Split Feather Read online

  I was afraid to move. I was afraid to breathe.

  Help me, I prayed. Help me.

  The bushes beside the path just in front of me trembled, and the bear stepped out.

  I’d seen pictures of bears in hunting magazines, and once a black bear had gotten into my trash and made a holy mess, leaving his tracks all over my yard. So I thought I knew what a bear was.

  I didn’t know shit.

  This thing was huge. Huuuuge. He blocked out the blue sky and the path in front of me. His shadow filled my vision till I couldn’t see anything but his burnt-orange fur and round brown eyes, staring at me like a man’s, and those teeth, holy fuck—what big teeth you have, Grandma, oh shit just eat me now and get it over with, I’m dead.

  He stepped onto the path between me and wherever it was I’d been headed, and snuffed the air around me, so close I could have reached out and touched him, and then he stood up on his hind legs and I swear to god that thing was taller than my house, and he tucked his paws in front of his chest like a kid about to recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

  And he roared.

  My knees turned to jelly and my guts to water. I thought I was gonna pee myself I was so scared. I’d thought having a demon in my head was the scariest thing in the world. Nope, I didn’t know shit.

  The demon inside my head screamed, a terrible thin sound that cut right through my eyes. I felt her claws digging into the sides of my neck, and I heard a pop.

  And she was gone. Just gone.

  But the freaking bear was still there.

  He fell down onto his front paws with such force that the ground shuddered and the fat and fur on his shoulders shook. His claws were longer than my damn fingers; omigod he was gonna claw my guts out with those things, he was gonna eat me, no more Siggy, just a pile of steaming bear crap in the woods somewhere and a torn up duffel bag and people wondering where the hell that crazy girl had gone.

  At that moment I realized I didn’t want to die.

  He shuffled closer, grunting under his breath, those big brown eyes staring at me. They were so intelligent they’d have given me the creeps if I’d had any creeps left to give, but I was past the point of thinking wow, I’m looking into a bear’s eyes. I was probably past the point of crapping my pants, though if I’d thought of it I might have tried that as a method of defense. Hey, it works for skunks, right?

  I couldn’t outrun him—hell, I couldn’t move—and my best roundhouse probably wouldn’t even piss him off.

  I stopped breathing.

  I stopped thinking. I went still all over, inside and out.

  Don’t see me, I thought desperately, don’t see me. I’m not here. Nothing here. Go away.

  This wasn’t the first time I’d thought such things… but it was the first time it had worked. The bear stopped in the middle of the path with such a look of surprise I might have laughed if I hadn’t been half-dead of fear. He snuffled the air, mouth half-open and so close I could see his freaking nostrils flaring wide, head weaving back and forth as he tried to figure out where I was.

  Only I was right there in front of him. He was so close I could have reached out and run my hands through his fur, if I’d wanted to.

  Didn’t want to. Nope.

  Finally, I shit you not, he gave the bear’s equivalent of a shrug and kind of leaned off to the side, and with just another little rustle of bush he was gone.

  It was a long time before I could convince my body that I was still alive and kicking, but eventually my lungs squeezed air in and out, and I was able to blink the grit out of my eyes. A few tears might have shaken loose, too, I’m not sure. I was too busy noticing that my heart was still beating to care. I’d never noticed before how awesome it was to have a beating heart.

  Lub-dub-thunk, lub-dub-thunk. Awesome stuff. Holy hell, I’d just survived my first bear…

  …wait a minute.

  Where were the tracks? That bear had been inches from me—inches—and it hadn’t left any tracks? I crouched down, wobbling a little from the weight of my duffel bag, and splayed my hands on the soft path, scattering the dried needles and soft leaves. No tracks. I stood slowly and looked back. I was leaving tracks. Then I stared at the bushes beside the path. Not a twig out of place, and they weren’t particularly thick bushes, either. Surely they couldn’t have hidden a bear. Right?

  Right?

  So… had I imagined it? Had I hallucinated a bear, just as I’d been imagining demons and spirits and angry ghosts since I was a little kid? Demons and bears and superpowers… yeah, I was a fuckin’ mess.

  Nothing much had changed, then. The thought was almost cheering. I might be in a strange place, half sucked dry by mosquitoes, and fairly certain I was lost on the path to nowhere, but at least I was still crazy. The sky was blue again, and the trees were whispering to each other about tree stuff. I smiled, and shrugged my pack straight, and kept on keepin’ on.

  Still, I had a feeling I was missing something.

  * * *

  As it turned out, I didn’t have much farther to walk. The trees thinned till I found myself standing in a patch of skinny willows not much taller than I was, at the top of a tall bluff overlooking a handful of crappy-looking houses. I mean, half of them weren’t entirely built, and the other half were falling apart. The yards were dirt, full of rusted bikes and woodpiles and wolfish-looking dogs on chains.

  All the picture was missing was tumbleweed and banjo music. It looked like the end of the line, the end of all hope. Only crazy people would live in a place like this.

  Maybe I’d found my family, after all.

  I reached out and plucked a willow leaf and stood there for a while, rolling it back and forth between my fingers, smelling the green smell, and wondering what in the world I’d been thinking, coming to the middle of A-freakin’-laska. What did I expect, a golden place at the end of the rainbow, streets lined with beautiful people singing and dancing as I skipped up the steps to my new home? Hell, nobody had come out to meet the plane. Maybe they weren’t even expecting me. Was I supposed to just knock on a random door and tell them who I was?

  I shredded the leaf with my fingers. Would these people claim me as one of their own? Or would they shut the door in my face, just like every other family I’d tried to fit into? As I looked at the raggedy little cluster of houses, I wasn’t sure which would be worse.

  9

  A crow landed in the tree beside me and gave a skrawk; I jumped halfway out of my skin. I may have squeaked a little, too. I was too damned twitchy after that encounter with the bear.

  I stooped and picked up a stick to throw at the dumb thing, but stopped short when I saw him. This wasn’t a pesky crow, but an enormous, sleek, bona fide Alaskan raven. He was black and shiny as a beetle’s shell and stared right at me. Something about that look gave me pause. I’d seen it before, on the face of a black belt who was waiting for me to throw an obvious punch. I’d had the floor mopped with my face enough times to know when not to take a dare. So I dropped the stick, and the raven made a weird noise like a watery chuckle and then he exploded from the willows.

  Skraa skraa! Qa’hoq!

  My heart galloped around my chest like a racehorse taking its victory lap. Damn bird. I looked down at the crappy little buildings again, sighed, and started down the embankment.

  They’d better have coffee.

  I was hyper-alert by then, and froze when I heard a low growl behind me. As it neared I decided it was an engine, not that bear coming back to eat my face. I grew more certain as it drew nearer, though no less wary. Just because it wasn’t a bear, that didn’t mean it wasn’t a monster. My fears were confirmed when a big yellow all-terrain vehicle snarled its way out of the woods and fishtailed to a stop behind me.

  Yep, he was human. A good-looking young male in his prime. Absolutely the worst kind, and I figured that after my flight, and the demons, and the bear, I probably looked more like Mowgli than something you’d want to drag home. I even may have scowled a little.
r />   “Hey,” he shouted, showing off a set of perfect even teeth. And dimples. “You Sigurd?”

  “No, I’m frickin’ Goldilocks,” I snapped.

  Normal people get a taste of my temper and just back off, but apparently there was something wrong with this dude. He laughed as if I’d said something clever.

  “You’re one of ours, all right! I’m Garvin. Garvin Hooper… We’re cousins. Grandpa John sent me to get you, but you weren’t at the slip. I saw that raven and figured you got yourself lost in the woods. You city people… one road into town, and still you can’t find the way. Didn’t anyone ever tell you to stay on the path, Goldilocks?”

  His accent was odd, the words slow and slurry and clipped at the ends as if he were biting them off one by one. He was handsome, I thought, his cheekbones so high they pushed his eyes into smiling half-moons. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, and dimpled—he probably had his pick of the girls in town. My scowl deepened.

  “Nobody was there to pick me up, and I got tired of waiting,” I said, still sounding bitchy. “And I didn’t get lost, I took the same road you did.”

  “Girl, this ain’t no road,” he laughed. “You took a bears’ trail. Lucky you didn’t see one, they’re pretty cranky this time of year. You look almost like one got you on the neck, though. What’d you do, pick a fight with a tree and lose?”

  My heart gave an odd thump, and I reached up to touch my neck. Just as he’d said, the skin was raggedy, and now that I was aware of the scratches, they stung like a bitch. My demon had clawed at me before, but it had never left a physical mark.

  That can’t be good, I thought. And then it dawned on me. Maybe I didn’t imagine the bear, either.

  Well, that’s a reassuring thought. Either my demon was real, and the bear was real… or I was going even crazier. Well, crazy was okay. Crazy was good. Crazy doesn’t eat your face, but a bear might.

  “I thought I saw one on the trail… a bear,” I admitted, and waited for him to laugh. Hell, I hoped he’d laugh. “But then there weren’t any tracks or anything, so maybe not.”

  As soon as I said the words, I wished I could take them back. I had to be on my best behavior with these people, trick them into thinking I was normal for as long as I could. As soon as they realized I was nuts, I’d be back on that plane to Michigan.

  Bane had warned me about coming back too soon. I wasn’t a wimp, but I had a feeling the sparklepunk assassin with purple nails was a threat way above my pay grade.

  Garvin just shrugged. “Could be. Lotsa bears here. Why you think it’s called ‘Tsone’? Means ‘Bear,’ you know.”

  No, I hadn’t known. How could I? If I’d grown up here, maybe. I might know the words, I might know these trees, this strange soft ground under my boots. I might know this handsome cousin of mine. But I didn’t know the words, this place, these people. It had been taken away from me, all of it, and in its place I’d been given a head full of demons and scars on my wrists.

  This pissed me off, but Garvin didn’t seem to notice my black mood.

  “Don’t worry, Goldilocks. Bear’s not gonna eat a skinny thing like you, not when he’s got a river full of fat fish and lots of blueberries. He was probably just welcoming you home. Come on, my mom’s making soup. Hope you like fish, city girl.”

  My stomach growled, surprising us both. Garvin laughed and scooted forward on the ATV.

  “Come on, then, let’s go eat.”

  I tossed my duffel bag onto the back rack, securing it with bungee cords, and swung my leg over so I was seated behind Garvin, kind of squooshed up against his back. I hadn’t ridden one of these things in years, and felt the same little thrill I’d had as a kid. Garvin felt solid in front of me, and smelled of sawdust and motor oil and shampoo. I wasn’t sure where to put my arms—it would have been awkward to grab a stranger round the middle—especially one I was related to. So I grabbed tight to the seat behind me.

  “Hold on to yer butt, city girl!” Garvin yelled, and we shot off at such a breakneck speed that I had to grab onto him after all. The path dropped out from under us, and my stomach dropped with it. Garvin whooped and hollered, and we kicked up dirt and rocks and I’m pretty sure I swallowed a bug. The wind roared past my face so fast that tears leaked from the corners of my eyes and flew into my ears. I clung to Garvin’s rough jacket for dear life, figuring this was it, this was the end of Siggy’s story. A weird feeling grew in my belly and my chest, and it took me a minute to realize what it was.

  Fun. I was having fun.

  The next time we hit a bump in the trail and went flying, and Garvin let out a war whoop, I hollered right along with him. We flew down the bluff and up over a little hill covered in willows, which slapped me in the face as we passed. The path was sandy-soft and the wheels sank on one side, then the other, threatening to dump us on our asses, but somehow Garvin managed to keep us upright.

  At the bottom of the little hill we surprised a huge wall of moose and two little mooses—a mama and her babies, I guessed, and was it mooses or moose? Meese? They scattered in front of us, stilt-like legs pumping up and down as they put as much distance as they could between themselves and these insane creatures.

  I had fallen through the looking glass and wound up in Alaska. Which made perfect sense, since I was crazy.

  All this place needs, I thought, is a white rabbit and a frickin’ Cheshire cat. And… something else. Something else was missing, but it took me a minute to figure out what that was.

  My demon. My demon was gone. She hadn’t come back.

  Even as the thought crossed my mind, the hairs on the back of my neck stood straight up. I risked a glance over my shoulder and saw, thought I saw, a huge dark shape watching me from the woods.

  10

  In order to get to Grandpa John’s cabin we had to travel through town, past the dump, about ten miles up something called Salmonberry Ridge, and about a hundred years into the past. It was an attractive little cabin, neatly built and neatly kept, with a split shingle roof, moss chinking between the logs, and no running water.

  Okay, maybe two hundred years into the past.

  I sat at one end of a beautifully polished long table made of some heavy dark wood, nervous as hell and wearing my best manners. Either half the town had turned out to meet me, or the cabin slept a lot more people than it would appear. The place was packed like a can of sardines, but strangely quiet. I could feel the weight of their regard like a heavy blanket, though nobody seemed to look directly at me.

  All I have to do now, I thought, is realize that I’m sitting here in my underwear, and I’ll wake up.

  I’d never, ever been in a room where everyone looked like me. Dark hair, dark eyes, mocha latte skin, even the bone structure said “these are your people.” I held as still as a deer, afraid that if I breathed they’d realize there was an impostor in their midst and toss me out.

  Garvin caught my eye and winked, and I managed a weak smile. His mother, Trudy, ladled soup into a shallow bowl and it was handed down to me. It smelled like heaven, if heaven smelled like fish. I picked up my spoon and stopped, staring.

  The soup stared back.

  Garvin reached across the table and touched my elbow, a pained look on his face.

  “Not till Grandpa gets here,” he whispered. I set my spoon down, still staring into my soup with growing horror. The broth was a beautiful, sparkling gold, and heavy with inelegant chunks of salmon and potato and unfamiliar vegetables, and—were those salmon eggs?—and what I thought might be lumps of cartilage.

  And eyeballs. The salmon stared up at me from his watery grave, clouded eyes accusing. I looked up at Garvin, pleading, but just as I was working up the nerve to ask do I really have to eat this the door banged open, and a man came stomping into the cabin.

  He was five foot nothing, a miniature man with a bent back and gnarled hands. Looking at him, I knew I had never really worked a day in my life. Everyone in the cabin stood at the same moment, packed in as they were, and I stood as w
ell, nearly spilling my soup. It felt as if the whole world was holding its breath as the old man looked at me for the first time.

  “Sigurd,” he said, and his smile broke like the dawn. “Oh my dear Sigurd, you came home.” Without the least hesitation, without a moment’s doubt, he opened his arms wide as morning. I pushed my chair back and walked into his embrace, wishing I felt half as sure as he seemed.

  Then he held me, he held me tight, and snap I was three years old again, bouncing on Grandpa’s knee: home again, home again, jiggity jig. The tears pushed against the backs of my eyes. They clogged my throat and filled my chest till I could hardly breathe. The old man—my grandfather, my grandfather—clung to me for a long moment, and even when he held me out at arm’s length so he could look at my face, his grip on my shoulders was strong as tree roots.

  “You came home,” he said, and his voice broke. Tears rolled down from his eyes to become immediately lost in the cracks and crevices of that marvelous face. “You look just like your mother.” He had the same strange, smooth, slurred accent as Garvin.

  With that, the mood in the room shifted perceptibly. There was noise, and laughter, and smiles as the village of Tsone welcomed home a long-lost daughter. Me. Garvin pounded me on the back and Trudy—Aunt Trudy, she insisted with tears in her eyes—handed me a big chunk of crusty bread to go with my eyeball soup. Grandpa John took his place at the other end of the table, and dinner was served.

  It was time to eat.

  I could feel eyes on me, sidelong glances from the people to my right and left, and the salmon’s direct glare. Grandpa John didn’t seem to notice and he shoveled soup into his mouth using both hands, a spoon and a chunk of bread. So these folks wanted to see if I could handle Alaska? Challenge accepted.

  Here goes nothing, I thought, wielding my spoon as if it were a weapon.

  “You spit out the little balls in the eyes,” Garvin whispered helpfully. I raised both eyebrows at him, giving him the blandest look I could manage, and scooped one of those fuckers up into my mouth. I may be crazy, but I’m no coward. Hell, as a kid I’d stolen lunches out of the cafeteria garbage cans, and more than once. How much worse could it be?