If she’d seen them in a picture, Alice would have found the things beautiful and charming, if a bit silly-looking, but it took only a few moments of watching them to see that they had vicious tempers. Whenever two of them bumped against each other, the closer head on each would lash out with a nasty peck, sending blood and tufts of feathers flying. They honked and squawked constantly, ripping at the turf with their claws. The ground around the shack was already churned to mud. As best as Alice could tell, they were trying to get into the shack, slamming themselves against the brick walls and scraping at the mortar.

“There are more of them on the other side,” Alice said. “Let’s circle around, I bet there’s a door.”

Soranna nodded, and they worked their way in a broad circle, staying well clear of the flock. Alice found cover in a small cluster of shrubs about fifty yards away. A few of the birds had looked in her direction—having two heads, they could hardly help it—but they didn’t seem to notice her, being fully occupied in feuding with their fellows. On this side, the flock was much larger, and they were shoving and fighting to get close to a wooden door set into the brick.

Alice could see the Siren, floating above the roof of the shack, translucent as a smudge of white smoke in the brilliant, sourceless daylight. The ghostly figure of a woman had her mouth open in continuous song, and Alice could hear a faint backwash of the melody, but its full force was directed down at the bird-things. As she watched, one of the creatures closest to the door wobbled and collapsed, and there were several lying on the ground already. But the Siren couldn’t seem to entrance more than a half dozen at once, and each time one of the things fell over, one on the ground would shake itself awake and surge to its feet.

“Isaac is trying to hold them off,” Alice said. “But I don’t think it’s working very well.”

The bird-things were considerably hampered by their constant infighting, but they’d already done quite a bit of damage to the door. Splinters flew every time one of them got the chance to rake the wood with its claws.

“If they notice us, we haven’t got a chance,” Soranna said. “I doubt we can outrun them, and aside from in there, we haven’t got anywhere to hide. Can you fight that whole flock?”

Alice shook her head. There had to be sixty or seventy of the big bird-things. “And Isaac doesn’t have enough power to put them all to sleep.”

“Can you open a path in there?”