Chapter 4
That first play date between Harper and Grey became the first of many. Floyd was invited to bring in his son about once a week, and Grey was then driven off to a private park where Harper would be waiting with her band of security guards. Together they would play one of several games: President and Messenger, War, or Funeral.
Harper loved to see Grey shift and carry her messages off to different security guards. They would read her notes with serious faces and then compose a response and give it to him to fly back to her. Even though she was only a few feet away, she still laughed and clapped any time she got a note. Grey was always breathing heavily after a few minutes of President and Messenger. That would be when he would suggest they play Funeral.
Funeral was Grey’s chance to lay down and close his eyes. Harper liked to stand over him and say lovely things about how brave he had been, how nice he was, and how his favorite kind of sandwich was bologna. He always had to fight hard not to smile when they had one of these play sessions. It was always fun to hear a president’s daughter say nice things about you.
The two of them only played War on odd days. Grey was always taken by surprise when Harper wanted to play it; she was normally very happy and sweet, but every once in a while, she would narrow her eyes and say, “Let’s have a war.”
That was Grey’s cue to run as she chased him around the park with a stick or a handful of rocks, yelling, “You dirty shifter! Stay away from us! Get back to your Hills!”
Grey had to act extra scared and surrender as quickly as possible, swearing that the humans could have whatever they wanted. She would laugh triumphantly up to the sky and put one little, black shoe on his back as he kneeled on the ground.
“Humans win again!” Her declaration would echo around the empty park, and Grey would secretly roll his eyes. He knew the real story of the war, and he knew it hadn’t gone that way. His parents had been very clear with him – never correct Harper even when she’s wrong.
One day, after a round of War and Messenger, the two of them settled into a game of Funeral. Grey lay down on the cool grass and closed his eyes as Harper cleared her throat and pretended to cry.
“Dear friends,” she began, “today we are sad. Very, very sad. Today, Grey is dead.”
Grey nestled into the grass and relished the moment. He waited, eyes still closed, for her to continue, but all he heard was movement. After some quick footsteps, the park went quiet. Was this some new surprise from the security guards? He waited for a long moment, keeping his eyes closed so the game could continue, but the grass got too cold. He listened hard to try and determine what was happening, but again, nothing happened.
He couldn’t take it anymore and opened his eyes. “Hey, what’s…” he sat straight up. All around him were trees and blades of dead grass, but no people. Everyone was gone.
Grey’s breath came fast and hard; his heart beat far too fast. He kept trying to make sense of what had happened – he had been left in the park, while Harper had been whisked away. Not a single adult was there. He didn’t even know how far away his home was.
As a shifter, Grey could have changed form and gone off to The Hills, but as a person he knew something was very wrong and that the wrong move could make it worse. He jumped up and ran to the edge of the park to see if any adults were nearby, but the only people he saw seemed to be running away from him. One man jogged by with a shocked, pale face and flashed by Grey.
“Hi. Sir, please…” but he was gone. Grey looked around, but no one else was nearby. He swallowed hard and started running in the same direction he had seen the last adult go and followed the road to see where it led.
The park was just down the road from a row of stores and a big community screen. Grey saw a group of people standing around the towering structure with moving pictures. He listened to the booming voices coming from the speakers and veered towards them. As soon as he reached the spot, he was surrounded by others who were also running and trying to find help and found himself pinned in by his arms and legs. He tried to wiggle out of the tiny space, but he couldn’t move.
Above his head, mouths were gasping and jaws were dropping. Around him, hands were reaching for one another and squeezing so hard that their knuckles turned bright white. The bodies around him crushed in even closer until he was finding it hard to breathe. He moved back little by little until he was just one step away from the back of the crowd. He ducked down and out and gasped for breath as even more people ran to join the others.
Grey looked around and saw a nearby abandoned building with a high tower of crumbling rooms. He ran over to it and hid in a corner, shifting to his bird form. As an animal, Grey was an American kestrel, a small breed of eagle with soft grey wings and a white crest on his head with black flecks all over his body. He could fly around without attracting much attention as his size was very modest; every time he’d played President and Messenger with Harper she’d been able to hold him against her chest as she read her notes. He hopped out to the edge of the building and then took flight.
As a bird, Grey was able to flit around the crowd and take in the scene in its entirety. He flew in a circular motion, passing in front of the screen in five-second intervals. As he did, he saw videos of people covered in bloody marks, buildings on fire, and babies crying. A voice boomed from the speakers and reached him each time he passed the screen.
“This horrible attack…victims are claiming that shifters are to blame…fire, blood, and tears….” Grey was so shocked by the claim that any shifter could do such a thing that he flew too low and smacked into a man’s ear. The force made him dizzy, and his wings flapped at an angle, making it easy for a nearby hand to grab and hold him.
“What is this?” The voice belonged to a large pair of angry eyes glaring right at him with fire deep inside the black pupils. “I think this bird is a shifter.”
Grey quickly let out a series of little bird peeps just as his parents had taught him to do anytime he was caught in animal form, but the squeaky sounds coming out of him just made everyone lean in closer and screw up their eyes even more as the hand holding him squeezed a little tighter.
“Kill it,” one voice said. “No reason to risk it. None of us will say anything.” Mumbles of approval went around the crowd as Grey’s tiny heartbeat doubled in speed. The hand began to crush in on him and it got harder to breathe.
“I’m dying,” Grey thought. “Today is the day I die.” He shook in the man’s hand and turned his head from side to side, peeping as quickly and as pathetically as he could. The crowd gathered in a bit tighter, anxious to watch the little bird be crushed to death.
“Please!” The cry came from him against his will. “I’m Harper’s friend!”
The sound of a human voice coming from a bird shocked the man holding him so much that the big, strong hand released him with a loud “Oh!” Wasting no time, Grey quickly flapped in the air and slipped through the hands reaching for him in the air. He sped away, flapping his wings hard and breathing fast. He had to get home.
As a bird, Grey’s honing skills came to the fore and he could navigate through the crumbling buildings, over the square and rectangle roofs, and out to The Hills. Even from a distance, he could see the mob making its way to the settlement.
From his point of view, the crowd looked like a long, stretched out caterpillar in blue jeans and dark jackets crawling out onto the dirt. Grey extended his wings and tilted to the side, swooping down and out to get a closer look.
Through his sharp, eagle eyes he could see angry, clenched faces focused on the space in front of them. Each pair of hands seemed to hold a long, heavy object slamming into rough, mean hands. Grey went up again and aimed toward his house, desperate to find his parents, but saw right away that someone else had beaten him to it.
A small crowd stood outside the door of his family’s shack and seemed to be observing. He perched on the roof of the house across from theirs and hopped side to side in a panic. The men at the door were big; they wore welder uniforms and each had a long, hooked piece of metal in his hands. Grey had always liked the welders. They had cool masks and made the sparks fly with their special tools, but that wasn’t their plan today. They wanted to tear everything apart and leave it all in pieces.
For a long moment, nothing happened. The men in the doorway seemed to be yelling orders to the inside of the house. Were his parents in there?
Grey felt his heart thumping in his little bird chest. He wanted to fly in and help, but he also knew that if he did he’d be caught and killed. It would be much harder to get away if he got cornered in the house. He forced himself to calm down and breathe. Then, his breath was taken from him again.
Two men emerged from the house, bent over from the waist. On the ground, they were dragging his mother.
“She’s a shifter! Get her!”
The flashing metal pieces were raised and then thrown down with a loud, hard thud. His mother’s screams went all the way up to the sky. He could hear cracks and thwaps as she begged for mercy. The men gave her none, but rather kept hitting and yelling, saying something about how she deserved this, she needed it. Soon, his mother wasn’t yelling anymore.
The horrible beating stopped and the men stood around, their heads and eyes down on the ground where her unmoving body lay. They mumbled a few words and one kicked her with his boot. Grey waited for his mother to say something, to cry – anything – but she made no noise.
Slowly, the men moved away and left her bloody, broken body on the ground. They walked off without looking back, instead raising their weapons and yelling out to others nearby. They were about to cross the boundary into the earthbound side, but a big, strange cat crossed their path. One of the men jumped back in fear, but the cat didn’t attack, holding them at the boundary as one earthbound family after another ran as fast as they could to get away.
With the attackers distracted and the others on their way to safety, Grey flew down to his mother’s head. Her hair was sticky with blood and her jaw was broken and lopsided. He settled into the space between her ear and her shoulder, nestling down onto her flowing, brown hair and put his beak near her ear.
“Mama Bird,” he whispered. “Mama Bird, I’m here. Wake up. Wake up, Mama Bird. Wake up. Please. Please, Mama Bird…” His tiny eyes welled with tears almost too big for them to cry, and he rested his little feathered head against his cold, dying mother. The air grew cold and he wanted to find his father, but he didn’t move. He felt paralyzed by the stiff and silent body beside him. He stayed there, nestled in her brown hair until dawn, whispering his love to his mother and begging her to return.
Grey woke to find himself in his own bed and in human form. His father, who must have found him, was there beside him with his head in his hands. His skin was ashen, and when he looked up, Grey could see the dark circles under Floyd’s eyes. The two looked at one another and reached out to hold the other by the arm. They clutched each other and cried softly. Neither said a word.
A few weeks later, Grey learned what had happened. Some human children had been attacked just over the border of The Hills and were in the hospital with broken bones and huge gashes on their faces. The police found what looked like claw marks and paw prints all around the house where the kids had been beaten. Each child swore it was an animal that had appeared from nowhere and come at them, but none of them seemed sure what kind of creature it had been.
Their friends and neighbors had waited for the police to make an arrest, but because the children couldn’t name the animals they swore had instigated the whole problem, none of the law enforcers were sure of where to start. So, they just left the victims on their own. That was when they decided to go and get the shifters themselves.
None of the news services or papers offered an explanation for the massive fires and videos of desperate mobs they had shown that day. Their silence made Grey’s heart change; it began to develop a hard, dense shell. These grown-ups were lying just like the president had lied about their new home. He didn’t know how they had done it, but somehow they had made the humans kill his mother. He made a fist and felt his fingernails press into his palm like teeth biting into skin. He didn’t know any shifters who attacked human children. Everyone he knew in The Hills were far too frightened of humans to do anything like that. And yet, the humans didn’t seem scared of them at all.
Grey listened on several occasions while his own father tried to speak to the police about the death of Avey, his mother. They made notes and nodded their heads, but Grey’s father was always angry about it. He told Grey the police didn’t care about them and were just as uneducated as the others. Grey didn’t understand – his mother had been killed. Someone needed to go to jail. He offered to help, but that just made his father sad.
Several weeks went by and things calmed down. The families came back little by little and moved back into their homes. Grey didn’t know where they had been hiding, but he knew that there was a secret place only shifters knew about. He didn’t ask any questions because he wanted to show he could be trusted.
His father spent more and more time at home, saying the president didn’t need him so much anymore. Grey asked what had happened and got a comment about the government feeling guilty and “hush money,” but he wasn’t sure what any of it meant. He decided to look for Harper and ask her himself.
He didn’t have to look far; he took to the skies and saw Harper and her father at a big event. An old building called a shopping mall had been repaired and would be available to the people of the city. They had put a big, red ribbon across the door, and the president had a huge pair of scissors in his hands. Grey flew to the top of a lamppost and perched there to watch.
“I hereby proclaim,” President Bachmann said in his sweet, dripping voice, “this former shopping mall open and available to the public. Now remember,” he added, “first one to a space gets to claim it. On your mark, get set, go!”
The giant scissors flashed, and the ribbon fell open just in time for the crowd to crush themselves through the giant doorway. Bachmann held Harper back so that no one would run her over, and the two of them watched excitedly as the mortals fought for a space. Grey decided it was a good time to make his move.
He swooped down and over to the president and his daughter, flitting around for a moment to get Harper’s attention. She saw him and just watched him for a moment, then her eyes lit up with a moment of recognition.
“Grey! Oh, Daddy, it’s my friend Grey. Can I play with him for a moment, please?”
“Where, darling? This little American kestrel? Why, look at him!” The president presented his arm, and Grey landed on it as calmly as he could, though inside he was shaking. Bachmann’s big, dark eyes drifted down to Grey’s level and his heavy, syrupy voice boomed through the air.
“What are you doing here, little bird?”
“Mr. President,” he responded, “I’m Grey Wiseman, Floyd Wiseman’s son. I came to ask if um, if…” Grey tried to continue, but all he could see was the mental image of his father sitting at home on the little messy nest they had made, sitting without Grey’s mother, not eating and not moving. ‘The president did that to him. This man,’ he thought to himself. Then, the image left him, and Grey suddenly understood something: the president had the money and the power to change lives. No matter what happened, Grey had to find a way to work with the power above his head. Just like his father.
“I came to ask if I could work for you.”
The president raised his eyebrows in an impressed expression. “Well, well. An in-person application from the loyal Wiseman family. I am impressed. Turn into your human form, boy.”
Grey flitted down and then grew to what felt like an enormous stature after embodying such a small shape for the morning. He stood up tall and proud to face the president who looked him up and down.
“I am sorry to tell you,” he began, “that your father has been let go. With a substantial severance package, I may add. However,” the president put his hand on his daughter’s head, “my daughter would simply adore a messenger. She talks about all the days the two of you spent in the park, playing together. Perhaps you could be messenger to the First Daughter. I’ll pay you an entry wage. What do you say?”
Grey had no idea what a severance or a wage was, or why Harper had any need for a messenger, but he kept a serious expression on his face so that the president wouldn’t change his mind.
“Thank you, Mr. President. It would be an honor.” The man and the boy shook hands, then Harper squealed and threw her arms around her friend’s neck.
“Oh, yay!” She gave him a squeeze, and Grey was surprised at how soft and nice-smelling Harper’s clothes were. She seemed to be made of soft and luxurious materials that had been scented with flowers. “Now we can play every day right in the palace. We’re going to have so much fun!”
Grey’s stomach gave a big twist, but he kept his brave face on. “I’m a man now,” he thought to himself, “and men have to do scary things.”