Feather Dark

Chapter 1

Author note: this is not a stand-alone story.  Find part one on my profile.

Keira

There is a man on my balcony.

I woke up with a fright, sweaty and unsure of where I was for a moment. Sitting up, I wrapped my wings tight around me and shivered. All I wanted to do was fall back asleep, but the memories of the last few, horrendous days assaulted my memory.

After my flight from the beachside house that had become my home, I'd arrived back on the balcony of my own apartment. It had been so many weeks since my departure, I wondered how much had changed. Would the furniture be gone? Had someone else moved in? Was I about to discover I was homeless?

But, no. My apartment was just as I'd left it all those nights ago. The apartment hadn't been robbed or squatted in. Everything was disturbingly, depressingly normal, just the way it had always been. The place smelled a little musty and the fridge was full of rotted food but that was it.

It was actually upsetting that I had been gone for that amount of time and no one had missed me or even checked if I was alive or dead. Standing in my lonely apartment, I had a very unpleasant vision of myself as an old lady who died alone and got eaten by her twenty cats. Which would have been both horrible and weird because I hated cats.

Even so, at that point, I was simply grateful that after everything I'd left behind and the agony in my heart I was trying to quash, I could just fall into bed still wearing my elegant birthday dress and ignore the world for a while.

As I collapsed to the sheets, I felt a pinch on the skin over my heart, a piercing sensation that seemed more than physical. My clenched fist revealed Noah's feather and Leigh's pendant, pressed against my breastbone. Too spent to even weep at the symbology of both objects, I dropped the feather into the drawer. I left the necklace on, resolving to hide it away in the morning. In that moment, having it against my heart soothed me enough to sleep.

In the morning, I'd woken up to overcast weather, rainy and cold. I wondered vaguely if my moods somehow controlled the weather, decided they probably didn't and then got on with the day. The first thing I needed was comfort food; sugar and fat to ease the pain. So I hit the shops and loaded up with every kind of junk imaginable: cookie dough, corn chips, chocolate bars, ice cream, fries, bacon, fluffy white bread, cheese spread and of course, doughnuts.

Laden down with bags of artery-clogging goodness, I dragged myself home and consulted the internet. I need something to watch something long. Something really long.

The browser threw back dozens of suggestions, mostly romance-related, young people looking for love in New York, a single mother's second chance at finding her soul mate, et.

Pass. I filtered out romance, and decided on a show about an honourable serial killer and his crime-fighting best friend who happened to be a werewolf.

I sat on my couch and blocked out the world successfully for a few hours at a time, gorging on junky food and disturbing storylines. When I was so exhausted I couldn't lift my spoon or keep my eyes open, I would crash out in front of the TV with my legs swaddled inside my mermaid tail blanket.

But even the magic of television and healing power of crummy food couldn't distract me forever. I would wake every few hours, seeing Leigh's angry face, hearing Noah's broken voice. I'd left to save them, to save myself, but I wasn't disillusioned, wasn't trying to pretend to be strong: I was broken. My plan was to nurture myself at home for at least a week and then think about relocating, finding another job, learning to live without my heart. It wasn't a very good plan, but it was all I could manage.