Felicity Flamingos Corvine's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Felicity Corvine could not sleep, and sleep was killing her. She knew the pattern now. Each time her eyes closed, the black flamingo that was her right arm screamed inside her skull. The scream had no sound. It had teeth. It pulled her bones into new shapes while she dozed. She woke with her neck longer, her knees bent the wrong way. She had a needle and thread hidden in her dress pocket. She had a plan. She would stitch herself a new body from stolen pieces, a human body, before the flamingo finished taking the last of her. But she could not stitch while awake, and she could not rest while the flamingo screamed. So tonight she walked the crooked path of broken black stones to make it stop. A cracked lantern hung from a dead branch over the path. Its glass was shattered, but a sick yellow glow still lived inside. Felicity remembered a thing her mother once said, long ago, before the dark in her memory. Sing to the thing that frightens you. She did not have a lullaby. She had the lantern's light. Low fog pooled around her bent legs. Up ahead, purple spires rose from the mist, twisted trees with a grinning cat's face carved into the trunk. The eyes watched her. The grin did not move. The flamingo screamed again. Her spine arched. Feathers pushed through the skin of her shoulder. She fell against the lantern pole and held on. Then a real cat stepped out of the fog. It was gray and watchful, with a hard stare, and it sat on the path and would not look away. It did not run. It simply watched her shake. Felicity understood. The flamingo screamed because it wanted her asleep and helpless, so it could finish. If she gave it something softer to listen to, it might quiet. She took the lantern down. She pressed its warm glow against her chest, over the place where the screaming came from. She began to hum, low and flat, the only tune she could find. The cat's ears turned toward the sound. The flamingo's scream stuttered. For the first time, it faltered. She hummed until her throat ached. The feathers on her shoulder stopped spreading. The scream shrank to a whisper, then to nothing. Her neck stayed long, her knees stayed wrong, but the change had stopped. The flamingo slept. Felicity sank to the stones, holding the lantern, and finally rested. She did not finish turning. But when she opened her eyes, the gray cat was gone. In the fog where it had sat, a trail of pawprints led deeper into the spires, toward a low shape she had not seen before. A body. Small. Still. The first piece she needed, if she had the nerve to take it.