“Unworthy,” he says, echoing the madness of Danny Ninepoint as he levels it at Caroline.
Bennet throws himself in front of the line of fire just as the gun blast echoes and we hit another time pocket. And on cue, there’s another crow. This one makes a sloppy landing out in the hallway in front of the door, flapping and hopping to a standstill in the time it takes for the bullet to leave the chamber. The crow stares at me. The sulfur hits me like a smoke ring to the face. People are caught in mid-scream outside, but they are like shadows of themselves—bugs rolled in sap, caught in time. Then there is another crow. It flutters down from the top of the splintered door, much more gracefully than the first, and then another that seems to swagger into the room. This one ponders the bullet leaving Parsons’ gun with a cosmic cloud of gunpowder—a misshapen lump of lead that inches forward even as it spins over itself, like a curve ball in slow motion.
If I could reach out I could grab it, I could pluck it from the air like a lazy bumblebee. But I can’t reach out. There is a weight on me that I know has stopped my lungs, and I will never breathe again. That was the last one, the final breath. I’ve taken in all of the oxygen that will ever reach my blood. I can only watch as Bennet dives in front of Caroline with his eyes closed, and I can’t help but admire him. What a strong, crazy bastard he is. I know he loves her. Loves her madly. I also know he is worthy of her. It’s a slow motion game of angles and trajectories between him and the bullet, one that was written out long ago, and the crows hop up on my bed to watch with me. They rest on my headboard and perch on my feet. There are many of them—first ten, then twenty, then thirty. They gather around and watch with me as the bullet, in a game of millimeters, misses Bennet’s heart and rips into his shoulder. And then they all titter, like an applause. I want to jump up and hoot.
I turn towards Joey and Douglas, locked around each other’s necks like lions on the savannah. Joey has him. I turn back to Parsons, who is frozen in an implacable look of dismay. We’ve been slowed by the thousandth now. His look is such that he knows that was the only shot he had, because I can feel the last page of this story being inked, and I know it ends with this: Ana.
Ana walks through the door after the crows. She walks with the same girlish bounce she always had, and the crows move aside for her. One sits on her shoulder and bows its head to her. She is pale, so pale, paler than she ever was before. And she wears a child’s dress of black and lace that is resplendent one moment and tattered the next.
And she is smiling. And illusion, vision, demon, or nothing at all, when my sister smiles like that, I’ve never been able to resist it. I smile too.
“Hello, brother,” she says.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
“I’ve come for you,” she says. “At last.”
“Am I dead?” I ask.
Ana cocks her head in such a perfect imitation of how she used to listen to us when we tried to get her to come in from the back, or eat her dinner, or close her eyes to go to sleep, that it’s as if the years of her absence never happened at all.
“No,” she says, after a moment. “Not yet. But I can wait.”
She steps over to Bennet, the bullet still ripping the sinew of his shoulder. She grabs at the rippling air that marked its passage as if she could stop it, but her hand passes right through. And that’s when I see that Caroline is with us in the pocket of time. She looks up at me with huge eyes. Blinking wildly, she takes a staggering breath and touches her own face, as if to confirm it’s still there.
“Am I dead?” Caroline asks.
Ana listens to the air again, and it chills me to the bone. Such a childish expression, like she’s listening to a tin-can phone, but I’m terrified of whatever is on the other end.
“No,” she says, nodding to herself. “Not yet.”
Caroline stands heavily. She lifts her head as if it is yoked. Then she freezes. Very carefully, very slowly, she reaches down her collar and grasps the bell. She pulls it out and over her like it is a link of iron chains. She holds it out in front of her and opens her palm.
“The clapper. It’s back,” she says.
Ana nods cheerfully.
“It only appears when someone is dying,” Caroline says.
“Yes,” Ana says. “My brother is dying.”
She hops up, scattering the crows, and she comes to the foot of my bed. Her little head barely reaches over the footboard.
“Is this really you, Ana?” I ask, my voice hoarse.
Ana listens to the invisible wind again.
“Yes, and no,” she says.
“How?”
“Because I am Ana. But I am Death,” she says, and she smiles. It’s pure and young and good. But there is something in her eyes. Something just as natural as the smile, but far blacker. She walks around my bed, trailing one small finger, and now she looks embarrassed. She scrunches up one side of her face as if she’s about to cry.
“I missed you, Ben,” she says, nodding at the truth of it.
I start to weep, and I grab her to me. She lets me take her in. I feel as though I’m leaving my body. I know I have seconds left, but seconds stretch. I smell her hair. I kiss her forehead. I wrap my arms around her tiny frame, and she hugs me back, giggling. “Ana, why didn’t you come to me before?”
“Silly,” she says, smiling up at me. “Because you weren’t dying before. I can only take the dead people away.”
The air chills again. And when I look at her I see that the deep black is leaking from her eyes again, just like it did when I saw her in the Evilway, when the chant breached our two planes.
“It’s almost time,” she says, and the black leaks like tears from her, dripping down in triangles from her eyes.
“But how, Ana? How did you come to take all the dead people away?” It’s all I can think to ask as I watch the child in her morph, turn darker, blacker, longer. But she still has that same puckish voice as always.
“I rang the bell that Gam gave me,” she says. “That’s how. She told me to keep it very secret, and if I felt like I was going away, to ring it. So I did.”
Caroline looks at the bell in her hands, bowing down her arms with its unseen weight. Ana ponders it, then nods.
“That’s it,” Ana says. Then she laughs with a strange, unsettling darkness. “I saw her pick it up from my bed after I left it. Careful. If you ring it, you have to take dead people away too.”
The page is almost done, the ink almost dry.
“Ana,” I say. “Are you tired?”
She thinks for a second, then shakes her head.
“Are you lonely?”
She nods.
“Are you ready to go?” I ask, because I know now. I know what the bell is and what the bell does.
She looks at me for a second, then throws a fierce hug over me. I can feel her changing, feel her moving, but inside all of it is my little sister. The girl I’ve dreamed of seeing gives me the hug I’ve dreamed of getting. The one that I used to weep over when I woke up before it happened. It’s happening now. She holds me. And she is warm, and small, and she is Ana. She is finally here. And she and I come to an understanding then.
“I’m ready to go now,” she whispers.
And that’s when I look at Caroline.
“Can I have the bell?” I ask.
She shakes her head vigorously, throwing tears left and right. “No.” She knows, too. She knows what happens if I ring the bell. She knows what I become. “No. You’re going to live. You’re going to get better. You’re going to beat this, and we’re going to live together and have kids and dance around the fire together and grow old and die holding each other’s hands.” She shakes her head again. “No. Absolutely not.”
“Caroline,” I whisper. “Look.”
I turn towards my vital monitor. It’s flat. No beats. Nothing. I am sitting up talking to her, and I am lying down dead at the same time. We’ve caught a window, but that window is closing. I listen carefully, and I can hear the
flat buzz of the machines in the time outside of our time. I hear the alarm of the code. I see the soft pulsing of the blue light outside of my room. It’s slow and subtle, but it is there.
“Caroline, I’m already gone,” I say. “In a heartbeat I’ll be beyond you forever anyway.”
Caroline hears the sounds, she sees the lights. Ana looks curiously at us, her face melting further and further.
“Hurry,” Ana whispers. “Please hurry. Or I have to take you.”
“Please, Caroline,” I say. “Ana isn’t meant for this. She was thrown into this. She needs to go home with Gam and Dad.”
“What happens to you?” Caroline asks, weeping. Snotting. She sniffs and coughs and cries, still holding the bell like it’s a ten-pound stick of dynamite.
“What happens to me?” I ask Ana.
“You become me,” she says, as if that explains everything. “It’s a lot of work,” she adds, knowingly. And in a blink her face has become that of a monster. Her eyes have dripped down to nothing. Her face is two strips of terrible black ripped through an orb of pure white.
“It’s time,” she says, and her voice is changed too. It is layered beyond itself into endless echoes. She reaches for my hand. For the first time in my life, I refuse my little sister.
“The bell, Caroline. Last chance. If I go with her, it’s all over.”
Caroline sobs, but she stumbles forward, her thumb in the bell. She falls onto me, and my hand grasps the bell. Our lips find each other, and we are given a kiss outside of time that lasts longer than the lives of many people. It lifts me. It unwraps me. And then it is over.
“Goodbye, Ben,” she says.
“Goodbye, Caroline,” I say. “Go. Live.”
The thing Ana has become grasps my hand with cold finality, but I ring the bell first, and the time that had been slowed truly stops.
In a blink Ana is herself again. She laughs and jumps and stretches—and she begins to fade. I am not afraid of this. I know this is what is supposed to happen. It’s a one in, one out policy.
“Goodbye, Ana,” I say. “Say hi to everyone for me.”
She giggles and spins in circles and runs up to me and grabs me around the waist, but her grip is like the brushing of a feather.
“It’s hard,” she says. “What you go to do.”
“I am sure.”
“You’ll do good,” she says, nodding. Then she pushes back. “Remember,” she says, pointing at the machines that blare and the flat lines. “You’re gone too, Benny. When the bell rings again, you come to be with us.”
She fades and fades. Soon she’s just a smile. “Love you, Benny. See you later.”
“Love you, Ana.”
Then she has truly passed. In the silence, one of the many crows that nobody but I can see hops onto my shoulder and turns to look at me. He ruffles his feathers and stretches himself, and somehow he seems to grow, and grow, and shocks of red tinge his feathers until I recognize him once more.
“Hiya,” he says.
“Hello.”
“Time to clean all this up, I’d say,” he says, nodding at the slow motion spectacle that is happening around me. Bennet is about to hit the floor. Joey and Douglas still spar for each other’s necks. Parsons watches with cold fury.
“Ben? Where are you?” It’s Caroline. “Ben?” But her voice slows, matches the pace of the world around us as she passes out of the pocket of time and we are gone to each other.
I stand.
All of my pain is gone. Everything that marked my understanding of the world is gone. In its place I have what I can only describe as a black map that is marked with pins of light. Millions upon millions of pins of light, more popping into existence all the time, but as soon as they do, they start to fade, each in their turn, by infinitesimal degrees. And I am there, with each of them. But I am here, too, completely. I am where I need to be, exactly as I need to be. Because I walk the map, and I tend to the lights when they are dim enough. I have been called Death before, but I already know that’s not accurate. Better to call me the Walker.
Where I once lay, the covers softly cave. My body is not there. My body is gone. Nothing remains of me on the plane where these humans stand, screaming and fighting and bleeding. I am separate from them. Separate and alone. And yet I remember. I remember them. All of them. I see the agents, but I do not feel anger towards them. I mark their time. I can measure the strings of their lives.
I see my mom. She is screaming in madness, and her string is weak, fraying. I am troubled by this only in the sense that I know it is not yet her time.
I see Owen Bennet. He is bleeding, but he will survive. His string is stronger than he shows. Stronger than he knows.
And I see Caroline Adams and am shocked by the force of feeling that swells within me. The crow cocks his head at me, and the light brushes his beak such that it seems to smile.
“You don’t lose everything of yourself,” he says. “Kind of a curse, though, because you can’t do anything with what remains.”
“She’s special.”
“I’d say so,” the crow says. His voice has a bit of a drawl to it. If you were to close your eyes and listen to him, you’d think a twenty-something beach bum was talking to you.
“Look at her string,” I say. “It’s beautiful. Colorful.”
“I’ll take your word for it. She does have that glow though.”
“I have to save her. These men will hurt her.”
“Can’t do that.”
“Why not?”
“Direct interference. Strictly off limits. Them’s the rules.”
“Rules? Horseshit.” I take a swipe at Douglas, who’s still moving at a snail’s pace. My arms pass right through him.
“Told ya,” says the crow.
“So she’s going to die…”
“Not necessarily.”
“What?”
“It’s the bell they want. Not the girl.”
“But I can’t give them the bell.”
“Oh, you can’t let them have the bell. That would be a terrible idea. You’re right. They suck. What you can do, though, is take it out of the equation.”
I look at the bell in my hand. I see the clapper is fading, and my grip on it is slipping as well.
“Quickly now. Once the clapper’s done for, it’s back in their plane again. Those bastards will snatch it up, and that’s all she wrote.”
“What do I do?”
“If I were you, I’d take it out back and chuck it as far as you can.”
“Out back?”
“Way out back, if you catch my meaning.”
I think I do. I focus beyond the hospital room and grab on to the map of lights, but this time I also step into it. It’s like opening up a heavy trap door at the bottom of my mind, and jumping in. The lights zip around me and spin wildly, and I start to scream. It’s like falling in a dream, but endlessly. There’s no waking up from this one.
“Stop flailing around, dumbass. Your little sister got it on the first try,” says the crow. He’s flapping his wings next to me, keeping steady with my head.
So I stop. And the lights settle around me. I see them for what they are. I’m floating inside a map of souls. The bell is still in my hand, but it feels lighter and lighter.
“Get rid of it, man! Throw it!”
“But where will it go?”
“Who cares? Not here!”
So I wind up and throw it. I throw it forever. It’s like a golf ball in space. It sails and sails and sails, and then it’s gone, like a coin disappearing into the ocean.
“Where did it go?”
“Somewhere else on their plane. Don’t you worry about that bell. Worrying about the bell is my job. Frickin’ thing has a propensity to show up at inopportune times. To say the least. The point is, I’ll find it, and if I know these two scumbags, you bought your friends some time. Look.”
The crow flips in the air with all the grace of a flying rag, but he manages to turn around and
look back where we came. I follow him, shakily, like I’m turning around in close quarters on a bike.
I see nothing but the soul map. Billions of lights pulsing in an orb around my head.
“Where’d they go?”
“You tell me, bro. You saw their threads. You can find them again.”
“How?”
“Hell if I know. I’m just the bird. You’re the Walker. That’s why you get paid the big bucks.” The crow titters.
He’s a wiseass, but he’s been helpful so far, and even though he sounds flip, I get the feeling he really believes in me. I’ll chalk that up to being related to Ana, who I can already tell he was fond of. I focus on the threads I saw back in the hospital. It’s hard to picture all four of them, though, so instead I think of only one: Caroline’s. It shimmered like a rip of sunset through campfire smoke, if the fire burned in every color of the rainbow: flare red, sparkler white, gas-rich blue, the green of flaming sap, and more— purples and pinks and so many shades of white I don’t have the words to describe them, from soft to hard, all burning at a million degrees. This was her line of life.
And then I see it. I reach for it, and in a smashing blur I’m back in the room. Standing by the bed. My clothes ripple and still. I notice that the hospital gown is gone. In its place is a uniform, not unlike my NNPD getup: crisp slacks and a trim buttoned shirt, but it’s pure black. I don’t wear shoes. I can see the veins in my feet, and in my hands. They are very thick and very clear, and they pulse black.
There are many crows still in the room, including the one that talks to me, and all of them turn to watch me. I hold my hands out to the one that speaks and show him the pale underside of my wrists and the black veins there. He shrugs.
“Comes with the territory. The soul map is a powerful place. It leaves its mark. Only you can walk it for that long and live. And me, of course.” He preens his glossy feathers, and I see the red marks there more clearly than ever. “What do you think of your new threads?”
“Not bad.”
“Ana figured you’d like ‘em. All right, get ready now,” the crow says.
Follow the Crow Page 21