“Let me see it again,” he said, standing up and grabbing my head, his thumbs at my temple and his fingers rubbing my scalp.
“Not so rough this time,” I warned. This time it wasn’t unpleasant. His touch was whisper soft, and if I had hair I’d have moaned embarrassingly loud. His touch was something I could easily become addicted to, better than cocaine, but perhaps more costly because I loved every soft stroke of his skin on mine. This must be a dream, I thought, closing my eyes and reveling in the feel of him.
“You aren’t dreaming. This place is real,” Keeper said softly.
“It doesn’t feel real. Life doesn’t feel like this. This is perfect,” I said, looking up at him. His eyes swirled a soft caramel. “Why do they change?” He knew exactly what I was referring to.
“They reflect emotion.” He had mood eyes.
“Why do your tattoos change?”
“They aren’t tattoos, and they reflect the language I speak and the words that I need. They are reflections of the pleas I utter.”
His thumbs massaged my temples and I melted into him. “Remember everything. Show me everything that led you here.”
So I did. I took him back to when my life began to unravel at the seams. I remembered the paparazzi, the car accident, and the feeling of letting go. I remembered Doc and rehab and trying to escape Dimitri. The feeling of shattering bones and bruises so deep I would always be sore. The spikes of my hair upon my fingertips when I realized it was gone and the ridges and bumps of the staples and skin that lay cramped in between. I showed him the moment I realized I was the girl attached to the machines, laying in the bed effectively dead, the fabric or veil or whatever he wanted to call it and how I poked at it, my finger coming away clean. Giving him the moment of Pamela’s abduction and then mine, I showed him how I fought them, how I didn’t go down without a fight—I’d fought Dimitri and his thugs, too. No matter who or what I fought, it never did any good, but I did it to show that I wouldn’t buckle before I broke. I showed him how the fabric tore, and then the fear in Gus’s eyes and the overwhelming gray that found me as the swirling black mass soaked into my body and awakened me to this place. I showed him the gate and The Killing Field and the moment I saw him.
His body, so close to mine, went rigid. “Thank you,” he whispered, easing his fingers away from me. When he touched my face, there was no spark. It didn’t hurt or anything. Maybe we were past it.
“This is beyond my knowledge. I don’t understand.” The strained lines in his face showed how difficult it was to even admit it.
“The veil thing you talk about – is it a bad thing that I tore it?”
“Most likely, yes,” he replied. “But it was so small a piece.” His eyes, now ebony, snapped to mine. “Those men who hurt you, why did they do it?”
“I’m not the type of girl who deserves Heaven, Keeper. I was mean and did some very bad things.”
“Every human does. Most waste the gifts they were given.”
“Can you see life on Earth from here?”
“No. I can’t leave this place. I haven’t for a long time,” he said, turning his back to me. Snapping his fingers, the crows swirled to the ground, pecking at the leftover manna.
I wanted to ask him what he was and how long he’d been here. Watching his back stiffen, I knew he heard my silent questions. He didn’t want to answer, and maybe I shouldn’t even think those things. Curiosity killed me a few times before. I still hadn’t learned my lesson, apparently. The Lesson, the man with his ears melted by the demon, flashed into my mind. Would I suffer a similar fate?
“You won’t.”
“How can you be so sure? If the veil wasn’t supposed to be torn, how do you know I won’t become just like them?”
He leaned against the deck railing. “I don’t feel it,” he said, rubbing the muscle over his heart.
“What do you feel?” I asked, watching him rub his chest, his face contorted in emotions so deep, I couldn’t wrap my head around them.
“I feel you, but it’s so confusing. I’m not sure that what I’m feeling is accurate. My gifts don’t seem to work on you.”
“Does every Lesson lose their hearing?” I asked, toying with the fleshy bottom of my ear.
“No, some lose their sight. Others lose their ability to speak. Their mouths are sealed.”
My chest tightened. “Hear no evil.”
Keeper smiled. “Speak no evil, see no evil. Smart girl.”
With a mirthless laugh, I told him, “No one’s ever accused me of being smart.”
His jaw ticked. “Don’t put yourself down, Carmen Kennedy.”
“Easy for you to say, Keeper.” I took a deep breath. “What’s on tap for today?” He could tell I was done talking about me and this crazy situation, and he graciously let me change the subject.
“We lay low and wait for help to arrive.”
“Will help have a name?”
Keeper smirked. “Perhaps.”
“Asshole.”
Then he laughed, wholeheartedly. Keeper liked being called an asshole.
“I can think of a few ways to fill our time,” I suggested.
“No,” he said sternly and walked out the balcony door.
9
In what I thought was the afternoon, it began to rain. It rained hard, the drops blown sideways from the gusts of wind that accompanied it. Keeper ran outside into the deluge, getting drenched immediately, but it didn’t deter him.
“Come on!” he yelled, stripping himself of his clothes. With his back to me, I watched his hands scrub over his body. Every inch. And I couldn’t tear my eyes away from him. Every inch of him was sculpted, powerful, and intimidating. He’d been chiseled from stone, I was sure of it. The only part that wasn’t perfect were the two vertical scars slashing through his shoulder blades.
His body tensed, hearing my thoughts. I didn’t dislike the scars at all. Scars were important. It meant bad stuff happened. Scars were the remnants of terrible things, but also proof that a person had survived them. I slid the pad of my finger over the large scar on my head, the skin around it still puckered and tender to the touch.
He wasn’t naked for long, unfortunately, because just a few minutes after it began, the rain stopped pouring. Keeper gathered his clothes, tucking them strategically in front of him. I hadn’t gotten a peek at that yet, but damn, if it matched the rest of him…
He was smirking when he walked through the door, fishing his cigarette packet from his dripping, tragically well-positioned pants.
I pointed a (sexually) frustrated finger at the window. “What the hell was that?”
“The cleansing.”
“The cleansing. Oh. Well, why didn’t you just say so? Does it come at this time every day, like the manna?”
“It does.”
“Well, I know when to bathe tomorrow, then.”
He looked at me and earnestly said, “You smell good.”
“Oh, I smell good. Well, I’d like to get clean too, buddy. So, when ‘the cleansing’ comes again, I’ll go get naked with you. Unless you want me to strip down now…”
“I told you to come. And I waved for you.”
Water sluiced down his body, making him look like a delectable, juicy, fresh piece of man-flesh. Damn it.
“I’ll be back,” he said, walking to the steps. The muscles in his ass alone... My God. If this was Purgatory, maybe I should stay.
When he came back down, I was sitting on the couch, yet again. I’d snooped through every cabinet, closet, and room and found nothing interesting at all. Who had lived here?
“It mirrors someone’s home in your world.”
“But why? Why the city? Why the homes and manna and rain?”
“The city was built from one man’s imagination, and this house came from another’s. Some things stay, some go. Eventually, this house will fade away. The owner stayed here for a long time, but has moved on.”
“To Heaven or Hell?”
“Does i
t matter?”
Did it? We were using the house now. That mattered. A chick lived here. She had a black Labrador retriever and a nail polish fetish, given the obscene amount of tiny bottles under the bathroom sink. She was my size. How did he know we were the same size?
“I can sense these things.”
“You can sense them?”
“You repeat my questions often.”
Hmm. He had a point there. But I still couldn’t wrap my mind around this place. This dream was the weirdest and longest I’d ever had.
Keeper wore a long-sleeved black Henley, its sleeves pushed up to reveal muscular forearms and the tattoos that covered them. Dark jeans fit him like they were made for him.
“Where’d you get the clothes? I didn’t see men’s clothing in any of the closets.”
“I asked for them.”
“Whom did you ask?”
He rolled his eyes and strode toward me, reaching out for my hands. “Stand up.”
Uh.
“Stand. Up,” he said more softly.
I stood and placed my hands in his. He lowered his head, bringing our mouths precariously close together. Lightning struck between the pair of us.
“Do you feel that?” he slowly whispered.
“The electricity?” I was breathless, lightheaded. I could feel him everywhere. The spark. The connection. Him.
“Yes.”
“Then, yes. I feel it.”
Keeper’s eyes fastened onto mine, swirls of violet and blue. “It’s real. This home is real. You are not dreaming.”
“But it can’t be real. I saw my body. I’m not in it anymore.”
He nodded. “You aren’t in your earthen body anymore; you’re in a body made only for this place. You are in Purgatory. It’s a reality with its own rules. Earth’s rules do not apply here. If you can accept that, you can survive here. If you refuse, you may lose your mind before your soul makes its way back to your body. Do you understand? If you lose your mind, you’ll never find your way back to your body and you’ll be lost for good. You have to keep a grasp on who you are and what happened to you, even though it’s painful.”
Remembering was part of the punishment of being here. Swallowing, I tried to pull my hands away. His lips were perfect, the bottom slightly plumper than the top.
“I’ll try,” I said, pleading with him to understand. It just made no sense.
“It doesn’t make sense,” he answered my unspoken thoughts. “None of this does. Especially not you.”
“Why don’t I make sense? The fabric? I’m telling you, my soul was like a sponge. Somehow, it just soaked it up.”
Keeper smiled.
“This place is so strange, but I can honestly say I’ve seen weirder here,” I added. I mean, hello, the tears or fissures themselves were creepy as hell. All of a sudden, a sharp sting ran up my spine. I jumped into him and Keeper caught me, holding me tight to him. It felt like the lightning leash was stinging me, or a lightning whip was cracking across my spine.
“Aaah!” I winced. He held me upright, fingers digging into my hips.
“What’s happening?” he gritted.
“I don’t know! You should know!”
He held me up as another surge forked up my spine, tearing a scream from my throat, and then he looked up to the ceiling.
“It’s not possible.” His irises turned dark and began to swirl and ooze like oil, hints of lavender, teal, and deep brown roiling within. “How did you know it was coming?”
“What? What was coming?”
“I only now sensed it. Come outside.”
He pulled me along behind him, my back alive with sharp, stinging bursts of something more powerful than I was.
Out on the deck, the crows cawed and swirled into a funnel. The film of fabric appeared, swirling angrily. The noise, the screeching, ripping, ear-damaging sound came from above us. RIGHT above us. The fabric had torn apart.
“Is this your version of help?” I asked hopefully.
“No, this is you.”
“Me?”
“You did this. You mentioned the fabric of the veil, and then you mentioned it tearing and separating. Holy… You envisioned it. You caused this fissure!”
The wind swirled as angrily as Keeper’s eyes, as frenzied as his birds. They watched the flapping edges of the fabric, watched the gaping hole to see what or who would pass through it. But no one did.
“Close it!” he yelled over the sound of the wind and wings.
“I can’t!”
“You can! Think it. Imagine it closing!”
Toward the fissure, I screamed, “Close, you fucking thing!”
He frowned at me but watched incredulously as the fabric begin to swirl, congeal, and repair the wound I’d caused. The scar was present for a fraction of a second before it disappeared, along with the veil itself. Keeper’s jaw gaped open as he looked over at me.
“That was one way to do it.”
“I didn’t know what to say! I don’t think it was me in the first place.”
“It was you,” he said, relaxing his stance. The crows circled more slowly and began to land in the yard and on the roof of the house. A few perched on the dead limbs of a nearby tree. Cawing at each other more calmly, they settled down. So did he.
I pinched my lip as he cast a wary glance in my direction, but there was something else in those tumultuous eyes. Intrigue, maybe?
“You are dangerous,” he said simply, resting his forearms on the deck rail. If I was dangerous, then the Keeper of Crows was terrifying. I’d seen what he could do. He ignored the mental comment and barreled toward me with more.
“If the ruler of the city knew of your power, he would use you. But I swear on my life, I’ll keep you safe. I’ll help you find a way out of here.”
“No one is using me ever again,” I bit out.
“Never say never, Carmen Kennedy.”
10
My feathers had been ruffled. No one was using me, whether I had some sort of power to open fissures or not. Besides that, I thought he was insane. I didn’t cause a fissure, I thought solemnly. I can’t tear the veil. I’m just a soul here. I watched Keeper as he stood deep in thought, arms braced against the deck railing. I was almost able to hear the gears turning in his mind as the sounds of night fell around us and the unearthly bugs sang their sad songs.
The crows rested all around us; some on the tree limbs of a large tree in the back yard, some on the roof’s peak, while still others lay on the ground, nestled into the overgrown tufts of gray grass. It was a moment of calm. A moment to catch our breath after such a strange event this evening. And calm moments in Purgatory, I learned, were fleeting.
Keeper suddenly stiffened, shoving me behind him toward the sliding glass door and the shelter of the safe house. “Get inside.” The low, warning timbre of his voice set me on edge.
“Why? What’s wrong?” Peeking over his shoulder, I saw what worried him. A Lesson, this one a male built like a wall of angry, hulking muscle. His eyes were gone and the sockets that once held them dripped tar onto his heaving chest.
See no evil. Why didn’t the demon bind him so he could do no evil?
“Please go inside and secure all of the doors,” Keeper requested calmly.
“I don’t think I want to be inside,” I admitted on a whisper, inching closer to his back. Not to mention that he was the one who told me no one needed keys in this place.
He looked over his shoulder at me, a perplexed expression wrinkling his forehead just slightly. “You will be safe. I wouldn’t send you into danger, but I will keep you from it, or it from you.”
Swallowing down my fear, I opened the door and backed into the house, watching Keeper jump up onto the railing, standing tall and raising his arms in the air. The crows swirled around the Lesson, disorienting the beast.
Keeper jumped off the balcony and then I couldn’t see him anymore. I locked the glass door and ran to the front door to lock it, too. The windows were beyond m
y control. Most were stuck either up or down, and those that were up wouldn’t close no matter how hard I pushed. They were frozen. Maybe it was how the person who lived there made them or remembered them, and they brought the whole thing here like this. Maybe it couldn’t change.
From the window, I watched as the birds carried the threat away, dragging the Lesson away from the approaching Keeper. But then I saw the rest of the Lessons waiting nearby and wondered how there would ever be enough crows to combat them all. There were at least a hundred, some without eyes, others with tar dripping from their ears, and others with sealed black spots where their mouths had once been.
I ran to the kitchen, searching for a butcher knife—anything I could use as a weapon. Keeper would need help with this hellish army.
The ones who couldn’t speak? They were the most dangerous, I learned. Because while the others had control of their voices and screamed and bellowed, the ones with no mouth were unable to make any sound whatsoever. Just as I reminded myself of the formidable threat, I realized I shouldn’t speak of the devil. He would appear.
Two hands grabbed my throat from behind, wrenching me to the side and throwing me against the refrigerator. My head swam with black dots, but the pain in my ankle kept me lucid. Fuck. Me. This guy was strong. “Keeper!” I bellowed.
The Lesson needed to be taught a lesson, and I was in no shape to give him one. The windows burst open, angry wind swirling inside along with a torrent of crows. Feathers, once light and delicate as air, soft as down, were driven toward the silent monster. They skewered him, sharp as needles, each embedding into his flesh until he was covered, stumbling toward an escape he wouldn’t find.
I covered my head with my forearms as he passed me by, my mind buzzing with a strange static. A soft touch on my shoulder made me jump. “It’s me,” Keeper said softly, crouching at my side.
“Did you do that to him? Did you have the crows kill him?”
He didn’t answer right away and didn’t look me in the eye when he answered. “Yes.”
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