As soon as Owen had left, Daecon started feeling boredom set in. He stood up and pulled his phone out of his pocket. Miraculously it had survived the dunk in the lake, but the battery was at 15%. As with Owen’s, his phone had no signal. He held it up and took a selfie just to get a better look at those wings. They were pure white and showed no signs of soiling, even after being dragged up the side of the hill. 

Instead of just dragging limply on the floor as they had been, though, they were now perked up and assumed a resting position against his back. They were still far too large to be ‘hidden’ as Owen had put it, but at least they weren’t hindering his movements anymore. They were actually quite fetching, Daecon thought, as he regarded them in the photo. They should match well with his white hair after the blue dye wore out and it returned to its natural colour. 

While looking at the photo he was reminded that he was still wearing his blue contact lenses. “I guess I won’t be needing these anymore”, he said aloud, as he set about removing them. He had never liked wearing the contacts, but it was easier to wear them than to answer questions about his oddly coloured eyes. He popped the first one out and set it on top of his phone, and then worked at the other. While he was working at extracting it something started fluttering around his head. Something large. A bat, emerging from its daytime slumber, was now active and confused at this large intruder in its home. Without even thinking he swatted it away with his right wing and proceeded to remove the contact lens. Just as he placed the lens on top of the phone next to the other one he realized what he had just done: He had swatted at the bat with his wing! 

He looked at his right wing and started thinking about moving it. He wasn’t sure how to do this, of course, so he was trying to send the same signal to the wing that he would have sent to his arm to straighten out the elbow. To his great surprise, his right wing straightened out at the first joint, what would have been the elbow in an arm. He almost jumped with excitement. He then sent the signal to bend again, and the first joint folded up and resumed its resting position. He did this a few more times, and then tried a different thought signal. Instead of trying to straighten and bend the ‘elbow’ joint in the wing he sent a command to the root of the wing where it attached to his back. He sent the same signal as he would have to raise his arm, and sure enough, the wing rotated in its socket and lifted. He then sent the ‘elbow’ a signal to straighten out and it did as he commanded. Finally, he tried the second joint, the ‘wrist’, and it opened up on command as well. 

He was figuring it out: The wing basically functions like an arm, and has the same joints in it that an arm does. He worked the joints as he would have with an arm and very quickly was moving it just as naturally as an arm. He had the same success with the other side. 

He decided to try actually flapping them but it was no use: The cave was too small inside. Instead he folded them back up to the resting position and started thinking about hiding them. Moving them and flapping them seemed to be easy, as it was just like moving and flapping his arms, but what thought command would make them shrink and disappear? There was no equivalent to arm movement here. He concentrated on shrinking them, but nothing happened no matter how hard he thought. 

He spent the next several hours ‘playing’ with the wings, stretching and bending them. He discovered that if he stood to one side of the cave there was just enough room to flap just one wing, so he did this several times with each wing. Each time he did it, it felt better, more natural. He could almost feel the strength coming into them. Still, even after several hours of messing around he was no closer to being able to hide them.

It was now quite dark inside the cave, and he was getting tired, so Daecon took a deep drink from the stream and laid down in the corner. The cave floor was sandy and soft here, so it wasn’t particularly uncomfortable, except for those wings. Daecon didn’t know how he was going to sleep with them – every sleeping position he tried, they were in the way. He tried to imagine how birds slept and remembered that they usually slept by perching on a branch or roosting in a nest. That was obviously not going to happen, so he made himself as comfortable as possible by lying on his side with the wing underneath him splayed forward almost so that it was acting as a pillow for his head and drifted into a fitful sleep. 

He wasn’t sure what time it was when the urge to take a leak woke him up. It was now pitch black inside the cave and just a small amount of light from the moon was illuminating the cave’s entrance. He remembered Owen’s warning about leaving the cave and considered peeing in the corner, but decided against it. It was dark out, surely he could step outside of the cave to take a leak and have a breath of fresh air without anyone seeing him. 

He stepped out onto the plateau, carefully made his way to the edge, and relieved himself on a wild rhododendron. As he went he gazed out over the valley and the lake. The moonlight made it quite easy to see – or was it the moonlight? It was only a crescent moon, giving off a small amount of light but not nearly enough to allow him to see as well as he could. He looked around the plateau and confirmed it: He was definitely able to see things he should not have been able to see. He could see every leaf on every bush, right down to the finest detail. He even caught sight of a tiny mouse scurrying between two bushes. 

Even a full moon wouldn’t have allowed Daecon the vision that he had right now – it  wasn’t quite as good as it would have been in broad daylight, but it was at least as good as it would have been at dusk, shortly after the sun had set but it hadn’t gotten dark yet.

He returned his gaze to the valley and lake below and was just noticing that not only could he see, but he could see details far clearer than he ever could before. He could see small boats moving around in the lake with spotlights shining off of them and was alarmed to realize that they were very likely searchers looking for him. 

Daecon focused his attention on one of the boats and was quite amazed that he could make out every last detail. He could see the lettering “Search and Rescue” on the boat riders’ shirts, he could see the word “POLICE” on the ball cap of the guy piloting the boat, and he could clearly make out the faces on the people, even though they were several kilometers away. 

He was just beginning to realize that this must be his brain figuring out how to use the animal powers that Owen had mentioned when something he saw filled him with terror: He was looking around the lake and noticed that one of the small boats was beached on a small, sandy shore on this end of the lake. The same shore that Owen had dragged him to after he first fell into the lake. The boat was empty, meaning that the people in it had come ashore here and were searching around. Daecon shuddered as he wondered about the tracks they must have left behind in the sand. 

He was wondering how long that boat had been there and how far into the woods the searchers had come when a faint sound sent shivers up his spine. It was dogs barking and men shouting. He listened for a few more minutes and started getting really scared. They were here, they were looking for him, and they were definitely getting closer. 

Daecon surmised that the dogs must have been following the scent that Owen-bear had left behind. Do shape shifters even leave a scent behind? It didn’t matter. Whatever it was that was bringing them here, they were coming and he had to think quickly. He looked around the ledge once again. There was nothing to hide behind here. He did not want to go back into the cave because he was afraid that he’d be cornered there. He looked up past the cave, on the mountain side above the opening, and saw several large trees with thick boughs standing there. He would have to climb one of those trees and hide. That shouldn’t be a problem, as he had always been an accomplished climber, but the problem was with his wings. As bright white as they were there would be no hiding them from the beams of those flashlights.

Those God-damned wings. As much as Owen had gone on about flying, so far his wings seemed to bring him nothing but misery. Instinctively he reached back to touch them and discovered that they were gone. He turned his head back as far as he could and confirmed it: No wings! He must have somehow hidden them while sleeping! He almost gave a yelp of joy, but a loud bark snapped him back to attention. 

Those men and dogs were almost here. He ran over to the edge of the cave opening and scrambled up the side of the mountain. The going was very steep but the rock was very rough and he was able to find plenty of hand and foot holds. Soon enough he was standing on the mountain side above the cave opening, staring up into one of the trees. They looked a lot bigger from here.

Still, Daecon had climbed bigger, more challenging trees as a kid. He didn’t know why, but he had always possessed a natural talent for climbing. As a child he would grip tree trunks with his hands and pull himself up just as easily as any squirrel could. He was utterly fearless when it came to heights, so he would go right up to the very top branches. This ability even earned him the nickname “Squirrel” among the kids at the orphanage for a while, until very young kids became adolescents, and adolescent attitudes became much crueller with little tolerance for anything or anyone who was perceived as different. Then much nastier nicknames were used. 

Daecon had little time to reminisce about his childhood, though, so he took hold of the large tree trunk and started pulling himself up. He was delighted to discover that even though it had been years since he climbed a tree it still came quite natural to him – in fact it seemed like he had only improved. He made his way up the trunk and found a large branch jutting out 3/4 of the way up. Where it met the trunk it made a perfect seat, so that is where he sat and waited. 

The barking of the dogs was getting louder and louder, and now he could hear the men shouting commands at the dogs quite clearly. Soon he could hear branches and twigs snapping as the dogs and men were getting very close, and finally he saw the beams of their flashlights. First a dog emerged from the woods onto the plateau, then another dog, then a man, and then another man, waving their flashlights around as the dogs sniffed the entire plateau, paying particular attention to the rhododendron that Daecon had just peed on. They were here. His heart was pounding in his chest, so loudly that he was convinced the men would hear it. 

As the dogs sniffed around the men waved their flashlights hear and there. “There’s a cave right there”, one of them said.

They walked over to the cave opening and stood in front of it. 

The other one called into the cave, “Hello! Daecon! Are you in there? Are you hurt?” 

For a brief moment Daecon was tempted to shout “I’m up here!”, but he did not. At first he wondered how they had even known his name, but he realized that they could have identified him from the remains of the smashed Porsche, and there was also the probability that the friends that he had been visiting at the campground would have reported him missing. Still, he felt uneasy, and even though his wings were now gone he felt that he did not want to talk to or be discovered by these men. 

“Doesn’t look like he’s in there”, man number one said.

 “Either that or he’s afraid to be caught”, said man number two. “Fucking freak coming around here and murdering Adam MacInnis like that. He wants to hope the cops catch him before I do.” 

“You believe that, do you? That he murdered Adam?” 

“Why shouldn’t I? Fucking city boy faggot comes here prancing about, trying to fuck Adam. Adam and the boys try to teach him a lesson, he lures them to the lookoff, and he pushes Adam over the cliff to die with him. Shame, really. And that fucking truck of his...” 

“See, that’s what doesn’t make sense to me. I know the other boys said that he pushed Adam over the cliff with him when he realized he was going to get the shit beat out of him, but how in the hell is that little sports car going to push that big Dodge 3500 over that cliff? That car weighs what, 1500 kilos? And Adam’s truck likely weighs 5,000 or more. I just don’t buy it. And then they said he done sprouted a set of wings and flew away. Do you really believe that?” 

“No, I don’t believe the flying away part, that’s stupid. Those boys was just drunk. He probably had a parachute strapped onto his back or something, and they thought it was wings.” 

“You actually think this Daecon fellow had a parachute strapped to his back while out on a Sunday cruise, do you? How many times have you left the house with a parachute on your back?” 

“Well, how do you explain what happened, mister smart guy?”

“You know what I think? I think that Adam and the boys were fixing to fuck this Daecon fellow up. I think they forced him over that cliff, and Adam was just too late on the brakes and went over with him. I think the boys knew they’d be in big shit and made the whole thing up about Daecon pushing Adam over, and I am certain they made the whole thing up about Daecon flying away. I mean, that’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard, and it’s just stupid enough to come out of those three drunken idiots.” 

“Hey now, easy on the name callin’. Those ‘idiots’ are cousins of mine. So if he didn’t fly away, where is his body then? They found Adam smashed all to hell inside that truck, but there’s no sign of the other one. If he didn’t fly away, where is he?”

“Well, the car’s a convertible, isn’t it? He was probably thrown clear from it. Doesn’t matter, he’ll still have died when he hit the ground, but I think his body is shattered on that ground or tangled up in a tree somewhere near those two vehicles.” 

“Yeah, yeah. You’re probably right about him being dead, but I still think he killed Adam. Now, let’s just take a look inside this cave, then we can get back down to the boat and get the hell out of here.”