Cleaner of Bones

by Kassel, Meg

  “What are you kids doing out here?” he asks.

  I lean over and give the officer a polite nod. “Just talking, sir.”

  “Uh-huh.” He’s heard that one before. “Windows are steamed up. You two aware this is a public parking lot?”

  “Yes, sir,” Angie says with a nervous little laugh that makes the officer’s eyes narrow again. She’s acting twitchy and anxious, and neither of those things is helping our cause with this guy. If she keeps this up, he’s going to suspect we’re up to no good in here. This evening would end better without having adults called. “We were just about to head home,” she says in a high-pitched voice.

  “And where’s that?” he asks.

  “Mount Franklin Estates,” I supply, trying to sound firm and levelheaded enough to conclude this interview. “It’s a little after seven p.m. Have we violated any laws?”

  He mutters something I can’t catch and waves toward the road. “Get going, then. Do your ‘talking’ at home. And be careful,” he warns. “The drunks are out tonight.”

  “Yes, sir. We’re going,” Angie says, fumbling for the key. “And thank you.”

  She puts the car in drive and pulls away, eyes working between the road and the rearview mirror. She bites her lip, clearly worried that the policeman will follow us. It’s not surprising that Angie’s history with her mother makes her sensitive to law enforcement. She must have felt tremendous conflict as a child, between knowing her mom’s drug use violated the law and also wanting to protect the parent who cared for her. I look out the window to give her a few moments to relax. I don’t want her to get us in an accident.

  She clears her throat. “You were saying you came out to The Dredge because you knew someone was going to die?”

  I sigh, feeling exhaustion weigh down my limbs. The momentary hit of death energy from earlier tonight has faded. The conflicting emotions tearing up the space inside my head are growing unbearable. “Yes,” I reply. “My kind are drawn to death, but you already know that.” I send her a quick, sharp look. “Just ask me already. Get it over with.”

  There’s a pause, then: “You’re a…harbinger of death?” she asks.

  I nod slowly, unsurprised her guess is dead on. There. It’s done. I can’t take it back now. I imagine, after all the clues I’ve unwisely dropped, whatever Rafette said to her behind the Strip Mall, it wasn’t a stretch that she’d figure it out.

  I remind myself to exhale, to stay cool, to let her work out whatever she needs to in her head. I watch her from the corners of my eyes. She holds my gaze for a moment and swallows hard. Her gaze slides away, darting all over the road. Maybe we shouldn’t be having this conversation while she’s driving.

  “It’s my fault the beekeeper noticed you,” I say when the silence stretches long and tight. “Did he have all the faces when you saw him at the bus stop?”

  “I thought I was imagining it.”

  “Hmm,” I say. At least she’s not acting upset. “That’s interesting. It’s unusual for a normal human to see a beekeeper’s true face.”

  “What do they usually see?”

  I take a breath and a long look at her. So far, so good. She’s asking questions but seems rational enough. My sanity isn’t being questioned. She’s not ordering me out of the car. Yet.

  “They see a man so perfectly generic, so unremarkable, he’s essentially invisible,” I reply.

  “Only guys?” she asks.

  “I don’t know the full story on them. They were prisoners or something, but yes. All the beekeepers I’ve ever seen or heard about are male.”

  “Why is that beekeeper watching me?”

  That is a good question. One I don’t plan to answer. I’m keeping entirely too many secrets from this girl, considering all she’s seen and heard. I won’t be here long enough for anything I answer—or don’t—to matter. “He’s watching a lot of people. Try not to worry. We are also watching you.” I regret that last bit the instant it exits my mouth.

  “Who’s ‘we’?” she pounces. “The crows?”

  “Yes,” I sigh again.

  “Are you seriously telling me you’re a crow?” She bites her full bottom lip again. “How does that even work?”

  “Like I said, it’s complicated.” I look away from her. I need to stop thinking about this girl’s mouth. “I don’t even fully know how it works. You’d have to ask those who cursed us. Unfortunately, they’ve been dead for a thousand years.”

  “A thousand years?”

  I shrug. “Give or take.”

  “I can’t believe this. You’re not a one-thousand-year-old crow.”

  “No way, I’m much younger.” My pride kicks in enough to feel relief in refuting that. Technically, I am a teenage boy. That’s one aspect of our lives that is the same. “But the magic that made me this way is that old.”

  “Oh, sure.” Her voice careens to a high octave. “Magic.”

  She doesn’t like that word. I don’t like the way her voice sounds when she says it. She isn’t laughing yet, but the edge of disbelief is there, at the edges. Perhaps I have finally reached the threshold of what Angie can take. It shouldn’t bother me. It’s not like I’d ever have a relationship with her, anyway. Anything we had would have been a temporary thing.

  “Hey, you asked.” My voice has an edge, and I wish it didn’t.

  It shouldn’t bother me.

  To my distress, she eases the car to the shoulder at the entrance to our neighborhood and puts it in park. I know she’s not parking us here to make out, and I’m nearing the end of my comfort level with discussing the nuts and bolts of harbingers of death and beekeepers. There are things I just can’t tell her without consulting with my group. I don’t know all the rules, but I do know that breaking them has consequences. My friend, Hank, for example. And Strawmen don’t care if you know you screwed up, just if you did.

  “I have more questions,” she says.

  Of course she does. Her barrage of them is wearing me out. “I’ve told you everything I can, which is already more than I should have.”

  “You can’t just drop magic crows in my lap and leave it at that.”

  “I just did.” I shift in my seat, suddenly eager to be out of this car. Away from her. Away from her inevitable rejection. “Angie, I answered the questions relevant to your safety. The rest is curiosity, and I’m sorry, but I can’t indulge it. I have more than just my own selfish wants to consider.”

  “I’m going to keep following you until you answer me.”

  My gut clenches at her words. “I strongly advise against that. Go home. Make music. Study for the trig test tomorrow. Be a normal teenager.” I have no doubt she’ll do exactly what she says. Next time, the situation might be more dangerous than a crashed car. I might not be able to keep her safe. “This isn’t how I wanted things to go with us, Angie. I wanted…” I shake my head. “Forget it.”

  “No. Don’t do this.” Her voice is urgent and harsh and unbearably sweet. I find myself caught in her gaze, and there isn’t a speck of disdain or disbelief or pity. She believes me. She’s not rejecting any of it.

  Her lips part, and my gaze drops to them. I want to kiss her so badly. It’s all I want to do. I move toward her without intending to, and suddenly our faces are close. My mouth is inches from hers. It’s been so long since I’ve felt like this. Since I’ve wanted…anything, really. I can see the smudged liner around her eyes. I can feel her quick breath on my cheek. The air all but snaps with a current that locks us both in place. She’s staring at me with eyes all wide, full of surprise and wonder and, yes—wanting. It’s there, mixed with uncertainty. If I kissed her now, she’d kiss me back. The urge to close those few inches is almost as powerful as the curse pulling me toward death.

  But she doesn’t yet know that we have no future. No chance. That I will be leaving her, whether I want to or not. I can’t kiss her until she has no illusions about that. At least, I shouldn’t. It takes all my willpower to place a hand on the dashboard and
push myself backward. With a hiss, I tuck my injured hand against my body. Ah, I forgot I tried to break it on Rafette’s face.

  Angie’s brow creases. “Hey, are you hurt?”

  She reaches for me, but I shift away. I can’t bear her touch right now. Every nerve ending in my body is uniquely tuned to her. It’s taking all I’ve got to not be drawn in by those soft, moist lips. To not get lost in her eyes, which are looking at me with a yearning certainly mirrored in my own.

  “No. I’m fine,” I say roughly.

  “Reece—”

  “No. No. I have to go.” I really do. I’m swimming in a stew of uncertainty, self-recrimination, and my own miserable hormones. I really dislike being a teenager. “Don’t follow me again, Angie. Death is never far behind me. I don’t want it to catch you.”

  Oh man, did I just say that? Those have to be the corniest words I’ve ever uttered, but I mean them. I slam the door and run straight for the nearest dark, wooded area. The instant I’m sure I’m out of sight, I invite the change to bird form. I push the dark magic to uncoil from within, rushing the transformation from boy to crow. It’s not something I usually welcome, but today, I’m desperate to be out of my own skin. To be a thing Angie has no power over.

  As soon as it’s done, I leap into the air. My clothes and phone lie in a puddled heap on the forest floor. I’ll retrieve them later. The air is cold, but as a bird, I can’t feel it. There is wind, but I angle with it, swooping over the rooftops of this quiet, dignified neighborhood. Her car moves slowly up the hill toward her house. It’s freeing, watching her from above. Up here, there are no questions I shouldn’t answer. No longing looks that draw me as powerfully as any curse. She pulls her car into the driveway, and I fly low, close enough to her windshield that she can see me. Brooke always tells me I have a dramatic streak. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I’m just a lovesick fool.

  Angie may not like talking about magic, but my life is bound to it in a way that will never let me be more than a brief memory to her. The truth is, I will likely hurt her. If I allow this thing with her to go anywhere, I will certainly hurt myself.

  Confession

  No one blinks an eye when I walk through the back door into the kitchen without a stitch of clothes on. The cold does hurt in human form, and those brief moments on the back porch after I changed back to myself leave me with a shuddering chill.

  Six-year-old Fiona stands at the open refrigerator. She wears a pink nightgown and still has all those little barrettes in her thick black hair from when I left earlier. She reaches up to pull out the gallon of milk, and I catch a glimpse of her harbinger mark—the three narrow scars we all bear somewhere—marring the dark brown skin of her shoulder. Mine are on the palm of my hand. I once saw a harbinger with the marks on his cheek.

  Brooke, who is twenty-one and attending the local community college, sits on a kitchen chair, one bare foot braced up on the table. Her long blond hair sits on top of her head in a messy bun. She’s painting her toenails. They both look up and stare at me but not because of my nudity. We don’t keep our clothes when we change from crow to human, so all of us have seen each other naked more times than we can count. You become desensitized pretty quickly.

  “Where did you leave your clothes?” she asks.

  My hands shake as I take a glass from the cabinet. My emotions are a tumultuous mess, and I’m certain it’s showing. I don’t have Paxton’s poker face. I’ve never seen the man die with more than a grimace, and I’ve seen him endure some gruesome deaths.

  “In the woods,” I reply. “I’ll get them tomorrow.”

  She purses her lips. “Better get them tonight. Before someone finds your identification and phone.”

  “Fine.” We’ve perfected the art of appearing typical. Abandoning an entire set of clothes in the woods plus phone and ID would appear strange, which could invite scrutiny. We don’t like scrutiny. I pour a glass of water and gulp it down. “I’ll do it. Later.”

  Fiona raises one eyebrow but says nothing more.

  “You found a dead burner,” Brooke speaks up, turning her attention back to her toes. “Was it a suicide? Drug overdose?”

  “Drunk rolled his car off the highway,” I mumble. The burner she refers to is our irreverent term for all the people in the world who are not afflicted with a supernatural curse. Those whose lives are done when their light “burns” out. So, most everybody. Even though it was only one death, Brooke can smell it. She’s not terribly perceptive when it comes to emotions, but she knows when one of us has lingered near a corpse.

  Fiona, on the other hand, is exceptionally perceptive when it comes to others’ emotions. I can feel her staring at me, glass of milk in hand, and I don’t meet her gaze.

  Brooke sniffs. “I like cities better. You can find dying burners on a daily basis. Better than starving for months on end.”

  “A few burners here and there won’t sustain us. You know that,” Fiona says.

  “There are harbingers of death who work in hospitals. They’re sustained just fine,” she says. “We’ve just become addicted to the big hits.”

  Big hits, like the large-scale catastrophe bearing down on Cadence. That’s the type she craves more than anything. I rub my temples. All right, fine. I crave them, too. My head throbs with an ever-tightening tension. “Those harbingers are singles who don’t belong to a group.” My voice goes sharp. “If you want to do that, go ahead.”

  “Reece, what happened tonight?” Fiona asks. Her little girl voice doesn’t match the serious, mature tone of her words. It would unnerve a normal person, but we recall our entire tenure as harbingers of death—each horror-filled lifetime from death to rebirth as a crow and then back to a child. We cycle over and over without end, rarely reaching old age. Seeking out mass death does not make for a long life. Fiona has been a harbinger of death longer than me. We all have the minds of adults—damaged adults, thanks to what we’ve seen and endured—but we behave in public according to the age we appear. Fiona is a grown woman in a child’s body. In the privacy of our own space, we can be who we are.

  I give her a level look. “I’d rather not discuss it.”

  “Hmm. So formal.” Fiona takes a sip of milk. “This should be interesting.”

  “Something going on, Reece?” Brooke pauses her toenail painting mid stroke. The bottle on the table is a virulent shade of purple. “Wait. Does this have anything to do with that burner you’re obsessed with?”

  I set my glass down with a thunk. There will be no dodging where this is going. This talk is necessary, anyway, since I violated house rules by discussing the curse with Angie.

  Footsteps clump up the basement stairs, and Lucia emerges with a basket of clean, fragrant laundry. “You know it’s winter, right?” She takes a pair of sweatpants—not mine—off the top of the pile and tosses it to me. Lucia takes the role of “mom” very seriously when it’s her turn. “Put something on. I won’t have you catching your death by sickness, Reece.” She rolls her eyes. “Of all the ways to go.”

  I sigh and pull on the purple sweats. Brooke makes a sour face. “Well. I’m never wearing those again.”

  “What’s with you?” I ask, genuinely perplexed. Brooke is usually easy enough to get along with, but tonight, she’s downright snappish.

  “I’d like to ask you the same,” she says. “You got defensive when Fiona asked you about that burner. Wanna tell us why?”

  I scowl at her. “Stop calling Angie a burner.”

  “Why?” she counters, raising one carefully plucked eyebrow. “It’s what she is, Reece. Maybe you need some reminding of that.”

  “Angie?” Lucia cuts in. “Reece, isn’t that the neighbor girl? The one you, um…like?”

  No one knows how to describe my interest in Angie, least of all me. “Yes,” I say through my teeth. “Her.”

  Lucia puts the basket down on the floor. “Do you have something you need to tell us, Reece?”

  I sigh. “Better get everyone together. I don’t wan
t to have this discussion twice.”

  “This is everyone,” Lucia replies. “Jean, Paxton, and James have all gone flying with the others. Whatever you need to say, there’s a majority here.”

  “The others” she refers to are the members of our group stuck in crow form. Over half of our thirteen-member group died in a commuter train pile-up at the last marked place we visited. The rest of us—luckily—chose seats in different cars. They won’t be able to regain human form for at least a few months and possibly a few years. It’s different for everyone. Either way, we’ll have a whole slew of kids to deal with at some point.

  “Fine. Okay.” I take a deep breath. “I caught the scent of a burner set to expire this evening and followed it. The problem is Angie followed me.”

  “What did she see?” Brooke asks, eyes sharp.

  “Too much,” I reply gruffly.

  Lucia winces. “That was very irresponsible of you, Reece.”

  “I’m aware.” I pull out a chair and sit down at the table. “It gets a little more complicated. A few days ago, she had an encounter with Rafette at the dance club where she works. He manhandled her some. I broke it up, but she saw him. Really saw him.”

  “She saw his faces?” Fiona asks. “How is that possible?”

  “I don’t know, but she figured out I’m not exactly who I appear to be, either.” Which is entirely my own fault, but they don’t need to know the extent of it.

  “And you’re just telling us this now?” Brooke asks with a frown.

  “Yeah. I’m telling you now.” I fold my arms. “I wasn’t planning on telling you at all. I wasn’t expecting Angie to see…” I cut myself off with a hard exhale. “What she saw.”

  Fiona smiles faintly. Her opinions are hard to ferret out, and this time is no exception. She told me once how she likes me the best of the members of our group. One of the reasons was because she and I were the only ones who didn’t die—we were killed, unjustly to boot. She didn’t elaborate, but it was clear the distinction held meaning to her. Her opinion, whatever it is—if she even has one—is important to me. “What do you want to do about her?” she asks me.