by Ann Aguirre
Two girls actually paused to snap a picture of him. He frowned, probably because they didn’t ask permission. Then they ran off giggling like idiots. The surge of jealousy surprised me; it wasn’t that I thought he was interested in them. Kian loves me. Enough to die for me. And he cared, before. But I was territorial about him, though that wasn’t all of it. More that I wanted to protect him, keep idiots from treating him like he was … artwork in the public domain.
“That gets old,” I guessed.
“I’m sure you’re getting the downside by now, too,” he said.
“Definitely. There was an asshole on the T this morning…” I trailed off as his eyes flashed. Yeah, Kian didn’t like hearing about other guys trying their luck.
“I shouldn’t let that piss me off.”
When he reached for me, I forgot that I was irked over the way he blew me off yesterday, along with everything I wanted to talk about. He drew me close by hooking his hand behind my head and I stretched up to put my arms around his neck. I raised my face for the kiss, prompting the sweetest smile I’d ever seen from him. He kissed me once, softly, so my eyes drifted closed, then his lips brushed my eyelids in turn with such tenderness that the barbs of sweetness pierced my heart.
This is the worst part of love, I thought in silent desperation. Because now I have so much to lose.
His mouth came back to mine, and I was starving for him. We kissed until someone cleared his or her throat loudly nearby. Dazed, I turned my head to find Allison standing there. “You think you’re untouchable now?”
“What’re you talking about?”
“The Harbinger might be looking out for you, but that doesn’t mean I can’t make your life miserable,” she said. “There are a lot of ways to hurt people that don’t result in permanent physical harm.”
“Don’t threaten her,” Kian said softly. “I’m not on anybody’s leash now, and there’s no limit to what I’ll do if you mess with Edie again.”
“Sexy little guard dog,” she mocked, reaching out like she’d pat his cheek.
And he actually slapped her hand away, shocking both of us. Then he tightened his arm around me and steered us toward the car. His Mustang was parked behind all of the black SUVs and town cars, no sign of Aaron. Does that mean he found his family?
“Where’s the kid?” I asked, as we pulled away.
“My place.”
“No luck at the police station?” I expected to hear they still hadn’t gone.
To my surprise, he shook his head. “There’s nothing on file. Crazy, but he seems to be telling the truth about how there’s nobody missing him.”
“That’s so sad.” Poor kid.
“Yeah. I feel like we’re kind of responsible for him now, you know?”
“We took him away from the Harbinger,” I agreed. “And Aaron hasn’t exactly astonished me with his street smarts.”
“He’s got a bad case of Stockholm syndrome. His first day at my place, he asked permission for every damn thing and shadowed me like a puppy.”
“You always wanted a little brother, right?” I was trying to find the bright side.
Kian shot me a surprised look, along with a half smile. “Maybe. We won’t have as much privacy at my place, though.”
“It’s fine. I’m sure you can teach him to respect a tie on your bedroom door or whatever. Good practice for college.”
He hesitated. “I don’t know if I should say this.”
“Go for it. You know you want to.”
“Will you look after him for me? You know. After.”
My faint happiness spun away like broken cobwebs. “This is such bullshit. How long do you plan to pretend everything is okay?”
Like always, my belligerence shut him down. Kian went quiet, focused on driving instead of arguing. But I couldn’t let it go.
“Keep this up, we won’t even have these last months together. I don’t like being shut out.”
At that, his green gazed snapped right, practically sparking. “Are you threatening to break up with me because I won’t fight with you?” Incredulous tone.
“Maybe.”
“How does that even make sense?”
“It makes as much as you promising to die for me and then refusing to talk about it!”
His jaw clenched. “It’s done, Edie. Nothing we say can change it.”
The rest of the ride was silent to say the least. He dropped me off without another word and, yeah, he was pissed because I didn’t even get a kiss on the cheek. I got out with a mumbled thanks and he roared off. I hated myself for bitching at him and issuing half an ultimatum and him for refusing to talk to me about anything. Sometimes I thought he still saw me as the dog girl, broken by that one moment and forever fragile, perched on a bridge.
As I turned to head into my apartment, I caught sight of something that chilled my blood. Across the street on the opposite corner, the old man stood with his empty sack, the two dead-eyed children beside him. Their clothes were no longer bloodstained but I knew they could show me whatever they wanted. Before I made a conscious decision, I was running on my bad ankle—into the street against the light. I ignored the shouting drivers and screeching brakes. Somehow I made it to the other side, breathing hard, but they were gone. Only the necrotic stink lingered.
The sun came out, nearly blinding me. I felt no trace of Wedderburn, who’d hired them to execute my mother. Did this mean Dwyer was paying them to torment me now? Crazy. Sometimes a sunny day is just a sunny day. Spinning slowly on the sidewalk, I whispered, “Which way, Cameron?”
It was a long shot, but if he didn’t hate me—if he was an ally—then maybe he could help. I had some crazy idea of tracking down the monsters and getting back my mother’s head. I wasn’t religious but there were stories about how a butchered body could never rest in peace. If there was an afterlife, I wanted my mom to have the best one ever. Dumb as hell, probably, but this was all I could do after failing to protect her so spectacularly.
A cool breeze drifted along my right arm. “This way?”
No reply was forthcoming but I inhaled a hint of graveyard rot. Yeah, this was the right track. Desperate not to lose them, I pushed into a sprint despite the pain, drawing looks from other people on the sidewalk. I called an apology over my shoulder when I nearly bumped into an old woman. She shot me a glare and mumbled something incoherently cranky as I raced past. Another touch on my forearm, icy damp, and I turned that way. Two or three more jogs, more running, and soon I didn’t recognize where I was anymore, and the buildings were looking sketchy, most of them boarded up or obviously abandoned.
“Shit,” I said aloud. “How stupid am I?”
I had no proof this was Cameron, and this spirit might be leading me into a trap. Whatever it was, the thing clearly knew I had no ability to be rational when it came to my mom’s death. I tried to calm my pounding heart and the roaring in my head that insisted I had to find the bag man right now and make him pay. As if my mental call summoned him, he appeared half a block down, flanked by his creepy cohorts. My feet pounded against the sidewalk as I closed the distance between us. I had no plan, just a cascade of endless rage.
But before I reached the old man, the world stutter-skipped, just like it used to when Kian ported me. I stumbled and fell over, scraping my knees on the cobblestones. Wait, what? Dizzily I took stock of the historical feel of the area. I wasn’t here five seconds ago. Blood trickled down my wounded knee, through my tights, and my ankle was throbbing again.
“What the hell,” I muttered.
A single black feather floated down from above.
I tilted my head back to find an enormous black bird perched on the electrical wires above. It watched me with beady eyes, quietly preening its feathers. I blinked and the raven was gone, replaced by a pale-faced Harbinger. Today his eyes were ringed in kohl and his mouth was red, smeared as if he had been kissing someone up until a few seconds ago. Or maybe it was blood. Both ideas were equal measures of terrifying and
revolting.
I blinked again and he was on the pavement before me now, not a bird and not man, but the wild smell licked around him like a brushfire.
“You are becoming a problem,” he said silkily. “Had I known you would be so much bother, I never would’ve made the deal.”
I stared up at him.
His eyes teemed with possibilities, all silver madness etched into ebony, and he looked so deep into me that I felt his stare gnawing at the back of my skull until it seemed impossible that my brain wouldn’t topple out the back and splatter on the cement. Swallowing hard, I couldn’t move; he had me pinned like a butterfly in a specimen case.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“First you ruin my lovely spectacle, then you abscond with my favorite divertissement and now you’re willfully trying to get yourself killed. Have you no mind at all, Edith Kramer?”
I’m normally the smartest person in the room, I tried to say, but my lips burned as if they’d been stitched together. I touched them with trembling fingers but I didn’t feel the rough black thread I could picture so readily in my mind’s eye. One of his illusions, I guessed, but so effective that I literally couldn’t speak.
“Rhetorical question,” he added, in case I really was an idiot.
I nodded slightly, remaining on my knees.
“You’re forcing me to be helpful. Dutiful,” he went on, radiating ire. “Faithful. All the most revolting ‘fuls.’ And you’ve no idea how much I loathe it.” He paced around me in a tight circle while I wondered why there were no pedestrians on this oddly archaic street. “So I’ll speak one final warning. I cannot be everywhere at once, and if you are so determined to die, why not save your beloved and get on with it?”
The invisible thread unraveled from my mouth, so I could respond. “I wasn’t thinking. Just … my mother … and that monster—”
“Your people created it, dearling.” But his gloved hands were surprisingly gentle when he pulled me to my feet. The blood was sticky on my knee, all the way down my shin. The Harbinger cupped both hands around one of mine, somber as a shadow. “Don’t act like such an imbecile again. If you get yourself killed, it’ll wreck my reputation—to say nothing of wasting your darling boy’s sacrifice.”
I swallowed hard. “I don’t want that.”
“Leave the stupidity for actual morons,” he finished. “Otherwise it’s far too confusing. But … I most definitely must punish you. So you don’t waste my time again.”
FUNERAL OF THE HEART
The scene skipped, and I stood alone on the street near my apartment.
There was no sign of the Harbinger, but the bag man and his terrifying children were nowhere to be found either. The Harbinger might have saved me, but whatever punishment he had in store was probably worse than simple death. Pain was his purview, after all.
Instead of going home, I headed for the subway. My dad wouldn’t be around until late, and I was in no mood to talk to Vi on Skype, pretending to be fine. I’m tired of lying. But truth would only freak her out.
Forty minutes later, I walked toward the cemetery where we’d buried my mom. It was a cold afternoon, heavy cloud cover threatening snow. The trees were dark and bare, and the grass was brown. I wove through the gravestones, stepping over tree roots grown up through the ground and tangled like petrified tentacles of some ancient, desiccated beast. A lone statue of a woman stood down the hill, her stone hair pretending to blow in the icy wind. Likewise her gown was swept back from her legs, showing bare feet, bare arms, and a bare face. She was probably supposed to be a Greek maiden or possibly a goddess keeping vigil over a nearby grave, but I had the uncanny sense that her flat eyes were following me as I passed by. Shivering and huddling deeper into my thin school jacket, I glanced back once.
Was her head at that angle before?
I told myself it was and that I needed never to watch the Doctor Who angel episodes ever again. But there was something inherently spooky about a graveyard anyway, knowing you were surrounded by acres of the dead. Even in the summer, this wasn’t a cheerful place, though it must be prettier. I tried not to step on any plots on my way to my mom’s grave, and as I knelt in front of her marker, now engraved with the Einstein quote my dad had chosen, I wished I had thought to bring some flowers. Not that my mother would care, but still. It felt weird showing up empty-handed, impulsive and thoughtless, just like chasing after the bag man. Ignoring how the damp ground soaked through my shredded tights, I bowed my head for a few seconds. In the movies, people didn’t seem to feel weird unburdening themselves to dead loved ones, but I checked the area to make sure there was nobody nearby to overhear.
“I’ve really screwed up,” I finally whispered. “You’re gone … and so is Dad, basically. I don’t know what to do. And all I can think about is getting revenge for you when I should be figuring out how to save Kian. I mean, shit, haven’t I learned anything? Wanting to get back at the assholes at school is what got me in this mess in the first place.” My voice broke.
The tears felt unnaturally hot trickling down my cold cheeks, dripping off my chin and onto my jacket. I leaned my forehead against the unyielding headstone to hide my face from anybody passing by. They’d probably guess I was grieving—and while that was true, I also didn’t know how to fix any of the enormous problems looming over me. The immortal game cast a long shadow. Nerves drove me to sneak a look at the statue again. This time the angle was the same, but a black bird was perched on top of the woman’s head.
Have I seen that one before…? Familiarity warred with foreboding. But all crows pretty much looked the same, so I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t want to turn into the crazy girl shaking a fist in a cemetery, screaming, are you following me, bird? So I pretended there was nothing creepy about its staring.
“If this was an equation, I could solve it. But for Kian, where do I even start?” That was part of the problem, having no insight and no resources.
Unsurprisingly, she didn’t answer. At least not out loud. But I heard her sighing. Since I had been listening to her sensible advice since I was a little kid, her voice sounded in my head. What are you thinking, asking a dead person for help? But since you’re here … you’ve been fighting with Kian about his decision, one that can’t be changed, I might add. But have you ever once thought about how he must be feeling? You’ve thought only about yourself, how you’ll feel about losing him. Now put yourself in his shoes. He’s twenty … and he’s dying.
“Oh, shit,” I said.
My mom—or my subconscious—was right. He must be scared to death. It wasn’t like he made the deal with the Harbinger to be difficult; he honestly thought it was the best way to save me. And all I’d done was argue with him about what a bad move it was. Yet if he hadn’t stepped up I might not even be around to give him crap. I hadn’t come here to cry, but I did, as quietly as I could manage. By the time I stopped, my hands and feet were numb. It took me a couple of tries to push to my feet and when I turned, one bird had turned into many. Hundreds of them lined the trees, on electrical wires, and the ledges of the mausoleums near the gate. And they were all watching me, all those crows, quietly preening their plumage with a vigilant air.
I took a step toward the exit and they scattered, not disorganized, nervous creatures, but more like an aerial command unit. I’d never seen crows in formation like ducks but these birds were definitely a flock. Or something worse, I thought. Pretending I wasn’t freaking out, I hurried toward the walls and as if that was their cue, they dove en masse. Suddenly I couldn’t see for the fluttering wings and sharp claws lunging for my face. Something nipped at the back of my neck and I had them on my arms and shoulders as I ran. Their talons dug into my biceps, ripping my school shirt, and blood welled up in the shallow scratches.
In blind terror, I tripped over a short gravestone and wrenched my sore ankle again. When I hit the ground, I expected to die from a thousand beaks and claws. But the murder didn’t happen; instead the murder of crows flapped awa
y, soaring up and out of the graveyard, leaving me bleeding in the dirt like that was their goal. Sore and bewildered, I got up and staggered toward the iron gates standing open at twilight. As I approached, an old man came around the corner of a tomb with a shovel; he was probably harmless but I couldn’t take the risk.
“Miss, what happened? Are you all right?” he called.
I ran. Well, as fast as my ankle would let me.
Two blocks, then three. Finally I had to pause because my leg was throbbing. If I had more cash on me, I’d just call a cab, but somehow I limped the rest of the way to the station, so I could get on the T. Nobody hit on me, likely because I looked kind of nuts, covered in grave dirt and smeared with blood. During the ride, I wished I had a smartphone because it was urgent that I find out what the crows meant. Something had clearly sent them as a warning but I couldn’t interpret a bird attack without outside help. I drew more than a few sympathetic glances yet no one tried to get involved in my problems.
Belatedly it occurred to me—more than once I’d seen the Harbinger as a big black bird. And he’d said he would teach me a lesson or something. The birds hadn’t hurt me seriously, only scared the crap out of me. Though I needed the Internet to confirm, I highly suspected that this was the trickster version of a spanking. Otherwise, the crows would’ve pecked my eyes out and eaten my brains through the holes in my skull. And though I’d heard the warning from Raoul, the Harbinger telling me I might make a reckless move that he couldn’t protect me from? It was definitely sinking in that I still needed to be careful.
Feeling slightly better, I got off at the stop nearest Kian’s apartment and I paused outside his building. It seemed wrong to just knock, knowing he was mad at me, so I texted, I’m outside. Can I come up? A long silence followed, ten minutes, so I sat down on the steps. I couldn’t go home without apologizing. Everything else could wait.