Nightingale

by Amy Lukavics

  To my incomparable crew of writer friends, lovingly known as my hags, being able to chat daily about everything under and above the sun with you ladies has been such a treasured escape in my work and personal life: Kate Hart, Kody Keplinger, Courtney Summers, Somaiya Daud, Stephanie Kuehn, Lindsey Culli, Samantha Mabry, Phoebe North, Alexis Bass, Stephanie Wargin, Kara Thomas, Veronica Roth, Maurene Goo, Debra Driza, Kaitlin Ward, Michelle Krys, Kristin Halbrook, Laurie Devore, and Leila Austin. Thanks for all of the laughs and support, hags.

  To Chelsea Stazenski, Alexa Simpson, Cassy Foster, Jessica Crocker, Adie Matthew, and Lauren West: as always, you gals are essential to my happiness. May we continue to have the wildest adventures together, and thank you for letting me use you to build June a girl squad almost as awesome as ours. (Nurse Chelsea may have not been a favorite of June’s, but I sure loved her.)

  To T.S. Ferguson and my wonderful team over at Harlequin TEEN—thank you so much for enabling me to live my dream.

  And last, but certainly not least, to my love Edmund. You are the chainsaw to my Ash.

  The Ravenous

  by Amy Lukavics

  Chapter 1

  Before the birthday balloons, and before the accident, before the broken mirrors and the black veins and the dismembered bodies in the basement, there was only the Cane sisters.

  If only it could be like this all the time, Mona Cane thought as she and her four sisters crowded the reflection of the store mirror. They stood in a row, smiling and tilting their heads back and forth in unison as if they were all a part of the same organism. If only what people thought about us was the truth. “The Cane sisters are so great!” “They love each other so much!” “What a wonderful family the Canes have!”

  But really, Mona knew it was all a lie.

  The other customers at the boutique let out passive-aggressive sighs and begrudgingly made their way through the narrow aisle left by the sisters, who were crowded in front of the entire sunglasses section at Lily Lu’s, leaning into each other to fit in front of the mirror as they tried on several pairs. Some people tried to hide their stares, flit their eyes up in between browsing the brightly colored scarves and fashionably-thinned T-shirts from the racks nearby, but others just stared openly.

  While their family moved around frequently according to the whims of the army, there seemed to be a general sentiment shared about the sisters wherever they went, a hushed sort of intrigue, an envy that bloomed from the knowledge that no matter what happened in the world, the girls would always have each other.

  How nice, Mona thought, trying not to let the bitterness creep in.

  Although it was kind of nice on days like this, she knew as she took in the shared joy between herself and her sisters, so rare these days. Even Juliet, nineteen years old and the hardest of them all, couldn’t help but laugh as their youngest sister, Rose, picked up a pair of hot-pink-framed sunglasses, slid them onto her face and struck an enthusiastic pose.

  “Those were made for you,” Juliet said, her smile warm as she addressed the baby of the family. But her smile hardened and chilled when she turned to look at Taylor, her constant shadow since the age of one. “Can you step back, please?”

  Taylor flinched at the unexpected sting. “Me? Why?”

  “You’re hovering.” Juliet pulled her shoulder dramatically in. “Jesus, Taylor, you’re so close that I can smell your breakfast! Can’t you breathe through your goddamn nose every now and then?”

  Taylor backed away immediately, not changing her facial expression as she reached forward and picked up another pair of sunglasses to try on. It was like she had simultaneously heard Juliet and not heard her at all. None of the other sisters reacted, either. Mona let her eyes fall away from the mirror.

  Letting out an irritated sigh, Juliet gently took the glasses out of Taylor’s hands and put them back. “I think we should all get the same ones Rose did, but with different colored frames.”

  And just like that, Mona knew that the decision about the sunglasses was made, all because Juliet had said so.

  “Everybody pick a color!” Rose squealed in delight as she grinned at her reflection through her new shades. “Obviously, I call pink!”

  Beside her, their middle sister Anya shot forward to claim the pair with the emerald green frames. Mona knew that Anya was choosing them because they were the same color as the beloved weed that she was always packing into her starglass pipe and smoking in their closet.

  “Best color,” Anya said to herself with a wicked, confident little smile that Mona both resented and coveted. Even though Anya was only sixteen, a year older than Mona, the difference felt enormous at this point in their lives. Especially in the past year, since they’d stopped spending so much time together, right around the time things at home had gotten worse.

  “I can’t decide,” Juliet said, studying herself in a pair of sunshine-yellow-framed shades. “These, or...” she quickly replaced the sunglasses with ones that were framed with bright bloodred “...these.”

  “Ooooh,” Rose cooed, and all the other sisters nodded in quiet agreement. “I think the red looks so good on you, Juliet, and it even matches your lipstick!”

  And your uncontrollable temper, Mona thought, wishing she could whisper it to Anya so they could share a laugh. What a perfect match.

  “I think you’re right,” Juliet said, carelessly letting the yellow sunglasses fall back crookedly onto the holder on the table in front of them. She barely had time to pull her hand away when Taylor snatched the yellow frames and eagerly put them on. She stared at herself in a way that showed how shamelessly she wanted to be just like Juliet.

  In fact, Mona happened to know that Taylor usually hated yellow things, and that the only reason she’d chosen the glasses was because Juliet almost did, which meant that Taylor would be almost as cool for getting them instead. Ever since Mona could remember, Taylor was always right behind their oldest sister, eager to please her and be accepted by her and, as far as Mona could tell, somehow transform herself into Juliet’s clone.

  “Hurry up, Mona,” Juliet urged, turning her head toward the cash register, obviously over the thrill of the search and eager to leave. “Just pick already. Blue or orange are all that’s left.”

  Without hesitating, Mona reached out and took the blue pair. Blue was calm. Blue was cool. Blue was...sad, which was embarrassingly reflective but oh well. She slid the glasses on her face and studied her reflection with those of her sisters, the lot of them like one long, fucked up rainbow.

  Once the glasses were paid for, the Canes got ice cream cones across the street. This was a sisterly tradition that they had taken with them to every town they’d lived in: ice cream. Everywhere had ice cream. Juliet and Taylor got coffee flavored, Anya got butter pecan, Mona got cookie dough and Rose got rainbow sorbet. As they strolled down the sidewalk downtown and licked the cones that were already melting in thick drips down the waffled sides, their likeness was so strong it nearly looked manufactured: auburn hair and freckled skin and very thin upper lips that, much to the sisters’ dismay, revealed their slightly buck front teeth if they didn’t remember to hold their mouths right.

  They walked in a group with Rose in the middle, surrounded like a baby elephant in a herd that was anticipating lions. The other people on the sidewalk were forced to step aside as the girls pummeled through, licking their cones and letting out shrill bursts of laughter as Rose told a joke she’d heard at school.

  If only it could be like this all the time, Mona thought again, but with Mom and Dad with us.

  But “Mom and Dad” wasn’t really a thing, not for eighty percent of the year anyway, since Dad was always away for work.

  When the cones were gone and their fingers were sticky and the sky became heavy with clouds, the girls reluctantly made their way back to the vintage Mustang convertible at the curb two block
s back, which was a guilt gift from their father when Juliet turned sixteen. Even though Taylor had her license and Anya had her learner’s permit, Juliet was the only one with a car, and she always drove. Mona suspected it was her way of claiming the spot closest to their father, since she might as well have been a third parent herself.

  Even with their combined stories, the girls felt like they hardly knew their dad. They’d never seen him long enough to get past the awkward, always-smiling stage of the relationship, where at the sign of any sort of conflict or situation requiring discipline, he’d slip away to clean the grill, or fix the gutter, or anything that would allow him to slink out the back door and drink a few beers alone.

  But having a father as dedicated to the army as one could possibly be, the girls also knew that there was no chance of change, ever. Mona had faced this fact maybe five years ago, when she had to stop reading her favorite book series because of how envious she was of the main character. Instead of finding escape in the books like she always had before, Mona’s heart began to hurt at the carefully crafted descriptions of a family that had lived in the same town for their entire lives, descriptions of family dinners and Saturday outings and showy holidays that the main character didn’t seem to cherish at all, at least not in the way that Mona thought she should. One day after finishing the most recent book, Mona mumbled under her breath that the main character was a dry bitch.

  She never read another book in the series again.

  But now, five years later, Mona thought she’d done a good enough job of internalizing those feelings—what good were they, anyway? She stopped having fantasies about setting down roots somewhere with her parents and sisters, stopped imagining what it would be like to have sleepovers with a best friend that you’d known since kindergarten, stopped believing that there could ever be such a thing as “home” to her. Not a real home, anyway. There were only houses and houses and houses, across states, across the country, back and forth, never staying long enough to develop any real bonds with anyone else. New ideals were thought up and embraced.

  Mona’s situation was hardly extraordinary, there were plenty of military brats that grew up to be just fine, better than fine even, happy, fulfilled. “Home” could supposedly be attained through people instead of houses, home is where the heart is and all that, but Mona didn’t feel like she had a home in any of her sisters.

  She used to, in Anya.

  But like so many other things, Mona had lost that, too.

  Once all the Cane sisters had piled into the convertible, with Taylor in the front seat and Rose tucked securely in between Mona and Anya in the back, Juliet reached overhead to close the roof of the car. She secured the last latch just as raindrops started to dot the windshield, and with an irritated sigh, she cut away from the curb and made her way back to post, where their two-story house with a large wraparound porch and big windows sat in one of the designated housing neighborhoods.

  Between the size of their family and the seniority of their father’s rank, they were always placed in especially nice houses wherever they were stationed, although their current house had only three bedrooms and therefore required the girls to share. Mona was bunked up with Anya and Rose. Taylor and Juliet had the bedroom down the hall.

  They entered through the kitchen to discover the house just as quiet as when they left it; Mom must’ve still been in bed, where she spent the majority of her recent days. All of the lights were off, the blinds were closed, and, with another one of her signature irritated sighs, Juliet made the rounds to wake the house up.

  Their mom was always home but never in sight; she lived like a snail, retracted beneath the covers of her bed, sleeping or peeking out at the television that was always playing the cooking channel. The shades on the windows were always drawn shut, and the paper pharmacy bags of prescription pills and empty wine bottles formed quite the spread over her nightstand.

  Mom had once told Juliet that having children ruined her life. That was eleven years ago, when Rose had been only a newborn. Dad was overseas, as he’d been for all of their births. Juliet was eight. A little young to become Mom Number Two, but as Juliet loved to point out, life was not only a bitch, but a goddamn raving mad bitch who loved to point and laugh and kick and claw.

  What a wonderful family the Canes have!

  After the windows were open and the television was on and the younger girls had plopped evenly over the couches to get caught up with their shows, Juliet checked the sink for thawing meat and found none, although she did discover an empty bakery box that had contained an entire banana cream pie when they’d left for downtown earlier. When Mona checked over her shoulder from the couch to see what Juliet was cursing under her breath about, she saw the white and yellow box for just a second before her sister pushed it deeper into the trash can and closed the lid.

  No, Mona thought, desperate to keep the mostly-jovial mood the girls had shared at the boutique and the ice cream shoppe. No no no no.

  But it was too late. The discovery of a stagnant, sleeping house and the missing banana cream pie that was meant for Rose’s birthday in two days was apparently enough to force Juliet back into what Mona thought of as her dark place. When Juliet was in her dark place, you had to be especially careful not to piss her off in any way, which wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Anything from a too-loud speaking voice to leaving a piece of trash on the kitchen counter was enough to make Juliet yell or hit, or both.

  Mona thought of the joke she’d made to herself at the sunglasses shop, about Juliet’s uncontrollable temper, but it had lost any glimmer of humor by now. Mona remembered the awful time when she was eight and Anya was nine, and Juliet needed to use the bathroom, so she told them to watch Rose. The girls had been right in the middle of a video game, and weren’t too excited at the prospect of stopping it to keep an eye on Rose, who was only four, so they sat her down on the couch behind them and went back to it without a second thought.

  After the game came to an end, the girls realized that Rose, who had been quietly sitting and watching before, was nowhere to be found. Juliet came downstairs before they could find her, and made a heart-stopping discovery: the baby gate that usually blocked Rose’s access to the doggie door in the kitchen had been down the whole time.

  The girls had run outside in pure panic, only to find Rose barefoot in the middle of the street, waving her little arms frantically at a truck that was speeding past. Juliet had screamed at the sight, sprinted down the driveway to scoop Rose up in her arms, before turning to Mona and Anya, fire in her eyes.

  “How would you like it if Rose had been hit by a car?” she screamed, grabbing a handful of Anya’s hair and pulling her down to the ground. Then she came for Mona, shoving her hard onto the pavement. “In fact,” she whispered, leaning down so that only Mona could hear her, “how would you like it if I pushed you into the road the next time a car came by? How do you think it’d feel to get hit? Do you want to find out? Because I can make sure it happens, Mona, trust me.”

  The look in Juliet’s wild eyes had turned Mona’s blood to ice. That was the first time she had felt true, real fear at the hands of her oldest sister. But like so many other things in life, Mona had forced herself to stop thinking about it. She didn’t want to face what it might mean for Juliet to be so willing to threaten her like that.

  “Mona and Taylor, get off your asses and help me make dinner,” Juliet screeched from where she stood in the kitchen, her voice deadly sharp. “Now.”

  Both girls scrambled over themselves to comply.

  Because, despite the fact that they were all old enough to take care of themselves, and despite the fact that they argued so much over everything under the sun, if there was one thing all of the Cane sisters could agree on indefinitely, it was this:

  When Juliet told you to do something, you listened.

  Copyright © 2017 by Amy Lukavics

 
ISBN-13: 9781488095245

  Nightingale

  Copyright © 2018 by Amy Lukavics

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