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Sheriff Ellie

THE WORLD MOVED IN slow motion.

Ellie reached for her sidearm and managed to unsnap the leather guard on her gun the moment before Buck jerked the slide on his shotgun, chambered another round, and fired again.

The second shot blew through the girl’s shoulder, causing her body to twist and pivot.

Ellie yanked her gun out and leveled it at Buck as he chambered another shell. “Drop it!”

Buck fired.

Point blank, directly at the girl’s face.

What happened next would remain ingrained in Ellie’s mind for the remainder of her life.

There was no blood, no gore, no brain matter or bits of flesh, none of the things she expected. Instead, there was a flutter of black—small bodies, wings—this explosion of harsh movement from where the girl stood beside her in all directions at once, and when Ellie’s brain managed to make some sense of what she saw, she realized the girl had burst into hundreds of crows, all of them shooting out from center mass with the force of an explosion. They twisted through the air, found the wind, the trees, the sky, and then they were gone with nothing but their angry cries left to echo in Ellie’s ears behind the thundering blast and ring of the shotgun.

Ellie wasn’t sure how long she just stood there. It might have been a lifetime, or it might have been half a second. Her mind had reached some kind of breaking point and flipped a switch. It wasn’t until Buck spoke over the ringing in her ears that she found the string attached to reality again and managed to tug herself back. His deep voice resonated through every inch of her being as he held out his hand, grazing the tip of her gun with his fingers. “No, Ellie.”

Her finger was already moving toward the trigger, though. She couldn’t stop that involuntary motion any more than she was able to stop the younger version of herself from firing at the meth head in that store.