“No, you didn’t,” Mirabel says. “You want to think that you did or that you were supposed to but you always had a choice. You don’t like choosing, do you? You don’t do anything until someone or something else says that you can. You didn’t even decide to come here until a book gave you permission. You’d be sitting in the Keeper’s office wallowing if I hadn’t dragged you out of there.”
“I would not—” Zachary protests, infuriated by the sentiments and the truths behind them but Mirabel interrupts.
“Shut up,” she says, holding up a hand and looking off behind him.
“Don’t tell me to—” Zachary starts but then he turns to see what she is looking at and stops.
A shadow like a storm cloud is moving in their direction, accompanied by a sound like wind. The flames on the fire fountain waver.
The cloud grows larger and louder and Zachary realizes what he is looking at.
The sound is not wind but wings.
Zachary Ezra Rawlins has seen an owl that wasn’t of the taxidermy variety only once before, not far from his mother’s farmhouse, on a spring evening just before dusk, perched by the side of the road on a telephone wire. He had slowed as he drove by because there were no other cars and because he wanted to make sure that it was, in fact, an owl and not some other bird of prey and the owl had stared at him with undeniably owl-y eyes and Zachary had stared back until another car came by behind him and he continued driving and the owl remained, staring after him.
Now there are many, many owls staring at him with dozens and dozens of eyes and they are getting closer. A shadow made of wings and claws, descending on them. Owls swooping down from above and soaring through streets, disturbing the bones and the dust.
The fire falters in the changing air, sputtering and dimming, darkening the shadows so the cloud of owls consumes first one street and then another as it moves closer.
Zachary feels Mirabel put a hand on his arm but he cannot look away from the dozens—no, hundreds—of eyes staring down at them.
“Ezra,” Mirabel says, squeezing his arm. “Run.”
For a second Zachary stands frozen but then something in his brain manages to react to Mirabel’s voice and follow her instruction, grabbing his bag from the ground and bolting in the opposite direction, away from the darkness and the eyes.
Zachary runs through the archways and toward the buildings and down the first street he reaches, tripping over books and faltering, trying to hold on to both his bag and the sword. He can hear Mirabel behind him, her boots hitting the ground a fraction of a second after his own, but he doesn’t dare look back.
When the street splits he hesitates but Mirabel’s hand on his back nudges him to the left and Zachary runs down another street, another dark path where he cannot see more than two steps in front of him.
He takes another turn and the echo on his footsteps has vanished. He glances back and Mirabel is gone.
Zachary freezes, torn between retracing his steps to find Mirabel and continuing forward.
Then the shadows around him move. Deep hollows of windows and doorways on either side of him are filled with wings and eyes.
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Zachary stumbles backward, falling, dropping the sword. The stone path beneath him scrapes his palms as he tries to steady himself.
The owls are above him, he cannot see how many in the shadows. One grabs at his hand, claws biting into his skin.
Zachary retrieves the sword and swings it blindly, its blade catching on claws and feathers, cleaving into blood and bone. The screeching that follows is deafening but the owls back away long enough for Zachary to get on his feet, slipping on blood-splattered stone.
He runs as fast as he can, not looking back. He has no sense of direction in this labyrinthine city so he settles for following his ears, moving away from the sound of wings.
He takes turn after turn. This alley turns onto a road that takes him across a bridge, the nothingness beneath it deep with something golden far below but Zachary does not pause to look. He reaches the other side and there is no road, no path, only a gap followed by the remains of a staircase that commences above his head and continues upward, missing the rest of its steps.
Zachary turns back and the city seems empty but then the owls appear, one and then another and another until they are an indistinguishable mass of wings and eyes and talons.
There are more of them than he’d thought possible, moving so quickly that he cannot imagine they could ever be outrun. Why they even dared to try.
Zachary looks at the stairs above him. They seem solid, carved into the rock. They’re not that high. The gap in front of them is not that wide. He could reach them. He tosses the sword onto the lowest step and it stays there, steady.
Zachary takes a breath and leaps upward, one hand finding its grip on the stone stair and the other settling on the sword and then the sword slips, taking his grip with it.
And so the sword pulls Zachary Ezra Rawlins away from this broken stairway in a forgotten city and instead sends him sliding down into the darkness below.
DORIAN HAS NOT spent much of his life covered in honey so he had never before realized how it can get absolutely everywhere and insist on staying there. He fills another bucket with cold water from the barrels stored in the ship’s hull and pours it over his head, shivering as it cascades against his skin.