Darkness covered the funeral as those black clouds rained onto black umbrellas. Most of the policemen were gathered to put Sergeant Ventura into the ground. Detective Winters turned from the man's family, Police, and with a scowling cigarette, he headed back towards his car.

"Did it go well?" I asked him from where I had waited in the back seat.

"You know I told them exactly what happened?" He asked me, after a moment of silent conversation. The rain was making a soothing noise on the roof and windshield, repetitive, insistent and natural. I listened to that, instead of the rest of his monologue: about filling out a report, and then talking about the report to his superiors, and now telling me the whole story. I looked out the window as he went on and on, and watched the various policemen and their wives filing away. I noticed only half of them had wives and only one had a male partner. I wasn't sure if he was to be referred to as a 'wife'. Can't be a 'spouse' in this state. "And for all that they just made me write that I had accidentally shot the corpse-shaped booby trap that killed Sergeant Ventura."

"You finished?" I asked while he stopped to catch his breath.

"Yes. Thank you. I feel better." He claimed. He started his car and we drove back to the hotel.

"You just gonna stay here with me?" I asked him as I headed past the beds for the bathroom. I intended to have a shower, thinking: "I admit I don't get them very often, living outdoors."

"I wouldn't dream of leaving you. You are the love of my life. I can't sleep when you aren't in that bed over there, in the same room as me. Meals just don't taste as good without you." Detective Winters had an odd tone of voice as he said all of that. I decided to just leave it alone.

While I was showering, I realized I was afraid of him. I was harmless compared to him, and I could kill someone to protect something I couldn't even explain. What would he do if I tried to escape? I decided it was best to accept this path. I wanted to make recompense for taking a life. It meant something to me, even if I avoided Earthly justice.

I shaved off my beard and tied my hair back with my bandanna. I looked like a human-being. I finally put on the clothes Detective Winters had bought for me at the thrift store. I looked like a decent person. Cory tilted his head at me.

"Looks like you could find a mate." Cory complimented me.

"Think so?" I asked, blushing.

"Amen." Cory squawked supreme affirmation. I presented myself to Detective Winters.

"Thank you." He muttered, with a cigarette towering ash atop a filter on his mouth, as he lay on his back with a towel over his eyes. He was thanking me for cleaning up.

I too got some rest. It seemed like all we did was sit at the policestation and fill out paperwork. I had started pacing and found I was not allowed out of his sight. Being confined was strangely exhausting.

I laid there and started to fall asleep. It was strange, sleeping indoors again. It had taken me so many nights in that bed to get used to it. My dreams were of distant times and places. Sometimes I saw Khurl and primitive humans in my dreams. Those were strange nights. The hotel window was open, and the sounds of people softly shuffling by, or arguing in the distance, or watching an infomercial all night on full volume, drifted in with the cool breeze. The world was outside and I had learned to sleep in a new place. A strange kind of sleep.

The phone rang and I awoke and sat up. Cory was watching me in the darkness. He asked:

"What is that?"

"It's Detective Winters's phone." I told him.

After it stopped ringing he woke up and got it and called back. He was laying there half asleep.

"You called?" He sounded quiet and spoke slowly. "I was asleep. I saw that you just called. I want to talk to you. Are you okay? I miss you. Hello?"

Someone might be talking to him. He was listening, there in the darkness. Then he looked at the phone, acknowledging that the call was ended. He gently set the phone down and rolled back over. I could only presume he was trying to fall back asleep.

Then his phone rang again and he answered it and asked in a voice I only heard him use there, at night:

"Please tell me what it is. I want to hear it." And there was a pause as he waited for a response. But it was his boss instead, and after chuckling: he told Detective Winters that he was needed at the scene of a murder. I could hear it.

"Let's go." He looked over and saw I was awake. We dressed and went to the car. The cool night air greeted us and Cory outstretched his wings, loving the breeze.

We got out of the car, at those last moments of night, at a hiking trail that led up Grandfather Hill, after crossing Sunberry Creek. I've tasted the legendary sunberries. They aren't meant for human consumption. I wouldn't recommend them.

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

Forensics had a van near the head of the trail. The body was about to get removed. They had waited for Detective Winters.

"There is the trail they made to get to her." Detective Winters had his last cigarette and lit it with his 'little red riding hood and wolf eyes' lighter. He took a death-sucking drag from it and pointed with it while he exhaled unhealthy air. "I want us to go the long way. I want to know the rest of her story."

I stood quietly and shivered. Cory clicked that there was a path if I turned around. It was a click that meant it was only the first step. There were three or four to find the path. He'd not tell me there were a series of steps, because crows don't think of numbers in the same pattern as humans. Numbers are magical, in their symbolism, to crows. Crows can count to a degree, but they will often stop counting if the number matches the same meaning they identify with the bushels they are counting. Thus the number three, to a crow, is also essentially female, as a symbol. Therefore when counting a group of females, there would necessarily be three. Every number had such a meaning.

I found a stone and when I stepped upon it I knew the path across the roots. It appeared when we got to the top of the hill. It led down to where the creek was. I stopped to get Detective Winters and heard him behind me:

"I'm following." His voice sounded like he had his eyes on me and couldn't really see the path. Cory kept urging my steps and then told me:

"This is where it first found her." Cory hopped down and pointed with his beak. "I think it is like a man. See its funny footstep?"

"What happened?" I asked.

"How should I know, my Lord? You always task me so." Cory flitted up to my shoulder and trembled and whispered into my ear: "It killed her, I am guessing. What do you think?"

I listened then. I had heard the forest once before. I knew this place, it could whisper, in that same tone. For just a moment it was almost a glimmer of a feeling, a childish emotion, a very crude and simple feeling, like just one note of a song. I glanced up and smiled.

"Cory." I said softly, smiling. He drilled a long series of clicks that was his most hilarious laugh.

"My Lord?" Cory wanted to hear what I was thinking.

"It is like Beauty and the Beast. This footprint, that is like a man. It is a man that is like a beast. He wanted her, loved her, followed her."

"Killed her." Cory added.

"That wasn't the plan. See how carefully it hid." I pointed where the shafts of sunlight lit each footprint perfectly. Such a thing could not step out of the bounds that were set for it by nature. Each of its movements in the forest was perfectly synchronized. Until something on its trail changed. Its movement pattern changed. It was following her, although still very careful as it went.

"What godless beast saw this woman and looked so intently?" Cory sounded interested. I could not guess, while I studied its saddest footsteps.

"This is where it retreated." I pointed to the path of its egress from the kill site. The sunlight danced through the trees as though the light were floating through the forest. In those strange shadows I could imagine the rest:

Hunched and breathing in the moonlight it had watched her approach. She had seen its eyes and perhaps she had screamed, fled, panicked. On instinct the beast had forgotten its fascination and attacked. Her fragile body stood no chance and it left her there and fled this direction. I was walking its path.

"I am going to get dogs out here. Wait!" Detective Winters called after me. He sensed the terrible danger and wasn't driven to it as I was.

"Must go now." Cory was insisting. My crow was also afraid.

"I want to see for myself." I also insisted. I was afraid too, but the quality of my fear was merely a sail to the fears lurking upon my path. I could not turn back and face those darker gazes. They could see into my soul and ignore me, cosigning me to the void.

The full moon still stood overhead and shone down in the lighting sky. In the eerie green light of the forest I found a clearing. I had followed the trail, losing the policemen and the detective. They would eventually find me.

The clearing was ringed by mustard colored toadstools all around its edge. A man lay in the bloodied pelt of a wolf as it peeled from his body. His claws held the earth and were caked in gore. Now I only felt the terror of my action. I had ignored my fear, for fear of being ignored by my own lucky stars. Now I was terrified of the thing before me, the deadly and unnatural visage of it.

The beast was breathing a painful mist onto my hand. He was a little more man, than creature, as his stillness grew; from moment to moment. He looked up at me.

"Know we see you." Cory spoke in his most sincere and clearest English.

"Why have you come to see this?" The man-wolf asked in a voice, broken by remorse, tired by rage, shamed by murder and driven to isolation. Besides the inhuman growl that its voice was composed of. Its yellow eyes stared, bleeding tears across a face not yet human and no longer an animal.

"Did you love her?" I asked. "Before she saw you, nothing happened to her."

"Melody! Oh god no! She followed me!" He exclaimed. When he said 'me' he began to howl dismally. This broke into an unearthly and almost inhuman cry of agony, straight from his soul. Hearing it, and knowing the fruit of his lamentation, is what turned a streak of my beard and hair white, and the white feather on Cory drained of color at that same time.

We stood in the morning light and waited. The cursed creature in front of us sobbed miserably. He said:

"I should be dead, not her."

"Death will always happen." Cory told him.

"Not for me." He wept bitterly.

"He understood you." I noticed.

"Indeed. I think it shows he is not so bad. You listen well enough to understand an animal." Cory spoke to me and then to him. He just stared at my crow. Then he confessed:

"It is the beast that is evil."

"She loved you too." I was sure. "Twas the beast that killed her, for that love."

"She did love me." He told the truth and the hot tears washed some of the blood off of his face.

Dogs and policemen arrived. The moon was gone and the sunlight was warming the forest. They trampled the toadstools and put the decomposing wolf's skin into evidence bags. They put the cursed one in handcuffs. An irony that the cuffs could only hold him while he was relatively harmless, not when he was the beast, of course. I was sure of that too, as I looked at a tree he had struck in his bestial fury, cutting into it like the wood of oak were soft.

"What will happen?" I asked Detective Winters.

"You know as well as I do." He replied. "Crazy guy like that will get the best care of modern medicine."

"That's probably for the best." I surmised.

"Yeah?" Detective Winters complimented me, as he lit a smoke he had bummed off of someone. "I believe you. You know I do."

"Thanks."