8/1/11
Casey watched the fire. He’d filled up the tank twice and rode as far as he could when he got off the ferry, finding himself in New Hampshire.
The birds were relentless, telling him to go to different places, to help assorted people. They reported back to Hino, they said, and then they went away, sending more birds in their place. Sparrows, chickadees, cardinals, pigeons.
He’d stopped a boy from getting beat up by bullies.
He’d stopped a man who was high from jumping off a bridge. That would leave a mark.
He gave a woman at the checkout enough money to cover her food, when she was ten dollars short.
He randomly paid for the guy behind him when he used the Turnpike.
Small things, little things that it might seem to him. No saving the world. No “fighting off the darkness.” No Black Spiral Dancers and ghostly children with vengeance on their minds. No wolves. No monkeys. Just people, and the world and the birds.
“Who, who!”
Casey looked up. An owl looked down at him, large and majestic. “May I join you, Black Fox?”
“Of course, wise one,” he said, and the bird swooped down to land on a fallen tree across from the bike. A meal was in one of its claws, still squirming. The owl squeezed it. Casey heard the crunch of bones along with the popping of his fire, and the small mouse ceased to move. The owl bent to eat his dinner, swallowing the mouse whole. Casey finished eating his. It was cream soup out of a can, cold and salty.
“So what do you wish for me to do? Save someone else?”
The owl studied him. “I wish for you to return to your people.”
“My people?”
“Your family, your friends. Your lover.”
“They don’t need me.”
“It is not a question of need, Black Fox. It is a question of want.”
“Why do they want the asshole?”
“You are their ragabash. A trickster and truth sayer.”
“I don’t like playing pranks. They bite me in the ass.”
“Yet you insult, for what?”
Casey tucked the can in a plastic bag, and put that in his saddle bags. “To get them to think about how they’re not so high and mighty.” He shrugged. “Doesn’t usually work.”
“You don’t realize that it does, Black Fox. You don’t realize how much you are respected, and loved.”
“And pitied.”
“They wish to help you. Your Uratha loves you with all he is and wishes to help you, to make you happy. We wish to help you. The Sunset Goddess and the Knight of the Dark wish to help you. And Lord Hino, in his way, wishes to help you.”
“He wants his wife back.”
“So she can help you.”
“How? I’ve been this way for her most of my life. These people, these wolves, all this supernatural stuff is beyond me. Keep me among humans; I’m not worthy of going back.”
The owl tilted his head 180 degrees. “Get out of your self-pity, Black Fox, or no one will wish to help you anymore.” The owl flew up. “Do you think that Soniac would have no other power to offer her champion? The world has changed, Black Fox. You can change with it.”
Casey said, “I’ve changed –” But the owl had disappeared. He looked down and realized that, really, he hadn’t. After the war, he hadn’t changed, and still had the ubermensch mentality. He had to think of himself as a member, not as a leader, not as superior.
He would go back. He would use this time like the times at the temple and no longer fight in the field. Not among them.