The Found: A Crow City Novel

by Cole McCade

  LONG AFTER HE’D LEFT, WILLOW curled in the bed with the rosary clutched against her chest. What Priest was doing wasn’t wrong, she tried to tell herself—but no matter how many times she said it, no matter how she contorted her thoughts to try to justify it as noble, honorable, vigilante justice…she couldn’t.

  No man was perfect. Not even with the best training, the finest education, a lifetime of experience. And if there wasn’t a mistake in Priest’s past, there would be one in his future. The odds were stacked against him, and one day he’d make the wrong call and it would bring him down.

  And an innocent would be dead.

  Murdered. Say it. Murdered. That’s what he is. He’s a murderer. Those hands that touch you are a murderer’s hands. The lips that kiss yours are a murderer’s lips. He thinks he’s doing something right and righteous, but he’s delusional. Insane. Strip away the pretty words and the dark stories of each of his victims, and…

  And it’s murder.

  She closed her eyes and ran her thumb over the rosary beads. There was still a chance, if he was bringing the drug runner back here. She’d said she would stay; she didn’t say she would stay out of the way. He’d left her unchained, even if she’d heard him snap the padlock on the door. She could interfere, get in the way, give the man a chance to escape or fight back.

  But he could kill Priest.

  She shuddered.

  Because she didn’t know how she should feel. Logically she knew: she should want Priest dead. For everything he was. For everything he’d done to her.

  But he’d turned logic on its ear, and she couldn’t think straight when he was on her mind.

  Would he kill her, if she interfered? Would he even realize what he was doing, before she was limp and lifeless in a pool of spreading red? Or would it be a conscious, cold-blooded choice, her punishment for defying him?

  Tell me no, he always said.

  But she didn’t think this time he would listen.

  She opened her eyes. The rosary was a blur of brown against her knuckles, so close everything was nothing more than shapes and colors; the beads spilled across the sheets, the carved wooden crucifix nearly vanishing underneath the pillows. She tugged it free and turned it over in her fingers, tracing the angular edges of the cross. It was almost identical to the crucifix on the wall, the details lovingly hand-carved, minute and perfect and exquisitely cared for.

  Biting her lip, she looked over her shoulder at the crucifix, then shifted to roll out of bed, catching herself on her good ankle. Something hung strange and heavy in her heart, something that would hollow her out if she didn’t unburden herself of its weight. And she didn’t know what she was doing, as she limped across the room to the crucifix with a soft whimper in the back of her throat each time she touched the toes of her splinted ankle to the floor enough to push off again. She didn’t know what compelled her. Or why it felt right to kneel naked before the cross, clad only in her skin with the rosary clutched to her chest.

  She looked up at the crucifix on the wall, at the strangely angelic face with its carved wooden eyes both empty and knowing, lifeless and aware. She thought she should say something profound, but she had nothing. Nothing in her mind, nothing in her heart but a deep and aching sense of despair, and a need to find an answer that didn’t end in destruction.

  “I don’t know what to say to you,” she whispered, and jumped at the sound of her own voice in the quiet warehouse. A faint, strained laugh choked past her lips. “I’m not sure if I even believe in you. It’s not something I’ve thought about for a long time. I…I never really decided that one day, you just weren’t there…but day by day I stopped thinking about if you were. And now I don’t even know why I’m talking to you. I don’t know what the hell kind of guidance I think I’ll get from a wooden statue.”

  The carved face of Jesus didn’t move. Didn’t blink, or begin to cry tears of blood or water or some holy ambrosia. He only looked at her, non-judgmental, and yet still something in his painted-on gaze watched, waited, expectant. She lowered her eyes.

  “I guess praying is usually about asking for something, isn’t it? Whether it’s inner peace or for something…something bigger. What I want…I’m not asking for myself. Not me.” She smiled slightly, bitterly, letting her hands fall to her lap; the rosary beads spilled over her legs, and she wondered if it was some kind of poetic irony when the strand fell right between her thighs, desecrated as she was. “Or maybe it is for me. I don’t know. I…I was such a fucking coward, the night Priest killed that first man. I froze. I was only thinking about myself, and if I’d done something…I might have gotten hurt, but maybe I could have stopped Priest from killing him, too. I know he wasn’t a good man. I know he hurt people, killed people…but he could have been anyone. And I would have reacted the same way if he was innocent as if he was a fucking child trafficker, and…” She scrubbed her hand to her nose, sniffled. “I don’t know. Maybe the man Priest is bringing back is guilty, but I can’t…” Her chest seized, heaved, and she glared up at the crucifix. “I can’t keep being a coward. Even if I know he’ll kill me. I’ve accepted that…or I thought I had.”

  Nothing. Not even the ugly voice in her head that liked to call her dirty thing, dirty thing, and she screamed at the effigy, that perfect face that had no right to be so calm.

  “What do you want me to say?” But it didn’t want anything from her. It was just a statue on the wall. She wanted something from herself—as if purging this way could really bring her to some kind of solution, when solutions were hard to come by. Realization, awful and bone-sick, was in much greater supply. “I…I’m going to have to choose this. If I do this…I’m not passively waiting for him to kill me. It’s not all him. It’s me, too. It’s me willingly forcing his hand, and I…” With a hoarse inhalation, she pounded her fist against her thigh. “I don’t know if I can do that. Not even to save someone else’s life, if it even will. He might kill me…then kill him. How am I supposed to do this?”

  The crucifix stared at her with bland indifference. It didn’t care. Nobody cared. Nobody cared, and once she was dead nobody would care then, either. Priest would whip himself until he he’d bled his way into absolution; her father would eventually give up on finding her corpse and be fine with Wally and Maxi to take care of him. She’d be a crumpled photograph fading in everyone’s wallets, and in the end she would amount to what she’d always known she’d been:

  Nothing.

  “What do you want from me?” she screamed, misery clawing through her with a stark shock so fierce it was like grief—as if she was grieving herself when she was still alive, still breathing, only dead inside. “Do you speak to him? Do you want me to whip myself, tear myself apart, bleed for you before you’ll give me something? I…I…”

  She curled forward, bowing over her thighs, pressing her brow to her knees as silent, heaving tears shook up from her bowels and spilled out her eyes, like her heart’s blood spilling over her skin.

  “I just want to find the right answer,” she gasped. “But I don’t know if I’d recognize it if I saw it.”

  A muted grinding sound rose at her back. She jerked upright, uncurling and staring at the door. That was the exterior garage—and there, the sound of the Firebird’s engine. Oh God…oh God, he was back already, which meant either his prey had eluded him or…or…

  Or she was about to find out how much of a coward she truly was.

  She dragged herself upright and limped back to the bed, biting back her cries as pain speared up her leg. Tumbling onto the bed, she scrabbled for the discarded shirt and pulled it on, buttoning it up hastily. It wouldn’t protect her, but at least she wouldn’t be so vulnerable. She pulled her knees up to her chest and watched as the interior door rolled up; a thick, slimy knot clogged her throat, the hideous taste of terror and the fear that she wouldn’t have the courage to do anything but sit here and watch another man die.

  She only wished she’d had the sense to grab one of the whips, a knife—a
nything.

  Priest’s silhouette filled the doorway like the shadow of the grim reaper. Something bulky dangled from his grip, and as he stepped inside with hard, purposeful strides, he tossed that something across the floor. A man. A man with a mop of curly hair that fell into his blindfolded face, his arms bound behind his back, his cries muffled by the rag shoved into his mouth. Willow covered her mouth with both hands. Oh—oh God, he was barely a boy, barely her age, and she thought she recognized him. He looked like the boy who sold flatbread outside The Track, spelling in sometimes for his grandfather, fresh-faced with an easy smile when he rang the bell and called out to pedestrians to stop by, buy a fry, have a lemon drink on a hot day.

  No. No, it couldn’t be him—but once her brain made the connection, that was all she wanted to see. Suddenly he wasn’t a faceless stranger, but just some boy her age who helped his grandfather run his flatbread cart.

  He didn’t deserve to die.

  “Priest,” she whispered, but he ignored her, his gaze locked, fixated on the boy. There was something wild around his eyes, something that made sharp lines around the edges and pulled them a little too wide, a little too stark, and he was breathing too fast. Something was wrong. Something was wrong, that calm mask cracking.

  “Priest.”

  Nothing. But the boy whimpered, struggling and writhing, twisting blindly and turning his head from side to side, before jerking toward the sound of her voice. He screamed against the rag in his mouth, the sound a faint muted cry, but with all the desperation in the world in that muffled noise. The tendons in his throat stood out in severe lines, his face red, tears leaking from under the blindfold, soaking the edges dark and smearing down his face. Priest shoved a booted foot into his back and forced him over, pushing him face-down onto the concrete.

  “Look away,” Priest grit out, his mouth creasing into a terrible line.

  “But—”

  “Look. Away.”

  “I won’t!” Willow pushed herself forward, onto her hands and knees, dragging herself to the foot of the bed. “Are you really going to kill him like that? Trussed up like an animal?”

  “He is an animal!” Priest snarled. His head jerked up. He stared at her, his eyes paled to that strange, acid yellow that made him look like a demon risen from the depths, his humanity swallowed inside his crazed, desperate need. “They’re all animals. All of them! Filth preying on the weak, as if they have the right—”

  “Look at him,” she pleaded. “Does he look strong to you? He’s a boy. Someone probably set him up. Another mule pushed into taking the fall, and you’re going to kill him while he’s crying? Begging?”

  Priest’s upper lip curled. “They always beg. Guilty men plead the same as innocent.”

  She curled her hands against her chest, clutching at the rosary, clutching at the firefly pendant around her neck. “Exactly,” she said, and pleaded with him to understand. “They beg just the same, so how can you tell them apart? How can you tell when you’re killing an animal…and when you’re the animal, preying on the weak?”

  “I am righteous!” His breaths came harder and harder, his chest heaving, his teeth bared, his eyes wild and desperate. The silver glint of steel slid down from his sleeve, the knife falling into his hand; his boot pressed down harder on the boy’s back, and the boy screamed against the rag, his head straining back, his shoulders writhing. “For we know him who said ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay.”

  “But he isn’t the one who hurt you. Whomever hurt you, it wasn’t him. So if you don’t care who you have your revenge on…”

  She forced herself off the bed. Even if her ankle was screaming, even if her entire body was as sick and sore as her heart, she forced herself to stand. To square her shoulders and limp in rhythmic burst of pain across the floor, his eyes on her the entire time, tracking her like a wildcat’s, locked with suspicion. Everything in her wanted to collapse; everything in her quaked with a world-shaking violence, the tectonic plates of terror and fatalism grinding together to rock her with shocks of heat and cold and knee-melting dread. But still she limped forward, and it was with the last ounce of courage left in her soul that she stepped across the boy on the floor, standing over him with her feet flanking his shoulders, Priest’s bent knee almost pressing into her stomach, and that heat she knew both inside and out reaching out for her like the breath from a hunter’s hungry jaws.

  She lifted her chin, looked up into those golden eyes, and told herself she would accept this. No matter what came, she would accept it—and the steadiness of her voice surprised even her as she said,

  “Take your revenge on me.”

  Still as stone. Blank. Only for his eyes to widen, something clicking behind them, and he made a low, harsh sound in the back of his throat.

  “Willow.” Her name was gravel on his tongue, rough and painful. “Willow, step back.”

  She set her jaw, shook her head. “No.”

  “Move or I will move you.”

  “I said no.” She was shaking—shaking so much even the smallest parts of her trembled, as if the world quaked around her and rattled her in the box of her fear. She swallowed, but she wasn’t moving. “And you promised to respect that.”

  He growled, a deep thing that had clawed up from the darkest depths of hell; he leaned closer, towering over her, his shadow blocking the light, his eyes slitted and wild and a touch mad, desperate, lost.

  “What do you want from me?” he demanded hoarsely.

  “For you to stop,” she whispered. “It’s as simple as that. Let. Him. Go. You can’t do this forever. One day it will be one body too many, one kill too far…and someone will cut you down.” She risked reaching for him. Even with that blade in his hand she risked reaching for him, lifting her hands to cradle his face in her palms, framing him, framing those searing golden eyes that sometimes were as empty as she so often felt, looking for the right thing to fill him up and take the place of this awful nothingness. “This isn’t a life, Priest. It’s just pretending to live.”

  He held perfectly still, as if her touch had turned him to stone. “I know the end waiting for me,” he whispered. “Why should you care?”

  She knew what he wanted her to say. The need in those golden eyes, the rawness constantly seeking something to numb the pain. But what he wanted from her, what he needed from her frightened her even more than the blade in his clenched, trembling hand, and she bit her lip, silently pleading with him to let it be.

  “I just…do,” she said. The words came faltering, heavy, broken apart by the strangled cries of the boy beneath them. “Isn’t there anyone left out there who cares if you live or die?”

  “Vaughn. Hart.” He said the names as if they were bitter poison. “But I cut them off.”

  “Did they cut you off?”

  His gaze dropped from hers. Slowly he went lax—and after long moments, there came a clatter: the knife falling from his fingers, tumbling to the concrete floor. “…no.”

  “Because they know you’re more than you think you are.” She leaned into him, resting her brow to his. “I know it, too. Let him go, Priest. Let him go.”

  He lifted haggard eyes to hers. “And if I do not?”

  “Then…” Say it. Say it. “Then you’ll have to hurt me to get to him. Because that’s the only way I’m moving.”

  He jerked back, breaking her hold. She started to reach for him again, but he caught her wrist, stopping her, staring at her with such frustration, such ferocity. “You care for his life so much?”

  “Not just his,” she admitted, the words stitched on her tongue by the needle of her traitor heart.

  Priest stared at her. And she silently begged for him to hear her—to hear her, to take every word into that unfeeling mass of red meat in his chest and let go of that dogged pride. Let go of that stubborn, suicidal determination to keep moving forward on the same path even when it led him off a cliff. Because she understood what this was, now. Understood what he was doing.

&nbs
p; He didn’t know how to stop killing, so he was looking for a way to die.

  He turned away from her, dragging a hand through the fall of his hair. “Do you think I can let him walk away, firefly? Do you think it is so simple?”

  “Keep him blindfolded,” she said. “Take him somewhere. Let him go somewhere far from here, where he can get somewhere safe.”

  The boy cried out again, and this time she could make out words; nothing but long stretches of agonized sound, but she knew those words because she’d begged them so many times herself.

  Please, he cried. Please. I won’t tell. I won’t come back. Listen to her. Please, please, please.

  Please…I don’t want to die.

  Priest pinned her with a look over his shoulder. “That still makes him a liability.”

  “Did he see you?” When Priest didn’t answer, Willow shook her head. “That’s the only reason I’m a liability, isn’t it? I’ve seen you. I know your face. I know your name. All he knows is your voice. If he hasn’t seen your face, hasn’t seen where we are…there’s nothing to trace back, Priest.”

  “What if you are wrong? What if he is exactly who my client claims?”

  “Then let your client do his own dirty work,” she said. “Or take the information to the police. Let them do what they’re supposed to do.” She ran her fingers over the rosary, then uncurled it from her grasp, let it dangle from her fingers, offered it to him. “It doesn’t have to be your weight to carry anymore.”

  Golden eyes fell to the rosary, watched its sway as if hypnotized; for a moment that princely mask cracked, and what lay underneath was racked with such pain it was like seeing his soul bared, laid across every dusky line of his face. “You speak of my duty as if it is a burden,” he whispered raggedly.

  “I watch you beat yourself bloody to atone for the blood you’ve spilled.” She risked a step closer, still keeping her body between Priest and the boy, still willing herself to have the courage to be a shield, a sacrifice, if that inkling of humanity snuffed out and Priest turned on her like the wild beast he was. This moment shivered, a delicate thing like a spider’s web threatening to snap with a breath too much pressure, but still…still she whispered, “You know this is wrong just as much as I do.”