Witches’ Brew by Terry Brooks

* * *

Vince had completed his shift at the Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle and was on his way to his car when he impulsively changed direction and went back into the aviary for a last look at the crow. The damn thing fascinated him. It was right where he had left it earlier, sitting by itself on a branch near the top of the enclosure. The other birds left it alone, wanting nothing to do with it. You couldn’t blame them. It was a mean-looking thing. Vince didn’t like it, either. But he couldn’t stop wondering about it.

A crow with red eyes. Not another one like it that anyone had ever heard of. Not another anywhere.

It had popped up out of nowhere. Literally. Same day as that incident at the King County animal shelter when those two nuts posing as Drozkin and some guy from U Dub had stolen that monkey or whatever it was. No one knew what had happened to them. They’d just disappeared into thin air, if you could believe the lies being spread around. Then, not two hours later, this bird appeared, right there in the same cage the monkey disappeared from. What were the odds of that happening? No one could explain it, of course. It was like one of those UFO stories, one of those sightings where weird things happened to the people involved but no one could prove it had really happened. Vince believed in UFOs. Vince thought there were a lot of things happening in the world that you couldn’t explain, but that didn’t make them any less real. It was like that with this bird.

Anyway, there’s the bird, this crow with the red eyes, lying there in the cage, stunned. The animal shelter people were no fools. They knew a specimen when they saw it, even if they didn’t know exactly what sort of specimen it was. So they hobbled it and brought it over for study. An exotic bird, so it belonged in the zoo. Now it was Woodland Park’s job to figure out what it was. No one knew how long that might take. Months, he guessed. Maybe years.

Vince leaned against the wire, trying to get the bird to look at him. It didn’t. It never looked at anyone. But you always felt it was watching you nevertheless. Out of the corner of its eye or something. Vince wished he knew its story. He bet it was a good one. He bet it was better than any UFO story. There was a lot more to this bird than met the eye. You could tell that much by the way it conducted itself. Aloof, disdainful, filled with some inner rage at life. It wanted out of there. It wanted to go back to where it had come from. You could see it in those red eyes if you looked long enough.

But Vince didn’t like to look into the crow’s eyes for too long. When he did, he could almost swear they were human.

About the Author

Terry Brooks was born in Illinois in 1944. He received his undergraduate degree from Hamilton College, where he majored in English Literature, and his graduate degree from the School of Law at Washington & Lee University.

A writer since high school, he published his first novel, The Sword of Shannara, in 1977. It became the first work of fiction ever to appear on the New York Times Trade Paperback Bestseller List, where it remained for over five months. The Elf Stones of Shannara followed in 1982, and The Wishsong of Shannara in 1985. Magic Kingdom for Sale—Sold! began a bestselling new series for him in 1986–the most recent book in that series is Witches’ Brew. The Heritage of Shannara, a four-book series begun in 1990 with Scions of Shannara, concluded with the publication of The Talismans of Shannara in 1993.

The author was a practicing attorney for many years, but now writes full-time. He lives with his wife Judine in the Pacific Northwest and Hawaii.