Ravensong (Green Creek 2)

He was a stranger. I wondered if even he knew who he was anymore.

He looked like a wolf.

“Is it okay?” Kelly asked. “I didn’t—”

“It’s fine,” I said, voice rough. “It’s… fine.”

“My turn. I want the same.”

I blinked. My reflection blinked back. The tattoos seemed a little brighter then. “Are you sure? I could probably take some scissors and—”

“I want the same,” he repeated.

Carter and Joe came back when I was halfway done. Kelly’s nostrils flared, and the raven shifted lightly on my arm even before they opened the door.

We ignored them as they called out for us.

“Keep going,” Kelly said. “All of it.”

“What the fuck,” I heard Carter say faintly from the bathroom doorway.

Joe didn’t speak.

When I finished, I set the clippers on the counter and reached down to brush off Kelly’s shoulders. He stood in front of me until we were eye level. I took him by the chin and turned his head slowly from side to side.

I nodded and took a step back.

He watched himself in the mirror for a long time.

He looked older. I wondered what Thomas would think of the man he’d become. I thought he’d be devastated.

“Do me,” Carter demanded. “I want to look like a badass motherfucker too.”

Goddammit.

Joe was last. We stood in that tiny bathroom, his brothers crowding around me, watching him. He reached up slowly and tugged on his hair before looking at his hands. I wondered if he saw the wolf underneath.

“Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

From then on, every few weeks, we’d do it all over again. And again. And again.

THERE WAS a secret pocket in my duffel bag.

I hadn’t opened it since we left, no matter how intense the urge.

“WHEN DID you know?” Joe asked me in a whisper, his brothers asleep in the back seat, the hum of the tires on pavement the only other sound. We had crossed from Indiana into Michigan an hour before.

“Know what?”

“That Ox was your tether.”

My hands tightened on the steering wheel. “Does it matter?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“He was… a kid. His father wasn’t a good man. I gave him a job because he knew cars, but he wasn’t a good man. He took more than he gave. And he didn’t—Ox and his mom deserved more. Better than him. He hurt her. With words and with his hands.”

A car passed us going in the opposite direction. It was the first one we’d seen in over an hour. Its headlights were bright. I blinked away the afterimage.