by Meg Kassel
She narrows her eye at me before motioning for me to enter. “Beekeeper.”
“Hello.” I go inside. Only she and Adele are here. No evidence of a bloody near-death remains in the room. The bed Michael lay in is tidy and clean. Black fog engulfs the crow. It transforms back to Michael. I watch as the transformation is completed with the inky smoke forcing itself down his throat.
“What happened to your face?” Adele asks me, stepping forward to peer at my bruise.
“I was hit by a human claimed by a Strawman.” I hold still while she pokes a finger at my cheek. “Could that be why his strike injured me?”
“It’s possible,” says Adele, the little royal harbinger, as I’ve come to think of her. She pauses, a frown gathering between her brows. “Were you able to find out who it is?”
“No.” I sink into the chair in the corner of their little motel room. “He wore a mask.”
Her lips compress. “This doesn’t make things easier.”
“I’m aware.”
Michael pulls on a pair of shorts. “He touched someone who is now obsessed with killing her family members. Only the ones not affected by the curse. Not Essie.”
“Yet,” I add.
“He warned us off.” Michael shrugs. “It seems like the Strawman is trying to send you a message with all this. Also, with the things he’s told you in your little meetings.”
“I have zero interest in his message,” I say harshly. “I am only interested in keeping her safe until the event passes and this newly created psychopath is captured or killed. And I can’t even get her out of town because the police have restricted them from leaving.”
“Why?” Lish asks.
“She’s a suspect.”
The leader of these harbingers laughs. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
I let out an exasperated growl. “I wish I was. They have no one else, so naturally they’re looking at the girl whose missing hat was found with one of the victim’s bodies. Her condition doesn’t help her ease their suspicions.”
“Dresden.” Lish stands between the two beds, arms crossed. Her face is unreadable. “We called you here because we have his name and location.”
“Whose name?” I ask wearily.
“The boy who used to be a harbinger, but isn’t anymore,” Lish explains. “You wanted the origin of the rumors we heard. We found it for you.”
My chest contracts, unsettling the already-unsettled occupants of my rib cage. I clamp my teeth closed to keep bees from coming out, as per Lish’s request. I mustn’t give her any reason to withhold information now. “Who is he?” Speaking with my mouth closed gives me the appearance of sounding angry when I’m not.
“Reece Fernandez,” she says. “He found a way to return to full mortality. The beekeeper he had an altercation with died.”
“Who was he?” My throat is tight.
“He went by name of Rafette.”
Rafette. I recall him. He always had a cruel edge and was terribly in love with his own visage. It must have broken him utterly to lose his features to those of his victims.
“There was also a girl involved—Angie something. Apparently, she had a role in what happened.”
I immediately begin scheming how to locate this person. No easy task. There’s surely more than one Reece Fernandez out there. I’ll have to find a computer, “borrow” a cell phone—
“We have an address.” Adele folds her hands. “Promise you won’t hurt him.”
“The young man? Why would I do that?”
Adele’s gaze goes intense. “It’s a long journey. You may not have full control over your bees.”
“You have my word. I won’t harm him.”
“You’ll share with us what you learn.” Lish doesn’t ask it.
My head snaps up. Something raw haunts her eye—a desperation I have seen enough times to know it’s a plea for an answer. For an end to this existence we’ve all been relegated to. “Of course. Where can I find him?”
She gives me an address in Philadelphia, and my gut clenches. I don’t know the miles, but Pennsylvania is a long way from Missouri. That will pose problems for me, energy-wise.
“Can you make it?” Adele asks. “Maybe you should you wait until after the event.”
“No…” My head is spinning, and not just because I got punched in it. “I need to find him now.”
“You should tell Essie what you’re doing,” Michael says.
“She asked me not to visit her again.”
He makes a face. “That’s not quite what she said.”
“Nevertheless, I will respect her wishes.” I turn my gaze to the floor. “I won’t hurt her again.” Or myself. If I can’t be honest with her, I can be honest with myself.
Michael shakes his head. “We’ll watch out for her.”
“Thank you.”
I make for the door, but he grabs my arm. “Be careful. Come back with answers.”
“That is my intention.”
His face is a complicated twist of emotions. “I’ve known you a very long time. You’ve been the constant. Everything changes, dies, is reborn. Except for you.”
I’ve never been the back-slap, hugging type, and I won’t start now. But Michael is looking at me like a dog just dumped at a shelter. He must be more worried about me than I thought. I clasp his arm. He’s been my constant, too. Even when he is a pain-in-the-ass kid. As many times as we’ve swiped at each other, we’ve been unlikely brothers through the changing world. Each other’s steady rock to turn to after seeing things that can’t be unseen. When there has been absolutely no hope.
I can feel the heavy gaze of the other harbingers. They watch silently. How strange they must think this is, this friendship between beekeeper and harbinger. Perhaps now, they understand.
Or perhaps they’re just counting the seconds for me to leave.
I squeeze his arm, release it. “Nothing truly remains unchanged through the ages, not even I.”
I burst into a cloud of bees and fly east.
22
Essie
the avalanche
I know I’m in trouble when I can’t tell the difference between dreams and reality. When things get so blurred and twisted up, my reality looks like a Picasso. Not one of the pretty ones, either, but one of those twisted cubists. I’m not sure how I got to this state. It wasn’t gradual. I went to bed the night after Dresden came to visit and woke up with glass skin. Too many fears pressing around me, I guess.
Killers. Disasters. My father. Dresden.
Too much sadness, worry, anger. The pressure would bend the strongest mind. It snapped mine, transforming me into something sharp and brittle. It dropped a veil around me, and I can’t summon the effort or desire to claw out of it. I can hear Aunt Bel talking to me, but she’s speaking a foreign language, Chinese, maybe—when did she learn that? I’m glad she has time for some personal enrichment, but I wish she’d remember that I only speak English and some Spanish.
I don’t understand why her eyebrows are worried. And why she’s always there. Good grief, she won’t leave me alone. She’s always next to me, spooning food in my mouth, leading me to the bathroom, pulling a nightshirt over my head—ah, that pink one with the cat on it. The cat is nice until I fall asleep, then its claws come out and it scratches the hell out of me.
But whatever.
Now, all I want is to sit still and quiet, but Aunt Bel is bent on torturing me. Every time she moves me, my glass skin breaks and I have to wait and wait for all the cracks to smooth out again. The woman is relentless. But she doesn’t know, of course. I can’t tell her because my voice is gone. Worms have eaten away at my voice box. It’s a miracle the food Aunt Bel feeds me doesn’t just fall through the hole in my throat.
I’m glad Dresden is gone. I wouldn’t want him to find out that I’m nothing but a porcelain doll, an inanimate thing to dress up and sit on chairs. Useless. A curiosity.
I’m sitting outside on the back porch with Grandma Edie. I
’m on the wicker love seat and she’s in the matching rocker, watching the small TV Aunt Bel puts out there for her on nice days. For the past two hours, my grandmother has rotated between The People’s Court, a marathon of Gilligan’s Island, and a repeat of last night’s baseball game. She rocks the chair at an agitated pace with one foot, muttering that no one on the goddamn television is doing what they’re supposed to be doing.
I know what’s wrong. She’s out of sync is all. It happens to me sometimes. The soundtrack doesn’t match the video, so you have to try to match the actions with dialogue that happened ten seconds earlier. Except it’s worse when your brain is out of sync with the show you’re watching. That’s what’s happening now. If I could move, I’d turn the TV off, then back on again, and she’d be fine.
But the only things I can move are my eyes.
“Son of a bitch,” Grandma Edie snarls, taking a swig of Coke from the bottle. “Bastard couldn’t throw a pitch if his life depended on it.”
That might make sense if she wasn’t currently watching Gilligan’s Island. But who knows? I might be the one out of sync. I can’t tell anymore. I don’t care anymore. I just want to sit still and not break myself.
A crow lands on the porch railing behind Grandma Edie’s rocker. It cocks its head, studies me with dark garnet eyes, then starts preening its feathers.
I’ve seen this crow before. Outside my window. On my windowsill the last time I saw Dresden. I watch it, turning my eyes so far into the corners they start to water.
It fluffs its feathers and settles in. It looks like it’s waiting for something.
Grandma Edie switches to the courtroom show and says something about there being no damn way they could make a coconut do that. She clucks her tongue and goes quiet about it. Aunt Bel had to run out to the store and I can’t move, so she’s just going to have to stay out of sync until Aunt Bel gets back.
I’m switching between eyeing that crow and the TV, but then I notice that Grandma Edie’s foot stops rocking her chair. Her head is slumped forward. The remote is clutched in one hand and the bottle of Coke in the other. It’s tipped over and dripping on the blue, painted planks of the porch floor. She fell asleep. She’ll be pissed when she wakes up and finds her Coke empty.
The crow hops down to the floor in front of us. It blinks up at my grandmother, then opens its beak. Thick black smoke-fog-stuff pours out of its mouth. I suck in a breath, wishing more than anything I could move right now. The smoke smells like a blacksmith shop and envelops the crow like a dark cloud, growing larger, larger until it’s the size of a person. I can see long, lean limbs through the smoke. Bunched fists. A shoulder and back puckered, disfigured with burn scars. The black stuff flows over his body to his mouth and funnels inside. What’s left is a guy crouching on the floor, head bowed. He’s naked. Totally nude. I’ve never seen a naked guy before. Well, a couple times on cable. What an exceptionally pretty delusion he is. Maybe he’ll stand up and I’ll see his—
He lifts his head and looks at me. I blink my eyes, and the delicate glass of my eyelids crunches. That, I can’t help. Blinking, I mean. But I know him. Well, I don’t know him, but I’ve seen him before. He’s that guy Dresden was talking to a few weeks back at the parade before they both left in a hurry, all freaked out. He’s not a man, either. He’s a teenage boy. And if he’s Dresden’s friend, there’s a chance he’s real. I wish I could eat a peppercorn and find out for sure.
The first pang of panic twists my gut.
“Hi Essie,” he says to me. “I’m Michael, Dresden’s friend. I need you to stay calm, please.” His eyes are soft, the ends of his words turn downward, like he feels bad about something. He kneels, angles himself so his privates are hidden behind his leg. It’s probably a good thing. I’m staring like a weirdo. But then, he was a crow just a few moments ago.
I can’t say anything in reply. It’s hard to speak since turning to glass. My jaw is locked and only hinges opens when Aunt Bel pulls it open with her fingers and spoons soup in there. A tiny noise escapes my throat. A whimper.
“What’s wrong?” He scrutinizes me, then an understanding eases his gaze. “Ah, okay. You’re stuck. Can’t talk.” He winces, then turns his gaze to my grandmother, who is still sleeping. He closes his eyes and opens his mouth and inhales long and deep, like he’s inhaling something that smells wonderful.
I wonder what he’s doing. Grandma Edie’s going to wake up and freak out. It’s been a while since she’s seen a naked guy in real life, too, I bet. And from her angle, she’d see everything.
“I’m so sorry, Essie,” Michael says, then does something strange—he reaches toward Grandma Edie’s face and gently closes her eyelids. Until that moment, I thought they were already closed. I thought they were closed…
Ice pours through my veins. A cold, painful sadness uncurls through my belly. It feels worse than my father’s cruel words. Worse than the most sickening delusion. Because even now, I know this isn’t a delusion. For once, I wish it was. I can’t turn my gaze from my motionless grandmother. Just a few minutes ago she was cursing at the television.
“No.” The word slips through my frozen lips.
Michael leans in close to my grandmother and closes his eyes again. What is he doing? He looks like he’s smelling her again—but his face flushes and his jaw slackens on a sigh. He stays that way for a long moment, and even though he’s gentle, reverent with her, I want to rip him away. Whatever it is he’s doing, it’s too intimate. Too personal.
I’m her granddaughter. I should be the one closing her eyes, holding her cooling hand, and acknowledging her passing—me and Aunt Bel. But I’m trapped on this chair in this glass body.
When Michael leans back and looks at me again, there’s a slight radiance to him that’s not natural. His eyes shine bright and they’re a little watery. He all but glows with an odd, euphoric vibe. I want to slap his face until it’s gone, but then I remember something Dresden told me—harbingers of death. They survive off the particular energy given off by the dying. They’re drawn to places where bad things happen. Where people die. Well, Concordia is certainly a place where bad things are happening. The town, and I, it seems, are steeped in death. Drowning in it.
That must be what Michael was doing—taking in her death energy. My heart contracts. Michael—the crow—came because he knew my grandmother was about to die.
He knew and didn’t warn anyone!
A scream builds below my heart, but it’s stuck somewhere in my throat. It can’t leave my mouth.
“I’m sorry you’ve lost her,” Michael says gently, peering at me. His eyes are concerned. “There’s nothing I could have done. I can’t interfere with death.”
Liar! He could have done something. He could have called an ambulance; he could have told me!
“You need to call someone,” Michael tells me. “You can’t sit here with her like this. Your aunt won’t be home for a while.”
I’d like to move. I’m not choosing to sit here in stillness. Doesn’t he understand that? Fury, hot and pressure cooked, puts a red tint to my vision. My grandmother just died, and I can’t move. I can’t move, because of this broken, defective brain I was born with. I’m drowning in death and all I can do is sit here like a fragile, useless doll.
“Seriously, someone needs to be notified right away.” Michael looks out over our small, fenced-in yard. The neighboring houses are quiet, empty. It’s a work day. Only the old and the crazy are home right now.
The scream has moved up my throat. I can hear the creaking rasp of a thousand hairline cracks fracturing my glass skin. It hurts. Oh, the pain is terrible. Pain over my skin and under it. Suddenly, it’s all too much. The glass shatters. My head tips back, and my gaze goes skyward. The scream rips from my throat. Unbearable. Unending.
Michael says something I can’t make out. I catch a glimpse of that black fog, and then a crow streaks off the porch in a blur of black feathers.
Everything breaks down. The broken pieces of
me: fractured and jagged and precariously stacked up in this seat. Every single bit of me is shattering. Defined in this one moment of undoing and the piercing shriek coming out of me.
And I know, in my last moment of lucidity, there is no coming back from this.
Thoughts, deconstructing.
To feelings. Basics.
The beginning of it.
And the end.
An avalanche.
23
Dresden
the boy who changed
The bees are at war with me.
They went along with it for a while, this departure from Concordia, but now, after two days and two nights, they are in revolt. We shouldn’t be leaving the place of nourishment, where fear is running higher than it has since we arrived. In the past—distant past—when I attempted to defy the curse that defines my existence, the bees have kept me in line. They’ve taken over, forced me to sting. They are insects, merged with the intellect of a man. The original design of the beekeepers was to secretly infiltrate an enemy community, destroy it from the inside. We did that very well, for the brief time we were used for that purpose. Before the magic users began the purge.
None of them considered what would become of us after. None of them considered that they wouldn’t eradicate all the magically altered blights they’d created. Just as they previously believed they’d controlled their power, they believed they’d effectively wiped it out. Mistakes, both.
And now, here I am, stumbling around Philadelphia at night, leaving a trail of dead bees dropping from my mouth. The rest are tearing up my insides in pure misery. I can’t reason with them. I can’t explain things to them. Changing to bee form is a trial. The swarm that I become is more powerful than the swarm inside me, but the struggle takes tremendous energy.
I touch the fading bruise on my cheek.
And I continue on.
I don’t think this neighborhood is a great one. I’m counting on that. A group of four men congregate in the alley between two buildings. I head for them, walking quickly, hating myself for what I’m about to do.
