Black Wings Read online

  “You come back and stay with me again,” he told Briella. To Marian, he added, “You too.”

  It took a short trip in a Ryde to the bar parking lot to get her car. Briella buckled herself into the backseat of Marian’s car without a word. Marian looked in the rearview mirror, trying to catch her gaze, but Briella was staring out the back window.

  “Are you tired, Bean? Did you and Grandpa have a good time? Did you stay up too late?”

  “Yeah. We did.” Briella yawned. “I love Grandpa.”

  “Me too.” They drove a little farther before Marian added, casually, “Did he talk to you about anything you want to talk about with me?”

  Briella looked up and met her mother’s eyes in the mirror. “Like what?”

  “Like anything.”

  They drove a little longer, turning onto their street. Briella said nothing. Marian didn’t ask again until they’d pulled into the driveway. She shut off the car and twisted in her seat to look back.

  “Did he talk about…angels? Tapping at the windows? Or singing?”

  Briella laughed. “There’s no such thing as angels.”

  “Bean…did Onyx come to Grampa’s house last night?” Ice crystallized in Marian’s chest as she waited for Briella to answer her.

  “No, Mama. Onyx didn’t come to Grandpa’s house.”

  Marian looked hard, but if Briella was lying, she’d at least learned to do it better.

  Chapter Twenty

  Marian was suspicious about a school like Parkhaven having ‘show and tell’. She was still having trouble logging in to the parent portal – no matter how many times she changed her password, it never seemed to stick – but there’d been an email reminder about the upcoming event, so she guessed it was legitimate. She’d suggested Briella take in one of her music boxes from the collection Marian had started before the girl was born, but that idea had been met with a rolling of eyes and a huffed breath.

  “I’m going to take Onyx.”

  The kid still fed the damn bird dinner scraps and spent time every evening talking to it. As far as Marian could tell, it still brought her trinkets, but as November got colder, Briella spent less time outside with it. Marian had started hoping it was the end of what had been an odd obsession, replaced with whatever it was Briella was working on at school, whatever she was filling notebook after notebook figuring out.

  Marian sighed and shook her head. “Briella, you know you can’t.”

  Briella put her hands on her hips, looking startlingly like Marian’s mother. The kid was a chameleon. “Why not? Onyx’s really awesome, and Braxton D. brought in his baby sister last week. Alicia brought her new puppy.”

  “It’s not a pet. Or a baby. It’s a wild animal. How would you even get it there?”

  “I’ll just tell him to meet me at school and wait until it’s time for show and tell. Then I’ll open the window, and he can fly in,” Briella said.

  Marian’s eyebrows lifted, but she thought of the day at the frog pond. “That would be a good trick, wouldn’t it?”

  “I haven’t been teaching him tricks.” The girl had tomato sauce from their ravioli dinner, eaten an hour ago, clustered in the corners of her mouth. Her hair had been done up in a couple of cute ponies for school that morning, but they’d come half-loose now. Her pale pink shirt was filthy with smudges. One nostril was rimmed with dried snot that turned Marian’s stomach.

  She grabbed a paper towel and dampened it. “Wipe your face, please.”

  “Tricks are behaviors learned to gain rewards.”

  “So what are you teaching it, then?” Marian turned back to the counter to finish wiping it down. The worn pattern on the Formica reminded her of a fifties sitcom, but here in this kitchen, there was no laugh track to remind her that this argument could seriously be a comedy.

  Briella snorted under her breath. “I’m not teaching him anything. He already knows how to do everything.”

  “And you really think you can just tell him to show up at school tomorrow?”

  “I can tell him to do anything,” Briella said. “He’ll do it, because he’s my friend. But I won’t tell him to do something bad, Mama.”

  Marian turned to look at Briella’s wide-eyed and forcefully innocent expression. “Why would you?”

  “I won’t,” Briella insisted.

  “What bad thing have you told it to do, Briella?”

  A silence fell between them, tense and twisting. Marian had spoken too sharply. Too accusing. In the face of Briella’s blankly cheerful expression, she felt ridiculous.

  “Nothing,” Briella said. “I’m just going to go tell him to come to school for show and tell. That’s all. Can I give him this piece of garlic bread?”

  “You know I don’t like you wasting food on the bird,” Marian said, but relented because although Briella wasn’t going to eat it, she’d already put her dirty fingers all over it and it was only going into the trash, anyway. “Fine. But you have five minutes, that’s it. It’s dark outside.”

  Cold, too. Autumn had been unusually warm, but winter was coming on hard this year, and Marian shivered as she pulled her oversized cardigan closer around her. The wind from the open back door tickled her under the chin.

  On the back porch, Briella whistled. “Onyx! C’mere! I have a treat for you!”

  Briella held up the piece of garlic bread. She called again for the bird. Marian stepped closer, getting in range in case something happened.

  “Close the door,” Marian said sternly, but too late. The bird was in the house, flapping its enormous wings and landing neatly on Briella’s shoulder.

  “Briella,” it said. “Hello, Briella. Give a treat, please. Give a treat.”

  The look her daughter gave her was purely smug and somehow adult. It pushed Marian back a step. Where had her little girl gone?

  Briella stepped out onto the back porch and put the garlic bread on the railing. The raven hopped from her shoulder onto it and pecked at the food. It paused to tilt its head, one bright and unblinking eye studying Marian before it went back to eating.

  “You’ve been teaching it more words?”

  Briella shrugged. “Ravens are really smart. I told you that before. Like as smart as chimps, and chimps are as smart as little kids. I mean, Onyx’s probably smarter than Toby Patterson.”

  The bird had finished the garlic bread. Now it ruffled its feathers while burbling something incomprehensible. There were words, but Marian couldn’t make them out.

  “Onyx, you should come to school with me tomorrow. I’ll go in the white van. Okay? You follow the van, and you come to school with me. Good night now, Onyx. Good night.”

  “Good night, good night.” The bird’s beak only barely opened with the words, but its throat worked before it flew away.

  “Ravens don’t talk like people do,” Briella said as though Marian had made a comment about it. “They don’t have lips like ours. Their vocal cords are different. But that doesn’t mean they don’t understand what they’re saying.”

  “It’s just mimicking.”

  Briella shook her head and allowed her mother to draw her back inside. “Nope. He understood me. He’ll go to school with me tomorrow. You wait and see.”

  Marian had a hard time believing that, but there was no point in arguing about it. “You know, there are other birds that can learn to talk.”

  “Yeah. I know.”

  “If you want, we could get you a parakeet or something. A pet you could keep in the house. Wouldn’t you like that better?”

  “Right,” Briella said in a voice dripping with scorn. “Onyx would probably peck it right in the face!”

  Marian flinched, then frowned. “What does that mean? It would peck it in the face? Is Onyx nasty like that?”

  “Everyone’s nasty like that,” Briella said under her breath.

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