The Weight of Feathers (33 page)

“What?” he asked.

A figure stepped out from behind a tree. Cluck recognized the broad shape.

“You back for more,
chucho
?” the figure said. He hadn’t gotten close enough for Cluck to make out his face, but the word he remembered.
Chucho
. The two syllables called up the feeling of getting kicked in the stomach, his grandfather’s collar coming undone.

Two more figures stepped forward, their silhouettes showing against the trees. Lace’s cousins, the ones from the liquor store.

Now his wings told them he was a Corbeau.

“And you brought your girlfriend this time, huh?” one asked.

If they knew she’d been with a Corbeau, they might kill her, treat her like a fallow deer a wolf had gotten its teeth into.

“Run,” Cluck said, low enough that the three of them wouldn’t hear.

But the break in his voice betrayed him, told her that if she ran, he wouldn’t.

“No,” she whispered back. “Justin,” she said to the biggest one.

But Justin didn’t hear her, or didn’t care.

They didn’t recognize her. Her makeup was too heavy, covering the red heart on her cheek. In the dark, they didn’t see past her wings.

Cluck walked up to their line. He wasn’t taking anyone, Paloma or Corbeau, standing in front of him anymore.

“Get out of my way,” he said.

The oldest one laughed. The other two went at him.

Lace’s cousins had not been the ones to call the police about
Pépère
. But their parents or grandparents might have brought the police to the hospital, where the officers accepted Lora Paloma’s writhing and sobbing as a statement. Lace’s cousins carried the blood of everyone who kept him from his mother.

This time when they hit him, he hit back. Every time one of their fists went into him, his hands returned the blow. Feathers rained from his wings. The salt of his own blood dried out his mouth. This was what his hate could press against. Their hate, and the pain in his own body.

Lace called their names, trying to pull them off Cluck. One tugged on her dress to get her off him, and the fabric tore, exposing her slip. Cluck shoved him and he fell. She kicked another one, and he backhanded her to flick her away. The force knocked Lace’s right wing out of place. Cluck hit him in the jaw, a clean copy of how he’d gotten the risk manager.

Lace gripped the biggest one by his shirt collar and yelled into his face, “Justin, look at me!”

Her yelling, almost breaking into screaming, made her cousins freeze. The two younger ones let go of Cluck.

Their stares all met on her face. They stepped back like she could burn them.

“Lace?” the biggest one said, the word choked like Lace had her hand around it.

She looked at Cluck. “Run.”

Cluck grabbed her hand to make her go with him. The
fildefériste
blood in him shook awake. The wind shifted, the air sharpened with the scent of iodine. He had never been to the towns in Provence where his great-grandparents strung their wires. He had never walked a tightrope between a town’s tallest tree and steeple. He had never waved to the crowd gathered in front of a village church. But these trees were his wires. He could climb higher and faster than anyone in the show.

They’d hide in the cottonwood tree. They could get high enough in the branches that no one could reach them.

He let Lace get ahead of him so he could see her, make sure she didn’t turn back. The trees blurred. The moon barely reached the ground. His lungs cramped and stung, but he told her to keep going. The undergrowth crunched and snapped under their steps, the sounds scattering night birds.

But Cluck didn’t find the cottonwood trunk standing alone. Another familiar shape broke its line.

Cluck and Lace stopped.

Dax stood near the tree’s base, still in his funeral suit. He would have heard the fight with Lace’s cousins, the noise in the stretch of woods both the Corbeaus and the Palomas considered theirs.

He took in Lace’s ripped dress, her bent wing, her tangled hair. Then he looked at Cluck. “What did you do?”

The pain between Cluck’s ribs brightened and spread.

It didn’t matter if Dax knew the truth, that this town thought Alain Corbeau had raped Lora Paloma. Whatever he knew or didn’t know, Dax had been waiting for years for Cluck to live up to his left-handedness and the red in his feathers. Cluck was
le petit démon,
the blighted thing that would ravage this family if Dax didn’t keep him caged.

Something had lit the green in Dax’s eyes. Cluck being with Lace. The white wings that might have been enough to make Dax realize she was a Paloma. The black and red wings on Cluck. Dax wondering if Cluck had been the one to tear Lace’s dress.

Cluck got in front of Lace. He’d made her part of this, so he had to stay between her and Dax.

But Dax didn’t go after Lace. He grabbed Cluck’s collar and shoved him against the cottonwood. The impact went through Cluck’s body. He fought to hold his breath in his lungs.

“You never listen, do you?” Dax hit him in the jaw.

The force rattled down through Cluck’s neck.

“I told you not to.” Dax got him again, left temple this time. “And you did it anyway.”

A seam of blood dripped down Cluck’s cheek. It stung like a spray of hot water.

He tried to get Lace’s eye, to tell her to run even though he couldn’t. Dax wanted him. He was the traitor,
le bâtard
. The evil thing that would ruin his family. If he let Dax pin him against this tree, hit him until he had to hold Cluck up by his collar, Lace could get away before Dax remembered she was there.

El que quiera azul celeste, que le cueste.

He who wants the sky must pay.

Lace saw the look, the flick of Cluck’s eyes telling her to leave. She ignored it. Blood streaked his face. It stained his collar. If she left him here, Dax would kill him.

So she kept searching the dark ground for anything to stop Dax. She wasn’t big enough to pull him off Cluck. If she tried, she’d make it worse, irritating Dax like a wasp. She needed something big enough to knock him out.

The sound of Dax’s fist hitting Cluck’s skin again made her stumble. Her hands found a branch, heavy and knotted. The bark felt rough as raw quartz. The rain had eaten at the wood. It wouldn’t have fallen if the chemical hadn’t weakened the bough.

“You always have to do something, don’t you?” she heard Dax say.

She picked up the branch and steadied her grip to go at him.

“I don’t know what you did,” Dax said. “But everything bad in this family starts with you, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Cluck said.

The hint of a laugh in his voice made her look up.

She stopped, the branch still in her hands.

“It does.” Cluck half-smiled, blood trickling from his lip.

Dax stared at him, fist frozen at his side.

The fear left Cluck’s face. He opened his eyes, the moon a white fleck in each iris.

Yeah, it does
. Those three words, accepting the things his family hated about him. Instead of letting them leave a thousand little cuts in him, he sharpened them himself, held them like knives.

It wasn’t true. Everything bad in these trees and that water lived there before Cluck took his first breath.

But Dax could think anything he wanted. The truth didn’t belong to him anymore.

Cluck turned his shoulder, getting free of Dax’s grip. He drove his fist into the side of Dax’s face, and Dax fell. His body hit the underbrush, and he blacked out.

This was just one hit returned out of a thousand Dax must have given Cluck. But it was perfect, and clean, and it belonged to Cluck. All those years of hiding in trees and crouching in corners, every bruise, split lip, broken finger that had held him down like a hundred little stones, now let go of him. She could see his back untensing, not fighting them anymore, until she thought the black and red of his wings would lift him off the ground if they caught the wind just right.

Lace dropped the branch and put her hands on the sides of Cluck’s face. “Are you okay?”

His palms slid over hers, warming the backs of her fingers. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I am.”

A rush of voices drifted through the forest. Both their families were coming for them.

Cluck grabbed her hand and set it on the cottonwood. “Climb,” he said. One word, and she got herself up the first few branches. He followed her, their weight disturbing the boughs. Leaves fell, catching in their hair.

She stalled halfway up the tree, where they’d stopped the night he’d shown her how to climb. She set her back against the trunk. Her eyes flashed down, the ground so dark she couldn’t make out the undergrowth.

“We have to keep going.” He held her waist, easing her away from the trunk. There was strength in his palms, the assurance that whatever his family thought he was, he could own it, make it his. “I won’t let you fall.”

“I can’t,” she whispered back. “I’m not like you.”

He laughed softly. “I’m not like anybody.”

He offered his hand. She took it, and he pulled her up a bough at a time. Her arms and legs trembled, shaking the leaves on each branch she touched. The wings pulled on her shoulders. But she gave him her weight, and he kept her steady.

The two families, Paloma and Corbeau, ran from their sides of the woods and surrounded the tree. Cluck’s aunts and uncles. The woman Cluck once thought was his mother, slapping Dax’s cheek to wake him up. Eugenie. Lace’s cousins.

Cluck got her to sit down on a high bough, close to the trunk. “Don’t worry.” He sat next to her, keeping his hands on her. “We’re too far up. They can’t get to us.”

The wind made her shudder. If it caught their wings, it could knock them both from the tree like a nest.

What they both knew, what he wouldn’t say, was that they’d have to come down. And when their feet touched the undergrowth, everything they’d left on the ground would be waiting, worse for being given room to rage and spread.

The height stabbed into her. It pulsed through the dark. Cluck had brought her so high she thought she could brush her fingers against the moon. Its light reached down through the branches, showing their families’ faces.

Lace looked down enough to match the voices to the far-off figures.

“Let her go,” her uncles called up to Cluck, not begging. They reprimanded him like he was bothering a stray cat, telling him to leave it alone. Because he was a Corbeau, they thought they could scare him like they would a crow.

“Come down,” Cluck’s aunts and uncles and the older cousins said, gesturing with their hands as though he’d forgotten the way.

Dax got to his feet and lunged for the base of the tree, ready to go up after Cluck, not caring that he’d never learned to climb as high. He knew now what Lace was, that Cluck had brought a Paloma into their family, and he was ready to make Cluck pay for it.

But Nicole Corbeau dug her fingers into his arm and pulled him back. She whispered something Lace couldn’t hear. But Lace could guess. Some assurance that Cluck was not worth it.
He has never belonged with us. Leave him to the Palomas. Let them do what they want with him.

“I’ll kill you,
chucho,
” Justin yelled up, his brothers echoing him. “Bring her down or I’ll kill you.”

Lace gripped Cluck’s arm. As long as her cousins were waiting for him, she wasn’t letting him go.

“Lace, come down,” her mother said. “We’ll make sure he doesn’t hurt you.”

“Are you out of your minds?” Clémentine shrieked. “You’ll break your necks.”

Abuela
called for them to kill him, kill the boy with the
violador
blood in him. Her gaze fixed on Lace’s torn wing, the white plumes proof that a Corbeau boy had not only taken Lace, but had tried to make her a feathered thing.

“Please, come down,” Martha and Emilia pleaded. “You’ll fall.”

“Cluck,” Eugenie said.

The blunt crack of a shotgun cut through the voices.

A scream tore free from Lace’s throat. She ran her hands over Cluck’s body, checking for blood, feeling for it because his shirt was too dark and too red to let her see. Wondering which of her uncles had the Winchester and if Cluck was just another crow to them.

The shot’s echo wrenched away the few pins holding the inside of her together. They fell away, so softly they did not ring out as they hit the branches, and there was nothing but the ringing of distant glass chimes.

Cluck shook his head and pointed down.

Lace’s father stood at the base of a nearby tree, his Winchester pointed at the ground. The muzzle smoked. So did a pile of leaves below the barrel. The dull burnt smell drifted up.

He’d fired it down, at nothing.

Both Palomas and Corbeaus gave his gun a wide berth.

“What’s the matter with you?” he shouted to both sides. “All of you.”

Her father didn’t understand. He had never understood. He cast off his name not because he believed
Abuela
’s superstitions, but because he did not care to argue. Cuervo or not, Sara Paloma would still be his wife, and Lace Paloma his daughter. To him, it was this simple.

He thought the feud was live ash a boot heel could stomp out. He didn’t notice it burning down both their houses.

“I don’t care what you are,
muchacho
.” Her father looked up at Cluck. “Come down. Both of you.” He lowered his eyes and held the shotgun at his side, his gaze taking in every face. “If any of you lays a hand on either of them,
que Dios me ayude
.”

He tilted his head back up to the tree, his stare broken only by the flickering leaves. “Come on. I won’t let them at you. Either of you.” His eyes stayed on Lace. “
Te lo prometo
.”

She believed him. It didn’t matter that he let the Paloma men kill crows with his own gun. He would not let the family he married into slaughter a boy.

This was their best chance, coming down, letting their families take them.

Lace pressed herself against Cluck’s chest. He put his arms around her, his hands holding her wings to her back. She wanted to remember how he smelled, the salt and the cottonwood bark. She wanted to memorize the warmth of his body on hers, the only heat that didn’t hurt her still-healing skin. When she couldn’t sleep, she would think of it, the shimmer of warmth through her breasts when she felt him looking at them.