Page 20 of Brought to Light
Kaspar cut Oskar off with a sharp, “Hush!”
“What do you—”
“Be quiet!” Kaspar tilted his head to the side, listening.
Then I heard it too. The rushing, rhythmic sound of the beating of wings, followed by a chorus of harsh caws, growing nearer.
“Crows,” Kaspar whispered. “They’ve found us.”
Chapter Ten
Callum
Oskar snatched up his sword, shoved me out of the way, and flung the door open. “Linden, stay inside,” he said, and ran out.
Kaspar went to his bag and started rummaging through it, muttering under his breath.
Linden stood frozen, his face completely white. Even his rosy lips had gone pale. He’d already looked like he was about to collapse.
Crows—and that begged for a fucking explanation, but what in this bizarre place didn’t?—were the last straw, apparently. For a second, indecision took me over. Go to Linden? Try to comfort him? He’d wanted me to sleep with him, apparently, and fuck if I could figure out if that had been some kind of joke or not, but I doubted he wanted me to hug him.
I wasn’t a hugger. Fuck. DidIwant to hughim?
Yes, I fucking well did, and that shook me out of it.
I turned and followed Oskar outside. Deal with the immediate threat, even if that threat was some birds, and then deal with Linden later.
Maybe it was an avoidance tactic. Or maybe the crows breathed fire and Oskar needed backup. I could go either way on that at this point.
When I’d stepped out a few minutes before to find a convenient bush, the air had been chilly but the sky clear, a pure, too-blue blue that almost hurt my eyes. Now clouds were scudding in, moving faster than weather had any right to, and the sun had dimmed down to something like twilight.
Oskar stood with his feet braced apart and his head up, as if facing down an enemy, even though there wasn’t anything there that I could see. He held his sword out in front of him in a two-handed grip. I drew my gun from its underarm holster, thumbed off the safety, and pulled the slide back. The familiar chunk and click gave me a little moment of normality.
That lasted for exactly a moment. The beating of wings and the caws of crows resolved into a group of birds coming in fast, skimming over the forest treetops. Eight or ten, it looked like. Oskar raised his sword higher. I moved into position next to him, and he shot me a suspicious glance.
“Kaspar looked busy,” I said. “I don’t have anything better to do than maybe shoot some crows.”
Oskar grunted a laugh. “Don’t shoot them. It won’t do any good. They’re not really birds.”
Okay then. I kept my weapon at the ready anyway.
The crows swooped over the last of the trees at the edge of the little clearing that held the hunting lodge and settled in front of us with a great flurry of beating wings and loud cries. Dead leaves and dust swirled into the air in a choking cloud. Oskar and I stayed perfectly still, waiting. I wasn’t used to my enemy being a flock of fucking birds, or not-really-birds, whatever, but an enemy was an enemy. It felt good to be standing my ground with someone else, something I hadn’t done much of since I left the army ten years before.
Even if that someone else happened to be Oskar. I glanced sidelong at his sword, which wasn’t even wobbling from the strain of holding it at that precise angle in midair. I could do a lot worse.
One of the crows strutted forward, leaving the other nine in a hostile, beady-eyed cluster.
I thought I’d started to get used to the weirdness of this place.
And then the crow opened its beak and said, “My master sees you, Oskar of Varnu. And he sees the one called the child of sunlight.” The crow’s voice creaked like a tree branch in a high wind, with a whispery undertone that sent a shudder down my spine. It felt like nails on a chalkboard.
“I see you, harbinger,” Oskar replied grimly. “Speak.”
“Lord Evalt summons the one called the child of sunlight to his home, there to meet his fate.”
Oskar snorted. “No one’s going anywhere on Lord Evalt’s say-so. Tell him to go fuck himself.”
I’d never in my life imagined that one day I’d hear a crow laugh. Cross that one off the bucket list, and fuck, but it was the creepiest sound I’d ever heard, a scratchy, hacking noise that had me itching to pull the trigger.
