Megan Fennell
I knew I was dreaming, but it was a sweet dream so I let it ride.
1907, Ellis Island. The immigrants were streaming off the ships in a weary tide, clutching raggedy suitcases and herding wide-eyed children. Up above, the ocean breeze was my own personal rollercoaster. I was taking unholy pleasure in dive-bombing the whole sorry lot of them as they shuffled along, making the women shriek and the men flap their hats at me. It was the most fun I’d had in weeks, weaving that colorful tapestry of curses in a hundred different languages, flipping and dancing and staying just out of reach. Welcome to the brave new world, suckers! Take a nice deep whiff of your American dream!
There was a loud rat-a-tat-tat right next to my head and I jolted awake, jerking away from the noise before my brain sorted out the difference between gunfire and the sound of a billy club being dragged along the bars of a holding cell.
“On your feet, asshole,” the guard called through the bars. “Looks like someone out there loves you.”
I blinked, bleary-eyed, before the sight of him fully registered. He could have made up for his receding hairline if he wasn’t ugly. And he could have made up for being ugly by not being a total dick. Sadly, he didn’t seem to be making up for much of anything.
I sat up, rubbing the sore muscles in the back of my neck. A three-toed sloth could count on its fingers how many people in the world loved me, so I didn’t get the joke.
“Say again, brother?” I said.
“I ain’t your brudder,” he shot back, forcing an accent about a hundred years out of date. “Some guy up front decided to waste his money. You made bail.”
I got to my feet real slow, trying to figure out the trap. I’d been wearing the same name and face in this city long enough that the boys in blue had gotten to know me and they’d set my bail so high I figured I ought to get an engraved nameplate for my cell this time around.
“Does some-guy-up-front have a name?” I shuffled over to the door, standing where I was supposed to stand, keeping my hands in the open. Behaving is easier when someone’s unlocking a cage for you.
“I didn’t ask your boyfriend his name,” he muttered, working the lock. “Tall guy. Asian-looking. Got a bit of a dead-eyed stare going on. Hell, maybe you’ve got debts to a gang and this guy’s about to make my life a whole lot easier and better smelling.”
He was still talking, saying something about turning off the security cameras in the parking lot out back, but my spine had turned into one long icicle, fused solid with fear. The door of my cell was wide open and I just stood there, fighting the urge to swing it shut again. Tall guy. Asian-looking. No way, no way, not after all this time…
A drug-debt to a gang would have been a hell of a lot easier to deal with. I was much older than I looked, and scrappier too, but there was no controlling the stranglehold fear that grabbed onto me at that description. Like thinking you’re all alone in a dark room and then hearing someone cough.
Kakashi.
“Move, Johnny,” the guard barked, jabbing me with his baton. “Pow-wow your ass on out of there unless you want to stay.”
I can’t say I was proud of what I did next, but I was stressed and sore and the one person who’d come the closest to putting an end to old Johnny Crow had found me again and, goddamn it, a pow-wow was a gathering, not a way of moving. So I locked onto the guard’s eyes with mine, letting the old power crackle along the path of my bones, and learned a truth that a part of him knew and a bigger part of him didn’t want to. I hooked onto the thought like a prize catch and reeled it to the forefront of his mind.
Funny how Jennie never misses her book club meetings even though she’s never really been a reader since you married her. Funny that it always, always falls on the same Thursday as Greg’s poker night where he never seems to win or lose any money.
Funny, isn’t it?
* * *
I strolled my way to freedom with a grimy gray lost-and-found t-shirt wadded against my bleeding nose. The guard packed an admirable right jab. I mean, it didn’t make up for having a marriage that was falling apart as fast as his looks, but it was a nice solid punch just the same.
I knew where Kakashi would be waiting even before my eyes found him. Whenever we were within range of each other, the old lines of magic we both carried within us collided with a vicious friction. Flint and tinder, saw-blade and tree trunk, toddler’s reaching hand and red-hot stove. I hated how I knew exactly which side of each of those metaphors was me.
He was standing by the sliding door, a creature of perfect stillness in the bustling lobby, like something carved centuries ago. Which, technically, I suppose he was. From this distance, he almost looked human. Neatly put together with black suit and white shirt, he stood just shy of six feet (though he always felt taller in my head) and could have passed as a professor coming over from Tokyo. But the illusion fell apart quick when you noticed that his polished-obsidian eyes never blinked, his chest failed to rise and fall under that tidy suit, and that just looking at him made it feel like a parade of ants was marching mercilessly along all the most sensitive parts of you.
Well, maybe that last part was reserved for my kind alone.
I pulled the blood-stained shirt away from my nose and waved it at him with a shit-eating grin. He wouldn’t try to fight me here. We never danced in public. Anyway, I hadn’t done anything wrong. Lately. To him. That he knew about.
So that made it more like skinny-dipping in a tank full of well-fed piranha, rather than starving ones.
“Kakashi, my brother!” I greeted him. Strolling up to him felt like walking upriver, waist-deep. “Twenty-five years. But I do like your timing.”
He inclined his head slightly, his expression moving not at all. “Twenty-three years,” he corrected softly. His once-upon-a-time accent had been eaten up by the blank slate nothingness of modern North American. “And we have never been brothers.”
“Nobody wants to be poor old Johnny Crow’s brother today,” I sighed.
He didn’t answer, just took his silent measure of me, making me feel like a bug under a magnifying glass. I fidgeted and scratched at the dried blood on the side of my nose, a hundred questions and accusations roiling under my skin. It was a relief when he finally spoke again.
“Karasu-tengu,” he said, “Do you still speak prophesy?”
I winced, a little at the old name, a little at the question. I would have loved to say no, but I knew damn well his arrival was the reason I’d been dreaming of New York in the years when it really had been ‘new.’ Those ambitious immigrants swarming ashore had carried more luggage in their hearts than in their suitcases; some families had believed in the kind of scarecrows that packed a bit more clout than the basic straw-stuffed-coveralls, we’re-off-to-see-the-wizard affair. They had believed in the power of the Kakashi so deeply that the eastern scarecrow had been able to dig his wooden toes into western soil and throw a monkey wrench into my centuries of undisturbed machinations.
Awful hard to deny that the gift of prophesy was still clinging to me like a stubborn burr when he turned up on the heels of my dream about our meeting place. Well then…
“When it suits me,” I said.
He nodded, the picture of solemnity. “Then let us leave, unless you would prefer to remain here.”
I gave a last resigned swipe of the grubby shirt over my sore nose and stuffed the bundle into my canvas knapsack. Never wise to leave your blood lying around where just anyone could find it.
“It’s not so bad here,” I said. I headed towards the big sliding doors just the same. “Folk in here tell stories the old way, starting at the end. Every damn one starts ‘Here’s the story of why it’s not my fault.’ I miss that sometimes.”
Out in the parking lot, I discovered that I’d been cheating myself out of a beautiful summer day while biding my time in custody. The sun was bright and hot in a clear sky and the air had a rich green growing smell to it.
“Is that why you were in prison again?” Kakashi asked. His voice was always so toneless that it was hard to untangle sarcasm from honest curiosity. “Do you come back for the stories?”
I tossed him a reckless smile. “Nah, I just have bad luck. Do you want to hear the story of why it’s not my fault, Scarecrow?”
“No,” he said.
He led the way across the parking lot to his car. Naturally, it was a sleek modern affair, just tiptoeing up to the line of being ostentatious. Spotlessly black, it was probably the cleanest car in the lot. I immediately wanted to coerce a flock of pigeons into a well-timed fly-over, but the sky was empty of my allies.
“So,” I began, “Twenty-five years…”
“Twenty-three.”
“…and here you are doling out my bail.” I popped open the passenger door and hopped into the car. The interior was as clean as the outside. A pair of expensive-looking sunglasses lay neatly in the center console. I picked them up and put them on, grinning at my reflection in the side mirror. “We’re not brothers, but we’re not enemies today either, eh?”
Kakashi slid in next to me, his cold aura filling the car, turning the cozy leather interior suddenly claustrophobic.
“Not enemies today, tengu, no,” he said. He wrapped his unnaturally long fingers around the wheel, seeming to hesitate. “As a matter of fact, it seems I may require your help.”
I laughed out loud, a startled squawk. Having grown accustomed to wearing my touch of telepathy like a pair of old boots, I’d forgotten how much fun it was to be surprised.
“Say that again!” I pleaded, still cackling. “Kakashi the immovable, Kakashi of the shining sickle, asking for help from old Johnny Crow! I oughta make you beg! No, I want a boon. A big one! Carte blanche, brother! I want…”
He reached out quicker than I could track, his fingers suddenly cold against the skin of my throat. My laughter died so fast it was like he’d turned it off by touch alone. My very long life took a quick sprint before my eyes, but he only rested his fingers lightly against my pulse, studying me.
“This is new,” he commented.
It took my mind a moment to claw its way past instinctive panic, but I eventually remembered the trio of raggedy black feathers that I’d had Bug Torres ink onto my neck during my last stint inside.
“Well, that’s another nice perk of the big house,” I croaked. “Good stories and cheap ink.”
All the bluster was gone from my voice. Even after Kakashi sat back, I could still feel the ghost impression that his touch had left on my skin. Bastard had a way of making me feel pretty damn mortal.
He waited, silent. I stalled, petulant. Muttered a curse in the old language. English wasn’t expressive enough to sum up my feelings sometimes.
“What kind of help?” I grumbled.
If the old boy actually had the facial mobility to smile, I think he would have but he only nodded in satisfaction and started the engine.
“I have been hunting one of my kind in these last weeks,” he told me. “We believe he has gone mad. Become dangerous.”
I snorted quietly. A dangerous scarecrow? The mind fairly boggled.
“I have been tasked with his elimination,” he continued, ignoring me.
“Can’t help you with that,” I said. “Killing scarecrows? Too damn rich for my blood.”
“I’ve been unable to even locate him. He has proven elusive.”
“Well, of course he has,” I sighed.
He glanced over at me, though he also could have been checking behind us as he backed out. “Explain.”
I shrugged and pushed the borrowed sunglasses up on my nose, relaxing against the sun-heated leather of the upholstery. I pretended that I was a pat of butter melting onto fresh baked bread.
“You’re the same as him,” I said. “Same powers, same tricks… It’d be like me trying to take down Magpie. We’d chase each other in circles until rain started falling up.”
We pulled out onto the highway and Kakashi nudged the car up to speed, the engine purring like a contented mountain cat.
“You believe I would be wise to seek the advice of someone whose mind runs counter to mine,” he said quietly. “Someone whose natural instincts go against everything that my people believe.”
I nodded. “Them’s the breaks, brother. Every so often, you proud boys need to hop down into the muck with the rest of us and…”
He glanced at me and his hell-black eyes were twinkling. I realized the tidy little corner that I’d talked myself right into. Perfect. Now the stubborn bastard thought I agreed that he needed me.
“Any of us could do it for you,” I said. My attempted nonchalance fell flat. “I mean, I’m not the only bird still spitting prophesy on the western seaboard, old man. And most of ‘em have less history than you and I.”
Kakashi and Crow, trying to work together. Hysterical. It wasn’t going to be a buddy-cop movie; it was going to end in blood and panic and fury and maybe a death that stuck this time.
He shook his head. “We balance each other, tengu. Yin and yang, dark and light. Stronger together.”
I peered at him, head cocked to the side. “You didn’t feel that way in ’44.”
I’d had to regrow both my hands. Took the better part of the year. Sometimes still hurt in cold weather.
“I was younger then,” he said, immovable. “And you were more foolish.”
I thought I’d been doing those people a pretty big kindness, showing them a sneaky way out of the internment camp. But I’d always been better at ‘spur of the moment’ rather than big plans and the guards had started shooting and then people were screaming and running. Someone kicked over a stove and then one of the main buildings went up like dry tinder and Kakashi had come striding through the woodsmoke, his sickle gleaming red with reflected fire. To clean up my chaos and to teach me a valuable lesson.
I really hated Kakashi’s valuable lessons.
I found myself massaging the bones of my wrist, thinking it over. If I did this, he would owe me. It wasn’t in my nature to turn up my nose when something that good fell into my lap.
“You still don’t eat, do you?” I asked.
“I do not. You do not need to either.”
“But I like to eat. Tell you what,” I said, “Stop calling me tengu ’cause I’m not one of your peoples’ damn ‘heavenly dogs,’ and stop for fries on the way to wherever you’re taking me, and you’ve got yourself a deal. I’ll work with you, to do this.”
Kakashi shot me another one of those looks, the closest thing to a smile that he could muster.
I didn’t need prophesies to tell me this was going to end ugly.
* * *
Kakashi’s little downtown apartment was like his car: modern, clean, elegant, and more than I could afford. I hadn’t expected anything different. While he hung up his jacket, I took a stroll around the place, poking through the bookcase and snooping fruitlessly through the barren kitchen cupboards. I gave the fireplace a wide berth; he’d mounted his weapons above the mantelpiece, the simple wooden club crossed with that damn sickle like a coat of arms. It made my bones ache to look at them.
“Please, make yourself at home,” Kakashi said, his tone even drier than usual.
I grinned at him and went to play with his expensive-looking stereo system, gleefully rearranging all the carefully balanced dials until the bass throbbed like a distant drum and the strident guitars had been all but obliterated.
“Of course, brother,” I said. “Shut the curtains for me, would you? Visions are easier to see in the dark.”
He did as I asked, which was a novelty that I didn’t have nearly enough time to savor. The room was still too sterile, a bleached modern carapace. Inducing a vision here would be like trying to work a card trick without hands. Which, believe me, was harder than it looked.
Hunting down the thermostat, I cranked the heat as high as it would go then hunkered down to unlace my boots and chucked them aside with my socks. Kakashi watched me, a motionless silhouette in the gray light that seeped in through the curtain.
“What do you need?” he asked.
I sighed, curling my bare toes into the carpet as I stood up to strip off my jacket and shirt. “Smoke and drums and sweat and fire. I miss the old ways, my brother. Do you ever catch yourself thinking that you just want to go home, and then remember this is the same world you’ve always lived in?”
My old counterpart watched me in silence for a long moment, then moved over to the fireplace and flipped a switch. Weak colorless electric flames sprung up around a sculpted log tucked safely behind a layer of glass. I snorted, then snickered, and then I was laughing so hard that I had to brace my hands on my knees.
“That’s terrible!” I exclaimed. “The worst excuse for fire I’ve ever seen! Oh, this delicate century…”
“I don’t like fire,” Kakashi said primly. “Pull yourself together, Crow. I do have a drum.”
He slipped into the next room while I collected myself. I shut my eyes and swayed there in the quickly warming darkness, trying to feel the pulse of the earth beneath us. I shifted my weight from foot to foot, turning in a slow circle, taking deep breaths. Kakashi’s return to the room was a low buzz of dissonance against my senses.
“What do you need?” he asked again, quietly.
“Drum for me,” I said. Bobbing my head, I turned through my circle again, stomping my foot against the carpeted floor to show him the beat.
He took up the rhythm, too stiff and careful at first, but gradually improving until it amplified the rhythm of the earth and caught time with my heartbeat. Bending towards the ground, I hummed low in my throat, keeping my eyes shut, and I danced. I danced out a prayer and a plea, and I danced for an answer.
Where is he? Where is this rogue scarecrow?
Falling deeper into the dance, I let my drifting mind sneak past the sharp-edged disruption of Kakashi and slip into the streams of fate where prophesies spawned and a hundred possible futures glistened with untold potential.
I want to see him.
I felt my mind caught and irresistibly pulled through time, skipping into the near future. My final plea slipped from me half-formed and hardly considered.
Show me the place where Kakashi will be able to kill him.
Meat and feathers, the stink of fresh blood and salt water. A strong hand plunged down into an open torso and I heard the crackle of already broken ribs being shoved aside. Twisted burlap fingers stained dark red were wrenched out of the chest, trailing gore. The creature crammed the fistful of dripping meat into his gaping mouth. Wooden teeth crunched and squelched, black eyes gazing dispassionately down at the meal pinned in a crumpled heap under his filthy knees.
And I knew the guy. Son of a bitch, I knew that sorry mess of meat lying on the ground, eyes fixed and staring, blood dripping from spiked indigo hair. Blue Jay. Too late for the poor bastard now, caught halfway between forms and no longer whole enough to be patched back together, a puzzle of torn flesh and broken feathers. His ripped chest steamed slightly in the cool ocean air.
Two things occurred to me at once like a one-two punch taking my breath away. One: Kakashi knew about this guy. Knew he was a bird-eater out of control, knew how dangerous he was, and that he was wandering around my home turf. What the hell was he playing at? I would have been safer behind bars with this rogue on the loose.
The second thing, which eclipsed the importance of the first in a heartbeat, was that the rogue had stopped eating and was looking at me. Looking at me as my mind hung invisible within the vision.
If I’d had a body at the time, I think I would have pissed myself.
Hey there, good-looking, I thought weakly, and tried to skedaddle out of the trance.
Unlike Kakashi, this scarecrow no longer bothered with the veneer of humanity. When he opened his mouth, strings of burlap hung in blood-sodden strands over that dark opening, and I could see the rotting clumps of straw poking through the tears in his plaid shirt. Ants crawled like his madness under the worn material and a few spilled from his raggedy cuff as he stretched out his arm towards me as though he meant to grab me. As though he could grab me. That wasn’t right; scarecrows had their fear and birds could dance through visions and never the twain should meet.
What exactly had he been eating along with the meat of us?
With a horrifying lurch and a bone-jarred shock of pain, I felt myself suddenly drawn towards him. My mind began to tear free from the anchor of my body and panic exploded within me. I clawed backwards, upwards, anything to get away from that widening mouth, but everybody knows it’s impossible to run away from monsters in a dream and I was slipping.
With one last desperate struggle, I surged back towards my body and felt some other power catch hold of me there. I had become the rope in a vicious tug-of-war between two strong, cold powers and it hurt, it hurt in impossible ways that I hadn’t known I could hurt. Every part of me that had the capacity to scream did. The vision began to collapse as I fought to get out of there, the edges of reality blurring and possible futures swirling around me like images in a kaleidoscope.
Through the pain and panic, I saw the vision continue to play out, fast-forwarding in confusing stops and stutters. I smelled blood and rot, and saw myself creep up behind Kakashi and set the back of his suit jacket on fire. Saw him go up just like the tinder he was made of. The vision churned wildly. I saw the rogue scarecrow dropping in smoldering clumps while Kakashi clawed at his own burning clothing, his hair. I saw myself explode into my treasured flock form, my mind fragmenting into thirteen parts as my dozens of wings beat at the fire hot air, and together we dove, all the parts of myself driving towards Kakashi as he staggered backwards with real fear in those eyes that had always been so blank…
I snapped back to my body in a defensive huddle on Kakashi’s living room floor. My throat was raw like I was still breathing in the fiery air, but I thought maybe I’d just been hollering. Kakashi had a death grip on my shoulders and there were little black feathers gleaming around me on the floor in the weak antiseptic light from the fireplace. I picked one up unsteadily and examined it, giving a croaky laugh before blowing it out from between my fingers.
“Open the blinds,” I rasped. “It’s done.”
Kakashi seemed hesitant to let go of me, but got to his feet and walked over to let the sun back in.
“You know where he is?” he asked.
I sorted through the jumbled vision, putting helpful details into one mental pile and all the disturbing shit into another heap. Like the fact that I’d seen a future where two bird-scarers had been killed with one stone. Where I’d seized up another shiny opportunity that had fallen into my lap, bright with spreading fire, and looked out for number one just like I always had. But right now was the time to focus.
I remembered the bridge with vivid detail and the distinct, red graffiti painted on its underbelly. I’d camped out there a time or two, snatching treasures from the cargo ships as they cruised into the harbor, enjoying the ocean air and harrying the sailors.
I nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, I know where to find him. Blue Jay’s a dead man. I don’t think we’ll be in time to stop that.”
Kakashi was already moving to the fireplace, switching off the flames and reaching to remove his sickle from the wall. “Then let us go before any others must die.”
Others like me? Or like him? Like the humans packed into this city, as fragile as kittens? What exactly was on the potential chopping block when something as strong as a scarecrow lost their mind? And where did Kakashi’s priority lie?
I thought it but didn’t ask aloud, watching as Kakashi swung the polished sickle in a graceful arc. It cut through the air with a faint whoosh. Scary bastard. Glad he was on my side at the moment. For the moment.
I gathered up my shirt and boots, moving for the door. “Let’s go,” I agreed.
* * *
Kakashi was all but silent on the drive, despite my attempts to plant the seeds of conversation, and that left me a little too much time to think. Every red light and traffic jam detour had me grinding my teeth. I’d really liked Jay and nobody deserved to go out like that. Not for the first time, I decided the world had been much more fun before the scarecrows came about.
At long last, the bridge rose up before us, resplendent with the setting sun shining through it.
“If he destroys me,” Kakashi said, “I leave it to you to spread the word to the others. Warn them. Do what you must to get away.”
“Aren’t you sweet,” I muttered, popping open his glovebox and rummaging through it to distract myself. “I already know how this goes down. He dies, brother. Trust me on that much.”
He nodded, satisfied. “Put my pressure gauge back, Crow. You don’t even need that.”
I sighed and put it back where I’d found it, but palmed a shiny little Zippo to make up for the loss. “This isn’t your first rodeo, is it?” I commented. “You’ve done this before.”
Kakashi hesitated, but nodded once.
I propped my boot against the dashboard, enjoying his resulting wince. “This didn’t used to be part of your job description,” I said.
“No,” he said softly. “It was not necessary.”
I whistled low, rubbing my hands over the knees of my jeans. “So it’s true. The scarecrows are slipping their gears. Losing the plot. Out to lunch. Got a few bats in…”
“We are endless creatures with a purpose that has ended,” Kakashi broke in. His voice was so damn sad that it shut me up. “Those we serve no longer need us. Modern technology offers more elegant solutions than we could hope to provide.”
It was true enough. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen a scarecrow standing guard in a farmer’s field. Now it was all motion sensors and noise machines and static bursts. Scarecrows had become the quaint novelty of farmers’ markets and Thanksgiving kitsch. My people had mostly forgotten me, but at least I hadn’t been replaced.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it. I probably should have stopped there, but the words tumbled off my tongue before I could stop them. “So when are you going to crack? Because I really think you ought to do me the favor of a two week running start, after all we’ve been through.”
He made a noise, kind of like a laugh with most of the joy bleached out of it. “Not for a very long time, I imagine. My people still have some small need of me. I protect them when I am able.” He looked at me and I think I was getting better at seeing the glimpses of humor in his dark eyes. “Besides which, you’ve proven yourself somewhat of a full-time occupation since we met. Your sense of fun, my reckless friend, may provide enough work for me to last through eternity.”
I snickered and shook my head. “Well, I’m mighty flattered, wooden-man. Or maybe that’s just hysteria setting in.” But as the car slowed, reaching our destination, I found that I was smiling.
We parked the car just off one of the streets that funneled onto the bridge and started out on foot from there. Kakashi had turned tense and silent, his sickle tucked under his jacket. The gravel crunched under our boots as we went off the path and started down the slope to get beneath the bridge.
“I can feel him,” Kakashi murmured. “He is here.”
“Told you, didn’t I?” I said. I could feel the presence of the rogue buzzing against my nerves too, like the whine of power lines in high wind. “Are you scared?”
The shadow of the bridge fell over us and it felt suddenly colder.
“No, Johnny,” Kakashi said, “I am not. Are you?”
I shook my head, stuffing my hands into the pockets of my jacket, turning the stolen lighter over and over in my nervous fingers. “Nah.”
We trudged a little further. The hairs on the back of my neck were standing on end and goosebumps rushed down my arms. Kakashi slid the sickle out from under his jacket.
“Were you lying a little just now?” I asked.
“Perhaps,” he said.
I grinned. “Perhaps me too.”
The rogue was where I had seen him in the vision, tucked up against the thick concrete struts of the bridge, hunkered down over poor Jay’s mangled body, red to the elbows. When he looked up this time, it was Kakashi that his eyes went to, not me. He rose to his feet, an unnatural unfolding, and held out his arms to Kakashi, his bloody mouth twisting into a monstrous smile. He greeted him like a friend. A friend who’d brought a snack to share. Sudden fear gripped my bones, pooled in my kneecaps, and left my legs shaking.
At my side, Kakashi bellowed out some sort of kung fu battle yell and dropped into a ready stance, and I could feel the icy waves of induced fear flowing out from him so thick that I imagined for a moment I could see them. The rogue snarled in betrayal, his wet fingers clenching into fists, and I sure as hell felt the moment when his terror crashed into Kakashi’s. The air wavered and warbled as it would above a fire, and I was shaking so hard my bones felt like they were going to pieces.
Kakashi growled low in his throat and the rogue staggered back a step. The pressure of their grappling powers intensified, like thunderstorms colliding. My ears popped and my eyes watered fiercely. I locked my chattering teeth onto my tongue to keep myself from throwing up, but my knees were betraying me and I was sinking, falling…
Kakashi’s glance flicked over to me and the pressure dissipated as suddenly as an electric fireplace being switched off. The rogue’s final blast of fear broke over us like a wave and I could felt the strange dark wrongness of it, could almost taste it. It made Kakashi’s aura of fear feel like clean mountain air in comparison and I shuddered uncontrollably.
“Better go put him down, killer,” I muttered to Kakashi. “Scream real loud if you need me.”
Kakashi nodded once and darted in front of me. The rogue trampled over Jay’s body and charged down the slope towards us, kicking up loose stones, his wet mouth opening wide in a raspy roar. Kakashi swung his blade, but the force of the rogue’s charge took them both down in a messy tangle. I sidestepped, skittering back. I’d only seen Kakashi fight with all his strength a few times before, and each time reminded me that I never wanted to see it again. But the rogue was fast and violent, clawing at Kakashi’s face, painting them both with Jay’s blood. He was in too close for Kakashi to take another swing, so they grappled with each other, rolling over and over. I heard Kakashi’s jacket tear on the rocky slope. It was taking all my will not to follow my instincts and get out of there. This was not a place for Johnny Crow.
I forced myself to take a step towards the pair, just as the rogue darted in like a snake and bit Kakashi’s shoulder with an audible crunch. Kakashi grunted in pain and took a wild, clumsy swing with the sickle, tearing the rogue’s side. Straw and rot spilled onto the rocks and the rogue untangled himself with a nerve-jangling wail, making a break out from under the shadow of the bridge.
“Quickly, after him!” Kakashi stumbled to his feet, his hand clasped against his shoulder but his face still unnervingly expressionless despite the clear pain in his voice. He sprinted up the slope and I followed, hopping over clumps of bug-infested straw.
Out from under the shadow of the bridge, I was blinded for a moment by the setting sun and had to blink away sunspots. Squinting, I realized the rogue had broken a rule that Kakashi and I had almost always managed to maintain; he’d taken the fight out in front of the humans. He was running up the walking lane at the side of the bridge, ricocheting drunkenly off the guardrail, and Kakashi was on his heels. Cursing under my breath, I gave chase.
Putting on a burst of speed, Kakashi swung again and took one of the rogue’s legs out from under him. I nearly crashed into them both as the chase came to a messy halt.
“Stay away from him, Johnny!” Kakashi cried and swung for the rogue’s neck, but the other scarecrow threw his arm up to block the blow. The blade hissed through cloth and rotten straw and something thicker that tore another howl from the rogue. The rogue had Kakashi in a death grip with his remaining hand before the severed arm had even hit the ground. Kakashi was at a bad angle and couldn’t get a shot in, and the rogue was pulling him down, his bloody teeth chomping viciously as he tried to take another bite out of him while they grappled.
I danced around behind Kakashi in a helpless frenzy, unarmed and sorely outmatched. I’d get torn to shreds in my feathered form, even flying as the flock, and all that I had on me was a stupid lighter that’d be no good to anyone since I couldn’t get past Kakashi to safely set the rogue on fire. It would be so easy! The bastard was made out of dry straw.
A thought struck me with such force that, for a moment, I went hot and cold all at once. I couldn’t reach the rogue to burn him. But I could sure as hell set them both on fire from here.
As with most of the major choices I’d made in my life, I acted before I could think about it too hard.
It took maybe three seconds. The lighter was in my hand, a snap and spark, a quick lunge in, and Kakashi’s back erupted in a sheet of flame. He cried out, his sickle clattering to the ground, and I backed away from him, my heart thumping. He groped at his back like he could grab the spreading flame and cast it away from himself, but he only succeeded in catching his arms on fire. Mindlessly, the rogue snarled and lurched in to sink his teeth into Kakashi’s cheek just as the fire billowed up to engulf them both.
I’d fantasized about setting Kakashi on fire dozens of times. Maybe even hundreds, while I was waiting for my hands to regrow. It had given me a bitter kind of pleasure. But now that I’d done the deed, the only thing I felt was horrified regret at destroying one of my last constants in this new world.
The rogue’s scream tore through me with a final blast of terror, but it was all over for him. He dropped away from Kakashi in clumps that fell with heavy thuds and spatters, stinking black smoke pouring up from them. Ants and earwigs fled the burning heaps in a steady stream.
And still, Kakashi burned, staggering like he was drunk. Wood burns slower than straw. He burned slower…
I burst into my feathered form, felt myself scatter into the flock as I plunged through the smoke towards my old nemesis, my sometimes friend. I battered at him with my wings, driving him back, shoving and carrying and clawing until I pushed him over the guardrail and sent him tumbling like a comet towards the river below. My wings were singed, a whole lot of feathers burnt to the nubs, but I swooped down after him. He met the water with a hard splash and when he sank, he wasn’t moving.
I hit the river as the flock, thirteen individual splashes, and then reformed myself under the freezing water. The shock of salt water against my burns left me choking as I broke the surface, but I took a gulp of air and dove under again, swimming for the bottom.
Let me tell you, waterlogged wood is not fun to drag through a fast-moving current. It wasn’t pretty, but I managed it, keeping my fist locked in the collar of his jacket as I kicked and paddled for the shoreline. By the time I got there, I barely had enough strength to haul Kakashi out of the water and I’d swallowed half an ocean in the process. I dropped to my knees beside him and turned him over.
The old boy was in rough shape. His outer shell was mostly burned away, the veneer of flesh clinging in ragged patches, the bare wood beneath black. But he was looking at me and making feeble little movements. Still alive. I was so relieved I could have kissed him.
Water dribbled from the sides of his ruined mouth with a garbled sound. He made a blind grab for me and managed to find my boot with his charred hand. The words were a mess when he forced them out, but I understood them. “Thank… you… Crow…”
I cackled and flopped down on my back next to him, letting the last of the setting sun dry us out. The cars on the bridge rumbled past above us, the humans untouched by what had just brushed up against the edges of their lives.
Destiny’s a funny bird. I hadn’t really thought about it at the time, but the vision had played out just as I’d seen. The only thing that I’d misunderstood was the motivation.
The world was changing, faster and faster, but Kakashi would always be Kakashi. Scarecrows didn’t make much sense without Crow and, to speak the truth, there’d be a hole in my world without the old devil around too. Maybe he wasn’t as crazy as I thought when he said we were stronger together. Maybe, as usual, he was just able to see a bit further than I could.
I glanced over at him again, studying him. He looked back up at me, pain mixed with patience. Yes, I was getting better at reading him. Maybe his current lack of skin helped a little.
“We’re going to have to do something about your face,” I said. “It’s uglier than usual.”
I sat up, shaking the river out of my hair, and offered my hand to him.
“Lucky for you,” I told him with a grin, “I happen to know a guy. And he owes me one.”
My old heart beat in my chest once. Then twice. Then Kakashi reached up and grasped hold of my hand.
* * *
Megan Fennell is a court clerk, cat owner, and writer of strange tales, currently living and working in Lethbridge, Alberta. Although loving magpies to the point of having two of them tattooed on her, it was the Danish myth of the Valravn that held her corvid-like attention span for this anthology. Her stories can also be found in Wrestling with Gods: Tesseracts 18, Tesseracts 17, OnSpec Magazine, and the charity anthology Help: Twelve Tales of Healing.
* * *