Tyler Kyle's Arc

Chapter 2 of 7

Tyler leaned against the alley wall and listened. Somewhere above the rooftops, a sharp whistle carried. The cardinal had not gone home. It was still hunting his scent, circling the district in wide passes. He could hear the leather harness creak each time it swung past the gutters. Until the bird was off him, he could not walk any street in daylight. He could not start turning the hunter factions against each other if a red bird kept painting his back. He needed the bird grounded, and he needed it done without a hunter watching. That meant help from someone who hated hunters more than she hated visitors. He knew one door like that. He had passed it a dozen times and never knocked. The house sat at the end of a quiet lane, a boxy stone-and-timber place with a red tile roof, half hidden by a willow whose branches dragged the grass. Tyler slipped under the leaves and knocked twice. The door opened a crack. The old witch looked up at him from snout height, black eyes flat. Her gnarled fingers hung at her sides. A strip of skin along her forearm had gone gray and soft. He tried not to look at it. "I need a bird pulled out of the sky," Tyler said. "Hunter's cardinal. It has my scent." "Cost is blood," Obsqora said. "Figured." "Not yours. Bird's." She turned into the house. "Come." He followed her through a kitchen that smelled of vinegar and into the back garden. She knelt in the grass and dragged one long finger through the dirt. A ring lit up under her hand, runes inside runes, green and pink, humming against the lawn. "Stand in it," she said. "Bleed one drop. Bird comes to you. Circle keeps it." Tyler stepped in. He bit the side of his thumb and let a bead fall on the sigil. The runes brightened. Above the willow, the whistle cut off. Wings clapped down through the branches. The cardinal dropped into the circle like a stone in water and could not lift again. It shrieked and beat the grass. The silver charm at its throat rang. Obsqora pinned it with one foot. She snapped the harness pouch open, pulled a folded scrap of cloth, and held it to her snout. Her nostrils flared. "Your sweat," she said. "And hair." She flicked it into a tin bowl and set it burning. "The bird?" "Mine now." She lifted her foot. The cardinal stayed still, eyes on her. "It flies where I say. Not back to its den." Tyler watched the smoke curl. His scent was gone from the sky. But the hunters would notice a bird that never came home. They would blame the nearest rival faction first. He smiled under his bangs. That was the tinder he needed. "Send it," he said, "to the wrong den." Obsqora's snout twitched. She did not ask which one.