“Run,” Cluck said, low enough that the three of them wouldn’t hear.
But the break in his voice betrayed him, told her that if she ran, he wouldn’t.
“No,” she whispered back. “Justin,” she said to the biggest one.
But Justin didn’t hear her, or didn’t care.
They didn’t recognize her. Her makeup was too heavy, covering the red heart on her cheek. In the dark, they didn’t see past her wings.
Cluck walked up to their line. He wasn’t taking anyone, Paloma or Corbeau, standing in front of him anymore.
“Get out of my way,” he said.
The oldest one laughed. The other two went at him.
Lace’s cousins had not been the ones to call the police about Pépère. But their parents or grandparents might have brought the police to the hospital, where the officers accepted Lora Paloma’s writhing and sobbing as a statement. Lace’s cousins carried the blood of everyone who kept him from his mother.
This time when they hit him, he hit back. Every time one of their fists went into him, his hands returned the blow. Feathers rained from his wings. The salt of his own blood dried out his mouth. This was what his hate could press against. Their hate, and the pain in his own body.
Lace called their names, trying to pull them off Cluck. One tugged on her dress to get her off him, and the fabric tore, exposing her slip. Cluck shoved him and he fell. She kicked another one, and he backhanded her to flick her away. The force knocked Lace’s right wing out of place. Cluck hit him in the jaw, a clean copy of how he’d gotten the risk manager.
Lace gripped the biggest one by his shirt collar and yelled into his face, “Justin, look at me!”
Her yelling, almost breaking into screaming, made her cousins freeze. The two younger ones let go of Cluck.
Their stares all met on her face. They stepped back like she could burn them.
“Lace?” the biggest one said, the word choked like Lace had her hand around it.
She looked at Cluck. “Run.”
Cluck grabbed her hand to make her go with him. The fildefériste blood in him shook awake. The wind shifted, the air sharpened with the scent of iodine. He had never been to the towns in Provence where his great-grandparents strung their wires. He had never walked a tightrope between a town’s tallest tree and steeple. He had never waved to the crowd gathered in front of a village church. But these trees were his wires. He could climb higher and faster than anyone in the show.
They’d hide in the cottonwood tree. They could get high enough in the branches that no one could reach them.
He let Lace get ahead of him so he could see her, make sure she didn’t turn back. The trees blurred. The moon barely reached the ground. His lungs cramped and stung, but he told her to keep going. The undergrowth crunched and snapped under their steps, the sounds scattering night birds.
But Cluck didn’t find the cottonwood trunk standing alone. Another familiar shape broke its line.
Cluck and Lace stopped.
Dax stood near the tree’s base, still in his funeral suit. He would have heard the fight with Lace’s cousins, the noise in the stretch of woods both the Corbeaus and the Palomas considered theirs.
He took in Lace’s ripped dress, her bent wing, her tangled hair. Then he looked at Cluck. “What did you do?”
The pain between Cluck’s ribs brightened and spread.
It didn’t matter if Dax knew the truth, that this town thought Alain Corbeau had raped Lora Paloma. Whatever he knew or didn’t know, Dax had been waiting for years for Cluck to live up to his left-handedness and the red in his feathers. Cluck was le petit démon, the blighted thing that would ravage this family if Dax didn’t keep him caged.
Something had lit the green in Dax’s eyes. Cluck being with Lace. The white wings that might have been enough to make Dax realize she was a Paloma. The black and red wings on Cluck. Dax wondering if Cluck had been the one to tear Lace’s dress.
Cluck got in front of Lace. He’d made her part of this, so he had to stay between her and Dax.
But Dax didn’t go after Lace. He grabbed Cluck’s collar and shoved him against the cottonwood. The impact went through Cluck’s body. He fought to hold his breath in his lungs.
“You never listen, do you?” Dax hit him in the jaw.
The force rattled down through Cluck’s neck.
“I told you not to.” Dax got him again, left temple this time. “And you did it anyway.”
A seam of blood dripped down Cluck’s cheek. It stung like a spray of hot water.
He tried to get Lace’s eye, to tell her to run even though he couldn’t. Dax wanted him. He was the traitor, le bâtard. The evil thing that would ruin his family. If he let Dax pin him against this tree, hit him until he had to hold Cluck up by his collar, Lace could get away before Dax remembered she was there.
El que quiera azul celeste, que le cueste.
He who wants the sky must pay.
Lace saw the look, the flick of Cluck’s eyes telling her to leave. She ignored it. Blood streaked his face. It stained his collar. If she left him here, Dax would kill him.
So she kept searching the dark ground for anything to stop Dax. She wasn’t big enough to pull him off Cluck. If she tried, she’d make it worse, irritating Dax like a wasp. She needed something big enough to knock him out.
The sound of Dax’s fist hitting Cluck’s skin again made her stumble. Her hands found a branch, heavy and knotted. The bark felt rough as raw quartz. The rain had eaten at the wood. It wouldn’t have fallen if the chemical hadn’t weakened the bough.
“You always have to do something, don’t you?” she heard Dax say.
She picked up the branch and steadied her grip to go at him.
“I don’t know what you did,” Dax said. “But everything bad in this family starts with you, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Cluck said.
The hint of a laugh in his voice made her look up.
She stopped, the branch still in her hands.
“It does.” Cluck half-smiled, blood trickling from his lip.
Dax stared at him, fist frozen at his side.
The fear left Cluck’s face. He opened his eyes, the moon a white fleck in each iris.
Yeah, it does. Those three words, accepting the things his family hated about him. Instead of letting them leave a thousand little cuts in him, he sharpened them himself, held them like knives.
It wasn’t true. Everything bad in these trees and that water lived there before Cluck took his first breath.
But Dax could think anything he wanted. The truth didn’t belong to him anymore.
Cluck turned his shoulder, getting free of Dax’s grip. He drove his fist into the side of Dax’s face, and Dax fell. His body hit the underbrush, and he blacked out.
This was just one hit returned out of a thousand Dax must have given Cluck. But it was perfect, and clean, and it belonged to Cluck. All those years of hiding in trees and crouching in corners, every bruise, split lip, broken finger that had held him down like a hundred little stones, now let go of him. She could see his back untensing, not fighting them anymore, until she thought the black and red of his wings would lift him off the ground if they caught the wind just right.
Lace dropped the branch and put her hands on the sides of Cluck’s face. “Are you okay?”
His palms slid over hers, warming the backs of her fingers. “Yeah,” he said. “I think I am.”
A rush of voices drifted through the forest. Both their families were coming for them.
Cluck grabbed her hand and set it on the cottonwood. “Climb,” he said. One word, and she got herself up the first few branches. He followed her, their weight disturbing the boughs. Leaves fell, catching in their hair.
She stalled halfway up the tree, where they’d stopped the night he’d shown her how to climb. She set her back against the trunk. Her eyes flashed down, the ground so dark she couldn’t make out the undergrowth.