“Of course,” I answered. I twisted my woman-wrist and snapped his neck, and his dying breath was a sigh of relief.
I dropped his body to the floor, where he landed with a soft paff. Then I thought better, and I picked him up, returning him to his cage and locking the door. His fellows huddled in the corners, burrowed into sawdust. They stayed far from the stench of his freedom.
I did it in the bathtub. I stopped up the drain so that I would know how much blood I’d lost, and I tied up the shower curtain so that it wouldn’t stain, and I reached behind myself with fists full of tools. A sharp tool, and a long tool, and a tool for grabbing, and a tool for burning. It wasn’t as hard as I had expected it to be—I had enough experience with pulling things out of humans, had nimble enough fingers.
I wouldn’t have expected the pain, but the boy Peter had ripped the other wing out without even using tools at all. So it really wasn’t so bad.
I reached into myself with the tool for grabbing as blood pooled around my feet. It was warm and soft and reminded me of more comfortable times, and I was thankful for it. I gritted my teeth as I rooted around, cried out as the tips of the tool for grabbing found the spur. I clenched my fist, and I yelled a guttural, animal yell, and I pulled.
An eruption of white fire. A gout of burning blood spilling over my spine and buttocks. And there, right there in my hand, a two-inch long piece of wing. All that was left. Not bound behind iron, not hidden away in a collection.
Mine.
I wept with pain. I wept with relief. I wept with joy.
I did not let go of the tool, even as I unstopped the drain and ran water and washed myself, letting soap sting the wound in my back. I did not let it go as I dried myself. I did not let it go until it was time to bury it in the earth of the boy Peter’s weedy little flower garden. I had to force my fingers to straighten. I tucked the spur of wing into my cheek, sucking the woman-blood off it, and buried the tool for grabbing with a whisper of thanks.
Before Peter came home, I walked back into his lab with my piece of wing poking at the soft flesh of my cheek. I opened the door and stood just inside, my hand resting on the doorknob.
Squeaks. Squeaks and chirps and even a high, steady scream from the rabbit.
“What are you saying?” I whispered, my voice wavering around the spur in my mouth. “What do you want?”
The squeaking intensified, rose to a fever pitch, and I smiled as the incomprehensible cacophony crashed over me.
I couldn’t understand a word they were saying.
It had worked.
*
“How’s your back doing?” the boy Peter asked that night as he climbed into his bed. Into my bed.
“Better, I think,” I answered, and my voice was almost normal. I had been practicing all day, learning how to speak around the piece of wing in my mouth.
“Good,” he said. He kissed me on my empty cheek, and then he rolled over and he closed his eyes and his breathing slowed and he was asleep.
He was asleep.
And I was awake.
I waited, waited, waited. I waited until he was deep asleep, so deep that a pinch on the plumpest part of his cheek wouldn’t wake him. And then I swung a leg over his hip, and I settled my weight onto the bones of his pelvis. I felt his hips underneath me and I waited for two breaths. If he woke up, I wouldn’t need to make an excuse. He would assume, and it would be over fast enough, and I could try again another night.
Two breaths.
He didn’t wake.
I toyed with the spur in my cheek. It was sharp at both ends, broad in the middle. Too big to swallow whole. I shifted it with my tongue until it was between my broad, flat-bottomed woman-teeth. I breathed in once, filling my mouth with the smell of old blood and wet bone, and then I bit down.
It tasted like me and like blood. It burned my tongue, and I bit down again and it burned my cheek. I chewed, chewed until it was a fiery paste, and then I swallowed, and I felt it. Underneath the lingering pain of the blood.
I felt the magic.
It flooded me, bright and brief as lightning, and there was so little time that I didn’t even have time to think, and I did it in that moment, and it was perfect.
I changed.
The boy Peter’s eyes flashed open. He looked at me, first through the veil of sleep and then through the veil of terror. I grinned down at him.
“What the fuck?!” He struggled to sit up, but I clenched my new thighs, pinning him. He wriggled, caught, and it wasn’t until I rested a thick-knuckled hand on his chest that he stilled. “What the fuck?” he whispered again.
“Yes, Peter,” I whispered back in my new voice. In his voice. “What the fuck.”
“But—how did you—you’re—”
“Don’t you like it?” I asked. I leaned down until our noses touched, and then I kissed him. He kept his eyes open, panic clenching his pupils. “Oh, come on, Peter,” I said, my lips moving against his so that he would feel his own voice humming across his teeth. “What’s the matter?”
“But—you can’t—”
“You’re right,” I said. “I can’t. Not anymore. That was the last time. That was the last of my magic.” I kissed him again, brushing his Peter-lips with my Peter-tongue, and he flinched violently away.
“Go away,” he said, but his voice was weak and I knew that he knew better.
“Never,” I whispered, and I rolled off him. As I closed my eyes I smiled, because I knew he would not sleep that night.
He might never sleep again.
*
I had never looked into mirrors before the boy Peter ripped my wings off.
Now, every morning was a mirror.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said when he woke to find me perched on my side of the bed.
“Like what?” I asked. “Show me. What does my face look like right now?”
“Stop it,” he said when I climbed into the bathtub alongside him.
“Stop what?” I asked. “What am I doing?”
He hit me once, a closed fist and a slow, weak push of knuckles into my nose. It wouldn’t have hurt, but I leaned into him to make sure. He looked at his hand, and he looked at my face—at his own face—with blood coming out of it, and he whitened.
“I didn’t mean to—” he started to say, and I wiped at the blood so that it smeared across my face.
“I didn’t mean to punch you,” I said. He bit his lip and I grinned. “I didn’t mean to make your nose bleed,” I continued in his voice, saying it the exact way I’d heard him say a thousand things. “I didn’t mean to hurt you like that. You just made me so mad.” I licked my lip where my blood was dripping, and the burn was worth it. “You made me so mad,” I said, “and I lost control.”
“Stop it,” the boy Peter said, and I laughed, and I kissed him, and when he shoved me away my blood was on his teeth.