Murder of Crows

He collected one copy of every magazine the store stocked, which wasn’t many since the terra indigene didn’t find magazines all that interesting and the human customers didn’t like paying the nonrecycling fee he tacked onto the price. Now, though, he would consider whether magazines would provide a useful reference for Meg. He’d have to talk to her about that.

Should he pick up a notebook at Three Ps so he could write such things down? Why did he need to write them when he could remember them?

Damn humans. He was second-guessing himself, wondering if he’d really passed for human as well as he’d thought all these years.

Wondering why it mattered now.

After he handed out the magazines, most of the Courtyard’s guests took their assignments into A Little Bite, where they could use the tables and get a drink.

Alan wandered over to the shelves of children’s books and selected several before he joined Joe and Jackson at A Little Bite. Vlad went upstairs to deal with paperwork. Henry and Bobbie headed for the Market Square shops to see what might be helpful.

That left Simon alone with Charlie.

Going behind the counter, Simon reached for the stack of orders from the terra indigene settlements. If Heather was going to quit, he needed to get a start on these.

“Whispers from across the water,” Charlie said quietly.

Simon began separating the orders into stacks that would go on the same earth native delivery truck. “Whispers of what?”

“War.”

He looked up, giving Charlie his full attention. “War” was a serious word because war reshaped the world. “You think the humans over there are that foolish?”

“Enough of them are.”

“If it does start over there, do you think war will come here?”

“It will touch us. But not, I hope, with the ferocity that will touch the Cel-Romano part of the world.”

“How did you hear about this?”

Charlie smiled. “The Crowgard live in many parts of the world, not just Thaisia. We share what we know. But the Crows can’t tell if the humans will fight to steal territory from each other, as they sometimes do, or if they are looking to take what is ours.”

“I guess the terra indigene over there will find out soon enough and deal with it,” Simon said, frowning as he read the titles being requested from the settlements supplied by the Lakeside Courtyard. It looked like everyone had finished reading the survive-the-blizzard-and-the-evil-human thrillers and had made the seasonal change to stories about surviving other kinds of storms. The evil humans didn’t vary even that much.

Charlie leaned his forearms on the counter. “Simon. This Controller is your enemy, and the Midwest leaders especially are not averse to helping you with this hunt. But that human might not be the only one making the drugs. He might not be the one responsible for the bad meat.”

“He might not be,” Simon agreed. “So that’s one of the things we’ll ask Meg.”

“Meg?” Ruthie asked while Merri Lee opened up the Lakeside and Northeast Region maps on the sorting table. “May I ask you something?”

“Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do today?” Meg replied, setting aside the Lakeside News. “Ask questions in order to find answers?”

Ruthie raised her notebook. “Why would the terra indigene be angry about us taking notes for this assignment? If they’re worried about security or something, we can leave the notebooks here.”

“And everyone in the Courtyard’s Business Association knows Ruthie and Karl are living together and will be getting married this summer and that Michael and I are dating,” Merri Lee said. “At the very least, Simon and Vlad have to figure the police will be aware that something is going on since Ruthie and I were called in to work on Earthday.”

“So why would they be upset about the notebooks?” Ruthie asked. “Because all four of us saw it. The Others in HGR were seriously ticked off, but they didn’t say anything. I know it made Heather and Theral uneasy.”

Meg closed her eyes and recalled training images of notebooks. Appointment books? No, she was pretty sure Simon and Vlad used that kind of notebook to make the work schedule for the store, and Elliot must use one for his meetings with the mayor and such. Journals? No. The Others wouldn’t be upset about such things. Besides, Ruthie and the other girls wouldn’t have brought a journal to a meeting. So what would matter to the terra indigene?

Girls and boys carrying books, going to school, sitting at desks and writing, taking notes while a teacher pointed to something on the blackboard. Then she considered what she knew about the little school here in the Courtyard, about what puppies like Sam were learning and what the juveniles were learning before going off to schools that would give them the technical training or education that was supposed to match what was available to humans. According to the agreements made with the terra indigene in Thaisia, humans could not be taught anything that wasn’t also available to the Others if they wanted to learn.

But what if there were less blatant ways to discourage the Others from insisting that those agreements were met to the full?

She opened her eyes and looked at her friends. “How old were you when you learned to take notes?”

“How old?” Merri Lee frowned. “Before high school. Certainly before going to the university.”

Ruthie nodded. “Not the first few years of school, but definitely before high school. And I’ve always liked keeping track of a project, making notes for myself when I think of something or listing the things I need to do for the assignment, so I started carrying a notebook around since I learned how to write and spell. It’s my way of thinking aloud. And I keep them for reference.”

More images. Boy in the back of the classroom, books closed, sneering at the teacher. Or looking resentful. Or hiding confusion by looking bored? “And if someone doesn’t take notes during class? What would the teacher think?” Meg asked.

“Not interested in the lesson,” Merri Lee replied. “Figures the student thinks the subject is beneath him. Or her.”

“What if no one ever explained to you about taking notes?” Meg asked softly, thinking of how Simon and the other terra indigene she considered friends treated the notebook she used as something private. Which it was. The notebook was her way to build a life, to bridge the gaps between the images she had absorbed during lessons at the compound and the full experience of living. They were curious about why she needed to write things down, but they’d assumed it was part of her being a blood prophet—until this morning when four humans pulled out notebooks and pens and showed the Others that this writing things down wasn’t exclusive to the cassandra sangue. “What if you didn’t learn about taking notes when you were young, so that when you attended classes in a human school, the teacher thought you didn’t care and were wasting his time? What if you wanted to learn but thought the teacher …”

Fetching the copy of the Lakeside News, Meg opened it to the comics and pointed to one strip.

“That strip has been around for years,” Merri Lee said. “When I was young, I thought it was funny, but it doesn’t seem funny anymore.”

One group of characters in the strip always wore elaborate hats, symbols of authority. But the other group, dressed in business suits, were always pulling tricks on the primitives who “couldn’t understand civilization.”

“The Others never learned about taking notes to help them remember what they heard in classes?” Ruthie said. She pressed her lips in a thin line. “Then the instructors would think they’re taking up space in classrooms because they’re entitled to be there but they don’t really care about learning. So the instructors don’t make an effort to find out why the terra indigene aren’t doing the things that would help them get the most out of the class. And the Others realize they aren’t getting what was promised even if they aren’t sure what’s missing, and they resent the humans they still see as intruders even though we’ve been living on this continent with them for centuries.”

“And they express their resentment by tightening the resources we need for the way we live and the things we make, because why should they give up bits of the world that belong to them in order to make things convenient for us?” Merri Lee added. “We all feel a lack, and resentment keeps building. And when the humans go that one step too far …”

“I picked up an old book at an estate sale,” Ruthie said. “Inside was a folded sheet of paper with a list of cities that don’t exist anymore. I didn’t realize at first that’s what it was. It was just a list of city names and dates. When I looked up the cities … or tried to … that’s when I realized they had been destroyed, reclaimed by the wild country.” She looked sad. “How many of those cities vanished because someone couldn’t be bothered to explain something as simple as taking notes?”

Meg watched Ruthie turn to a clean page in her notebook. “What are you doing?”

“Mr. Wolfgard hired me to teach the Others about human things, and that’s what I’m going to do. And not just how to order from a menu or what utensil to use when in a restaurant or how to make a purchase in a store. Karl thinks we have an opportunity to interact with the Others in ways that might make a difference for all of us, and I think so too. So I’m going to teach the terra indigene in the Courtyard about social skills and what to do when they attend a school that employs human instructors. I’m just going to take a minute to make a note about this.”

Merri Lee nodded. “While you do that, Meg and I will start working with the Lakeside map to figure out how she got here.”

It sounded simple. It wasn’t. Meg hadn’t realized how little of the journey she had absorbed. Or, more to the point, she wasn’t sure what had been real and what had been training images. She had focused on following the images that had guided her escape and somehow managed not to see anything that might have created confusion or doubt—the very things that would have helped them now to follow her journey.

There had been a train. She remembered being too scared to sleep and too tired to stay awake. Caught in that mental vagueness, the images that guided her were sharp but had no context. She’d bought a ticket for the last train leaving that night, but she couldn’t remember how she’d reached the station. There must have been a vehicle that had left the compound, but … She remembered riding on the train a long time and seeing something that triggered the decision to get off before the stop listed on her ticket. Which city? She didn’t know. And there had been buses, the kind that provided transportation between cities. And another ticket for another train? But, again, she had followed the visions, and most of what she’d seen had faded too much to recall.

Before the three of them became too frustrated, the first set of pictures was delivered for a review of region.

The pictures of alligators, panthers, and snakes fascinated her. Her training images of these creatures had been line drawings that weren’t the least bit scary. These images were of predators. Maybe even terra indigene. The trees and flowers were like nothing she’d seen before, not even in training images.

“Okay,” Merri Lee said, making notes. “You didn’t recognize the critters or the plants, so I’d say you didn’t live in the Southeast or come through there when you ran away.”

“It was dark a lot of the time,” Meg said. Or had that been her mind’s way of protecting itself from absorbing too many images as the train sped on? There had been daylight at least part of the time, but not bright. Winter light and gray sky.

“You were wearing jeans, a T-shirt, a denim jacket, and sneakers,” Ruthie said, making her own notes. “You didn’t have a winter coat, so you came from someplace warmer than here.”

Meg frowned. “No. The denim jacket was part of the outfit. The Walking Name was wearing the winter coat.”

They looked at her.

“They wore white uniforms and changed out of their regular clothes. She took the coat out of her locker because she went outside for something. She didn’t close the locker properly. That’s why I could take the clothes and the money in her wallet.”

“It was cold when you went outside?” Merri Lee asked.

Meg nodded. “Very cold. But I was so afraid. Maybe it felt cold because I was so afraid of what the Controller would do to me if I got caught. Jean … Jean and I were going to run away together. It was before the visions that helped me escape, so it was just talk, just wishful thinking about having a real life. But a Walking Name overheard us, and the Controller didn’t think I would run away by myself, so he … broke one of Jean’s feet. I still wanted both of us to run away, but she said if she went with me, we’d get caught. By myself, I would escape. And I did.” Meg didn’t realize she was crying until Merri Lee handed her a tissue. “But Jean is still there.”

She wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “I’ve never been in the Southeast. I’m sure of that much.”

They crossed off the High North next. Theral was using the library computer to check details for them, and she confirmed that the lake-effect storm that had touched Lakeside the evening Meg arrived had shut down rail and bus transportation in the High Northeast for the whole day.

Tess brought over coffee, sandwiches, and fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies, as well as another stack of pictures.

Meg, Merri Lee, and Ruthie drank the coffee, ate the sandwiches and cookies, and crossed the West Coast region off the list.

Midafternoon, Heather showed up with a handful of magazines and eyes that were puffy from crying.

“I don’t think I can do this anymore,” she said, setting the magazines on the sorting table. “They used to make more effort to stay human, and they don’t anymore. Have you noticed that?” Heather looked at Merri Lee, who had been working at A Little Bite for over a year. “And most of the customers were human, so it wasn’t too bad. And with the Market Square credit, I was making as much working part-time hours as I would make working full-time in another bookstore in the city.”

“Then why can’t you do this anymore?” Merri Lee asked.

“Last night my father told me he doesn’t want me setting foot in his house again while I’m working in the Courtyard. He said it was hard enough to find work in Lakeside, and being tarred as a Wolf lover was the first step toward losing a job and then sleeping in a homeless shelter and begging on the streets, and how that brush spread the muck over everyone in a family. And while he was saying those things, my mom just sat there and wouldn’t look at me. She didn’t say anything to me until I got up to leave. Then she stopped me at the door and told me if anything happened to my younger brother or sister because I was being a whore for the Others, it would be on my head.”

“That’s awful,” Ruthie said. “They had no right to say those things!”

“Like your family hasn’t said it to you?”

Ruthie took a step back.

“You lost your job because of this place.” Heather looked at Merri Lee. “And you were beaten up and can’t go back to school.”

“The Others didn’t do those things,” Merri Lee replied. “Humans did.”

“Because of them! And now we’re being asked … Do you even know what they’re going to do with the information we’re providing? What if we’re helping them do something terrible? What happens to us if we’re branded traitors to humankind?”

“I don’t think anything about working with the terra indigene is as black-and-white as that,” Ruthie said carefully. “Maybe it is that simple in places like Cel-Romano or Tokhar-Chin, where humans control a big chunk of land and only brush against the Others at the borders between human-controlled land and the wild country. But our ancestors settled on a continent that didn’t belong to humans, so it’s different for us. If we can’t work with them, they’ll turn against us.”

“That doesn’t change the fact that Heather has been given a choice: give up the job or lose her family,” Merri Lee said.

What will happen to Heather if she makes the wrong choice? Meg thought, knocking her hand against the underside of the sorting table as she reached for the magazines. She almost cried out at the sudden stab of pain, but she swallowed pain that turned into mild agony, too surprised to speak when the cover of a magazine kept shifting into a different picture. Only pieces, so she never saw the whole image, as if she was seeing bits of several pictures. Then, struggling to focus on the vision, she saw a date—and blood soaking the paper.

When she came back to herself, she realized no one had noticed anything had happened. Ruthie and Merri Lee were still talking, still trying to offer Heather some sympathy and encouragement. But their friend didn’t need sympathy and encouragement. She needed …

“Heather, you have to go,” Meg said quietly.

They all stopped talking and looked at her.

“I’d rather stay here and work with you,” Heather said. “There’s too much strange fur and fang in the library.”

“No.” Meg walked over to the counter, picked up the phone, and dialed. “You have to hand in your notice today and go.”

“Meg?” Merri Lee said. “What’s going on?”

She shook her head as Vlad answered the phone at HGR. “Vlad? Can you come to the office? We need to talk to you. No, just you.” She hung up before turning to look at her friends and the maps and the notebooks, but she didn’t see anything else, didn’t feel any warning prickles.

“Meg!” Vlad rushed into the sorting room moments later and jerked to a stop.

“Heather needs to leave,” Meg said. “She can’t work in the Courtyard anymore.”

“I hadn’t decided that!” Heather protested. Clearly frightened, she turned to Ruthie and Merri Lee for support. “I didn’t say that.”

“She didn’t say that,” Merri Lee said.

Vlad gave Heather a considering look, but Meg didn’t think the decision surprised him. Then he sniffed the air and walked around the table until he stood next to her and said gently, “Let me see your hands.”

“What?” Meg said.

“Your hands,” Vlad repeated.

“What’s going on?” Ruthie asked.

“Meg?” Merri Lee said.

She held out her hands. The gouge on the top of her right index finger was tiny, barely the size of a pinhead, but it was just enough lost skin for blood to rise in the wound.

“How did you do that?” Vlad asked.

“I hit my hand on the table when I reached for the magazines. I must have scraped something?”

“And you saw …?”

She saw Merri Lee scramble for a notebook and pen. Distracting. Another image. Not the answer to Vlad’s question. “I saw the cover of the magazine.” She tried to point but Vlad still held her hands, so she tipped her head to indicate the stack of magazines on the table. “But the one in the vision wasn’t the current issue. I saw blood. All the pages were soaked in blood.”

“What does that have to do with Heather?”

“Her family wants her to stop working here. When I reached for the magazines, I was thinking about what would happen if she made the wrong choice, and then I felt pain … and I saw …” She looked at Vlad. “She has to go.”

“Yes,” Vlad said, giving her hands a gentle squeeze before releasing them. “I’ll take care of it.” To Heather he added, “Gather your personal belongings, then meet me in the store’s office. I’ll give you your pay.”

Heather stumbled to the back room and out the door.

“I’ll make sure she has enough money to take care of her bills for a couple of months,” Vlad said. “That will give her time to find another job. And I’ll have Blair come by to sniff out the spot where you damaged your finger and repair it so you won’t get hurt again.”

“But I don’t even know how I did it!” Meg protested. “How can he find the exact spot?”

Vlad smiled. “He’s a Wolf with an excellent sense of smell. He’ll find it.” The smile faded as he waved a hand to indicate Merri Lee and Ruth. “What about the rest of the human pack?”

No pins-and-needles feeling in response to the question. No other vision. “They can stay,” Meg replied. Then she added silently, They’ll be safer here.

She couldn’t be certain of that, but the thought felt right.

“All right,” Vlad said. “I’ll have to tell Simon, so take care of that wound before he shows up howling about it.”

Once Vlad left the building, Ruthie turned to Meg, wide-eyed. “Okay, that was weird. What was that?”

“That,” Meg replied, “was prophecy.”

Simon wasn’t happy that Meg had called Vlad instead of him, but after he went off by himself for a few minutes to snarl about it, he thought he’d worked out the human logic. Since he’d summoned the terra indigene leaders to Lakeside, he was in charge of the big meeting, which left Vlad in charge of the bookstore. And Heather leaving and being paid was bookstore business.

Realizing Vlad would also be stuck with the employee-quitting paperwork cheered Simon up considerably. He hated filling out that paperwork.

Of course, finding new humans to work for them wasn’t going to be a romp in the woods.

We’ll make do, he thought as he checked the list of pictures he was supposed to look for. Most Courtyards don’t have any human employees except the Liaison. Even Lakeside didn’t have other humans working for us on a regular basis until I became leader and opened a couple of stores to human customers. Most Courtyards don’t have humans like Lorne running a little printing business that is strictly for us.

Now most of those humans were gone. Would the terra indigene who couldn’t pass for human feel more comfortable shopping in the Market Square now? Would the human employees who were left respond badly to Others who didn’t look like them?

No point in chewing on a bone that wasn’t there, so he focused on the task he could see.

He had found half of his list of images when he gathered up the books and magazines and headed for the Liaison’s Office. He just wanted to see Meg, make sure she was all right. He deserved a reward for politely calling the office instead of rushing over when Vlad told him about Meg’s vision. No reason to think Vlad would make light of anything that hurt Meg, so the injury really was nothing to howl about—just a puncture so tiny that Meg hadn’t realized why she’d seen the vision until Vlad had scented blood and checked her hands.

It probably would be considered bad manners to sniff her just to make sure the Sanguinati hadn’t missed another injury—especially if the other girls were still in the office.

Neither he nor Vlad understood why the prophecy meant Heather had to leave the Courtyard today, but they didn’t challenge Meg. For one thing, none of the other leaders had seen a cassandra sangue speak prophecy. When they did witness a cut, he wanted them to have no doubts about the accuracy of what was said.

Interpretation was something else. Meg wasn’t always right when it came to interpreting images. She’d thought she was going to die in the Courtyard because of the prophecy she’d seen about herself. And she had come close to dying. But she’d survived, which proved her wrong.

Not something he intended to mention.

Charlie caught up to him as he walked out of the library and headed for the Liaison’s Office.

“Tess the Scary says the girls should take a break. Get some food and fresh air,” Charlie said.

“That’s a good idea.” Too bad they couldn’t play prey. Meg was a fun squeaky toy when she was the pretend prey, but there was too much risk right now of her getting hurt by a Wolf who wouldn’t remember it was pretend. And seeing a human being chased might scare the other girls into resigning. Once all the guests went home and everyone settled down, there would be time to play again. “And don’t call Tess names.”

There was no one around them, but Charlie lowered his voice. “There are stories about her kind throughout the world, and those stories are very old.” He studied Simon. “You do know what she is?”

“I have some thoughts. Henry knows for sure.” He’d found and read some of those old stories, but he hadn’t told anyone what he knew about Tess’s kind of terra indigene. Not even Henry. Safer that way for all of them.

“And yet you let her stay.”

“My choice,” Simon said in a tone that would have warned anyone else that the conversation was done.

“Did you know they’re called Plague Riders in some parts of the world?” Charlie said.

He did know. In contrast, calling them Harvesters made them sound more benign—until you saw what they could do.

“You would be wise to keep that information to yourself,” Simon said. “Especially while you’re here.”

A beat of silence. “Wasn’t intending to share it with anyone but you.”

They walked into the office. The girls had taped maps on the walls and then pinned notes on the maps. Spread out on the table were photos of trains and buses and pictures Theral must have printed off the computer of signs that read WELCOME TO … some town or other.

Seeing the images, Charlie grinned, then said in a conductor’s voice, “All aboard! Next stop, Wheatfield!”

Meg spun around so fast she stumbled into the sorting table. “What did you say?”

Charlie backed up. “I don’t know. I was just—”

Merri Lee leaped at Charlie and held up a list. “Say the names of these towns, just like you did that other one.”

When Charlie looked at him for some explanation, Simon just shrugged, too busy trying to keep his ears from shifting. His human ears hadn’t heard whatever Merri Lee and Meg had heard, but the Wolf ears wouldn’t do any better because it was the tone that had significance. Human ears could hear that just fine. His brain understood but his instincts weren’t convinced.

Charlie obliged, saying the town names the way a conductor would. Meg shook her head or nodded. Merri Lee wrote in that damn notebook while Ruthie made notations on the map. When Charlie called out the last name, the girls sagged, and Simon realized Tess was right—they needed to rest.

“That’s it,” Merri Lee said.

“What’s it?” Simon asked.

“That’s what I remember of the journey to Lakeside,” Meg said, sounding too weary. “It’s broken up, and there are too many possibilities of how I got to the first town name I remember hearing. I’m sorry, Simon. I don’t think I can get closer than that.”

He looked at the map. “Nothing to be sorry about. We started with the whole continent this morning. You’ve narrowed it down to a region.”

“That’s still a lot of towns and cities,” Ruthie said, sounding uneasy.

“It’s fine.” He tried a smile. When Ruthie and Merri Lee paled, he ran his tongue over his canines. Damn. Those were definitely not human anymore.

“We should take a break,” Meg said. “Get some air. And I could use another sandwich.”

There was something too deliberate about the way the girls set their notebooks on the sorting table before heading out.

“Can we look at these?” Charlie asked, reaching for Merri Lee’s notebook.

“I don’t know,” Simon replied, wishing he knew either more or less about human females.

While they waited, Simon studied the map. Either Meg had been scared witless or she’d been attempting to hide her trail from a hunter. She’d been right to assume the Controller had sent men after her, but he’d seen rabbits with a Wolf on their tails zigzag less than she had. And since the bus station and the train depot were both in the downtown part of Lakeside and south of the Courtyard, how had she ended up north of the Courtyard in order to head back down until she reached the Liaison’s Office and Howling Good Reads the night she applied for the job?

She may have been a brainless female for being out in a storm that night, and she probably arrived on the last bus or train that had reached Lakeside, but she’d gained enough time to escape capture and find the terra indigene.

The room usually felt like it had plenty of space, but with so many earth natives crowding around the map, he was glad he didn’t have a tail right now that could get stepped on.

“So, the enemy is in the Midwest,” Joe Wolfgard said. “That’s confirmation enough for us. We know what we need to do.”

“That can be the last choice,” Simon said. “First, we’ll try to narrow the search for the prey.”

They didn’t want it to be a last choice. He saw that truth in the eyes of the Midwest leaders. Humans were causing too much trouble. It was time to seriously thin the herds. He wasn’t opposed to thinning if it needed to be done, but that would mean abandoning everything humans made in that part of Thaisia or asking terra indigene to take up those tasks. Which meant more of the Others staying in human form for hours a day in order to do the work.

Maybe the Midwest leaders were also considering what they would have to ask of their own because Cheryl Hawkgard finally said, “How do we narrow the search?”

He bared his teeth in a smile. “Now we get the police to help us.”