Page 19 of Following Their Heart

I take flight. The journey is long. I am weary. Every flap of my wings pulls me from my home. I am heartsick. I am old and do not want to die far from my docks, where the scent of the ocean and the music of my fellow fowl are as much a part of me as my wings.

Still, I fly north. Against my will, I fly north. And the whole time, I feel Raptor’s consciousness inside me. He sees through my eyes. He hears what I hear. I am an extension of him, and I despise his petty, human obsession with power and wealth.

I wish I could break free of Raptor’s will, but it seems a part of me. I am no longer my own. I am a slave.

“It’s Raptor,” I say as the visions and feelings fade. “The black spots. I think it’s somehow Raptor’s Gift making Bernard his slave. If we can sever the bond, we can free him.”

Doc is quiet. I turn to see him studying Bernard with the corners of his mouth tipped down. “If that’s true, that’s not a medical thing. I don’t know if my Gift can do anything about it. Besides, why do we need to free him?” He motions at the bird. “He’s fine here. He’s safe. He’s being fed.”

“He misses his home,” I say simply. I can relate. There are times when I miss my parents’ farm. I miss playing with my childhood friends in the small village down the road with the shingle-sided church and the creaky windmill. I miss the car ride down the winding single-lane road to Groningen, where my mother would let me buy candy at the hardware store.

As I remember my fondness for the Netherlands, Bernard sees it. I feel his sympathy for me. A bird is relating to me. How strange! But also cool!

I feel him wondering why I don’t go back if I miss it so much.

I send him a bleak image of how I imagine my homeland post-Virus. “Everyone’s dead,” I say, and in my heart, there is jagged grief. I do not bother Bernard with thoughts of the shame that kept me away when my family would still have been alive to greet me.

But Bernard senses it, anyway. And of course, knowing he knows makes me think about my suicide attempt even more. Dumb bird. Mind your own business, I want to say, but here I am getting all up in his business, so I suppose it’s fair I should share my shame. Fine.

I let him see me at my worst, lying on a dirty motel carpet after receiving yet another rejection from the pro-wrestling circuit, unable to afford the cocaine my body needed, my father’s criticisms ringing in my ears in Dutch:“No son of mine prances around half naked! Take your foolish antics out of my sight and don’t come back until you have a respectable job!”

I’d thought I could earn his respect doing what I love, performing and using my big body for something entertaining. If I could only have made more money at it, maybe he would have found it a respectable occupation. But I never made it to the top. I was a failure. I couldn’t even afford to have my costume professionally mended, doing it myself with thread and needle while shaking from withdrawal. I was pathetic. Useless. Utterly unnecessary.

It wasn’t hard. I used the small, razor-sharp seam ripper in the sewing kit. With my strength behind it, the needle-sharp point dug into the underside of my wrist. Feeling disgusted with myself, I hacked at my veins over and over again, alternating sides, until I began to feel lightheaded. Then I simply lay back in the tub and went to sleep.

And I woke up restrained to a hospital bed, my wrists bound in bandages. I was under arrest for buying and selling drugs. I had failed, even at ending my pathetic life.

At that moment I knew I would never see my parents again. The son they had wished me to be was gone. In his place was a shameful failure. A criminal. A prodigal deadbeat, and my father was no forgiving soul, like the figure from the Bible story. No one would welcomemehome with open arms when I had been reduced to such disgrace.

Not that I could have gone, anyway. I was in prison and did not care if I ever got out. That was, until the Virus. In a fit of fever, a sick guard came to my cell, led by his German Shepherd companion. “Rufus told me to let you out,” he said, and he paused his coughing into a bloody rag long enough to open my cell door.

I am distracted from my memories by intruding thoughts that are not my own. It is Bernard. I sense his appalled confusion at why any being would wish to end its own life. In his haughty avian way, he feels that he is smarter than me, because only an idiot would spurn his own survival.

“You are not wrong,” I tell him, and I feel we have made some sort of connection. When I show him Doc petting him and the black spots disappearing, I feel his trust opening like a flower in the sun. “You can touch him now,” I tell Doc with confidence. “He will allow it.”

Chapter 8

Doc

“He wants to be freefrom Raptor,” Shep says as I reach through the bars.

I aim for the bird’s long neck, and I go slow. That hooked beak looks like it could tear a chunk out of a man’s hand.

“Yeah, well, if this works, tell him to keep clear of Raptor,” I say. “Otherwise, he’ll probably just get jumped again.” I’m within an inch of the feathers lying flat along Bernard’s neck. They’re a dirty shade of white, like socks that need washing. He leans away, but only an inch. It’s like he’s afraid but trying to trust us.

“It’s okay,” Shep tells him. “He’s a healer. He won’t hurt you.”

“Yeah. I want to heal you,” I add, even though I doubt he can understand me.

“He understands you,” Shep says, proving me wrong. “At least, he understands your intent. Even if it doesn’t work, he appreciates the attempt. He also doesn’t hold out much hope of evading Raptor for long once he returns. The man summons the birds to him, and they have to go.”

“Like, all of them?” There are a lot of birds in New Orleans. I ought to know, being from nearby. Pigeons, seagulls, herons, pelicans, cranes. The city, surrounded by all that water, must be a paradise for someone with a Gift for controlling birds.

“Ja.He controls all the birds in the area.”

I freeze and feel my eyebrows climb my forehead. “That would be like having an airborne army. You think he can do that when his gang comes up here? That could be trouble. Could mess with Scrap’s radar, affect visibility. The birds could attack us. It could be chaos.” With that unsettling realization, my hand makes contact with Bernard’s neck.

He flinches and shifts his weight from foot to foot, but otherwise remains still. His feathers are a little rough, and his temperature is surprisingly warm. In fact, it’s too warm. Don’t ask me how I know what a pelican’s normal temperature is. I just do. And this ain’t it. “He has a fever.”

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