Christina Henry: Black Wings

“You,” I said, addressing the thing before me. I had the slightly hysterical thought that our conversation thus far had been less than scintillating. “I remember you.”

It paused. I still couldn’t see the features of its face, but I sensed that it smiled. Sweat pooled at the base of my spine.

“Do you, now?”

“Yes,” I said. “You killed my mother.”

A chuckle. “And a very tasty morsel she was, too.”

The sly remark filled me with rage. That was my mother it was talking about. My mother, whom I’d loved more than anyone, had been nothing but a bar snack to this . . . thing.

I felt the familiar burn of magic in my chest, filling up my throat, pulsing on my tongue. But I couldn’t control it; I didn’t know what to do with it. I’d never called magic for anything but soul release, and I wasn’t sure how I was calling it now. I gasped for air and flung my hands in front of me.

A ball of blue fire hovered above my palms for a split second, then flew where the monster’s chest should have been. I still couldn’t see much more than a huge black mass. The ball exploded and the monster howled its rage. The combined force of exploding magic and angry monster breath flung me backward through the air. I smashed into the stop sign at the corner and crashed to the ground. The last thing I remembered was knocking my forehead against concrete.

I don’t know how long I lay there before I realized that Beezle was tapping my cheek with one little finger, his anxious face very close to my nose. It made me cross-eyed to look at him.

“Maddy?” His voice was low and urgent.

“Ugh,” I said.

“Are you okay?”

I took a moment to assess things. My ears rang, my vision blurred and every part of my body ached. It felt like I’d been hit by a train, or possibly an airplane.

“I hurt all over,” I whimpered, and then I turned my head to the side so I could vomit.

Beezle tactfully flew a few feet away until I was finished being sick. “Can you stand up?” he asked.

“Working on it,” I said, and laid my cheek against the cold sidewalk.

I must have passed out again. I had a vague sense of being lifted very gently. I heard Beezle and another voice fading in and out, although I couldn’t understand what they were saying. I wondered who was talking to Beezle. Most people thought he was just a statue, or maybe a stuffed doll. It sounded like they were arguing. The arms that held me gripped me a little tighter. I felt safe and warm, so I let go into the darkness again.

I went further, falling, falling, falling through darkness, back to the beginning. And there was a girl, and her name was Evangeline, and I saw her, and I was also a part of her.

At first Evangeline thought he was something she dreamed. He came to her as she lay under the half-moon in the cool of the midsummer evening. Her mother snored away in the hut and Evangeline, unable to sleep, had felt the stars calling her and gone out to listen to them.

The warmth of the earth cradled her, and the grass stroked her long black braids with loving hands, and the stars told her their secrets in whispers. Her fingers pressed into the earth and she closed her eyes and opened herself to everything.

Then she heard the great leathery flapping of mighty wings. Evangeline opened her eyes to find the dark angel blocking out the sky, and all she could see was his awful beauty, haloed in starshine and moonlight, and his black, burning eyes. He whispered her name, and his voice wound into her ear and down her throat and under her ribs, and she knew what he had come for. She opened her arms to him, and his smile dazzled like the Morningstar and he enfolded her in his great black wings.

Evangeline woke the next morning to the sound of her mother’s voice. She was on her own pallet, her hair still braided and not undone by a lover’s hands, her shift clean and unstained by the grass and the earth. She sat up as her mother told her to get a move on, there were chores to do, and she wasn’t a princess who could laze around all day. So she rose, and felt herself all over as she washed her arms and legs with a washcloth from the bucket. Her body did not feel different, and she thought he must have been a dream, and her chest ached a little at that. But she put on her day dress and walked out barefoot to fetch some wood so her mother could bake bread.

Evangeline’s mother had sharp eyes and a sharper tongue and she saw her daughter moving soft-legged and dreamy-eyed, and thought that it was time to go to the bone-counter and have a match made. She knew that when girls got that look you had to take them in hand and tie them to a husband before they got ideas about flowers and handholding, ideas that had them skinning off their shifts with the first sneaky-eyed and sneaky-handed boy that came along.

Evangeline walked behind the hut toward the river to collect the branches that fell from the trees hunched over the bank. As she passed the place where she had dreamed of the dark angel coming to her in the night, she saw that the grass was tamped down, as if someone had lain upon it. Her heart quickened, and she knelt in the grass and ran her fingers across it. As she did she remembered a Morningstar smile, and she saw three drops of blood on three blades of grass. She pressed her hand to her belly, listened, and heard the fluttering of tiny wings deep inside. Evangeline smiled, and stood, and went to the river to collect wood.

All day she smiled a faraway smile, and her sharp-tongued mother said sharp things to her more than once so that Evangeline would pay attention to her chores. Evangeline would start and remember that she was kneading bread, or stitching a blanket, but after a while she would forget again, and smile her faraway smile, and her mother would have to use her tongue as a lash.

And all the while that Evangeline remembered her lover, her mother watched her and thought again that she needed to get to the bone-counter sooner rather than later. So after supper was finished, she told Evangeline to wash the stewpot; she was going to the bone-counter. Evangeline hummed a little noise, and her hand moved forgetfully inside the stewpot, and her mother went to the bone-counter with fear in her heart that her daughter may have been lost to her already.

The bone-counter was a thin brown man with thin white braids and a long thin nose. He sat in front of his hut all day rolling the bones and reading them for the villagers. He knew all of the signs and portents, and whether that year’s crop would be good or bad, or if a woman would birth a boy or a girl, or if the wind might shift and bring the sickness from the Forbidden Lands, as it sometimes did, though not very often anymore.

He also knew all of the old stories, how a long time ago there had been great, shining cities of stone and metal, and there had been noise and people crammed together, and all of these people were connected by roads. Then one day the Great Powers had grown angry and destroyed all of the cities. There had been a great burst of flame, and a white cloud of ash in the air, and then another, and another. And afterward many people got sick and many people died for many years to come. Evangeline’s mother had seen some of these roads once, when she was young and her family had moved from one village to another. They were cracked and filled with grass and trees, and they had felt strange beneath her feet.

Evangeline’s mother went straight to the bone-counter’s hut, and did not stop to visit with the other women of the village that she passed, but the women wondered at the look on her face, and began muttering among themselves about the cause. One word passed their lips again and again—“Evangeline.” For all of these women were mothers, and knew that mothers looked that way only when their daughters had made them heartsick.