There is something comfortably anti-climactic about sitting down with fellow-investigators after a wildly energetic period of evidence collection. When, with photos, maps, charts, reports, and whatnot piled in front of you, you have inevitably arrived at the “Now What?” phase of the operation.

Granted, I am not a police officer or a forensic investigator. Nor have I ever been. But as a writer, my job often demands that I do research … that I conduct interviews … that I collect data. And at the end of day, like the men and women working on the Avian Slaughter Task Force, I, too, have to ask myself this one pivotal last question: “What does it all mean?”

That’s what we were doing on Saturday morning when Clayton Yonder, my boyfriend and the Task Force’s Lead Investigator, arrived at my house carrying a bag of bagels and a large transfile box.

I had bought cream cheese and lox, and I’d sliced Vidalia onions and beefsteak tomatoes (very thin) to go with the bagels. Before we got to work, I created a little buffet on my coffee table, including a large dish of bagel crumbs for my bird friends. Rochester and Stella, the goldfinches, Nigel and Gwendolyn, the tufted titmouses, and Florence, the teeny, tiny swan, were the veritable definition of “genteel” as they daintily pecked at their food, encouraging our newcomer, Daffney, the chickadee with the backward knees, to partake of the meal.

My friend Archie, the Giant Chickadee, swooped down from his mantel, grabbed an entire sesame bagel from the bread basket, and flew back with it to his over-the-fireplace home.

I gave him a look.

He responded with a halfhearted shrug (well … a Giant Chickadee sort of a shrug). “What can I say?” he asked innocently. “I love bagels.” He began to nibble ravenously at the doughy masterpiece.

I laughed.

As always, Byron the dragonfly, was on his own. Also as always, there were a large coffee urn, milk, sugar, and mugs on the table to keep us lubricated and caffeinated as we talked. However, even before I took my first bite (pumpernickel bagel with raisins. Cream cheese, onions and lox … I was as greedy as Archie), Clay, in a roundabout way, started to tell us what he had discovered.

“Did you ever hear of Vlad the Impaler?” He asked.

I frowned for a moment. Then I said, “Doesn’t he have something to do with Dracula?”

“Uh huh.” Clay answered. “Supposedly, Bram Stoker’s book DRACULA, was inspired by the real Count Dracula, Vlad III, who was born in Transylvania in the mid-1400s.”

Clay took a sip of coffee, returned his mug to the table, and reached for a bagel.

“After the Ottomans killed Vlad’s father,” he went on, “they tortured and blinded his brother, and buried him alive.”

“Something tells me going for grief counseling wasn’t high on Vlad’s TO DO list,” I volunteered.

“Nope.” Clay took a bite out of his bagel. He chewed. He swallowed. He added, “What Vlad did next was to invite hundreds of the family members who’d opposed him to a banquet, and just as they were sitting down, order his men to stab them and impale their still-twitching bodies on spikes.”

I put down my bagel and pushed away my plate. “Good grief,” I muttered.

“He also decapitated, flayed, and boiled his victims alive. His favorite way of killing was torture. He loved to shove sharp spikes up their pelvises to their mouths, and leave them hanging. Sometimes it took them days to die. Vlad once impaled 20,000 men on wooden stakes after a single battle.”

Clay paused for another sip of coffee. It was only then that I noticed distressed twitters coming from where Rochester, Stella, Nigel, Gwendolyn, Florence, and Daffney-with-the-backward-knees had been eating (and over which Byron the dragonfly had been hovering.)

From the mantel where he was perched, Archie said (and I translated), “Special Investigator Clayton Yonder of the United States National Park Service, you are scaring the bejesus out of us.”

First Clay turned to look at Archie. Then he moved his eyes to include our other small winged buddies. He said, “I meant to scare you. You need to be afraid, and you need to be prepared.”

“Afraid of what? Prepared for what?”

By then, even those of us still hungry had lost our appetites, so we didn’t object when Clay suddenly got up and began to clear the table of our gastronomic debris. After he wiped away crumbs with a dry sponge, he extracted photos, newspaper clippings, notebooks, files, and charts from his transfile box and spread them out across the table. He sat, opened a three-ring binder, and held it out to show us a photograph (which motivated Archie to fly off his mantel ledge and join us).

Clay said, “This is a shrike.”

The photo was of a smallish, black, brown, blue, and white bird in flight.

“Pretty,” I said.

My boyfriend grunted dismissively, and said, “Now, I am going to read you, almost verbatim, a description of the shrike from a National Audubon Society publication. It may sound melodramatic, but it isn’t. After I’m finished, tell me what you think.”

Clay cleared his throat and read. “The shrike, also called a butcher-bird, is a nine-inch carnivore which gruesomely impales its quarry on sharp objects like thorns and barbed wire. With its pointed beak, it grasps mice, grasshoppers, frogs, and birds by their necks, and with a precise bite, pinches their spinal cords and induces paralysis. It then vigorously shakes the immobilized prey. This back-and-forth whipping motion generates more than enough force to snap the vertebrae of its victim and break its neck.”

I took the binder from Clay’s hands, and studied the photo.

“What you’re looking at,” Clay continued, “is a North American shrike. But DNA analysis by our Task Force scientists suggests that the feather you found probably came from a species of shrike that only lives in the sub-Saharan region of South Africa.”

Still studying the photograph, I asked, “Did you say that it’s also called a butcher bird?”

“Uh huh.” Clay reclaimed his binder. “I’ll read you the last line of the Audubon description of the shrike. They call it, and I quote, ‘A headbanging, prey-impaling death-bird.’” Clay relaxed against the back of his chair, crossed one leg over the other, and added, “Remind you of anyone?”

Before I could answer, Arche the Giant Chickadee, shouted from the mantel, “Vald the Impaler.”

Again, I interpreted Archie’s twitter for Clay. He nodded.

“Exactly.”

I shook my head. “But your sub-Saharan shrike-y type things doesn’t look anything like the bird I saw at the MRI Center.”

“I know that.”

“So why…”

“Because further DNA analysis of your feather tells us that the shrike is only half of our problem.”

Neither I, nor any of our little friends at the table responded verbally. However, we all stared at Clay with a thousand questions in our eyes.

He went on, “Not only does our apex predator represent an invasive species … one that massacred hundreds of sparrows, warblers, robins, and so on in Gossamer Gardens, it is also a hybrid. A crossbreed. A mutant. An anomaly. A fusion. A mongrel. A killing machine more monstrous than anything any of us on the Task Force could have dreamed up, and it has already expanded his killing field beyond Somerset County.”

Clay leaned forward and again began to flip through the pages of his binder. He didn’t stop until he got to the photograph of a very different, very fierce, very frightening, and truly terrible looking bird. One that was almost a dead ringer for the one that I’d drawn for our WANTED posters.

“This,” he said, “is its other half."

Copyright © Shelly Reuben, 2026. Shelly Reuben’s books have been nominated for Edgar, Prometheus, and Falcon awards. For more about her writing, visit www.shellyreuben.com.