She let him lead her back to the bed. Dog followed them and curled up on a rug while she and Ever sat on the mattress. She was still trembling violently though he had put the blanket around her shoulders again. Tears streaked the residue of sweat on her cheeks, and she could taste the salt of her eyes.

“Oh, I almost forgot,” he said. He reached into his pocket and took out the stone woman—sheela na gig. He set it on the bedside table. “This is yours, yeah? You left her at my place.”

Izzy looked at the little stone exhibitionist. For some reason, she didn’t want to touch it, though when she’d stolen the thing, it had seemed to call for her to put it in her pocket. Now it grimaced at her with its various orifices.

“Can I stay here tonight?” he asked. “I don’t want you to be alone.”

Izzy nodded.

She let Ever undress her and cover her with the sheet, the blanket of birds. Ever took out his guitar, sat in a chair, and sang her a lullaby. Something about the moon.

“Liar,” she whispered as she drifted off to sleep.

He stopped playing. “What?”

“You can sing,” she thought she said. “Cyrus, when did you learn how to sing?”

◆◆◆

In her dream that night, Izzy held an infant in her arms, stroked its downy-brown head. Milk poured from her engorged breasts, letting down into its mouth. But the child didn’t have a mouth.

Pain—as from something sharp. Blood on her breasts. A beak, this child had a beak. A baby falcon—an eyas—with a tooth-like beak for hunting insects, rodents, and reptiles. It would grow to a fledgling, and its wings would thin and taper for faster flight and hunting. The kestrel would hover above its prey before swooping down for the kill. She knew all this because of the tattoo on Cyrus’s back.

Then the dream changed.

Izzy stood beneath a tall tree laden with brown pods and bright red flowers—silk tassels from which protruded sinewy stamens. A man crouched in the tree. He wore a crown of leaves, thorns grew from the tips of his fingers, and he held something in his hands—a wooden box inlaid with pieces of bone carved into different miniature body parts. Tiny heads, hearts, arms, hands, torsos, legs, and feet. The man opened the box and took something out. It was another child. Izzy saw the snout, the teeth, the slanted, predatory gold of the child’s irises. The baby god of the dead.

When she opened her eyes in the dark, Ever was studying her. “What?” she said.

“You were crying in your sleep.”

“And I look like her. Am I like her?”

“Like Emma? You’re brave. And you look like her. Especially with your hair like that.”