The Devil Gave Them Black Wings

by Lee Thompson

  It was so hard to see through her tears, and it was hard to hear anything but Jacob mumbling, and the sound of her blood pounding in her ears, and upstairs a door slamming shut and feet beating a path toward the basement.

  And as Sebastian slipped back into the shadows, she heard Officer Friendly yell, “Clint?” And he sounded so angry and Jacob stood and looked at the window and moved away from her and she wanted to cry: No, don’t leave us!

  14

  Jacob knew he didn’t have time to lift both children to the window and push them outside, not with the cop on the landing above, and a second later, his feet on the basement steps. Jacob ran to the far corner, to the pocket beneath the old rickety stairs, dust and sawdust floating about his head as he watched Friendly’s brightly polished black shoes bend each riser, until the policeman’s shoes hit the concrete floor with a loud thud.

  Jacob raised the pistol between the steps and pointed the gun at the side of the policeman’s head. All of Friendly’s attention was devoted to his son, who lay motionless next to Nina, and to the girl who held his latest project.

  Friendly didn’t say anything for a moment as he processed what he saw. Then he moved quickly and knelt over Clint, running his hand through his son’s hair, totally oblivious to everything else.

  But Jacob saw Sebastian looking at him—Santana, and Nina, and Robin, and countless other girls’ self-professed guardian and destroyer—standing where Friendly had been only a moment ago before running to his son’s side. Sebastian said, “Act now. Quickly.”

  Jacob imagined himself walking up behind the cop and putting the barrel to the back of his head and saying something profound before pulling the trigger, yet he couldn’t move. It was sinking in what he’d done, shooting Clint, and how Nina had cried looking at the boy, how she had said it wasn’t him, it was never him, it was his father.

  And the revelation that he had killed a boy who had only been trying to help Robin Stark escape, a boy who needed help and had brought Nina, to show her, so she could grasp the magnitude of what his father had done, chilled his insides. And he remembered the two black men looking for a daughter, this girl, and how Nina had accused and questioned Jacob about coming down there before, and it clicked into place slowly, too slowly, for him, that Friendly had been preying on little girls like this hollow shell that Nina held now, for years.

  He knew he should move without thinking, he should heed Sebastian’s advice and act now, quickly, but he didn’t want to kill again, part of him afraid that he would miss and the bullet would ricochet and hurt Nina or Robin.

  Nina stared at him over Friendly’s shoulder, her face scrunched up, and the cop must have noticed it because he glanced over his shoulder and looked directly at Jacob who still could not come out from under the steps, yet somehow found the strength to raise the pistol and point it at the policeman, and Jacob somehow found his voice, quiet and tinny: “Put your hands up and move over to the wall. I don’t want to kill you.”

  Friendly stood and faced him, a cold dark light in his eyes.

  Nina picked up Robin and stood, shakily, backing away from the two men, backed toward the bed, attempting to hold herself together since she knew that the next few seconds would guide her into one of two futures.

  Jacob gestured with the pistol to the wall below the window and said to Friendly, “Put your hands on the wall and don’t say a word and don’t even look their way, you hear me?”

  “Put that gun down,” Friendly said.

  Nina sat on the dirty mattress and cradled Robin on her lap, and said, “Shoot him!”

  Friendly said to Jacob, “You killed my son?”

  Nina said, “You killed nine little girls! And you killed my mom and Rick and they didn’t do anything to you!”

  Jacob said, “You killed the only person I could truly call a friend, too, and I won’t tell you again. Put your hands on the wall.”

  “I don’t think you’re going to walk out of here alive,” Friendly said. He looked back and forth between Jacob and the girls. “None of you.”

  Nina said, “Shoot him, Jacob. Please. Do it! Look at her, look what he did to her.”

  “I can’t look at her,” Jacob said. And he couldn’t because if he did he would shoot the cop, for all his cruelties to Robin, for gunning down Victor in the parking lot. “But he needs to go to prison,” he said. “He needs to know what it feels like to be powerless and to pay for his crimes that way.”

  Friendly laughed for a second and then grabbed the window casing behind him and pulled his body up through the opening. Nina screamed. Jacob stepped forward, hoping to grab a hold of Friendly’s right ankle before he pulled it outside, but the man was fast.

  Jacob aimed the pistol at the window, at the shape in the murk beyond it and fired two shots. He thought he heard the cop grunt but couldn’t be certain.

  Nina cried, “You let him get away!”

  Jacob, stunned, and ashamed, hung his head.

  “Aren’t you going to go after him?”

  “It’s dark out there now. I don’t have a flashlight and I don’t know the woods or anything around here.” He glanced back into the shadows by the stairwell, struggled with the grief he felt, and he knew that Nina was looking into the shadows of the staircase as well, looking for the creature who called itself Sebastian, but neither of them sensed his presence now. Jacob whispered, “He said he’d kill someone. But he just watches people die.”

  “Who are you talking about?”

  “This guy who has been following me named Sebastian. I think he’s a hallucination.”

  “I met him,” Nina said. “He’s real. If he was here with us, I hope he’s out there now in the dark with Clint’s dad.”

  She hugged Robin, then pulled back and studied the child’s face, trying to imagine what her parents would think when they saw her, when they held her, as the years passed.

  Jacob wanted to scoff at the idea Sebastian was out there now in the dark with Friendly, but he didn’t have the strength anymore to hope for something so bizarre, and yet he knew that stranger things had happened than that.

  He said, “I’m going to close that window and call the police. Come upstairs with me. We should probably stay close until we know he isn’t coming back.”

  “Friendly, you mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He’s not coming back,” Nina said. “Sebastian won’t let him.”

  “I wish I had your faith.”

  “It doesn’t take much to believe,” she said, “Try, for me, please. Try for Robin.”

  “It takes more than I have left in me.”

  Nina nodded. She said, “Will you carry her? I can barely hold her anymore.”

  “Gladly,” he said, taking Robin into his arms. He wished he could carry Nina as well because she looked so weak she could barely stand. She leaned against his side and stroked Robin’s leg. She said, “I wish you could bring Clint upstairs too.”

  “It’s a crime scene. I better not move him.”

  “You’re going to go to prison,” she said, “and you know it but it doesn’t bother you.”

  “I took someone’s life,” he said. “I can’t take it back. I thought I was protecting you.”

  “I’m so tired,” Nina said, “but all I can think about is Sebastian tearing Clint’s dad to pieces.”

  “It’s a nice thought.”

  “Not as nice as it will be to return Robin to her parents,” she said. “They’re good people. Really good people.”

  “You’re a good person.”

  “I don’t think I am,” she said. “And right now I don’t care.”

  “I should have shot him.”

  “Maybe Sebastian knew you wouldn’t from the beginning.”

  “It was why I came here,” he said. “He killed Victor in cold blood.”

  “Victor’s really dead?”

  Jacob nodded.

  “He’s killed a lot of children,” Nina said. “But not this one.”

&nbs
p; She reached out and stroked Robin’s hair.

  They went upstairs and Jacob laid the child on the sofa and called the police. He and Nina sat on the floor and had a difficult time looking at each other. She said, “Are we friends?”

  “Me and you?”

  “Yes.”

  “We can be if you want,” he said.

  “I think I might.”

  “We could be friends with her and her family too,” he said, nodding at Robin.

  “You’d like them,” she said. Then she sniffled and said, “My mom is dead.”

  “I know. I heard that in the basement. I’m sorry.”

  “Why did he have to destroy so many lives?” she said, tears in her eyes. Jacob scooted closer to her and hugged her from the side and searched for an answer.

  “Victor said men like that enjoy it. And he would have known. As good as he was, especially as much as I got to see it these last few days, he enjoyed hurting people, just not weak people or ones who couldn’t stand up for themselves. Most of us guys have a fearful little boy living inside us and we never outgrow him. Sometimes that little boy’s rage grows as his body does and it gives him a tool to use.”

  “How can an angry or twisted boy continue to live in the body of a man?” she said. “I don’t understand that.”

  “I don’t either,” he said. “But do we have to?”

  “I think we have to understand something if we want to change it.”

  Jacob nodded. “You’re a smart kid.”

  “I am,” she said, smiling a little.

  She looked at him a while, for so long that he felt uncomfortable. Then she said, “You look more human since you shaved.”

  She rested her head against his shoulder and within a few minutes fell asleep. Jacob held onto her and watched over Robin on the couch and prayed that the things they endured, and still had yet to overcome, would be a guiding light for others who had suffered.

  Epilogue

  Jacob got his wish, although he witnessed it from a minimum security prison. He could have been out in five years on manslaughter, given the circumstances of his case, but he felt he had a penance to pay, he just wasn’t sure to whom. Richard and Loretta Stark brought Nina and Robin with them to visit. Watching the girls made Jacob smile and others there, men doing time, their families visiting them, seemed to pause their own lives to watch and listen to Robin and Nina giggle as they loved on each other, and joked in sign language, and Nina giggled and Robin laid her head against her shoulder, like sisters.

  Their love would never abolish the pain they carried in their hearts or in their eyes, but that they shone so brightly despite such pain was a testament to many, none more than Jacob and Richard and Loretta, who knew what the children had endured.

  And the years seemed to fly by and Jacob watched them grow, watched as Robin learned to walk better and better with prosthetic feet and Nina grew better at sign language, the two of them sharing little jokes they would not let the adults in on.

  And Jacob was quiet now, quieter than before, as was Richard, both of them soaking up all the girls and Loretta had to say, appreciating the kindness and understanding they showed each other sometimes with nothing more than a look. Richard spoke very little, but the first time he’d seen Jacob again, he’d introduced himself, hugged him, and whispered Thanks in his ear.

  And five years into Jacob’s sentence, when Nina was eighteen, she brought him a book called A Savage Autumn. The Stark family hadn’t come with her and Jacob asked if they were okay. Nina nodded. She looked like her mother and she was happy about that, wore it like a sigil to ward off all the bullshit she saw on television and in movies and had heard in high school about how beauty was everything. She didn’t think most people had any idea what true beauty was, and she sometimes, late at night, lying awake in bed and having trouble sleeping, thought that she had never known what true beauty was until she had lost nearly everything that mattered to her.

  She said, “I thought you might like to read this. You’re in it.”

  “Is this the book about Robin and the other kids?”

  Nina nodded again. “I got all the backup files Ms. Reno had at her mother’s.”

  “Breaking and entering?” Jacob teased.

  “That would have been more exciting,” she said, smiling a little. She watched Jacob study the cover of the book. She told him that she had watched the tape of Santana’s accident. That his wife had been babysitting when she was sixteen and someone had hit her in the head with a lead pipe, left her for dead, and had taken the child. Nina knew it was Friendly the moment she read the description Santana had given the police, but no one else had. The little girl he had taken from her and her parents was one of the cases Caitlain Reno had been looking into before her death.

  Nina said, “I read your wife’s journals, too. She seemed like a really good person. She dreamed about Sebastian. There were a few times she thought she saw him watching her, and it scared her. She never knew his name, but she mentioned the tattoos on his arms and the stork tattooed on his chest. After her accident it seems she never saw him again.”

  Jacob sat there for a while, letting it all sink in.

  Nina cleared her throat and said, “I hated you for a few years, I bet you didn’t know that.”

  He looked up and said, “I didn’t know that.”

  “When I saw that it was you that shot Clint,” she said, “I don’t know, I thought you were every bit as bad as his father was.” She shook her head. “It never made sense to me, you know? How I could feel that way and keep it a secret, and it was eating me up. I’d dream almost every night that Clint’s dad was out in the woods, running along the bank of this fast flowing river, and he was smiling because he thought he was going to get away.

  “But he tripped on a tree root and hit the ground face first, and while he was still dazed, Sebastian would appear, and he’d sit on Friendly’s back. And Sebastian was as light as smoke at first, but he gained more substance and more weight until he was this giant man-like boulder over Friendly’s heart and it kills him. Only sometimes it’s your face Clint’s dad is wearing. Sometimes it’s my dad’s face.” She shook her head. “It’s so confusing.”

  “The police said Friendly died out in the woods of a heart attack, Nina. I don’t think Sebastian had anything to do with it. But I don’t know that he didn’t either.” Jacob tried to smile. “I don’t know much of anything really, but I understand why you hated me for killing Clint. Do you still?”

  “I can’t hate anyone anymore.”

  “I feel that way too.”

  She wiped at her eyes and said, “I love life, and I love the Stark family like my own family, and I want to love you like my own family.”

  “You guys are all the family I have left,” Jacob said. “You can love me like family once you learn to forgive me. It doesn’t take much faith.”

  She said, “I’ve been cleaning the house Victor left you. It’ll be ready for you when you get out of here.”

  “Thank you.”

  Nina hugged him. He wrapped his arms around her and felt all the restless energy living inside her and he thought that her dreams were probably troubling, but never nearly as troubling as what had actually happened, and he wished her peace. She said, “I believe you. I’m going to try and let all of this go, but it’s so hard to. My counselor helps some, but even after years of therapy, and then working on this book, getting it organized, and telling my part of it… it feels like a wound I can’t let heal, you know? But I’m going to try. I’ll always keep trying.”

  He squeezed her tighter and kissed the top of her head and his tears were hot against her scalp, and neither of them cared what anyone else in the visiting room thought.

  Jacob said, “You’re a smart kid. Odd, but smart. When I get out of here, I’d like to hire you to remind me how important it is to smile.”

  She laughed and in it he heard Santana’s laugh when she’d been that age, and he heard Victor’s chuckle, remembered
his shy smile on camera… And he remembered seeing a man who had claimed to be an angel, a man who walked quietly in the sunlight, and in the shadows, his arms tattooed with the names of those he loved, and those who bore his mark...

  Nina rolled her sleeve up and showed Jacob the small stork tattoo she had on the inside of her forearm. It lay on its back, a child nestled against its white breast, its black wings stretched out like the arms of a fallen cross.

  Jacob smiled at her and she smiled back, and said, “Lest we ever forget.”

  Author bio

  Lee Thompson is the bestselling author of the Suspense novels A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS (August 2014), IT’S ONLY DEATH (January 2015), and WITH FURY IN HAND (May 2015). The dominating threads weaved throughout his work are love, loss, and learning how to live again. A firm believer in the enduring power of the human spirit, Lee believes that stories, no matter their format, set us on the path of transformation. He is represented by the extraordinary

  Chip MacGregor of MacGregor Literary. Visit Lee’s website to discover

  more: www.leethompsonfiction.com

  Other titles

  A BEAUTIFUL MADNESS

  IT’S ONLY DEATH

  EARTHLY THINGS

  WHEN WE JOIN JESUS IN HELL

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