“Drag marks,” Bitch said, pointing at the dirt road.

Her head turned as she looked at a nearby house.

“Coast is… not clear but not unclear. Irredeemably weird,” Imp said. Snag startled a little at the suddenness of the voice from his peripheral vision.

“Weird?”

“I asked Tattletale and she said it was one of the same people as yesterday.”

Snag frowned.

Foil held her rapier, with knives in her other hand, one knife poking up between each pair of fingers. She took the lead. Bitch followed.

Only Biter and Parian remained. Biter didn’t go in, and Parian remained behind with the stuffed animals and dogs. Snag pushed the door open and followed the others up the stairs.

He could hear a whispering and a rustling. As he reached the top of the stairs, he could see past Bitch and Foil to the large cluster of black feathers, illuminated by light from the windows. Four spindly black bird’s legs gripped nearby walls and floorboards.

It spoke, but in a voice so quiet he couldn’t make out the words.

“Sssh,” the bird thing made a sound, and the words that followed were like breath through rustling leaves.

“Hey,” Foil said. “Creepy. I need you to back off and leave them alone.”

Them?

The bird-thing twisted around, until it peered at them with one large eye, the pupil misshapen, like the impression of a skull pressed into ink or mud. As the pupil dilated, the shape filled out to look more like a face.

Beneath it, Nursery, Magnate and a Fallen were lying in a heap.

The bird-thing moved slowly, looking around the room. There was a window to one side.

Snag pressed two fingers against the center of his gauntlet’s palm. He felt the vibrations as the inner cylinder rotated through his options. He settled on the shuriken. Scraping one finger against the palm, he set the loadout. Paralyzing despair. The arm throbbed silently to provide tactile feedback as it loaded the charge from the battery into the loadout of shuriken.

The bird-thing twisted around more, curling up until it was condensed, instead of the broader form that had let it envelop three individuals. Snag could see two smaller bird-limbs pull tight against its body as it withdrew that section into the center. He could see clothes, and he could see hints of other things near that central core.

“Step away from them,” Foil said. “Trust me, you do not want to get on the wrong side of this rapier.”

The bird-thing dragged itself closer to the window.

“That’s fine,” Foil said. “Who are you and who are you with?”

“Tats said it’s the same thing as the screaming skull thing they described from yesterday,” Imp said.

Snag tried not to startle at Imp’s sudden appearance, but the bird-thing did. It jumped, lunging for the window, and Snag fired the burst of shuriken between it and the window.