“Holy fucking shit,” he says, not taking his eyes from the design as he steps closer to the mirror and twists his arm from side to side. He absorbs every detail, both in the mirror and on his arm directly, his sharp gaze bouncing to me every few seconds. “It’s amazing, Blackbird.”
The raven’s black feathers shimmer with hints of indigo, its eye otherworldly and opalescent as it looks into the distance. It stands clutching a polished chef’s knife, light a bright reflection on the blade. Behind the bird and its sharpened perch is a background of graffiti-like spatters in bursts of vibrant color.
“The colors are epic, Laura,” he says, glancing over at her with an appreciative smile.
She grins. “Thank you, but your girl here is the one who came up with it. I just brought her design to life.”
Laura hands him the reference drawing on her iPad, the original that I sent her two months ago when Rowan first suggested a cover-up for the scars. He stares at the image and swallows. It takes him a long moment before he turns his gaze to me.
“Color?” he asks. He points to the image without taking his eyes from mine. “You did this?”
I shrug, the start of an ache forming in my throat when I take in the hint of a glassy shine in his eyes. “Yeah. I guess I did.”
Rowan hands the iPad back to Laura and crushes me in a tight embrace, his face buried against my neck. He says nothing for a long while. He just holds on.
“You did color,” he whispers, but he still doesn’t let go.
I smile in Rowan’s arms. “What can I say, Butcher. I guess you brought it out of me.”
OceanofPDF.com
24
OceanofPDF.com
PLUCKED
OceanofPDF.com
ROWAN
“You know, Blackbird, even though I suggested it, I honestly didn’t think I’d enjoy hunting together as much as I would competing against you,” I say as I clean off my butcher knife with a bleached cloth.
Sloane laughs but doesn’t turn around, her focus too taken with the colored sheets of dyed muslin that she attaches to the fishing line with glue. “I’ll take a guess. Is it because your favorite part is not actually the killing, but winding me up?”
“Pretty much.” I grin when she gives me a flash of a teasing glare over her shoulder, and then I drop my gaze to the tiny knicks in the sharpened blade in my hands. I slide my cloth in one more pass over the edge before setting the knife aside with my other tools. A bone saw. Meat slicers. And my favorite, a Damascus steel Ulu knife that Sloane gave to me from Etsy for my birthday. “But I did enjoy it. Very much. I like working with you.”
“I like working with you, too. I think we should catch the Forest Phantom together next year, even though I technically won, because I am the ultimate winner, just in case you forgot. And you probably deserve a runner-up prize anyway since you didn’t even vomit this time,” she says as she reaches up to point to the eyeballs hanging in fishing line over Dr. Stephan Rostis’s head. “Go you.”
“I’m never going to live that down, am I.”
“Probably not, no.”
While Sloane continues to glue her last few sections of pre-cut cloth, I work on my own final preparations. And then I just sit back and watch my Blackbird, no longer wielding her art in monochrome, but in vibrant technicolor.
When she’s done, she stands back and surveys her canvas behind the body. The three layers of her web are mixed with bursts of color. Hues of jeweled greens in one layer. Blues in another. Reds and purples in the last, each one meticulously dyed by her own hand. It’s a stunning installation that radiates like panes of stained glass from the suspended body, his arms and legs outstretched. Rigging him up from the walls and ceiling has been my biggest contribution, aside from slicing off a few choice pieces of flesh for Sloane’s skin ornaments that she’s sewn within the layers of filament and muslin. But the art? That’s all her.
“Beautiful, Sloane,” I say.
“Thanks,” she replies warmly, but she doesn’t turn around, or she would see that I’m not staring at her canvas, but at her.
As her gaze remains fixed to the layers of color, I change playlists on my phone. “The FBI is going to be so fucking confused. You’re evolving, not devolving. And I’m not sure they’re going to finally figure out that the webs are maps now that there’s color involved.”
“You’d think it would help,” she says on the heels of a little laugh, then shakes her head and shrugs.
“One thing has stayed pretty consistent though...”
“What’s that?”
I jerk a nod toward the body when Sloane turns to face me. The question in her eyes rapidly dissolves into suspicion. When she folds her arms across her chest, I raise my hands in apology, though I’m not sorry at all for what I’m about to say. And she knows it.
“What,” she says flatly.
I point to the not-so-good doctor, whose blood trickles down his face in drying streaks. “Left eye hole. Always a little gouge-y.”
Sloane guffaws a laugh, but it wanes when I shrug. A sliver of doubt etches a crease between her brows. “It is not.”
“I’m sorry to say, it is.”
“You’re so full of shit.”
I drag my step ladder in front of the body and gesture toward it. “See for yourself.”
Sloane’s lips part, her cheeks flushed with rising frustration. Fucking adorable. Flustered Sloane with her feathers ruffled and her talons ready? That’s always my favorite version. And I savor every moment, from her fierce glare to her determined steps as she stomps to the ladder to get a closer look.
“Rowan Kane, you fucking weirdo with this left eye hole shit, I-do-not-gouge-I-plu—”
Her irate tangent stops dead as she takes in the bloody hole, then looks down to me, then back again. Though I manage to bite down on a laugh, there’s no hiding the amusement in my eyes, not from her.
“What the fuck is that?” she asks, pointing to the dead doctor’s face.
“I dunno, Blackbird. Maybe you should check it out. Unless…”
“Unless what?”
“You’re not squeamish, are you?”
At this, her laugh breaks free, though it’s short and unsure. “How’s the ice cream looking these days, Butcher? Managed to crack into some cookies and cream yet?”
“Ouch, Blackbird,” I say with a hand over my heart. It thunders beneath my palm. “Wounded, yet again.”
Sloane grins, her dimple popping out next to her lip, and then she focuses on the lifeless face before her, the eyes rimmed with blood and the features slack. She reaches her gloved fingers to the left eye socket and pulls out a small, round packet wrapped in tape.
“See?” she says as she balances the mystery on her palm and descends the ladder. “Plucked. I plucked it right outta there.”
“You did. Almost like you’ve done this before. Elite-level plucking.”
She stops in front of me, her eyes glittering with amusement as they bound between mine. “What is this?”
“I think the trick with a present is usually to open it,” I say as I press a kiss to her forehead in reply to her eye roll. She takes the tissue I offer and begins wiping the blood from the tape. “Make sure to clean it all off, though. Important documents inside.”
Sloane’s face crinkles, her pretty hazel eyes narrowing as she tries to reconcile my words with the small size of the package. “Documents…?”
“Life-changing documents, actually. So, yes. Be careful.”
With a final, suspicious glance in my direction, Sloane shifts her focus to the ball of tape and cleans every ripple in the cellophane until it’s free of blood. Once it’s finished, she peels off the strips of sticky plastic, setting each one aside until she can unfold the outer layer of protective paper.
