Winter Sparrow (10 page)

Then she saw the mysterious figure in black sliding down the side of the cliff. How his hat managed to stay on his head during his clumsy descent, she didn’t have a clue. But it was the one clear thing she could perceive in the darkness. Searching, she waited for those harshly lit eyes to seek her out.

She wanted to wail out a name, but she didn’t know this strange figure.
Man. He’s a man. Not a figure.
What was his name? Why was he here? Why now?

“Are you all right?” he yelled, his boots dragging into the hill’s muddy, corrupted torso. As he snaked into the valley, an overwhelming fear knotted up her stomach.

“I said, are you all right, miss?” the man asked again. “Seeing you hit that guardrail scared me half to death, I gotta say. Can you hear me? Just hold on. I’m comin’ for ya.”

He had come to rescue her. “Where is Joshua?” she mumbled, the rain blending into her lonely tears. “Joshua?”

“No, miss. Name’s Lucas Fisher,” he said, sinking to his knees. “Can you move anything? Tilt your head? Flinch. Anything?” He had enchanting eyes. She must’ve been insane to think they could have ever been such a horrible shade.

“Where did you come from? I’ve seen you before.”

Lucas carefully inspected her body, gently handling her crooked, broken legs. Mary’s wrist had been caught between her body and a jagged rock. He winced, removing the rock and asking her to turn her wrist just slightly.

“I can’t.” Her stare never drifted from his. “Your eyes are like magic,” she said.

“Okay, now I’m gonna lift your head up just a hiccup so I can get underneath. I’ll be careful.” Lucas eased behind her neck with one hand and, with the other, attempted to raise the rest of her.

She jerked when his hands agitated a protruding shard of bone. “Oh, it hurts like you can’t imagine.” Mary ground her molars. “Are you a doctor?”

“Not by trade, no. But I’ve got delicate hands, I promise. Always had a knack for taking away the pain. You just gotta be gentle with people. You gotta calm ’em down. Are you calm?”

“I’m trying, but it hurts so much.”

“It’s going to, Mary. It’s going to. Tell me, can you move any part of your lower body?”

“I don’t think so…H-how-how do you know my name?” she asked.

“Your wallet fell out of the car with you. I glanced at your license. Please don’t alert the authorities.”

“Oh.”

He feathered her matted hair. The stars had abandoned her eyes and his. There was a blinding light that shined so furiously in front of her, but maybe paranoia was just hard at work playing a trick, guiding her toward a fearful doorway she wasn’t ready to walk through.

All consciousness returned to the city, her home once upon a time. But Joshua wasn’t there, and he wasn’t here.

“Help me. Save me. Help me. Save me.” The repetition was a jagged composition. Mary wanted to stroke his chin when her gaze captured his. With every blink, her face grew cold, her eyes opening and then closing again like untrusting misers.

“I think I’m…Lucas…I think…I can’t m—
Joshua. Joshua!
I can’t move at all.”

“Shhh,” he whispered, touching her lips. “Be still. It’s just a dream.”

Her throat quivered, and a fever burned behind her eyelids.
That
she could feel. But why could she only move her neck? Had something broken beyond repair? She hadn’t fractured any major arteries, had she?

“Can you do something for me?” Lucas softly asked.

“What?”

“Can you sing?”

“Why do you want me to sing? I’ve got such an ugly voice.” 

“It helps calm
me
down. I love music. I mean, doesn’t everybody?”

“I suppose.”

“Can I tell you a secret?”

“Yes,” she answered with a shaky voice.

“I’m convinced one day music will save us all. Maybe even bring a person back to life, hallelujah!” He leaned in even closer. His hands were attempting a miracle, it seemed, the way they traveled and inspected her body. “Sing for me, won’t you?”

Mary carried a tune she didn’t even know existed. It was a tender verse that, despite her corrupted condition, new sensations spiked. She felt a blooming in her chest and then a heartbeat. Bones and muscles loosened in her arms. With his knuckles bent, Lucas slid his fingers down and across her frame. He began at her kneecap; it was a crushed, oozing mess. He slowly twisted the bones into proper place, aligning one leg with the other. Mary gasped in agony.

“Don’t stop, Mary. Please, it will be over soon. I promise.”

She bit down hard the next time she heard something make a splintering sound in the other leg. Was he breaking her or healing her? She didn’t really know. But the song didn’t cease. Soon after, a new awareness spread across her feet, and her toes suddenly flinched. A hidden smile returned to her face.

Lucas
was
restoring her.

Mary’s shirt was torn from the fall, bits of flesh peeking through the wet fabric. Lucas delicately lifted the shirt and exposed her crunched spine. After kissing his fingers, he pressed them against her back. In seconds, feeling returned to her vertebrae. Mary could sense the chilled water tapping against her ribs. She managed to distinguish her heartbeat from the ringing in her ears, which she knew was Lucas’s voice assuring her everything would be all right.

On the next blink, Mary watched a centipede tickle her belly with short needle legs. Lucas’s peculiar hands finished bringing order to her battered joints and skin. He gradually stroked upward to her chest. His hands were careful and quiet devices, yet as he touched her, the nightmare she had endured long ago in a high school locker room once more ravaged her mind.

“He didn’t hold you like I can, Mary. You must forget all that is past. I can take that pain you feel away. Just forget.”

Mary wanted it to be so. She cried and let the tears roll down crimson red cheeks. His fingertips moved over her affectionately, resurrecting warmth that swept through her completely. The purple color in her neck turned white again, and when Lucas shut his eyes, he reinserted her splintered bone. It was a harsh, piercing slide, but the pain disappeared almost instantly.

“I feel everything now. I can move.”

“Yes. But you must keep singing. Just sing.”

Is the process hurting him?
she wondered.

She swallowed. And in that moment she also bent her fingers, marveling at the sight of bruised and broken knuckles repairing in front of her very eyes. With a full breath, Mary rose from the unfiltered slush, stunned.

“How do you feel?” he asked her.

“Incredible. It doesn’t make sense. I couldn’t even move before, and you—” Mary stepped back as Lucas got up from the ground. “It’s a miracle.”

A grin stretched across his face.

“You fixed my body.”

Lucas nodded.

“What are you? Some kind of devil?”

He chuckled.

“A witch?”

He shook his head. “I’m a musician, you could say. An artist. These woods are special, you see. Sometimes the trees can speak. Sometimes humans and animals interact. And on occasion, things are changed.”

“Changed?”

“I’ve lived here a long time. I’ll bet you didn’t know that there is real magic in these woods. Most of them don’t. Most aren’t ready to know it.”

Mary didn’t understand him, but she believed him. After all, this stranger, this Lucas Fisher, whom she could have run over with her car, had just put life back into her. She had no choice but to trust him.

Mary started to shiver, so she rubbed her arms with her hands, still mystified that the cuts had vanished.

“It was fortuitous my going for a walk tonight, of all nights.”

“I’m grateful the woods let you heal me.” The reality of it all remained perplexing to her.

“It’s a connection between the magic of these woods and the magic in our minds. The mind is a powerful creation, you know. Very powerful.”

“I never knew it could literally heal a person,” she confessed.

Lucas brushed her hair behind her ear gently. “Now you do.” He held out his hand. “Let’s get you out of this mess.”

Mary hesitated.

“You’re safe, Mary. Just take my hand. It’ll be all right.”

So charming and freeing were his words. Mary took his hand and with it, her first step.

“Follow me up now, back to the road,” he said. “I can bring you home.”

“Home?” she said, looking at him like a startled infant. A haze drifted over her mind. “I forgot the way back, I think.” A chill slipped off her skin. “I’m afraid. Do you know a way back?”

“Yes, my dear. I know a way.” Lucas marked her wrist with his lips just once and led her up the hill.

JOSHUA SWORE HIS STOMACH HAD
turned to lead. He parked his car on a small section of gravel right before the road began to bend. It wasn’t time to panic, but the damage to the guardrail that blocked traffic from careening down the sixty-foot cliff forced him to mutter brief, intermittent prayers between his wary steps.

Where is her car?

The blackness of the night choked him. He spread his nostrils, picking up the rotting scent of a dead deer not far off. He strained his eyes and caught a glimpse of the creature. Before subjecting himself to the horrors his imagination toyed with, the fear of what—sweet mercy—
who
lay at the bottom of that cliff, he approached the unmoving animal.

The crunch of his work boots digging into the jagged stones of the road was a corroded nail in his eardrums. The harsh noise would soon plunge deeper into his disoriented subconscious. The closer he came to the dead animal, the sicker his stomach turned. All his life, he’d never been taken by such petty things. Death, after all, was a part of the mystery of life. What reason was there to shun it? But here, now, things were not as they used to be. Things were not certain. Things were not in order.

A whisper lifted into the night just then. A mixture of this creature’s pain and his. How similar and numbing both were. But on his next blink, Joshua came to realize there was no sound coming from the deer.
It’s your own heart crying.

He knelt on the ground and stroked the mammal’s tan, stiff coat. Crimson syrup matted the torn flesh. The deer’s belly had been sliced through and shredded. Joshua noticed an underdeveloped youngling lodged in the wall of a pink stomach. He peeled back some of the meat and exposed the frail, unborn thing. It was lifeless too.

Joshua pulled the unborn deer out of its mother and cut the umbilical thread with the utility knife from his back pocket.

“Speak to me,” Joshua begged of the frail lives before him, his hands stained with their blood. He knew the request was mad, but still he hoped for an answer. Neither creature stirred. Their eyes held gray frost. “Sing the way you used to. I still believe in it.”

In what, Joshua? In what?

“Love,” he cried aloud, hoping the night could hear him. Hoping the blood that had cursed this mother and her infant to die could hear it, could feel the ever brittle vibrations in his throat. Praying to the sky for new warmth.

“It’s almost finished. I almost finished our home. Can you hear me? Just a little while longer. Just a little while longer.”

If anyone could see, they’d think him insane to be talking to a dead animal like it was his wife. Like it was Mary ripped open by some truck that didn’t even bother to push her remains off to the side of the road. He both pitied and loved the creature. One of her eyes was shut, the other eye pulled back and reflecting Joshua’s anguish.

Such a cruel fate. He smelled the caved-in chest. His tears weakened the vile stench. He dropped the unborn baby. Fatigued, he thrust his callused hands beneath the mother and lifted her into his arms. His tongue wet thin, dry lips, and he sobbed with every step.