by Sarra Cannon
I reached for the handle of the first door to the right, but as my hand touched the antique bronze knob, Rend placed his hand on my arm.
“Not that one,” he said.
I yanked my arm away as if his touch were poisonous to my soul.
“Franki, I know I owe you an apology,” he said. “I should have never kissed you like that. I let a weak moment get the best of me.”
It wasn’t the kiss I wanted an apology for.
I held my feelings inside, unsure how to respond, but not wanting him to know how he’d hurt me.
“And you’re right,” he said. “I don’t own you. Working at Venom is one hundred percent your choice, but if you come back, I promise I’ll do my best to keep you safe for as long as I can.”
I swallowed and turned toward the next door. “I can take care of myself.”
The words came out of my mouth, but I knew I didn’t really believe them. Who was I kidding? I didn’t know the first thing about protecting myself from vampires and demons and witches. I had no idea how to control whatever power I happened to possess.
“Franki—”
“Don’t,” I said, raising my voice and lifting my chin. “I never should have come here.”
I looked into his eyes and hoped he couldn’t see the struggle deep inside.
And I don’t ever plan to come back.
Those were the words I wanted to say, but I knew I would be lying. I couldn’t walk away from him forever any more than I could deny that I belonged here in this world of magic.
“Come back tonight,” he said softly. “At least to let me explain what it is you’re up against.”
I took a deep breath. How could I say no?
It would be torture to be around him. The memory of his kiss still burned on my lips, but something had made him pull away from me. My heart couldn’t handle that kind of push and pull for long. I needed to get as far away from him as I could before I disintegrated into a pile of ashes in his hands.
But I needed to know about my family. I needed to understand who the Devil was and why he found my blood so valuable.
I sighed and looked at the door leading back into Venom. “I’ll come back when and if I’m ready,” I said. “Don’t ask me for more than that.”
Rend stepped toward me, but I pulled away, not wanting to feel his touch on my skin. I was terrified that if he touched me again, he would own me and I would never be able to get away from him. His eyes searched mine.
There was still so much unsaid between us, but for now, it would have to wait.
Instead, I opened the door and walked through, crossing back into Chicago and the hall of doorways.
Not Exactly Nothing
I closed the door behind me and took a deep breath. I threw a wishful glance back toward the door with the crow embedded on its front.
I hadn’t even gotten the chance to really talk to Rend about the crows. How many of them were there? Why had they never come to find me? What did he know about my mother?
If the answers were behind that door, I wanted to go through and face them, no matter how dangerous.
But now was not the time to be going through strange doors. For all I knew, the crow door could lead me straight to hell. Or Kansas. Who knew?
Someday, though, I would go through that door and learn the truth.
I reached for the handle of the door that would lead me back to Venom and without another glance back at Rend’s door, I stepped through to the main part of the club.
I ran straight into Azure.
Literally.
A tray full of glasses flew out of her hand. She cried out as they all went tumbling toward the floor. I jumped back, waiting for glass to shatter and spray across my legs and bare feet, but before the glasses hit the floor, they froze in midair.
I gasped, taking two steps back in surprise. My eyes traveled up to Azure’s face. She stared down at the glasses with great concentration, one palm lifted and curled, as if she held them in her hand. She raised her palm up and all ten glasses followed her movement, rising through the air and back onto her outstretched tray.
“Whoa,” I said. “That was amazing.”
She glared at me, then slowly let her eyes travel down my body. Shit, I was still wearing Rend’s shirt and my hair was probably tousled, like I’d just had a good ride in the sack.
I straightened the shirt and squared my shoulders, daring her to say one damned word to me about it.
She cleared her throat, the muscles around her mouth tightening. “Well, I guess now we know where you disappeared to last night.”
I was all ready to tell her to fuck off, except that there was a twinge of sadness mixed into her hateful tone. Even though she turned away to try to hide it, I saw her eyes fill with shiny tears.
Crap, did she have a thing for Rend? Had he treated her like this, too? Kissing her and leading her to believe there was something between them, only to back off just when things were getting intense? I felt cheap and used, suddenly sure that what I had thought was special between Rend and me was just some kind of game he liked to play.
“Look,” I said, reaching out to put my hand on her arm. “It’s not what you think, trust me.”
She snapped away from my touch, her glare back. And this time it had daggers in it. “I’m sure it’s completely innocent.”
Sarcasm dripped from her tone like acid.
I crossed my arms in front of my chest, feeling slightly naked even though I still had my dance outfit underneath. “Fine, you don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to, but Rend was just trying to help me out,” I said. “Nothing happened.”
Okay, so not exactly nothing but she didn’t need to know that.
“You don’t have to explain yourself to me,” she said, sniffing and turning back toward the bar. “It’s none of my business.”
No, it isn’t.
She obviously wasn’t going to respond well to my attempts to be nice, so screw it. I had enough problems without worrying about her.
“Okay, well, see you around, then,” I said. She didn’t even bother to look back at me or say goodbye. She just continued to clear the used glasses from the tables.
I glanced back before I disappeared behind the black curtain and watched for a long moment as she used her magic to clean the place. Glasses flew through the air in perfect lines, lifting from the tables to the bar where they dipped gently into a large sink full of soapy bubbles.
I briefly wondered why, if she could do that with nothing more than a flick of her wrist, she’d been using the tray at all. I wondered what kind of things I might be capable of if I stayed in this world a little longer.
I shook my head and went back to the dressing room, changed back into my own clothes, and left for home.
Something In The Shadows
I got on the ’L’, but didn’t get off near campus. Instead, I kept going, taking the familiar route back to my mother’s old house.
I hadn’t been there in a full year.
Time had been hard on the place.
Greyish-white paint chipped off the exterior, leaving the boards shabby and dirty. The bushes that lined the front of the house were overgrown and misshapen. Paper cups and other trash disintegrated in the weeds that owned the small front yard. The bay window to the left of the porch that my mother had prized was now covered in dirt and grime, the lace curtains inside yellowed and torn in two places.
The bottom step had all but fallen in completely now, and I stepped over it to walk up to the small porch.
Guilt still twisted in my stomach. I should have taken better care of this place, but money was tight and I needed every dime to pay for school.
The deed was still in my mother’s name. Without a death certificate or any idea where she was or if she was okay, there was nothing else to do with the house than just leave it to rot away. Looking at it now, I realized I should have made it more of a priority to pay someone to take care of the place.
Mom had lov
ed this house. She’d fought so hard to pay for it and keep it, saying how proud she was when she’d finally been able to pay it off. And it had been a very rare thing to see my mother excited about anything.
She was such a loser, always numbed by drugs and alcohol.
But the day she closed on this house, she’d been completely sober. I still remembered her blue eyes being so bright, they almost sparkled.
She’d been happy.
At the time, I’d resented this stupid house. Yes, it was nice to get out of cramped apartments and not have to move around every few months. But at the same time, she had never once looked at me with the same pride and happiness. She’d rarely ever smiled at me, much less been happy about having me in her life. I was nothing but a nuisance to her my whole life and she never let me forget it.
The leaves had just recently begun to change and fall and they covered the small front porch entirely in orange and red and brown. They crackled under my feet.
The porch itself seemed to be holding up all right except for one area in the front corner that had collapsed, the boards sunken.
I sat down in the old swing hanging from the ceiling of the porch. I must have come out here a thousand times when I was younger and needed to get out of the house so I didn’t have to stare at her zombie eyes. Sometimes, the house had felt like a tomb. It often felt as if my mother was already dead. She was just waiting for her body to follow her to the grave, so she’d entombed herself inside this house.
I still wasn’t sure how she had gotten the money to buy the place outright. It hadn’t seemed that strange when I was little, but back then I didn’t understand how money and loans worked. I just knew that one day we were worried about getting evicted from yet another apartment and the next, we were moving into this place and Mom never mentioned needing to leave. She’d promised me we’d never have to move again.
And yet she had left. Three years ago, I had come home to find the entire place empty, as if she had packed up and moved again. Only, this time, she had forgotten to take me with her.
I stood and stilled the swing. The old memories here were already pulling me into their sadness. What was I even doing here?
I shook my head and looked around. Was I hoping to find some kind of answers here? Some kind of proof that Rend had been right about who I am and where I came from?
The front door was locked.
I stretched up and searched for the spare key above the door frame. It was still there after all this time. Probably, no one had even touched it since the last time I had come here to sulk.
I opened the door and put the key back where I’d found it.
“Hello?” I called into the house. I don’t even know why I said it. It was obvious no one had been in here in a long time, but I guess I just wanted to be sure.
Some stupid part of me imagined the furniture she’d sold off in the months before her disappearance would be back, set up just like it used to be. She’d be sitting there on the old flower-patterned couch smoking a joint and in one of her better moods. I could picture it now as if it were real.
“About time you brought your lazy ass home,” she’d have said. “Get into the kitchen and make us some dinner. I’m starving.”
The very idea that I thought of this as a fond memory was so incredibly fucked up that I wanted to punch the wall. She had been a terrible mother and if she was dead, the world was better for it.
But even as the thought came into my head, I knew it wasn’t true. There were times when I had seen the light in my mother’s eyes. Times when I had so desperately wanted to believe she loved me.
I realized then why I had come all this way. Why I had come back to this house of horrors.
I wanted to feel close to my mother. I had somehow believed that being back here, in her house, would allow me to see the truth. Was she really dead? Or had Fallon been lying just to upset me?
My eyes filled with tears and for the first time in three years, I let them fall.
There was no one here to see me or judge me. I was alone with my memories and my pain.
I wiped the wetness off my cheek and walked into the empty living room.
Something in the shadows caught my eye and I sniffed, then walked over to it, crouching to get a better look.
With a trembling hand, I reached for it, taking it between my fingers and twirling it around with wonder.
A single black feather.
Rend had been telling me the truth.
Why Hadn’t He?
I stayed at my mother’s house for a few hours, wandering around the empty rooms and looking for any clues that she had been here recently.
I kept the black feather in my pocket, convinced it was one of hers.
I thought of the dream I’d had and the flutter of wings in the alley the other night after I’d followed someone who looked like her out into the darkness. My mind raced ahead, trying to make sense of all the questions running through it.
Was my mother dead? Or had she been at Venom the other night?
But if that was her, why would she have turned herself into a crow and left me there with those other demons? It didn’t make sense. Just because she didn’t want to be around me anymore didn’t mean she would willingly lead me to my death. I refused to believe that.
If it wasn’t her, though, who could it have been?
Lyla and the other dancers used glamours to make themselves look younger and more beautiful. Did that mean they could make themselves look like another person?
Anything might be possible in this new world, which made it even more difficult to figure out what was really going on around me.
Then there was Rend.
There was no denying the way my body reacted to him, but I would be lying to say there wasn’t more to it than that. I thought he had felt it, too, but just when we’d started to give in to our desires, he had pulled away as if I disgusted him.
I would be smart to stay away from him, but even the thought of him now made my whole body flush with warmth. It was dangerous to be around him, but dangerous to stay away. I was trapped.
I needed him in a hundred different ways.
Which was exactly why I needed to stay away from him until I could get this need under control. I would stay home and go about my normal life as best I could until I’d somehow managed to put some emotional distance between us.
I just had to hope Fallon and the Devil wouldn’t come after me before that happened.
With a plan in place, I closed up my mother’s house and headed back home on the train. I was looking forward to seeing Katy, even if I couldn’t tell her everything that had been going on.
But Katy wasn’t home.
Disappointment flooded through me. I could really use a friend right now, and the last thing I needed was to be alone.
She’d left a note on the whiteboard we’d mounted on the back of the door.
Sorry we keep missing each other. Derek’s home this weekend so going to stay with my parents for a few days. Hugs, Katy.
I sat down at the kitchen table where my open books were still waiting for me. Derek was Katy’s older brother. He was two years older than she and was working on his law degree at Columbia. She didn’t get to see him much, so whenever he came home, she usually went to stay with her parents in Highland Park for a few days, only coming back to campus for class.
Suddenly the thought of Rend’s safe house in the mountains didn’t sound so bad. I told myself I wasn’t scared to be alone here all night, but I was lying to myself. I was terrified.
The Devil, whoever he was, had known about me before I even knew demons existed. I was fairly certain he was the one who had sent me those flowers, which meant he knew where I lived. What was stopping him from coming in here right now and killing me?
I rested my head in my hands.
So why hadn’t he?
My brain worked through the problem, putting a question to his actions for the first time.
If he wanted to
kill me so badly, why invite me to a club where I would be introduced to an entire world of people just like me? People who despised him. And most of all, why introduce me to someone like Rend when he was offering the only protection a girl like me could find?
It didn’t make sense.
What kind of game was the Devil playing?
If he’d wanted me so badly, he could have come in and taken me without a powerful guy like Rend ever knowing about it. Or about me.
I stared at my homework and sighed. There was no way I was getting this done tonight. Even if I wasn’t completely exhausted, I couldn’t get my mind off the events of the past few days. What I needed was sleep. I would have to ask my professor for an extension on the homework. I’d tell him I had a family emergency or something, which was actually somewhat close to the truth.
I closed the book with a thud, then headed back to my bedroom.
I stripped off my work clothes and went to grab my discarded PJ’s from this morning when my eyes landed on the white dress shirt I’d laid across my chair.
Rend’s shirt.
I knew I should have it cleaned and taken back to him, but right now, I wanted to curl up in it and fall asleep. I wanted a reminder that even if I was alone here tonight, no matter what his motivation for doing it, Rend was watching out for me. He wanted to keep me safe.
I pulled the shirt on, breathing in the lingering scent of his cologne and wishing he were here with me now.
I left the bedside-lamp on—something I hadn’t done since I was a little girl—and crawled into bed.
Invite Me In
I am back in the hall of doorways. The sound of flapping wings ahead draws my attention, but I can’t see anything in the darkness. I lift my palm and concentrate on creating light. It takes a few tries, but after a few minutes, a small spark of light forms, allowing me to see a few feet in front of me.
"Come to me, little bird," a voice says in a whisper.
"Mom?"
I move forward, glancing at each doorway until I’m standing in front of the one with a crow carved into its surface. I raise my free hand to the carving, letting my fingers slide over the bumps and ridges of it.
