The Weight of Feathers

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.

He held her tight to him, this boy she might have grown up with. He knew what she knew, that safe meant safe, but it also meant never again. A tear on her right cheek met one on his, the only one she found on him.

She let him go, nodding. She’d go back to her family. Maybe her father would even convince Abuela to forgive the burn on her arm, and she would swim as la sirena rosa again.

She didn’t know where Cluck would go. He was born among Palomas, raised among Corbeaus, and now neither wanted him. He’d spend his life coming up with lies about his real name and what happened to his hand.

Lace would remember this one night she saw him in his black wings.

She shifted her weight, easing onto a lower branch.