Two and Twenty Dark Tales

by Georgia McBride

  James regards me from a distance. He doesn’t try to touch me again—perhaps he knows better. I am relieved and disappointed all once. And then I am irritated with myself for wanting his touch when I don’t even know him and am not even sure I’d like him if I did. I’m not sure of anything. He might not even be real. Perhaps I have lost my mind at last, and this is some kind of super-delayed PTSD.

  Without needing to discuss it, we leave the school. I crumple the permission slip and drop it into a bin outside. The cold air hits my face, makes my eyes water, and I immediately feel better. I don’t need a nurse. I don’t know what I do need, but it’s nothing they can offer me here.

  I slide behind the bicycle rack and push my way along one of the many utility blocks at the edge of the school grounds. James follows me, walking quickly and quietly as we move through the jagged bushes that have grown in the narrow space. I stop and turn to face him, alone with this boy who is strangely familiar and utterly alien.

  “You’re… I…” I can’t even get the words out. What are you supposed to say to someone who shouldn’t exist in the world we know? Our safe, familiar world.

  Safe? I can’t help laughing at that. What’s so harmless about a world that takes away the people you love the most? What is so damn safe about a world that rips you into pieces and then expects you to get through life with only half a heart?

  James touches my face with his hand, the hand with the pinky ring that might once have been a shackle. I feel the cool silver kiss my cheek and wish it was this untamed boy’s lips instead.

  I feel the blush spread all the way from my neck to my forehead. What am I thinking? This is surreal, crazy, messed up. Wrong?

  I don’t want it to be wrong. I gaze into his eyes and see a kindred spirit hiding in those shadowy pools.

  “Wait,” I say. I push his hand down and step back. “Just… wait a minute.”

  He nods. He waits.

  I take a deep breath, trembling as I let it out. “James Vanderveer. That’s really your name?”

  “It’s the name she gave me.” His voice is low and husky, almost as though he doesn’t use it often. He sounds older than seventeen.

  “Who do you mean? Your mother?”

  “Nah,” he says. He kicks a stone by his boot. “The witch.”

  He talks differently from the others around these parts. He doesn’t belong any more than I do, but for reasons I don’t quite understand. Not yet.

  But I intend to.

  I reach out and rest my fingers against the back of his left hand. I make sure not to touch the ring, but I want to. I want to know what it is, who put it there, what power it holds over James Vanderveer.

  He watches me, but doesn’t move away. Something in his expression dares me to do more, so I run my fingers across his hand until they stop at the cuff of his leather jacket. I imagine sparks where our skin comes into contact.

  James grabs me with his other hand, too fast for me to stop him. I hardly see the movement, just a blur and then his fist is gripping my hip, and he drags me toward him until our bodies touch. His fingers curl into one of the belt loops on my jeans, twisting until I have to press myself against him.

  There are no visions in my head this time, just a delicious blankness that makes me feel like an untethered balloon.

  All this time, his left hand doesn’t move, and I’ve wrapped my fingers around his wrist without even realizing it. I am looking directly into his face, pale and savage, with strong features that make him look more other than I know what to do with. He dips his head to mine slowly, so slow, giving me plenty of time to push him away. He is testing me, challenging me to be the one to say no.

  Well then, I think with a secret smile. He doesn’t know me. Maybe nobody does, not anymore. Not since Alice.

  I tug his left hand forward and place it firmly on my other hip. Now I am trapped in the circle of his arms, and I wrap mine around his neck, reaching up on tiptoe and swaying against his chest.

  I catch a glimpse of a feral smile as his lips clamp down on mine, and the world stops turning as I take him in.

  This boy I don’t even know, is holding me against his lean body and running his tongue along the seam of my mouth, encouraging me to kiss him back. I freeze, just for a moment, not because I don’t want this, but because I am savoring it. Enjoying the warmth of him, the smell of him. He tastes of licorice and the night sky, and I don’t want him to stop. Not ever.

  Mind the gap, I think, before stepping over the edge.

  I kiss him with everything I’ve got: all of my loneliness and rage and pain. I pour it all into James as he meets my passion with his own. I let him touch me in places I’ve never been touched before. I am dizzy, drunk. I feel as though I am flying as he moves his mouth against mine in a kiss that lasts a thousand years. My toes curl inside my heavy winter boots.

  When he finally comes up for air, I’m still clinging to him because my legs are as mushy as horse feed. My lips tingle, and I imagine I can still feel his fingers beneath my shirt. I want him to kiss me again, to touch me again. I grab his face between my hands and pull him toward me.

  He laughs and nuzzles my neck. I sigh, content.

  He pulls away, and this time I let him. We leave the school and run across a nearby field just as the sun goes down. James follows me without question, his intelligent eyes darting around and taking everything in. He’s a fascinating combination of hyper-aware and laid back.

  We creep into Mr. Forester’s barn, climb the tall wooden ladder, and hide ourselves in the hayloft. I don’t want to go home. I’ll be in trouble as it is, what with how late I’ll be and how I didn’t call Stella. I try to tell myself she won’t be worried about me, but I know that’s not true. She cares, in her own way, but it can never be enough for me. How can she possibly fill the holes in my heart? Nobody can.

  I look at James and wonder if that could change. I never used to think of myself as a romantic, but this… this is something else. If magic is real, then maybe there really can be a magical connection between people. Especially when one of them can change his shape and fly.

  Anything is possible, I tell myself. You just have to hold on and believe.

  So that’s what I do. I hold on to James’s hand and we talk, sharing our lives and our scars. When two lonely people connect, the sun shines even at night. I feel warm all the way through, despite the winter air creeping into the barn like a secret—like the secrets we exchange in low tones. We pass them back and forth between us, each tentatively revealed truth like a piece of brightly colored glass.

  I tell James about Mom and Alice. I tell him, my voice barely above a whisper, about the accident on the old railroad, seven years before the new crossing was finally built last summer. Too late for my family. Mind the gap, I think, before showing him the empty spaces in my heart. I like him even more when he doesn’t suggest ways of fixing me.

  He just listens and holds my hand until it is his turn to share.

  James tells me about how he was born different from most people. His clan originates from the mountains, but now they try to live among human beings and pass for “normal.” There aren’t many of them left—the Crow People, he calls them. Men and women who can change their shape, grow feathers and wings, who can take to the sky and soar above the world.

  Even though I believe him, it still makes me shiver to hear him say it in that straightforward way he has.

  And then he tells me about the witch and the curse, and I am shivering for an entirely different reason. He puts his arm around me, pulls me close, and we listen to the night calls of the farm beyond our perch.

  I glance at the silver ring on his little finger, the ring that holds the key to his freedom. He sees what I’m staring at and clenches his hand into a fist, hiding it from me.

  I remember the rawness in his voice when he told me about the death of his own family—a bad death at the hands of an ambitious witch. A murder of crows. I want to help this strange boy so very much. Maybe
one of us can find a happy ending.

  “Tell me more about this curse.”

  “I told you all of it. I can’t take the ring off. Believe me, I’ve tried.”

  “Let me try,” I say, stubborn.

  He shakes his head. “Nobody can help me, Rose.”

  “You’ve given up?” I can’t help the note of anger that creeps into my voice.

  “There’s nothing or nobody can get this ring off’a me,” he says. “No how. No way.”

  I meet his black eyes. “Nevermore?”

  His lips twist into something resembling a smile. “Something like that, yeah.”

  “Wait,” I say. I push up onto my knees, ignoring the scratchy hay as I lean toward him. “There is always a way.”

  “There ain’t. What’s done is done.”

  The witch took him home with her, kept him in a cage, treated him like a pet. The silver manacle around his crow-form’s ankle was attached to a chain, and it was charmed to keep him trapped as a bird. Sometimes she would let him out, force him to change into a boy, watching feathers give way to flesh, until he stood naked before her. She made him take her name—Vanderveer—and told him he could be her son.

  “Only,” he says, looking down at the ground, “I don’t think a mother should touch her son the way she touched me.”

  I dig my nails into my palms, wanting to use them against her. The woman who enslaved this boy. Who treated him like he was nothing. Used him.

  He escaped, though. Eventually. The witch, it seems, is a busy woman, with other schemes to concoct. While she was away—on a business trip to Europe—James managed to peck through his chains, pick the lock of the cage door with his beak, and fly to freedom. But the cuff was still around his ankle, and that was why a crow had come tapping at my window one cold winter night.

  The witch found him and caught him again, though. That explained his disappearance after those first nights we shared.

  “She punished me,” he says. “Fixed it so I’m stuck in one shape. And the worst part of it…” His voice trails off and he shakes his head.

  I bury my face in his neck, snuggle as close as I can. “What?” I ask him. “Tell me what she did to you.”

  “She made me choose,” he says, softly.

  I breathe in his warm scent. “I don’t understand.”

  “Said I can stay human or crow, but can’t be both. Not ever again.”

  “You chose human,” I whisper, pulling back to look into his eyes.

  He strokes my cheek. “Yeah, I guess I did.”

  “And then you escaped again?”

  “Nah, she’s keeping tabs on me.” He holds up his hand and the ring flashes.

  “What would happen if we could get it off?” My mind is racing again, looking for possibilities.

  He sighs. “I don’t know. Not sure I want to know.”

  I’m suddenly not sure whether I want to find out, either. This way, at least he can be human—with me. I shake my head at how selfish I can be. I want to be a better person, so I listen to what he says next.

  “In this shape, like this,” he continues, “I’m only half a person.”

  I nod, thinking of Alice. My other half.

  He leans his head against a bale of hay, stares up at the roof. “My heart… it don’t feel right, you know?”

  “I know,” I say.

  “Sometimes, it feels like I’m dyin’ inside.”

  “Yes,” I whisper.

  We sit, holding each other for a long time. I still want to kiss him, but it’s just a passing thought now. A feeling that comes and goes, like watching fireflies in the fields at night. There is more at stake here than kisses. More, even, than love.

  Later, he reaches inside one of his boots and pulls out a pocketknife. I’m not scared of him. I know the knife is not for me.

  “You asked me earlier how I tried to get the ring off.”

  I swallow. I know what’s coming.

  James pulls out the blade. It is long and sharp.

  “I cut off my finger,” he says, conversationally. “But even then, the ring stayed on.”

  Nausea churns in my stomach. I can’t say anything, but I don’t need to.

  “An’ then my finger grew back and the ring was just… there.”

  He stares at his finger in disbelief, almost as though he is reliving the moment when his severed limb regenerated before his eyes. He put himself through all that fear—all that pain—for nothing. Could I do that? Would I do that? Losing a little finger would be bad, but maybe not as awful as a thumb. I try to imagine what it must have been like, to feel the blade biting into skin and bone.

  I push those thoughts away and find my voice. “What did she do? The witch, I mean. When she found out what you’d done.”

  He laughs, a terrible sound that reminds me of a crow’s call. “She made me clean up the mess I’d made. I even had to put my own finger in the trash.”

  I think I might vomit, but I hold it in by taking deep breaths. Slow breaths.

  “I was thinking,” he says without looking at me, “that maybe there is something we can do, after all. Maybe it didn’t work before because it needs to be someone else who does the cutting.”

  “I… what?” I am almost more surprised by the fact that he has actually strung two full sentences together, rather than shocked at what he’s suggesting.

  Although of course, that does shock me. I try to pretend that I don’t understand him, but he is not fooled.

  “You heard me, Rose.” Now he looks at me with something close to desperation on his face. “Meeting you is a sign of… something. You could take the knife and—”

  “You have no way of knowing that will work!” I am standing over him, and I don’t remember how I got there.

  He pushes himself to his feet, towering over me in turn. “And you don’t know that it won’t.”

  I shake my head, trying to think of a decent argument. I come up with nothing.

  James holds my shoulders, makes me look at him. “A while ago, you was tellin’ me how there’s always a way. Well, maybe this is the way.”

  “I can’t do that. I just… can’t.”

  “The curse is on me—or maybe just the ring. Might be that it takes another person, someone apart from the magic, to break it.”

  It is a good theory, but that’s all it is. I can’t cut off his finger! How do you do something like that to another person?

  But he is pressing the knife into my hand. “Take it, Rose. All my family are gone, so I ain’t got nothin’ else to lose.” His eyes glitter. “You’re my only friend. I’m beggin’ you to do this for me.”

  “James, I—”

  “Don’t tell me you can’t. Don’t you do that,” he says, almost shouting.

  “Shhh!” I look around guiltily, suddenly aware that it is late and we are alone in my neighbor’s barn. “You’ll wake the dogs.”

  He folds my fingers around the cool handle of the pocketknife. “Just do it fast. It’s sharp as talons, I made sure of that.”

  I glare at him, trying to hide behind anger. “You planned this all along! You knew you were going to ask me to do this; that’s why you followed me to my school.”

  “Nah, that was her. The witch. She made me enroll so I can graduate. She wants me educated.” He snorts.

  “I don’t want to do it,” I say.

  “I know you don’t,” he replies. Now his voice is gentle, and his eyes have returned to their familiar blackness. “But I’m askin’ you, all the same.”

  I bite the inside of my cheek, tasting copper. I wonder how much blood will flow from his finger when I slice it off.

  That’s when I know I’m going to do it. I pull back my shoulders and meet his eyes. He looks scared, like he saw my decision on my face the very moment I made it, but he crouches down and lays his hand on the wooden floorboards of the loft. The silver ring gloats at me as it shimmers in the shadows cast by his body.

  I squat beside him, touch his feathery ha
ir quickly with my free hand, before setting to work with the knife.

  The second before I sever his pinky, James touches my shoulder. My heart slams into my ribs, and I just stop myself from cutting in time.

  “What?” I hiss.

  “I’m sorry,” he says.

  “You’re sorry?” I shake my head. “You’re crazy.”

  His lips quirk. “Yeah. Been told that before.”

  I choose that moment to slice all the way down, through the base of his finger just behind the cursed ring. I have to press both hands on the knife’s handle and lean all of my weight on it to break the bone.

  I try to pretend I can’t hear the sound it makes.

  The ring falls and rolls toward a gap in the floorboards. There is no time to think about the bloody finger, or to remember James’s shout of pain. I drop the pocketknife and throw myself after the ring. I manage to grab it before it disappears.

  I sob with relief when my fingers close around it. The silver is warm, and I wonder if it is because of the magic or because James was wearing it until moments ago. I open my hand and stare at the smooth silver resting in the center of my palm. It is speckled, like an egg. Fresh blood rubs off on my skin.

  Another cry brings me back around, but James has disappeared in a rush of feathers. He flaps his wings and lands on my shoulder. I look down at his crow feet, and am not surprised to see that one talon is missing.

  We’ve broken the curse, but at what cost?

  “You’re a crow,” I manage to say.

  He cocks his head, listening. If he was human right now, I think he would be smiling at my ability to state the obvious.

  My lip trembles and I try hard not to cry. When I feel hot tears running down my cheeks, I know I have not been successful. He’s a crow again. It didn’t work, not in the way we hoped.

  He cannot turn back into human; I know this without needing to be told. The curse is broken and he is free of the witch, but now he is trapped in his other form. The one he didn’t choose.

  And I am alone again.

  I feel my crow settle onto my shoulder.. His talons dig into my collarbone, but I don’t mind. He presses his sleek feathers against my cheek, as though trying to offer comfort. For some reason this makes me cry harder.