But.
“I have to do this alone,” I murmur into her hair. “I’m sorry. But I’ll be back soon and then maybe we can watch the sunrise?”
“Perfect.” She gives me a squeeze and pulls away and then changes her mind and kisses me. She kisses me like it’s the first day of summer. She kisses me like a patch of blue sky breaking through a gray morning. She kisses me like she’s saying yes.
I could kiss her forever.
I would kiss her forever.
But I have to do this alone.
“I love you,” I whisper, and she whispers it back, and then she kisses me again and then she’s gone. The door closes with the softest of clicks and I’m alone outside.
Alone doesn’t feel the same now as it used to feel. Before prom—before Josh—alone felt scary. It felt like maybe if I wasn’t careful, alone would be permanent. But as I walk across Marcelina’s lawn and into the trees, alone feels temporary. It feels like a gift that the morning is sharing with me: a moment with myself and the waking-up forest and the taste of heat already on the air.
I walk without direction. I know that when the time comes to find my way back, I’ll be able to. I can ask a bird or a colony of beetles the way home. And more than that, I can feel it. I can feel the pull of the sleeping magic girls in that house. I can feel Roya waiting to kiss me and fall asleep together. I can feel the path I’m cutting through the forest, the broken leaves and bothered mice.
It doesn’t take long for me to reach the lightning-struck tree. I step around the place where I buried Josh’s head—the earth is still a little rounded there, and I give it a wide berth. I walk around the tree in a circle, looking up at the branches. The long black scar is still there. I wonder if it’ll ever fade. And a lot of the leaves are still brown. But at the very tips of some of the branches, in the graying light of the predawn sky, I can just make out a few buds of bright green. New leaves.
I lay a palm on the trunk and press until the bark hurts the tender parts of my skin. I close my eyes and I try. I know that I’m not Marcelina, and I can’t tell this tree anything or hear anything back from it, but I try to tell it that I’m happy it’s doing better. I hope it knows. I hope it understands.
This is what I needed to see. I needed to see the place where I dug a hole for a boy’s head. I needed to see the tree that his bones fed.
I’m startled by a noise—a whistle of wind, a heavy wingbeat. I look up to see a hawk dropping from the branches of the lightning-struck tree. Her wings don’t flutter, she’s not a fluttering kind of bird, but she’s not diving for prey, either. She lands on a gnarled tree root and cocks her head at me.
She looks so different from the hawks that fell out of the sky the day we failed to bring Josh back to life with our magic. She’s just like them, the same species, probably the same size. But with all that life in her—she looks bigger.
“Hey,” I whisper. She doesn’t respond, because hawks don’t talk, but she watches me with one yellow eye. I can’t make out her markings, but I can see that eye, and I can see that she’s staring right at me. I sink to the ground slowly—not slowly enough, as she still ruffles her wings at me, but slow as I can go. As I sit, the hawk hops down off the tree branch. It’s light enough out that I can just barely make out the spots on her wings. She steps toward me, walking with broad, bold steps. She’s not afraid of me.
I’m afraid of her. More afraid than I thought I would be. Her beak is huge and hooked and dangerous, and her talons sink into the soft soil as she approaches me. She’s a predator. She’s made to destroy soft things.
She’s perfect.
My heart is beating hard and fast, and some part of my brain is screaming at me to run run run from this thing that is born to be danger.
But then, some part of me is born to danger too.
I lift my wrist until it’s parallel to the ground. She looks. Hesitates. Takes another step forward.
And then, with a flutter and a terrifying lurch, she’s on my arm.
She’s heavier than I expected her to be. She smells like meat and feathers and something that I can’t put my finger on but that makes the run run run part of my brain scream. Her talons dig into my skin. I feel blood running down the length of my arm, curling into tight spirals in the air around me. I don’t look away from the hawk, but there’s something feathery about the red rising next to my shoulders.
She studies my face, the one pupil I can see contracting. She shakes her feathers once, squeezes my arm in a heart-clenching grip of her talons.
And then she’s gone, and my arm is burning, and it’s over. I’m alone. I stand up, my legs trembling with fear and relief and fatigue.
I turn back the way I came and head for the house. Roya’s waiting for me, and I’ve got a sunrise to watch with her. I wind my way between the trees, feeling unbearably light, the flesh of my arm knitting itself back together. I trail spirals of crystallized blood that will melt away as the dew evaporates at dawn.
I breathe in the first day of summer.
I
