Red Feather & Bone

I'm not used to this bird watching shit. I'm the guy the New York Council of the Dead brings in for the really nasty jobs. The headless bastards trying to make it back to tell their ex-wives some bullshit, the homicidal midget house ghost – all these wayward souls with grudges that won't stay where they belong – that's my turf. Unlike the rest of the NYCOD, though, I'm only half dead. Yes, my skin is more gray than brown – a weird neither-here-nor-there hue, just like me, and I'm eerily cold to the touch. But I've perfected the forced easy grin of the living, the authoritative cop snarl, the just-walking-by shrug. In short, I pass. It allows me access to places that fully dead COD agents could never get their translucent asses into, so the ghouls upstairs dispatch me only on those good juicy messes.

At least, that's how it was right up until three weeks and four days ago, when my partner Riley Washington disobeyed orders and did away with the child-killing ghost of a long dead plantation master. Riley went rogue and the Council went batshit – sent the full raging force of their soulcatchers on him. Everyone's been out there looking, except for me. They knew I'da sooner hugged the dude than taken him out, so I'm stuck staring at the Manhattan skyline, watching this stupid long-necked bird trouble the skeevy business men with its beautiful, pathetic song. Below me, the tall shadows of the elite COD soulcatchers roam back and forth, looking for my friend.

To top it all off, it's the middle of day – that horrible, bright lull when there're no shadows and no mercy. I put down the binoculars and walk back to the rooftop shed. A small, translucent child is waiting for me inside. He's about five or six, sipping absentmindedly from my two-day old coffee and staring much too closely at the scribbled over maps and bird drawings plastered across my walls.

"What you doing there, youngin?"

"Minding mine," the child says.

"Actually, you're minding mine. Why don't you go help some dead geriatric cross the street?"

The boy gives me such a haunted, intense stare that I'm not sure what to do with myself. He looks familiar – one of these lost soul child phantoms that haunt the outer boroughs running odd errands for folks like me in exchange for toys and candy. This one, as I recall, is only interested in rusted-out car parts and electrical wiring.

"You want a light bulb?" I try. He scoffs and hovers his little body to another corner. His bulgy eyes scan the floor plans to a building my bird was sighted in.

"What do you want?"

"You think the ghost bird came from the burial ground?"

"Seems likely," I say. The thing started its midday cooing in a high-rise beside the weird shaped, corporate rock that comemorates some forgotten African slaves. "I don't know where else it would come from down here. The thing is old, from what I can tell, and not any species I can find in the bird nerd books. All the buildings it shows up in are within a five block radius of the site. It's starting to add up." The boy grunts thoughtfully and floats over to an old map I found of the financial district in 1863.

"Where'd you get this map?"

"Ganked it from the research room at the historical society. But this is a nonsense assignment, kid. What you care?"

He hovers for another minute and then turns, looks up at me and says: "Just curious. Thank you for the nice visit." He moves out the door and then pokes his little head back in. "Oh, and I have a message for you. Almost forgot."

It can't be from the Council – when they want to get in touch they just blare another staticky transmission directly into my head with that creepy dead people telepathy they got. My slow, slow heart quickens by a fraction. Could it be—