She raised her eyes again. The larger flock was coming.
“Jim,” she said urgently, holding his face in both hands, peering into
his beautiful blue eyes, icy now with a cold fire of self hatred, “only
one more step, only one more thing to remember.” Though their eyes were
only a few inches apart, she did not believe that he saw her; he seemed
to be looking through her as he had earlier in Tivoli Gardens when the
burrowing creature had been racing at them.
The descending flock squealed demonically.
“Jim, damn you, what happened to Lena might not be worth suicide!”
The rustle-roar of wings filled the day. She pulled Jim’s face against
her body, and as before he did not struggle when she shielded him, which
gave her hope. She bent her head and closed her eyes as tightly as she
could.
They came: silken feathers; smooth cold beaks ticking, prying,
searching; claws scrabbling gently, then not so gently, but still not
drawing blood; swarming around her almost as if they were hungry rats,
swirling, darting, fluttering, squirming along her back and legs,
between her thighs, up along her torso, trying to get between his face
and her bosom, where they could tear and gouge; batting against her
head; and always the shrieking, as shrill as the cries of madwomen in a
psychopathic fury, screaming in her cars, wordless demands for blood,
blood, blood, and then she felt a sharp pain in her arm as one of the
flock ripped open her sleeve and pinched skin with it.
“No!”
cloud of other birds, a mass of dark bodies and wings, perhaps two
hundred of them high overhead.
She glanced at Henry Ironheart. The birds had drawn blood from one of
his hands. Having huddled back into his chair during the attack, he now
leaned forward again, reached out with one hand, and called Jim’s name
pleadingly.
Holly looked down into Jim’s eyes as he sat on the bench in front of her
and still he was not there. He was in the mill, most likely, on the
night of the storm, looking at his grandmother just one second before
the fall, frozen at that moment in time, unable to advance the
memory-film one more frame.
The birds were coming.
They were still far away, just under the cloud cover, but there were so
many of them now that the thunder of their wings carried a greater
distance. Their shrieks were like the voices of the damned.
“Jim, you can take the path that Larry Kakonis took, you can kill
yourself I can’t stop you. But if The Enemy doesn’t want me any more,
if it wants only you, don’t think I’m spared. If you die, Jim, I’m
dead, too, as good as dead, I’ll do what Larry Kakonis did, I’ll kill
myself, and I’ll rot in hell with you if I can’t have you anywhere
else!”
The Enemy of countless parts fell upon her as she pulled Jim’s face
against her a third time. She didn’t hide her own face or close her
eyes as before, but stood in that maelstrom of wings and beaks and
talons. She looked back into scores of small, glistening, pure-black
eyes that circled her unblinking, each as wet and deep as the night
reflected on the face of the sea, each as merciless and cruel as the
universe itself and as anything in the heart of humankind. She knew
that, staring into those eyes, she was staring into a part of Jim, his
most secret and darkest part, which she could not reach otherwise, and
she said his name. She did not shout, did not scream, did not beg or
plead, did not vent her anger or fear, but said his name softly, again
and again, with all the tenderness that she felt for him, with all the
love she had. They battered against her so hard that pinions snapped,
opened their hooked beaks and shrieked in her face, plucked
threateningly at her clothes and hair, tugging but not ripping, giving
her one last chance to flee. They tried to intimidate her with their
eyes, the cold and uncaring eyes of beasts of prey, but she was not