After the End

“Is it essential that we waste time talking about my eye, or can we go now?” she says stiffly.

I try to speak like she does. “Considering the fact that we’re being trailed by a dangerous hippie bird hypnotist and two thugs, I don’t mind continuing the eye conversation later.” Turning the key in the ignition, I head out of the parking lot and toward signs for Highway 47.

As we leave town, I have an idea and pull over in front of a drugstore. “Stay here,” I order, and duck out so fast she doesn’t have a chance to stop me. Two minutes later I’m back in the car. Juneau’s sitting there staring quizzically at me as I pull onto the road and drive toward the edge of town. I let her stare, and we sit in silence until we’re way out in the country, driving past a sea of yellow flowers toward a horizon of low purple mountains.

Juneau’s fidgeting like crazy, and the longer she tries to fight the urge to ask me what I bought the happier it makes me feel. She’s been freaking me out so much for the last eighteen hours or so, it’s kind of nice to finally be getting under her skin. I glance at the clock. Almost an hour passes in complete silence. I’m kicking myself for not thinking to ask to use the phone in the drugstore. But the thought of people chasing us has driven almost everything else from my mind, including the reason I’m driving her. Also, it’s so much fun watching Juneau squirm, I don’t mind putting off contacting my father a little longer.

Finally I reach forward to turn on the radio. Before I can touch the button, she blurts out, “What’d you get?”

“Well, Juneau, I’m glad you asked,” I say in my Dad voice. I hand her the small plastic bag from the floor in front of my seat. She opens it and pulls out a pair of black sunglasses. She stares at them, confused for a moment. And then a broad smile stretches across her face.

“It’s to help you look like a normal person,” I say.

“Thanks a lot,” she replies, but she cracks a little pleased smile.

“No problem.” I grin. “You have to peel this label off before you put them on,” I say, and reach toward the glasses. My hand brushes hers, and something electric passes between us. Juneau looks at me, surprised. I return my hand to the steering wheel and focus on the road and try to ignore the tingling in my fingers.

27

JUNEAU

WE’RE PASSING OVER THE LINE FROM WASHINGTON into Oregon when Poe starts shifting around in the backseat. He flaps his wings a couple of times, and then goes into full-fledged panic, banging against the window, shedding feathers, and squawking like someone’s squeezing him.

Miles throws his arm up to shelter his face, and the car swerves wildly. The giant wheels of a truck we were passing come inches from my window and I yell, “Miles! Truck!”

Cursing, he yanks the wheel and we veer away from the truck just as it lets out an earsplitting honk.

“Is anyone behind us?” Miles shouts.

“No,” I yell back, and he crouches down, ducking out of reach of the flailing wings to steer over to the side of the road. I crawl into the backseat with Poe and wrestle with him until I get ahold of him, folding his wings in and pulling him firmly against my chest. His heart flutters wildly against my fingertips. I try to still his panic by closing my eyes and slowing my own heartbeat, but it has no effect on him. No longer able to struggle, his eyes roll in panic.

Something is trying to pull him out of the car. I concentrate and attempt to tap into the Yara, but I am getting absolutely nothing. Please, I think. I pull my opal out from under my shirt and press it tightly against the bird. Nothing. A minute passes, and Poe starts to struggle again and there . . . finally it comes, my lips and fingers tingling as I make the co

I can just guess who is messing with his little bird mind, and try to picture where it is that Poe wants to go. I see the same clearing that I saw before—the place Whit released Poe with the note for me. He must have lost my trail and gone back to where he started to wait for the bird’s return and get a clear picture of where I am. A flare of anger ignites in my chest.

I still don’t understand what Whit is doing, but I am the last of my clan ru

Poe feels my anger, and our fragile co

The car has stopped and Miles is staring at me, eyes wide, lips pressed tightly together. I crawl out of the back and into the front, strapping myself in. “He’s okay now,” I say, but instead of putting the car in gear, Miles turns it off.

“Why was the bird having a panic attack?” he asks, his voice a note higher than normal.

“Whit was trying to get him to come back and tell him where we are,” I say, and then, seeing a twitch in Miles’s right eyebrow, correct myself. “I mean, Whit was going to read his memory to see where we had gone.”

Miles nods, his eyebrow still twitching. “So you used my shirt as a straitjacket.”

“It’s called swaddling,” I said. “It’s to calm him.”

“Because that’s what you do when you’re ‘close to the Yara,’” Miles says, ending in a spooky voice; then his lips form that sarcastic smile that makes me want to punch him.

“No, that’s what you do when your baby’s freaking out. So, Poe’s a raven—I inter-species extrapolated. And it worked. What would you have done?”

“Rolled down the window,” Miles says. “Let the bird go before it shits all over my backseat.” He gestures to two white splats on the upholstery and looks mildly upset.

I roll my eyes and pull out the atlas. “We need to get off this main road. When Whit realizes that Poe’s not coming back, he will come after us. And if we were headed in the right direction—toward my clan—this would be one of the obvious routes we would take.” I trace our path on the map and find a junction where two small roads veer off and away from the highway, one meandering past a lake before it joins back up with the larger road near Idaho.

There’s a road sign within view, and I compare it to the map and calculate how far we are from the turnoff. “We’ll keep driving another sixty miles and then exit,” I say, and then wait.

Miles sighs and turns the key in the ignition. I’m going to have to tell him more. I need him to understand what’s happening or else . . . Or else what? a voice says in my mind. Or else he might leave me. And I still need him, I think, cursing the fact that, for some reason, I need this boy to help rescue my clan.

28

MILES

“GIVE ME BACK MY WATCH, YOU FLEA-RIDDEN winged rodent!” I am chasing a raven around a clearing in the woods in the middle of nowhere Oregon as a brainwashed teenage ex–cult member meditates by the campfire. It seems that crazy spreads, because I have finally lost it. I’m at the end of my rope.