Chapter 1
I raised my face to the sunshine,
closed my eyes, and tried to remember what joy felt like. It had been five long
years since I had been able to feel any deep emotion. The best I could hope for
was a mild interest in something new or complicated. I knew, in the way I knew
most things I couldn’t explain, that I hadn’t always been that way. I had been
able to feel once. But it didn’t matter. I survived without strong emotion,
muddling along without real enthusiasm, but unable to grow depressed enough to
contemplate suicide. It was a wasted life, but luckily, I didn’t possess the
emotions to be concerned by it.
My companion didn’t make a sound,
but I knew she was trying to get my attention. I opened my eyes and looked at
her. The red-tailed hawk perched on a rock beside me, her keen eyes on the fish
I had just caught from the river.
I took the fish off the hook and
held it out to her without ceremony. She snatched it with even less ceremony
and began to eat it. It wasn’t in the nature of a hawk to be thankful or
appreciative. Luckily, it wasn’t in my nature to desire thanks or appreciation.
Red was a good companion for me in that respect. She was by no means
domesticated. I found her with a broken wing four winters ago. I set her wing
and kept her alive, not due to any goodwill on my part, but because she sparked
what little interest my broken mind was capable of producing. She stayed of her
own volition, probably because I provided easy meals. I couldn’t have been
around an animal that needed affection. I didn’t have any to give.
I stayed by the river until I had
caught three more fish. One I would give to Red whenever she nudged me. The
other two would be my dinner. I didn’t need to eat often, but I found some
small pleasure in it. I also found that when I ate regular meals, I had fewer
black-out rages. I didn’t possess the capacity to be remorseful for anyone I
killed or anything I destroyed during my violent mindless episodes, but I
remembered the emotion and tried my best to avoid doing anything that should
have been regrettable.
I picked up the old metal bucket
containing my fish and stretched my legs. I unfolded my leathery wings and
tried to enjoy the feeling of the sun on them. My naturally copper colored skin
had grown darker as the summer continued. I hadn’t found a style of shirt that
comfortably fit over my wings, and living as a hermit in the woods didn’t
require clothing. I didn’t possess the ability to be embarrassed, but I always
wore shorts or pants out of habit. I also needed to have pockets to store
things that interested me. Sometimes, I would find rocks that had the hint of a
shape and I would take them home and carve them. It was one of the few
activities I had found that resulted in the tickle of my lost emotions.
Red landed on my bare shoulder, her
claws not managing to puncture my thick skin. It wasn’t particularly
comfortable, but I didn’t have my leather gauntlet with me, so my shoulder was
her best perch. She preened her chest feathers while I walked.
I became aware of a presence a mile
away from my cabin. I had a sense of smell that would make a bloodhound
envious, but it wasn’t her familiar scent that gave Kate away. I stopped
walking. I knew it was her because of the crushing pressure I felt in my chest.
It would grow worse and worse as I closed the distance between us. And when she
touched me, I would drown in the storm that had been suppressed since our last
meeting.
I only experienced emotion when I
was in her presence. She was like a light switched. As soon as she was around,
I could feel again. But it came in a maddening rush; an overwhelming attack of
feeling that left me huddled on the ground sobbing hysterically. Adding to the
misery was that her presence allowed me to be embarrassed by my condition. I
might not have been human anymore, or ever, but I was definitely a man. I did
not enjoy devolving into a whimpering mess every time I saw her.
I hadn’t moved since feeling the
first crushing slap of real emotion. I was afraid to go forward. The novelty of
being capable of fear brought tears to my eyes. I embraced it, pulled
uncontrollably toward the source of feeling. Red fidgeted on my shoulder,
probably sensing my unease. She rubbed her sharp beak along my jaw in a
comforting gesture that had never had meaning for me before. With my emotions
returning, four years of companionship-joy slammed into my head and it was all
I could do not to pull the bird off my shoulder into a hug. It was good I
didn’t do that. She was a wild animal and hugging her wouldn’t work for either
of us.
I kept walking forward, ignoring the
stream of tears that lined my face. Five years of emotions were waiting to
crush me with her first touch. But I wanted it. I needed to feel again. The bad
feelings always came first and hardest, but they never lasted too long. She
could redirect me toward the good things I had been missing. But would she?
I stopped. Why was she here? Who had
sent her? How had she found me? I lived in hiding for a reason. It had taken me
a whole year after my escape to be sure I had gotten myself well and truly
lost. I owned nothing, had no credit cards or bills in my name. I paid for the
land I had built my cabin on with cash. The owner of the wooded mountainside
was under the impression I was a high functioning autistic with paranoid
schizophrenia. I had convinced him I wasn’t dangerous, and that all I needed
was isolation. Over the past two years I started going into the small town that
was the closest civilization. There was a library there, and reading was as
good as rock carving to spark my dead emotions. Going into town was the
mistake. I tried to keep a low profile. Considering I was six foot nine, had
fangs and wings, one would think that impossible. But I could fold my wings
tightly against my back and put a shirt on over them. They still showed, but I
covered the odd lines and raised ridges with the lie that I was scarred from a
fire. People accepted the lie, and my other lie of autism that kept them from
touching me. I went into town once a week to get new books, buy food and to
sell my carvings and custom built wooden furniture. It was a good simple life.
No one should have been able to find me.
But she was here. I fell to my knees
and threw up as fear and panic tormented my normally calm mind. I couldn’t
process the emotions. I wasn’t used to them. I felt my retractable claws extend
from my fingers and I began to hyperventilate.
I
must have passed out, because I had no memory of slamming my face into the
dirt. Red was hopping around shrieking at me. Her unease allowed me to take
control of myself. I pushed the panic back. I wiped the dirt and tears from my
face and held out my arm to the hawk. I didn’t bother talking to her. She
wasn’t like a dog that reacted to the tone of a voice. She responded to body
language. She inspected my outstretched fingers critically, her feathers still
fluffed. She nipped me when I tried to settle them with a stroke along her
breast. A moment later she hopped up onto my shoulder and resumed preening.
I started walking toward my home
with my pail of fish. There was no need to panic. She had come alone. There was
no other scent. If she had been sent to drag me back to the facility, she
wouldn’t have come alone. But why had she come? Had she been sent, or had she
escaped them just as I had?
She had been there from the
beginning; when I was nothing more than a mindless animal in a cage, unwilling
to eat anything that wasn’t tossed into my cell alive and terrified. She had
watched me, a young innocent girl. I shook my head, upsetting Red. She hadn’t
been a girl, only younger than the others observing me.
She had come to me alone in the
dark. I had grabbed her by the throat and pinned her against the wall, intent
on killing her. She had looked into my eyes calmly, and cried for me. I set her
down, my brain filling with words I hadn’t known a moment before. The first
words I remember speaking were an apology. It was little more than a grunted
‘sorry’, but she had smiled at me in a way that I would never forget.
The night before I escaped, she came
to me in a blue dress. She told me they had ordered her to seduce me. She gave
me my first remembered kiss, and whispered that she loved me against my lips. I
hadn’t said it back. I was unfamiliar with the gentle emotions. I was a
creature of rage. I didn’t hold her when she kissed me. I was a breaker of
beautiful things, so I kept my hands at my sides. I didn’t feel the softness of
her skin, or run my fingers through the silk of her hair. I was made of rage.
But she tamed the rage. She stole it with a gentle touch. She terrified me.
It figured that they would send her.
