■
She was stirred from a nap by someone speaking her name.
“Geez,” a voice. “You go a while without thinking about just how big she was, but then you see her, and… she’s big.”
Midge looked around. Her breath fogged in the air.
A house on a hill, woods at the edges. A town sprawled beneath.
She wriggled her toes, squeezing snow between each toe.
“I’m nervous about this,” someone said. “Last time…”
“The binding was imperfect,” another someone said. “We need strong, if we’re going to make it. Midge is strong.”
Midge turned to look. The last voice… a boy in a mirror.
His face crawled with branches, his hair was so grimy it didn’t move when his head did. When he blinked, six different beady eyes that peered between branches also blinked, slightly out of time.
She’d hunted his type too, more than once. Not a hunt that ended in food, but satisfying all the same. Made her think.
“She can’t come in the house,” a girl said.
“No.”
“She’ll freeze out here.”
“I don’t think she will.”
“Can we give her a blanket, or anything like that?”
“We need to focus on summoning more help, and I really don’t want to leave Andy alone. Even with his injuries.”
“I’m getting her something anyway,” the girl said.
“We agree on that,” A taller woman said, arms folded. She glared at the mirror. “If he dies, it’s on you.”
“I know. But Alexis is helping him.”
Midge watched the discussion continue.
The girl emerged from the house, two fur pelts in her arms.
No, not pelts. Coats.
“I know these probably don’t fit,” the girl said, laying the coats down on the snow, before backing up. “But I thought maybe they’d help?”
Midge stepped close, and smiled at seeing the girl stumble back three steps in quick succession, running.
She liked it when they ran.
But she’d been called like this before, and this calling was proper. She would obey until they made a mistake.
She bent down, collecting the coats. Too small. They wouldn’t fit her if she was half the size.
Still, she wasn’t stupid.
She did up the buttons, putting the buttons of one coat in the holes of the other. She lifted the resulting garment up to her shoulders, and worked her arms into the sleeves, tearing them at the seams until her arms were through.
“That works. Midge? Stand guard,” the girl said, “You have free reign to kill and maim anything that isn’t human, unless they’re someone you see standing here before you, or they say the password, ‘birds and trees’.”
Midge nodded her agreement.
“Good. Great,” the girl said, turning back to the group. “There’s something reassuring in thinking that we can’t summon anything much worse.”
“I’m not so sure,” the boy in the mirror said. “We’ve had a lot of non-answers, a lot of Bogeymen were very recently summoned and put down by witch hunters, going back to the Abyss. I almost suspect that a few locals have summoned some things to deny us the chance to. None of the ghosts in Grandmother’s records are responding, and the goblins are Maggie’s schtick. Doesn’t leave a lot of options. We’re running low on convenient allies and especially low on time. That leaves us with the inconvenient ones.”
“What’s more inconvenient than Midge?”
Midge didn’t hear the remainder of the conversation. She stared off into the distance, at this dark, beautiful place, and she saw the sunset, dark red, as the sun was a sliver at the horizon.
She smiled.
■
A spark of flame, sweet grass burned.
A voice sang, undulating, in time with a drum.
Herbs were thrown onto the fire.
Other substances were thrown into the fire.
A dozen minds within the house exploded with new sensory information, visions, hallucinations, thinking further, even as those thoughts meandered. The typical limits and defenses crumbled. The minds became truly innocent.
The singing rose in intensity.
The fire blazed.
The spirits exulted, dancing among one another, into one another.
They stuck, they bound to one another.
More grass joined the fire. The smoke changed from a clean white to black.
The spirits tore apart then rejoined, one spirit leaving a part of itself behind as it separated itself from the mass, then tried to find a better position, suiting its own need for worship and attention, for power, for placement in the grand harmony of how it all was put together.
The singing grew more intense, until each sound sounded like it caused pain to utter. There was heartbreak in there, loss and pain. Anger, all the wilder and more dramatic for the herbs in the smoke.
The tears in eyes wasn’t from the smoke alone.
The spirits collected and gathered, drawing in the emotion, feeding on it, altering themselves.
They congealed.
A greater spirit, the least of gods, the line was thin between the two.
They wore the form of a bird.
They opened their mouth to make their terrible piercing noise, a croak. Or a guttural cry. It depended on the listener.
It opened its mouth, to croak, to cry.
It ruffled its feathers.
There was only the crackle of burning grass, now. No singing.
The singer’s voice was hoarse as he spoke in Algonquin, “Cause them heartbreak. Do it until they have suffered what we have three times over.”
The spirit-bird cried out its response.
It flew from the building of interwoven wood.
It viewed the world through the eyes of a spirit. A web of connections. A tree was only a tree in the shade it gave to the ground below, to the relationship of wind to branch and air to leaf. A man was only a man in relation to those he knew, to the wife and children he supported, the house he owned and the job he worked.
The crow soared, and it saw things as greater or smaller by the good they did the people and things around them.
The crow found the brightest places, and it found a place to land.
One of the bright things was a governess, kind, looking after children that weren’t hers, because their parents had passed.
The crow watched until they had gone to sleep. It undid the latch and let itself inside.
A medallion, a precious heirloom, was moved to a box owned by the governess’ favorite orphan boy. A collection of trinkets and funny stones, buttons and one mouse skull.
The movement was careful. The thread that tied the governess to the heirloom was still strong. She would find it, and she would be hurt. Damage would be done that was irreparable. A small amount of damage, but damage all the same.