Thirteen birds shifted restlessly on a telephone wire outside a house in Upper Nyack, New York. They didn't look like healthy birds; their eyes seemed dull, tired, and their plumage lacked any sort of luster. Every so often, a bird would shift its weight on its perch and lose a few dark feathers.
A young woman in her twenties watched them and pulled her sweater closer around her shoulders.
One of the birds made eye contact.
The woman looked out at it, her fists clenching so hard in the soft wool that her knuckles went white.
Abruptly, Sarah Williams turned away from the window and headed in through the house. In a young boy's room, she pulled the shutters closed.
Rain pounded down on fallen leaves and forest grass. He could smell it, the rich scent of wet loam and water. A faint tang of sky clung to the water as it fell and he could smell that, too.
From behind him, he could the muffled clatter of hooves on damp earth. Fear rolled in rivulets down his spine, colder and wetter than the rain. Adrenaline made him jolt, his body feeling light, his stomach seeming to hover as it threatened to send its contents up through his throat.
He turned and saw precisely what he'd expected to see: a stag, walking slowly toward him. It had a pelt of glossy black feathers.
The scent of the rain changed, turned saltier, charged with iron.
The stag placed its hoof in a red-brown mud slick of blood., It watched him intently, as if wondering what he would do to turn the blood to water again.
And Will Graham woke in his shower. The water had long gone cold, and his skin was clammy. Winston and two of the other dogs had found their way past his shower curtain to press their noses to his knee.
He cut the water and reached down to pet the dogs.
The wiry man who stared intently into his apiary seemed less to possess nervous energy than to be made of it. Not for the first time, the woman who watched him wondered which truly had come first: his restless and racing mind, or his restless body?
Had one developed in deference to — defense of — the other, or were they perfectly comorbid?
It didn't matter.
What mattered was the way the bees buzzed around in their hive. She was no beekeeper, but even she could hear that the pitch of their noise had shifted. This was less the absent-minded drone she'd grown accustomed to hearing and more an angry sound.
Joan turned away from Sherlock and his hive, and looked out over the city. The sun had set, but that didn't mean the skyline had gone dark. Lights glistened, blinked, danced, near and far. The breeze played with the sky over the roof, brought her the scent of food and smog and a faint tang off the harbor.