Falls the Shadow (Sparrow Falls Book 2)

by Justine Sebastian

  Mooncricket shut it softly and shuffled away and Jeremy did as he said he would: he waited, staring at nothing, looking back onto forever and time kept ticking right on by.

  It was three hours later when Mooncricket came back, his arm in a cast, a splint on his nose and a line of four stitches bristling from his chin. The skin around his eyes was shiny with some kind of ointment and he had prescriptions in his hand that he threw on the dash when he got in the car. He was wearing a blue hospital smock instead of his black shirt.

  “Can we go now?” he asked, voice flat and curiously vacant.

  “Yes,” Jeremy said. He cranked the car and backed away, casting little glances at Mooncricket who stared straight ahead through the slits his eyes had become. “Did they give you anything for the pain?”

  “Tylenol,” Mooncricket said. “They wouldn’t give me nothin’ stronger ‘cause they saw the marks on my arms. They had to cut my shirt offa me even though I asked them not to, but they wouldn’t listen. Nobody ever listens. Now I don’t have it no more.”

  It had been Jeremy’s shirt and he was annoyed about it, but not ashamed like Mooncricket was.

  “I’ll buy you a new one,” he said. “Get your prescriptions filled, too.”

  “Thanks,” Mooncricket said. He leaned his head against the window and closed his eyes. He didn’t speak the rest of the way home and Jeremy didn’t force the issue.

  Once they were home again, Jeremy left Mooncricket sitting on the couch, eyeballing Barghest who watched him right back. Mooncricket didn’t like the dog, he said he was too smart to be a regular dog, that he was more like a person stuck in a dog’s body. Barghest was a special dog, but Jeremy wasn’t going to tell him that, though he did truthfully tell him Barghest had never once been a human being. He had been just a dog once though, but that was another thing Mooncricket need not know about.

  Jeremy fixed them both a shot, a stronger one for Mooncricket than for himself because his monkey wasn’t quite so big. Jeremy’s habit was a chickenshit habit; it snarled and begged to be allowed growing room, but he couldn’t afford to follow that yellow brick road too far. He had too many other things to do, things that required he keep a clear head and steady hands.

  “Here,” he said, kneeling on the floor beside Mooncricket.

  Mooncricket looked at him with his sad, bruised eyes and held out his arm obediently. Jeremy tied him off then shot him up and smiled when Mooncricket’s head tipped back and he sighed. He flexed his fingers when Jeremy untied him and his head lolled to the side, rolling on his neck, eyes glazed and staring up at the ceiling.

  “You have the best shit,” he murmured.

  Jeremy nodded as he shot himself up. He did have the best shit because unlike Mooncricket, he could afford the best. He didn’t buy from street hustlers that cut their shit with everything from baby laxative to powdered ammonia; Jeremy bought his shit from a man who lived in a fine house near the lake in Mandeville. His drug dealer was a real drug dealer, not some two bit thug with lofty ambitions.

  He climbed up on the sofa beside Mooncricket and sat there, everything quiet now that he had fixed himself up right. He wasn’t floating like Mooncricket, but he was gliding along fine and it was beautiful. All the sharp edges faded, the voices inside him became muffled and the memories became soft focus, more like dreams instead of the sharpness of recollection playing through his mind in an endless high-def stream.

  When he wasn’t all tied up in his pasts, choking on his demons and obsessions, Jeremy enjoyed Mooncricket. In another life—God, now that was a laugh riot—things could have been different. If Jeremy wasn’t used and recycled, his soul Swiss cheese, he would have been a different person altogether. Of course, in that fantastical other life, Jeremy probably never would have met Mooncricket. Mostly Jeremy thought Mooncricket would have been better off had he never met him in this life, this most recent turn in the vicious cycle Thanatos had thrown him into.

  Eusebius dying, gasping, bleeding and afraid. Thanatos kneeling beside him, cool hand a comfort even as tears that smelled like benzoin dripped from his black eyes. The moon and stars were reflected in their obsidian mirror surface, Eusebius already a ghost lost in their shadow when he looked down at him.

  “I’m afraid,” Eusebius whispered around a welling mouthful of blood.

  “Don’t be,” Thanatos said as he dipped his head to kiss the blood away and swallow it. When he rose again, it dripped from his chin, shiny and black as lacquer in the moonlight. “I am here.”

  “I don’t want to die,” Eusebius said. The idea of leaving the world, of dying and losing everything—most of all, Thanatos—was unbearable. Once Thanatos took his soul to the river and let it go, they would be parted forever. Eusebius would go on to eternal glory or eternal torment, but Thanatos would not be there. His job was to take the souls of the living, not to recline with the souls of those already dead.

  In the moonlight, Thanatos stared into his face long and hard. Eusebius’s breathing was quick and shallow, his heartbeat stumbling in his chest like the gallop of a hard-run horse. He brushed his fingers against Eusebius’s cheek then gathered him into his strong, pale arms to hold him close.

  “Then you shall live forever,” Thanatos whispered into his ear.

  What a horrible mistake they had made that night so long ago.

  Jeremy wiped at his face and mourned for that dead boy and for the love he had lost all in the name of trying to hold onto it. Time was not the same to a god and Thanatos was almost always too late. In every life Jeremy had lived, he had lived very few of them with the comfort of Thanatos’s arms around him.

  “Do you even like me at all?” Mooncricket asked sometime later. His head was on Jeremy’s shoulder, breath warm and slow, like that of someone sleeping deeply. Junkies like Mooncricket were the real deal; sleepwalkers who did not sleep.

  “Yes,” Jeremy said honestly.

  “Then why do you hurt me?” Mooncricket asked.

  Jeremy grimaced and laid a hand on Mooncricket’s head. He noticed he was looking at one of his drawings; it must have been on the couch and he hadn’t seen it before. It didn’t surprise him though; he had flung them everywhere and the living room was covered in a blanket of pages like unwieldy snowflakes.

  “Because I am fucked up.” Jeremy’s voice was a harsh, cracked whisper. “More fucked up than you will ever know.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mooncricket said.

  At that, Jeremy’s heart twisted in his chest and he shushed Mooncricket; he didn’t want or deserve Mooncricket’s pity. His kindness, not yet dimmed or dirtied by drugs and his harsh life, was one of the things Jeremy liked about him. And it was one of the things that damned Mooncricket day in and day out.

  “Don’t be,” Jeremy said. “It’s not your fault.”

  Mooncricket was quiet again for a long time though he wasn’t asleep. Jeremy could see his thumb lazily stroking the drawing, tracing the curves of the great, black wings on the page in a clumsy arc.

  “I like your drawing,” Mooncricket said.

  It was from the rear, only the hint of broad shoulders and an elegantly muscled back showing beneath the heavy plumage that began at the man’s shoulders. The wings swelled out in a feathered pair of parentheses at their topmost arches and tapered down to the tips that crossed ever so slightly, as long as the body they were attached to. Jeremy reached over and touched those wings, too, fingers grazing over Mooncricket’s thumb. It was the last drawing he had done that night, the memory of Thanatos standing in the light of a dying sun burned bright and hot as gold in his mind translated to paper.

  “Would you like to hear a story?” Jeremy asked

  “Sure,” Mooncricket said, voice thick and drugged.

  “I knew a man with wings once.” Jeremy wrapped his arms around Mooncricket and laid them down on the sofa together. He stroked the backs of Mooncricket’s shoulders where wings would never be and said, “He had wings, but he wasn’t an angel…”

 
He talked until Mooncricket dozed off and when he was snoring softly, Jeremy fell silent and told the rest of the story only to himself.

  9

  Weekends were for gardening and that was precisely what Tobias did. From sunup to sundown, he worked outside tending his many flowerbeds and potted plants; he pruned trees and tended his herb and vegetable patches. The expansive gardens of Gallagher House were another thing that kept people driving past his house and poking cameras and smartphones through the bars of the wrought iron gates to snap pictures. Most of his handiwork couldn’t even be seen from the road or the gates, but what people could catch a glimpse of was magnificent; particularly in spring when the profusion of tulip bulbs he planted beneath the pecan trees that lined the drive were in bloom. They rippled toward the house in a fiery array of reds, yellows and oranges, the pecan trees towering over them as they grew in wave after wave from the beginning of the driveway all the way to the gravel turnaround in front of the house.

  On Saturday afternoon, he had made his way down the hill toward the guest house where Wesley Panzram lived. Tobias tended Wesley’s lawn as though it was his own—because it was and because it was Tobias’s job as landlord to take care of the land and house that sat on it.

  He was standing on one side of a large old camellia that acted as part of the screen between the guest house and the main house. Tobias listened to the wind sighing through the trees and whispering through the grass like a hushed conversation all around him and wondered if he should write his next article on camellia care. They were a popular southern flower and he hadn’t touched on the subject before. For the last couple of years he had been writing a gardening advice column for The Era Leader, something which Hylas had cheerfully pestered Tobias into doing. The column ran every Wednesday in the paper under the title of Well-Rooted with the byline naming the author as “The Green Man”. Each week there was a short article offering helpful hints, techniques or discussing specific plants and how they might (or might not) fare in Louisiana’s sub-tropical climate.

  He was thinking on his article for the upcoming week and shooing Lenore away when she criticized his pruning methods when he heard voices on the other side of the tree screen.

  “No, Wes.” It was Nick’s voice and Tobias cocked his head, listening to his footsteps as he walked across the porch. “I don’t know how many times I have to tell you that.”

  “Well, dang it, Nick,” Wes said, his own footsteps hurried as he tried to keep up with Nick’s longer stride. “I don’t know how many times I have to tell you that it’s not bestiality, I swear. Think about it: wolf and—”

  And that was where Tobias took it as his cue to walk away. Quickly.

  “Can you even imagine that?” Tobias asked Lenore when she alighted on his bare shoulder. “I don’t even know if such a thing is possible.” He started to say more when the very much unwanted image of what Wes was proposing to Nick popped into his mind. “Goddamnit.” Tobias rarely cursed, but sometimes profanity was the only thing that could accurately sum up one’s feelings. Thinking about Nick-the-werewolf getting it on with his very human boyfriend was one of those things.

  Years of near-solitude had left Tobias with a vivid imagination and he used it like a shield to put up against his loneliness when he was young. As he got older, it grew like his love of plants and gardening. However, sometimes it backfired on him.

  Tobias decided the only cure for that was to go check the mail. It made zero logical sense, but it was a distraction from the sweaty, incredibly hairy and strange mental pictures his imagination was subjecting him to.

  The driveway was shaded and cool, shadows dancing and flitting like the silhouettes of pixies playing in the limbs overhead. Tobias tipped his head back as he walked, checking on the lowest hanging limbs for any that may need trimming. Pruning a potted shrub was the first gardening work he had ever done. He’d been observed by his stepmother, Callie (short for Calliope) who had called him outside one sunshiny summer day when he was seven. She’d asked him to help her in the garden, most of which was in containers she kept on the front and back porches and around the house.

  Callie never had known what to do with Tobias, not much, but she was a doggedly determined woman, stubborn to a fault almost. She was uncomfortable around Tobias from the get-go, but he’d overheard her telling his father one night that, It doesn’t matter if he’s weird, Mitch, he’s still just a little boy. It’s a damn shame he’s so alone all the time with his brother as his only friend. No kid should ever be as sad as Tobias is.

  It was a couple of days after that when Callie had called him outside to help her with the gardening work. She had found a way to keep Tobias occupied, had given him a hobby, even if she couldn’t make people like him and want to be his friend. He hadn’t figured that out until he was much older, but from that day on Tobias had loved Callie Morton-Dunwalton a lot.

  Near the end of the driveway, Tobias took out his keys and pushed the button on the small fob that he used to open and close the gate. In order for anyone to get in that did not live there or go around to the guest house driveway, they needed one of those or had to buzz at the call box. He waited for the gate to swing open then walked through it, stopping to check the sconces bolted to the heavy stone gate pillars.

  “Damn,” Tobias said when he found they had both flipped themselves upside down again. The sconces never stayed upright, no matter what he did to them—including bolting them near the top and at the base.

  After staring at them for a moment, mildly irritated and amused at the same time, Tobias shrugged it off. Lenore fluttered from his shoulder to perch on the right sconce and preen herself while Tobias walked the rest of the way to the mailbox.

  There was the usual assortment of junk mail; most of which was addressed to Resident or the more specific Current Resident. His bank statement was in the mix, a couple of gardening magazines, a small box from Amazon that contained a book he’d ordered Dawn Marie as a late birthday present. Last in the stack was a catalog called HOT SPOTS: Adult Curiosities for the Erotically Adventurous. Tobias felt his eyebrows jerk upward as his mouth fell open a bit. At the same time, he thought, Hot spots are what dogs get in the summertime from flea bites. He turned the catalog over to read the address on it and found it was addressed to Gloria Rubinski; the single woman who lived a few miles down the road.

  “I have learned so many things about my neighbors today,” Tobias said as he walked back up the drive to the gate, still staring at the scantily clad woman on the cover who was licking a vibrator that looked a disturbing lot like a cucumber. “Cucumbrator?” Tobias mused aloud to Lenore when she rejoined him. “No, that’s awful. I shouldn’t say that.”

  “Hold the gate,” someone shouted behind him.

  Tobias turned around, finger on the button to close the gate already, though not pushing down. Hylas was pedaling toward him, his restored vintage bike heavenly shades of blue, the silver stars painted all over it winking and glittering. Tobias raised an eyebrow when he noticed Hylas’s shirt: it was white with the word PENIS printed across the chest in big, bold letters.

  “Yo,” Hylas said when he braked beside Tobias.

  “Hello,” Tobias said. “To what do I owe the honor?”

  “Poetry contest at the paper,” Hylas said. “I have to start reading the entries tonight. I thought I would swing by and share my pain with you.”

  “I really wish you wouldn’t have,” Tobias said.

  “But I have to,” Hylas said. “They’re so bad, Tobias, you have no idea.”

  “Yes, I do,” Tobias said. “I’ve heard all about them every year since you’ve been doing the judging.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t want to be alone,” Hylas said. “Maybe you can help me.”

  “I’d rather not,” Tobias said, turning inward to try and find a happy place at the thought of reading a couple hundred entries of exceptionally badly written poetry because it really was that terrible.

  The Era Leader had been runnin
g its annual poetry contest for as long as Tobias could remember. He also could not remember ever having read a winning poem that he liked. Until Hylas started judging the entries, Tobias had thought it was because the previous judge had been predisposed toward sappy love poems or flagrantly religious drivel, all in a standard ABAB rhyme scheme. Now he knew the previous judge had only been working with what they had, which was not much.

  “Aren’t you even curious to see how many people try to plagiarize Shakespeare and Plath this year?” Hylas asked. “Maybe even Byron.”

  “Mildly,” Tobias admitted. Every year there was a slew of people who tried to pass off classic works as their own. It never stopped being hilarious and appalling.

  “Wonderful,” Hylas said as he got off his bike to walk it alongside Tobias. “So now I have two questions.”

  “And they are what?” Tobias asked.

  “One, what’s with the bird?” Hylas asked. “And two, what’s for supper?”

  “Now your motives are clear,” Tobias said, answering the second question while he thought of an answer to the first. “I was thinking chicken with pesto.”

  “Or pesto chicken,” Hylas said. “That shit is good.”

  “Maybe,” Tobias said.

  “Bird?” Hylas asked.

  “Plane?” Tobias said.

  Hylas bumped his shoulder against his with a soft laugh as their shadows led the way up the drive.

  “I don’t know what’s with the bird,” Tobias said. “She likes me.”

  “Of course she does,” Hylas said. He reached for Lenore. “Hi, birdie, hi. Who’s a nice bird? Polly want a cracker?”

  Lenore nipped the end of his finger then switched to Tobias’s other shoulder, away from Hylas.

  “You’ve offended her,” Tobias said. “Shame on you. Her name is Lenore, by the way, not Polly.”

  Hylas sucked at his finger and grinned, not at all bothered. Birds did not flock to him the way they did Tobias, but they didn’t mind him the way they did other people. Lenore would come to accept him if he didn’t continue to patronize her.