by Cole McCade
I see you as a man, she thought. I’ve seen nothing but since the first moment I tried to see enough of a heart in you that I wouldn’t hate you for everything you’ve done.
She lowered her eyes, fixing on the paleness of her fingers splayed against his chest, her breaths hot and her eyes aching. “Priest, I—”
A sharp, booming rattle sounded from outside. She jumped, stifling a scream, and buried against him, instinctively hiding against his warmth, his strength; his arms came around her in a defensive barrier, his entire body going hard and taut beneath her.
Then nothing. Silence. Silence filled with only the faint reverberating echo of that boom, a boom that must have been the exterior door. Her heart made tiny thump-thump-thumps so fast it was like little scared mouse feet, and she risked a glance over her shoulder.
“What is it?” she whispered.
Priest didn’t answer. He stared over her head, gaze distant, searching, battle-ready tension turning him stone-still and hot with that latent energy that could so easily become violence. Fear twisted in the pit of her stomach. Maybe she was being paranoid. Maybe they both were, but Priest was like a hunting hound and if he sensed trouble…
“Priest—”
“Hide,” he said flatly, and pulled away from her to roll out of bed.
“What? Where?” She sat up sharply, watching him with panic leaden and weighing her stomach so hard she wanted to puke. “Were you followed?”
“I should not have been.” His hands clenched into white-knuckled fists. “Sometimes ‘should’ and ‘is’ do not always coincide.”
“Priest, what’s—”
“Stay quiet.” He jerked his jeans on, his shirt, his Kevlar, then came to her with fierce burning eyes and swift movements, gathering her up against his chest and carrying her across the room. She was too shocked to protest, to struggle, as he took her behind the bathroom screen and kicked the standing cabinet open, then bent to wedge her into the largest bottom shelf space, with just enough room for her to curl up if she tucked her knees close to her chest and scrunched herself as small as a child.
“Do not make a sound,” he warned, dire and clipped, golden eyes pinning her. “For your own sake. Do not come out.”
“But—”
“Stay here,” he commanded.
Then the door swung closed, trapping her in darkness, confining her in this tiny, claustrophobic space, helpless and confused, frightened and lost. First there was nothing. Then there was shouting, loud and commanding. That sound—that sound meant bad news. Meant maybe she and Priest had both made the wrong choice. And she could do nothing, she realized with sick, horrifying certainty. Nothing but wait. Listen.
And try not to scream, clapping her hands over her mouth, as the first gunshot rang over the warehouse.
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
FOURTEEN. THAT WAS THE YEAR of blood; the year people began to call her young lady; the year she became a monster not just to herself, but to everyone.
Fourteen was the year she started her period for real. She was late by then, but she was okay with that. She liked being rawboned and awkward and still not a woman in a way that would make boys want to touch her and one day want to make her pregnant and turn her into a mother like Mama. Fourteen was the year she started high school, too, at the special magnet school for STEM her father had finally fought to get her into—where she’d get to take focused courses in mechanical and electrical engineering, robotics science, all the things she could learn to make and build as soon as she figured out what made them tick. Fourteen was the year she’d thought she’d escape Erin, too, when Erin-the-Girl wasn’t into the kind of things Willow was into, the kind of things Erin called boy-things, and Erin-the-Girl should be going to the general public school all the way on the other side of the school district.
And fourteen was the year she was wrong.
Fourteen was also the year she started taking the bus, instead of walking or letting her Dad drop her off; Dad couldn’t drive anymore, his license revoked, and the magnet school was over six miles from home; no public school buses came to her neighborhood for the STEM program. Instead she walked the block and a half to the stop for the 82 line, and leaned against the wall of the transit kiosk and waited with her messenger bag on her hip and her nose buried in a book.
She was reading EDA for IC Implementation, Circuit Design, and Process Technology today, tracing her fingers over the wiring diagrams and circuit grids and squinting at the shortcodes to make sense of them. Across the street was the pickup for the public school bus; she was usually gone by the time the other kids came straggling from around the neighborhood, both Nests urchins and a few from the Rooks on the other side of the tall high fences a couple of blocks over. But Willow was late today, catching the next scheduled run on the 82, because last night Daddy had gone into the hospital for observation and he’d told her it was okay, it was okay, don’t miss school—but she was ready to bite her nails down to nothing wondering if, while she was in class learning about transistors, Daddy was breathing slower and slower until something went wrong and the soft wet machines inside him stopped.
At least she didn’t have to wait with the other kids. Willow was as isolated as the one kid who didn’t get called for dodgeball, as people who’d once been familiar faces gathered on the other side of the street, laughing and shoving and murmuring with their heads together while they waited to enter a world Willow had willingly extracted herself from.
She felt years older, on what she had labeled the adult side of the street. The people at her stop were tired, their faces lined, their shoulders slumped, but they were adults, and so was she. So much more mature than those childish jerks who didn’t care about anything but who was dating whom and who to vote for on American Idol. And she was content to ignore them, she in her world, they in theirs, until a familiar voice rose over the street, loud enough to make the crows on the telephone lines flap their wings and caw back, scolding and argumentative.
“Hey! Hey, Willy-boy! Where the fuck you been?”
Willow’s hand stopped in the middle of turning the page. Her stomach became a hard knot of iron, the entirety of her insides condensed to a single tiny, dense point that drilled its weight into her.
Erin-the-Girl.
It was Erin-the-Girl, standing across the street with her pugnacious little nose sneering and her lips in a wide grin and her hair still in that fucking cutesy blonde bob that cupped her heart-shaped face like it was a diamond in a golden setting. Erin-the-Girl was small, but she carried herself big, carried herself like a bulldog with her chest thrust out and her shoulders so far back it was like she was trying to fold her shoulder blades like wings, and her arms curved out and her fists clenched until she was like a tiny curvy Popeye with that round angry jaw and the puffy puffy pillows bouncing on her chest. She didn’t have any problems being a woman, and at fourteen already knew how to walk the right way to make her butt go side to side in a hypnotic sway.
Willow couldn’t walk like that. Willow walked small and slow, shortening her long stride so she wouldn’t take steps as big as boys’. She was used to making herself small, and she tried to think small now, tried to think small enough to disappear behind the post of the bus kiosk, as she stuffed her face in her book and stared at it and hoped if she ignored Erin, she’d go away.
Erin didn’t go away.
Erin never went away.
If Erin was a bulldog, Willow was her chew toy, and she came with a lifetime of teeth-marks embedded in her skin.
“Wiiill-yyy,” Erin called in a high sing-song. “What’s the matter? Got your dick stuck in your ear?”
Ignore her. That was what Dad always said; ignore her and she wouldn’t get any satisfaction out of it. Willow screwed her face up into the fiercest scowl she could manage and glared at her book.
“Hey!”
Erin’s voice was rising now, piercing and hard, and Willow could feel people staring. The adults around her had that kind of calculated stil
lness that said they noticed but didn’t want to, didn’t want to be caught noticing, because then they might be expected to get involved. And across the street the other students were giggling, managing to whisper and shriek at the same time, isn’t that that fucking dyke, yeah the one with the cripple dad, what the fuck, I thought she dropped out—
“I know you can hear me,” Erin jeered. “Fucking bitch. Don’t you fucking ignore me. You want another kick in the nads, bitch-boy?”
“It’s okay, dearie,” a small, kindly voice said at her side, yet even the tiny, shriveled old woman patting at her purse spoke softly, whispering as if she, too, feared drawing Erin’s laser scope onto her. “You pay people like that no mind. They do that ’cause they’re scared, that’s all. That’s all it is.”
Willow offered a faint, tepid smile over the top of her book, but said nothing. She didn’t think Erin was afraid of anything. Not like most people, who were afraid of not being liked or afraid of embarrassing themselves or afraid of getting hurt or afraid of the cute boy rejecting them. If Erin was afraid of anything, it was of being ignored, but Willow wondered if, right now, Erin was frightened of something bigger than the space that separated her and Willow, a space much deeper and larger than the simple asphalt river flowing between its sidewalk banks.
“Wiiiilly-booooy.” Erin’s cackling laughter was a cacophony of smashing, tinkling bells. “You ready to be the man of the house yet, huh?” A chorus of sniggering laughter followed. “Your sad sick cripple Daddy’s gonna kick the bucket and then you’re gonna have to find you a little wife to take care of, huh?”
Willow stilled. Pain shot through her fingers as they clenched against the book so hard her knuckles buckled, but she wasn’t really doing it, wasn’t really doing anything but staring at a sidewalk that blurred into a haze of yellow sunlight on pale white concrete, the heat a cloud that had a sound and it was filling her up inside with its invisible, strange roar.
Don’t talk about my father that way.
“You fuck girls, Willy? That what it’s like for you? You fuck girls? You fuck girls ’cause your cripple Daddy can’t with his broke-ass dick?”
She closed her eyes. There was a heaviness building in her chest like tears and a scream, but she didn’t want to cry. She didn’t know what she wanted, but it was red and trembling inside, and it whispered in an awful, sticky voice so much worse than Erin’s shrill lilt.
Dirty thing, it said. She talks like a dirty thing, her mouth is a dirty thing, bad dirty thing, sick dirty thing, she needs to close that dirty thing right up.
“Fucking carrot-top dyke. Wait’ll your Daddy’s dead and then tell them bitches some sob story so they’ll hop on your di—”
The last thing Willow was conscious of was your Daddy’s dead and then the sound of the book hitting the sidewalk, the thud and then the oddly wet flump of the pages sliding and curling and fanning on each other and then she wasn’t even there. Then asphalt under her feet and Erin’s face growing larger with her mouth moving wide, this wide open gaping dirty thing, and poison came out of that dirty thing but it wasn’t words, never words, just a fucking dirty thing and she wanted to rip that fucking dirty thing off her face and make sure it never made a sound again.
Erin screamed something, and then she was going down down down and Willow was on top of her—and Erin kicked and squirmed, but Willow was a dense fucking neutron star of rage and she wouldn’t be moved. No, she wasn’t fucking moving until she shut that dirty thing up for good, and when her fist smashed down and Erin’s teeth split her knuckles open, Willow screamed and screamed and screamed with pleasure until she laughed—and did it again and again and again until those teeth stopped cutting her because those teeth came out, snapping right off like dirty little chiclets and then it was red everywhere, bright beautiful glorious red, and Erin’s mouth was like Mama’s wide-spread legs, just a bloom of red all over the place, all wet and meaty and Erin wasn’t talking anymore. No, Erin was sobbing, begging, and her eyes were all puffed up closed and streaming wet and her cute little bob was a sticky bloody mess poking up in spikes everywhere.
Pretty, Willow thought, and crashed her fist down again. She liked the shock of it, vibrating up her arm with the impact, and she did it again and again with both hands, alternating back and forth like she was pounding dough and caring nothing for the scream and cry of horrified voices around her, shouting words like stop and don’t and she’s gonna fucking kill her, words that had no meaning when all she could think was pretty.
You’re so pretty when everything’s all red.
Then hands grappled onto her, and she tried to shake them off but they were hard and firm and stronger than she was no matter how she fought. She kicked and twisted and bit, but they wouldn’t let her go. They were pulling her away from Erin, pulling her away from that smashed red face and her twitching, jerking body. She didn’t want to go. She didn’t want to go when Erin had given her so much over the years, so many gifts…and all she wanted was to give them all back.
All she wanted was red.
Red everywhere while that murder of crows screamed along the power lines, and for Erin to never open her dirty little mouth ever again.
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
WILLOW TRIED TO TELL HERSELF she hadn’t heard a gunshot. Priest didn’t carry guns; only those blades, those shining sickle-mouthed blades with their silver grins, silent and deadly where guns were too loud.
He’d told her to stay. To not come out. To not make a sound. But a voice barked over the warehouse, and it wasn’t Priest’s. Priest wasn’t making a sound at all, and she imagined him lying in a pool of his own blood, golden eyes glassy and blank while the boy they’d let go, the boy they’d cut free, stood over him with a gun and an ugly smirk that said You fucked up, Willow. You fucked up.
And now you’ve gone and gotten him killed.
She listened, pressing her cheek against the cabinet door, but heard only that voice: trying to be authoritarian, but a brokenness turned it shaken, nervous, stunned. Male. Young. She didn’t…think it was the boy they’d let go, but she couldn’t tell through the door, couldn’t even tell what he was saying.
Carefully, she eased the door open enough to peer out. Past the screen walling off the bathroom area she could only make out a thin sliver of the warehouse, but a sliver was enough. A man in black stood in the open doorway, and Willow didn’t need to see more than the set of his shoulders and the cut of his shirt to know he was police. Priest sprawled on his back, utterly motionless, and pooling around the officer’s feet was so, so much red.
Willow tried to breathe, but nothing would come past her frozen lips. Her heart moved at glacial speed, cold and heavy and churning by microns.
Was he dead?
The officer held his sidearm in both shaking hands, extended as the point of the triangle of his arms and aimed straight at Priest. But he swapped the gun to one hand as he lifted the other to fumble at the radio clipped to his shoulder holster, turning his head to gasp into it but trying to keep his wide, rounded eyes on Priest.
“I repeat, I need backup on the corner of Magnus and Locke. Suspect is down, approaching with caution to apprehend.” He took a shuffling step closer to Priest; sweat beaded and drenched on his brow, his neck, the collar of his uniform stained dark and sodden. “Suspect has taken fire. One round to the thigh. I repeat, backup requested.”
Something crackled over the radio, but Willow couldn’t make it out past the static emitting from the speaker, the static inside her skull. Priest wasn’t dead. Shot in the thigh but not dead, and even as she watched he slowly shifted, pushing himself up on one arm, the other hand clamped around his thigh and pressing down hard. He moved slowly, pain chiseled in every line of him, and yet still his calm hadn’t shattered. Willow pressed her fingers to her mouth, begging silently. Begging for Priest to hold it together; begging that the officer wouldn’t shoot him.
“Get back down!” the officer barked, clapping both hands onto the hilt of hi
s revolver again, his voice cracking and high.
Priest ignored him, and continued surveying his leg and the massive, dark blot of red soaking the denim over his thigh.
“I said get down!”
With a slow, annoyed sigh, Priest lifted his head, fixing the officer with a cool, contemptuous look. “If you intend to shoot me again, I suggest you improve your aim.”
He started to gather his legs underneath him, his palm pressed over the wound as if he could hold that fountaining red inside, his movements slow, labored. The officer shouted something unintelligible, so high and shrill it bordered on a scream. Willow bit back a cry, clasping both hands hard over her mouth until her lips bit into her teeth and she tasted metallic skin.
Don’t do it…don’t…Priest, stay down!
But Priest wouldn’t stay down. This must be everything he’d expected; everything he’d waited for. Whatever judgment is handed to me. This was judgment, brought by that boy or some other mistake that had led to this moment, and he was waiting for it, welcoming it with open arms.
Please.
But her pleas were pointless, silent, and would save nothing.
He struggled laboriously to his feet. Spread his arms, inviting. Challenging. There was a strange serenity in what she could see of his face, just a profile past the edge of the cabinet and the line of the screen. Her cries twisted up inside her throat, begging to get out, and she scrubbed a palm against her eyes and forced herself not to look away, not to close her eyes and hide. Not when she had to do something.
She should be relieved. Should be happy the police were here. Let them take Priest out, and she would be safe. She could go home, return to her life, pick up where she’d left off and try to weave all the broken threads of a thousand false starts into something new, some tapestry that would tell a better story than a parable of wasted potential. All she had to do was wait.
All she had to do was stand back, and let Priest face the death he’d planned for since the moment he’d set down this path.