“She saw that crazy gun guy?” he asked.
“Brent, she didn’t come home and there’s something you should know about her to understand why I’m concerned.”
“Oh man, Chloe, are you going to tell me she’s a badger or something?” He laughed at his own horrible joke.
“No, she’s a deer, and someone was shooting in the woods.”
His eyes widened and he realized what she was saying, grabbing her hand. “Let’s go.”
“I’m coming too.” Aunt Z was right behind them and she put a hand on Brent’s arm.
“Z, I thought you were staying out of my hair,” Brent said as he pulled Chloe to the door. Her legs would barely work. She was terrified something bad had happened to Layla.
“She can come, Brent, we have to go.” They all piled into Brent’s truck and took off toward the woods on the other side of town. Chloe hoped she was wrong, that Layla was just on drugs and lost track of time. She would deal with being angry with her when she found her safe.
The gentleman looked down at the body of the woman who lay at his feet. The bird had changed and dodged the bullets easily the day before, but the deer hadn’t been so lucky. She was beautiful, with long blonde hair spread out on the ground. She’d recently dyed the tips purple and her eyeliner and lipstick were both dark. The bullet had gone straight through her heart. He was an excellent shot. She’d gone for a morning run through the woods in the same place her best friend had escaped him the afternoon before. It was an unfortunate accident. The fog rolling in through the trees was a part of his plan to buy some time so he could get far away from the scene of the crime. He’d come back after she’d been lying there for around five hours so rigor had set in. At least he’d smartly put her the way he wanted before he ran out of the woods.
She’d seen him, so she had to die. It was that simple. It still felt a little wrong leaving her there. He’d arranged the body carefully so it looked ladylike and proper. She would have called her mother if she was going to be late, he thought. They would be looking for her soon.
As if hearing his thoughts, he heard the nuthatch’s high pitched voice as she spoke to the boy. They would come back where they had so narrowly escaped the day before?
Pulling the magic within him around his body, he pushed it out to mirror the forest. He moved away quickly, running so they wouldn’t see him. The reflection he created could be moved through, but it was an illusion. It would take the search party longer to find the body and he would be long gone. He laughed at himself and his clever magical ways.
&n
bsp; He mourned having to kill. Mourned was the wrong word because he reveled in the sorrow of others. He truly enjoyed watching the shifters suffer when he took one of them away from the world. It wasn’t his ultimate goal, however. His ultimate goal was to see the world turn on them and get rid of them for him. Exposure and humiliation would be so much sweeter. He’d discovered quite by accident that the shifters were motivated into changing quickly by fear. Some, like the sweet little nuthatch, couldn’t control it when they were frightened, which gave him the perfect way to expose them.
“Perhaps I’m a bit bipolar,” he said to a tree as he passed by it. “You try having insane parents.” The tree unsurprisingly didn’t respond, but he felt its judgment.
It wasn’t something he wanted to do. It was something he had to do. The cause he lived for was bigger than his regrets, bigger than his momentary hesitation before he killed someone. Fear drove the creatures from their bodies, and sometimes he went too far or made a miscalculation that resulted in one dying. This was the first who would be noticed. She had a family and friends. She would have people missing her and there was no turning back now. He put more distance between him and the body, careful not to move inside his own illusion and get turned around.
Ducking in between trees and around logs, he sensed them nearby. It’s the bird, the little bird and the boy she exposed herself to, he thought. It would be fun to stick around and see her find her friend. Fun and heart-wrenching. Laughing loudly, he had to clamp a gloved hand across his mouth before they heard him. He knew it would be a while before they could find her because of the obstacles, but now he truly wanted to see what was going on.
It was time to get a bird’s eye view. He grinned while he was looking around for a big stick. He swung it at a passing bee and missed, cursing. Well, he was a wizard, not a baseball player. Taking the stick, he drew a pentagram on the ground and stood in between two points. With the tip he drew a line in the dirt and put a slight v toward the end of the line and a line from the top of it that represented the beak of the crow. All it would take to summon his black feathered friend was a spell spoken and he could see the bird and her friend stumbling around, looking for the doe.
“Heed me, the Guardians of the Watchtowers of the East, powers of air and invention. I compel thee to obey. Grant my eyes the power of the crows, through the strength of sacrificed blood, through the wind and air’s might, the darkness from which my magic grows!”
The crow flew to him, settling on his shoulder. “Go and see what you can see, be my eyes while you fly.”
His familiar was a bit clumsy and sometimes disobedient. He eagerly watched as it flew into the air to go and look for the girl and her friend, but was distracted by a quarter and landed on the ground. It hopped toward it, tilting its head. "No, you dumb crow!" he yelled to the vision in his head. "Watch the people."
Although he could feel its resistance, it left the shiny quarter and took off again to fly over the nuthatch and her human companion. They stumbled into view and seemed to be lost. His mirror was working. Although they were right next to one another, they couldn’t see each other. The woods reflected more woods and although they could have touched, they couldn’t see.
“Man, I love magic,” he said out loud and threw a fist in the air. He watched as the girl turned in circles and finally sat down. He was surprised she’d given up so easily, but it had been about an hour now that the crow had watched them. The human stepped close to her a couple of times, but they’d never made contact. He tripped over her outstretched legs and fell on his face in front of her and the spell was broken. In the beginning he’d cast the spell so he could run away before the two of them saw him. Now it had just been for his amusement, watching them look silly as they tried to find one another, and the woods had doubled in size so they couldn’t figure out where to go. Now that the mirror was gone, his fun would be seeing the girl’s face when she found her best friend lying there.
The crow picked up a third person wandering in the woods, and his chest tightened. It was Zazie, that crazy old bitch. What the hell was she doing out in the woods? He realized she knew the boy when he heard her calling him. “Brent boy, this isn’t funny.” She stumbled over a rock and the forest shimmered in front of her. “What fresh hell is this?
“We’re over here, Aunt Z,” Brent said.
“What an interesting development,” the gentleman spoke to a squirrel that had hopped up beside him. “The boy has magic blood and doesn’t know it.” Zazie would tell him, she was always big on sharing the fact that she was magic when he was younger. His mother had used her as an example on how you shouldn’t act when you had the magic gift. He missed his mother. She would have loved to see Zazie worn down from years in the crazy house.
He briefly wondered if the squirrel he was talking to was a shifter. It was amazing how they could be anywhere at any time. He was beginning to realize that he didn’t want to just expose shifters to the world, he wanted to do what they did. Humans would study them. Humans were always studying shit.
“Brent,” the nuthatch screeched. “She’s here!” Chloe sounded completely gutted. Show time!
Chloe stared into the eyes of her lifeless best friend. It looked like she’d been shot in human form judging by the bullet hole in the shirt she was wearing. It had gone through the white shirt and blood spread all over her chest, running down the sides. It was too surreal. When she’d found her she thought she was just passed out from drugs and shook her until she realized her eyes were open.
“Something’s not right,” Zazie said as she walked around the body. “There’s magic here, in the woods around the girl.”