Alex Bledsoe - The Hum and the Shiver

A screech owl stood on the porch rail, its tiny talons scratching against the wood. The dawn light made the tufts of its wind-ruffled feathers look jagged and bloody. The bird had a voice far out of proportion to its size, and was intimately acquainted with the night winds that guided the Tufa destiny. It was also, when seen during the day, an omen of death.

So when Chloe Hyatt, a pureblood Tufa, saw it through the little window over the kitchen sink, she froze.

Water from the faucet ran heedlessly down the drain. She began to hum a secret tune for both calm and protection. The day’s events were going to be difficult enough without adding this to it.

The owl’s head turned almost 180 degrees to stare at her. The movement was so sudden, she jumped. For a moment the bird held her gaze; then it flew off into the trees.

She followed its flight and caught the haint’s outline as it faded into the dawn. As it had done for the last week, the apparition remained silent and watchful all night. When it first appeared, they’d all approached it, but it ignored entreaties from Chloe; her husband, Deacon; and their younger son, Aiden. Kell, her older son, would have sensed it and come home from Knoxville had it been meant for him. That left only one Hyatt ordained to receive its message: her wayward middle child and only daughter.

But though the haint wanted someone else, Chloe knew the owl was intended just for her. It wasn’t the first death omen the night winds had recently blown her way.

The sun crested the side of the mountain, turning the ominous red dawn to gold. Midges and pollen hung sparkling in the air. Everything brought by the night wind vanished.

Deacon came up behind her and kissed her on the shoulder. He smelled of aftershave and that generic dandruff shampoo he liked. “Morning,” he said quietly, not wanting to wake Aiden. The boy had been so excited about his big sister’s impending return that he hadn’t fallen asleep until midnight, after both Chloe and Deacon sang him their usually foolproof lullabies. Even Tufa children, it seemed, could hear the hum but resist the shiver.

“You haven’t made the coffee,” Deacon observed.

“Sorry,” Chloe murmured. She put the carafe under the faucet.

Deacon peered out the window. “Was the haint still out there this morning?”

Chloe nodded as she filled the coffeemaker. She did not mention the death owl. Deacon had been upset enough by the unseasonable blooms on her acacias.

“You’d think it’d know she ain’t here yet,” Deacon continued.

Chloe dried her hands, hoping Deacon didn’t notice the trembling. “Just ’cause they’re from the other side don’t mean they’re any smarter than they were before. When it was alive, it might’ve been one of those people who were always early for things.”

He nodded. “True enough. You sure it ain’t for you or me? Maybe we should call in Bliss, see if she can talk to it.”

“It won’t speak to her, you know that. Aiden can’t see it, and Kell would’ve been home from college by now if it was for him, sensitive as he is. That only leaves one of us.”

Deacon nodded. He spoke the name with all the weight it carried: the name of his middle child, the one who caused him more sleepless nights and grief than the other two put together. It was a name the whole world now knew, the name of his only daughter.

“Bronwyn.”

The Black Hawk military helicopter blew wispy fog from the treetops as it circled over Needsville, Tennessee. The rotors’ throb bounced off the Smoky Mountains, echoing as if a herd of gigantic, apocalyptic horsemen were charging over Redford’s Ridge.

The pilot dropped as low as he dared, twenty feet above the power lines, as he approached the town. He recalled his father’s description of a similar approach to an Asian village, only instead of power lines, it had been palm trees, and the villagers had pointed guns and artillery instead of fingers and American flags.

“Your folks are sure glad to see you,” he yelled over his shoulder to the young woman in the passenger seat behind him. She did not respond.

Needsville’s main street—its only street—swarmed with people watching the helicopter as it passed overhead. But Bronwyn Hyatt, a private in the United States Army for at least the next thirty days, knew that the pilot’s observation was wrong; these weren’t “her” people packing the street below. Hell, the entire population of Needsville couldn’t block its own traffic. Most of the crowd consisted of reporters and well-wishing strangers drawn to the circus her return home had become; the vehicles she saw were TV news vans and shiny SUVs, not the rusted-out pickups and old sedans of the natives. As she scanned the crowd, she saw very few heads with the same distinctive straight, jet-black Tufa hair that she wore neatly pulled back and tucked under her uniform’s cap.

Her official minder, public relations liaison Major Dan Maitland, peered out the other window. “Jumping Jesus on a pogo stick, look at all that,” he said. “Where the hell are they all going to stay? Didn’t you say there’s only one hotel in town?”

Bronwyn shifted her weight slightly to take the pressure off her leg. The metal rings and struts of the monstrous Ilizarov apparatus wrapped around her thigh and calf, sending bone-holding screws and pins through her pasty, tortured skin. She would’ve been more comfortable on a stretcher, but she’d been on her back quite enough these last nine weeks. And not, she reflected wryly, in the way her Needsville reputation always implied.

Maitland leaned close and shouted above the engine, “Can you see okay?”

Bronwyn shrugged. The engine’s vibrations jingled the new medals on her chest. “Seen it all before,” she said.

“Yeah, but from the air?”

Again she shrugged. Tufa flight was something she could never explain to someone like him.

Maitland patted her on the shoulder. He was a career officer, frighteningly good at his job, and exuded false sincerity with such skill that dozens of flash-in-the-pan media figures still counted him as a friend when he likely couldn’t remember their names. Luckily Bronwyn had seen right through him at their first meeting and maintained a cool cordiality that ultimately perplexed him. He seemed unable to imagine anyone, male or female, immune to his charm. Watching him hide this confusion was one of the few things that still brought Bronwyn any pleasure.

Maitland said something to the pilot, and the helicopter passed back over the town, banking sharply so Bronwyn could be seen at the window. The harness that held her in the seat dug into her shoulder. When she placed her left palm against the glass to maintain her balance, she saw many of the hands below wave in response. The sun glinted off a thousand camera lenses. None of this was a surprise, but it disheartened her just the same. A hero’s homecoming, and she couldn’t even remember what she’d done to earn it. Or even if she’d done anything at all.

As the helicopter rose to continue on to the small county airport, she caught a glimpse of an old man seated in a rocking chair outside the post office. Rockhouse Hicks did not deign even to acknowledge the circus around him, or her passage overhead. It wasn’t in his nature to admit, even for a moment, that someone else might be more significant than himself. That made her smile; some things in Needsville truly never changed.