Silvertongue by Charlie Fletcher Read Free Book Online

the bird and the damage it had just sustained for her.
    “Get off with you, or there’s more of that!” shouted the man, suddenly elated by his success. “I’ll have you! Get away!”
    The bird stayed in its place, between Edie and the knife. It screeched, but this time the man both flinched and lunged. Edie saw the knife blade come through the wing, and then the man screamed even louder than the owl’s screech.
    The owl’s talons gripped the man’s head on either side, and the great wings dragged him out of the water and up into the air. He shrieked again, and it lifted his kicking body higher and higher. The screaming grew softer as the bird lofted him higher into the sky and farther out to sea.
    Edie stood in shock, the waves lapping above her knees as the bird and the man got smaller and smaller.
    Her face didn’t change when the owl dropped its prey and the distant man-shape rag-dolled its way through the gulf of air between the bird and the sea. Because of the distance, the smack of impact that cut off the screaming arrived a beat after she saw him hit the water.
    She still didn’t change her expression.
    She watched the great owl’s slow wing beats as it flew back to her. She saw the blood on its breast, red against white, and then it dropped into the sea and was gone.
    Edie gave a startled half-cry of disbelief.
    Once more she was alone.
    And then the sea’s surface burst open in a mighty wing beat, and the owl resurfaced, all traces of the blood washed clean away.
    Edie allowed herself a smile of relief as it hovered overhead and powered its wings up and down without moving, while the water moved instead.
    Somehow the owl was forcing the water back, making a kind of bowl around Edie’s legs. The water dropped below her knees, and she saw her calves stuck in the sand. The owl screeched and the sand began to blow away from her legs, revealing her calves, her ankles, and the hands that were holding her.
    They were hands made from sand—women’s hands— and they gripped her ankles tight as they were exposed. Edie knew that all she had to do was reach down and brush them off, but something within her rebelled at the idea of touching them, and she hesitated.
    The owl screeched again, a deeper noise, and Edie knew it was telling her to do it. She tried to touch the grasping sand hands, but she just couldn’t make herself. Although they were made of sand, she knew they were a dead woman’s hands.
    “I’m sorry. I can’t,” she murmured, her voice low and graveled with shame. “I just can’t. . . .”
    The owl roared. It wasn’t a screech. It was a deep thrumming noise, rumbling with age and power and primeval fury. It was such a profound and implacable sound that all Edie’s fear suddenly seemed irrelevant and petty by comparison. It was a roar that resonated through her bones and straightened her back, and when it stopped, her face was set and she felt washed clean by the noise that had just blown through her.
    She looked at the owl.
    It held her gaze long enough for Edie to notice how large and pale and moonlike its eyes were, then it blinked and looked away, as if uninterested.
    Edie bent and rubbed at the sand hands tugging at her ankles.
    As she had known, they just disintegrated into a scrabble of shell granules beneath her palms. She stepped out and looked back. As the water filled the depression in the sand, something gleamed and rose out of it.
    When she saw that it was another hand, she stepped back a half pace.
    The owl turned and looked at her pointedly. Edie watched the hand rise above the water and open out, revealing something small and familiar that blazed light at her.
    Her sea-glass.
    The thing she had felt the lack of while she was running away.
    The thing she had forgotten to remember.
    Her heart stone.
    The owl hooted low and insistently, and Edie stepped back and took the sea-glass. The hand disintegrated and dropped back into the sea, leaving a momentary gray swirl in the water