Falls the Shadow (Sparrow Falls Book 2)

by Justine Sebastian

  “What now?” Jeremy asked.

  “She’s in the kitchen,” Mooncricket said, backing even farther out of Jeremy’s reach. “She wanted to hang out and I said it would be cool and like, I didn’t think you’d be so mad.”

  “You didn’t think,” Jeremy said. He didn’t really like having guests either, but he could manage. Absolutely. “Of course you didn’t.” He turned his head to the side and popped his neck then squared his shoulders and put on his best, friendliest smile. “Let’s go say hi to Dawn Marie, shall we?”

  “Are you gonna be mean?” Mooncricket asked.

  “Nope,” Jeremy said. “Seriously.” Jeremy leaned in to kiss Mooncricket softly on the mouth. He tasted like a distillery.

  In the kitchen he found Dawn Marie swigging from a bottle of tequila and looking at the magnets on his refrigerator. She tipped forward a little too far and bumped into the brushed stainless steel with a curse. She pushed herself back upright and swayed there. Jeremy wondered how she and Mooncricket had even managed to make it back to the house without dying a horrible, fiery death along the way because they were both wasted. Hell, he didn’t even know how they were both upright.

  “Hey, good looking,” Dawn Marie said with a smile when she turned her head and noticed Jeremy standing there. “I’m Dawn Marie.”

  “I’m Jeremy, hello,” he said with a smile of his own. Mooncricket finally caught up and came to a stop just shy of plowing right into Jeremy’s back. He ignored him and walked toward Dawn Marie, hand extended to shake.

  She took his hand and shook it with a little extra squeeze then slumped against the side of the fridge. After a little while spent watching each other, Jeremy took a deep breath and looked away from her and over his shoulder at Mooncricket.

  “So, are we going to party or what?” he asked as he turned back to Dawn Marie and took the tequila from her.

  As he drank, she and Mooncricket cheered and Jeremy knew the answer: Party on.

  Three hours later, Dawn Marie and Mooncricket were nodding out together on Jeremy’s bed, heads leaning together like they were deep in conference. Jeremy watched them for a little while then lurched away to go sleep in the barn, Barghest padding along behind him, silent as a shadow.

  19

  By the time Dawn Marie came home the next day, Tobias was on his head with worry. She had not answered her phone or replied to his texts. Tobias had no idea where she went and drove around town checking the parking lots of all the bars. Her running off the way she had was the last straw on an already towering pile of worry and aggravation. Between Dawn Marie, feeling like he was being stalked by some unseen something and his new—and unpleasant—knack for coughing up insects, Tobias could feel himself starting to crack from the strain. The butterflies could not be real, but they felt very real. The scratching insect legs dragging up his throat. The tight twitch of trapped wings pressing against his esophagus like a velveteen heartbeat.

  As the night wore on into morning, Tobias’s worry became fretting touched with the first chilly tendrils of anger. When Dawn Marie pulled her car into the garage at half past six that evening, Tobias was running on about two and a half hours of fitful sleep. The second he saw her green car, his worry began to abate and in its place those tendrils of anger curled into the gaps his waning concern left behind.

  She half-stumbled through the door from the garage into the kitchen and stood there staring at Tobias. There were bruise-dark circles ringing her bloodshot eyes; she looked too pale and her hair was a hopelessly snarled mess.

  “Hey, Toby,” she said with a sleepy, lopsided smile.

  For a moment, his worry came back, but when she smiled it faded away again. He had thought she was ill at first, but looking at her—really looking at her—was a different story. She was high, not ill and possibly even a little drunk again. She smelled like she might be, the wafting aroma of beer overlaying the older, staler scent of tequila. And yet again, she had gotten in her car and driven like it was nothing at all.

  “What is wrong with you?” Tobias asked her, hands balling into fists at his sides. His voice was a raw, husking rasp. “You scared me to death last night and now this.”

  “I came home because I didn’t… didn’t want you to worry,” Dawn Marie said. She leaned against the closed door to the garage and snorted. She seemed to be having trouble focusing her eyes. “God, Tobias, don’t be such a… such a… ninny.”

  “Ninny?” he asked, incredulous. “Ninny?”

  “I didn’t stutter, man,” she said. Then she laughed, coughing, stoned laughter.

  “You could have died or killed someone else,” Tobias said. “You hauled ass out of here with Tristan—Mooncricket—like you were sober as a judge and we both know that’s a damn lie. Then you come home and you’re out of your head on God knows what. Do you ever think about these things before you do them?”

  After all that had happened lately, after what had happened to Hylas—after Dawn Marie had seen what was left of him—for her to just get in her car and take off for parts unknown and leave Tobias going out of his mind was not only inconsiderate, it was death wish levels of irresponsible. Tobias had always wondered about Dawn Marie in that regard, wondered if deep down (or maybe not so deep) she didn’t have a death wish. She courted it often enough, like she was daring Death to come and take her. Like she wanted it to. Sometimes it was almost as though Dawn Marie was in love with Death; not in some gothic, romanticized way, she did not spend her time mooning around cemeteries writing shitty odes to the “undead” or anything quite so feebly melodramatic. She was actually serious and it horrified Tobias. She wasn’t suicidal, but he thought she would welcome death if it came for her.

  “You wouldn’t let me die,” Dawn Marie said. “I don’t even get why you’re freaking out right now. You know what’ll kill me, I know you do. But shh, don’t tell me, I want it to be a surprise.”

  She laughed again and the chilly tendrils of anger became glaciers inside of Tobias. It was appalled anger at how she could be so callous about her own life when he could not imagine a world where she did not draw breath. It made him angry because she broke his heart a little more with each tottering step she took toward her own grave and he was helpless to stop her. It made him furious because he loved her and it was never enough.

  “Shut your fucking mouth,” Tobias said through his teeth. She snapped her mouth closed and looked at him, slack expression showing as much surprise as the drugs and booze would allow. “I don’t know when you’ll die because the idea of it ever happening scares me. You walk around with a noose around your neck like it’s an accessory you don’t want to take off. One day you’re going to trip and it’s going to tighten and you will die then. Is that really what you want? I worry about you because you don’t possess the give a damn to worry about yourself.”

  “Ugh,” Dawn Marie said after a drawn out pause. “You shut up, Toby.” She rubbed her forehead and looked away from him. “You sound like my fucking mother.”

  He scoffed. “If your mother gave half as much of a damn about you as I do, I sincerely doubt you would be this unequivocally fucked up.”

  She gawped at him, eyes wide and hurt as she blinked, trying to process the sting of what he said. She knew it was unkind, that it had hurt her, but her brain was too slow and bogged down; she couldn’t figure out why it hurt, only that it did. Tobias watched her trying to sort it all out and the disgust he felt right then took his breath away. Never had he felt that about Dawn Marie, but right then it was sharp as poison thorns and it tore at him.

  “Don’t talk about my mama like that,” she managed as she stumbled into the side of the island counter.

  Tobias could not look at her one second longer, if he did, he would scream. His keys were in his trouser pocket and he took them out as he went around the opposite side of the counter to get to the garage door.

  “Go to bed, Dawn Marie,” he said as he walked through the door. “Sleep for a little while and when you wake up, n
one of this will have ever happened.” Because you will forget and I will not remind you.

  He shut the door softly and walked to his car.

  Tobias only stopped long enough at the end of the driveway to pick up Lenore who had flown after him, faithful as a hound. He rolled down the passenger side window for her fly through and then they were off. As he drove, Tobias told himself that it had needed to be said, that someone had needed to say it to Dawn Marie for a long time. The only person there was to say it was Tobias himself; Dawn Marie’s sister Carol Anne and her mother Virginia (Gin to her friends and many lovers) weren’t that much different from Dawn Marie. Virginia was worse and Carol Anne was slightly more stable, but all three of them walked the flimsy, dry rotted tightrope between life and eternal oblivion. For the most part, they seemed to like it—just like Dawn Marie did.

  It was not difficult to understand the hows and whys the three of them had ended up the way they had. It started with Virginia’s own childhood and her father who didn’t know how to keep his hands (or his cock) to himself. She’d gotten pregnant in tenth grade (thankfully not by her own father; he’d had a vasectomy) and rode that boy right out of her shitty home life. Seven months later, Carol Anne was born and three months after that, her daddy was out of the picture.

  That began a domino effect of Virginia waiting tables in dive bars and greasy spoon diners to buy liquor and occasionally food and clothes for her daughter. Then Dawn Marie happened and no one knew who her father was, which was something Virginia seemed perversely pleased about. The lives of the two Schuler girls were a carousel of booze and their mom’s boyfriends (the “Uncles”) some of which were handsy in that they beat them, others were handsy in that they liked pinching little girl titties and groping their pre-adolescent (and adolescent) asses.

  So it wasn’t hard to understand it at all, but Tobias hated it, had always hated it. He couldn’t fix Dawn Marie or take away her awful childhood. He couldn’t make her stop hating herself long enough to realize she was better than all of that. Carol Anne was proof that maybe there wasn’t a cure, but there was more than drugs and meaningless fucks in the backs of abandoned cars. She had leveled out and hit cruising altitude. Dawn Marie kept herself in a near-perpetual nosedive.

  It had needed to be pointed out to her for a long, long time, but whether or not it would do any good was a moot point. She wasn’t likely to remember a damn thing Tobias had said. Maybe that was better though; he didn’t know for sure about that, but he did know he hated hurting her more than almost anything. He also thought that maybe he was pathetic, the Duckie Dale to Dawn Marie’s Andie Walsh.

  Tobias passed the sign welcoming him to Mississippi, sighed and lit a cigarette. He’d go as far as Crossroads then he would turn back. He couldn’t stay gone forever, but even as a grown man he couldn’t deny that the idea of running away still held an awful lot of appeal. He knew he would get over it though and so, when he came to the Crossroads city limits, he drove just far enough to reach a gas station and fill up his tank before heading back to Sparrow Falls.

  On his way back, he turned on the radio and listened to Robert Johnson because Crossroads had put him in a “Me and the Devil Blues” frame of mind. He had a long drive ahead of him even after he crossed the line back into Louisiana. Halfway between the Mississippi/Louisiana border and Sparrow Falls the huge mansion of an evangelical preacher named Willy Ray Cox offered a break in the monotony. The Blood of the Lamb Pentecostal Church was a legitimate cult and creepier to Tobias by far than most of the other bizarre things in the surrounding area.

  There was no other traffic on the nearly deserted stretch of highway, so Tobias drove slowly past the Cox estate and looked at the stone sculptures of animals littering the lawn near the tall black iron fence. Every now and then a new one would crop up and people whispered about how that was the way the drugs Willy Ray sold on the side to further fund his cult were shipped. Cocaine, heroin and marijuana packed inside the hollow concrete bodies of the eerily realistic animal sculptures. He inched along, staring at a sculpture of a grizzly bear that was so new the paint still looked wet in the glow of the floodlight that illuminated it. Tobias wondered how many kilos of cocaine would fit inside that huge thing.

  Waving the thoughts aside, Tobias began to accelerate away; he needed to get the lead out and quit turtling along in the road. There was no traffic at present, but there was no guarantee someone wouldn’t come barreling over the hill behind him and right into his rear end. His cell phone rang just as he hit fifty again and the sound of it coming through the car speakers was loud and jarring. The phone was attached to his stereo by some technological magic Tobias didn’t drive himself up the wall trying to figure out. The sudden racket startled him and he just barely stopped himself from slamming on brakes. The hands-free phone thing was no doubt a safety feature, but scaring the hell out of the driver was anything but safe and he had yet to get used to that feature in his new car. Lenore squawked and flapped her wings, trying to fly away from the sound. The farthest she could go was the backseat, which wasn’t good enough since there were speakers back there, too.

  “Call from Dawn Marie Schooler,” said a pleasant robotic male voice that always mispronounced her last name. It was Shoe-ler, not Schooler, but Tobias had no idea how to fix that. The ring came again and Lenore responded with another outraged squawk. Tobias’s finger hovered over the button on his steering wheel that would allow him to decline the call and he almost pushed it, but at the last instant, he tapped the one to accept instead.

  He didn’t say anything though because he didn’t know what to say. Hello felt inadequate somehow given what had happened earlier.

  After a minute of listening to each other breathe, Dawn Marie took a deep breath and said, “I’m sorry, Toby.”

  “It’s fine,” he said.

  “You always say it’s fine and it never is.” She sounded like she was about to cry and that gave him pause. Dawn Marie did not cry; in all the years he had known her, he had seen her weep maybe four times. “I was a cunt earlier. A stupid drunk, high cunt. I did stupid shit last night, shit I said I’d never do again, but then I did it.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Fucking heroin, all right? I snorted a couple of lines with Mooncricket and Jeremy and I… Goddamnit. I fucked up. I really did.”

  She had indeed fucked up. Just out of high school Dawn Marie had a brief flirtation with heroin and just like with her more serious cocaine addiction, she had come to Tobias for help when it started to get out of hand. He had taken care of her while she kicked her fledgling habit to the curb. While she had suffered a couple of relapses with cocaine over the years—though nothing too serious—she had kept her word when she said she’d never touch heroin again. At least until last night.

  “It was one slip,” Tobias said. “Just… don’t do it again.”

  “I know, but I’m ashamed I did it at all,” she said. “I’m so fucked up. You were right about that. So fucked up.”

  Tobias winced; he really hadn’t thought she would remember that, but Dawn Marie always had been full of surprises.

  “I shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Why not, Toby? It’s true. You think I don’t know that? Because I do,” she said. “But I still somehow manage to pretend I don’t. I tell myself I’ve got a fucking handle on all the… the… shit, but it’s a lie. I believe it though, all the time. Every time.” She took a watery breath. “And I was shitty to you. The only person in the whole fucking world who really does care about me and I was dumb and crappy to you.”

  “You’re forgiven,” Tobias said. “For all of it. Even the heroin. Even the crappy stuff you said. Even driving drunk.”

  She huffed out a laugh. “Even when I go do drugs with a beater motherfucker and his punch bag boyfriend. I was so messed up I didn’t even think about the fact that Jeremy guy hits Mooncricket all the time and is no doubt the reason his arm is in a fucking cast now. We hung out and drank and I had fun and I ne
ver thought he might turn on me like a rabid damn dog, too. But still, you forgive me because I’m always forgiven, right? Fuck, Toby. You kill me.”

  “Hardly,” Tobias said. “What I do, however, do is make you hot fudge sundaes when you feel bad and are probably a little hungover.”

  “Oh my God.” She sniffled, the sound loud through the speakers. Sadness in stereo. “You are way more forgiving than I am. Wow. What would I do without you?”

  “I haven’t any idea,” Tobias said. He did have some idea, but he refused to think about it. “I’m about halfway back to Sparrow Falls. So, how about I stop at Bateman’s on my way through and get the necessary supplies.”

  “And a twelve pack of beer?” she asked.

  He shook his head, but said, “Sure, I can do that.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I think I need to slack off with the hard stuff.”

  Dawn Marie wouldn’t stop drinking until she was good and ready to do so, but she was right about the hard liquor. It didn’t sit with her as well as beer, it didn’t leave her as manageably inebriated. When she drank liquor, she often blacked out, got belligerent and was more apt to do things she’d regret the next day. After her lapse the night before, however, she would behave herself for a little while—a couple months at least—until she forgot again. Tobias was like a beggar when it came to Dawn Marie though: he took what he could get and was glad for it.

  “Okay, I’ll get all of that,” he said. “For now, I suppose I should let you go. I’m sure you want a shower and perhaps a post-waking nap. I’ll wake you when I get in if you’re still asleep.”

  “Thanks, Toby. You’re a doll,” Dawn Marie said. “But wait. Where the fuck are you?”

  “I ended up in Mississippi, but I’m almost back now,” he said.

  “Wow,” she said. “You must’ve been really pissed.”

  “I just needed to catch my breath is all,” Tobias said. “I’ll see you soon, Dawn Marie.” He ended the call before she could say any more, he didn’t like to talk and drive. More than that though he hated the way her voice kept cracking, coming at him loud and real through the speakers. He could hardly stand it.