The Weight of One Feather
The watch. I’d forgotten all about my silent notifications.
Voices. Arguing. Louder by the second.
Charlie and Rune were back!
Raven turned, moving fast, but to me, it was in slow motion. The kitchen floorboard squawked under his footfall.
“Back door,” he whispered, running, one hand in front of him to seize the doorknob and the other behind him, open, for my hand. “Hurry!”
But I was frozen in place. I hadn’t finished zipping my bag.
The feather might fall out.
The microwave plate might clink against the batteries.
“Go,” Raven pleaded soundlessly, sharper now. He shoved the back door wide open, waiting for me to dive through it. Night air spilled inside.
I moved. Like waking from sleep paralysis, I moved.
But before I could make it through, the front door opened, catching for a moment on the threshold before a harder push freed it.
Rune’s voice, venomous. Not the sweet waif she pretended to be.
I stared across the open space at Raven, knowing I’d never make it. I gestured at him as I finished zipping my stuffed backpack. We always knew what the other needed when things went wrong. I was hoping this time was no exception.
“Don’t you even touch me! You used her name? Are you kidding me, Charlie?”
“I didn’t mean to—”
“Oh, you didn’t mean to say ‘Charles and Lilah Peterson’ to the hostess when she asked who the reservation was under? You’re still in love with her, aren’t you?”
Footsteps. The click of clunky heels on the wood floor. Fast. Angry. Somewhere a switch flipped, and all the overhead lamps blazed like spotlights.
I gauged the steps to the back door. I’d never make it. I was out of shadows.
Raven was already gone, the door closing silently behind him.
I turned and dove behind the living room sofa, into the space between the sofa and an étagère full of antique lockets without pictures. No time for stealth. Just reflex.
Holding my breath, I pressed myself flat to the floor and yanked my hood over my head. The heavy backpack under me dug into my shoulders. I could feel the feathered vial digging into my side, but at least I was reasonably certain I hadn’t broken the vial or the microwave plate.
Pressing my cheek harder to the gritty floor—which probably hadn’t been vacuumed in my absence—I peered between the dust bunnies at the comings and goings on the other side of the sofa.
Please, please, please, don’t let me sneeze.
Rune kicked off her shoes, one of them tumbling under the edge of the sofa, and stomped into the kitchen. The floorboard creaked under her fleeting weight.
“Baby, how many times do I have to tell you? I’m not in love with anyone but you.” He plopped down on the sofa, and it shuddered next to my face. By the position of his feet, I guessed he was leaning forward, probably with his forehead in his hands.
“Words, just words!” The refrigerator door opened in the kitchen, then slammed a few seconds later. “It’s your actions that count, Charlie.”
“Yeah,” he murmured, “I’ve heard that before.”
I almost gasped. At least that much was true. I knew all about Charlie’s words and actions, and I’d told him so.
“What was that? What did you say?” Then the hiss of a beer bottle cap.
“Nothing. Just…just talking to myself. Is that beer for me?”
“Does it look like this beer is for you? You can get your own.”
Charlie shifted on the sofa but didn’t rise. I watched Rune’s bare feet with blue-painted toenails at the edge of the room, standing their ground. Her swallows were loud enough that even I could hear them.
Come on, Raven, I prayed. Get me out of here.
Breathing deeply, silently, through my nose so neither Charlie nor Rune could hear me, I glanced upward at the étagère. The lockets were obviously Rune’s. Charlie never collected anything. None of them looked particularly valuable, but I could sense a variety of energetic signatures radiating from each as if they’d all been important to someone at some point in their pasts. Maybe trinkets for spells if Rune were a witch. Equally possible that they were souvenirs from the past husbands she’d collected: according to Raven’s research, there had been five, maybe six, most of them taken under different aliases, all of them conveniently dead once their bank accounts ran dry. I had tried to warn Charlie, but he refused to hear anything I said about her.
“Look, Rune, I’m sorry. It was just a slip of the tongue. I was thinking about work, and something Dru told me to put together for a job Lilah was doing and—” He stopped and sniffed the air.
“You get her name out of your mouth. I don’t want to hear her name in my presence again. Ever!”
I watched her feet stomp away.
“And another thing,” she called from out of sight, “I think you should work on getting her removed from the library.”
Charlie let out an exasperated sigh. “I can’t do that, Rune. If there’s a choice between her and me, Doctor Saint Augustine will fire me, not her. I’m on thin ice, and you’re not helping.” He sniffed again. “Are you burning incense? Patchouli, maybe?”
I couldn’t make myself go quiet enough or still enough. Raven and I hadn’t anticipated Charlie and Rune would share air with us on this mission, so we hadn’t taken a lot of the usual precautions. Like avoiding strong soaps or shaving lotion. I’d showered two hours ago with a soap that was my signature scent.
Something about the shift in Charlie’s energy and the aura of the entire room told me empathically that Charlie was thinking of me. Then a wave of angry energy exploded from him, even before he moved.
“Rune?”
He sprang off the couch, his feet landing with a thud on the other side, directly in front of my face. Then a beat of silence. His feet lurched away from the sofa. Toward the shelf, near the front door.
“Rune,” he said slowly, loudly, “where’s the feather?”
“What feather?”
“The one in the bottle. The black one. Right here.” His voice cracked. “Right here.”
“I didn’t touch your creepy feather bottle.”
“Don’t call it that,” he snapped. “I know you didn’t really need to come back for your shawl. That’s when you got rid of it, wasn’t it?”
“Creepy. Feather. Bottle.”
“Rune—”
“Why would I need to lie?” Her voice was closer now, even though I couldn’t see her feet in the room. “Maybe I should have trashed it. It’s probably some dumb gift she gave you—”
“It was!”
That stopped her.
“Oh, you’ve got to be shitting me, Charlie! Are you seriously still holding onto that crap? That sentimental nonsense? Is that why you said her name tonight?”
“I didn’t mean to. I told you—”
“Didn’t you?” Rune spat. “Because you’re always thinking about her. I see it. Every time you zone out. You think you can keep dreaming about her and come home to me? You think I don’t see it when you go quiet, and your head’s already somewhere else—with her?”
I could feel the air pressure shift. Her fury was a weather system all of its own.
Rune had probably passed that feather at least twice a day on her way out of and into the house. All this time, and she’d never had any idea it had been a love token from me. Or what it meant to him.
“You think I don’t see it?” She was screeching now. “You think I don’t know when you’re imagining her instead of me?”
“I’m not,” Charlie said. But he sounded tired. Beaten.
Rune’s voice lowered, suddenly cold. “If you’re not over her, then maybe you don’t deserve me.”
“Maybe I don’t,” he said.
There it was.
I didn’t know if I felt vindicated or sick.
The two of them started shouting again, closer now—just on the other side of the sofa. Rune’s voice climbed into the predatory register I’d heard her use in Ireland. Charlie’s followed, flat and worn down.
I had nowhere to go.
I started calculating escape paths in my head—how fast I could roll, crawl, dive. None were good.
And then—
A sudden chorus of car alarms ripped through the quiet neighborhood.
Sirens. Horns. Flashing lights that lit up the ceiling through the windows.
At least half a dozen cars. All at once. Then what sounded like a house alarm across the street.
Rune stopped mid-sentence. “What the hell is that? Is that our car?”
Rune muttered something vicious and stormed toward the front door, barefoot. From underneath the sofa, I watched Charlie’s feet clomp toward her and out of sight.
Which meant that if I couldn’t see their feet, they couldn’t see me.
Pushing myself off the floor and into a crouch, I peeked over the sofa and through the windows, just enough to see porch lights flicking on up and down the street. Neighbors opening doors. Blinking, irritated, stepping into front yards. Rune storming out into the driveway, with Charlie following. He fumbled his key fob like it was a live grenade.
The front door slammed behind them.
I bolted, dodging the sofa and crossing the floor in three long strides. Maybe I hit the squeaky board, maybe I didn’t—there was no time to care. All that mattered was the open door and the night waiting beyond it.
The air tore past me, and I didn’t stop running until the house was a memory.
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