White as a Raven's Wing

  White as a Raven's Wing

  by

  Seanan McGuire

  “We are born of winter. We live in winter. We die in winter. Spring is a lie we tell the young to give them hope before they are devoured.” –Waheela proverb

  The Freakshow, a highly specialized nightclub somewhere in Manhattan

  Now

  Last call had come and gone, and the customers of the Freakshow—Manhattan’s only carnival-themed bar and burlesque club—had gone with it, streaming back into the chill February night. There was still snow on the ground, a fact that many of them had seen fit to complain about when I made my rounds with their final orders. More took this as an opportunity to look me up and down and then ask if, quote, “the chubby Eskimo lass was on the menu.” Their racially insensitive and inaccurate words, not mine. I had not broken any fingers. Kitty would be pleased with me.

  Kitty Smith had become a bar owner in the traditional way: she had been standing in the right place at the right time when her Uncle Dave, who had founded the establishment, proved to be untrustworthy and had to flee to avoid being presented with his own liver. Dave had opened the bar under the name “Dave’s Fish and Strips,” and had traded less on novelty, more on nudity. Like her uncle, Kitty employed a largely inhuman staff. Unlike her uncle, she understood that each of us came with our own unique habits and complications. My temper, for example, was a complication when drunk tourists insisted on calling me a “chubby Eskimo,” and I deserved to be rewarded for keeping it in check.

  Candy and her coterie of dragon princesses had already finished bussing the tables by the time I emerged from the back with the freshly laundered dishtowels. We had learned from hard experience that a failure to wash the dishtowels before closing would result in untidiness and despair. Many of us were nocturnal, or more so than the human members of staff; it made no difference whether we did our cleaning in the morning or at night.

  Angel, our human bartender, was usually more than happy to do the opening tasks without our aid, if it meant that all towels and glasses were glistening clean when she arrived at work.

  I had expected to emerge into a hive of activity, with the dragon princesses attempting to shake Angel down for a larger share of the night’s tips while Kitty hovered around the edges, prepared to intervene if their avarice became too aggressive. Instead, I found the main room effectively deserted, save for my boyfriend, who was leaning against the bar in what could only be described as careful nonchalance. He looked like a man who was sitting uncomfortably atop a secret.

  I frowned at him as I walked to the bar and placed my burden of dishtowels atop its polished surface. “Where are the dragons?” I asked.

  “Gone,” he said. “Kitty took them back to her office to adjudicate the nightly tip division.”

  “She generally prefers to perform the division here, where the rest of the staff may watch and eat leftover buffalo wings from the kitchen,” I protested. “I very much enjoy the consumption of leftover buffalo wings.”

  Ryan laughed, showing teeth that were slightly more square, and slightly more sharp, than the human norm. As always, seeing those teeth put me at ease. He did not try to conceal his predator’s nature from me: he wore it proudly on the outside of his skin, like it was a badge of honor, and so I knew that I could trust him. Only predators who mean you ill conceal themselves.

  “As it turns out, I have something better than leftover buffalo wings,” he said. “Kitty agreed to let me use the roof if I’d lock up when we were done. So what do you say, Izzy? Want to come have a picnic under the stars with me?”

  “I am not dressed for a date night,” I protested. “You should have warned me if you were intending to seek romance after work.”

  Ryan shook his head. “You always look amazing to me.”

  I smiled at that, even as I chafed at the idea of a picnic in my current attire. “As it should be.”

  Most waheela do not care for the finer points of fashion. They are content to live their lives naked on the tundra, dressed in fur while in their great hunting forms, dressed in blood or in snow when in their softer, more dexterous bipedal forms. We look like wolf-bears when we prowl the snow, evoking memories of megafauna long since vanished from this world, and we look like the First Peoples of Canada when in our smaller shapes, but always we are waheela, the shapeshifting children of the north wind, who knows only hunger, and nothing of the thaw.

  I am an aberration among my kind, a freak, for I find more pleasure in lace and taffeta than I do in mindless slaughter and the feeling of blood drying sticky-wet against my skin. As always, I had brought a change of clothing for when my shift was ended, for I take no pleasure in walking home covered in spilled alcohol and the sweat of strangers. I was wearing a simple pink gown over three layers of petticoats, with a hand-painted peignoir tied over the top. The sleeves were cap lace, and the silver stars I had applied to the dark blue gauze of the peignoir glittered in the light. They matched my boots, which were silver at the tops and mellowed slowly into dark blue as they approached my feet. It was a charming outfit for walking home with one’s mate. It was not necessarily appropriate for dining.

  Ryan sighed as he picked up on my reluctance. “You look amazing, Izzy, and I’m hungry now. Aren’t you? It’s been hours since you’ve eaten.”

  My belly, always open to suggestion, rumbled loudly. I looked down at it, muttering, “Traitor,” before looking back up at Ryan. “You won’t think less of me for wearing inappropriate clothing on a romantic occasion?”

  “Sweetheart, I love you. Never think that I don’t love you. Any man who voluntarily sleeps in a room with a hungry waheela is either in love or suicidal.”

  I nodded. “Very true, and you have never shown any inclination to take your own life, or to give it over to my jaws.”

  “Exactly. So please don’t doubt my affections when I say that I basically never know whether what you’re wearing is appropriate: I just let you tell me one way or the other, and I keep smiling, because you always look amazing, whether you’re wearing twenty layers of lace or nothing at all.” His smile seemed to have more teeth this time. “Maybe especially when you’re wearing nothing at all.”

  I shivered. The words, the tone, the expression on his face—he was trying to be suggestive, to imply that his love for my body was such that I could wear whatever I liked and he would admire me all the same. It was flattery of the highest order, and I only wished that I were capable of appreciating it.

  But when he said those things to me, he did not conjure pleasant images of bed and lovemaking. He conjured the frozen tundra, blood drying in my hair and on my skin, teeth aching from the pleasant sensation of ripping through living flesh and bone. I was still that naked, feral girl. I always would be, beneath the lace and crinoline. The north wind was my father and my lover and my unborn son, and he loved me too much to ever truly let me go.

  Ryan blinked, his smile fading. “Izzy? You okay?”

  This time the smile was mine. He would never understand how much it cost me. “I think there was a draft,” I lied, as pleasantly as I could. “You promised me food?”

  “I did,” said Ryan, looking relieved. “This way.”

  *

  I was born in the high tundra, where the thaw never comes completely, and where the names of so many things have been lost in the face of colonialism and modernization. My kind have human lifespans, and as the people who were once our neighbors died or moved to the cities of their conquerors, we forgot what our ancestral caves and hunting grounds had been called by human mouths, in human tongues. We were waheela, children of the north wind, born to the cold that never ended and the hunger that could never be fulfilled. What cared we for names? Names wer
e nothing, meant to be forgotten.

  Ryan was born in Seattle. He was a tanuki, a breed of Japanese shapeshifter that had more in common with the waheela than it did with the more common humans, although his father was human. Paul Yukimura was a witch, and a very pleasant man who had married a tanuki woman while fully aware of her nature. They had many children together, all of whom were tanuki like their mother. I had only made the acquaintance of two of his siblings, and had found them both to be pleasant enough, if someone prejudiced by their preconceptions about my kind. I had done what I could to convince them that I was neither threat nor monster, although I hadn’t tried as hard as I could have.

  Most waheela were monsters, after all. It was best if they never learned to trust us.

  I had grown up cold and naked and shivering, with the knowledge that my own death was never far from laying claws upon my skin. Ryan had grown up warm and wrapped in love, confident that he and his siblings would live into adulthood. Our differences ran so deep, were so foundational, that sometimes I despaired of ever resolving them.

  Then he led me up the stairs to the rooftop, where a picnic had been spread out beneath the stars, and I wondered whether resolution could really be said to matter in the face of buffalo wings.

  The blanket had probably been scavenged from the prop room: it was red and white check, borrowed straight from a production of The Wizard of Oz, and large enough to cover a ten by ten square of rooftop. It was almost obscured by the sheer volume of food laid out atop it. Buffalo wings and fried chicken and pizza; slices of raw liver and beef heart and bowls of ranch dressing. There were also strawberries and slices of white-frosted cream cake and flutes of champagne, but I bore them little notice as I focused on the other offerings.

  It is virtually impossible for a waheela’s hunger to be fully sated. I was fortunate: I had been in New York City, land of convenience stores, fast food establishments, and plentiful rats, for so long that I had built a certain softness over my bones, cushioning them from the worst cries of the north wind. A slender waheela is a waheela who cannot control her hunger any longer. Humanity prizes slimness, deifies it almost, as if hunger were a holy state. Had they ever met my teeth, seen my claws, they might have felt differently.

  Tanuki also have a tendency to eat enormously, at least by human standards. According to Verity—once a coworker of ours at the Freakshow, and always a student of biology and the ways in which the human world encroaches on worlds such as ours—this is because therianthropes burn calories at an accelerated rate, compensating for the strains placed upon our bodies by fluid biology and even more fluid physics. For a time, all was silence, except for the sound of chewing, and rending, and bellies being filled. The night air was cool. Snow clung to the corners of the rooftop, scenting everything with winter, atop the normal New York smells of too many humans and hot dog stands and motor vehicles. Ryan’s scent wound through it all, comfortably male and solid and familiar. I was content, even if I rather wished that I had something more substantial than a peignoir between me and the night.

  I should have realized that it was all far too ideal to last.

  Ryan cleared his throat. I tensed, shoulders locking, and swallowed my last bite of raw liver dipped in ranch dressing as I swiveled to face him. He looked very serious, and I swallowed again—only air this time, but sometimes a belly full of air will soothe nerves better than anything else. Hunger is a great distraction from the other trials and troubles of the world.

  “Hey, Izzy, so I’ve been thinking,” he said. “My folks actually sort of like you now.”

  “Your mother believes I am a monster who will one day devour her grandchildren,” I corrected stiffly.

  “Yeah, but see, that means my mother believes there are going to be grandchildren. From her, that’s basically an endorsement. And Dad thinks you’re swell, you know that. He was really impressed with how well you handled Christine.”

  “Your sister was no trouble at all,” I said. Christine was the youngest of Ryan’s siblings. She had spent a month living in Ryan’s apartment while she saw the city, and I had taken her on several trips to the Fashion District, helping her find the best items for the lowest prices. My knowledge of discount schedules and sample sales was unparalleled in the cryptid world, save perhaps among the dragon princesses, who raised the conservation of funds to the level of religion. I feared nothing, but even I would hesitate to get between them and a box of marked down pumps.

  “See, you say that, and you even mean it, because you’re amazing, but trust me, Christine can be plenty of trouble when she wants to be,” said Ryan. “My whole family likes you, and they know you’re out of my league. I keep waiting for you to wake up and realize that.”

  I frowned politely, waiting for him to make his point. Ryan looked at my face and sighed.

  “What I’m saying, Izzy, is that my family likes you, but they don’t really matter, because me? I love you. Big love. Stupid love. The sort of love that makes people do things they wouldn’t normally do. I’ve never loved anybody like this. You know that, right?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I know.” I felt the same about him, inasmuch as I could: I would never be as hot a creature as he was, never as passionate or as capable of summoning my heart into my hands. But I did love him, had loved him since the night he came to my aid beneath the body of Manhattan, even if it had taken me a little longer than that to sort through my complicated feelings and find my way to acceptance. I had allowed him to set his hands upon my body without severing them from his body. I had slept curled against his side, warmed by the heat of him, leaving my throat unguarded. Among my kind, there was no truer or more honest declaration of love. He knew that.

  Didn’t he?

  For the first time, I began to feel unsure. What if he didn’t know? What if he had done as so many friends and casual lovers had done since I started trying to live outside the cold, and taken my silence for aloofness, or worse, disinterest?

  What if he was leaving me?

  Ryan looked at my face and frowned. “You look upset.”

  “Is there a reason I shouldn’t be?” I picked up another piece of liver, twisting it between my fingers until it drooled blood and connective tissue. It didn’t make me feel any better. I reached for a napkin, wrapping the liver uneaten in the paper. “I can have my things removed from your apartment before morning.”

  “What…Izzy, what do you think is happening here?” Ryan leaned across the blanket and caught my hands before I could mutilate any more of the leftovers. He held them tight, and for my part, I resisted the urge to transform them into claws and punish him for touching me when I was already upset. “Do you seriously think I planned a romantic picnic on the roof so I could tell you I was breaking up with you?”

  “There are so many customs I still don’t know,” I said, as bravely as I could. The words seemed to stick in my throat, making them difficult to speak aloud. “Perhaps this is how tanuki always manage a separation. With alcohol and organ meats, to make it less painful.”

  “Okay, one, even if this was customary among tanuki, which it’s not, I would break with custom, partially because this would be a dick move, and partially because you would absolutely throw me off the roof if I broke up with you like this,” said Ryan. “I am not Verity. I do not appreciate toying with gravity. Gravity tends to toy back.”

  “I am glad you’re not Verity,” I said. “I would never have been able to become romantically involved with her. She’s so…”

  “Nosy? Talkative? Human?”

  “Breakable,” I finished. “I would have snapped her in half the first time I drew her close, and I prefer my lovers not to double as late night snacks.”

  Ryan actually laughed before sobering again. “No, Izzy, I did not bring you up here to break up with you. I swear.”

  I frowned at him. “Then why?”

  “Because I wanted to ask you to marry me. Become my mate, whatever it is that you call it, I want it. I want to wake up with yo
u beside me. I want to see what our kids will look like. Don’t you want that? Whatever ceremony is required, I’ll do it. We can go down to City Hall and have a human-style wedding, if there’s not a waheela ceremony for us to observe.”

  “Anything?” I asked, eyes going wide with the force of my disbelief. I stared at him. He couldn’t possibly know what he was asking me—he couldn’t possibly!

  But really, did it matter if he did?

  “Anything,” said Ryan. “So what do you say, Izzy? Will you be my wife? Or mate or, you know, whatever?”

  I looked at him solemnly. “Yes, but only if you will do something for me.”

  Now it was Ryan’s turn to look bemused. “You mean other than marrying you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. Sure. What do you need?”

  I sighed, and brushed a few crumbs off the front of my peignoir. It really was lovely. I was going to miss it while it was packed away. “I need you to explain to Kitty why we will both be absent from work for the next two weeks.”

  “Where are we going?”

  I had to give him this: he was extremely quick on the uptake. It was one of the things that had first attracted me to him. That, and the way he could transform into a vast, ravening raccoon-dog, fully capable of disemboweling my enemies. A girl likes to know she will be taken care of.

  “Canada,” I said, and stood. “I will arrange tickets.”

  “Why are we going to Canada?”

  Maybe not that quick on the uptake. “I wish to marry you, Ryan Yukimura,” I said. “I will be the first waheela with a surname of my own. But before that can happen, we must return to the high country, so that I can kill my husband.”

  Ryan stared at me, and didn’t say anything. That was probably for the best, all things considered.

  *

  The closest airport to our destination was located in Kugluktuk, a settlement at the mouth of the Coppermine River. Getting there required us to travel to the very top of the continent, to the place where the land began to split into so many loosely affiliated islands.