The House, that evening

  Husk was lucky; Gerard was preoccupied at dinner.

  What they called the second meal of the day varied. When your day starts at noon, when was lunch? This meal was dinner because Gerard called it such.

  During dinner, it was easy for Petal to stay quiet. She preferred not to be the center of attention, and the two gentlemen she ate with respected her privacy as often as possible, especially when she was eating.

  Had Gerard been less wrapped up in his own mind, he might have noticed how far Husk got through his meal without an exclamation of any kind. Most unnatural for any 10-year-old boy, nevermind this one in particular.

  At a certain point, Husk had been so quiet for so long that even Petal took notice. She kicked her brother sharply under the table, and after a brief yelp of pain, he deciphered her featureless glare and caught wise.

  “Ah! Ah, I uh…I wish we were having risotto!” Husk said, pushing the cheesy spaghetti Gerard had made around the plate emphatically, “Spaghetti is so booooring.”

  Gerard only grunted, dabbing at the line of tomato soup that settled on his mustache before speaking. “We shall have to wait until Wednesday, young Husk. A steady schedule is tantamount to a healthy diet.”

  Husk threw his skull back and spewed a dramatic recreation of a sigh. Then, once he was sure that Gerard had returned to his plate, Husk snuck a peek at his sister. She was organizing her own plate with her head down, but as Husk looked up at her, she slowly slid her other hand up so only he could see her upstretched thumb: mission success.

  After the appropriate amount of time eating or at least moving their dinner and the minimum required questions from their caregiver about their day had been answered, the twins slid out of their chairs and cleared their dirty dishes. They stood at attention behind their chairs for a while. They almost never left dinner before Gerard finished. Neither of them felt quite confident in their position to ask for an early dismissal, so there was nothing to do to wait.

  Or, that was what Husk thought. Petal surprised him and Gerard when she spoke.

  “Is there anything else we can help with before we get ready for bed, Gerard?” To Gerard, the sound of her voice, clear and high, was like a pail of water thrown in his face. He had been lost in thought, staring ahead through the high, narrow windows above the sink. He came back to the room to realize the twins had cleaned their plates away without him noticing.

  “Oh. Erm, no. Thank you, Petal.” Gerard tried not to stare at the girl, but he found it difficult. It wasn’t as though she never spoke, but it was rare to hear her project so well. “Ah, and well done tidying your plates up. I can easily finish cleaning up for the evening. You may retire early, if you’d like.”

  The twins only squirmed with excitement a little as they thanked Gerard and headed towards the stairs. Their caretaker followed them part of the way, stopping in the foyer at the foot of the stairs to watch them go up.

  “Does anyone need me to come up later to put them to bed?” They were old enough now not to always need it, but it was an old habit of his he hadn’t been able to break. They responded in unison, as usual.

  “No thanks. Goodnight!”

  “Very well. Goodnight, children!” As the twins scurried up to their floor, Gerard couldn’t help but feel a little guilty. He had been distracted at dinner. He hoped the ease with which they went down for the evening didn’t have to do with his behavior. Maybe tomorrow they could do something special together, to make it up to them. He loosened his bowtie and went to clean up.

  He couldn’t know that they fled not from him, but towards the secrets of Husk’s greenhouse ritual.

  By night, driving became significantly less sufferable for Gerard.

  Oh sure, by day it’s bearable enough, when his freedom of movement was already limited by the light of the blasted sun, but at night the car felt slower than a sleeping snail. However, with his necessary cargo packed nearly into the trunk, the car was really his only option. It was one thing for a Normal to see a shadowy, animalistic figure flitting through the streets and get a bit of a fright that they rarely thought of again; it was another thing entirely for them to see that same shadowy figure tromping around with a pack twice their height strapped to their back and teetering back and forth as he balanced. There was a limit to the strangeness that would swallow before they decided they needed to do something about it, or even worse, call someone else to do something about it.

  And so, he drove on. His headlights chopped a yellow pie slice out of the road ahead of him, the lines feeding monotonously into the car beneath him

  He tried not to think about how hungry he was.

  Stanley had no idea where he was going tonight. There had been a brief outline provided, as ever. But this one had been spectacularly brief.

  Bodies found mutilated in unclaimed territory, marked below. Proceed with the utmost caution.

  When he’d peeled it out, he hadn’t thought much of it, just gathered the usual bells and whistles and set his mind for the task ahead. The coordinates put him smack in the middle of nowhere, some kind of metalworks or warehouse–it didn’t really matter. He’d planned the route out on his map and began driving, but it didn’t take long before he stopped focusing on the road. He kept thinking about the note.

  Were the clergy ever so curt? Stanley chewed on his cheek. Typically, the amount of details they left behind for him bordered on the absurd.

  The false cigarette disposal bins outside a number of churches across the country, recognizable only by the small indigo cross stenciled on the North face. One of these butt boxes stood in front of a church in Marion county that Stanley’s Auntie had let him know about. Usually, the small scroll he unspooled from within the box’s opening stretched at least the length of his forearm. The clergy all worked together to prepare assignment outlines. This was useful for gathering the wisdom of the many minds they counted among their members. It was less useful for the chaotic hodgepodge of detail, advice, blessings, and preemptive corrections.

  Remember ample holy water. And don’t try to bless it once you get there, be prepared!

  Approach only under the light of day; if you go at night, you’ll face the entire nest at once. Best to ambush during the day, when the fewest of them are awake.

  On your way home, please grab some honey from the nuns in Quincy. I’ll have cookies ready for your return, and their honey is the best for tea.

  It wasn’t even necessarily that the clergy were verbose, though they certainly were. It was impossible for so many voices to converge on a single message. It had seemed impossible.

  Stanley had been worried it was something he had done. Could he have somehow soured this relationship between him and the church? He couldn’t think of anything. In fact, if he was being honest, it made him uncomfortable at times how much of a fuss they made over him. To say they liked to dote on him during his rare visits to the diocese was an understatement. It was like a crowd made up entirely of smothering Aunties, only instead of his Mother’s saccharine sisters, they were wrinkly old priests. All the clergy were a good deal older than him, and apparently always had been.

  When Stanley first encountered the diocese, a few years ago now, their field operations had dwindled and died, leaving them to scribble and scurry around their hermitage.

  The information they gathered was very valuable for Stanley’s work, so any rift between them would be problematic. But for the clergy, his ability to survive through a few good doses of blunt force trauma was of incomparable value to their mission. He was a necessary asset to them. He only knew of one other freelancer actively working for the clergy, Jalissa, but she stuck to a diocese in the West coast as far as he knew.

  It was hard to imagine them turning a cold shoulder on half of their workforce, even if said half sometimes treated his monster hunting as a job and not as some sort of crusade, or trial, or holy mission. If he was being honest with himself, he had to stop himself from having too much fun with this gig. The careers counselor at school used to admonish his love of comics, but they ended up being closer to accurate than any trade school pamphlet he’d ever been given.

  Stanley took a deep breath, trying to bring his focus back to the road. He wouldn’t be having any fun this evening. His knuckles rose up from clutching hands; eight cats raising their hackles in fear at the night in front of him.

  If the clergy weren’t being curt with him when they wrote this missive, then they were being ominous on purpose. Because they were worried. They were scared.

  Proceed with the utmost caution.

  The kind of work he did meant that he was no stranger to danger, even sometimes a potentially lethal amount.

  But apparently, whatever he was now heading towards was more frightening than any of the dangers he had faced before in the eyes of his benefactors.

  Stanley typically respected the clergy’s need for secrecy. For obvious reasons, the priests couldn’t let the general public know the finer details of their work. Without the ability to see the targets of their particular ministrations, the average onlooker would see the clergy as a cult of batty seniors in not-so-fancy dress. Deeper than that, when the first diocese was founded, they were more of a protection business than anything else.

  Their oldest relics came from the time of the crusades. Unassuming mantles and wood-plank shields used to guard pagans and Jews from spilled-over holy violence. Almost a full century of development of the most magical sheets and cloaks under which the clergy protected the secrets of their wards. Stanley liked to browse the dusty shelves of relics when he visited. It was like a trip to a museum.

  Stanley sucked his teeth, tasted salt from the line of sweat settling over his top lip. The night was warm, and the van was a little old for air conditioning. He had to wipe his hands on his coverall legs to stop them sliding on the wheel.

  He checked the clock. He should arrive in thirty minutes. The night still stretched before him, unswayed by his mental anguish.

  Truly, Stanley understood the need for secrecy. Most of the time. Usually. But at this moment, trundling through the dark Southern countryside, their omission of details only fed Stanley’s worst imaginings.

  Inhaling slowly, he fought to tamp down the lump of bile rising in his throat. As he exhaled, he pulled a cassette at random from the center console and slid it into the tape deck.

  The deck whirred and he continued to breathe, timing himself by the strips of road paint vanishing beneath the windshield. His breath training was only good for pausing a panic exactly where it was. The moment he got distracted or switched back to automatic breathing, he’d be off to the races again. Music was a more lasting antidote. It let him experience time in a way separated from impending doom, real or imagined.

  If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

  When the first sounds of Raising Hell ground their way out through the van’s speakers, Stanley could breathe a little easier. His hands, though shaky, drummed loosely along to the beat over the steering wheel. Run-D.M.C. would make 30 minutes survivable. Whatever came after that, he would deal with it.

  A gurgle rippled up his body from his stomach.

  Shoot. He should have eaten.

  As soon as Gerard had left the drive, Petal was in Husk’s bunk, her knees tucked up to her chin, her eyeholes glittering with anticipation.

  Husk couldn’t stop himself from flinching a little when she appeared. She moved so quickly in the dark, even in her costume.

  “Go on then,” even aware no one was home, Petal still whispered, “Tell me everything.”

  Husk sat up in his bunk, his penguin pajamas rustling against the sheets as he did.

  “Alright, then. But no interrupting!” And he told her everything.

  Birdie had been shot. Luckily, she had barely felt it, but it had still come as quite a shock, for her and Husk both.

  Birdie was a Carolina wren, one of a family of six who had moved South from her parents’ nest in North Carolina. They tended to dense, wooded areas, but Birdie could not deny her love of the wide-open air.

  There was no substitute, no amount of safety’s reassuring whisper in her breast, that could outweigh the joy of submerging herself in sky.

  Her wings would pump and flex, her feathers ticking with every minute change in the wind, her bones ringing from within at the lightness of atmosphere, until she burst through a cloud or reached her own limits. Then Birdie would surrender to the void below, spinning and careening in freefall, her heart singing loud in her chest.

  She never saw what hit her. There had been no sound, no evidence of an attack. One moment she was flying, the next she was dead; in a freefall that felt like sinking. Birdie had no way to know whose back garden she’d fallen into, only that her sick, sinking-falling feeling ended abruptly in a forgiving collapse of grass, and that was where she’d stayed for some time before Husk found her.

  When Husk came back to his own body, he did not move right away. He did not want to look at Birdie’s body, he didn’t want to be back in the greenhouse. He felt so sad.

  He always felt sad after watching the last memories of his new friends. In the transition between life and death, he felt the fear that wracked their minds. Fear of everything ending, fear of something worse. Birdie was afraid to never fly again.

  Husk didn’t know how to, but he wanted to let them know it would be alright. Everyone was fine afterwards. They all seemed to have experienced bits of their post-mortem journey, to some extent.

  But then again, Husk had no way of knowing whether his new friends saw the moments between their deaths and his arrival, or if that was something he was doing.

  Husk didn’t know what he was doing.

  Something clicked against the ground ahead of him, bringing him back to the greenhouse. He kept his eyes closed. It usually happened like this, afterwards. Experiencing the world through the senses of a small animal, then experiencing that animal’s subsequent death, only to then be promptly booted back into his own, barely sensate skin left Husk dazed. He liked to take a moment to check in with the different parts of his body.

  The flying didn’t help. He had never felt anything like that before.

  But there was another reason he hadn’t looked up yet. Even once he had come back into his own body, Husk only opened his eyes to look down at his feet.

  Husk was nervous.

  This magic felt weird. Not bad, necessarily. But definitely not what he thought necromancy would feel like. He didn’t think it was meant to make him so sad all the time.

  Birdie was the first full body Husk had found, ever. If he looked up and she was only standing at attention like his other, partial progeny. Husk might quit being a wizard forever.

  After what felt like a week, Husk slowly lifted his eyes. There, still in the center of his refuse ritual circle, Birdie stood tall and proud, looking straight at her father.

  Husk waited. Birdie did not move. Husk replicated one of Gerard’s favorite Normal gestures, bringing his chest up and dropping it again with an exhalation; an undead approximation of the sigh. Maybe Husk could get a Normal job that didn’t require anyone to see him. The first Nasty night janitor.

  He stepped closer to Birdie, and she hopped away from him, clear outside the bounds of the ritual circle.

  Husk gasped involuntarily, making the sound and all. Birdie’s head cocked to one side.

  They passed another half minute like this: Birdies dun, lifeless eyes fixed on Husk at a slanted angle, Husk with a hand over his chest and one foot thrown awkwardly behind him from where he had flung his body back.

  “You didn’t!” Petal had gasped as well, still stage-whispering.

  Husk flapped his hands in her face, whispering harshly back, “Shut up! I did, so. I said no interruptions!”

  Petal smacked down his flailing hands like swatting flies. Once the back of his hands were pink and stinging, Petal settled back down and gestured for him to continue.

  Husk relaxed first. His leg muscles gave out before his will. After regaining his footing, he approached Birdie warily. Birdie cocked her head again and Husk just resisted flinching. He stopped approaching.

  “Hello, Birdie,” Husk thought maybe even if she didn’t understand speech, she might just understand him, because of magic. “My name is Husk. I’m your Dad. Sort of.” He slowly held a hand out to her, extending his index finger. “You can come up here, if you like.”

  Birdie skipped back and forth, her little feet making the same clicking sound on the floor of the greenhouse. She did not seem keen.

  “It’s okay, we can wait.”

  Two half-dead creatures stared at one another for several minutes. Husk thought she had gone back to sleep.

  Then, as if nothing had been stopping her, the wings flickered once and she was airborne, her small clutching hands landing weightless on Husk’s outstretched finger.

  Husk was careful not to yelp with joy. There was something like a pulse passing through her feet into his finger. He felt a connection spark to life at her contact.

  “Thank you very much,” he said. He bit down on a wobble in his throat that felt like a sob. He reached out his other hand as slowly as he could towards her. When she did not shy away, he used his first two fingers to smooth the feathers at the back of her head.

  He knew what it was like after she had died. The feeling of his fingertips touching her would maybe have registered, but with a dullness over it.

  But nonetheless, Birdie leaned her head back, pushing back against him. Husk thought it must be different now, after having been brought back. She pushed against his hand and made a trilling kind of click with her beak and whatever was left of her vocal chords.

  Husk thought he might cry, if he could.

  Instead, he stood in the greenhouse giving his new friend pets and scratches for the better part of a half hour. He found it very soothing, and even when he pulled back, most of the time Birdie would lean over or hop along the length of his finger to get back to where his hand was.

  Eventually, Husk had to break himself away from this new delight. Being raised outside of Normal society was not something he had ever regretted, but there were some things he was jealous of.

  Television, live music. He wanted to see what all the fuss was about church. And he was jealous of Normals who got to keep animal friends.

  From the window in their room, Husk had seen neighborhood Normals jogging with dogs that ran alongside them without any leash. He had seen stray cats following packs of Normal kids, to the manic delight of the pack.

  But Birdie was better than any of those Normal animals. She was dead, just like Husk. And she could fly, which was really cool. His throat pinched with emotion again.

  Husk physically shook himself, causing Birdie to leap away onto the desk. He held up an apologetic hand to her. Now was simply not the time for mushy feelings.

  Now was the time for experiments.

  “And then we did some experiments.” This Husk said with dialectical flourish, and a wiggle of his fingers. Petal had been hanging on his every word, and now clapped her hands and bounced up and down on the bed. She thought her brother was ever so clever.

  “What experiments did you do?”

  “Erm, all your basics. Flying experiment, following experiment, words experiment. Basically, she’s your average bird, just a dead-er. Can’t talk, but I think she sort of understands me.”

  “That’s amazing, Husk,” Petal said.

  “We’ve only gotten one trick down so far, but she’s very good at it. She plays dead like it’s nothing,” said Husk. “I had to pause the experiment early because Gerard came home. But I’m sure she’s alright in there. Zombies don’t need to eat, right?”

  “You’re really becoming a necromancer.” Petal’s voice sounded different.

  Husk was quiet.

  “What? It’s good. I think you’re amazing for picking it up so quickly, Husk,” Petal said. He could hear it, though. The understanding hurt him at first, but he knew that the film of tension that had stretched across the dark between them, if broken, could solidify the dregs of jealousy floating in his sister’s voice into real, icy resentment.

  Neither of them had human faces. There were no cheeks or chins, no twisting lips or pinching brows. Emotion was not something either of them expressed in the usual way.

  They had only had the other to model behavior with–besides Gerard, who was rarely ever visibly emotional. The twins had practiced making voices to go along with the emotions described in the books they were taught from.

  Husk knew every different inflection in his sister’s voice. He knew how she sounded when she was doing an emotion on purpose, and when she was actually feeling something. He knew that he and Petal tried to hide their real feelings; tried to sound calm when scared, or acting nice when they felt naughty. That was why he knew that the crystal-calm of Petal’s voice, warm and friendly, was trying to cover up the pain she was feeling inside.

  Husk reached out to her, placing his hand on hers. They sat there in the dark for a long, silent time. Husk passed his thumb slowly back and forth over the worn leather of her outer skin.

  “I didn’t try to do it,” Husk’s voice had shrunk in the dark. “It just happened.”

  Petal remained silent.

  “Besides, I still don’t think it’s the same as what Gerard talks about all the time. I couldn’t tell her what to do or anything. She was just a bird. Didn’t even feel like I had done it, I didn’t really do anything.”

  After another short silence, Petal’s voice bubbled back up, “What did it feel like?”

  Husk had to think. He had felt like it happened around him, without him, at the time. But now that he thought of it, he realized that wasn’t exactly true.

  “It was like…I was doing her a favor. Like, she needed someone to hold something for her. They all felt like that, like watching their stories, seeing what happened to them, was enough. And then, because I did that, we got to hang out. It didn’t hurt or nothing. I got a bit tired after, but…” Husk trailed off.

  The tension had deflated a little. Husk could feel Petal’s curiosity overpowering her bad feeling. Husk wished he knew how to console her properly. “All I mean is it will happen to you, too. I wound up finding out on accident, and it all feels wrong. I think you’ve just got to wait.”

  Petal was quiet again. Husk was worried he’d tipped the conversation in the wrong way by talking too much.

  “Petal?” he said. Her drawn face didn’t move in the dark, but Husk thought he could see her shoulders shifting. Finally, she let out a sound. A whiny, keening gurgle was seeping out of her like a balloon leaking air. Petal was having herself a cry.

  “Oh, Petal!” Husk wasn’t whispering anymore, “What’s wrong?”

  “That means all the animals in, in… outside are all stuck there waiting, with no one to listeeeeeeen!” Petal threw her small body into her brothers, burying her face in his shoulder. Husk had to resist a giggle. For how scary she could be, Petal was really a sweetie.

  Husk stroked her back and held her while she cried. Unlike the twins’ affected expressions, there was no confusing one of their emotional breakdowns. When the twins really let go, it was a proper to-do. Without tear ducts, they leaned heavily on sound for that kind of catharsis. When Petal cried, it sounded like the wail of the banshee and the screech of colliding metal and the squeal of an animal who has realized it is headed to the block. It reminded Husk of Gerard’s Whale Sounds CD. He hummed back to her in sympathetic reply.

  They sat there for a while, crying and humming and wailing and shushing. Finally, Petal’s cries petered out, and they sat in the dark silence together, comfortable.

  “Promise,” Petal said in her normal voice, “that you’ll listen to as many of them as you can. Don’t…don’t overdo it. But I can’t bear the idea of all those pretty birds lying around waiting, just because Normals decided they don’t need funerals, or whatever.” Husk laughed.

  “I promise.” He had never been given a quest before, and Petal had trouble asking someone to pass the salt. “I want to make as many new friends as I can. Maybe tomorrow I can introduce you to Birdie!”

  “Please!” Petal said. She paused. “What about Gerard?”

  Husk’s excitement evaporated. But he had prepared for this. He faked a big breath, trying to steel himself.

  “I know. I’ll tell him tomorrow.”