Erin Bowman - Stolen

“Some things can’t be controlled. Like the Snatching.”

Bree let out a shaky exhale. “I got you into this mess, and I’m going to get you out of it. That’s a promise.”

“I never blamed you, you know.” He angled his head toward her. “Not even the littlest bit.”

“I promise,” Bree said again. “I promise I’ll fix everything.”

SPARROW WAS THERE WHEN BREE ducked off to hunt the next morning. The healer stood beside Heath’s mattress, Chelsea’s hands scooped up in hers. She patted them reassuringly. A condolence. An I’m sorry for your loss . Like it was already done. And maybe it was. The bandages had been soaked through with pus and blood, a wet rag. Flies buzzed around Heath like he was food. Lock would be gone at midnight the following evening, and it was looking more and more likely that Heath would beat him to an exit.

Everyone has to die eventually.

Bree tightened her grip on her slingshot and hiked faster. She would not lose them both in the same breath—Lock and Heath. She would not.

Before reaching the lake, she slowed to a crawl. The wind rustled the leaves. Hair stood on Bree’s arms. Despite the already sweltering heat, a coolness spread over her limbs. The bird was here. She was sure of it. Bree slid a stone into the slingshot and took her next steps carefully. Over a fallen log. Choosing moss-covered rock instead of dry grass. Silent, invisible.

At the foot of her tree, she peered around the trunk.

And there, in the shallows, no more than a stone’s throw away, was her heron. Her beautiful, flawless, breathtaking heron. He stood on his spindly legs like a graceful sentry, neck extended, wings tucked in at his sides. His bill twitched, then drove into the water, pulling out a small frog.

Slowly—painfully cautious—Bree moved into the tall reeds beneath the tree.

Her fingers itched to loosen the stone. Her heart hammered.

She stood only when the heron turned to focus on another portion of the shallows. She took aim as the breeze blew, so the whisper of her clothes and the stretch of her slingshot would be covered by the rustling reeds.

The bird spread his wings to take flight, and Bree let her stone free.

She did not strike the head as she’d hoped, but the body. The bird screeched, flapping a now broken and useless wing. Bree tore through the shallows, grabbed the bird by the neck, and twisted her hands. Its beady eyes went dull.

Bree scrambled from the water and set the bird on the bank. It was larger in death than it ever seemed while hunting or flying. White feathers blanketed its belly and wrung neck, but across the back and wings the plumage darkened like the sea before a storm—salty, gray, regal. An even darker gray—nearly midnight black—ringed the creature’s eyes, drawing back toward the crown of its skull like war paint.

Bree wrung out her wet pants and slung the bird over her shoulder. Its neck flopped, its legs dangled. It looked so ridiculous now. So pathetic.

Bree hiked to town at breakneck speed, shocked at how little the dead bird weighed. Alive, it had stood well past her navel, with a wingspan wider than she was tall, but in her hands it felt no heavier than the two rabbits she’d pulled from her snares yesterday.

Hope is heavy, Bree thought, but this bird weighs nothing.

Long before she reached Mia’s, she feared it wouldn’t make a difference, and yet she refused to slow.

Mad Mia tore into the heron like a starved savage. She hacked off its bill and ground it beneath a stone, sprinkling the dust into a shallow bowl. She plucked feathers like flowers, then slit the bird’s chest open, letting the blood spill. It overran the dish, flooding the table with red.

Bree watched from the doorway, motionless.

Mad Mia moved like she was dancing, which she may have been, given the constant hum at her lips. An upbeat, staccato chant. She added to the mixture. The roots of some plant on her sill. The crushed residue of seaweed. The pollen of the island’s wildflowers. When the heat of the hut was finally getting to Bree, the woman stood and shoved the bowl into her hands. A small portion of the liquid sloshed onto the front of Bree’s shirt, staining it deep auburn.

“The whole thing,” Mad Mia said. “He drinks every last drop or it will do no good.”

Bree nodded.

“By tomorrow, the fever should break.”

“And if it doesn’t?”

“Do I look like a seer of the future, girl? A gifted eye?” She batted a hand at Bree’s frown. “If it doesn’t work, I’ve done all I can. As Lock became lucky, Heath will be hopeless. I seem to wield complete successes or utter failures, nothing in between.”

You’re a complete failure in nearly everything , Bree thought. Rain dances and moonlit chants. Burnt fish and bone decor. But she just nodded at the woman and said, “I’ll be back for the bird. It belongs to the island now, to the dinner table.”

Mad Mia adjusted one of her mobiles, side-eying Bree. “That scrawny thing would barely feed a toddler. Little to no meat on the bones.”

“I’ll be back for it,” Bree growled. “Don’t move the carcass.”

With that, she stepped from the hut and into the blazing afternoon.

“It worked for Lock,” Bree insisted. Chelsea and Sparrow wrinkled their noses at the bowl now sitting on Heath’s bedside table. “‘Lucky Lock,’” Bree continued. “All because of Mia.”

“She also poisoned Bay’s son to death two years back,” Sparrow said.

“He was approaching an end anyway,” Bree said, remembering the fever the young man had come down with. “Just weeks from eighteen. Maybe she put him out of his misery.”

“And maybe she’s trying to do the same with Heath.”

Bree turned to Chelsea. “Please. You’ve seen his leg, the infection. It’s going to claim him, Chelsea. If this doesn’t work, he’s sailing for the same horizon either way.”

Chelsea worried the inside of her lip.

“I can’t condone a treatment from Mad Mia,” the healer said. “You know I can’t.”

“Sparrow,” Chelsea said. That was it. Just her name. Her name like a crack of lightning.

The healer fell silent, backed away. “He’s your son to lose. I can’t make this call.”

Even after she left, the house still seemed crowded, cramped. Chelsea’s gaze was locked on Heath, and when it finally drifted from the unsteady rise and fall of his chest, it fell on the bowl of heron blood.

“Go on and wake him. If he can stomach it, make sure he stomachs it all.”

She drifted to her weaving, as though busying her hands would cause the rest of her worries to melt. Bree didn’t understand this sort of detachment, the way some people gave up a fight long before it was over. Her mother did so after losing her father. Now Chelsea was doing it with Heath. As though the people left meant nothing. As though losing one meaningful thing meant there was nothing else worth living for.

Bree sat on the edge of Heath’s bed and put a palm to his brow. He was sticky. “Heath?” He stirred, shivered. “Heath, I brought you medicine.”

His eyelids fluttered open. The pain registered on his face almost immediately.

“Try to sit up. You have to drink it all.”

She helped him upright in the bed, the boy coughing and heaving all the while. He was paler than Bree had ever seen him, and he looked almost half his ten years. She placed the bowl in his hands and, with hers cupping them, helped lift it to his lips.

“Drink?”

He sipped cautiously, and instantly gagged.

“It’s bad, I know. But you have to keep drinking.”

Heath muttered and whimpered and some of the rust-red liquid ran down his neck as Bree urged him on. It felt like an entire afternoon had passed by the time the bowl was drained.