Hand over hand he followed the rope. And with every creak in the trees, he stopped and squinted, frozen cold with the idea of a rising whisper, a wrinkled face, a sudden bloated feeling in his chest…

21

Harvey took aim with the camera.

“Ready, Neal.”

He imagined the red dots in the bird’s eyes would haunt him for a long time to come.

“The first Gobliner to bag a Great Owl,” Neal said.

“That’s right, Neal.”

But it didn’t feel right. Felt like Neal had shown him a back door to his office, a room Harvey hadn’t ever seen before, where a young woman was kept in chains.

“On three now, Harvey. I’m going to let it fly on three. You’ll hear the snap. You take that photo a quarter second after you hear the release. I want that arrow inside the bird when you snap it. You got it?”

“I got it.”

“Three and release then snap.”

“Got it.”

“Got it?”

“Yes.”

Nash started counting.

“One…”

Jesus, Neal.

“Two…”

This isn’t good.

“Three!”

Harvey thought, Miss it.

The bowstring snapped, Harvey took the photo.

FLASH!

The light from the small bulb was blinding. For a moment Harvey could see what felt like the entire forest: an infinite maze of broken branches…trees weaving in and out of one another’s trunks…twisting up and wrapping over but never quite touching in the end.

And Nash.

Nash’s back, the pull hand open and empty, the other still steady on the bow. High up in that incredible image (an image burned into Harvey’s mind as he closed his eyes) the owl looked frozen in surprise and preflight…its eyes even bigger than they’d looked in the dark…everything about it bigger…an enormous feathered beast with long sharp talons and a beak as sharp as an arrowhead…its chest purple upon the black…Nash’s arrow wedged well into its heart.

The image was almost more lucid than what he saw when his eyes were open. But as he put a free hand up to his closed lids and saw Still Life of Owl Death in great detail, sound continued…and Harvey heard the thud of the arrow piercing meat, the crackle of the black body breaking many branches, and the bass whump as it hit the ground.

Nash had done it. With something as simple as a red velvet jacket, Nash had attracted Goblin’s off-limits bird.

Harvey opened his eyes.

“Uh-oh, Neal,” he said. He was looking up to where the owl had perched, seeing there many more patches of black rotating to face the two Gobliners below.

Harvey counted thirty, maybe more. And the noise of their necks creaking sounded to Harvey like a casket lid opening, releasing something far more dangerous than the Goblin Police.

Sixty Hell-red dots in the darkness. A canopy of the black feathers that had given Goblin such pride.

“We gotta go,” Harvey said. “We gotta go right now.”

Neal held his eyes on the black lump at the foot of the tree.