“We have to keep going.” He held her waist, easing her away from the trunk. There was strength in his palms, the assurance that whatever his family thought he was, he could own it, make it his. “I won’t let you fall.”
“I can’t,” she whispered back. “I’m not like you.”
He laughed softly. “I’m not like anybody.”
He offered his hand. She took it, and he pulled her up a bough at a time. Her arms and legs trembled, shaking the leaves on each branch she touched. The wings pulled on her shoulders. But she gave him her weight, and he kept her steady.
The two families, Paloma and Corbeau, ran from their sides of the woods and surrounded the tree. Cluck’s aunts and uncles. The woman Cluck once thought was his mother, slapping Dax’s cheek to wake him up. Eugenie. Lace’s cousins.
Cluck got her to sit down on a high bough, close to the trunk. “Don’t worry.” He sat next to her, keeping his hands on her. “We’re too far up. They can’t get to us.”
The wind made her shudder. If it caught their wings, it could knock them both from the tree like a nest.
What they both knew, what he wouldn’t say, was that they’d have to come down. And when their feet touched the undergrowth, everything they’d left on the ground would be waiting, worse for being given room to rage and spread.
The height stabbed into her. It pulsed through the dark. Cluck had brought her so high she thought she could brush her fingers against the moon. Its light reached down through the branches, showing their families’ faces.
Lace looked down enough to match the voices to the far-off figures.
“Let her go,” her uncles called up to Cluck, not begging. They reprimanded him like he was bothering a stray cat, telling him to leave it alone. Because he was a Corbeau, they thought they could scare him like they would a crow.
“Come down,” Cluck’s aunts and uncles and the older cousins said, gesturing with their hands as though he’d forgotten the way.
Dax got to his feet and lunged for the base of the tree, ready to go up after Cluck, not caring that he’d never learned to climb as high. He knew now what Lace was, that Cluck had brought a Paloma into their family, and he was ready to make Cluck pay for it.
But Nicole Corbeau dug her fingers into his arm and pulled him back. She whispered something Lace couldn’t hear. But Lace could guess. Some assurance that Cluck was not worth it. He has never belonged with us. Leave him to the Palomas. Let them do what they want with him.
“I’ll kill you, chucho,” Justin yelled up, his brothers echoing him. “Bring her down or I’ll kill you.”
Lace gripped Cluck’s arm. As long as her cousins were waiting for him, she wasn’t letting him go.
“Lace, come down,” her mother said. “We’ll make sure he doesn’t hurt you.”
“Are you out of your minds?” Clémentine shrieked. “You’ll break your necks.”
Abuela called for them to kill him, kill the boy with the violador blood in him. Her gaze fixed on Lace’s torn wing, the white plumes proof that a Corbeau boy had not only taken Lace, but had tried to make her a feathered thing.
“Please, come down,” Martha and Emilia pleaded. “You’ll fall.”
“Cluck,” Eugenie said.
The blunt crack of a shotgun cut through the voices.
A scream tore free from Lace’s throat. She ran her hands over Cluck’s body, checking for blood, feeling for it because his shirt was too dark and too red to let her see. Wondering which of her uncles had the Winchester and if Cluck was just another crow to them.
The shot’s echo wrenched away the few pins holding the inside of her together. They fell away, so softly they did not ring out as they hit the branches, and there was nothing but the ringing of distant glass chimes.
Cluck shook his head and pointed down.
Lace’s father stood at the base of a nearby tree, his Winchester pointed at the ground. The muzzle smoked. So did a pile of leaves below the barrel. The dull burnt smell drifted up.
He’d fired it down, at nothing.
Both Palomas and Corbeaus gave his gun a wide berth.
“What’s the matter with you?” he shouted to both sides. “All of you.”
Her father didn’t understand. He had never understood. He cast off his name not because he believed Abuela’s superstitions, but because he did not care to argue. Cuervo or not, Sara Paloma would still be his wife, and Lace Paloma his daughter. To him, it was this simple.
He thought the feud was live ash a boot heel could stomp out. He didn’t notice it burning down both their houses.
“I don’t care what you are, muchacho.” Her father looked up at Cluck. “Come down. Both of you.” He lowered his eyes and held the shotgun at his side, his gaze taking in every face. “If any of you lays a hand on either of them, que Dios me ayude.”
He tilted his head back up to the tree, his stare broken only by the flickering leaves. “Come on. I won’t let them at you. Either of you.” His eyes stayed on Lace. “Te lo prometo.”
She believed him. It didn’t matter that he let the Paloma men kill crows with his own gun. He would not let the family he married into slaughter a boy.
This was their best chance, coming down, letting their families take them.
Lace pressed herself against Cluck’s chest. He put his arms around her, his hands holding her wings to her back. She wanted to remember how he smelled, the salt and the cottonwood bark. She wanted to memorize the warmth of his body on hers, the only heat that didn’t hurt her still-healing skin. When she couldn’t sleep, she would think of it, the shimmer of warmth through her breasts when she felt him looking at them.
He held her tight to him, this boy she might have grown up with. He knew what she knew, that safe meant safe, but it also meant never again. A tear on her right cheek met one on his, the only one she found on him.
She let him go, nodding. She’d go back to her family. Maybe her father would even convince Abuela to forgive the burn on her arm, and she would swim as la sirena rosa again.
She didn’t know where Cluck would go. He was born among Palomas, raised among Corbeaus, and now neither wanted him. He’d spend his life coming up with lies about his real name and what happened to his hand.
Lace would remember this one night she saw him in his black wings.
She shifted her weight, easing onto a lower branch.
Movement on the ground caught her eye. A woman’s shape wove between the trees. She reached the watchers, and her small, running steps stopped.
Tía Lora halted at the outside of the ring, lifting her chin and searching the tree. Her eyes found Cluck and Lace. A wince broke the line of her mouth, her lips waiting to say again the things she’d told her son. Eres perfecto y eres hermoso. Words she’d had to tell him now that he was a man, because the hate that lived in these woods had kept her from telling him when he was still a boy.
Those years had collected, heavy and unseen, on Lora Paloma’s shoulders. Lace took them in her hands, sharing their weight.
If Lace and Cluck came down from the cottonwood, they would lose more than afternoons in the river and nights in the trees. They would become a second Lora, another Alain. The stories would go on. Their families would strap the cuentos to their backs. The weight of them would crush their wings. Lace and Cluck would carry them into the next twenty years.
When their parents and aunts and uncles grew old, when the story of the Paloma widow and the gitano widower shrank to a few embers, Lace and Cluck would be the kindling and the kerosene. They would be the story passed down to Lace’s younger cousins, and the inheritance of the little girl with dishwater eyes and hair like Cluck’s.