Hot Pterodactyl Boyfriend (35 page)

The crows. A mass migration of them, a cacophony of crow song, or whatever it was. Whatever they were saying to one another.

Was real. It seemed to Shiels that everything in the last few impossible months had been leading up to this moment, with the ice screaming closer and closer, not a smooth surface either, not glassy, but frozen in chunks, some heaved up by the force of the water below, jagged and hard and . . .

Ow!

They hit something and bounced. Shiels felt the blow in her shoulder, then they were rolling, rolling . . .

(
God!
Why had Pyke never learned to land properly?)

A bounce and something sharp again on her knees and then . . .

Still.

(The crows flapping all around them.)

Still.

On the ground.

Alive.

Her hands, her arms, would not move. Pyke seemed folded up beneath her, like that fossilized version of him she'd glimpsed in prison. He roused himself, struggled to his feet, but her fingers were still clamped to his neck choker (she couldn't let go, it would take a crowbar!).

It would take crows. A storm of them all around her, not pecking at her digits but prying them open. She thought her fingers might snap off like Popsicles twisted apart . . .

Ah! Ah!

She fought free and staggered to her feet.

“If you
ever
 . . . do that . . .” Her voice cracked. She wasn't sure she could speak.

She was surrounded by a universe of crows.

“Where the hell are we?”
she croaked.

On a frozen river somewhere in the backcountry, hemmed in by whitened hills pixelated with dark trees in the gloom. On the shore a few collapsed buildings, graying with age, were also cloaked in crows. The roar of them hit her full force—as if her hearing had been knocked out but now was online again.

Pyke stood unsteadily, his chest quivering with the effort.

Was this it? The honeymoon spot? How was she supposed to live here? Or were they just resting, were they actually heading somewhere even more remote, more private, more their own?

He did look, somehow, bravely heroic just at this moment. Obviously exhausted from the flight, his muscles spent, but he still sported that mischievous grin, and he was looking at her in naked love, starving with passion. It was true, what a romantic gesture to stage the breakout and fly her all the way here just for this moment when they—

Unless, of course, he wasn't quite looking at her. She glanced behind. Another pterodactyl, the one she'd glimpsed sometimes flying near them, now stood a distance away, wings folded, staring back at Pyke.

They were gigantic, these two, surrounded by the crows.

They pulled each other like planets entering mutual orbit.

She did not move, the female pterodactyl. She didn't have a crest. The back of her head was rounded. She was smaller. Her feet were yellow. She looked . . .

“Jocelyne?” Shiels cried out.

Jocelyne's gaze did not waver. It was Pyke who moved first, stumbling toward her, while Jocelyne stayed where she was, quietly catching her breath the way she did when she had broken some record on yet another long-distance run. Pyke staggered to her on the uneven footing, hop-hipping, his wings spread but clearly too weak for any more flight, at least for now. Jocelyne flew at him—he leapt at her, more than anything else—and they collided and locked wings. They spun and fell together with the crows swarming around them, cushioning their fall.

“No way!” Shiels yelled, picking past the ice chunks as she stepped toward them. “No way do you get to fly me here to watch you have pterodactyl sex yet again!”

The crows scattered, the lovers looked at her like something they didn't understand.

“Why am I here? Am I supposed to become a pterodactyl too? Part of the harem? Where are my wings?”

The wind shrieked, her body was chilled through. The two pterodactyls were not talking . . . not talking to her.

“Because I'm not doing it. I'm not! I had a life . . . I
have a life!
I'm human. Do you understand that?”

It was like yelling at the wind. Pyke—he thought he was God's gift, he thought he could just scoop her up and fly her against her will . . . practically against her will . . . all the way to this frozen stretch of—

It felt like the spell broke, like the sudden cracking of ice, like those endless pictures of glaciers falling away into the ocean. (What was the word? Calving.) This wasn't her place. This wasn't her. She was
human
, she had to . . .

Get over this hallucination, this ridiculous romantic fascination that had so upended her life! Pyke didn't love her. He loved her shoes, for God's sake. He wanted her to grow wings and a beak, to repopulate the world with shrieking little baby pterodactyls! But she was human, she had a brain, a life, a plan to go to college. All right, it wasn't flying above the clouds for hours against the sun, but it was her life,
hers
.

“I'm human!”
she screamed at him.

She had to act like a human, she had to . . . organize something.

Heat, for example. She wasn't some flying, writhing, shrieking beast. She was not equipped. Her teeth were rattling now, she had barely recovered control of her limbs, her gut was a chunk of ice. She had read about hypothermia. This was a crucial stage. She needed fire, she needed . . .

She thudded off to the nearest abandoned shack. What was this, a mining community of some sort, disappeared now back into the bush? The walls slouched, the roof was partially caved in. How old was it? No way to tell. The door was frozen shut.

For God's sake!

She kicked at it, the wood splintered, she fought her way through.

(How could she have fallen in love with a shrieking pterodactyl?)

She needed fire. It was truly black inside for a moment, but then her eyes adjusted. She hurried past the collapsed beams into the middle, to what used to be the kitchen. To a crumbling counter. To drawers . . . that would not open. The wood had jammed into place with the awful settling of the house. . . .

If Shiels ever survived this, what was she going to say to Jocelyne's mother? “It's all right, Mrs. Legault. They fly, hunt, and fish together. I'm sure Jocelyne will be wonderful at hatching the young.”

Jocelyne's mother, who might not be alive too much longer anyway.

A rusted oil drum crowded everything. Shiels almost knocked it over, getting to another drawer, which did open—old, cold cutlery. And in the drawer below: paper napkins, still wrapped in crinkly plastic that fell off when she picked up the package.

She could use the drum to house the fire. The paper to grow it.

She had no matches.

Outside, the screaming of the crows, and now of Pyke and Jocelyne, reached new heights. The beasts and birds were all warm with their movements, she felt sure, but she was going to freeze senseless in the next few minutes. Already her fingers, her hands were reacting spastically—she wasn't sure she could light a match now even if she were to find one.

The drum smelled oily. Maybe just a spark would do it.

She was no Girl Scout. Rub two sticks together? She didn't have two sticks. She pushed the paper napkins into the drum. They fell in a clump. In reaching down to spread them out, she felt frozen chunks of old burned logs. So the drum had been used for fire before.

There might be matches.

She would never have Pyke. Couldn't have him! Impossible. Not all for herself. Yet she'd fallen anyway.

In the cupboard above the sink—nothing.

She wanted to live.

She wanted to go to college. She wanted to pay back her parents the lost bail money, and raise a hundred times that for the boy who'd nearly lost his arm. All her fault! Because of her infatuation with a freak of nature. Because of what that freak had unleashed inside her.

She had things to do with her life!

Another cupboard near the rusted fridge. The blasted thing opened finally. . . . A dead, frozen rat fell out and bonked the counter.

“Ah!”

Right beside the glass jar of matches that had been in front of Shiels's face all along.

What did Pyke think she wanted to be, anyway—a freaking pterodactyl?

Her fingers worked. Barely. The first two matches fizzled, but the third flamed long enough for her to drop it into the drum, which did indeed have the residue of something oily. It leapt into flame so suddenly, Shiels had to step back. Just as quickly, it seemed, the fire died down again and Shiels regretted, in a sudden shocking thought, having thrown all the paper napkins in at once. The half-burned frozen logs would not catch fire so easily. She ripped the cupboard door off its hinges—where did that strength come from?—and splintered the board against the counter. She spilled the kindling into the drum, hoping.

She grabbed a fistful of matches—all of them—then threw them into the drum and blew and blew.

She said to herself—“I'm sorry, Sheldon. I loved you, but I didn't know it. I didn't act it. Didn't treasure who you are.”

She said, “Linton, if I see you again, I want to know about your wife and your boy and girl, Don and Samantha, not about the accident but about
them
, who they were.”

A dull flicker of flame.

To her parents she said, “Forgive me. Forgive me! I forgive you.”

She blew till she could hardly breathe anymore. The flames licked the edges of the kindling from the smashed cupboard. So she smashed some more. She tore up some of the floorboards, the ones that were sticking up anyway. She didn't care when she ripped her mitts and bloodied her hands.

Even Jonathan she wanted to see again. She missed that gleamy look in his eyes when he was chewing pizza and thinking about something ridiculous.

He wasn't ridiculous. Neither was she. She had things to do with her life.

The fire grew, and she knew she was not going to die.

•  •  •

She was not going to die. In the growing glare of the lovely warm fire the rest of the cabin disappeared into darkness. She could hear the uproar outside getting closer, closer, but she was so soothed by the hard-won heat that it took her a while to realize her fire was drawing the pterodactyls, Pyke and Jocelyne, back to her, and with them the crows. She fed the burning drum bigger and bigger boards. Soon the flames shot up to the cracked and slumping ceiling. Soon the beasts and birds began to spill in and out the broken-down door, much as they had in the gymnasium after Autumn Whirl, when Pyke had summoned them to help her out.

Flashing out of the darkness, Pyke glinted in the sharp light, shrieking as if onstage. She felt her blood coursing like the dark waters under the frozen river so close by. Maybe the spell was not broken?

Is this how it happened? A sort of animal madness grows within, and Jocelyne Legault presses her way into someone else's bedroom to mate and roil until she, too, becomes a winged thing? Was the darkened nose the start of it? Was Pyke trying to engulf Shiels in this fire now? Was this Autumn Whirl all over again?

The crows were feeding her cabin fire now, bringing twigs, branches, busted boards and scraps of faded clothing, long abandoned. Flames scratched the ceiling, leapt into the darkest corners, then retreated again, and the rising, roiling, shrieking dance of birds and beasts did not stop. Shiels remembered Jocelyne dressed in black, whirling herself, before the wrangle dance, which reinvented itself now within Shiels's kindling body.

(She did feel a flame, a burning from within. But she was awake now, she knew what was happening.)

What was happening?

Her body floated above the flames, almost (that was how it felt), she was lighter somehow, like ash dancing on the current.

(This was not a surrender. She was awake, wide awake! It was a dance.)

A current of air.

(Sweating now. In hypothermia you end up shedding your clothes. The last remaining heat has fled your core and so you feel hot, deluded.)

But she was sweating from the dance, from genuine heat, some firestorm awakening in her.

The shrieking Pyke, up against her, crows blacker, larger than night. And Jocelyne, too, all of them writhing as the flames danced.

Dancing as the flames licked.

(“It isn't
about
the dance,” Lorraine Miens said in a quiet part of Shiels's brain still able to watch it all unfold. “You
are
the dance. Find out what dance you need to be.)”

This dance. This night. Dream or no dream. After all that had happened, now she was here, moving like an underground river. Her body loosening, finally. Breathing, throbbing, twisting, soaring.

There was no denying it, she had to move with it, she had to stay awake and keep her wits and . . .

In the middle of the flames.

The whole house on fire.

With the crows fanning. Pyke laughed, Jocelyne waved her new wings. . . . They were outside in a moment, the fire was just bigger, they danced around it, and those who could fly rode the updrafts. . . .

Shiels steamed from the inside. The more brightly the old cabin burned, the more the rest of the world disappeared into surrounding darkness until it was possible to believe the world was gone, the cabin had become the sun, they were all whirling around it boiling on the inside, freezing where their backs were turned to the night.

What part of it was dream? What was possible and what not? This frenzy? Hour after hour? Where did the carcass come from, carried in torn-apart pieces by crows to be set upon? Did Pyke slash it with his beak? Did Jocelyne spear and guzzle her share? Was it a wolf? A deer? Struck by a far-off car in the night and carried here by the murder of crows?

Was it carrion?

How long had it been frozen before being passed through the flames again and again, to feed their feast?

Was this the spell again, Pyke reasserting his power? If Shiels ate her share, would she cross over? Was this the cliff-edge leap that would force folded wings to crash out through the bones of her back?