My breathing changed, heart rate sped. My last thought was of the animal I was to become. The Eurasian eagle owl, Bubo bubo. My bones slid, skin rippled. Mass shifted down, to the stone. To the rock beneath me with loud, cracking reports. Black motes of power danced along me, burning and pricking like arrows piercing deep. Mass to mass, stone to stone.
Pain like a knife slid between muscle and bone along my spine. Wings slid out along my shoulders, metamorphos ing from arms. Golden feathers, tawny, brown, sprouted. My nostrils narrowed, drawing deep, filling smaller lungs. My heart raced, a heart meant to power flight. My talons clawed across the stone.
The night came alive—everything new, intense. My ears were bombarded by sounds from everywhere. The mouse on the ground. Unaware of danger. The movement of tree leaves a hundred yards away. Chicks cheeping. Bird nest. Food. The house settling.
Eyes meant for the night took in everything, seeing as clearly as if the sun still shone. Light and shadow stung my vision, bright, acute. Ugly human light. I gathered myself, spread my wings, and leaped from the boulder, out over the garden. Beating the air with a five-foot wingspan, the wings of an animal that had never lived on this continent. It had been long since I flew, but the memory was stored in the snake of the bird. I wobbled, stretched into flight, caught a rising thermal, let it carry me up with less effort than beating wings alone.
I looked down, reaching into the night, finding the gold nugget on the boulder, its place in the world. Identifying it amid the grid of streets in my owl memory. My human consciousness merged with the owl’s, dispersed into the cells of the Bubo bubo.
Hunger ripped my belly. Below, a form moved, silent in the night, four paws padding, gray striped with white. I folded my wings tight, and dove. Talons reaching, I slammed into the prey. My forward-curving talons gripped, held. My beak tore into the back of its neck, through the vertebrae. I took down the feral cat. Sitting in the shadows, I ate, ripping bloody flesh with talons and beak until my belly was full. It was always like this after the change. Hunger. There was little left of the cat when I was done. Feet, bones, skull.
The memory of myself, buried under my skin, began to stir. I like cats. . . . My human self grieved. Then memory moved. A map. Ahhh. The hunt. For one of them. I drew in the night, sounds of shouting and gunfire in the distance, foul human smells and sounds and filth of their world. Motors and engines. Cat blood. I leaped into the air. Thermals were confusing in the city, rising and falling over buildings, stirred by unexpected drafts from the river. The river.
I banked and found it, sparkling and whitecapped in a rising breeze. Rain soon. The knowledge of weather was part of a raptor’s native genetic snake. I rose on the leftover heat of day, soaring high. Below me, I found the highway, a ribbon laced with moving lights crossing the river. I followed it, away from the city, along the map stored beneath my skin and in the human part of me. To the place where vampires lay their true-dead and find their healing.
CHAPTER 18
We still search for absolution
From a thousand feet up, the moon silvering the night, stars shining like a million lights, the ecstasy of flight filled me. My heart beat powerfully. My wings spread wide, soaring. Air currents ruffled my flight feathers as I cruised, my belly full, joy singing in my veins.
My attention was caught by a large rat emerging from a swampy place far below. Good eating if I was hungry—good for feeding chicks. Near the wet ground, I spotted a small, whitewashed building at the end of a crushed-shell street. Curious, I half folded my wings and dropped six hundred feet. Spread them again, to circle.
Distant memories stirred. I was searching for this place. The building had no cross, but its walls were tall, its roof was vaulted, and a spiked steeple speared the sky. Katie. Vampires. Remembering, I dropped lower.
Narrow, arched windows were pointed at the apex—chapel windows of stained glass. But unlit. Dark. Vampire dark. The white building was made of ancient cement mixed with shells, and it glowed with the light of the moon though no lights lit the windows or the grounds.
The earth all around the chapel-that-was-not was studded with white marble crypts, family-sized mausoleums, shining in the moonlight. They studded the ground, little houses for the true-dead or the living undead. I circled down, seeing car lights drawing in from every direction. Yet here, in this ancient building, no lights burned.