A Theft Most Fowl Read online

  Kill Three Birds

  A Kingdom of Aves Mystery

  Nicole Givens Kurtz

  Contents

  Credits:

  Patrons!

  Acknowledgments

  Other Nicole Givens Kurtz’s Titles

  Map of The Kingdom of Aves

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Bonus

  About Nicole Givens Kurtz

  KILL THREE BIRDS:

  A KINGDOM OF AVES MYSTERY

  * * *

  Published by Mocha Memoirs Press, LLC

  ISBN: 978-0-9840042-3-2

  Copyright Nicole Givens Kurtz ©2020

  * * *

  The author reserves all moral rights. No part of this book may be used or reproduced electronically or in print without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews.

  * * *

  Names, characters and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher. If you purchased the eBook version of this work, please note that eBooks are not transferable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement of the copyright of this work.

  * * *

  Credits:

  Cover art: Maya Preisler

  Editor: Melissa Gilbert

  Proofreader: Rie Sheridan Rose

  Map of Aves: Sarah Macklin

  Credits:

  Cover art: Maya Preisler

  Editor: Melissa Gilbert

  Proofreader: Rie Sheridan Rose

  Map of Aves: Sarah Macklin

  For Weston

  Patrons!

  Thank you, patrons, for continuing to donate and support Nicole’s creative efforts and works.

  Aiesha Little

  Alledria Hurt

  Andrea Judy

  Bishop O'Connell

  Darrell Grizzle

  Joel McCrory

  Kenesha Williams

  Maya Preisler

  Paige L. Christie

  Patrick Dugan

  Rebekah Hamrick

  Rick Smathers

  Rie Sheridan Rose

  Samantha Dunaway Bryant

  You can join these wonderful patrons and support Nicole’s work via Patreon.

  * * *

  Go here (https://www.patreon.com/user?u=19915635) to sign up.

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to acknowledge the assistance and support of the following individuals.

  Thank you to David Coe for his advice and feedback.

  Thank you to Maya Priesler and Trevor Curtis for their alpha reads of the manuscript.

  * * *

  Thank you to these amazing beta readers:

  Susan Ragsdale

  Andrea Judy

  David Lascelles

  Donald Kirby

  Rie Sheridan Rose

  Lucy Blue

  Chapter One

  “You wanna see what a killer looks like? Look in the reflecting glass,” Prentice Tasifa said over her shoulder. Her voice rose above the evening’s insects chittering. Not getting a reply, she stood up and looked over to Dove Balthazar. “Anyone is capable of killing.”

  “Those who are with the goddess, and follow along her path, don’t slaughter others,” Dove Balthazar said, with a sweeping arm across the bloodied body between him and Prentice. The white, gold-trimmed sleeves of his cloak just missed the carnage. “Hawk Prentice, try to remember how this woman lived. Holy. Pure.”

  “She’s a teenager.”

  Prentice pinched the bridge of her nose and sighed. Balthazar, like most in the rural egg, was about to discover the true nature of human beings. Anyone was capable of great violence when dumped in the right situation. Doves like him only saw goodness in people. That was their role.

  She put her attention back on the body. Despite the velvety darkness enveloping the site, Prentice used her skill to observe what most people missed. This wasn’t a homicidal rage.

  The body was covered in blood, but Prentice could tell she’d been hit with a blunt object. Her hands bore defensive wounds. A pit tightened in the bottom of the hawk’s stomach.

  “Do you want to talk about the skeletal remains found over there in the woods? We can wait on that one. Tomorrow will be soon enough.” Prentice watched his face.

  Balthazar paused, his index finger pointed at Prentice’s chest. Her scarlet cloak, dark dress cinched at the waist and crossed with a leather gun belt that contained her talons, covered her entire body. The guns shot silver bullets infused with fairy dust for penetration. Boots and her utility belt completed her look.

  “Skeletal remains?” He gaped.

  “There’s no rush. There’s a depression in the grass. The trail has gone cold, anyway. Body’s been there a while.” Prentice shook her head. She stepped back from the current corpse, moving to the trail that snaked through the woods behind the church. Like most eggs, this one had a centralized location to worship. “The two men, suspects, who came here.”

  “Two men? How do you know they were men?” Balthazar followed her to the worn path, his white cloak grabbing leaves and other ground debris in his wake.

  Prentice took out a cigarette, hand-rolled with tobacco. She snapped her fingers, sparking a small flame. She touched the cigarette’s tip and inhaled deep and long. When she exhaled the stream of purple smoke through her nostrils, Balthazar scowled.

  “Answer me, Hawk Tasifa.” He coughed. “Can you stop smoking?”

  “No,” Prentice said.

  “No, you can’t stop or no, you can’t answer me?” Balthazar’s thick eyebrows rose in question. He removed his hat, decorated in white and gold. Doves wore them. “We requested, I requested, help from the Order. We have a real situation here. Some of my nesters are dead. The eagles have no idea what’s going on.”

  Prentice sighed. “Yeah, and the Cardinal sent me, the hawk. Let me work. The smell of blood is disturbing and turns my stomach. I’m not a condor, okay?” She didn’t want to explain to him that smoking kept her from puking at death scenes. Yet underneath the putrid odor, something else surfaced. It hinted strongly of earth magic tinged with something black.

  “How did you know about the skeletal remains? We searched the grounds after we found Gretchen…”

  “Hawks see the unseen.” Prentice pointed to her hazel eyes, wide and large, stretched from the bridge of her nose out toward her temples. From a young age, hawks’ appearance unsettled others. She had spent a lot of her childhood in the nyumbani with her family. Her male siblings went out, to school, to work. Home-schooled by the rooks, Prentice and her sisters worked hard on their studies.

  She adjusted her headscarf and sighed.

  In her role, she saw what ordinary people missed. She’d been born with this gift. As a descendant of hawks, her mother worked for the Order. Trained as the investigative arm of the Order, hawks were dispatched to see what others could not. Now, here she stood, in the remote Gould Egg, a small community of three-to-five hundred people. A scenic gem situated on four thousand acres of sprawling woodland.

  “We have a real problem here. Someone is using your woods as a dumping ground.” Prentice rubbed her right temple. She dropped the cigarette and ground it out w
ith the toe of her boot.

  Balthazar threw up his hands. “Obviously. Who? You mentioned two men.”

  Prentice peered across the grassy swatch of land. Her eyes widened, growing and allowing in the unseen. Her wings broke free through the slits in her robe, lifting her from the ground. She’d done an aerial sweep before, but only a cursory look around. This time she meant to see everything. A significant amount of blood had been spilled on this U-shaped patch of land in the center of the woods behind the church. It splattered everywhere.

  Prentice hated her abilities sometimes. There’d been no evidence to suggest there had been more killings, but Prentice could tell someone had been using this recreational section to dump bodies.

  As she soared, she searched for disturbances in the soil or newly dug graves using her ability to see through the pitch-black night. She spied the heap of what looked like a burned corpse, the eviscerated body left in ashes. The hint of burnt flesh hit her nose making her gag. She spied tiny bits of bone and teeth buried in the ashes. Someone would’ve seen the blaze, and nothing around the body itself showed charring. It could’ve been dumped here and scattered, but who had the time? She could see Balthazar’s confused and frustrated face as she flew over him. He wanted a fast answer and resolution. She didn’t blame him. Killing frightened people.

  When she landed beside him, she stumbled and grabbed his shoulder to steady herself.

  “Sorry.” She pushed herself to a standing position. Her stomach ached and her vision narrowed, growing more limited until all she could make out were shadows.

  Damn it.

  “Are you all right?” Balthazar touched her shoulder. “We need to get you back to the church.”

  Prentice nodded. “Yes. We can speak more there.”

  She made out that Balthazar had nodded and gestured to the carriage driver. The dove started for the carriage, and she followed, her hands out in front of her to keep her from walking into him or anything else.

  “Here, let me help.” Balthazar took her hands in his, and helped her climb into the back of the carriage.

  Once inside, she ran her hands over the hard leather seats. The door’s creak and then clattering told her it had been secured. Balthazar’s girth rocked the carriage back a bit. In minutes, they lunged awkwardly forward through the woods along the worn path.

  His quiet presence loomed in the small carriage. She could almost feel his questions. Indeed, she got them every time the Order dispatched her to another egg. The doves all had the same nosy inquiries.

  “It’s stuffy in here,” Balthazar said at last.

  Prentice heard the creaking of the window as he rolled it down.

  “One of my abilities is to be able to see the unseen…”

  “Yes, that is what makes your kind so invaluable to the Order.”

  “…but what many do not know, is that using the ability costs me some of my own natural sight.”

  “What do you mean?” Concern crept into Balthazar’s tone, coupled with surprise.

  “Each time I use my abilities, I am limiting my own sight. Eventually, I will be blind.”

  He gasped. “By the goddess! Is it so for every hawk?”

  “It is.” Prentice thought of her mother, very much alive in her later years, except she could no longer see. The Order retired her forthwith, and she spent the rest of her days in the cottage with her family. She could no longer see with her eyes, but her other senses more than made up for it. For her mother, her hearing became excellent and she worked at the church as an organist. She had a great ear.

  “Sacrifice is in the blood.” Prentice muttered her mother’s favorite saying. It was true for all daughters of hawks.

  The sacrifice ran in the blood.

  Chapter Two

  By the time they reached the church, Hawk Prentice’s vision had returned to normal. She tried not to use her abilities too often, for the longer she resisted, the longer she’d retain her own sight. Panicked shouting greeted the carriage as it rolled into the entranceway in front of the steepled building.

  She stepped out to a gathering of furious church members, nesters, who bore lit torches and angry faces. She also spied a few axes and random raised goddess bibles Many people in these backwater eggs had never seen a hawk. Rumors and legends led their expectations, so she wanted to shield herself from those often-inaccurate beliefs.

  “Just when I was starting to feel grounded here,” she said to herself. She’d been dispatched here to make calm out of chaos, and so far she’d succeeded in doing the opposite.

  Balthazar ignored her as he climbed out of the carriage. He put on his hat and he addressed the crowd, a glowing white figure amongst the nesters’ dark browns, grays, and blacks. He raised his hands to quiet them.

  “Calm yourselves.”

  The Order taught hawks little magic tricks to help them in their field work. She could conjure fire. The other trick was fading. Prentice pondered whether she wanted to spend her life-force on that trick. It took energy. It took blood. It helped her fade, or hide, from the average human being. She wouldn’t be invisible, but she wouldn’t be visible either.

  Sacrifice was in the blood, but for hawks, so was magic. Blood magic passed down, which also gave them their hawk abilities.

  The shouting became sentences that caught her attention.

  “Do we need to be afraid here, Dove?” yelled a man from the rear of the throng.

  “My son’s been missing for weeks!”

  “The east winds always bring trouble!” another person shouted.

  Balthazar kept his hands raised. “Indeed. The Order has sent a hawk, but it will take her time to complete her work and reestablish our egg as safe. Go home. Be with your families and pray.”

  His soft, reassuring tone worked like a salve. Rumblings remained, but the mob slowly dispersed. Balthazar remained standing with her as they vacated the courtyard. Once sure they’d all left, the dove turned to the carriage driver.

  “Thank you. You may return home to your own family, James,” he said.

  “Thank you, Dove.” James inclined his head.

  As he did so, Prentice realized the hulking man was a vulture. The sharp, black eyes and bright scarlet mark across the beak of his nose and mouth were common traits. Grayish skin stretched tight across the body and face hinted at a steady diet lacking vegetables.

  “Surprised?” Balthazar laughed at the expression on Prentice’s face.

  “No. I mean, I knew vultures work with the churches for the graveyard work…”

  “And other things. Come. Follow me. All are loved by the goddess.”

  “Hoot, even those who do not believe,” Prentice said, almost out of habit.

  “Hoot, even those who do not believe,” he repeated, and gestured for her to follow him into the church.

  They entered through the side door that fed into the office. The dove’s upstairs living quarters had a guest room across the hall. The bulk of the church belonged to the worship arena, the fellowship hall, and to closets, storage, and community get-togethers. Like most eggs, Gould was the hub of its community. It sat at the foothills of the Adams Mountains in the Adams Nest. Like a sprinkle of confetti along its base, tiny eggs—like Gould—dotted the mountain range’s base. All the nesters congregated at churches, and the entire egg depended on the church to govern and keep the peace.

  He removed his hat once more, placing it carefully on the edge of his wooden desk. He also stood and removed his cloak, hanging it on a coatrack behind his desk. Balthazar wore ivory long-sleeved shirt and matching slacks beneath his ceremonial cloak.

  Balthazar got the fire in the office fireplace going, set a kettle on for tea, and took out two mugs from one of the cabinets before sitting down behind his desk. He sighed.

  “The thing about early spring. Warm days. Cool nights,” he said.

  Prentice nodded.

  “I apologize for earlier. The entire egg is on edge. We’ve all been a bit high-strung.”

&n
bsp; He sat back down again. “None of this makes any sense. The Eagles came as soon as they could get here. They did a grid search of the woods. They didn’t come up with anything, especially not skeletal remains. Their investigation tapered off to nothing. That’s why I contacted the Order.”

  Prentice nodded. She sat in one of the two high back chairs facing him.

  “The eagles have good vision, but not like hawks. It isn’t their fault they missed it. In the morning, I can go with the vulture to show them where the remains are. There’s another body—well, ashes, really, farther back on the green.”

  She didn’t want to tell him about the blood splatter on the trees, the trunks, and the leaves. The eagles didn’t look very hard, if she had to guess, or it blended in so well, even eagles’ eyes missed it.

  He gaped. “No! Such brazen attacks!” He mopped his face.

  “Yes. You have at least three incidents of killing,” Prentice explained.

  Balthazar rubbed his chin in disbelief. “How? We don’t have two people missing.”

  “Could they be crows or ravens?”

  He tilted his head. “Maybe. They don’t all participate in the official annual egg counts.”

  Not everyone who lived in an egg agreed with the Order or followed the goddess’s practices. Some stood outside, in the outer shell—the outskirts—and off the Order’s logbooks.