The Murmurations of Vienna Von Drome
JEFFREY FORD
Pellegran’s Knot, in spring and summer, appeared an idyllic city. There was the shore, a vast park with hiking trails and, in the center of its enormous lawn, a working carousel. There were excellent restaurants, an historic district with a Pre-Empire cathedral (Saint Ifritia’s) and secret tunnels, an observatory, museums, a modern street car, and reasonable lodgings city-wide. The place was off the beaten track in the best of ways. As I noted above, the Knot, as we called it, “appeared” idyllic. There were, though, two very glaring aspects that disrupted its claim to quaint tranquility. One was disturbing in a kind of wonderful way, the other in a decidedly horrible way, and the truth was they were inextricably intertwined.
There was, in the Knot, a history of murder. Once every few years a body was found, always in the winter months, always after a fresh snow, the face shredded as if by claws, the abdominal cavity split open in a crude fashion and the spleen removed. Remnants of the partially devoured spleen were usually found near the victims but sometimes as far away as a half mile. My predecessors in the constabulary had determined that all these brutal killings had been carried out by the same person. The scenarios were identical. There were clues—long white hairs found upon and in the vicinity of the bodies. Strange dental marks in whatever remaining piece of spleen might have been recovered.
I came on the scene at the age of fifty, after having spent twenty years as an officer of the constabulary. It was a surprise promotion—head investigator for the third of the brutal murders. There was no way to sugar coat it: we had a serial killer living in our midst, someone all us citizens no doubt passed at one point or another on the street. Eventually, the newspaper dubbed our malefactor, the Beast. We locals discussed the existence of the maniac only among ourselves, keeping the tourists out of it. Everyone knew to keep mum in spring and summer. The newspaper never dared print a word about it each year until the leaves had turned orange. Even the killer acquiesced and killed well after the last of the bathers, sightseers, gourmands, had left for home.
A question you might ask is, “Was there never a witness to any of these crimes?” In fact, I met the young Vienna Von Drome through the treacheries of the Beast. Its third victim was Professor Clifford Von Drome, a naturalist and physician who taught at the local Lyceum. He was slain in his rooms overlooking the park—face torn to shreds and his spleen missing. The room the murder took place in, the parlor of his spacious apartment, was spattered and soaked in blood as if a blood tornado had cut through the center of the place. The only thing different about this incident as opposed to the Beast’s other attacks is that there was a witness. We were fairly certain that Von Drome’s thirteen-year-old daughter and her pet were present during the entire macabre act. Why she wasn’t killed as well, we had no idea.
Of course, I questioned her. She wore a student uniform, plaid skirt, white blouse, dark blazer—a pretty young girl with long hair, lighter than blond, clear blue eyes, and pale skin the color of cream. Her stillness and silence put me in mind of a ghost. She sat across from me in my office, and I asked her what happened. Not a word. The city doctor said she was in shock from seeing her father butchered. I asked her to write down whatever she could, but she just sat there and stared at me without blinking.
I sent Vienna home and had one of my officers go in a horse and carriage to pick up the professor’s. The woman, like myself, was a native of the Answer Islands, a colonial holding of the Empire. I knew her. Priscilla Goggin. Her aunt came from my old village. We got on very well, and she told me what I needed to know about the girl, her father, and her dead mother.
It was from her that I learned about Mortimer. Supposedly, the girl’s father was out in the local woods one day and discovered an abandoned chick. He brought it back to his home and gave the tiny bird to his daughter. “It’s a starling,” he said and handed her a small wire cage. My guess is he wanted her to have some responsibility to take her mind off her mother, who’d passed away only a couple of years earlier. The girl managed to raise the creature, which was no easy thing. By the time Vienna witnessed her father’s killing, the bird went everywhere with her, either flying close behind or sitting on her red beret. The starling knew hand signals and a few verbal commands, but he also could speak in a girl’s voice—a wide variety of sayings. You know, of course, that birds like the starling, the crow, the magpie, the mockingbird, can all be taught to speak like parrots. Here was my question, though. Priscilla told me that the girl’s silence and inability to communicate had come upon her quickly, sometime between when her mother and father had died. So if the girl wasn’t talking, who taught the bird how to speak?
I watched her for half a year before I started to believe that her affliction was real. It was about this time that it became clear to me that the only way an Answer Islander could ascend to Inspector was if it was a job that no one else wanted. Chasing the Beast frightened my colleagues. They were more than willing to sacrifice one citizen every few years to stay as far afield of it as possible. I was the one upon whom the scorn was to be directed when it killed. I’d have quit if I hadn’t promised Priscilla that I’d avenge her employer.
At the end of the first year following the murder of Vienna’s father, I ordered the girl and the bird to be brought in for questioning. We sat on the balcony on the southern side of the station house. I made us a pot of blue nerve tea. The weather was beautiful. We sipped in relative silence. The girl said nothing. “We’re all at sea. All at sea,” said the bird. I realized it was just nonsense, but I wondered if its voice was that of Vienna Von Drome. I’d asked Priscilla about that, and she said she didn’t know as she had come to be employed by Clifford Von Drome after the girl had lost her ability to communicate.
Vienna seemed touched. Her wealthy relatives, Clifford’s brother and sister, who lived mid-empire in the city of Totenveit, paid to keep her at a distance, with Priscilla as her guardian. Still, she was all I had to go on, and once she recovered enough to leave her apartment, I tailed her. She walked far and wide, the bird, of course, accompanying her—on her shoulder, her hat, flying from branch to branch along her path. She led me through the city gardens where she often rested on a bench beneath the ancient yew, led me along Philo’s colonnade, across the square in front of City Hall, along the twisting cobble stone streets of the old part of town, and sometimes out to the shore to ramble in and out among the dunes. On the days I followed her, I’d return to my apartment exhausted.
Then, in October, of the second year after her father’s murder, precisely on the fifteenth, I, along with my assistant, Jallico, another Answer Islander, newly hired by me to help in the investigation (I had to threaten to quit to get him a job), followed her to a bench just outside the carousel at the center of the park. There were maybe two or three people traipsing across the enormous lawn. The temperature had dropped and the wind was fairly high. Dead leaves blew out of the trees at the boundary of the field and rolled in waves across the expanse. From where Jallico and I sat, about a hundred yards away, pretending to have a conversation, we saw the bird, Mortimer, lift off her hat and fly into the treetops. That’s when I noticed that the branches were teeming with dark birds. When the wind momentarily let up, you could hear the din of their squawks and warbles.
I was taken by surprise, and Jallico jumped out of his seat, when the birds—starlings, I know now—burst forth from the branches at the edge of the field and flew in a swarm, rising and falling, twisting and turning. It was remarkable how they moved as if with one mind. They made shifting, fluid shapes in mid-air. But just as the energy of the flock was about to dissipate, and they were to fly apart and back to their branches, they made one more turn and what happened next I wasn’t quite sure I believed. When the amazing display was over, I saw Mortimer fly back to perch on Vienna’s shoulder. She got up and walked directly toward us. I took the newspaper from my pocket and brought it up to cover my face. Jallico, without a newspaper, improvised with the lame ruse of having fallen asleep. After she had passed, I turned to my assistant and said, “Did you see it there at the end?”
“The Fountain?” he said.
“Precisely.” In an instant the conglomeration of dark birds—as if the strokes of an ink pen upon blue paper—transformed into the image of a fountain. Starlings in the form of water, sprayed at the top and fell into the catch basin. The entire thing lasted no more than ten seconds but I distinctly saw it.
“If I’m not mistaken, Inspector,” said Jallico, “that was not just any fountain, but the fountain over by the cathedral.”
I realized he was right. “So it was,” I said, and patted the young man on the shoulder.
On the first anniversary of the murder of Clifford Von Drome, Jallico and I lurked in corners where we’d not be seen. From mine, the fountain was due west, and straight through the front doors of the cathedral. The wind blew through in gusts, leaves and stray paper, but not a soul. Later we walked the twisting cobble stone streets back into the ancient neighborhood. As day slid toward night, it began to snow. We got lost finding our way back to the cathedral where, when we finally arrived, we huddled for warmth before trying to make it to the streetcar. Jallico had a nasty habit of cigarette smoking, but I tolerated it because it helped him think. We sat in the front pew before the altar and beneath the empty echoing dome. We could hear the wind outside.
“He’s not coming, is he?” asked my assistant.
“What do you mean?”
“I mean he’s not coming out this year to kill. I think I can feel it.”
“You’re delusional, brother,” I told him. “The first time you think that, he will assuredly strike.”
As it turned out, Jallico was right, but that didn’t spare us the angst of the months between the end of autumn and spring. News of a body seemed always waiting just around the corner until late March.
It was three years before the Beast returned. Jallico and I stayed on the case, trading off days during which one of us either tailed Vienna Von Drome or wandered the streets around the cathedral. We witnessed the girl grow into a young woman. As she got older, it seemed that she became more aware of the existence of other people. She noticed, watched, winced, and nearly smiled once, or at least that’s what I thought. Mortimer stayed by her side. She never left the apartment without him. Almost every day, a long walk all around the Knot. And yes, on October 15 of each of the three years, Jallico and I witnessed, in the empty park, the murmurations of Vienna Von Drome. Each year the swarm left us with another clue: a cat, a triangle with a circle above and one below, and a giant starling. Although my assistant and I never disagreed about the images, there was always the slight sense that they were no more than a figment of the imagination. In other words, there was doubt.
The hissing cat head was a thousand starlings or more. The creature pounced into the air and burst apart. In the moment it was airborne, its hair was depicted as sharp angles and its eyes were enormous. The same thing with the giant starling made of starlings. A conundrum but it too was impressive. Once you’d seen these images born of the bird’s unified flight, there was no forgetting them. I wondered how much Vienna’s pet, Mortimer, had to do with it. “What if the bird’s running the show?” I said to Jallico.
He shivered slightly. “If that were the case,” he said. “I’d quit on the spot, but what if the Von Drome girl is the one who killed her father?”
“Vienna the Beast?” I said. “I suppose it’s possible, but she’d have had to have been ten when the first of the murders took place.”
We learned from the Commissioner of the constabulary that our office and our budget line would be stricken from existence if the Beast didn’t kill in the fourth year since its last slaughter. Our good fortune depended upon someone’s murder. That October there was no murmuration. Vienna and Mortimer showed up on the bench beside the carousel, but the bird never left her shoulder.
Something was up. She’d met a young man on the patio of the Coffee Exchange in late August. I watched the entire affair transpire from a distance. I’m not even sure you could call it an affair. They sat at a metal table, each drinking coffee, watching the horse-drawn carriages ferrying citizens off to their appointments. She didn’t speak to him. He carried on a conversation for the two of them. The few times I drew close enough to catch the topic of his monologue, he was going on about love and the cosmos. Jallico pegged him as having a loose screw. Still, Vienna, who cast no eye his way or gave any indication that she was listening to him, came every afternoon for two weeks in August to sit and drink coffee. That was it. Of course, the bird was with her. And old Mortimer wasn’t that pleased with the fellow. He’d fly high above them and shit on the young man’s hat. We did a background check on the guy, Kemton Lair, a pretentious lout living off his wealthy mother’s money. My assistant and I took him aside and warned him that there should not be any improprieties with the young woman. We told him we were watching. Then Jallico punched him in the gut as hard as he could. Definitive punctuation to an important message. One of the good reasons to have a younger assistant.
We kept an eye on Vienna’s meetings with Lair. Once winter set in and the weather grew very cold as it does in the Knot, they moved their rendezvous inside the Coffee Exchange. The surveillance seemed pointless. Nothing was happening. Still, one of us usually followed her. One day in January when it was Jallico’s turn (I was over in the old town skulking around the cathedral), he saw, from a bench across the street from the Exchange and through its plate-glass window, Lair surreptitiously pull a knife on Vienna and grab her arm. He forced her to stand and he led her out the back door of the place. My assistant took off, bolting through the coffeehouse and out the back. The two had a head start on him but they made slow progress. Mortimer, who’d been riding his mistress’s shoulder all morning, now flew wildly around the young man’s head pecking at his eyes and pulling his hair and ears with sharp talons. As they came into view, Jallico drew his pistol, took a bead on the assailant’s forehead, and yelled for him to stop. Kemton Lair pushed Vienna to the ground and fled.
My assistant helped Vienna to her feet, made sure she was fine, and gave chase. As luck would have it the suspect ran into the old town, and I saw Lair pass at the cross street I was approaching. A moment later Jallico ran by in the same direction. I called out to let my assistant know I was also in pursuit. Kemton ducked into the municipal entrance of the historic underground, a confusing warren of paths and dimly lit passageways that ran beneath the entire old neighborhood. Jallico asked if we should split up. “He has a knife,” he said as we bounded down the stairs to the first level of tunnels. “We stay together,” I told him. I drew my weapon, and we started slowly ahead through the shadows. We got lost for hours, never seeing a soul and never finding a flight of stairs up to the street. “Good lord,” I said, “by this time he could have eaten a half dozen spleens.”
“You think this white worm is the Beast?” said Jallico. “I don’t think he could cut bread with that knife.”
“I’m not sure what to think,” I said.
As it turned out, my assistant was right. Kemton Lair was not the Beast. In fact, we found him in our 3rd and a half hour of looking for a way up and out. He was slumped against the wall in a particularly dark passage, only one torch to light the entire length of it. Jallico retrieved the torch from off the wall and brought it up close for us to see. Lair had been raggedly cut from larynx to navel. His face was shredded so badly it was like a mop head of skin ribbons rinsed in blood. I knew before we even heard back from the coroner that his spleen was missing.
“I made a mistake,” Jallico told me. “I should have followed them a little longer to see what was going on.”
“You did right. He had a knife on her,” I said.
The monetary line for our unit remained intact. I kept my job as Inspector and Jallico remained my assistant. The Commissioner called me in one afternoon and told me that there were those in the constabulary who posited that Jallico and I did away with Lair, making it look like a Beast attack, to keep our unit together. I was sitting across from him. I stood up and leaned over his desk. “You know, we found a note from the Beast,” I whispered. “He wrote that this year he is hunting you.” Of course, a lie. The very thought of the Beast actually writing a note seemed amusing to me.
My superior trembled slightly and yelled, “That’s not true.”
I backed away, smiling and nodded.
“Well, catch the damn thing, will you?”
“Will do, sir,” I said.
Winter gave way to spring and, in the intervening months, Jallico and I looked more thoroughly into the background of Kemton Lair, the way we should have to begin with. Apparently the old woman he was often seen in the company of was not his mother. It was an assumption of those who knew him from the Coffee Exchange and the wine bar around the corner from the cathedral. As one woman put it, “I swore it was his mother by the way she yelled at him in a whisper, but when I referred to her as his mother, he shook his head. ‘She’s my fiancé,’ he said. Well that struck me because she looked saggy and old with that crazy white hair. He was so young and handsome and she was a mess.”
We asked after the woman, but nobody knew her nor where she lived, except that she seemed to be local, a resident of the old town. We couldn’t find Lair’s address either. We set that information aside for a while, since it was going nowhere, and went back to shadowing Vienna. It was difficult to tell whether she acknowledged that Lair was missing from their rendezvous. I watched her from a considerable distance through a spy glass as Jallico watched her from a bench ten feet away. She peeked in the Coffee Exchange window, hesitated a moment, and then fled in her inimitable style—like a sleep walker.
All spring and into late summer, I played the voyeur, setting myself in some vantage point in town from where I could spy on Vienna’s progress as she circumnavigated Pellegran’s Knot. I told my assistant to follow her every day. I tracked them as they made their way. Why? What did I have to prove? Nothing. I was waiting for Vienna’s next murmuration, for the Beast to strike again. Waiting and watching. In addition, we accomplished one other thing. We tested the white hairs we found on the body of Lair and a few of the other victims, seeing as that the old woman was said to have a shaggy head of white hair. We found in all cases, though, with the exception of one, that the hairs were not human—believed to be those of a cat. In the one exception, the victim’s own hair was white and that is what was believed to have been found.
We were reminded of the murmuration of the image of the cat, but it turned out to be as fruitless as the image of the fountain or of the starling itself. That summer was balmy, slow and still. Pellegran’s Knot had never seen so many tourists, but they were a subdued lot. I admittedly dozed through most of the spring and summer when I wasn’t spying on Vienna and Jallico. Then in late August I noticed that Vienna’s daily constitutional shifted course and the walk now took her, every day, out of sight, behind the giant sand dune east of the harbor known as the Eruption. For a good five minutes she and Jallico were blocked from my view. When the young woman finally appeared on the other side of the Eruption, she was walking in her usual somnambulant gait, and Jallico followed a surreptitious distance behind.
Vienna’s autumn murmuration that year told the tale. As clear as day, all made of birds flapping and soaring, she and Jallico embraced and kissed for distinctive seconds and then shattered into individual starlings dispersing.
Jallico and I sat side by side, across the field from Vienna, who was, as always, on the bench beside the carousel.
“Was that you?” I asked him.
He turned lightning quickly to face me. “Are you serious?” he said. “It’s not me.”
“Behind the Eruption perhaps?” I said.
“Never,” he said. “That bird is trying to frame me. I’m almost positive it knows I am following her.”
“Very well,” I said. “I trust you would tell me everything. But I do have to ask. You understand.”
“Of course.”
Still I was mightily suspicious. It could have been Lair in the murmuration, but the way the long hair hung in the back was the picture of Jallico, and his height. Lair was much taller. “Who do you think it is?” I asked him.
“It could be anybody. It could be her imagination,” he said.
After that day, I took Jallico off the duty of tailing Vienna and put him on a detail of searching through the old town for the woman with white hair. I followed Vienna with my spy glass from the bell tower of the cathedral, and I noticed that once Jallico was no longer pursuing her, she no longer passed behind the Eruption on a daily basis. In fact, she never did again. As the cold weather came on, her walking route stayed clear of the shore, and passed through the most pedestrian parts of town—the field with the carousel, the city square, Saint Philo’s colonnade, etc. One place she was making new visits to, though, was the Lyceum where her father had been a professor.
It was three weeks after we’d witnessed the starlings’ depiction of Vienna sharing a kiss with a young man—a cold and dreary Friday that made me feel my age. The old women who gathered on the benches in the city square were predicting a snow storm the likes of which hadn’t been seen in the Knot in years. That was the word from Jallico as he arrived at our offices at the constabulary just after the rolls and coffee had been delivered.
“You know what that means?” he said. “The snow?”
“I could smell it in the air,” I told him. “While I was waiting for you, I cleaned my pistol and made sure it was loaded.”
“Do you feel the Beast will strike today?”
“I’d like to put an end to this bloody case and retire.”
Before setting out—Jallico for the old town and me for the Lyceum, we decided to use a runner. We needed some way to keep in touch throughout the day, and so we put in with the Commissioner to procure a child messenger, willing to run word between us as the day progressed. The girl, Meralee, I was told was quite fast and could be trusted with any assignment. She was very attentive, her face like an axe-head pointing forward, ready to cut into the day. Long red hair and freckles; a lively child. Even as fed up with life as the Beast had made me, she brought a smile to my face. I would give her a handsome tip well past what the constabulary would pay her. Jallico and I decided that he should take her first as there was a greater chance that he might run into our quarry. The Beast had already struck a few times in the area around the cathedral and fountain.
“Send the girl off before you engage in anything the slightest bit dangerous,” I said. “And if you pick up the trail of the Beast, contact me and wait till I arrive.”
It had already begun to snow, and so I took a coach and four to the Lyceum. It was a hulking, somber old place built of granite shipped in from the majestic cliffs of Answer Island—even the least of my homeland’s attributes were appropriated by the empire. Of course, academics rarely work a full week, and the place was like a ghost town. I showed the secretary of the zoology lab my badge and asked to see Clifford Von Drome’s offices and effects. The fellow looked to be a science experiment himself, a shambling wreck in a moth-eaten sweater, a bent primate with long arms and short legs. Stokes was his name, and though he was certainly not much to look at, he knew where everything was.
An hour after I arrived at the empty school, I found myself knee deep in cartons of paper in a dimly lit room. Sifting through the professor’s work, I slowly came to realize he was a serious scientist. His specialty appeared to be centered on the nexus between human and animal disease. He seemed to be looking for human cures in the animal world. Most of the work dealt with immunology. There were papers on certain failings of human health and animals’ natural protection against those diseases—the slow loris, ghost lemurs, certain members of the cat family, civets, raccoons. There was a series of daguerreotypes I uncovered of individuals half naked and beset by strange growths and postures, odd manifestations of the face, like one old fellow with pointed ears and long incisors.
After a while I took a break and went out into the hallway to escape the stuffy room. Stokes came by and inquired if I needed anything. I asked him why all these boxes and notes were kept. He told me that Von Drome was a brilliant researcher and some of his investigations into the Natural world had resulted in cures and products that brought the Lyceum and the city quite a bit of money. I asked him to stay still for a moment and went back into the room to fetch the browning daguerreotypes of the patients. I’d hoped that he might be able to identify one or two of them even though time had moved on. I handed him the lot and said, “Do you know who any of these people are?”
“I’d seen them in here years ago,” he said. I remember these poor souls but their names are long gone. He came to the last of the pictures and held it up. “This one is Tessa,” he said.
“Tessa?”
“Von Drome, Clifford’s wife. If you ask me, it was the reason he undertook the study of these diseases and the search for cures. When they’d first married, she’d contracted something strange up in the forests of Lindrethool where they’d gone on their honeymoon. The symptoms of the disease showed themselves years later.”
I took the picture from him and beheld a lovely young woman whose upper body, stomach to breasts to neck was covered with a fine white down. Her pupils were pure black.”
“It finally killed her some years back when that poor daughter of theirs reached her teen years. A damn shame. Not to mention her father being murdered just a couple of years later.”
“She’s been coming here lately, hasn’t she, Vienna Von Drome?”
“Yes, I let her in to look at her father’s things. Why not, what could it hurt? I’ve known her since she was a girl.”
“Does she speak to you?” I asked.
Stokes smiled and shook his head. “Not a word.”
A half hour later, I was sitting in the Lyceum café, sipping a cup of chocolate, and studying the daguerreotype of Vienna’s mother. The place was empty, and I could see through the floor-to-ceiling windows that the snow was angling down. I heard the wind howling. The next thing I knew, there was a small mittened hand upon my jacket sleeve. I looked up. It was Meralee. She leaned over, out of breath, and dug into her coat pocket. A moment later she was flattening a piece of paper on the table. I lifted the cup of chocolate and handed it to her and told her to sit down and rest. I picked up the paper and read it. Jallico had scribbled me a note. At the top there was a drawing of the triangle with a circle above it and a circle below it, precisely the image we’d seen created by the flock of starlings during one of the murmurations. Beneath that was an address—62 Marfal Street, old town.
“Can you show me where it is?” I asked the girl.
She nodded, threw back the rest of the chocolate, and we were off. I flagged down a coach outside the Lyceum, and we hopped aboard. It was a relief to be out of the stinging snow. I offered the driver a tip if he could hurry but he told me that the cobblestones were slippery and therefore treacherous. He told me he’d go as fast as he could but the cobblestones were slippery and therefore treacherous. The red-haired girl was good to her word and brought us to a small side street in the old town. I had the driver pull up a few yards away as to retain the element of surprise. The buildings were close together in that area, and the streets were like narrow canyons that cut through them, hardly enough room for two small coaches to pass side by side. I got out and paid the driver. Then I paid Meralee and told her to stay in the coach, head back to the center of the city. She asked if I might need her later, disappointed that she was no longer part of the investigation. It was obviously too dangerous for me to allow her to remain. I saw her off down the street and then pulled my pistol and approached the house.
It leaned slightly forward out over the street. Its shutters were chipped and splintered as was the door. Green paint was faded or curling. On a wooden plaque screwed into the face of the house next to the letter box there was a figure, rendered in fading chalk—a triangle with a circle above it and one below. I didn’t knock but tried the knob. It wouldn’t budge. I kicked it in with little resistance from the flimsy lock. I peered into the dark, and my heart started to pound. “This is all wrong,” I remember thinking. I’d given orders for him to wait for me if he came upon something. The snow came down harder, the sound of the wind confused me. All I could manage to think was, “It’s the season for killing.” I stepped into the darkness.
I stood with my gun raised, waiting for my eyes to adjust, relieved, at least, to be out of the storm. A minute passed and then I heard something knock against the floor upstairs just above me. Slowly, I groped around and by lighting a match I was able to find the stairs. Retaining the element of surprise in an effort that involved climbing stairs was difficult. I breathed shallowly and tiptoed one step at a time. Although I’d just come out of the frozen afternoon, I was already sweating. The worn steps cracked and popped like an old man’s spine. The tension built to a breaking point and to relieve it, as I reached the top step, I called out for Jallico. A loud groan emanated from behind a closed door at the left end of a hallway. I suddenly had a purpose and moved without a second thought.
I kicked that door in as well. It swung back, and I stepped into a large room lined with bookshelves. Straight ahead, I saw no one, but as I turned the corner into the room, I went into shock. My training and my experience should have directed me to pull the trigger, but instead the hand holding the gun fell limp at my side. Jallico was slumped against the wall, his face in bloody shreds. His shirt and coat were ripped away and his torso was cut from top to bottom, a gaping cavity of gore. I saw rib bones and intestines. Leaning over him was someone, no, something, with a large serrated blade in one hand and a raw piece of dark bloody meat in the other. It ripped off a piece of the spleen with its sharp teeth, the blood smearing all over the long white hair on its body and head. I needed to stop seeing what was before me. I lifted the gun to obliterate the sight and saw Jallico’s eyes move and his mouth open. Instead of firing on the Beast, I shot my assistant in order to spare him. The creature shrieked and leaped at me like a cat, swiped the gun from my hand by raking the flesh off my wrist. I was slammed against the wall with such force that I momentarily lost consciousness.
I came around a minute or so later to the sensation of someone lightly stroking my forehead. I knew immediately I couldn’t move. Opening my eyes, I saw a blurry figure leaning over me. I was almost positive it was Vienna. There was blood on her lips and she made a soft trilling noise. That’s all I remember before falling again into total blackness. When I came to, it was also to the sensation of someone lightly stroking my forehead. Again I opened my eyes, and saw it was the red-haired messenger girl, Meralee. “Get help,” I managed to grunt. I saw her nod and she was off. In the hour it took for the constables to get there with an ambulance, I tried to hold on to that vision of Vienna I’d had, tried to determine if it was real or a dream. Eventually, I saw it all as a murmuration, a swarm of birds that became the world and then flew me into night.