The first time Janice saw a raven up close, she felt as though it were appraising her.
It was early February, months before everything that followed, and she was standing beside the garden fence of the house where she rented her flat, one of those large Victorian Malone Road piles subdivided into lots of too-small apartments. The raven had landed on the opposite wall flank, the polished black bead of its eye catching her own. She had paused mid-step, a few peanuts cupped in her palm, wondering what it saw.
Then the bird hopped once, puffed its feathers, and launched into the sycamores overhead where the rookery lived, its wings beating a deep, deliberate rhythm.
That was enough to set her on the path to feeding them.
Not because she’d expected anything to happen, though the TikTok videos had certainly played their part but because she found the act soothing. Leaving food for the birds was easier than calling an old friend, easier than facing the silence of her apartment after a long day as the youngest, most ignored member of the accounts team at the dental supply company on Lisburn Road. She worked, she rode the bus home, she placed the food, and the birds came after she walked away.
They never approached while she lingered. Never made a sound that suggested recognition. But the rookery was less chaotic than it had once seemed. Janice started to notice individuals. The large rook with the pale scar around its eye. The pair of jackdaws that stayed together like two old men arguing their way through retirement. And a small, irregular group of ravens, aristocratic compared to the others, who perched apart, observing everything with attention so sharp it seemed to pierce the air.
She learned the rookery’s rhythms almost by accident.
By late autumn the days shortened, and she left work in near-darkness, her coat damp from the Belfast drizzle. The feeding ritual became something she clung to. A point of stillness. A thread of meaning. Sometimes she imagined the birds noticing her persistence. Sometimes she imagined they didn’t.
By November she’d nearly given it up.
The Wednesday it happened was the kind of day Belfast did best: grey without drama, a dampness that felt personal, rain so fine it seemed to seep through skin rather than fall on it. Janice stepped off the bus on Malone Road, her grocery bag knocking rhythmically against her thigh, and pulled her scarf higher. She was already tired, the kind of tired that felt older than she was. Wednesday fatigue, she called it. The financial and emotional midpoint of her week.
As she walked the familiar path between the dripping sycamores, she heard the rook’s complaining overhead, their rough cries slipping between the branches. Typical racket. She was thinking vaguely about whether she had clean socks at home when something made her pause.
Atop the high fence that enclosed the property where she lived, seven ravens sat in a row.
She blinked. Counted again. Seven.
They were evenly spaced, like notes on a musical staff, each facing her with absolute stillness. She’d never seen that many together. Pairs were common enough, sometimes threes. But seven ravens in formation?
She took a step forward.
The raven at the head of the row lifted smoothly, glided a few feet ahead along the fence, and perched again. The others followed, each hopping or fluttering in order, as though pulled along a track.
She frowned. Took a step back.
The row reversed.
“Are you winding me up?” she asked under her breath.
Their eyes tracked her, sleek, dark, unreadable. Corvids had excellent memory; she knew that much from the videos. They recognized faces. They noticed patterns. Perhaps they’d noticed hers.
She moved sideways. The birds didn’t follow this time, but they all turned their heads in a smooth, synchronized motion to maintain sight of her.
A shiver, thin and silver, slid between her ribs.
Janice planted her hands on her hips, feeling faintly foolish.
“Birdies,” she said, somewhat louder now, “what the fuck is up with you?”
Her voice hovered in the wet air. She glanced around but the pavement was empty both ways. The thought of her mother hearing her swear rose unbidden, absurd but persistent. Her mother had disapproved of coarse language so intensely that the habit of checking her surroundings before using any had never quite left.
She walked toward the gate, expecting the ravens to lose interest. Instead, they grew restless. Their wings rustled. Several shifted their weight forward.
One of them, the largest, dropped from the fence with a deliberate swoop and landed directly on the middle of the wrought-iron gate. Each claw gripped one of the decorative leaves, its chest rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm.
The others lifted into the air, circling her in low loops. Not diving at her, never quite that, but passing close enough that she felt the breath of their wings skimming her hood. A rook would have been clumsy. A jackdaw random. But ravens were intentional.
Janice ducked, heart thudding. She backed away from the gate, her footsteps quick and uneven.
Immediately, the birds calmed. They regrouped on the gate, all seven settling into a precise line again. But this time they faced inward. Every head angled toward her garden.
Not at her.
At something behind the gate.
She stood very still. The rain tapped gently against her coat. The sound of passing cars on the road felt muffled, distant. The ravens were statues; their attention fixed on the dark shrubbery that lined the walkway to the shared front door.
Janice could not say what she felt then, something like the moment before a thunderclap. Suspense without thunder. Instinct without explanation.
She turned away.
Her feet crunched on the wet gravel as she walked quickly to the neighbouring house. She rang the bell twice.
James opened the door. Tall, white-haired, wearing a heavy cardigan, he had the faintly harried expression of a retired person perennially interrupted while attempting to relax. Behind him, Julie appeared, warm-eyed and steady.
“Janice? Everything all right?”
“I—” She hesitated. It sounded absurd when she prepared to say it aloud. “The birds. The ravens. They they won’t let me in.”
There was a short, polite silence, the kind reserved for unexpected statements.
But they didn’t dismiss her. That was the comfort of neighbours like James and Julie: they absorbed oddities without judgment. Julie ushered her inside with gentle hands, while James, ever pragmatic, ascended the stairs to the study, which overlooked Janice’s garden.
Julie put the kettle on, the small domestic sound grounding her. Janice wrapped her hands around the warm mug as it steeped, willing the tremor in her fingers to settle.
From upstairs came the faint scrape of the study window being opened. Then silence. A minute passed. Another.
Then James’s voice, a low, strained murmur.
“Yes, police please… Doctor Jamison speaking… there are two men in balaclavas in the garden of Forty Malone Road… yes, armed…”
The mug slipped in Janice’s grip. Julie caught it before it fell.
Janice felt her lungs tighten. A memory clicked into place with dreadful clarity: the quiet man on the ground floor of her building, the prosecutor in the news for leading the case against a Dublin cartel.
She had half-listened to the radio segments about threats, intimidation, the anonymous note slipped under his door three weeks earlier. But he’d seemed so normal in the hallway, so mild. It hadn’t seemed real.
James descended the stairs quickly. “They’re still there,” he told Julie. “Crouched behind the shrubs. They’re watching the door.”
Julie set the mug aside. Her hand slipped around Janice’s elbow, steadying her.
“You’re safe here.”
Outside, sirens rose in the distance, growing sharper by the second.
The next minutes unfolded in the brisk, authoritative choreography of law enforcement. An armed response unit arrived first, their steps heavy with purpose. An armoured vehicle followed, rumbling down the wet road. It turned toward the wrought-iron gate, the same gate the ravens had guarded, and with a low roar and a metallic shriek, it crashed through.
The sound startled the ravens from the sycamores where they had retreated. They swept upward in a dark burst, their cries slicing through the air.
Shouting followed. Two sharp cracks, gunshots. Janice jumped, her breath snagging in her throat.
When the noise subsided, James guided them upstairs so they could see, though part of Janice wished she hadn’t. One man, masked, lay motionless near the shrubs. The other was cuffed, his arm bloodied. Officers guided the prosecutor out under heavy guard, his face pale, his lips moving, prayer or shock, she couldn’t tell.
The garden was a churn of mud, boot-prints, and flashing lights.
The rain had eased by then. The sky was the deep, the bruised blackberry purple of early winter evening.
The last police car left just after nine. The prosecutor was gone; the forensics team was gone; the masked bodies were gone. The only sign of violence was the broken gate and the trampled garden.
Janice walked back with James to her building. The path glistened. A few stray feathers, raven, rook, crow, hard to say, clung to the bushes, caught by happenstance and the weather.
Something metallic gleamed near the gatepost. A small evidence marker had been left beside it, forgotten. Janice crouched to look.
A gold hoop earing. Mud-stained but bright.
She shook her head softly. “Not exactly the shiny present I was hoping for.”
James gave a thin smile. “Lucky, though.”
Lucky. The word sat strangely in her chest.
She stood, brushing the moisture from her hands. The garden was different now, same shape, same plants, but changed by the knowledge of what had passed through it.
Above her came the low croak of a raven. She tilted her head.
One had returned, perched in the highest reach of the sycamore, silhouetted against the streetlight glow. Watching. Ravens did that, checked on disturbances, monitored changes in their territory. It was rational, instinctive behaviour.
And yet Janice felt its attention like a thread pulling taut between them.
She wasn’t superstitious. She didn’t believe the ravens had saved her. They had responded to unusual movement in their territory: humans crouched low, masked, behaving like predators. She had simply been alert enough, or foolish enough, to listen.
Still, she lifted a hand toward the tree in a small gesture of acknowledgment.
“Thank you,” she whispered, not to the bird entirely, but to the intersection of instincts, avian and human, that had guided her steps that Wednesday in November.
The raven blinked once, slowly, then spread its wings and drifted down to the fence, landing with a soft click of claws on metal.
Janice watched it until the drizzle thickened again and the bird disappeared into the dark leaves.
The next day, the news carried the story, though the details were murky. Attempted intimidation of a prosecutor. Armed confrontation. A suspect injured, another dead. No mention of her. No mention of the birds.
Janice dressed for work with deliberate care. She washed her hair, tied it back neatly, and put on her navy coat. On her way out, she picked up a fresh bag of peanuts.
She wasn’t sure why. Habit, maybe. Or continuity.
At the garden wall, she placed a handful of peanuts on the usual spot, their shells pale against the damp stone.
From the sycamores came a soft rustle. A shape shifted in the branches.
Janice didn’t linger. She walked twenty paces, the familiar distance.
When she turned back, the ravens hadn’t descended. But one was perched on the wall now, its feathers shining faint petrol colours in the early light.
Watching her go.
Not grateful, not supernatural. Just present.
She allowed herself a small, private smile and continued toward the bus stop, her steps a little lighter than they had been the day before.
Behind her, the raven hopped closer to the peanuts.
And Belfast, waking around them, went on as it always did.