Falls the Shadow (Sparrow Falls Book 2)

by Justine Sebastian

  By the time he was ready for bed, he felt immensely better and vowed to dispose of the catalog first thing in the morning. It was only after he had climbed into bed and turned off the light that Tobias realized he didn’t hear the whippoorwills anymore. There was only the soft rrrr of crickets and the distant rumble of thunder.

  10

  One of Mooncricket’s most endearing traits was that he liked it when Jeremy hurt him. He didn’t like it when Jeremy hit him, when he took his aggression and whatever else happened to be floating through the toxic wasteland of his psyche out on him. What he liked was when Jeremy would pin him to the bed and bite at the side of his neck like a parasite seeking ingress or when he’d dig his fingers into his hips so hard he left bruises like smudges of black paint. Jeremy knew there was a difference between what they did in bed and what he did to Mooncricket without his permission. Both ways hurt, but only the former felt good at the same time. People like Mooncricket, pure masochists with none of the BDSM or D/s bells and whistles attached, were rare as diamonds.

  They lay in bed together all day after Jeremy broke his arm. He tended to Mooncricket, got his prescriptions filled, smeared him with ointments and gave him popsicles. Jeremy read to Mooncricket from a collection of poetry by Rainer Maria Rilke and Mooncricket told Jeremy about his parents. He told him about growing up a rich kid in New Orleans and the posh private schools he had attended. When he talked about his father’s reaction when he caught him kissing a boy for the first time, Mooncricket laughed but sounded like he wanted to cry.

  Jeremy coaxed Mooncricket into rolling over on his stomach so he could tap out a line of heroin and carefully shape it so it followed the line of the fire-breathing hummingbird on his shoulder. He snorted it off him then licked his skin clean and Mooncricket made a soft sound in the back of his throat that made Jeremy think of a purr. Then he told Mooncricket about his own parents, dead in a carbon monoxide poisoning accident due to a leak in the gas line from their new stove. The part where the line hooked into the stove had been determined to be defective and the Harris family sued the gas company and the stove manufacturer. His parents both had life insurance, too, that named Jeremy as the beneficiary. Most of that money had been put into a trust for poor, orphaned Jeremy and left to gather interest. When he was of age, he found himself to be disgustingly wealthy.

  He thought himself a very clever boy indeed for the trick he had pulled with his parents and the stove. He’d fooled everyone and made a nice bit of coin in the process. Jeremy had learned that at a very young age, when the memories first started flooding back with such intensity and frequency that they made it difficult for him to think of anything else. He could barely attend school and all the therapists his parents took him to didn’t seem to know what to do with him. He was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia since his recollections seemed like delusions, not manifestations of different personalities; Multiple Personality Disorder was still a thing psychiatrists could not agree on whether it was real or not.

  He was sorry about his mother and father though. They had loved him very much and Jeremy loved them, too. He’d done his dirty work in something akin to a fugue: he remembered doing it with great clarity, but it still felt like he had been possessed. Like he was a passenger in his body as he’d tampered with the stove that evening; he had been on the inside looking out, wondering at what evil things his little boy fingers were doing. Then he’d gone home with his aunt and uncle to play with his cousins and spend the night watching movies and eating junk food.

  The next day, when Jeremy went home, he found them dead in their bed, spooned together in such a way that said they had never even woken up. Jeremy screamed and he cried and none of it had been faked.

  Sacrifices have to be made, he reminded himself as he lifted Mooncricket’s hair to kiss the back of his neck. He was floating, a cloud caught on a lazy current of air that left him drifting to and fro across the eternal sky.

  Yes, sacrifices did have to be made and he had to test his shiny new theory out in full. He had to make an offering to Thanatos and call his name. He would weep and tremble and beg and plead, but he would never stop even if it didn’t work this time. Not in this life or the one after that or the one after that one and on into infinity, right up until the day the human race became extinct.

  The next sacrifice had to be perfect, too, which meant he had to go hunting. He breathed in the scent of Mooncricket’s hair; shampoo and cigarette smoke, while he mulled it over. There was a rock show in a bar in New Orleans in a few nights and he thought he’d go there to see what he could spy with his little eye.

  His thoughts were turning to brooding though and he didn’t want that. Jeremy needed a distraction and there was a good one lying right beside him, half-asleep and warm. Jeremy pushed himself up on one elbow and ran his hand down the length of Mooncricket’s spine, stroked the angel kneeling there then ran his fingertips beneath the waistband of the loose pajama pants Mooncricket was wearing.

  “Let me draw on you,” Jeremy said.

  “On me?” Mooncricket’s voice was muzzy when he spoke. Maybe he had been more like three-quarters asleep.

  “Yes, let me draw on you,” Jeremy said. “With something sharp.”

  Mooncricket was quiet, thinking. Then he shivered and stretched out, uncurling his legs and turning to lie flat on his belly.

  “Okay,” he said. “What’re you gonna draw?”

  Jeremy touched the fire-breathing hummingbird and traced his finger down, sketching with the tip of his fingernail.

  “I think a flower for your dragon bird to perch on,” he said.

  “Cool.”

  Jeremy could hear the smile in Mooncricket’s voice and got up to get an unopened double pack of Exacto knives, a bottle of rubbing alcohol, some gauze and antibiotic ointment. The thought of disease had crossed Jeremy’s mind before; Mooncricket was a needle user and he had lived a less than sanitary life before Jeremy met him. But the thing was: Jeremy did not care. He knew he should care, but he couldn’t bring himself to. If Mooncricket made him so sick he died from it then he wouldn’t have to worry about anymore sacrifices. There would be no more offerings. No more aloneness. No more memories of lives that were and were not his own stomping through his mind like pink elephants on parade.

  Suicide by junkie. It was not a poetic way to go, but Jeremy had died many different ways, some of which were even worse. Leprosy. Tuberculosis. Typhoid fever. Cholera. Bubonic plague. A multitude of viruses and bacteria had eaten their way through him though nothing beat being burned at the stake. It wasn’t a natural cause of death, but he thought of the Inquisition that had tied him to that stake as its own kind of virus regardless.

  As the fire had gained strength, so had Dolorita’s screams, competing with the crackling of the burning wood. The fire chewed through her long dark hair, turning it to burning ribbons before it was gone and her scalp began to crisp. Then through the moving curtain of flame, Thanatos had come at last and he had taken her pain away, the fire touching him as well though it did not consume him.

  “I am here,” he said.

  “Where have you been?” Dolorita wept.

  He had not answered, had only kissed her and with that kiss, he had taken her away from it all. For a moment that might have been a century in the time slip where Thanatos was king over all living things, they stood together beside a river so wide and deep the distant shore was only a suggestion. The water pulsed with streams and streaks of color that twined and looped around themselves. In the swift current, stars were born and galaxies created from nothing.

  “Are you ready?” Thanatos asked Dolorita who was at once herself and nothing more substantial than a wisp of smoke.

  “Yes. Will you be there?”

  “I will try.”

  Her heart had seized then, fear of waiting for something she didn’t even know evoking thick sorrow.

  “Please,” she said.

  “Yes,” he said. “Yes.”

  Dolori
ta had let him sweep her into his arms then and he had kissed her once before he threw her into the river to start over again.

  “Jeremy?”

  Mooncricket’s voice startled Jeremy and he snapped his head up to look at him.

  “What?”

  “You spaced out,” Mooncricket said. “You’ve been standing there for… I dunno… a long time. You okay?”

  “Yeah, I was just thinking.”

  “What about?”

  “Fire,” Jeremy said.

  He exhaled shakily as he climbed onto the bed and straddled Mooncricket’s hips. The supplies were already laid out on the covers and he picked up the rubbing alcohol. He poured a little on Mooncricket’s back and used his fingertips to spread it around. His hands were steady and that was good because he was a little high and he didn’t usually do such things when he was on drugs. He thought he would be okay though, he wasn’t wasted, he was thinking as clearly as he ever really did.

  Jeremy blew lightly on Mooncricket’s alcohol-wet skin to make him shiver and allowed himself to smile at the sight. Then he picked up the packet of Exacto knives and opened them.

  “Are you ready?” he asked, resting the edge of the first blade against Mooncricket’s skin.

  “Uh-huh.” Mooncricket’s voice was muffled as he turned his face into his unbroken arm, forehead resting against it. “Do it.”

  Jeremy didn’t need to be told twice and without a word, he began to cut. It was done freehand, but Jeremy knew art; every soul he had ever been had done something in the arts. Eusebius had carved wood and dreamed of going to a big city and making marble come to life beneath his hammer and chisel, but he had never gotten that chance. The one after had been a writer and philosopher. The one after that, a singer. There had been musicians and poets and turn of the century photographers. There had been dancers and sculptors and seamstresses. Mostly, he worked in pictures though; even when his main skill was something else, he could still draw. He lived the pictures, breathed them and their light and shadow; the way a couple of small strokes of paint in just the right spots could make a blue dot look like a drop of clear, cool water on a hot summer day.

  It was much the same for the spray of poppies Jeremy made bloom across the side of Mooncricket’s back. He gasped at the first cut and then moaned as Jeremy worked. He shuddered beneath him so that Jeremy had to take the blade away and give him a moment to compose himself.

  “Jesus,” Mooncricket gasped. “Jesus. Jesus. JesusJesusJesus.”

  He gripped the pillow beneath his head with both hands, fingers twisting in the dark blue Egyptian cotton until his knuckles were pale. His white skin ran with red, each line a tributary sprung from the river inside of him. And still Jeremy cut, the curve of a papery, lacy petal drooping out to touch the valley of Mooncricket’s spine, the long, slender stalks of the flowers growing up from the waist of Mooncricket’s pants; something for the weeping angel to cry over. The beauty of poppies in full bloom, the tiny claws of the hummingbird lost in a welling curve of blood. Each delicately serrated leaf painted in bright, dripping relief; each fold of petals one over the other defined by shadows made by carefully stripping small patches of skin away to reveal the sticky, raw loveliness beneath Mooncricket’s skin. One seed pod amid the showy blossoms, carved then stripped in places to make the dripping lines of score-marks; opium oozing from Mooncricket’s body.

  It was gory and it was divine, even the smell of it.

  Mooncricket shuddered, his breath coming in quick, harsh sips as Jeremy worked on him. It took him a long time and his hand was sticky with blood, Mooncricket’s back tacky and red with it by the time he finished. Mooncricket’s eyes were open and glazed; he was looking at nothing and everything, all of it far away. His fingers clenched and released against the pillowcase rumpled in their grasp.

  Jeremy lowered his head and licked into one of the cuts and Mooncricket arched beneath him, free to move now that the blade was gone. He was making gasping, pleading sounds as Jeremy’s tongue traced the line of a petal and down the stem to nip at the base of the flowers where their stalks faded back into pale skin again. The waist of Mooncricket’s pajama pants was soaked with blood and it stuck to Jeremy’s red fingers—like attracted to like—as he worked them down over his hips.

  “Yes,” Mooncricket said when Jeremy pressed his hand to the blood garden on his back to brace himself as he pushed inside.

  Mooncricket whimpered as Jeremy lowered his head to lap at the blood some more, to taste the magic of his creation. His own breathing was harsh, panting, like he had been running, not drawing, but it was a rush. Always it was a rush to do something like that and he so seldom got the opportunity. He thought that given enough time though he could make a gallery out of Mooncricket’s body.

  It was fast and hard, Mooncricket’s cries rasping in his throat as Jeremy fucked him and bit him. He agitated his wounds with the rasp of his tongue and dig of his chewed fingernails. Mooncricket lifted his head from the pillow, each inhalation ragged and forced from his lungs with every inward thrust. His breathing was strained, skin glossy with sweat as Jeremy moved inside of him, chasing his own end.

  He lowered himself against Mooncricket, chest pressing to the cuts on his back as he worked a hand beneath them to take Mooncricket’s cock in his hand. He made a strained sound that broke in his throat as he shuddered all over, the push of Jeremy inside of him sliding his cock through the ring of his bloodstained fingers. Mooncricket came with a throaty cry, body jerking and shaking as Jeremy fucked him through it, skin rubbing against raw skin, spreading wounds open to bleed anew. Mooncricket sank down into the mattress, still making throaty sounds of pleasure, though they were tired and touched with distress as the stimulation threatened to become overstimulation.

  Jeremy touched Mooncricket’s parted lips and Mooncricket licked his fingers like a dog begging for love. His eyes were closed, dark lashes disappearing into the deep purple bruises beneath his eyes. Jeremy watched and listened and felt everything. The muscles in his belly trembled, clenched and tightened and he sank his teeth into his bottom lip. Mooncricket opened his eyes when Jeremy moaned, cutting them to the side to look over his shoulder at him, Jeremy’s fingers still inside his mouth.

  “Bite down,” Jeremy gasped.

  Mooncricket did and his nice, well-tended rich boy teeth that had so far survived all the drugs cut into Jeremy’s fingers. Such delicate things, fingers, sensitive and full of nerve endings. The pain was paradise held in a single pinpoint moment where pain streaked up his arm and into his brain and it lit up like lightning. Jeremy came with a choked off moan, slumping over Mooncricket’s back, muscles shivering and eyes slipping closed as he buried his face in his hair.

  Mooncricket released his fingers then with one last lick and turned his head to gently nuzzle Jeremy. “Hey,” he said, hand coming up to touch the side of Jeremy’s head and run his fingers through his short, black hair.

  “Hey,” Jeremy said back. He roused himself enough to move off Mooncricket. His chest was streaked with rust red and he was sweaty; the room smelled like blood and fuck. Jeremy smiled and listened to the thunder roll outside; it had been growing closer the later it got and it had finally almost arrived.

  “What did you draw?” Mooncricket asked sometime later.

  “Poppies,” Jeremy said. He made himself sit up; he was lying on the gauze and tape he had brought, but really he needed to get Mooncricket up and actually wash his back. He’d do the bandaging after. He got out of bed and held his hand down to Mooncricket. “Come on, let’s go wash the fuck and gore off.”

  “I like the gore,” Mooncricket said.

  “I do, too,” Jeremy said with a real smile. “But I don’t like the idea of infection, do you?”

  Mooncricket wrinkled his nose. “No, like, that would suck ass, ya know?”

  “I do know,” Jeremy said as Mooncricket took his hand and allowed himself to be tugged out of bed. “After I clean you up, how about we eat something?”
>
  “Sure,” Mooncricket said.

  Jeremy knew he probably wasn’t very hungry; junkies and food weren’t exactly bosom buddies, but Jeremy made him eat more than would usually be his wont. Just like he made him shower, too, since needle freaks weren’t real big on bathing either. Some kind of superstition about washing away the crust of grime making it easier for the drugs to leak out of them. It was ridiculous and Jeremy couldn’t stand the idea of stinky junkies, even pretty ones like Mooncricket.

  “Good. After we eat, what do you say we get blown?” Jeremy said.

  “I say fuck yeah,” Mooncricket said back, breaking into a smile at the suggestion alone. He licked his lips, always hungry for the pretty poison.

  “Have you ever smoked opium?” Jeremy asked.

  “No.”

  “You want to?”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sweet,” Mooncricket said. “That’s like… Opium is like the mother of all, ya know?”

  “Oh, I know,” Jeremy said. He thought it was probably the smartest thing Mooncricket had ever said.

  He stood in front of Mooncricket and looped his arms around his waist. He had to tip his head back a little to look at him because Mooncricket was so tall, at least 6’4” to Jeremy’s 6’2”. Jeremy was built thicker; muscle layered over his bones where Mooncricket was long and narrow, all pale skin and sharply delineated bone structure. He kissed a bruise on Mooncricket’s collarbone, Mooncricket humming with contentment as he tipped his head to the side. Jeremy worked his way up to his mouth and kissed him, slow and thorough. When he pulled back, Mooncricket smiled again and Jeremy turned away, reaching back for Mooncricket to take his hand.

  Their fingers laced together as the storm finally found them and thunder boomed so loudly Jeremy felt it in the floorboards.

  11

  Rain pelted down like Mother Nature in the throes of a blind rage and thunder rumbled like the growl of some infernal beast. Hylas was in the living room, still going over poems and liking the few he found tolerable at best even less as the minutes passed. It was nearly three o’clock in the morning and he was wide awake. He’d fallen asleep courtesy of yet another unexpected nap—off his medicine, he could expect on average between four and six a day—and when he woke up again, the house was quiet all around him. He had his medication in the pocket of his shorts and he popped a pill then smoked a bowl in preparation for the jitters to come. He took prescribed speed, basically; he could go buy meth from Aaron Talley and get pretty much the same effect, with the bonus fail of his teeth falling out.