Moving through woods in daylight was enough of a pain in the ass. Walking through them at night was just plain crazy. I'd been working on some spells to augment myself during my training with Alek and my gaming buddies. One of those spells was darkvision. It didn't work quite the way I had hoped, at least not yet, and it wasn't easy to maintain, but I didn't want to cast a light until we were further away from the camp.
Ideally, the spell would have enabled me to see like it was daylight, only in black and white. The reality was more like an odd amber glow limning objects near me, making solid things shadowed and dark while their edges shimmered. It was good enough for me to follow Not Afraid without falling on my face or running into trees, but not much use beyond that. I couldn't move quickly, but Not Afraid patiently waited every time I stumbled or had to disentangle myself from a blackberry vine or dead branch.
He moved confidently through the woods, not making a sound. I couldn't tell if that was because he was just that good or if something seriously supernatural was going on. It had occurred to me that he might be a ghost, but then he would have been bound by the same general rules as a spirit and unable to affect the physical world this much without serious help from someone corporeal. I noticed that ferns and brush moved as he passed. So he had some solidity. I mentally checked off the box labeled "preternaturally quiet" and left it at that.
I couldn't tell what direction we were going. Only faint patches of stars glinted through the thick tree branches and I didn't spare much time for staring upward. With my darkvision running, light wasn't a pleasant thing to look at. Even the flickering blue in Not Afraid's eyes was disorienting any time I met his gaze as he waited for me to catch up.
After what felt like hours, I heard running water. A few minutes later, I could smell the stream and the air shifted to feeling more open. The forest fell away in an abrupt line and a wide, rocky ravine spread out below me. My vision wouldn't let me see too deeply into it, but amber light limned a field of boulders. To my right loomed a huge cliff, the top lost to the clash between the slowly brightening sky and my night vision.
The sky was turning from black to the dull grey of false dawn. It was enough that my normal vision could start to pick out details, I thought, so I dropped the night vision. I kept a hold on my magic, not trusting my companion or the spirit not to fuck with me.
The cliff rose a good hundred feet up from the floor of the ravine, the top outlined against the grey sky. The heavily sloping field was mostly rockfall but overgrown, as though the rocks had tumbled down a long time ago and nature was filling in the cracks. Boulders dotted the terrain like the bodies of sleeping beasts half covered in dew-speckled grass blankets. Down the hill to my left cut a creek, its cheery burble at odds with the mostly silent morning. Even the birds weren't speaking.
The rocky field had the same eerie stillness I associate with graveyards, and it unnerved me. Places can have their own power, their own energy. Sometimes from ley lines and other earthly sources of power. Sometimes from events like earth quakes or eruptions. Sometimes from people, though it would be rare for a wilderness spot like this to take on power from humans. I had a sense that we were close to whatever Not Afraid wanted to show me.
Wolf materialized beside me and growled, her hackles up, her eyes fixed on the cliff. She didn't appear to like this place any better than I.
"What is it?" I whispered to her. She looked at me with her starry-night eyes and growled again. I took a step forward, moving out of the trees, but she stayed put, swinging her head from side to side, her growl fading into a whine.
"Fine," I muttered. "Stay here then."
Not Afraid let me take in the surroundings, ignoring that I was apparently talking to myself, and then started picking his way across the rocks toward the cliff face. I followed, looking around me warily as the shadows deepened and the sky grew lighter.
Not Afraid reached the base of the cliff and waited for me there. I clambered up beside him to where it leveled out somewhat. The cliff face itself was pitted and gouged by the elements, too steep for vegetation to take hold. White streaks ran down the rocks like tears and something about the place made me shiver as I stared upward.
The bottom of the cliff was missing. Time and water had hollowed out the base into a low cave deep enough I couldn't see to the back, though something deep within seemed to move. I refused to peer too closely. I had had enough of dark places for a long while after the mine. Stalactites hung from the roof at the mouth of the cave, giving it the appearance of a gaping mouth waiting to crunch down. The area in front of the mouth had been dug away into a rough pit. The pit was still in shadow but there seemed to be bare branches stacked in it.
I gripped my D20 and called up light, sending it like a flare over the pit.
Not branches. Bones. Hundreds of bones in piles with more poking out from the earth beneath. The skulls were obviously human and I counted a dozen before I made myself stop.
"What is this place," I whispered. It felt wrong to speak loudly in the face of so much death. Perhaps this was just a burial site? I doubted it. The graveyard where the People buried their dead was back behind the big house and I knew there were graves there that were hundreds of years old, so this wasn't some ancient site for the Three Feathers tribe.
"This is where the fledglings who don't turn into crow go to die." Not Afraid came up beside me, his eyes fixed on the grim piles only a few feet below us. "Blood Mother and I are trying to find which bones are whose, but it is not easy. Most of the spirits here do not want to talk to us."
"Blood Mother?" I looked sideways at him. He was close enough I should have been able to feel heat coming off his skin, to smell his sweat. I might as well have been standing here alone.
"She is with me," he said. "She will be avenged."
He was talking about the spirit, I realized. A spirit of vengeance.
"Buttercup?" I guessed.
"She died here," he said, biting off the words like they hurt to say aloud. "I have only Blood Mother now."
"Did you kill these people?" I said, letting the identity of the spirit go for the moment.
He laughed, and the chill in my bones grew stronger.
"She does not see!" he cried, throwing his arms wide. His fingertips brushed my arm, cold but solid. "She will not believe, even here."
"Tell me," I said, turning to face him. "Tell me what this is."
I had a feeling already. I knew but didn't want to know.
"Sky Heart," he screamed at me and I felt his breath sting my cheek, cold and smelling of dust and death. Another sign he wasn't a ghost at least. "This is where he would bring them, the ones who did not change. The ones who changed but not into crow. He calls this 'the final flight.' But we call it the cliff of many tears."
"He throws them off the cliff," I said, taking a step back, unable to hold my ground in the face of so much rage and grief. "These are children."
I looked back at the pit; my light ball had died, forgotten by me in my horror, but the rising sun now cast light now into it, enough light that I could make out the bones for what they were.
"If they did not change and fly, they died. If they did not die, because they were other than crow, he would come down and finish them. This is why I hunt the People. Eventually the coward Sky Heart will have to face me. This time he will die."
"But I was only exiled. I wasn't killed. Is this still going on?" I hadn't been thrown off a cliff. Not that it would have killed me, nor would any other means aside from having my heart eaten by another sorcerer. Perhaps Sky Heart knew that, knew somehow that he couldn't kill me.
"Do the others know?" I thought of my mother, of her confusion over what was happening, over why Not Afraid had killed Sky Heart's wife a century ago. Over her insistence, decades earlier, that Jasper be the one to drive me away from the ranch, that he make sure the new family picked me up.
"It does not matter," he said. "They let it happen. They must pay."
"It matters to me," I said, though even as I did I questioned why I was trying to split hairs, to assign guilt. How does one process murder on this scale? Sky Heart, if what Not Afraid was telling me was true, was a serial killer. But Not Afraid had plenty of blood on his hands.
He'd let the fledglings live. Let Carlos live. Gone out of his way to make sure they were fed and unharmed.
Heartless killer with a drama streak out for vengeance. I had to keep that in mind. As well as the spirit, this Blood Mother. She had proven tricky, full of illusions in the forest.
I shook my head. "I cannot let you keep killing," I said. "Somehow this has to end."
Cold blue light flared in Not Afraid's eyes but he shrieked and violently shook his head.
"Let me show her," he said. The light flickered and he reached for me.
"What are you doing?" I took another step back and nearly fell over a rock. I gathered power in my hands, ready to unleash a blast of force at him.
"Do not fight it, please," he said. "Let us show you what happened."
Universe help me, I let go of my magic and he took my hands in his icy cold fingers. A wave of power rushed up through me.
For a moment I was two people, myself standing at the base of the cliff, clinging to a man who should be dead, and also a girl in a blue gingham dress at the top of the cliff, my hair loose and whipping around my face.
Then the vision settled and I was just the girl. Buttercup.
"What are you doing?" She/I cried.
Sky Heart advanced on her/me. He was younger, stronger, his hair with its mane of feathers floating and flapping in the strong wind like wings. Shishishiel's power hugged him like a dark mantle and she/I cringed.
"You are not Crow," he said. "You have one last chance, fledgling. This is your final flight."
"Please, please, no," she/I begged him. Not Afraid had changed, he was crow. She would too, she was his twin, she needed more time. Even as she/I thought these things, we knew that there was nothing inside her, no power, no connection to an Other, an animal self.
Her/my only connection was to Not Afraid. He wasn't here, but he was coming, her distress calling to him across the miles of forest.
Too late. Sky Heart lunged forward and grabbed her/my arms with bruising force. "Fly," he yelled, his breath hot on her/my tearstained cheeks.
Then she/me flew, thrown off the cliff. One moment there was dirt beneath her/my bare feet, the next just sky. The clouds were steel above, unbroken, the sun hiding its face.
"Brother," she/me screamed as the flying turned to falling.
I jerked away from Not Afraid just as I felt the horrible crushing pain of impact, pulling myself back to the present, back to life. I staggered, going to my knees, tears running down my face as his grief stayed with me, flooding my own senses. He had felt her die; her memories lived on in him. She might not have been shifter, but she was born a twin to one, born with inhuman blood in her veins no matter how human she appeared. Buttercup lived on in Not Afraid, lived on as Blood Mother. I was sure of it now.
"I found her in the cave," Not Afraid murmured. He knelt down in front of me, his hands splayed in supplication. "That is where Sky Heart left them. He stripped her body, leaving her for animals to find and scatter the bones."
The vision was over, but I still saw her broken shape, now naked and twisted, covered in blood and dirt, discarded like trash on the cave floor.
"How many?" I asked. "How long?"
"I have found sixty skulls," he answered. "I started before; this is when I built the grave here in front. I tried to bury them, to quiet their spirits. That is when Blood Mother found me. There is only one way to quiet the dead. Justice, vengeance."
"So you confronted Sky Heart, but he killed you." I didn't wait for him to nod before continuing. The pieces were falling into place. "How did you come back?"
"Some things are too important for death to stop. Blood Mother needed to regain her strength. And now Shishishiel has abandoned the People. Now was the time." The blue light was back in his eyes, casting shadows on his gaunt face.
"If Sky Heart dies, justice will have been done. No one else will need to die." I forced myself to meet those cold eyes.
"If they knew," he said.
"If." I cut him off. "That is a big if. I saw no one but Sky Heart in your sister's memory."
"I will kill them all if it means getting to Sky Heart."
I believed that. "You said Shishishiel has abandoned him. Why can't you get to him now?"
"There is still power in the stones, and Sky Heart carries a talisman. Like yours, but it keeps Blood Mother away. Without her help, I cannot kill him."
Looking at his face, seeing the intensity there, the desperate need, I knew why he had risked bringing me here, why he had showed me the vision and the bones.
"You want me to let you in," I said.
"You have power." He reached toward my D20 talisman and I flinched back. No way was he getting his hands on that again. "Our needs are not so different. You want to stop the killings; I want to kill only Sky Heart. He is the end." His expression grew more sly, and it was so adolescent and obvious I almost laughed.
Laughing would have been pretty bad, so I held it in. Teen boys do not like being laughed at and I doubted it would be any different with resurrected teen boys filled with the enraged spirit of their dead twin sister.
I leaned back on my heels, looking out over the ravine, looking away from the bones. He wanted to kill Sky Heart and he wanted my help. I wasn't sure how to feel about that. I did not like Sky Heart, and that dislike was quickly turning to hatred in the aftermath of the vision. It was hard to deny the evidence that my grandfather was a coldblooded killer as well as a narcissistic cult leader. I had suspected that he had killed Ruby, my grandmother, but it wasn't talked about and there had never been any evidence of it.
It would be simple to destroy the boundary, I thought. Magic like that worked as long as the anchors were sound. Destroy a boundary stone, and the magic should snap. Sky Heart's talisman would be harder to get, but the danger of an object like that was once it was removed, it no longer protected the person. If I could get it away from him, keep him from fleeing in his crow form. That was a lot of ifs.
But Blood Mother, the spirit, had proven very tricky with her illusions in the forest the day before. She had tried to fuck with my emotions. I didn't trust the spirit and that meant I couldn't trust Not Afraid. The vision felt so real, the bones were real, and this place had the energy of sorrow and evil about it. All that I could accept. Perhaps.
"I will help you," I said, meeting his cold gaze again. "But there are conditions."
"What conditions?" he asked. His mouth pressed into a thin line and I guessed from the flicker and dance of blue fire in his eyes that neither he nor Blood Mother liked the idea of strings attached.
Well, bully for them. They wanted my help, they could suck it up and do it my way.
"I will speak with Sky Heart first. He will tell me the truth and when I have verified what you say about him is true, then and only then will I break the wards and let you in. And only if you give your oath, on the bones and memory of Buttercup, that no one else will be harmed, that Sky Heart's death will end this and you will rest in peace."
He considered that for longer than I liked, but perhaps him thinking it over was a good thing. Agreeing too quickly would have been suspect.
"How will you make him tell the truth?" he said finally.
"I have a spell for that," I lied. It wasn't really a permanent lie. I had a few hours of walking back to the camp to figure out how I was going to cast a truth spell. I had some ideas.
"We agree," he said. "We give our oath. Killing Sky Heart will end our vengeance and justice will be done."
I searched his face for signs of a lie, but found none. He had given an oath. In my heart it felt right. I wanted to trust him, and an oath given from a spirit like this was serious. Breaking oaths for supernaturals like ourselves wasn't something done lightly. That would have to be enough.
Now I just had to figure out how to deal with Alek and Carlos. I doubted they were going to let me walk into camp, magically bind and interrogate Sky Heart, and then possibly let a murder happen.
As if reading my mind, Not Afraid spoke, "The lion and tiger have crossed the boundary. They hunt for you."
Them being out of camp would make things easier. If they didn't find me.
"Can you lead them away? Keep them busy until I can get back?" I asked. "Without hurting them," I added.
"Yes." Not Afraid flashed me a smile and for a moment looked as young as he had been when he died the first time. "I am good at being the deer."
"All right," I said. "You'll have to point me in the right direction to get back." I was going to do this. The killing had to end. As Not Afraid had said, justice needed doing, and it looked like it was up to me to see it done.
With grim thoughts and dangerous plans swirling through my head, I got to my feet and followed Not Afraid back into the woods.