Which was the best that Nightshade, Witch of the Deep Fell, could expect if she failed to escape.
Vince stood at the edge of the enclosure and studied the odd bird just as he had been studying her for the better part of the five years following her abrupt and mysterious appearance. Every day, right after he got off work—unless there was a pressing reason to get home to his family—he stopped for a look. He couldn’t have explained why, even if pressed to do so. Woodland Park Zoo was filled with strange and exotic creatures, some of them species so rare that they had never been seen in the wild. The crow with the red eyes was one of these. Whether she was truly a species apart or simply an aberration was something ornithologists and experts in related areas had been trying to determine from the beginning, all without success. It didn’t matter much to Vince. He just found the crow intriguing and liked watching it.
What he didn’t much care for was the way the crow seemed to like watching him, those red eyes so intent and filled with some unreadable emotion. He wished he knew its story, but he never would, of course. Crows couldn’t talk or even think much. They just reacted to the instincts they were born with. They just knew how to survive.
“How did you get here?” Vince asked softly, speaking only to himself, watching the bird watching him.
It had popped up at the local animal shelter, not there one day and there the next, come out of nowhere. He still wondered how that could be possible. The shelter was a closed compound, and birds didn’t just fly in or out. But this one had. Somehow.
The experts had tried to trap it repeatedly after it had been transported to the zoo, hoping to get close enough to study it more carefully. But they should have thought of that before they released it into the aviary. All their efforts had failed. The bird seemed to know their intentions ahead of time and avoided all their clumsy attempts to get their hands on it. They had to content themselves with studying it from afar, which they did until more pressing and fruitful pursuits had turned their heads another way. If the bird had not been a bird, but one of the big cats or lumbering giants of the African veldt, it would have gotten more attention, Vince thought. There would have been more money for research, more public interest, something to drive the effort to learn its origins. Vince knew how things worked at the zoo. The squeaky wheel got the grease.
Vince watched the bird some more, perched way up there in the branches, a Queen over her subjects. So regal. So contemptuous, almost. As if it knew how much better it was than the others.
He shook his head. Birds didn’t think like that. It was stupid to think they did.
He glanced at his watch. Time to be getting home. The wife and kids would be waiting dinner. There was a game on TV tonight that he wanted to see. He stretched, yawned. Tomorrow was another workday.
He was walking away, headed for the parking lot and his car, when something made him glance back. The crow with the red eyes was watching him still, following his movements. Vince shook his head, uneasy. He didn’t like that sort of intense scrutiny, especially not from a bird. There was something creepy about it. Like it was stalking him or something. Like it would hunt him down and kill him if it were set free.
He quit looking at it and walked on, chiding himself for such foolish thinking. It was just a bird, after all. It was only a bird.
UNEXPECTED CONSEQUENCES
Headmistress Harriet Appleton sat straight-backed at her desk, a huge wooden monstrosity that Mistaya could only assume had been chosen for the purpose of making students entering this odious sanctum sanctorum feel uncomfortably small. The desk gleamed gem-like beneath repeated polishings, perhaps administered by girls who had misbehaved or otherwise fallen afoul of the powers that be. Surely there were many such in an institution of this sort, where
“Come in, Misty,” Miss Appleton invited her. “Take a seat.”
Wanting nothing so much as to tell this woman exactly what she could do with her suggestion, she nevertheless closed the door behind her and crossed to the two chairs placed in front of the desk. She took a moment to decide which one she wanted, and then she sat.
Through the window of the headmistress’s office, she could see the campus, the trees bare-leafed with the arrival of December, the ground coated with an early-morning frost and the stone and brick buildings hard-edged and fortress-like as they hunkered down under temperatures well below freezing. New England was not a pleasant place for warm-blooded creatures at this time of year, and the buildings didn’t look any too happy about it, either. Hard to tell with buildings, though.
“Misty,” the headmistress said, drawing her attention anew. She had her hands folded comfortably on the desktop and her gaze leveled firmly on the young girl. “I think we need to have a talk, you and
