Yes, if you have no idea who the Songbird is you can click on these links to read the first parts of the story. I'll be kind. And if there's encouragement enough, I will keep writing... sign the f'ing guestbook, folks. Please. I could use the contact.

Part One - Part Two - Part Three

---

You're curious now, aren't you? Wondering what she could have done to him, wanting a look at that, at her violence, at the way she reacted to the taste of blood. Voyeur - that's the word for people who want to look, right? But this much you will know, no more: they beat him until he was bleeding, and after, she beat him until he was nearly dead. She hurt him far worse than they had.

No, not because she hated him. Not because she even knew what she was doing, and wanted it. She beat him because she wanted to see it, to feel it, but she didn't know what she was doing at all. When he passed out, she finally noticed how bad it had gotten.

Guilt. They introduced her to guilt.

They say that you can tell when the transition happened... that next album, that you could hear a depth to it that wasn't there before, how it started out so cheerfully, brightness and contentment, and then dropped down with one song... and somehow, everything afterward had a bittersweet edge. One of the music reviewers speculated that maybe she'd just found out she had some sort of terminal disease.

In a way she did - if you'd asked her, if you could have explained it to her, she would have said that yes, she was diseased. Unclean. And as she watched him, waiting silently for him to wake up at first, then finally singing, her creature calling to his, her soul spit out as if she no longer wanted it, hoping to lure him back to this world, she felt she was dying of that disease.

She hated herself already, you see. She'd been raised to view herself as a less-than, only her voice was important... and now someone, Wolf, came along and gave her faith in herself. And she repaid him like this.

Hurt him.

There was blood on the floor around him. Around her. She pulled off her dress, used it to clean up the now-sticky stuff, only twice dipping a finger in to taste it. She kept her eyes on him as she worked, humming slowly. If she'd heard of dirges, she'd have called it that. Not for him... no, not for him. He was breathing, alive, and no one had come in to take him away, so he must eventually survive. This was for herself.

He woke to see her half-mad gaze locked on his own. Licked his lips. Tasted blood... the first words out of his mouth were mumbled, she didn't quite catch them, and when she leaned closer he merely shook his head, dropping it back to the floor after a moment, silent now. He didn't repeat what he said, but later she puzzled it out: "I didn't bargain for this. They aren't paying me enough."

She didn't understand, so she tucked the words in the back of her mind and ignored them.

...until they came out in music, a week later, and the moment she sang them the door slammed open and Wolf was pulled away, kicking, screaming, knowing what he was being taken away for and honestly frightened now, the beating had been bad, her mockery of it had been far worse, but beyond the door the unknown waited.

Forget the Wolf, for now. Forget the cage, the dusty, dirty floor that still has bloodstains coloring it a rosy brown. Forget the people outside. The girl herself. Forget everything but the music, pay attention only to that for a moment. Listen closely and you can hear something else new. It was remarked on, eventually - there seems to be a second voice singing, sometimes. A similar melody, and a quiet one... but a second voice, as if another person is in the room, as if they'd dubbed her voice on twice.

They didn't. There wasn't. She'd learned a new trick. First just wordless humming, that second tone she somehow pulled out despite the clear impossibility of it. Then, gradually, as she waited and waited for Wolf to return, the miracle became almost commonplace. His voice, his touch, the way he moved... all of it spun together into this second voice she somehow projected. Her music, her sweet shadowtune, so achingly beautiful but still oddly harsh. It never lost that gravelly tone, you can still hear it in her songs at times. The sound that tells you the voice is one full of long-past suffering.

She sung him a dirge as she waited, not thinking him dead but no longer certain that he'd return. As the days crept by she sang to him, for him, woke up imagining his arms around her and fell asleep dreaming she could hear him shift on the floor nearby. In the little room that he lived in now, bruised and torn, his body slowly recovering, he could hear her songs. They were piped in all over the building, some days... and his cell was always filled with the sound of her. He didn't speak. Didn't beg. Didn't do anything but lift his own voice in song at times, matching that deep undercurrent she projected, longing, regretting... but no longer able to back out. He was in too deep.

--- to be continued ---