It starts with the birds.

That's what they always say: they're her eyes and ears, and if they start following you everywhere, it's already too late. But Slash is just a simple thug: he takes orders, kills people, and doesn't have any time for urban legends.

A pigeon lands on the lamppost above him with a soft coo as he makes his way down Western Avenue. Then another. Then a seagull. He doesn't listen to their feathers fluttering, but he should.

The birds follow him as he turns the corner, hand pressing against the knife concealed at his side. There are dozens now--not just pigeons, but cardinals, wrens, and yes, even a few crows. For the first time, he looks up and sees them, and he's afraid. People he can scare off. They know who he works for. They know there's no point messing with his orders. Animals are different, less concerned with the politics of the Windy City, less susceptible to bribes and threats.

They're just dumb birds, he tells himself. But the rumors come flooding back to his mind: whispers of thugs who encountered something in the shadows between dusk and dawn, who came back in the morning shivering and refusing to speak... or battered and broken.

He steels himself. He knows his job: the address, the names, the instructions to kill everyone inside. A smile crosses his face as he thinks of the reward money he'll get for this one. The birds start singing, their discordant songs reaching a fever pitch. Are they trying to warn him? Or are they calling out, signaling her?

As he enters the alleyway, he rubs his hands together. Now he's inside. No one can get him here. Slash unsheathes his knife from his belt and prepares to slam the butt end into the glass, beginning his planned night of carnage. He's disturbed by a soft, sudden sound from behind him: footsteps. He locked the gate. No one is supposed to be here.

He freezes and spins around to see a pale young woman wearing all black, glossy black hair glinting in the streetlights. Birds melt out of the shadows and sky, landing all around her: the ground, the fence, and even the sides of buildings, all covered in a wave of eerily still feathers. Every one of their beady black eyes stares right at him, and he feels as if they see all his horrible plans. And to his shock, her eyes are black and beady too.

"Who are you?" he whispers, although he already knows. The gangs have given her a name, one shared in quiet murmurs and furtive conversations. The Night Angel.

"An innocent family lives in that house," she says, tone dripping with anger. Her voice carries much farther than it should, and it burns inside his ears, loud and layered and resonant like music under so much compression and distortion and reverb. He has no way of knowing, but the words are targeted so only he can hear them. "Parents and children. You would have killed them in cold blood?"

He raises his knife like it's going to protect him. "The children aren't here tonight," he whimpers. "Boss made sure of that."

She gazes on, unsympathetic. "You would have made them orphans?" she roars, and he drops the knife to cover his ears from the sharp, angular noise. He keeps his hands on the sides of his head for a long, long time, hoping this is just a nightmare that will end soon. It doesn't help much.

"I just... I just do what I'm told. I'll go back home, promise."

"Doing what you're told," she says, slightly kinder now, "is no excuse for taking innocent life."

Slash backs away as quickly as he can. His back bumps against wood and metal: the other gate! But the gate is locked. He turns to see birds, hundreds of them, swarming in the night air above him like a hurricane of biblical proportions. The Night Angel walks towards him, her voice still echoing infectiously through his eardrums. "You may go home tonight in one piece. But you are not innocent, and I don't give second chances. Consider this a warning shot."

A shot... of what? He must be in a nightmare now, because her skin begins to glow with an internal light. Two shadowy shapes unfurl behind her: black raven wings that block out the lamplight as she spreads them wide. She opens her mouth and a roar comes out, more pressurized air than sound. The blast strikes Slash in the chest, knocking his head back against the wall. The last thing he sees that night are her dark eyes, turning from black to brown as she holds out her arm for a bird to perch on.

The Night Angel was not a vigilante. Nor was she a witch, as the rumours had said, naming her anything from sorceress, to alien, from creature of the woods to crazy whore. Underneath all of it, when she pulled off her clothes at the end of the night, and made sure the homing pigeons at least, were comfortable in their coop, and all her others fed, she simply became Bianca Lazuli. Bea, to her mother and her sister, tía, to her nephew, Marco, barely two, who formed the word half-baked in his chubby cheeks. Ta.

She arrived home late that night, ducking in between the awning of their shop, and ascending as quietly as she could, locking eyes with Paloma, rocking Marco against her chest, hushing him quietly. The two women nodded at each other in silent understanding as Bianca slipped past their sleeping mother, as if she were simply a rebelling teenager again, stole away too late at a drunken party. Somewhere, distantly, a lone pigeon trilled, as she stepped from the bathroom into her own room, and upon her return found large mug of milk with honey, a small note beside it rendered in her sister's handwriting: para ella ángela. She settled into her bed, changed quietly into pink cotton night-clothes, hair washed into falling, jet waves, staring at the ceiling and the ghost of sticky-tacked stars upon it. Bianca flexed her fingers as if to test the fist it made, humming to herself as she drank, a reprieve from the thunder of volume that had barraged her throat earlier.

The Night Angel was a title that had been bestowed upon her after years of honing it: after years of building up a resentment that ran parallel to her gift. When she was eleven, she had been hassled by men and boys with knives plenty of times on her way to school. When Bianca was sixteen, Paloma's boyfriend, Camilo, had proposed. A year later, he was killed in a mugging, by mercenaries who thought the prize of a couple thousand gold pieces was worth the destruction of all their lives. Bianca had never been a stranger to the beauty of avian destruction: when her father was alive, he would take her out to the woods, watching falcons dive and circle like angels of death, before diving down into the darkness and making their kill. She was fascinated, always, by the docility of the street pigeons that stayed so strong and versatile despite the urban sprawl around them, ever gentle despite the abuse dispensed upon them. She would stay up countless nights, impersonating the ravens outside her window, their nightsong like singing grindstones.

She was up one night, newly twenty-one, impersonating exactly that on the night that Paloma had been attacked. She hadn't been able to stop it then, her song too light, too out of practice and juvenile. Marco had been born nontheless, and loved as if he was Camilo's. But on that night alos, the Night Angel was born.