Maggie heard voices in her dreams, a swift endless chatter from the shadows. Soothing voices, familiar, and she drifted upon words and sighs, eavesdropping in her sleep though she could not understand a thing that was said. She woke slowly, and the warm thrush of voices continued unabated, chirring and sweet. A faint breeze stirred against her face. She opened her eyes, just a little, and found the redbud blooms rising off wizened branches to flit like fireflies, but with flowers instead of light. Maggie watched them, thinking she must still be dreaming, and smiled at the wee symphony of movement.

Perhaps that was too much awareness. Flying flowers faltered. Maggie’s vision became blurred, and she rubbed her eyes. When she could see again, the dance had ended, and the world had resumed its natural order: still, quiet, and ordinary.

She lay unmoving for quite some time, staring at those branches and the redbud blooms—taking note, too, of the blue sky overhead and the glint of sunlight through the trees. She did not think she had slept long, perhaps only to mid-morning. Maggie rubbed her face. Her nose felt cold. She untangled herself from her blanket, stretching out the crick in her neck. Two nights now, sleeping under the sky in the cold spring air. Not ideal. She jumped in place, rubbing her arms, trying to get her blood moving. She searched the trees for the crow.

She did not see him.

Dismay set in, and then concern. Maggie struggled not to feel either; or worse, not to feel fear. The crow was just that—a bird—and if he chose to fly about, doing what came naturally, that was his business. It did not mean he had abandoned her. At least, she hoped not.

Maggie stumbled around the redbud trees, searching for a good spot to use as a latrine, and heard water splashing.

She froze, head tilted, and then heard the sound again, faintly. She followed, pretending she was a ghost, silent as she picked her way over dead leaves, ducking under redbud branches. Petals floated down upon her shoulders and head.

She found a creek nearby, flowing around the base of a small hill. Oaks and maples twisted their roots through the water, which rushed quietly over large glistening rocks. Downstream, where the current quieted, there crouched a naked man. He was ankle deep, bent low as he furtively spilled handfuls of water over his lean, muscled back. His dark hair, cut short and ragged, hung wet and rough around his face, which she could see little of except for the profile of a strong jaw. His skin was golden brown, his hands large and elegant, moving with particular grace.

Maggie stared, rooted to one spot. Suffering from a compulsion, not unlike the one she had experienced with Irdu, to draw near, to see more, to be close for no reason, other than that it seemed right. Only, this was her own particular desire, and not something forced into her mind, as she suspected Irdu and his men had done, to her and others. She remembered how docile those women had been, as they were carried away on the motorcycles. No woman in Olo was that meek, Amish or otherwise.

Maggie took a step, and the man flinched, looking over his shoulder at her. She glimpsed a raging, burning gaze, wild and dark, and she felt a physical jolt, like a good shake. The man burst from the water, snatching up a dark robe from the dead leaves on the shore.

He ran. Maggie stared, voice choking in her throat. She wanted to tell him to wait, but it was no good. He was too fast. The robe he clutched to his chest trailed around him, fluttering. It was made of black feathers, she realized—long, shining, and sleek.

She thought about that for a moment, breathless, and then turned slowly and walked back to her bicycle, staring at nothing in particular as she stumbled through the redbuds, replaying that scene over and over in her mind. She searched those eyes. Considering the possibilities.

By the time she started pedaling down the old road, the crow was high overhead, little more than a speck of shadow.

Maggie reached Dubois Enclave late that afternoon. The border was marked with a single government-posted sign, jammed into the side of the road. It still looked new: bright green, with neat white letters. Olo’s sign was only five years old, and every now and then one of the Amish families sent their children out to weed around the wood post, and in the summer, to tend the petunias planted at its base. Dubois did not seem to care as much. Dead leaves and tall grass were its only decoration; but then, it was hardly spring.

She followed the road as it curved and twisted upward, into the hills. Her thighs burned, as did her lungs. The shark teeth were cold against her flushed skin.

The crow swept low over her head, into the trees, their branches bursting with new buds of green leaves. The air was cool and smelled like rain, and the sunlight flowing through the clouds was silver. No vultures in the sky. It had been years since Maggie had traveled outside Olo, but she had never been this far north to Dubois. She passed dirt tracks that faded into the forest, and somewhere in the distance she heard dogs barking. Maggie saw no signs of people, though she felt watched—and startled a small herd of deer grazing at the side of the road.

The barricade took her by surprise. She came upon it while pedaling up the curving road. A ravine was on her left, and a steep hill of jutting limestone on her right. She had to brake fast, front wheels wobbling, and she slammed her boots into the pavement to keep from tipping.

Fallen trees blocked the road, a very deliberate wall of logs and branches, so freshly cut she could smell the sap and sweetness of new wood. Two men and one woman sat on the logs, holding axes, old hunting bows, and rifles that Maggie thought were probably not loaded (though she was unwilling to bet her life on that). All three were dressed in old pants and thick jackets, glimpses of synthetic cloth still visible between hand-stitched patches of fur, leather, and government-issued cotton.

No one spoke as she drew near, no warnings, not one greeting—nothing but cold scrutiny and silence. Approaching them, Maggie felt a bit like a robber herself: dangerous, an outlaw. She watched their hands tighten around the weapons, and the shadows deepening in their eyes.

“I’m looking for someone,” Maggie called out, dismounting slowly from her bicycle. “Trace, the Junk Woman. I know she comes through here sometimes. I’m worried she might have been hurt. By men on the road.”

“Men on the road,” echoed the woman, who was as brown and wrinkled as stiff leather, though her fingers were supple enough to hold the ax handle. “Motorcycle men, though God only knows how those machines still run. Yes. We’ve had dealings with them.”

“And Trace,” added another fellow, who had a different look about him, with his coarse black hair and eyes—Asian, maybe, or Native Indian. “She was here little over a week ago, stayed for a bit, and left. She was fine then.”

Fine. Alive. Maggie struggled with herself. “Do you know if she went north?”

“Up to Martins. Said there was a detour she had to make, but that she would take some letters for us.”

Martins was another three days’ journey from here—never mind any detours. Maggie had a bad feeling that Trace had not arrived at her destination. She tapped her thigh, thinking about the message written on the handle of her sledgehammer, the necklace hanging heavy beneath her shirt, and felt those people scrutinizing her with an intensity that made her uneasy. Best not to linger, she thought. Strangers were unwelcome now.

“I don’t suppose I could trade for food?” asked Maggie. “I won’t bother you for more than that.”

The woman gave her a skeptical look. “Trade? You’ve got nothing I can see, except maybe your tools and the rig you’re riding.”

Maggie took off her backpack and crouched. Carefully, a little afraid they would be bent or broken, she removed the small puppets and whirly-gig fans that she had intended to trade in Olo. Much to her relief, all the small toys were intact, and she dangled the puppets and made them dance; and blew on the whirly-gig until its fans spun and whistled like ghosts. The men and woman were not easy to make smile, but they did finally, nudging each other with grim amusement.

The Asian fellow relaxed his hold on the compound bow, leaning it against his leg. “Just food, you want?”

“That’s all I need. And I can only afford to part with one of these.” In case there were other Enclaves she needed to trade with, Maggie thought.

The woman tore her gaze from the puppet to Maggie. “I know you now. You’re the Fixer from Olo.”

She might as well have called Maggie a bad name. The men gave their companion a startled look, and then turned their sharp focus on Maggie. The little progress she had made in relaxing them disappeared. Distrust settled again in their eyes, and anger.

“Is there a problem with that?” Maggie asked slowly.

“One of the robber men mentioned you,” said the woman, eyes narrowed, but with thoughtfulness, and not the same suspicion as the men. “You, specifically. He made a point of telling us that you might pass through here. He said … you were good at fixing things.”

“Like motorcycles,” added the other man; a freckled, tousled redhead who had been silent until now, and who had not stopped staring at Maggie since her arrival. “Is that what you did for them? Did you help those men?”

“No,” Maggie replied sharply, giving him a hard look. “But one of them … knocked me out. Took what he needed.”

“But not you,” said the woman. “He didn’t take you.”

“He took enough.” Maggie stared dead into the woman’s eyes, daring her to interpret that as she wished. “Am I going to have trouble here?”

“No,” began the Asian man, but he stopped as the woman’s frown deepened, and she chewed the inside of her hollow cheek.

“I knew your grandfather,” she said finally. “I came to Olo once so he could fix my plow. I remember you. Little spit of a thing, not more than five or six. You told me my future that day.”

“I doubt that,” Maggie replied, though a chill rolled over her arms. She bent to pack up her toys, and the woman crouched, touching her wrist.

“You said,” she whispered, “that I would have no children of my own, but that I would take in new blood. You said to watch for the green man, because he would try to hurt my family.”

Maggie went very still, memories rushing—memories that she had not known she possessed. She recalled a hot dusty day sitting in the shade of the barn, playing with a little wooden horse her granddaddy had carved for her. A long shadow had joined her, a woman in jeans and boots, with a long knife strapped to her waist. The woman had asked her a question about the toy, and her voice had melted into the shadows, sparking images; dreams, waking in Maggie’s head.

She remembered that, and more, and it made her breathless, and ill. “Hello, Ellen.”

The older woman rocked gently on her heels, rubbing her jaw. “Not long after I met you, some kids came in on the last of the refugee buses. I was forced to take them, even though I had no interest. But we got along. I loved them. And then a man came to town, one of those traveling types—a teacher, he said—and oh, what a fine green coat he had! But I remembered what you said. I kept an eye on him. And when I found him one morning with my little Eddie …”

The woman stopped, and looked down at the puppets. “You saved the boy. Other children, too.” She fingered one of the toys, tweaking a small metal arm. “I’ll trade you for this one.”

Maggie stared, stricken. But the deal was done. Ellen offered a jar of pear preserves, a chunk of dried beef, a loaf of bread, and cheese. Maggie accepted without argument, and the men—after a brief hesitation—helped drag her bicycle over the barrier of fallen logs. Neither one looked her in the eye. Maggie did not want to be around them, either. She did not trust herself—not her memories, nothing. She wondered what else she had made herself forget.

Ellen did not invite Maggie into town. She left her to fetch the goods, riding away on a lean fast bicycle. Maggie waited uncomfortably with the two men, who sat with equal discomfort a short distance away, on top of the barrier. The crow perched in a tree above them, but she did not think they noticed.

“So, you’re psychic,” said the Asian man finally, looking sideways at her from his survey of the empty quiet road.

“No,” Maggie replied.

The redheaded man muttered, “Your town was hit, right? People taken? Not a good psychic if you didn’t see that.”

“I’m not psychic,” she said, wondering if she would have to use the sledgehammer, after all; or make a run for it. But neither man moved, or looked at her, and after a short time the Asian fellow slowly, haltingly, shared a tale of men and motorcycles. Dubois, it seemed, had lost four women and two young men. Some had families. Nothing had slowed the kidnappers; not rocks, not baseball bats, not knives. They had not played bait and snatch, but simply roared in on thunder and taken what was in front of them.

Maggie frowned. “Did you try to follow your people? To see where they were taken?”

“We tried,” said the redheaded man hesitantly, a flush staining his cheeks. “They were too fast. We had others to think about, in case there was a second attack.”

You gave your people up for dead, she thought, but hardly blamed them. Death had become common. It was survival that mattered. Maggie knew she was nuts to look for Trace. She knew, too, that she was cold-hearted for hardly thinking of anyone else who had been kidnapped—forgetting them, even. But she could not help everyone; couldn’t even help herself.

Silence, after that. The men did not even ask about Olo, which under other circumstances would have been odd. News from other places was rare. They watched the road and Maggie, and Maggie watched her feet and the crow. She was almost sick with tension by the time Ellen returned with the food.

Maggie turned down offers of a free bed, though her body ached for something soft to rest on and a hot meal. But the shark teeth were cold against her skin, and above her head the crow fluttered his wings. She packed up her toys and loaded her bicycle with food. She waved good-bye to the men, who acknowledged her only with a nod, and pushed her bicycle a short distance down the road, while Ellen walked by her side.

“Are any old city forests nearby?” asked Maggie, knowing full well the answer, but wanting to gauge the woman’s reaction.

The response was as Maggie expected. Even after twenty years, Ellen flinched, distaste and fear flickering in her eyes.

She was old enough to remember the bad times, and Maggie was suddenly glad she had been too little, too well protected in the distant countryside, to do more than learn from afar that her parents had died.

“Several days east of here, along the old freeway, if you’re on foot,” replied Ellen, a warning tone in her voice. “But I wouldn’t really know.”

Maggie nodded, and swung her leg over the bicycle. Ellen grabbed her arm. “Those men had another message. It was also meant for you.”

Maggie’s gut twisted painfully. “I’m surprised you’re letting me walk out of here, as much as I was mentioned.”

“I’ll get flak for it. But you’ll be gone, and folks trust me.”

Maggie shook her head. “What was it?”

Ellen hesitated, grim. “Don’t give up. That’s what he told us to pass on to you. Don’t give up if you want to find your teeth.”

A bad taste rose inside Maggie’s throat, and she swallowed the urge to spit on the road. Son of a bitch, her granddaddy would have said, and Maggie found herself mouthing the same words. Son of a bitch.

Ellen had not yet released her arm, and her fingers tightened. “You, girl. Do you know what you’re doing?”

“What I have to,” she said coldly.

“And can you still see the future?”

Of course not, Maggie almost replied, but in that moment her vision blurred, and images raced through her mind; a torrent of shadows shrouding petals, feathers, and chrome. She blinked once and saw Ellen sprawled facedown in snow. A brace of frozen rabbits hung from her belt. Her skin was blue. She was not moving.

The vision broke. Maggie blinked again, rubbing her burning eyes. When she looked at Ellen, the woman was too bright, the entire world shining, and she had to squint just to see.

“Girl,” said Ellen.

Maggie looked down at her hands, searching for words. “If it snows … don’t go out alone. Don’t check your lines. Stay home. Stay home if it snows, Ellen, even if you’re hungry.”

Ellen’s hand fell away. Maggie forced herself to look at the woman, and found her gaze hard and flinty. But Ellen tightened her mouth and nodded once, like she understood.

Maggie said good-bye and pedaled away.

FIVE

Near evening it began to rain, winds kicking up with wild strength. The crow had led Maggie to an abandoned farmhouse, sagging on its foundation some distance off the road.

“You’re sure no one’s in there?” she asked the bird, wiping rain from her face, hesitant to venture inside. Most of the window glass was gone, and an oak tree was growing through the porch.

Trust me, the crow replied, perched on the edge of her bicycle’s basket. We’re beyond humans now.

Maggie was still cautious, though. She kept one hand on the sledgehammer. Inside was dark, and a cursory examination revealed little that was useful. Most everything except the floorboards had been taken away, and she supposed that eventually those would go, too. Maggie would not have waited this long to harvest them. There was linoleum in the kitchen that would be worth a good trade, and the insulation behind the walls could be used in another home. The Formica countertops were still in place, but the cabinet doors had been taken. An old clock hung on the wall, tilted at an angle.

The crow sat with Maggie during dinner as she curled up on her blanket, eating with her fingers and tossing him bits of bread and pear. She was in the dining room, just outside the kitchen. The wallpaper was peeling. Her tool belt lay beside her head, but she had pulled the sledgehammer free. She did not read the message on the handle, though it was impossible not to notice. The words, so large and black, seemed to crawl like spider legs in the corner of her vision. When she lay down, resting her head in her arms, she turned away from the tool and faced the crow. He remained at the edge of her blanket, and stroked her hair with his beak.

“Why are you different?” she asked him softly, as the rain began drumming harder against the roof, and the winds howled. Shark teeth had spilled out from beneath the collar of her shirt, and the floor was cold beneath her blanket. When her fingertips brushed against the dark, scratched wood, she heard children laughing, and smelled sweet cake, freshly baked and warm.

I am me, replied the crow gently. Just as you are you. We were born this way.

“My parents were normal,” Maggie said. “I think.”

The crow flipped his wings. There would be no shame in it if they were not.

“And the men with their motorcycles?” Maggie peered into his dark glittering eyes. “What about them?”

He ducked his head, busying himself with an invisible crumb. She touched his wing and pushed gently. He hardly budged. Sturdy little bird. Maggie thought about the man in the creek—lean, brown, effortlessly wild—and stopped stroking the crow’s sleek back.

She imagined that he sighed, gently. They are not men. They are something older. Their kind existed before the humans died, existed while humans were in their infancy, but in secret. Always, in secret.

Maggie thought of Irdu’s cold kiss, and shivered. “What do they do with those people they take?”

They hurt them, said the crow.

She closed her eyes. “One was wearing Trace’s necklace. You think she’s dead?”

I think she is strong. I think there is time.

“He was also wearing feathers.”

The crow made a small throaty sound. She opened her eyes and found him staring at her, so intensely and with such sharp intelligence that she gave up thinking of him as a bird. Never again. He was only pretending, she thought. Wearing a mask.

Maggie mumbled, “Why are you really helping me?”

Lightning flickered outside, and thunder rumbled. The crow flinched, and hunched so deeply, his head almost disappeared within his ruffled feathers.

Someone was stolen from me, he whispered. Very long ago.

Maggie did not know what to say. Her hand inched close, but she did not touch him. She just waited, and closed her eyes. The crow, after a moment, pressed the side of his sleek, warm head against her fingers.

She was not certain who was comforting whom.

Silence was heavy. Maggie tried to relax, but her thoughts stumbled over Ellen, and then Trace. She thought of her granddaddy, too. Big strong man, always pale, with large freckled hands and silver hair that sometimes in the sunlight revealed glimpses of red. Carver Greene. Maggie had some of his red in her hair, passed down through her daddy—who had been a football star before the Big Death. “Professional ball-thrower” sounded kind of odd to her.

She tried to remember interacting with her mother, but that, as usual, was impossible. Maggie had pictures, but nothing else. She had been small, though very elegant and keenly dressed in suits and heels, which no one in their right mind would wear now, at least not in the Enclaves.

Her family. She had never questioned those bonds, and still did not. But she was different from other people—just a bit—and she wondered where that came from. Granddaddy had been eccentric, she thought, but not … odd. Not strange—as in telling the future, or hearing voices.

Maggie knew nothing about her parents, though. Or what they had known about her.

There’s more you’re not telling yourself, came the unbidden thought. More you can do. More you can become.

Maggie hoped not. She wanted nothing of it. Just her quiet normal life—fixing things, making toys for children. Playing with the relics of the past, and turning them into something new.

She was still thinking about that as she drifted off to sleep and began to dream, gently, at first. She stood in her workshop, staring out the barn door into the meadow where the morning light trickled, sledgehammer in hand, and the foundry fires burning. But the gate bells jangled, and dread filled her heart. Maggie, in her dream, turned—and found herself plunged into darkness.

Irdu floated like a single claw, surrounded by men, and she tumbled through shadows hiding pale faces, and bottomless mouths that swallowed her whole. She could not fight their hunger—not even to run and hide—and in her dream she squeezed shut her eyes. As if not looking at them would save her.

But it did not. Instead of seeing the men, Maggie saw herself—and her face was a mirror of their hunger, pale and haunted, and merciless. She scratched at her cheeks, and her nails were claws; and when she screamed, her voice merely groaned, an aching sound like the shifting grind of mountain stone.

Behind her, Trace floated free of the darkness. She was younger, her brown skin as flawless as dark cream; only, her eyes were as black as ink, inhuman and cold, and her mouth was full of long white teeth.

Things change, she whispered throatily. We can change. We can forget what we were meant to be.

I am not this, Maggie told her.

You don’t know what you are, Trace replied, and reached inside her mouth. She began to pull out her teeth. One by one. Sharp and white. Like a shark’s.

Maggie stared, horrified. Until, suddenly, another presence entered her dream—someone solid and real—and strong arms slid around her waist, pulling her close against a broad, warm chest. Trace faded into the shadows, as did Maggie’s monstrous reflection.

Do not be afraid, whispered a familiar voice. Maggie, I am here.

Here, where? she murmured in despair, accepting him as though he had always been with her—her crow, who was now a man. What am I? What am I doing?

Hunting, he rumbled. Hunting hearts.

Maggie sagged within the circle of his arms. I don’t know what that means.

His warm mouth brushed against her ear, and those arms turned her around until she placed her hands against a hard chest that was searing to touch and shockingly naked. She had never touched a man—not like this, even in a dream—and the sensation sent a jolt from her heart into her stomach.

He kissed her cheek, and then her mouth, gently. “Never mind,” he said, his voice no longer echoing through her mind. “Maggie, rest. Go back to sleep.”

“I am asleep,” she mumbled, wanting more of his mouth.

“Yes, of course,” replied the man, after kissing her again, more deeply. Maggie’s hand slid around his chest to his back, tracing the hard line of his spine; and down, down even more, as she discovered he was truly naked, everywhere. She pressed closer, grinding her hips against the hard pulse of his body, and realized dimly that she was not standing, but resting on her side. The man made a slightly strangled sound, and kissed Maggie so hard that she sighed with pleasure.

And then he disappeared, abruptly, and she found herself holding nothing but air. Awake, she listened to the rain drum against the old tin roof, her body still aching and her mouth still tender from kisses that had been only in her dreams.

Or maybe they were not dreams. Maggie dragged in a deep ragged breath, curling around herself. She tried to remember those arms holding her, especially when thunder rumbled and lightning flashed outside the window, but it was the man’s voice that lingered instead. Warm, steady, and reassuring. Familiar now as her own.

Mister Crow, she thought, sensing something behind her. She twisted, glancing over her shoulder, and found the bird perched on the edge of her blanket. Not quite looking at her. Tense. Feathers ruffled. She stared at him, remembering that man in the creek who had run from her. The man in her dream. Heat filled her cheeks.

“It’s okay,” Maggie said weakly, just to break the ridiculous silence. She rolled into a little ball, and felt the crow settle against her back. He was a small, warm lump. An hour ago he would not have been noticeable, but now his presence burned.

“I lied,” she told him, after several minutes of discomfort. “It’s not okay. I’m going insane.”

We both are, replied the crow. Maggie hugged the blanket more tightly to her chin. It was still dark inside the house, but the rain had stopped, though not the thunder. It continued to prowl, a rolling, restless sound that throbbed through the night with an ever-deepening growl.

Maggie sat up, listening hard, skin prickling. The crow fluttered his wings and, after one short bounding hop, flew through the dining room to one of the open windows. He perched on the sill. Maggie ran to the window after him and saw lights flashing along the road—a long line of them, one after the other.

She hurriedly packed her things, but by the time she raced outside, the motorcycles had passed from sight. Maggie could hear them, though, growling beneath the thunder. She dragged her bicycle from the farmhouse and started riding hard, chasing them through the lingering fumes of their engine fuel. Faint light touched the eastern horizon, and stars peeked from behind fast-moving clouds.

In the distance, at the crest of a hill, she caught the glow of headlights and watched as the motorcycles turned off the road, following a ramp that joined the long cement loop of the old interstate. Maggie’s heart sank. She knew where they were going. She had known since leaving home where this journey would end—in one of the dead cities.

They might not have Trace. And if they did take her, she’s probably dead. There’s no need to do this.

Go home, she told herself wearily.

But those thoughts were like ash in her mind: dead and bitter and burned out. Her only instinct that felt right, and real, was the worst one.

The crow swooped in and landed on Maggie’s shoulder, his wings buffeting her head. She did not duck away or flinch, but kept watching those headlights move farther away from her.

“Mister Crow,” she said quietly. “I’m about to do something stupid.”

The crow said nothing. She started pedaling again, and followed the men.

There were always stories, always. Most everyone had something to say about the Big Death, but only a handful in Olo could talk about escaping the cities. Kids, and some adults, still paid attention with bated breath, but Maggie had stopped listening. She was no stranger to violence, but there was a wildness that crept into the eyes of the men and women who had survived those early evacuations that scared her. What was in their eyes, what went unspoken, was the real story. The rest was filler.

As she rode her bicycle along the interstate, Maggie saw the evidence of other stories, twenty years dead. There was only empty road the first ten miles, cracked and pitted with shrubbery. Then a concrete barricade, shoved aside, presumably by the motorcycle men, who had disappeared ahead of her, hours earlier. Her tires rolled over abandoned guns, rusted by two decades of rain and sun.

Beyond that, nothing but cars; more cars than she had ever seen, parked bumper to bumper. Small holes riddled the hoods of the vehicles nearest the barricade—bullet holes, she guessed—and for a moment all she could see were men in green uniforms and gas masks, standing on ladders behind the tall concrete walls, aiming their weapons and shouting—shouting at a roaring, desperate mob of men and women rushing from their cars, trampling one another.

A loud shriek filled her ears. Maggie winced, then rubbed her head and her eyes. She found the crow perched on top of the blanket inside her bicycle basket. His black feathers were ruffled.

Be careful, he said, tilting his head to stare at her. Your mind is sensitive. And this is an unpleasant place.

“I’m fine,” she muttered, her eyes still burning, and then leaned over to gag as another image pushed flush through her head: a little boy, left alone in a backseat, sobbing helplessly while outside, men and women screamed, cut down by bullets. His face was red and dirty, his fear agonizing. Maggie pushed her palms into her eyes, groaning.

Maggie, whispered the crow, more urgently. Shut it out.

She shook her head, unable to speak, as the boy disappeared and was replaced by an elderly woman, sprawled in the grass outside her car, clutching her heart. A small dark dog licked her face. No one helped her. No one looked. The simple despair of being alone—that poor woman, dying and alone; that little boy, afraid and alone—sickened Maggie in ways that bullets and disease did not. She could feel their fear and misery, and not just theirs, but everyone’s who had died in this place, on this road—hopelessness so thick in the air that every breath felt like murder in her heart.

Maggie heard her name said again, distantly, and then warm hands took hold of her shoulders. She was so startled, so distracted by that unexpected touch, that all the pain flooding her senses receded just enough for her to gain control over herself.

She began to twist around, and those hands tightened. Warm breath touched her ear, and her heart raced.

“Maggie,” said her crow, no longer just a little bird. “Maggie, breathe.”

It was impossible to breathe with him touching her, but she could not say that. Instead she nodded, bowing her head—those memories of the past threatening to devour her again. Tears burned her eyes.

His hands tightened, and his warm mouth grazed the back of her neck, shooting chills and heat through her body. “Leave it alone, Maggie. Just let it go. You do not have to see what is there.”

“I can’t help it,” she muttered through gritted teeth.

“You can,” he said firmly, and his hands trailed closer to her neck until his thumbs skimmed the base of her scalp. His fingers squeezed gently, again and again, and the slow, easy strength of his hands kneading her shoulders sent such soothing heat through her that those ghostly feelings of despair faded away.

She reached back and touched his right hand, warm and smooth with muscle. His movements stilled as she persisted and wormed her fingers through his, knotting their hands together.

“Maggie,” he whispered, and before she could ask him a single question—like, What kind of oddness, exactly, was he?—he leaned forward, slid his large hand under her jaw, and turned her head. Then he kissed her.

It was a slow, deep kiss. Maggie forgot everything but him, so wrapped up in the deliciousness of his mouth, she could not even open her eyes to look at his face. She tried, but everything was too heavy, and all she could do was to breathe and stay upright. She wanted to be back in that farmhouse with him, or home; anywhere but here.

He broke away from her, making a small, frustrated sound. Maggie tried to turn with him, wanting to see his face, but all she glimpsed was a flash of shining black feathers, and then nothing. He was gone, and in his place flew a crow, wings beating furiously, ascending into the cloud-scattered sky.

Maggie stared after him. Burned up, seared to the bone. But there was no man here now, just a bird, and she looked away, embarrassed and aching, sensing she was more than a bit insane.

Think of Trace. Keep moving, she told herself, and began pedaling down the interstate. She passed miles of rotting cars, as far as the eye could see, all pointed in the same westbound direction. Both sides of the interstate were occupied, six lanes of traffic. It was a graveyard. She saw bodies in those vehicles, behind dirty tinted glass; desiccated remains, skeletons held together with only the thinnest, driest vestiges of flesh. She had no doubt what had killed them, and saw—as if time-traveling—flash images of men and women sitting behind their wheels, trying to stay conscious as blood trickled from their nostrils and ears, and pain crippled their joints.

She blinked hard, sickened, and glanced through the windshields. She saw those people again, but dead for two decades now: sagging, locked inside metal coffins that Maggie doubted would ever be opened—not until folks forgot about the Big Death and stopped being afraid. Maybe never. The hanta-bola pox had disappeared, perhaps, but the miasma remained. She could taste, in these endless rows of cars, the bitter tangle of desperation that had led nowhere. Luggage still sagged atop the rusted roofs. She saw plastic toys in the road, unable to disintegrate. All those belongings: grave markers.

The crow swooped in close, over her head. Maggie, look.

Maggie stood on the pedals, staring at the horizon. The road curved, but not enough for the hills to obscure the wall of trees that cut across the cold distant line of the interstate. Beyond the forest, or within it, glittering towers rose toward the sky: steel and glass shining with shears of sunlight. She held her breath, coasting until her bike almost slowed to a stop, and then sat back on the seat and pedaled hard before she remembered that there … that there was death, and blood and loneliness, and men on motorcycles who hurt people. That was the forest, the city forest, and deep within monsters awaited.

The interstate had been eaten by the forest. The road ended at the tree line, without evidence that it had ever existed. There was pavement, where Maggie stood with her bicycle, and then nothing but dead leaves and thick curling roots that supported massive trees, as though the concrete had been more nourishing than the soil; or the trees had grown from magic seeds embedded in stone. There were still cars in the forest, parked on the interstate that had been. Maggie could see faint outlines of them, like ghosts, but the trees had grown through and around the vehicles, crumpling steel. Naked branches were budding with green spring, and redbud blossoms floated in the undergrowth.

Maggie had heard about the forests that had grown wild around the cities, but she never imagined what one of them would look like. The trees had a reputation that preceded them, told by the government men who rattled into town once or twice a year on their large gas-powered trucks, hauling clothwares and steelwares, and bringing news from three different coasts.

No more cities, the men had said years ago. The trees have swallowed all the dead cities.

But no one, as far as Maggie knew, had devoted much energy or thought into finding out why. Better things to do, after all. Like, survive. As far as most people were concerned, nature reclaiming places of so much horror, even with impossible speed, seemed preferable to the alternative: that the cities be accessible, and remembered. No one wanted to remember anything from the Big Death.

The crow landed on the road and pecked at a dried leaf. Maggie glanced down at him. “This growth looks older than twenty years. Are all the cities like this?”

All that I have flown over, he replied. And there have been many.

“Doesn’t make sense,” she muttered. “Did the hanta-bola pox cause this? Did it … infect plants?”

The crow jumped into the air and flew to the low-hanging branch of a squat, fat oak that looked as though it had grown in that spot for more than a hundred years. It was an unnatural disease. Even among my kind, we do not understand the how or why of it. But we do think it caused … this. There is no other explanation, and the disease was localized in the cities, even though it spread elsewhere.

“Were you alive then? Did you witness the Big Death?”

I lost family to it, he said, which surprised her. We were not immune, though we suffered less since we lived apart from humans.

Maggie forced herself to breathe. “Anything else?”

You could still turn back.

She stared at him and thought about Trace. She touched the shark teeth hanging cold around her neck, and her other hand traced the head of the sledgehammer dragging on her waist. Messages floated through her mind; Irdu’s voice behind them all.

A test of truth. Don’t give up if you want to find your teeth.

I’ve got plenty of bite, she told him silently, and said, “I don’t see an easy way in. Not for motorcycles.”

The crow launched himself off the oak branch and flew around Maggie toward her right. He landed more than thirty feet away on the ground, and hopped lightly ahead of her. She pushed her bicycle over and saw a narrow trail leading into the woods, and a long streak of lines as though tires had rolled through the leaves.

Maggie hesitated, exposed to sunlight and miles of endless concrete, cars, and corpses at her back. The crow dove from the tree to the handlebars of her bicycle. He perched there, wings flared, staring into her eyes with familiar intensity.

Fear knotted up her throat. “Well, you don’t have to come along, if you don’t want.”

The crow said nothing, simply settling his wings against his back. Maggie brushed his chest with her knuckles and whispered, “I’m scared. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

Trace, she told herself. If it were you, she would never turn back. Even if she thought you might be dead.

Heart thundering, Maggie rolled her bike forward, using her feet to push herself along. The crow rode on the handlebars. When she was inches from the edge of the forest, she stopped again, staring into the lengthening shadows and the endless supple variations of the trees. Sweat rolled down her back.

“You and me,” she said to the crow; and then, feeling a bit pathetic, added: “Don’t leave me, right?”

The crow leaned toward her, and when she held out her hand, he rubbed his beak against her fingers. Warmth tingled. Maggie smiled grimly. Not alone. She was crazy, but she was not alone.

The golden light of sunset warmed her back. Maggie pedaled slowly into the forest, imagining robbers, and the dead; and other stolen hearts. Hunting hearts, she thought. She was hunting. A hunter.

An hour later, Maggie found another barricade.

SIX

The barricade was lost in the woods. Maggie followed vainly the tracks and scuffs of motorcycle tires, and was finally forced to dismount and walk her bicycle. The forest swallowed everything within it, but as dusk spread into silver, the world seemed to sharpen, as though night allowed a deeper vision than day.

Or perhaps her eyes were changing. She had noticed that. Shadows hid nothing from her anymore. Every day since leaving her junkyard in Olo, she had found herself able to do more, feel more, hear more. And all of it was familiar. She had been able to do these things before, she realized, but had made herself forget. Maggie simply could not understand why.

She walked along the barricade, and found it almost exactly like the one on the interstate: tall, thick, and made of concrete. Sharp, rusted barbed wire coiled on top, and bullet holes had fractured the smooth, dark surface, along with the fading remnants of painted messages that were too obscured by vines for her to read.

A piece of the barricade had been pulled aside and was bordered by the trunk of a towering maple tree. Maggie imagined voices whispering in the shadows of the undergrowth, but that did not frighten her. She had heard those ageless murmurs back home, in her dreams; in the other forest beyond the city, beneath the redbuds. She felt as though she had heard them always.

Maggie lingered outside the barrier, staring through the break into another world. She saw more road and rusted cars, along with distant buildings half-eaten by trees. A ghost land, empty and quiet, the silence rimming her skin with ice.

She took a deep breath. This was the city.

Maggie pushed her bicycle through the gap in the barricade. She had imagined she might feel differently on the other side, but the air tasted the same, and the darkness was no deeper in the underbrush. The crow flew ahead. Maggie followed, and after several minutes of quick travel, found that many roads split from this one, tributaries and concrete veins. The interstate suddenly seemed elevated above the ground, and she peered over the edge of a bent steel railing. More forest spread out below her, shrouding the outlines of rows of decaying box homes. All she could see were rooftops and the hint of dark windows through the branches.

Her heart hurt, as she looked at those abandoned homes. Their emptiness made her feel small, and the silence hurt her ears, frightening in its finality.

Maggie followed the road and found another barricade, and another, as she passed deeper into the forest. She walked for a long time. Color was bleached from the world. All she saw were etched buildings, gray and black; monoliths, hunched and molding with disuse.

And the bones. She finally saw the bones, everywhere: in the road, off the road, on the front steps of buildings, and on sidewalks. Tangled, sprawling skeletons begging free of moss and brown leaves. Countless men and women who had simply dropped dead, on top of one another.

Maggie did not want to contemplate what it had been like when flesh still covered those bones and people had lain there, passing away in their own blood, their own sloughing skin. Her own parents might have died like this, exposed and helpless, watching each other fade, listening to the screams of a dying city.

She could hear those screams, echoing through her brain. She shut her eyes, pressing her knuckles to her brow. Maggie forced a deep breath, and then another. Trying not to see, she fumbled for the shark teeth, gripping them tightly, and it was suddenly easier to focus.

Be strong, she told herself fiercely, but it was difficult. She had thought she was strong all these years, but her strength had been built upon routine, and the familiar. Her junkyard. Her tools. The occasional stranger to mix things up. A false sense that this world was normal, no matter how much she had imagined otherwise from her books and daydreams.

Dead leaves crackled behind her. Maggie spun around, heart pounding, and glimpsed a coyote peering at her from behind the remains of a large truck. She met its gaze, startled.

The crow swept low, cawing loudly. His wings buffeted the animal’s head, and the coyote flinched but did not attack, or retreat. It just gave the crow a long look, and then flicked its gaze back to Maggie. Until, quite abruptly, it turned and loped away into the forest shadows.

“A friend of yours?” Maggie asked the crow, who settled on a branch above her head.

The crow flipped his wings, a gesture that looked distinctly like a shrug. He was too curious.

Maggie raised her brow. “That’s no crime. I’m curious about you.”

She heard a small harrumphing sound in her mind, and for the first time in a long while felt like smiling. But she thought of the old woman, and touched the heavy necklace.

“Do you know if Trace is close? Could you find her? And those men?”

Before now, it had not occurred to her that she could ask him to do such a thing. He had been a bird. He had been a creature she did not understand; perhaps a man, perhaps not. She still did not understand him, but she felt freer to ask small favors.

The crow tilted his head, looking away down the road, which was white with bones. I can do that.

But there was uncertainty in his voice. Maggie said, “Is there something wrong with that?”

He hesitated, still not looking at her. I will have to leave you alone.

Maggie looked down at her hands, which were scarred from steelwork and hard with muscle. Slender hands but strong.

Be strong, she told herself again, and sighed. “I’ve been alone a long time. I can take care of myself.”

You know this is different, he said softly, finally settling his gaze on her. You know you are more than food to those men who hunt.

No one had ever said anything about food, but Maggie understood what he meant. She had interested Irdu. He had seen something in her that was different. She knew it was the only reason he had not taken her life. She thought he might very well change his mind about that, the next time they met.

“I need to know,” she said.

Then follow me, he replied heavily, and flew from the branch. Maggie hurried after him, her skin crawling as bones crunched beneath her boots and tires. It was impossible not to step on the remains. She wondered if the bones still held traces of the hanta-bola pox. Maybe she was breathing in the disease, becoming infected, her cells already breaking down.

The crow led her down a narrow path crowded with cars parked closely together in tight, neat rows. Oak trees had grown between and through the vehicles, roots curling around the remains of rubber tires. Ahead of them she saw a vast low-lying building, the dirty glass windows revealing nothing. Vines obscured large blue letters embedded in brick. Maggie could not read them.

The crow swept down to the leafy ground, hopping to a slow stop. In there. Wait for me.

Maggie gave the building a dubious look. “What is that place?”

A relic, he said, and hopped closer, peering into her eyes. If there should be trouble—

“Don’t,” Maggie interrupted, crouching in front of him. “Won’t do much good, will it?”

The crow lowered his head. She briefly stroked his chest with the back of her fingers, touching him tenderly, her heart in her throat. He quivered, and she whispered, “What are you, Mister Crow?”

He said nothing, and pressed the side of his sleek head against her hand. For a moment, Maggie’s vision blurred, and she felt his life pulsing white hot, as though she could taste each beat of his heart, and the blood coursing through his veins. It was not her imagination, but instead felt as real as the leaves underfoot and the trees wrapped tight around the city.

It was also a curiously intimate sensation, one she did not pull away from. She studied her emotions with rare detachment, questioning why she felt the way she did, with a creature—sometimes a man—she barely knew. She had no answer to give herself. Only that it felt right, and safe.

Maggie placed her palm on the cool ground and glanced up at the sky. Stars dazzled beyond the tree branches. She was surprised to see them. Her eyesight had improved so much, she had forgotten it was night.

She turned briefly to look at the building behind her, heard a flapping sound, and felt cool air move across her neck and face.

When she glanced over her shoulder, Maggie found him gone.

The doors to the building were unlocked. Maggie ventured inside with some uneasiness, as she usually did most abandoned structures. Twenty years was a long time, and closed spaces could be dangerous if animals had taken up residence, or if other people were hiding, or had beaten her to the job. A good scavenge was never that safe. There was too much at stake. She wondered, even now, if all her junkyard belongings were still in place. She trusted most folk in Olo to do right by her, but there were a handful capable of small acts of theft.

It was very dark inside, but Maggie’s eyes adjusted almost immediately, and she found herself staring at an interior far larger than any she had ever seen. Long aisles spread away from her, and the ceilings were high. She stood beside a line of large mesh baskets, packed tightly together, one inside the other.

So still. So quiet. A dead silence. Maggie imagined she was the first person in twenty years to enter this place, and her skin prickled with chills. She clutched the shark teeth in one hand, while the other grazed the sledgehammer hanging from her tool belt. Slowly, she walked, and passed clothing hanging from racks—more clothing than she had ever seen, and of tremendous variation. Twenty years had left some things ragged, and dust and cobwebs lay heavy, but Maggie could see enough. She took in rows and shelves of jeans and coats and sweaters, and then socks and underwear. Trading just this much would keep her busy for years.

That would have been enough, but there was more. She passed aisles full of makeup, which she recognized from ads in the old magazines that her grandfather had kept, but she ignored the powders and lipsticks for the great variety of medicines displayed nearby. Most of them, she figured, were too old to do any good, but the diversity amazed her nonetheless. She marveled at what had been lost. The government issued aspirin and a narrow range of antibiotics, but most people had taken to relying on herbalists for treatment. Death took care of the rest.

Maggie wandered through aisles full of toys—stuffed animals partially devoured by mice, staring dolls encased in plastic, small cars for plastic men; as well as hoops and balls, and bats. She found bicycles and gardening supplies. She discovered sections devoted to blankets, curtains, and pillows, pots and pans, and thick glass bowls. She stumbled upon countless tools she wished she could carry out with her, still gleaming and new inside dusty boxes.

You are a greedy woman, she told herself, staring nearly with lust at all the useful things she could scavenge and trade, and use back at her workshop. Until she remembered that this was the city forest, and no one would touch a thing that came from this place. No one would touch her if they ever learned she had been here, assuming she made it back to Olo or any other Enclave. Some lies were bigger than others.

She found guns at the back of the store. Of all the varied things she had seen thus far, these looked the most picked over. Still, there were rifles and smaller weapons locked behind glass; and, more important, bullets—boxes and boxes of them. Enough to cause an uproar in trading, and to keep her fed for a long time. And draw all kinds of unwanted attention. Bullets were as rare as hen’s teeth—as rare as gasoline. The government controlled both, and shared neither.

Something rustled close by. Maggie turned, staring into the shadows. It had been perfectly quiet until now.

Two aisles down, in the opposite direction, someone hooted softly. It was not an animal. Not a bird. Not her crow. The voice was masculine, though, and full of quiet laughter.

Her first instinct was to run, and she almost did, but she gritted her teeth and tried to focus past her hammering heart. Guns everywhere, but not a single one she could use. Even assuming that not much dust had penetrated the glass cases, she could not risk using any of those weapons without cleaning them first. Twenty years was too long to take a chance, even if desperate. Bullets could jam, or go off inside the gun.

Maggie pulled her sledgehammer free and hefted it in her hands. Farther away, she heard a soft humming melody, and in another direction, closer, a heavy crash made her jump.

Surrounded. She was surrounded.

“Did you truly think you could come to this city without us feeling your presence?” called a soft familiar voice behind her. Maggie turned, and found Irdu leaning against a rack filled with long, thin metal rods, clubbed at one end. He watched her, his black hair spilling down the left side of his pale, sharp face. His eyes glittered.

“We know our own,” he whispered. A chill rode down her spine, and with it, a terrible dread. She could not breathe, and when a pale hand grabbed her arm from behind, lights flickered in her vision. Her fingers closed numbly around her sledgehammer.

Maggie did not think. She twisted in that hard grip, swinging with all her might. Solid iron connected with a very human face, and all she saw in that split second was black hair flying. Bone smashed as the entire side of the man’s head caved in. Blood sprayed from his nose and mouth, spattering her cheeks and clothing.

He let go. Maggie ran but did not get far before men moved in, graceful and low to the ground, like wolves. Hands snared her legs. She swung wildly, striking good, clean blows. No one let go, though, and she fought desperately for control over the sledgehammer as someone much stronger began prying it from her hand. She bit and clawed, searching blindly for his eyes.

Someone yanked her hair, jerking her head so hard her neck made a cracking sound. A fist connected with her face.

Everything went dark.

SEVEN

Pain found Maggie first, even in sleep. She dreamed of it as steel needles pricking her skin, sewing wires in her flesh: her ankles and wrists, and the sides of her face. She dreamed she’d been tied to a steel bar, as giant hands yanked her strings and made her dance. Alone, except for a steel crow, frozen on a floating branch—staring, because his eyes were all he had left of his flesh.

She woke up. Disoriented, head throbbing, so thirsty her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. She saw a pale ceiling above her, trimmed in dark wood. Shades of golden light flickered unevenly; small candles burning beside her on the carpeted floor. She smelled something sweet.

Maggie turned her head sideways and found herself staring at long aisles of shelved books. It was a remarkable, unexpected sight. She had many books, more than almost anyone in Olo, except for old man Reeves, who lived near town and ran his own personal library. But these numbers were countless, overwhelming; and though Maggie had been told of bookstores, she had not imagined their existence. Not like this.

She was untied. Carefully she rolled on her side, trying not to wince as she pushed herself into a sitting position.

Her head began throbbing again, making her nauseous, but she forced herself to focus, and stood. Her tool belt was gone, as was her sledgehammer. She tried working up enough spit to moisten her dry mouth, but all she succeeded in doing was making herself sick.

Maggie turned her head slowly. She was not alone. Irdu stood beside a table covered in neatly arranged piles of dusty books. One of her steel puppets dangled from his pale hands. He manipulated the strings with care—little arms twitching, feet dancing through the air. Candlelight seemed to give the toy a spectral power, as though it might come to life.

“Amazing,” he said quietly, “how some things never change. The world dies, and yet we still find room in our hearts for wonder.”

“Children deserve that much,” Maggie rasped painfully, unsure what to do, except to engage him; and worse, feeling stupid about it. “Do you have any of children of your own?”

“Rarely,” he said, which was an odd answer. He tore his gaze from the puppet and finally looked at her. “It is just as rare to find the children of others.”

Maggie let those words sink in, watching his cold gaze study her face as though he expected some reaction; as if his words had been calculated to get one.

She tried to show nothing, and instead pulled the heavy necklace out from underneath her shirt. The shark teeth were cold against her palm, but holding them made her feel stronger. She dangled the necklace in front of him, watching the teeth catch the candlelight. “Where’s the old woman who wore this?”

Irdu’s face darkened with surprise, and then distaste. “My brother should have destroyed that thing.”

“You used it to bring me here.”

“No,” he said, tossing the puppet at her feet. “I did not.” Irdu turned and walked away, down another aisle.

Maggie hesitated, staring at the puppet collapsed in a heap, and then followed. “What do you mean by that? Your … brother … was wearing this necklace.”

Irdu turned, so suddenly and with such speed that she could not stop herself from running into him. He slammed her up against a bookcase, his cold hands sliding up her throat, into her hair. His gaze burned through her.

“That is no simple necklace,” he whispered. “That is a repudiation. An abomination. You would do well not to admire its previous owner.”

“She—” Maggie began, but Irdu covered her mouth with his, kissing her hard. His mouth was as cold as she remembered, and as draining, but this time something rose up within her—a spark of heat—and without thinking, she rocked forward, exhaling sharply.

Irdu broke away, stumbling backward. He touched his mouth as though stung, and stared at her with narrowed eyes.

“Good,” he finally said, but his expression was not in agreement. He turned again, more slowly, as though unsteady, and began walking down the bookstore aisles. When his back was to her, Maggie touched her own mouth. Her lips tingled, but not with pleasure, and deep down in her stomach, hunger rumbled—a different kind of hunger, vast and yawning.

She followed him, fingers trailing against the soft spines of dusty books. Maybe twenty years was not so long after all, she thought, noticing how well the books had stayed preserved, despite cobwebs and time. So many stories. So many secrets and histories, wrapped up in fantasy. Such lovely lies.

Candles dotted the tops of the shelves, burning like small stars. Irdu led Maggie to a small area with tile floors, filled with tables and chairs. Even more candles covered the tables—more than she had seen in a long time—and mugs lined small shelves in the wall, as if placed there for decoration. A large glass case sat on a long counter filled with odd-looking machines. Inside the case were jars of preserves, dried meat, cheese, and bread. Some of the food looked as though it had come from her belongings.

Five men lounged around that small area, fewer than she remembered seeing on the road. Several were reading books by candlelight, feet propped up on chairs. Others were playing chess. All of them seemed relaxed, but there was a coiled quality in their long, lean bodies that was careless, cold, and lethal. Most wore black, chrome details glinting in the glow cast by the candlelight.

The men were so much alike, it was difficult to tell them apart. They shared the same long dark hair and aquiline noses, pale skin, and sharp cheeks. Brothers or cousins, perhaps. Only one man was distinctly different, and he wore a cape of black feathers around his neck. Maggie had a feeling about where those feathers had come from.

One side of his head was a mess. His cheek and jaw had smashed so far inward, she wondered how he lived—let alone stayed conscious. Blood covered his entire face, and his hair had matted into tangled clumps. But he was sitting up, staring at her, and holding one of her whirly-gigs and blowing on it, blades spinning gently. All those men stared at her, until she felt like the focus of one giant eye—the men, a single entity, not individuals; a force, hungry and strange.

She stood before them, trying to act bold and brave, and glanced at Irdu. His eyes were as black as the inside of a cave located ten miles under; unfathomably, inescapably dark, without light or even the smallest inner glow. Dead eyes. Cold.

“Welcome to our home,” he said quietly. “One of many, for we are rootless, and old as the wind.”

“Where are the people you took?” Maggie asked. “The women from Olo, the folk from Dubois? Have you hurt them?”

Irdu’s expression did not change, but the other men looked at one another, and faint, knowing smiles touched their mouths. Chess pieces clicked, and several books were put facedown. She could not see what those men were reading, but the spines were thick and creased, and their fingers were gentle upon the covers.

An odd sight. Maggie could still see them in her dreams, their heads thrown back, darkness spilling from their mouths—and somehow she managed not to flinch in revulsion when Irdu dragged his fingers up her arm, and brushed the underside of her breast with his palm. His face grew colder, and harder, until it was barely human.

He was not human, Maggie thought. None of them were.

“I will show you where those people are,” he whispered, and snapped his fingers. One of his men rose gracefully from his chair and strode behind the counter to a closed door. Keys jangled. He entered, and Maggie heard a faint tired voice.

A young woman stumbled out. She was not from Olo. She was dressed in a dirty wrinkled skirt and an unbuttoned blouse that exposed her breasts. Her hair was tangled, her face gaunt and smeared with gray dust marks. Maggie searched her face for fear, but there was none—just a languid quality to her expression that was not terrified or hungry, but full of weary pleasure. The woman seemed unbothered by her partial nudity. When she saw Irdu, a spark entered her eyes—a dull spark—and she gave him a tired, mindless smile.

“Pet,” he said to her, “bend over the table.”

“Yes,” she whispered, still smiling, and Maggie watched in horror as she bent over one of the few tables not laden with candles, her hands stretching out to grip the rim. Irdu undid his trousers and pulled free his penis, which was large and already erect.

Nausea rose up in Maggie’s throat. She took a step—unsure what to do, only that she had to do something—but strong fingers gripped her arm. It was the man who wore the black feather cape. He smelled like blood, and gave her a brief, merciless shake that rattled her teeth. His head seemed a little less caved-in, as though his bones were knitting together. Those feathers reminded her too much of her crow—her crow, whom she suddenly missed desperately—and Maggie tried to knee him in the groin.

He spun her around with a quiet snarl and forced her to watch Irdu, who pulled up the woman’s skirts and placed his palms on her naked rear. He did not look down at her exposed body. Just at Maggie.

“Watch and learn,” he said, and drove himself forward.

The woman cried out, but not in pain. Pleasure filled her face, mindless satisfaction, and the sounds of her gratification only grew louder, and more piercing, as the robber thrust harder and faster, never once taking his gaze off Maggie.

Maggie watched him, too, and for the first time in her life, she felt hate—burning through her like fire.

She saw something else, too, as the woman’s shrieks grew louder and more urgent—as she writhed against the robber and grabbed her breasts with one squeezing hand. Maggie saw a pulse of light surround the woman. Golden, precious light. And as the woman stiffened against Irdu, her voice breaking with pleasure, he threw back his head, opened his mouth, and breathed in the light surrounding the woman. He sucked it down like smoke.

The young woman collapsed forward, gasping for air. Irdu also gasped, but for a different reason: He was still breathing in flickers of the woman’s light.

Until no more. The light disappeared. The woman looked no different, showed no lessening of her pleasure, but Maggie knew, in her gut, that she was staring at a dead person. Something vital had been stolen from the woman. She would die, and soon.

Irdu stood back. His glistening penis was still erect, and he stroked it as he stared at Maggie. She fought not to tremble, to show nothing of her terrible rage and fear, but her voice still shook when she asked, “What are you?”

“We are those who came before,” said Irdu, moving close to Maggie as he continued to stroke himself; roughly, with increasing intensity. “We, who were worshipped once, and sacrificed to with flesh and honor.” He stood directly in front of Maggie, holding her gaze as his hand pumped up and down. She could barely hold it in to not be sick.

“It was easier before,” he said almost idly. “There were so many humans who could fall unnoticed. But now we must hunt in plain sight, and it is difficult to sustain us. We have so many hungers.”

And then his hand stopped moving and he said, “Touch me.”

“No,” Maggie whispered.

The robber reached out to finger the shark teeth hanging from her neck. “I thought you would come because we had forged a connection. Because I awoke what was sleeping inside you. And now I know you came because of her.” His hand squeezed hard around his penis. “Touch me, and I’ll tell you what happened.”

The idea of touching him made Maggie want to scream. And if she did as he asked, she was afraid of what he would want next. He could have anything. He could force her to do anything, outnumbered as she was.

“No,” she said.

“No,” he echoed.

“And if you make me—” began Maggie, but he held up his hand.

At first she thought he was merely telling her to be quiet. He tilted his head, his gaze sharpening as he stared past her. She heard footfall, something dragging, and terrible dread curled through her heart. Irdu’s mouth broke into an awful smile, and he bared his teeth—as sharp, white, and long as those hanging from her neck.

Which Maggie suddenly sensed had not come from a shark.

The fingers holding her arm loosened. She turned, slowly, and saw men walking toward them from across an expansive lobby filled with tables laden down with books, and shelves, and large windows that she had not previously noticed. Someone had propped skulls on the edge of a long wooden counter, grinning human bones staring endlessly at the books.

Seven men were striding across the floor, their long hair flowing like water around their cold sharp faces. Their eyes glittered with flecks of gold. The eighth man in their midst, whom Maggie did not see until they were almost on top of her, was being dragged. He was naked and lean, his skin covered in shallow crisscrossed cuts as though a net had bitten into him. His dark hair fell over his eyes. One of the men dragging him by the arm also held a cloak of feathers, much like the one being worn by the bloody heap who had been holding her.

Maggie stared, heart hammering in her throat, a scream building. She swallowed it down and remained utterly still and silent as the men tossed their captive at her feet. She looked at the familiar line of a strong hard jaw, and felt something snap inside her, just a little. She touched the teeth hanging around her neck and they burned cold against her palm. Her own teeth ached.

“A skinwalker,” whispered Irdu, walking up behind her. “Distant cousins. Sly creatures, but easy to catch if you know how. We see them rarely.”

“He was just outside,” said one of the men softly. “Watching for her.”

“Curious friend you have.” Irdu reached out, and took the black feather cape from the man who had been dragging her human crow. The feathers gleamed and seemed to Maggie to pulse with light and power. “Ekir. Put them both away.”

The injured man—Ekir—grabbed Maggie’s arm, and then reached down and twined his fingers through the crow’s hair. He yanked hard, pulling backward, and she watched the crow man’s eyes flutter open, dim with pain. She had never seen his human eyes, not up close, but they were wild and dark as night, and thunderous.

He saw Maggie first, and the faintest hint of a smile touched his mouth. It broke her heart. A small, pained sound escaped from her, and it was like a slap across his face. Awareness, memory, flooded his eyes. He looked up and sideways at Ekir, and his expression hardened quick as death, staring like death: implacable and grim.

He lunged upward toward Ekir, as did Maggie, digging her fingers into the crushed bone of his cold sharp face. Ekir arched his spine, breath rattling in his throat, but he did not release her, and his boot smashed into the crow’s head.

The sight made her wild. She fought harder, but strong arms wrenched Maggie backward, cold lips pressing against her ear. Words whispered, but she could not hear them past the roar and thunder of her pounding heart. Her vision blurred. All she could see suddenly were her dreams: men with their heads thrown back and darkness spilling from their mouths. Shark teeth burned against her skin. Her blood burned in her veins.

You could stop this, she imagined Trace saying. Listen.

But Maggie did not. She could not. And only when she and the crow were thrown inside a small room packed with corpses did she finally remember how to breathe.

EIGHT

Everyone was dead, or near death. Less than a week gone from their homes, Maggie thought, and their lives had been drained dry. The woman who had just been taken on the table lay in a heap by the door, barely breathing. Maggie tried to wake her, but nothing worked. She was asleep, her pulse so slow, Maggie could hardly feel it. Her face looked peaceful, though. Just as peaceful and still as the faces of the other seven women crammed inside the room. The two men from Dubois were dead, too. Blankets covered the floor, and the remains of food and some clothing. The air smelled dirty, but not rotten. Almost as if the bodies had been preserved.

Maggie did not linger over the women from Olo. She knew them. She knew their names, and tried to remember some of the Amish prayers she had heard growing up. Most of them were spoken in German, but one or two had been translated. She could recall only a smattering of words, but she did her best to say something kind over their still bodies. Her heart ached the entire time; with fury and grief. Life was too precious now to waste like this. Life had always been too precious.

“Maggie,” whispered her crow, struggling to rise from where he had been thrown down on the floor.

She crossed to him quickly, and crouched. “Don’t move,” she said, her hands hovering over his shoulders, afraid to touch him. “Something might be broken.”

“Only my head,” he muttered, and peered sideways at her. “You?”

“Alive,” Maggie said, but her voice croaked on the word. She sat down even closer, and finally let herself touch him. Her fingers threaded gently through his dark fine hair, searching for an injury—or just an excuse to be near him. Her heart felt so lonely she thought it might break. Brittle and tired, and full of grief.

His hand caught hers, and he pressed his mouth to her palm. Maggie closed her eyes, shuddering. “You have a name?”

“Mister Crow,” he murmured. “My favorite, I think.”

“Mister Crow,” she replied softly. “What else?”

He hesitated. “Samuel.”

She sighed, and allowed herself to be drawn down, all the way to the floor. She curled on her side, facing her crow—looking only at him, trying to pretend they were not so near death, or faced with their own deaths. He was naked, but she did not care. It was a clean nudity, compared to what she had just seen. Downright wholesome, even.

“I was foolish,” he said. “I came back too late. I saw you being taken, and I followed. I should have known they would feel me close.”

“They,” she said.

“Demons,” he said softly. “Incubi, or vampires. A bit of both, I suppose. Depending on what they are hungry for. Energy or blood.”

Maggie was quiet for a long moment, turning those words over in her head. She was familiar with both, having read them in her books—sometime, long ago. Vampires, full of teeth and cunning, with an allure that seemed to make people tumble over themselves like fools; enthralled, in lust, ready to give their lives for nothing but a kiss. There were so many stories like that, so many in such varied forms, Maggie had come to half-believe that those creatures existed. How could they not, when so many had dreamed of them? How, indeed?

Incubi was a word less known, but she knew it had to do with sex, and power.

Either way, death. Either way, truth.

“I don’t know how this is possible,” she said. “The Big Death, the forests around the cities. You. Those men. What does it all mean?”

He shrugged helplessly. “Must there be a meaning? The world is a different place now. This happens. Civilizations rise and fall, and are erased in time. The essence of everything that was, twenty years ago, will be forgotten the moment the last survivor dies. Those born now, even you, know nothing of the living past. You’ll make your own—a new world on the top of the old.”

“Alongside magic? Consumed by it?”

Samuel closed his eyes. “Not all of us prey on humans.”

Maggie curled up tight around herself. She had hid under her covers from monsters, as a child. Monsters in her dreams. Monsters she could see while awake, inside her head. She remembered now. She had made herself forget that, too. Whatever else might be inside her head, she understood why forgetting was better. Life was hard enough without searching shadows for the unreal. There had been enough death.

Home, she thought, aching. She could have been home, in her own bed, among the safe and familiar. Ignorant. Blissfully so. Content to live and die in Olo as nothing but a fixer, a salvager, a toy-maker. A dreamer, watching the changing seasons through the great doors of her barn.

For one brief second Maggie wanted that again so badly, she wished she had never seen those shark teeth hanging around Ekir’s neck. Never laid eyes on the necklace at all. She wouldn’t have known Trace was in trouble.

She would not be in trouble.

Coward, Maggie told herself, ashamed.

Strong fingers wiped her cheeks, which were wet with tears. Samuel whispered, “I should have told you everything.”

Maggie rubbed her nose. “Why didn’t you?”

“It was ugly,” he said simply. “And I wanted to spare you that. Even if it was reckless of me.”

“You were scared to show me your face.”

He hesitated. “You are not looking at me now.”

It was true, she realized. While lying so close, she had stared at his chest, his throat, past his ear—but not at his face, or his eyes. She did not know why. And yet, when she began to raise her gaze to his, fear gripped her.

“Let me meet you halfway,” he whispered, and scooted lower, his muscles flexing in the shadows, until there—in front of her—was his face. Lean and rawboned, with dark, wild eyes searching hers. Maggie stared back, drinking him in, her heart beating unsteadily.

“You’re a bird,” she breathed.

“And a man,” he replied with sadness. “Your friend, too.”

Maggie closed her eyes, but only for a moment. She missed his face, and had to look at him again simply to keep from feeling sick. But that was impossible. Bodies everywhere, and pretending that was not the case could last only so long.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” she mumbled, and pushed herself up on her elbow, struggling to stand. Lying down felt suddenly too much like giving up.

Maggie scrabbled to her feet, swaying. Samuel stood far more gracefully, his hands outstretched to steady her. Her fingertips grazed his, ever so lightly, and she felt the pulse of his life shimmering for one hot instant: lovely golden wings beating inside his heart. She could taste them.

“Those feathers that … thing … wears,” she began to say, and then stopped.

“Those feathers belonged to her,” he said. “Her skin. Steal our skin, and you steal our ability to become … something else. You steal our power. The demon did that to her. And then … used her up. Used her like these people have been used. I … found her. Afterwards. I think, maybe, I lost my mind when that happened. I no longer wanted to be a man. Ever again.”

Samuel’s elegant dusky hands twined light as air around hers. Maggie wanted him to tell her why he had chosen to become a man, for her—and if that was the reason he had hidden from her for so long, in shadows and dreams—but he answered none of those things. Not with his voice. He continued to hold her hands, and then he leaned in, very carefully, to kiss her cheek. It was not chaste, or distant. Simple, maybe, but that brief touch of his lips filled her with more longing, and heat, than a million of Irdu’s forced intimacies.

“I wish I could have known you earlier,” she confessed, almost afraid of saying that much.

He hesitated. “There is something I did not tell you.”

The quiet urgency in his voice made her straighten, staring. But before he could explain, she heard scuffing sounds outside, and the door was pushed open. Men came inside, a blur of sharp lines and dark hair, and hands were rough, cold as ice, as they took hold of them both.

She did not fight them, and neither did Samuel. Instead he gave her a terrible, knowing look that made her heart ache. Whatever was going to happen next, he had already gone through it once before, on the periphery. He had lost someone he loved to these men. And now he was going to lose himself in turn—all for helping Maggie. It made her sick. Furious.

Irdu waited outside the room. Maggie felt all the men watching her, as if she was as much a curiosity to them as they were to her—not normal, an oddity.

You are a fixer, she reminded herself fiercely, pretending she stood inside her barn, tools at hand. You help people. You make things better.

She told herself that, again and again, digging in her heels. Hands dropped away until no one touched her. The men—vampires, incubi, demons—did not make a sound.

Robber King, she named Irdu, savoring the weight of the shark teeth hanging around her neck. His gaze flicked down to it, and disgust briefly filled his eyes; difficult to see through the curtain of hair partially obscuring his face.

“You have no way to leave us,” he said coldly. “And I think I am tired now of trying to woo you with kindness. I tried to give you time. I tried to set you on a path that would wake you to us, with care. A greater courtesy than has been shown others, I promise. But that is done. You will serve me. You will become us, even if I must force the waking of your blood.”

“I have no idea what that means,” Maggie replied, trying not to tremble. “But I’m not your pet. I asked for my life once, remember? I bargained for my life, and you agreed.”

“You’ll have your life,” he said coldly. “A better life. One not subject to human weaknesses.”

“I am human,” she shot back. “I like my weaknesses.”

Anger flashed through Irdu’s eyes. “You still have no idea what you are. After all this, you still fight yourself.”

He snapped his fingers, and Maggie watched in horror as Samuel was dragged to one of the tables and slammed upon it face first. Ekir stood close, caressing Samuel’s cloak of feathers with a faint grim smile on his face, which seemed to Maggie as much of a violation of the man as any other gesture, this touch more intimate. Samuel snarled at Ekir, fighting the hands holding him down.

Irdu stepped close to Maggie, his body so cold she could feel him near her like a sheet of winter ice. “Another bargain. Give yourself to me—willingly, now—and I will set him free, with his skin intact.”

“No,” rasped Samuel, and Ekir slammed his fist into the man’s face.

Maggie flinched, her hands flying to grip the teeth hanging around her neck, which were cold, but with a reassuring bite that steadied her. She met her friend’s dark, wild gaze, and every moment—each one—spent with him as bird or man flashed through her mind in one split second of pure rock-solid clarity.

“Leave him alone,” she said softly, and despair crept into Samuel’s gaze.

“You agree then,” Irdu replied, and for such a dangerous man, Maggie thought, there was a great deal of greed in his eyes. A weakness, she told herself, such a human weakness.

“Kiss me,” Maggie told him. Irdu hesitated only a moment—as though sensing the possibility of danger. But it was not enough to stop him. He leaned in and clamped his mouth over hers; a rough touch, and violent. Maggie braced herself and kissed back.

She knew nothing but instinct, although she had been fighting that, and herself. She closed her eyes, reaching deep inside, and felt a great fury and hunger rise strong and hot within her belly. Irdu pressed closer. Maggie grabbed his head between her hands and held him to her, her lips sucking on his, stealing his breath—stealing him.

It happened so naturally she hardly knew what she was doing until Irdu stiffened, his eyes flying open. He tried to pull away, but strength flooded her body—as though all those years of steelwork had turned her into steel—and she opened her eyes, locking gazes with him, savoring his fear. Using it to stoke the hunger burning inside her belly.

Fixer, she told him silently. I am going to fix you.

Maggie inhaled him like smoke, filling her lungs, and still he remained frozen, eyelids fluttering. She could feel his life pulsing like a black flame, and she sucked hard, pleasure growing heavy between her legs as she pulled sharp, loosening the demon—vampire, incubus, be mine—from his moorings. Irdu’s life slid through his mouth into Maggie’s own; he tasted like bone, baked dry and hot; and the tail of his spirit slithered down her throat, making her fit to burst—which she did, pleasure rocking through her body. She gasped, and shoved him away.

Irdu collapsed. Maggie did as well, falling hard on her knees. She felt sick to her stomach, sick at heart, but there was something else in her, too; a rising scream of power that was silent and awful and heavy against her skin. Her heart hammered with such strength, she thought she could pull the vital organ from her body and it would still keep pumping.

She looked up, her vision blurred, but saw enough pale faces staring at her to know she was in deep trouble. Irdu was dead. She knew it. Killing had been easy, like a disease.

But I can’t fight them all, she thought, with both defiance and despair.

No one touched her, though. Samuel was still pressed to the table, but he was watching her as well, grim satisfaction in his eyes.

Behind the men, Maggie heard the loud squeak of hinges. A door, opening and closing. Boots scuffed the floor. The men turned, staring, and a quiver rode through them as though they shared the same nerve endings. Maggie watched as they stood back in slow retreat, heads bowed, revealing a dark-skinned woman with white braids and a knit green cap tugged low over her ears. Her eyes glinted, and she looked from the men to Samuel, and then to Maggie.

“Well,” said Trace, smiling coldly, “isn’t this a pretty party?”

NINE

It was like being bludgeoned in the head, Maggie thought. Seeing Trace felt like a physical blow, and the young woman stared for one long moment, blood roaring in her ears. The sickening crunch of taking another life—even a life that had threatened her own—faded in comparison to seeing Trace.

The men released Samuel. He slipped off the table, dropping quickly to Maggie’s side. She clutched his hand, leaning heavily against his shoulder as he helped her stand. She could not stop looking at Trace. The old woman looked good and healthy, with a light raging through her eyes that could have been anger or pleasure.

Ekir strode to Trace but did not attack her. He clutched the cape of feathers, and the old woman reached out and took it from him. He let her, and when she held out her hand and pointed to the cape he already wore, his expression darkened, but he did as she asked. Yielding to Trace as though he feared her.

“She won,” said the old woman. “Just as I promised. Just as we bargained. She beat your leader at his game, and so she owns you now. She owns you.”

“She knows nothing of us, or herself,” Ekir rumbled, the side of his face not quite as caved in, though his eye was still hidden—or perhaps just smashed beyond recognition. “She could never lead us.”

Trace grunted. “Crow. The demon questions your lady.”

Samuel rose to his feet and in two steps snatched one of Maggie’s forgotten whirly-gigs off a nearby table. Ekir began to turn, but Samuel was too fast—so fast, Maggie wondered if he had let himself be captured. Nothing but a blur, and then blood spurted and she saw that he had shoved one of the tin blades into Ekir’s remaining good eye.

The wounded man staggered, blind, against the table, grunting with pain. Trace kicked at the back of his knees, and he went down hard. She grabbed his hair, yanked back his head, and kissed him hard.

Not just a kiss, Maggie realized in horror. She was sucking him dry, stealing his life, just as Irdu’s spirit had been stolen, consumed.

Trace was not human.

And neither, Maggie realized, was she.

The other men backed away toward the doors. Something came over her. She stood and lurched past Samuel, who caught her waist as she began to fall. No words escaped her throat, just a low growl that twisted from her chest, raw with fury. The men froze.

Trace released Ekir, who fell backward into a boneless heap. The woman wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, her eyes bright, her skin less wrinkled. Ten years had been knocked off her life, Maggie thought.

“Run,” Trace whispered to the men. “But you remember what happened here. You remember what you owe us, and you stay clean and good. You keep away from people, much as you dare. You know you can.”

“No,” Maggie began to say, but the men nodded solemnly—if not with some disgust, and fear. They left the bookstore, filing into the night. They did not take the bodies of their brothers. They were perfectly quiet—pale creatures, black hair shining against their backs. Within moments, it was as though they had never been there at all. When Maggie heard the roar of their motorcycles, she ran toward the door. Trace caught her.

“They’ll hurt others,” Maggie protested. “How can you let them go?”

Trace shook her head. “You can’t destroy ’em all. And why would you? There’s a balance to these things, Maggie Greene. We took what was our right. The rest would be murder.”

Maggie yanked herself away. “Like they murdered? There’s a room back there full of bodies. Probably more in places where these demons have been.”

“And would you kill me?” Trace asked, a touch of hard grim sadness in her eyes.

Maggie stared at her, helpless, and then sank to her knees. Strong, warm arms encircled her shoulders, and Samuel said, “You put too much on her. All of this was too much.”

“Now or never,” Trace muttered, and settled cross-legged on the floor in front of Maggie. Her eyes were solemn but kind—just like the woman Maggie had always known—but Maggie could not forget the sight of her stealing Ekir’s life with a kiss.

Trace glanced at the teeth hanging from the necklace, and then met Maggie’s gaze, giving her a long steady look. Maggie waited.

The old woman reached inside her mouth and tugged. Maggie heard a clicking sound, and then—another shock—Trace’s teeth came loose in her wrinkled hand. Teeth, set in a neat row, embedded in a ridged plastic shell. A full set, both lower and upper halves. Trace held them in her palm.

“Those didn’t come from a shark,” she said, pointing at the necklace and showing off her pink gums. “But I got tired of being one way. I got tired of hurting folks for my supper. So I changed. I changed, Maggie Greene, in the same way those men might change one day. That’s why I gave ’em a chance. That’s why you should, too.” Trace bowed her head, and placed her teeth back into her mouth. “Not much difference, you know. Got some of the same blood in your veins.”

“How?” Maggie breathed.

“Your momma,” Trace said, and hesitated. “My niece.”

Maggie caught her breath. She felt woozy. Too much to hear, on top of the two dead men behind her, with more people close by. She swayed, and Samuel was there, bending to scoop her into his arms. He showed no sign of strain, and did not speak to Trace. He carried Maggie from the bookstore, into the cool night.

A great deal of time had passed. The sky was beginning to lighten. Maggie inhaled deeply, and the fresh air helped. Samuel set her down, carefully, on her feet, but she did not let go of him, and his arms remained around her.

“Mister Crow,” she murmured.

“I wanted to tell you,” he said. “I knew. I knew what Trace was, but I did not know how to share such a thing.”

Maggie nodded, numb. “Did she tell you to stay with me?”

“She asked,” he said softly. “But only, I think, because she thought it would do us both some good not to be alone.”

Tears burned Maggie’s eyes. She looked up as Trace exited through the creaking door, and stood there, very still, watching. She looked so human. So human.

Like you, she told herself.

“Did granddaddy know?” Maggie asked, wiping her face. “About you and me? My mother?”

“He was not your granddaddy,” Trace said heavily. “He was your uncle.”

Maggie stared. “He was an old man.”

Trace leaned heavily against the door, and for the first time, she looked her years. “He didn’t start out old. He was young at the end of the Big Death. Not as young as you, but close. He just … didn’t know what he had on his hands. His sister-in-law didn’t mention you had … certain gifts.”

Maggie pressed her hand over her mouth. “No. No, Trace. I … did I hurt him?”

“It was an accident,” Trace whispered. “Truth was, I didn’t even think you were capable of more than a few tricks. Your mother certainly didn’t have much to show for the blood in her veins. But you … you were different.” She looked deep into Maggie’s eyes. “You were so horrified, you shut yourself down. You made yourself forget … everything. And I thought … I thought it was for the best. So did your … your granddaddy.”

“My uncle.” She breathed, remembering the old man—who had never shown a sign of fear around her, who had loved her as his own. Maggie was certain of that. She knew, in her heart, that much.

Samuel said, “And the demon? How did he find her?”

“Blood calls to blood.” Trace crouched in front of Maggie. “He would have felt something, the closer he got. I was afraid of that happening one day. When I heard about those men and their motorcycles coming east, raiding Enclaves, I wondered if it might be them. I suspected. Made me worried they could catch your scent. I knew the truth when you described who visited that day, and knocked you flat on your ass. So I took off to find those brother numbnuts. I had words with them. Made a bargain. Irdu had to leave you with free choice, and if … if you chose him, I wouldn’t interfere.”

Maggie forced herself to breathe. “Is that why Ekir had your necklace?”

Trace grunted. “I made Ekir think he had a prize. You’re not the only one who can see the future. I knew what would make you leave home. Irdu thought it would be him, that you’d be so enamored, you’d think of nothing else. Didn’t know my Maggie. Not turned by a pretty head.”

Samuel’s arms tightened around Maggie. Trace added, “Until now, maybe.”

Maggie covered her face. “Why so much interest in me?”

“You would have been strong enough to bear him a child,” Trace said bluntly. “Children are rare among our kind. Those we consume don’t survive too much, and only if we let ’em. Doesn’t happen often.”

Chills raced over Maggie’s skin. She forced herself to look at Trace and said, “They were scared of you.”

A grunt of laughter escaped the old woman’s throat. “And now you, Maggie Greene. Now you.”

They burned the bodies, including the cape of feathers that had belonged to Samuel’s long-dead love. It was easier than trying to dig below the leaves and hit concrete.

Maggie did not stay and watch. At dawn, she walked inside the city, and listened to the birds sing, and watched the sunlight trickle through the green-budding branches. Spring, even here. Among the bones and ruins that in another twenty years might be lost forever in the endless tangled green.

But this place was not dead, she thought. There was life. Maybe not human, but there was life.

Trace had left her mules and wagon hitched somewhere on the northern side of the forest, and she went to fetch them. While she was gone, Maggie found Irdu’s and Ekir’s motorcycles, parked on the other side of the bookstore. The keys were in the ignition. She had found a gas station nearby.

A crow cawed once, sharply, above her head. Maggie looked up and watched the bird swoop low behind some bushes. Moments later, a human man pushed free, holding his cape of feathers around his waist.

“I think I’ve seen it all,” Maggie said dryly.

A faint flush warmed his cheeks. “Until you return the favor, I think I will attempt some modesty.”

She smiled—and marveled that she could. “Thank you. For everything.”

Samuel looked away. “I did nothing. You saved yourself.” He cleared his throat and looked down at his feet. “I suppose you will be going home. No reason not to.”

“I don’t know,” Maggie said, running her fingers along the motorcycle; no longer quite so in love with the machine, but still in awe. “The world is big. I’m here now. I think … I think I might like to see more of it. Other cities. Other kinds of … people.”

“Your home,” Samuel said, moving closer, studying her face. “Your things.”

Maggie swayed near him. “Things are just that. And I know where to find more now, if I really need anything.” She hesitated, searching his eyes—trying to see the root of him, the corners of his soul. “You want to come with me? I could use a friend.”

So simple. A straightforward question, heavier than the air around them, but Maggie had been through too much to care. Too much.

And she was not going to be afraid of her heart.

Wind sifted through Samuel’s dark hair and feathers, and a faint, warm smile touched his mouth. “What would we do?”

“Talk, I guess,” Maggie said carefully, also beginning to smile. “Same as always. We could find another forest. One without … you know, life-stealing demons.”

“You’re a life-stealing demon.”

“But I won’t steal you.”

“Are you sure about that?” But Samuel was laughing now, silently, and when Maggie climbed on the motorcycle, he slid behind her, naked, his large elegant hands curling around her waist. Maggie turned her head and kissed him hard on the mouth. He tasted good.

She started the engine. And they flew away, into the forest.