one had been orderly, this one was chaos. It looked as if someone had started out drawing in the island, roughing in its topological features. And then lost their mind. There were jagged teeth scribbled along the isthmus, turning it into a grinning mouth. Eyes clustered along the hillsides. Elongated human figures that reminded me of cave paintings were scattered randomly across the page. In the center of it all, drawn with such a heavy hand it nearly blotted everything else out, was a shape that I took at first to be random scribbling. But the shape of it coalesced from the mad tangle of lines, some so ferociously drawn they’d ripped through the page.
Two wings stretched upward, two pointed down, and two swept out to either side. They sprouted from a central body that suggested something both human and inhuman at once—a head, two arms, two legs, its eyes blank holes.
THE SIX-WING was written beneath it in shaky handwriting. And beneath: It took them.
My hands were trembling, my heart beating fast as a bird’s in my chest, as I held the map up for the others to see. The creature from the church. The creature from my dreams.
“This is what you saw?” Abby asked, taking the map from me. I could only nod. And then I twisted back to the drawer, a metallic taste in my mouth. There had to be more here. An explanation for how the monster from my dreams was replicated in ink on a madman’s map. There—something at the back of the drawer.
My hand closed around a hard object the size of my palm. A bird’s skull, the bone strangely blackened, easily double the size of the others along the wall. I frowned at it. A strange sensation gnawed its way down my spine. Like a vibration, the hum of a ship’s engine as you stand on the deck.
“Sophia?” Abby said.
A black liquid trickled from one gaping eye, oozing slowly down the contours of the bone. I touched it with my fingertip and found it was slippery, cold. Abby said my name again, but I heard it only distantly. Strange darts of light shivered through the air. My breath slipped from my lips in a cloud.
“It’s happening a—” Liam said, but it was like listening to voices from underwater.
“What—” I began, looking up, and then the room exploded into a flurry of wings. Birds careened, screaming, around me. Wings struck my face. Claws raked at my neck. I caught glimpses of the frantic bodies: doubled limbs, twisted spines, skulls with no eyes or too many. Birds flopped and writhed on the ground, or crashed into the walls. Screamed and screamed and screamed.
And I was alone.
“Liam! Abby!” I yelled, but they were gone. I charged for the door, the skull still clutched in one hand, and dived through. I slammed it shut behind me, putting my whole weight on it, and caught one white-winged bird. I felt the crunch and pop of its hollow ribs between the door and its frame. With the hand that clutched the skull, I shoved the twitching thing back through and latched the door. Bodies thumped against the other side, the screeching muffled now but unending.
I backed away, breath coming in short, sharp gasps that couldn’t seem to fill up my lungs. My stomach lurched and roiled, all acid and revulsion. My shoulder blades smacked against the wall, and it was then I realized the hall was dark. The lights overhead were out. And there was no sign of either Liam or Abby.
I had to remind myself to breathe. Convince myself to think things through, instead of picking a direction and running until I couldn’t anymore.
This wasn’t right. Neither was a room full of dead birds coming violently to life. I crept forward down the hall. Ahead of me, a door banged, again and again, the seconds in between punctuated by the whistle of a strong wind. I followed the sound.
I came around the corner. The door—one of the side doors—flew open again with another bang, then rebounded to almost shut. It couldn’t close all the way because someone was standing there—a man in a bright green windbreaker. The door hit his shoulders; the wind shoved it open.
I took a step closer, opening my mouth to call out to him, ask if he needed help—and the words shriveled in my throat as I drew close enough to see him in more detail.
The man’s back was pulp. Blood and spurs of smashed