Shades of Night (Sparrow Falls Book 1)

by Justine Sebastian

  “Hmm. Where are you, Daisy?” she said, mindful to keep her voice low.

  Turning back around, her gaze lit on the old barn. There were holes in the roof from a hurricane, but it was still sturdy enough that Mommy and Daddy didn’t mind if LaAsla played in there. She liked pretending it was her very own mansion and all of the old empty stalls were the rooms. She hoped when they got the roof fixed that they would let her have it as a playhouse, but kind of also thought that wouldn’t happen. When Mommy said, We’ll see, that usually meant the answer was no, she just didn’t want to say so for some weird grown-up reason.

  LaAsla headed toward the old barn and the closer she got, the better she could see. The door was cracked open a few feet and that made her cover her mouth against a laugh. She bet Daisy was in there hiding in one of the old stalls or something. She crept inside the barn then stopped right inside the doorway. The barn was different at night, waterfalls of silver light falling through the holes in the ceiling left spotlights of illumination on the floor and pools of even deeper shadow around them. The smell was wetter, moldier; it didn’t smell like sunshine and dust anymore to her. In the darkness to her left, something rustled through the dry leaf litter and made her jump.

  “Daisy?” LaAsla said as she took a halting step forward. “Daisy, are you in here?”

  Something farther back in the barn moved; another of those furtive rustling sounds. It was too slithery and weird to be Daisy; he would bump into something or chuff or pant to let her know where he was. She didn’t know what those sounds were, but she pictured snakes and rats or even a bad person, one who was trying to be quiet but was bad at it. LaAsla’s dark eyes got wider though she told herself to be brave. Daisy would protect her if there was anything bad in the barn, but if there wasn’t anything bad then she was just being a scaredy cat. If she gave up and ran away then Daisy would win this round and next time, LaAsla would have to be “it” again and she wanted to hide instead.

  She took another step forward, stuffing her cold hands in the pocket of her pale purple puffy coat. “Daisy?” she whispered as she crept forward on the balls of her feet.

  Something big flew into the barn through one of the holes, wings flapping loudly in the soft silence just as something poked her gently between the shoulders. LaAsla screamed bloody murder and turned around to beat at it with her tiny fists. It yelped and growled at her, white teeth flashing in the dark as it snapped at the thing that had startled it so badly.

  Big fangs tore through her tiny arm and the back of her hand. LaAsla fell down, crying and screaming as Daisy rose up from the shadows he had been lurking in. LaAsla cradled her arm and sobbed as he came closer and nosed her.

  “You’re bad, Daisy!” she screamed. Then, “Mommy! Mommy, help me!”

  Daisy whined and paced away a couple of steps then came back to her, sniffing at her curiously. LaAsla slapped the end of his snout and he yelped but didn’t try to bite again. Instead, he took her by the front of her coat and pulled her upright, which scared her worse, caused her to loose her loudest shrieking scream yet.

  “MO-OOO-OOOO-MMMM-YYYYY!” LaAsla screamed. Her arm hurt really bad and she was so afraid, not really of Daisy, he hadn’t meant to hurt her and she knew that, but her arm hurt so bad.

  “I wanna go home, Daisy,” she said. Speaking it aloud only made her cry harder and when Daisy picked her up in his big, furry arms, LaAsla sobbed against his shoulder.

  He moved quicker than the night as he ran with her back toward the house. She wailed against his big shoulder and when he stopped, she looked up. Daddy was standing outside with his big flashlight, pinning Daisy and LaAsla in the beam. She could see him in the light thrown back from the glow of it, his dark skin gone ashen with fear, his eyes big and wet. He had his gun, the one he liked to joke around with them about and call his “shoot pistol”.

  “Daddy!” LaAsla cried, waving her bloody arms at him.

  Daisy laid her down on the ground by Goliath’s hutch and made a grumbling noise. LaAsla tried to stand, but he pushed her back down. She didn’t understand why, but then she saw Daddy had his gun raised and pointed at Daisy.

  “’Asla, baby!” Mommy cried as she pelted out of the house toward them, a baseball bat in her hand. Daddy tried to grab her and LaAsla tried to tell her no, but her head felt fuzzy and she was scared and hurting. She just wanted all the bad things to be over.

  “Mama, Daddy, what’s—”

  Somewhere closer to the house, DeShaunda screamed. Mama’s step faltered and she stumbled, going to one knee. Daddy fired the gun in his hand when Mommy toppled out of his line of fire.

  Daisy made the most horrible sound LaAsla had ever heard in her life. It was so bad she forgot about her arm and covered her ears instead as all hell broke loose.

  LaAsla closed her eyes and curled herself up into a little ball, crying so hard she almost couldn’t hear the way Mommy and Daddy screamed or the way their bones sounded when Daisy bit through them.

  12

  Nick drove home with his high beams on and the driver’s side window cracked to let the cold night air in. He liked having fresh air on his face again after so long. He sat in the driveway while he waited to make sure Nancy got inside all right. When she flicked the porch light on-off-on-off to let him know all was well, it gave the illusion of the claw marks in the front door growing and swelling then disappearing again. He gave a quick tap of his horn before carrying on his way down the bumpy little lane that would lead him home.

  The first thing he saw when he pulled up to the trailer was the vintage bicycle leaning against the porch railing. It was painted in gradient shades of blue that went from misty, almost grey, to crushed velvet midnight. The entire frame was dusted with bright silver stars that winked back at Nick in the glow of his headlights. The second thing he noticed was the man asleep in one of the chairs on the porch, hoodie pulled up over his head, hands in his pockets, feet splayed out in a V in front of him. Another couple of inches and he’d hit the porch. Hylas Dunwalton had come a-calling—and dozed off while waiting. It was colder than a witch’s tit in a brass bra and there was some bloodthirsty whackjob roaming the area. So of course Hylas’s narcolepsy would decide that was the perfect time for some shut-eye.

  “Damnit,” Nick said as he killed the truck and got out. He went up the steps two at a time and crossed the porch to shake Hylas.

  Hylas made a soft muttering sound and Nick shook him again. “Hmm?” Hylas rolled his head up and blinked his eyes open. They were deep water blue, the kind of blue that Nick associated with dreams and calmness. He had the same black hair as Tobias did, but his seemed softer somehow, gentler; it begged to be touched if only to brush it out of Hylas’s eyes where it fell all the time and he was happy to leave it. Hylas smiled up at Nick when he finally woke up enough to recognize him.

  “Greetings, my delicate little flower,” Hylas said in a terrible French accent. “I have been awaiting your return.”

  Nick coughed out a laugh and smiled at him. “So you decided the best place to wait was on my porch. Asleep.”

  “The sleep was not really my fault, though it was kind of a lengthy wait,” Hylas said as he scooted up in his chair better lest he end up on his ass on Nick’s fine nice porch. That would never do. He held up a finger. “However, given the length of said wait, a nap really wasn’t inappropriate.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  Hylas shrugged. “One hour, maybe two or three. Who can really say?”

  Nick was well acquainted with Hylas’s lack of a concept of time; Tobias also had it though he managed to be punctual anyway. It was odd; it was like Tobias showed up at the right place, at the right time without really meaning to.

  Nick held his hand down for Hylas to take and helped pull him up. “I know you heard about Hunter and all the other weird shit around here lately. What if something had happened to you, Hylas? Do you want to be ripped apart by a psychotic killer?”

  “Dude, nobody wants that,
” Hylas said. He wrinkled his nose. “That’s awful. Don’t be so negative, Nicky.”

  “I’ll try,” Nick said as he opened the door and stepped inside. “You want a beer?”

  “Sure,” Hylas said. “You wanna smoke a bowl?”

  “I would love to,” Nick said. “But I can’t. I have a job now that requires me to piss in a cup.”

  “Damn, that’s true.” Hylas flopped down on Nick’s couch and looked around. “Nick Lange goes straight. You know what this means, right?”

  “What?”

  “The world has well and truly gone mad.”

  “It’s weird, I know,” Nick said.

  There was a time when he lacked the capacity to just say no. Hell, he hadn’t ever wanted to say no; he’d sought out oblivion and oblivion had never let him down.

  Nick brought Hylas a beer and sat down next to him. Hylas was comforting to be around, cozy and warm; soothing. He was the kind of guy you were happy to see. Nick relaxed and leaned his head back against the sofa cushions behind him. “How’ve you been, Hylas?”

  “Superb,” Hylas said as he packed the bowl of his little blue blown glass pipe. He yawned. “Doing the journalism thing, taking the pictures, editing some of the columns.”

  Nick had noticed that Hylas’s name was all over the pages of The Era Leader. For someone with severe narcolepsy, Hylas sure as hell got a lot of things done.

  “How’d you land such a sweet deal?”

  “Easy.” Hylas got up, went to the window on the far side of the living room and opened it. “No one else wanted to do it. The paper is understaffed like you would not believe, so I came in, hired on as a part-part-time staff photographer a few years back. Really putting my degree in journalism to good use, you know. Then I began to wheedle my way into everything like a journalistic ninja until bam, six years later, I’m practically running the joint.”

  “Good for you, man,” Nick said. Hylas had always wanted to run the paper; the plethora of typos had driven him nuts when they were younger. Now it seemed like he was doing that and Nick was glad to see that at least one of them really was living the dream.

  He watched Hylas spark the bowl and desperately wished for a pull before he shoved the thought away. Nick had a real job, an honest job (part-time prostitution notwithstanding) and he meant to keep it. He wanted more than anything to leave that old life behind—that old Nick, the Nick who wound up face down, ass up on dirty mattresses being fucked halfway-to-bloody by little Chihuahua men who needed an ego boost. Nick was a big guy; they were not big men, so they used him to make themselves feel that way. That was when his habit had been getting really nasty, when he had been turning into a common ditch-weed whore. That was not a person Nick wanted to know or be any longer.

  Hylas took a long draw from the pipe and was just exhaling a cloud of fragrant smoke when the screaming began outside. A moment later there was a thump on the front porch and the screaming became louder. Nick almost screamed himself and Hylas did, throwing his arms out to the sides so violently that he lost his grip on the pipe and flung it across the room.

  “What the hell?” Hylas yelled as he clamped his hands over his ears. “Make it stop, make it stop.”

  Nick stood up, a shudder running all the way through him. He knew it was a rabbit; it was the kind of noise you never forgot. The screaming was shrill and ongoing; Hylas was hunched over, horrified at the racket and Nick understood precisely how he felt.

  There was only one thing he could do; open the front door and make the screaming stop. It made him sick to think about it, but he crossed the distance to the door, unlocked it and yanked it open. He reeled backward at the sight which greeted him in the pale dawn light, one hand going to cover his mouth. He hadn’t expected anything good because nothing screamed like that out of joy. There was a fuzzy grey dwarf lop-eared rabbit on his front porch, screaming its poor little heart out as it dragged itself around in clumsy circles. Blood spewed the porch boards from the stumps that had been its back legs. It was fat and cute and dying a horrible death.

  Nick retched and stumbled around to go into the utility room where he had a small toolbox. He fumbled it open and listened to the rabbit screaming, each shrill, agonized sound like cold shocks through his body. Hylas yelled, “Nick! Nick, please!”

  Nick looked down the hallway in time to see Hylas edge closer to the open front door. “Hylas—”

  “Motherfucker.” Hylas took one hand away from his ear to cover his mouth instead as he turned to look at Nick with wide, wet eyes. “Why?” he asked, voice muffled behind his cupped palm.

  “I don’t fucking know,” Nick said as he came back down the hall with his ball-peen hammer in hand.

  He was angry about the poor rabbit on his porch miserably bleeding to death. Even if it didn’t bleed to death, having no back legs guaranteed the rabbit would have an awful quality of life. When he had been a little boy, Nick had a pink-eyed albino rabbit named Bunny-Hop. The big white rabbit had gotten out of his hutch somehow and the neighbor’s beagle had caught Bunny-Hop. The dog had broken the rabbit’s back. Nick had woken to the sound of his rabbit screaming that bright summer morning.

  Twenty-plus years later on a watery winter dawn, Nick knelt beside the mangled dwarf bunny and placed his left hand between its quivering shoulders. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Nick whispered to the little rabbit. Then just like his dad had done for Bunny-Hop all those long years before, he brought the hammer down on its head to end its suffering.

  “Jesus Christ!” Hylas screamed from the doorway when Nick bashed the rabbit’s skull. In the sudden hush, his voice boomed.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” Nick kept repeating as the rabbit gave one last jerk beneath his restraining hand.

  Strings of meat and gristle, clotted with dirt and porch filth, left by what was left of the rabbit’s hind legs. Nick didn’t want to see the mess, but he couldn’t help it; he could smell the raw tang of rabbit flesh and the copper stink of its blood. He couldn’t look away from the way the skin on its side was torn in a flap near where its rear leg had been. The rabbit’s legs had been torn off.

  Hylas came to stand in the doorway, big blue eyes glossy with horrified tears. “Aw, hell,” he said. “Who would do something like this, man?”

  He made a gah sound and looked down. His pipe lay on the floor a little way from where he stood and Hylas went to retrieve it. It wasn’t broken and once he had established that, he wasted no time packing another bowl. The previous bowl’s contents were lost in the pile of Nick’s carpet and that was a bummer, but there was no use crying over spilled marijuana.

  Still staring at the rabbit, Nick shrugged and made a helpless sound in the back of his throat.

  “You just got back, Nick,” Hylas said. “Who the hell have you pissed off that badly? Because dude, that rabbit is all fucked up. Poor rabbit. Oh, God.”

  “I… nobody,” Nick said. “I’ve haven’t done anything.” Except for Wes.

  Wes wasn’t a thing though, nor did Wes seem to have any complaints whatsoever about Nick doing him. Nick had been (mostly) behaving himself and he hadn’t crossed anyone. Except Crash. Crash wasn’t wild about Nick turning him down, but then he thought about that, too: Crash had no idea where he lived. There was only one way out to Anna Duff Road and Crash would have had to follow Nick not only that far, but down the long drive, through the yard around Nancy’s place all the way back into the woods where his trailer sat.

  “We should call the cops, Nick,” Hylas said. “Call the cops and tell them some evil animal murdering piece of shit is out here hurling bunny bombs at your house.”

  “No,” Nick said as he stood up. He went inside to grab a dish towel to throw over the pitiful little corpse. “Hell no,” he said when Hylas opened his mouth to protest. “You’re high as a damn kite, there’s pot all over my living room now, not to mention the paraphernalia you’ve got on you. I’m an ex-con and a part-time whore; there’s that, too. The cops around here used to know me and
I’m sure some of them still remember—including your dad, the sheriff. So, let’s not do that. Okay?”

  “Whoa,” Hylas said, blinking at Nick. “You’re doing that shit again?”

  “Hylas,” Nick said. He took him gently by the shoulders. “Focus.”

  “Yeah, I’m focused,” Hylas said. He blinked some more and yawned. “Totally focused. But… Nick… Really? I mean, what is that even like? You never would tell me.”

  “I’m not going to tell you now either,” Nick said. He lightly tapped Hylas on top of his head. “And you’re still not focusing. So let’s try this again: No cops, got it?”

  “I got it,” Hylas said. “Though I doubt Dad would be too mad about it, you know.” Nick glared at him and Hylas held up his hands. “All right, Nicky, all right. You make good sense… mostly.”

  “I try really hard these days.”

  “Well, hey, good job, man,” Hylas said with a smile.

  He hugged Nick and Nick laughed despite himself. He hugged Hylas back and let himself stand there for a minute with his eyes closed. Hylas gave the best hugs; they were genuinely soothing and comforting. They made Nick want to take long naps and forget his worries for a little while. He always suspected part of that might have been caused by mild contact highs sustained after prolonged exposure to Hylas’s pot-loving ways.

  It was with regret that Nick disentangled himself from Hylas to go drape the towel over the rabbit. He couldn’t just leave it or the blood there. He would bury the rabbit then scrub out the bloodstains as best he could. He had a shovel he had borrowed from Nancy the week before leaning against the end of the trailer. There was a hole he hadn’t yet filled in a few feet from it where he’d dug up a couple of spindly young pine saplings that had been growing too close to his house.

  The burial was unceremonious: Nick wrapped the rabbit in its impromptu shroud snugly and dropped it in. Hylas stood beside him with his arms crossed, hands tucked under his arms as he looked down at the sad bundle in the white-and-blue gingham dish towel. Big flowers of red had soaked through it in places and Nick grimaced as he remembered the meat and gristle dangling from the rabbit; the jutting splinters of bone on one side, the blood-filled socket where the leg had been yanked right out of the joint on the other.