Angel of Light [antikvár]

The Children of Maurice J. Halleck It is on a windy morning in early March, a day of high scudding dizzy clouds, some nine months after their father's ignoble death, that his only children, Owen and Kirsten, make a pact to revenge that death. Not revenge. Not revenge but justice—that's what we want. But how will we know . . . ? Who his murderers are, you mean?—we know. No. If it's justice. Or only revenge. A morning of falling tumbling shadows, high above the river. The raucous and distracting noise of birds—blackbirds, grackles—in the leafless trees. Owen finds the birds' cries distinctly unpleasant and when he finally pauses to look around he is struck, even a little alarmed, by the vast numbers of birds: a spring migration, evidently? Hundreds upon hundreds. Thousands. A ceaseless din, fluttering wings, cries, screams, virtual shrieks. He cannot remember ever having seen so many birds flocking at one time. There is something repulsive about them in addition, even, to their unholy noise—something blackly snakelike about their necks, their heads—he thinks of dream-serpents—a scuttling and slithering in the dark, out of the range of his vision—an incoherent memory, perhaps, from his troubled sleep of the previous night. Thousands and thousands of birds, and his sister is barely conscious of them. She blinks, she stares, looking around where he is pointing with a hand that trembles just perceptibly—her pinched anemic face and her slate-gray eyes with their contracted pupils, their look of glassy stupor, cannot seem to register the din—the nuisance—the panicky outrage that Owen feels.