The man in the grocery store asked about us on Monday.
Tessa told me at lunch, casual as anything, buttering a roll. "My mom says there's a guy asking around about the new family. Where you moved from, what your mom does, whether you have family here." She shrugged. "Small town. Everybody's nosy. He told her he's an old friend of your dad's."
"We don't have any old friends here," I said.
My hands had gone cold around my tray. Because the raven man had said others were looking. Because a thing had shifted in the trees across the street on Saturday night, in the dark, and been still.
I did not see him — my raven — at all that day. Not on the fence at dawn. Not on the gym roof. Not on the telephone pole. His absence sat in my stomach like a stone, because I had gotten used to him, me, the girl who was supposed to be running from him. His watching had started to feel like something else. Like a wall at my back.
On the walk home I kept to the main street where there were people, and I was two blocks from my house when I understood that the quiet behind me was the wrong kind of quiet. No birds. In a town full of trees, on a warm afternoon, there was no birdsong at all — and then, from the alley between the hardware store and the empty building beside it, I heard a sound I will hear in my sleep for the rest of my life.
A clicking. Slow. Wet. Like something deciding whether I was worth the trouble.
I ran.
I ran with my bag bouncing and my white sneakers slapping the pavement and I did not look back, because every part of me knew that if I looked back I would stop, and if I stopped I was finished. I heard wings — huge ones, but wrong, too heavy, a sound like wet canvas tearing — and then the shadow went over me, over the whole street, and I screamed his name. I did not even know his name. I screamed anyway, the only name I had for him: "Raven!"
He answered out of the sky like a thrown knife.
He hit the thing above me in midair and they went down together into the street in a storm of black feathers and pale ones — pale, wrong-colored feathers, grey as old bone — and for a moment it was only wings and fury and a sound no animal should make. Then he had it by the throat against the pavement, this creature that was shaped almost like a man and almost like a bird and completely like a nightmare, and his voice was not rough or low anymore. It was a blade. "Tell them," he said, "that she is under my wing. Tell them what it cost you to forget it."
The thing made that clicking sound, and smiled at me with a mouth that was nearly a beak, and then it tore itself free of him and went up into the sky bleeding light-colored feathers, and it was gone over the rooftops.
He stood in the middle of my street in broad daylight, breathing hard, feathers settling around his boots, a cut along his jaw dripping dark. And he looked at me, and there was no patience left in his face at all.
"You see now," he said. "You see what hunts you."
"That — that thing—" I could barely talk. My knees were water. "It was going to—"
"It was the first," he said. "Not the strongest. Not the last." He came toward me and I did not back away, and I could not have told you why. "Your choice ran out today, Serena. I will not stand over another street with your blood in it. Tonight, you come with me — to the place they cannot follow. You will hate me for it." His eyes held mine, and for the first time since the fence, I saw something