Hearts of Darkness

by Kira Brady

  “Peck through that, suckers,” Kayla said to the unseen assailants still cawing outside. She wiped her forehead with the sleeve of the T-shirt she had slept in. It was an old one of Desi’s, the Soundgarden logo faded from washing.

  Desi—

  She spun to the bed, but it was empty. “Desi?”

  No one answered in the empty room.

  She let out a breath. “Only a dream.” But it had been so vivid. She could have sworn she could reach out and touch her sister. Goose bumps broke over her skin. The dark bedroom seemed suddenly menacing. She flipped the light switch. The bulbs flickered once, buzzed angrily, and died. From the dresser Kayla grabbed a candle and matchbox. The matchbox read Butterworth’s, and Desi had ten more like it scattered around the apartment. She must have spent a lot of time in the club. Kayla lit the candle, and it sputtered in a phantom breeze. The tiny wavering light was too weak to fight back the darkness.

  Here among Desi’s things—her clothes that smelled like gardenias, her childhood teddy bear, her framed photos showing Desi hamming it up for the camera—the truth came home.

  Desi wasn’t coming back.

  Kayla choked back a sob. “Buck up, girlfriend,” she muttered to herself. “If you can’t survive staying in Desi’s apartment without going crazy, how are you going to find the truth about her death?” The last word caught in her throat, but she ruthlessly pushed on.

  After Hart left, she had knocked on every door in the apartment complex asking for information about Desi. No clues. It seemed her sister had spent little time at home. Disheartened, she returned to Desi’s apartment and crashed. Too little sleep and too many emotional hits. The clock on the bedside table was dead, but her windup watch gave the time at 11:30 PM. She’d slept for six hours. Jet lag hung from her brittle bones like lichen.

  The crows had reminded her of all she would prefer to forget. Dragons. Thunderbirds. Werewolves. Weapon-toting thugs who were madder than a hatter. Why couldn’t that part of it have been a dream?

  She gingerly picked her way over to the bed, hardly wanting to look at it—the memory of Desi’s face cut deep. After setting down the candle, she pulled the blankets on the bed, gripping the quilt with white knuckles. She whacked her pillow against the wall to smooth the lumps. She reached forward to grab the second pillow, and froze.

  There was an indent where a head might have rested.

  Kayla hadn’t used that pillow. No one had recently.

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” she said out loud. It was reflex. Hart said they did exist. Wraiths, he called them. Ghosts and electricity don’t mix, he’d said, and now the lights were out and the clock broken. Evidence, maybe. Hard to call him a liar with her heart jumping in her chest and her hair standing on end. Her rational half wanted to dismiss his entire story, but her instincts warned her to stay alert. She couldn’t afford to ignore him just because she didn’t want it to be true.

  Her hands shook. She carried the candle into the bathroom and splashed water on her face. The reflection in the mirror above the sink was pale and thin. Her eyes were red. Her skin sallow.

  She glanced at her palm where Hart’s message was now blurred. For a good time. Right.

  It was late, but perhaps there was still an hour or two left to hunt down leads. She pulled her phone out of her pocket to search the Internet, but it was dead. Great. She went into the living room and was surprised to find a phone book and a pile of bus schedules beneath the coffee table. It seemed like Desi had had to resort to old-fashioned methods to get around in a city with unreliable electricity. Butterworth’s seemed like her best lead. It was located in Pike Place Market; a bus could get her there in half an hour. She would snoop around and see if anyone had talked to her sister before she died.

  This day was so bad, something had to go right for her eventually.

  Right?

  Right.

  A shower did wonders for her confidence. She raided Desi’s closet—just like the old days—and found a pair of matchstick jeans and a jade-green silk shirt. It was sleeveless with toggle buttons down the left side of her chest. Dragons, embroidered in red and gold, danced along the high Chinese collar. Bright colors and expensive fabrics, just like Desi liked them. A little makeup cheered her skin to its usual luster.

  Only two crows greeted her outside the apartment. Creepy, but at least they didn’t attack. She checked the ground below the bedroom window out of habit. It was clear of injured birds, even though the crows had thrown themselves repeatedly against the glass. Her mother had had an unnatural talent for patching up injured creatures. Kayla had once caught her kneeling in the flowerbed over a robin, its neck bent at an odd angle, its soft wings wriggling helplessly in the dirt. But a moment later it flew off as if nothing had happened. Her mother had seemed embarrassed.

  Kayla often thought this cloudy memory had influenced her decision to go to nursing school. Her father had always said Desi was just like their mother. Kayla had wanted some connection of her own, however tenuous. Her mother was a healer in her memories. Now Kayla continued the tradition.

  The crows followed her as she hopped a bus downtown, arriving at Butterworth’s a little before midnight. The older red stone building had three arches marking three separate doors. Tiles on the porch spelled out MORTUARY, CREMATORIUM, and CHAPEL. The morbid décor didn’t detract from its popularity, if the line out the door was any indication. She waited for twenty minutes in the cold before a bouncer let her in.

  Cloyingly sweet air met her inside, mixed with the smoke of many candles and gas lamps. Shadows hovered in the depths of the recessed booths. The flicker of a match briefly lit a long silver pipe below a gaunt face and glazed eyes. Though the stage was empty, the crowd on the dance floor seemed to press closer as if straining to touch the vacant chair.

  It would be tough to find anyone who knew Desi in this crowd, but she had to try. She pulled out a photo of her sister and began asking around. No one had information—at least that he or she was willing to share. People glanced at her sideways and then away, dismissing her easily. Recognition flickered in a pair of eyes, but was quickly shuttered. She got the feeling that death and disappearance were common occurrences here. People accepted it like they accepted rain for nine months of the year. It happened. They moved on.

  Eventually she found two college-aged kids, tucked in an alcove, who admitted to knowing Desi.

  “Beautiful girl. Smart too.” Adam put the end of an ivory pipe between his lips and bent to hold the bowl over a small lamp. He wore an old olive-green army uniform. A multitude of straps buckled up his knee-high boots. He looked barely old enough to shave, though his downy whiskers tried gallantly to form muttonchops. His cheeks expanded as he inhaled the sickeningly sweet smoke.

  His companion, Caroline, wore a black dress with a bright red bustier. Her goth-black hair cascaded down her back in ratty ringlets. “She won that mythology fellowship. That’s how she met Norgard, when he came to present it.”

  Kayla had to lean closer to hear her over the noise. She pretended she didn’t see the pipe. She was not here as a nurse, but to get information about her sister. Her tongue hurt from biting it. “Norgard endowed the fellowship?”

  “Yup,” Caroline said. “He’s real generous with our department. Thinks mythology is an underappreciated field.”

  “Well, it is, Caro,” Adam said.

  “Do you know anything about Thunderbirds?” Kayla asked.

  Adam and Caroline exchanged a look. “Maybe. What do you want to know?”

  “This is going to sound silly, but have you ever seen one? You know, flying. Like a real one.”

  “There are lots of strange birds around here,” Caroline said.

  A curl of smoke escaped Adam’s lips. “A poet once wrote, ‘Old myths, Old gods, Old heroes never died. They are only sleeping at the bottom of our mind, waiting for our call.’ Do you believe that, Desiree’s sister?”

  She watched him pass the pipe to Caroline. “I’m not su
re. Goethe said, ‘We see only what we know.’”

  Adam’s face lit. “Ah! A philosopher, Caro. We have us a philosopher.”

  Caroline blew a smoke ring.

  “And tell me, Desi’s sister,” Adam said, “have you seen only what you know? A narrow viewpoint, I think.”

  “You would never see more than your own arse,” Caro added helpfully.

  “And Thunderbirds?” Kayla asked. She felt a little silly pressing the topic, but she needed to know.

  “Ah, Thunderbirds.” Adam took the pipe back. He lounged back in the booth and studied the velvet drapes hanging from the ceiling. “There are a couple good bird-watching spots in the city at dusk and dawn. The water tower at Volunteer Park gives you a fine view of Queen Anne and the Space Needle, and, best of all, some cover. The beach at Shilshole is another place, for another kind of rare bird sighting. Look up. Stay in the trees.”

  “So you’re saying you have seen one,” Kayla said. “It’s not some hallucination on my part.”

  Adam chuckled. “Hallucination? Damn straight it’s a hallucination, a trick of the light, a plane or whatever.” In the flickering lamplight, his eyes were bloodshot. She was asking about hallucinations from an opium smoker. What did she expect him to say?

  “That’s right,” he said more softly. “I’m just a dragon chaser, so what do I know?”

  Her face must have given her away. “I just want . . . I don’t know—”

  “Proof?” Caroline suggested.

  “You won’t find that here,” Adam said. “Let me tell you something. Seattleites are an odd lot. We will be perfectly polite to your face, but if you’re not from around here, you don’t get to be part of the club. The club is a tight-lipped bunch, but that’s what you get from a city built by Scandinavians. Now, I’m not a native either, so I can let you in on our little secret.”

  “Adam—” Caroline said.

  “You and me and Caro, we’re on the low end of the totem pole. No one cares about you as long as you keep your head down and stay out of the way. But once you throw in your lot with either team—the prudish, but powerful animal gods, or the dangerously seductive soul stealers—then your clock is wound and the timer set.”

  “That would be the Kivati and the Drekar?” Kayla asked.

  Caroline drew in a sharp breath. “The squeaky wheel gets the ax, Adam.”

  “Exactly.” He offered Kayla the pipe. “So join us. Open your mind. Watch dead musicians through the smoke. Search the horizon at dusk for unnaturally large flying birds. But it’s good to be seen as delusional. You know how these things go, don’t you?”

  Kayla refused the pipe. “Not really.”

  “My old man calls me a pothead, and I’m okay with that,” Adam said. “I don’t have a leg to stand on. Because I am a nobody, I’m not a threat. I like my little pleasures on this side of the Gate.”

  Someone might kill her if she asked too many questions, was that it? Is that what had happened to Desi? “Can you tell me about my sister?”

  “Desiree,” Adam said. “We’re all a bit jealous of her. With Norgard as a tutor, she’s getting a damn fine education. She’ll be big someday, you can count on it. Kiss ass and live forever.”

  Present tense. Kayla took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, you must not have heard. She’s dead. She died almost two days ago.”

  Adam gave her a long look and drew another breath from the pipe. He must have known already. He let it out slowly. “Did she now?”

  Caroline slapped him on the arm. She turned to Kayla. “Sorry for your loss. May her spirit rest peacefully on the other side.”

  “Thanks.” Kayla wondered if Desi had been afraid to die. Death frightened Kayla. Perhaps that’s why she had studied medicine, to seek some control over life and death. Useless, really. Modern science had found ways to postpone death, but couldn’t put it off forever. Perhaps Desi had found comfort in the supernatural, because it meant death wasn’t an ending. It was only a change of status. Kayla wasn’t sure she believed that yet, but these kids obviously did. Hart, too. “Is there anything else you can tell me? Who her best friends were? Who she might have gone to if she had a problem? A professor, maybe, or—”

  “Norgard,” Caroline said. “She was always talking about him. He knows everything. He’s got the power to fix any problem she might have had.”

  Kayla needed to talk to Norgard. The man had answers. But if Desi had been running from him, he wasn’t going to be forthcoming. “Anyone else?”

  Adam settled back against the booth, his limbs relaxed, his eyes half closed. “There was a girl she mentioned once or twice. Was teaching her Norse mythology, I think. What was her name?”

  Caroline took the pipe from Adam’s limp fingers. She tapped it against her lips. “I saw her once, but her face was shadowed. Short. Had a cat following her.”

  Kayla filed that information away. A short girl with a cat. Why couldn’t anything be easy?

  Adam seemed to have fallen asleep. Caro’s heavy eyelids indicated she would soon follow. Kayla turned to go.

  “Adam’s wrong, you know,” Caroline called after her.

  Kayla stopped and glanced back. “About?”

  “He’s a cynic, because it’s cool. It doesn’t take great magic or wisdom to cheat death.” She blew another smoke ring. The opium lamp lit her face from the bottom. Her eyes suddenly looked older, and a bit sad. “‘For love is immortality.’”

  Kayla gave her a brief smile. Desi had been a romantic too. All clues seemed to point to Norgard, and his reputation was growing bigger by the minute. She wondered if Desi had loved him.

  She didn’t find anyone else who knew her sister. She needed a break, and found her way to the ladies’ room. The lavish powder room was surprisingly empty—a welcome respite from the noise and heat. A brass, nine-headed dragon statue stood at one end of the room. It was serpentlike, but with glittering wings that stretched out to the ceiling. She recognized the hydra from Greek mythology. Each head arched over a shell-shaped basin. The mouths were closed, but when she drew in front of one, the jaws snapped open with a small whir and steaming water poured out.

  The toilets were, thankfully, more traditional. While she was in the stall, someone else entered the room, shoes clickity-clacking on the tile floor. Whoever it was slammed the stall next to her and commenced vomiting.

  Kayla exited her stall and washed her hands in the sink. She wondered if she should assist. Alcohol poisoning was a serious danger. She’d seen her share of deaths in the ER. After a minute the sounds tapered off to dry heaves.

  She tapped on the door gently and asked, “Can I help you?”

  “Go away,” came back the slightly breathy voice. “Ugnh.”

  A teenage girl with pin-straight apricot hair and a black leather miniskirt that barely covered her butt stumbled out a moment later. She was classically lovely, with an oval face, wide cheekbones, and large blue eyes. Her nose was perhaps a trifle too long. Fishnet stockings covered her impossibly long legs. Her cute high-heeled half boots jingled with small bells at the ankles.

  “Ohhh, I feel gross,” she moaned. “I’m quite drunk.”

  That much was obvious. The girl’s eye makeup had smudged circles below her eyes. She clutched the shell washbasin to hold herself up. With her free hand she cupped water from the spewing dragon and rinsed out her mouth.

  “You want me to call someone for you?” Kayla asked.

  “No!” The girl straightened and wobbled. “No. No-no-no-no-no. They’ll find me soon enough. I don’t wanna go back yet. I’m not done being terribly improper.”

  “Improper?” If she were back home, Kayla would probably find the bartender and discuss the medical and social ramifications of underage drinking. But this wasn’t Philly. This was a strange place with strange rules.

  The girl nodded with the earnestness of the very drunk. She lunged toward Kayla and threw an arm around her shoulders. “You’ll be my friend, right? Friends don’t turn friends in. I hav
en’t been this amused in aaaaages.”

  “Sure. Why don’t you drink some more water? How many alcoholic drinks have you consumed?”

  “It was just tea. Very proper. But I think he spiked it. He keeps pouring me another. Don’t have to pay for a thing.”

  “Let me call someone for you—”

  “No!” The girl let go of Kayla and fell against the sinks. “You promised.”

  Kayla hadn’t, but it seemed rather irrelevant.

  “Want some chocolate?” the girl asked. “I just llllove chocolate.” She opened her purse and pulled out a small box covered in gold foil.

  Kayla’s stomach rumbled painfully. When had she last eaten? A day ago? She hadn’t felt like eating, not when grief clawed its way through her gut. Suddenly, she felt a bit faint.

  “He doesn’t look evil,” the girl mused, popping a chocolate in her mouth and chewing thoughtfully. “He’s too pretty. Pretty. Pretty. Pretty. Don’t you think?” She held out the box. The chocolates lay temptingly in gold foil. Each one heart-shaped with six red dots decorating the top.

  Kayla politely refused, though she was starving. She didn’t accept candy from strangers.

  “You sure? Persephone’s Delight. They’re shpecial. Special.” The girl laughed. She picked up a fine linen towel embroidered with a B, wet it in the sink, and rubbed at the smudges around her eyes, but only succeeded in spreading them farther over her wide cheekbones. “I didn’t ask to be the Crane Wife, you know. Didn’t want to. I thought Crow, yeah, or Eagle. My parents are birds, you see? But not a Crane.”

  A Kivati, Kayla realized. She tried to imagine this slight girl turning into a giant bird, and failed. No one had ever accused her of an overactive imagination. On the bright side, at least this delusional person wasn’t over six-feet and packing heat. This was her chance to get data without getting her head blown off.

  Pumping a drunken teenager for information. She stooped to new lows. “What’s wrong with a Crane?”