Split Feather by Deborah A. Wolf

Author:Deborah A. Wolf
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785654497
Publisher: Titan

19

Dawn is an odd thing in the land of the midnight sun. The sun has only just dipped below the horizon when it begins to rise again. The birds have hardly finished their goodnight songs before it’s time for them to get back up and hunt for the early worm.

I knew just how they felt.

I’d taken to piling pillows on top of my head to keep out the light—two or three usually did the job—and I’d rigged up maybe a mile’s worth of mosquito netting to keep the bloodsucking little fuckers away from my exposed flesh as I tried to sleep. By little, of course, I mean mosquitoes the size of Volkswagen Bugs and with all the malicious zeal of religious fanatics, bent on driving me insane with their evil buzz, and then sucking the last drops of blood from my corpse.

Emily told me that Raven, having created the world and everything in it, decided that humans had it too easy, and invented mosquitoes to even things out. Raven and I needed to have a talk about that. I’d take a plague of demons over Alaskan mosquitoes, any day of the week.

Pillows over my head didn’t do the job the night after the dance, and a couple of mosquitoes got through the netting somehow—my guess is they had tiny bolt cutters—and bit the crap out of me. So I wasn’t even close to evolving into my human form when I stumbled downstairs only to discover that we’d drunk all the coffee the night before. We were out of coffee. I mean, who runs out of coffee?

Emily was there, and she stared as I found maybe half a spoonful of stale grounds in a can stashed behind the pilot bread, and ate it dry. She laughed so hard I thought she’d split in half, like Rumpelstiltskin.

“Don’t judge me,” I snapped. Anyway, it didn’t work, and I weighed my options—get dressed and walk to the store for more coffee, or don’t get dressed and walk to the store for more coffee.

A knock came at the door.

This wasn’t the polite tap-tap-tap of a neighbor asking for a cup of sugar, and it wasn’t the muffled thud-thud of Grandpa or Garvin with their arms too full of wood. This was the precise, no-nonsense knock of Satan herself, come to steal a child.

“Emily,” I said in a low voice, “go upstairs and hide.”

And poof, she was gone.

Fuck getting dressed. If she didn’t want to see me in my skivvies, the bitch should mind her own business. I jerked the door open, teeth bared in a half snarl, and shot Monday the blackest, meanest scowl I knew. No human in their right mind would have stood to face Decaf Siggy at her worst, standing in the middle of a room full of guns in her tee shirt and undies, itching for a fight.

But this wasn’t some human in her right mind. It was The Man herself, Angela Monday, and it would take more than dropping a house on this bitch to slow her down.

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