Chapter Seven

A Wish on a Crow Feather

"Shit!"

My whispered curse is sharp against the night as I watch my sneaker tumble through the wet branches to the ground below. You'd think, as many times as I've climbed up this tree, I'd have the proper skills to keep my shoes on. One swift kick in the air and I send the other one flying. It bounces on the rain-soaked lawn with slurpy thwaps.

My head is still reeling from the sight of Rook—or maybe it's the alcohol. But he's here. Back. I have to tell someone, even if it's a ghost.

Crusty paint bites my palms as I press against the window frame and sloppily push. The old wood stutters a welcome as I shimmy up it. A far-off storm rumbles as it draws nearer. I straddle the window so as not to knock over Adaire's bookcase and duck my head—son of a bitch! I press a hand to my throbbing temple where I whacked it against the windowpane.

As kids, Adaire and I would escape to a cave in the woods near the quarry pond to hide from Grandmama and Adaire's father, a real asshole, God rest his soul. A place only birds could reach, maybe a mouse. Or two curious little girls with a rope and a bagful of courage. We stole a few of the pastor's albums, records of Loretta Lynn and Johnny Cash, and would play them on an old windup Victrola Adaire found in an abandoned farmhouse.

That cave was a hell of a lot less drab than her room. Gray walls, tan bedding, and bland brown-speckled carpet. Even the furniture was sad, dinky remnants left over from church bazaars and yard sales. Child-sized, so that you have to bend down just to get your clothes out of the top drawer of her dresser. Her room still smells of Dr Pepper and incense. I let the familiar odor envelope me as I lower myself onto the bed.

So many nights, Adaire and I have lain here together. Our bodies always huddled close in the narrow twin bed. Many times after I talked the death out of someone, or at least tried. Sometimes just so I could prattle on about whatever my heart felt full with that week.

For a time, she didn't believe my wild stories about a boy who was sometimes a crow. We were kids. She thought he was my imagination gone wild. Hell, I thought it, too.

But hadn't I made a wish on a crow feather once, to save a little boy's life?

Barely nine at the time, I saw it lying there in the dirt. The setting sun captured its blue-black sheen. The wind tickled it. Grabbed my attention by my collar. I thought it was a sign. I could have sworn I heard that boy asking for my help.

Adaire saw him long before he went missing. I'll never forget the blank, lost look in her eyes as she stared off into the oil pan Bone Layer used for the truck.

Gazing is what we call it. Others call it scrying. It's when you see something that hasn't quite happened yet in a dark reflective surface.

Gazing is in Adaire's blood like death-talking is in mine. Aunt Violet used to gaze, before she gave herself over to drinking. Wyatt never quite got the hang of it. But Adaire could do more than either of them—she even had visions.

She showed Papaw on a map right where to find the boy. She'd seen him, said he was stuck in between coming and going but wouldn't be there for a few days yet.

Sure enough, a couple days later a boy fell in the river up at Blackbeak Falls in Tennessee. Rapids were fierce that winter with all the ice storms and flooding that hit us. They combed the woods from Tennessee all the way to down Georgia where our borders kissed, hoping he'd got free from the waters and was wandering in the forest simply lost.

Papaw and Bone Layer found him right where Adaire said he'd be. Washed up five miles south down the Savannah River here in Black Fern's Creek. They said he was laid on a stretch of slate rock, eyes wide-open to the sun, looking like a waterlogged raccoon with his heavy dark corduroy coat that probably weighed him down below the surface.

The boy was stuck between coming and going but not in the living and dying kind of way. He was dead, but stuck between this world and the next. That's what happens when an innocent life is snatched too soon.

Papaw's ancestors say it's the crow's job to take those ill-fated souls to the other side. Guide them safely into the afterlife. That's why I made the wish that day.

I figured, at the time, if you could talk the death out of dying, then maybe, if a Death Talker worked the prayer just right, they could convince death to leap out of the dead just the same.

But death-talking doesn't work that way, Papaw said. We shouldn't try talking the death out of the dead.

Shouldn't.

Late in the night, he and Bone Layer finally returned home with the boy's body wrapped up in one of my great-granny's quilts. They left him in Bone Layer's one-room smokehouse until the sheriff could come the next day to collect the child and return him to his family.

I wanted to see the boy. So I snuck into the smokehouse and pulled back the quilt—about jumped out of my skin to see him looking back at me. His eyes were wide-open, cloudy white, but you could tell they were once blue. His dark hair was shorn tight to his head. His skin pale as moonlight. He was beautiful, even then. So beautiful I kissed him. Coldest kiss my lips ever felt. And there was a terrible ache in my chest, seeing him lie there, lifeless. So I bent my head next to him and whispered a little prayer, something from Psalms that drifted comfortably into my thoughts.

And then I talked the death out of the dead.

I twiddle a crow feather between my fingers in the moonlight that's streaming through Adaire's bedroom window. Rain drizzles down the glass pane, casting wormy shadows on the wall.

"You think Rook will stay this time?" I ask aloud, my voice cutting through the darkness of her room. My whiskey-filled head begins to think maybe I didn't see Rook at all. That he was just a dream. Or an omen.

Pathetic how I let my emotions get here. Wanting him to come. Trying to hold on to something in this lonely world. Makes me wonder what's broken in my head—or maybe my heart—that dreams about a man who can't stay. But this time might be different, I tell myself.

A cold breeze pushes through the room. My breath a frosty cloud. I turn toward Adaire. Our noses a finger's width apart.

You gotta let me go,she whispers. I close my eyes and choke back my feelings and let the liquor and exhaustion drag me off to sleep.