Cleaner of Bones

by Kassel, Meg

  Angie’s eyes hold tears when she rips her gaze from the man in the car. She covers her mouth with her fist, and I worry I gauged her wrong. That the hysterics were simply delayed. I touch her gently on the arm. “Are you…okay?”

  She turns to me, eyes bright and assessing. I blink back in surprise, suddenly self-conscious. What is she seeing? Nothing good, apparently, because her brows draw together.

  She jerks away from my touch. “Oh God,” she says, her voice thick with disgust. “Are you enjoying this?”

  “No!” What? “No, it’s…” The sirens are louder. They feel like they’re shrieking inside my skull. “I can’t explain this to you.” My tongue moves heavily through the words, slurring them slightly. “You aren’t supposed to be here.”

  Her gaze is too riveted on mine. “What are you?” she asks in a hoarse whisper. My heart drops into my stomach. That question. Not who, but what. I let my gaze roam her face. This may be the closest I ever get to her. That would be fine. Natural. As it should be.

  “Get out of here, Angie,” I say with effort. “Before the police come. We’ll talk. But not now.”

  “I witnessed this,” she says. One hand weakly swings toward the car. “I have to stay.”

  “This wasn’t a crime,” I tell her, reasonably, and hope she listens. “It’ll be better for you if you go. I’ll meet up with you.”

  “But…” She bites her bottom lip, looks toward the road with more than a bit of longing. “What about you?”

  “I’m new here,” I say with a casualness I don’t feel. Sometimes the new kid line works; sometimes it doesn’t. “I wandered into a bad neighborhood. Got lost.”

  She stands up, fists balled. “I’m parked on Second Street in the Walmart parking lot. Tan Civic. I’ll wait for you there.”

  The Walmart parking lot. She’s been on my tail since I left the house with Cody. I angle away so she can’t see my grimace. “Fine.”

  With a nod, she turns and walks away. I watch her retreating back. The slim line of her, all determination and resolve. She followed me all the way out here. I’m not going to get out of answering some of her questions. She wants to know “what” I am. I wonder if the “who” part will matter to her.

  I thought I stopped longing for a different path, but my chest aches with the desire to be not this. I’m not the hero of any story. Not the villain, either. I’m the one that cleans the bones after the battle is over.

  I’m just the scavenger.

  Death

  The last gasp of light illuminates the clouds in shades of purple and fuchsia. The mountains are dark shadows rolling along the horizon. The roof of the Mountain View Gardens is peaceful, unlike the bustling human activity happening down in the parking lot. The wide, flat roof is empty. I haven’t met one of my kind who doesn’t gravitate to roofs or other high places. It’s the crow in us, always yearning to survey the world from a high vantage point. Distance offers some detachment from tragedy. For a little while, I can separate from what I am. I can breathe and smell only the cold night air.

  I took off and slipped inside the building just before the EMTs and police arrived. The press of sirens on my skull and the flashing lights had pulsed through my closed eyelids, overwhelming my mind. The many years, all the different names I used, the addresses, phone numbers—even my own age—fell out of sync, jumbled. The magnitude of what she saw crashed on me with the weight of a boulder.

  I should leave. The thought scratches through my head, unbidden. I don’t like it—I hate it—but there’s a truth to it that turns my stomach to stone. I want to stay. I want to spend the time I have left here talking to Angie, playing hockey, talking to Angie some more. But I worry about two things. First is Rafette’s interest in her. I suspect it has more to do with the connection between her and me, so if I’m not here, Angie’s connection to harbingers is gone. She becomes a normal girl again. Nothing to fixate on. Nothing to pay attention to.

  The second worry is my interest in her. The fact that I want to spend time with her could cause problems for us both. My feelings for her are growing complex, layered, deeper. If her life becomes endangered, I could try to help her, but there are rules against that. The ancient Strawmen, who we (thankfully) rarely see, do awful things to us when we defy them. I’d be willing to break rules for Angie. That scares me.

  I scrape my fingers through my hair and work through the logistics of leaving now. My group will be stuck having to explain my sudden absence. I’ll call them at some point. I’ll take a hit by not staying here. Without that rush of sustaining death energy, I might get stuck in crow form for a while, as that’s what happens when we’re starved of it, or my depleted state may compel me to rush into a completely unsafe situation and get killed. Again. Start over as a small child, again. And to think, I just finished puberty. I’m not thrilled about the prospect of yet another go with growth spurts and pimples and a cracking voice.

  But I should leave. Even if things are great with Angie, and she is, by some miracle, cool with me being a harbinger of death, I can’t stay here after the disaster about to hit this town. Our relationship is doomed no matter what I do. The way I feel right now is similar to when I’m in crow form, flying over a wasteland and unable to find a safe place to land. Presently, my elusive landing spot is a good course of action. My head is all over the place. I don’t know what to do.

  Maybe I just need to fly it off. The uncomplicated mind of the crow can sometimes settle challenging mental matters, and I welcome a break from the complicated, even if for only a few minutes.

  The roof is bare except for a metal folding chair, an empty cooler, and a mail crate containing a pile of paperback books. All of it’s under a tarp. If someone comes up here shortly, they’ll find a heap of expensive clothes, forty bucks, and a locked cell phone.

  With a shudder, I summon the dark coil of magic always waiting within me. I can’t tell where it is. Sometimes I feel it in my gut, sometimes in my throat. Sometimes it pulses in every cell of my body. Right now, I feel it under my ribs like a compressed knot, waiting to be unwound. It’s always pushing for release, no matter what form I’m in. I’m always fighting it in one way or another. Always fighting for my humanity, my sanity—that’s a fight I’ll lose someday. But not tonight.

  I let the magic unfurl. Icy cold scrapes under my skin like a creeping plague. It feels like a spreading pollution of my body. The magic twists my body, compacts it, takes parts away and adds new parts in. No matter how many times I do this, it always hurts. This time, the pain is stunning.

  The blackness swells up, begins to curl from my mouth in smoky wisps. As I begin to fade to the simpler mind of the crow, a memory flares. A girl’s face—one from my past—swings into sharp focus in my mind. It’s startling enough to interrupt the change. Powerful enough for me to pause the magic amid transforming from a young man into a crow. The dark power growls at me, but inch by inch, I reclaim my body.

  I can’t lose this memory. It’s been gone for so long, so achingly long, I can’t give it to the crow’s mind. I may never get it back.

  And yet part of me doesn’t want to remember. Can’t bear the pain of recalling her, this girl from my real, human life. So long ago, I lost her and myself.

  Margaret. The name wrenches from my lips, which are presently a meld of beak and flesh.

  The magic roars in my veins, burns like acid in my bones. I feel flooded with disease, filth, but I push the curse back. The blackness retreats. My body returns to me, and she is still there, behind my eyelids. I can’t control the gasp that turns into a sob.

  Margaret. The girl I was set to marry before I’d been condemned to death. I drop to my knees on the rough, hard surface of the roof. The memory unfolds, plays out like a movie written to break hearts. Mine has broken a thousand times.

  Margaret is crying, her black hair a tangled mess curling around her tear-streaked face. She is on the other side of iron bars. Her hands grip them tightly, as if she thinks she can bend them ope
n. I’m a little older than I am now—early twenties. My chest aches. I’ll never see her again after today. She’s here to say goodbye and to watch me die, and it’s my own fault I’m about to be hanged.

  I drink in the sight of her face, the tone of her voice, taking everything I can—so maybe I can get through what happens next with a bit of dignity. So maybe my last moments won’t be ones of complete disgrace. There’s an empty gnawing in my gut and a cold shaking in my hands that’s creeping up my arms, toward my heart.

  It’s a singular emotion, a livid bruise of the soul. I know then that this feeling is what revived this particular memory, which my mind buried deep. The feeling of loss and despair and regret mirrors how I feel now, considering leaving Cadence, my group, Angie. It was stronger then, of course. I was about to die. The first death of many.

  Margaret leans in close, and so do I. We kiss through the bars under the hard, watchful eye of a jailor who has no sympathy for a criminal like me. He sees a thief and a murderer, even though the latter isn’t true. She pulls back on a sob, her hand pressed to her lips. The guard’s lip curls at her tears even as his gaze roams over her in a way that makes my hands fist. He knows there’s nothing I can do. I’m allowed this one goodbye—the last of my brothers perished in a gunfight, and my parents died long before that—then he’s taking me out to the gallows.

  “You should not have come here,” I whisper hoarsely. “This is not how I want you to remember me.”

  Her jaw firms, and her eyes flare. Good grief, she’s beautiful. My Athena, I called her.

  “I will take every moment left to us,” she says. “Did you think I would let you leave me without saying farewell? You have never taken the easy way out. You will not start now.”

  Her fingers slide over my cheek, come away wet. I didn’t know I was crying. “You must promise me something,” I say to her. “Promise that you’ll keep on. Love again. Be happy. That you won’t—”

  “I’ll find my way. Don’t you be worrying about that.” Her face goes soft. “I love you, William. I will fight for you until the end.”

  William. That was the name my parents gave me. I hadn’t forgotten, exactly. It just faded into unimportance. I haven’t been William in such a long time. He was a different person. An entity separate from what I am now.

  The guard comes to the cell door. The key rattles in the lock. “That’s enough of this,” he says. “Time to get this criminal to the gallows.”

  “He’s not a criminal!” Margaret shouts at him.

  The guard raises an eyebrow. “What do you call a robber, horse thief, and murderer of two good people? He and his gang deserve to hang.”

  Sweet, loyal Margaret. He’s right, though—I am a criminal, although I don’t think I deserve to hang. I never murdered anyone, but it was impossible to prove that my brother, George, had pulled the trigger. Still, I followed my brothers down the path to hell, and the devil has a way of bringing home his own.

  “I’m sorry, my love,” I tell Margaret as I’m led past her. “You deserved better than the likes of me.”

  The guard roughly jerks me to the door. “Now, there’s the truth,” he mutters under his breath.

  I died in a hushed, dusty square, listening to Margaret sob and a rasping crow circling somewhere overhead. I died with a thousand regrets. I died with her name on my lips.

  Shortly before, and not too far away, a harbinger of death was being pecked to death by its murder of crows. The act of mortouri is one of mercy and savagery that kills the harbinger but releases the curse to find another victim. That curse found me as life ebbed from my swinging body.

  Official ledger accounts read that my body disappeared before it could be buried. Body snatchers were suspected. I don’t remember being transformed by the curse. The next thing I recalled after being on the gallows was flying, soaring above the farms and houses and forests. And profound terror.

  I never saw my Margaret—my brave, beautiful Athena—again. I buried my memories of her deep, where they’d hurt less, and I lived. Over and over, time and again, and now, I am here, in another small town, with another name, longing for another girl I cannot be with. I gasp in a breath I’ve been holding. This memory, which took seconds to play out in my head, has left me gasping on my knees on this lonely roof.

  Gentle laughter behind me. I jolt from my memories and swing around.

  Rafette stands on the other side of the roof, on the very edge. His arms are crossed. There’s a stillness to him that tells me he’s been there for a while, watching. He stayed upwind and out of my peripheral vision. Beekeepers have the uncanny skill to go unnoticed when they wish it. He’s seen far more than I would have liked. Another thing that’s my fault. I didn’t keep my guard up.

  According to the old stories, the beekeepers were once these beautiful young men from some ancient, extinct society ruled by magic wielders. Or some crap like that. I don’t know or care how many of the stories are true, but one thing can’t be denied: the beekeeper boys aren’t beautiful anymore. Rafette’s face is a twisting, grotesque mask. His features are an ever-changing montage of the people his bees infected who subsequently died with psychosis-inducing venom in their veins. It’s a living reminder of all those he’s killed. Whatever face Rafette had before the curse took him is long lost.

  “Are you considering leaving?” Rafette smiles, pitiless and cold. “Don’t worry, scavenger,” he says. “I’m going to make this decision easy for you.”

  Promise

  I want to be clear: I don’t hate Rafette. I’m not a fan, but I feel about beekeepers the way most people feel about squirrel nests in their attics––they’re an annoying, sometimes destructive, pest, but you can’t hate a creature for following its nature. No, that’s not true—some people do hate squirrels. It’s pointless, though, to hate a wild creature for what they can’t control.

  There’s no preventing Rafette from following my group around. Beekeepers have followed harbingers of death for as long as anyone can remember. They feed on human fear and excel at generating it. They can infect an entire community, turn neighbor against neighbor. We’re no better than beekeepers, when it comes down to it. We both consume the waste of humanity. I look up at him now, standing there, looking so smug and full of himself, and I can’t shake the shiver that skates down my spine.

  “Why do you care where I go?” I ask.

  He chuckles again, a blurry sound caused by the bees living in his throat. “I care a lot. You’re the key to everything.”

  I rub my temples, not in the mood for his weird riddles. “Seriously, Rafette. What do you want?”

  He seems to like this question, because he gracefully hops down from the ledge and comes over to me. “I want freedom from this curse. I want death. True death.”

  “Who the hell doesn’t?” I ask wearily. “I have nothing to do with your curse, so why don’t you just…go away? Go sting someone.”

  He sits down next to me, closer than I’d like. His venom can’t affect me, but the sound of all those bees buzzing in his chest is unnerving.

  “I’m here to talk to you about that, actually,” he says in a silky voice. “About stinging someone.”

  My stomach twists. I have a very bad feeling I know where this is going, and there’s no benefit in pretending to misunderstand. Both of us would like to conclude this conversation as quickly as possible. I shift to face him and look him dead in the eye. “Angie Dovage is not someone your bees would target. Leave her alone. She’s a nice girl.”

  “A nice girl who knows you are a harbinger of death.”

  “She doesn’t know that.” The words feel thin, baring my uncertainty.

  His mouth, presently with a scar running through both lips, turns amused. “She does.”

  “You’re giving me a headache, Rafette.” My voice lowers to a warning growl. Not that there’s anything I can do to him.

  He sighs. “Then I’ll make this very clear for you. You leave Cadence, and I’ll sting her. You stay
, and I don’t. Simple as that.”

  “What?” I gape at him. “Why? What’s your interest in her?” He may as well have punched me in the gut.

  “Not her. You. I was told by a high authority that the beekeeper curse can be transferred to a willing harbinger of death. I expect you will be that willing harbinger of death.”

  It’s all I can do to not laugh in his face. High authority, indeed. Probably his own delusional mind unraveling from being alive for too many years. “You’re joking.”

  He shakes his head.

  “Oh yeah?” I fold my arms. “What ‘high authority’ told you this nonsense?”

  His eyes shift to glittering blue, barely visible now in the dying light. “An ancient one. A Strawman himself.”

  “Bullshit.” I spit out the word. “One of them would never tell you something like that, except maybe to entertain himself. They don’t help us, Rafette.”

  “Maybe they don’t help you,” he says.

  “When did this miracle meeting happen?” My voice rasps with scorn. “No one in my group has seen a Strawman in years.”

  He turns his face to the sky, which is beginning to sparkle with stars. “It hasn’t been that long. Don’t forget, we beekeepers are almost as ancient as they are.”

  “Whatever,” I snap. “I don’t believe you.”

  “You don’t have to.” He’s so calm, it’s starting to screw with my head. “Your feelings for her make you weak. I can use that.”

  I get to my feet. “What feelings?” I snap, although panic slices through me. “She’s a regular human girl who we happen to be living next door to right now. Nothing special.”

  “A girl you share a history with.” Agitated bees fly from his mouth in disorganized clouds. “And do not insult either of us by denying your feelings for her. I saw you with her just now. Your face reveals your heart and your mind, scavenger. Don’t forget—I’ve been following your feathered group, with little else to do but observe, since before the curse took you. I’ve seen you curled on the ground, sobbing over what you’d been turned into. I’ve seen your intestines splattered across a battlefield. I’ve seen you vomiting up poison you took to find your own true death.”