Shades of Night (Sparrow Falls Book 1)

by Justine Sebastian

  He took his cart back to the custodial station then clocked out for his lunch. Walking through the ER that time of night during the week was eerie as hell because it was so quiet. On the weekends it was bedlam until at least three o’clock, but during the week it was relatively calm, no squirting arteries or bones jutting out at strange angles, no faces rearranged into messy abstract art. Nick hated having to clean up the ER on the weekends because not only did he see the aftermath of horrible things, he got to see them in progress, up close and personal, hemorrhaging and screaming.

  Janitorial work still paid better than working in a gas station and even though he still had his looks, they wouldn’t last forever. Even if they didn’t go all to hell on him, the simple fact remained that Nick was getting too goddamn old to keep whoring himself. Thinking about it made a rabbit of panic skitter through his insides as he walked across the parking lot toward his truck, already lighting a cigarette. He had no other marketable skills, so he had to hope he kept his job at the hospital because he had nothing else to fall back on.

  Thinking about all of that was still easier than thinking about Wes and the big red stain spreading across the gauze that covered his back like a Kool-Aid Rorschach blot. It was a werewolf. He had sounded so damn certain about it that it hurt Nick a little. He didn’t want Wes to have to deal with some kind of delusional disorder after what had happened to him. Nancy had mentioned he would likely have nerve damage. A broken brain on top of that would be extra cruel and Wes was too nice of a guy to deserve being dealt such a shitty hand.

  He lit another cigarette and stared into the darkness at the edge of the well-lit parking lot. He could make out the faded sign of Margie’s Florist across the way; the dark green letters picked out by the cheerful twinkle of the poinsettia Christmas decorations hanging from every light pole in town. His lunch sat in a sack by his hip, but Nick wasn’t hungry, he was too preoccupied with Wes, with thoughts about what his body looked like beneath all the gauze. He remembered LaAsla Washington’s rabbit screaming on his porch, how its legs had been ripped off. He remembered the entire family slaughtered; Hunter dead only a few days before them.

  Wes said it wasn’t over and Wes was a lot of things, but dumb was not one of them. Nick knew he was right; Wes had gotten away, but he had to wonder if the next person would be so lucky. Anyone that could slaughter a family then wander out into the world to harass another unsuspecting motherfucker and all before sunup was single-minded if nothing else. Determined to cause as much misery and bloodshed as possible.

  No, Nick definitely did not have any appetite left whatsoever.

  “I’ve been thinking we got off on the wrong foot.”

  “Fuck!” Nick jumped, coming off the tailgate and stumbling over the lip of the parking lot as he turned around.

  Crash leaned against the side of the truck, looking abashed and even a touch humble. He smiled at Nick’s startled expression though and covered his mouth to try and hide it a second too late. Nick had no idea how long Crash had been standing there watching him. The guy was spooky quiet and just the kind of fucking weirdo to stand around staring at a person without speaking to them right off. Nick didn’t know Crash well, but he knew Crash’s type too well.

  Nick had seen him a few times since the night Tobias interfered with him getting too hands-on with Nick—and getting his nice, white teeth knocked down his throat. Nick avoided him though; he crossed the hall or went down a different corridor to get away from him. Crash was not someone he was overly keen on having a sit-down conversation with. Or any kind of conversation with, actually.

  “What do you want?” Nick said.

  “A second chance at making your acquaintance,” Crash said. He spread his hands wide and smiled again, sheepish that time. “I have terrible social skills, as I’ve mentioned, but that doesn’t excuse some of my behavior.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Truly,” Crash said. “A thousand apologies to you, Nick. I’ve been a real cad.”

  Nick waited for him to add, and that’s just not rad. He didn’t, which was nice, but Nick still didn’t know what to say.

  “So you stalked me out here to apologize,” Nick said.

  “I didn’t stalk you,” Crash said. “I saw you crossing the parking lot and decided I should come out and say ‘how-do’.”

  “And how long did you stand there and watch me?”

  “Don’t you wish you knew.” Crash’s smile was the one Nick knew better, the odd one with too many teeth. It was the one that twisted across his face after taking a bite out of Nick’s name.

  “There you go,” Nick said. He pointed at Crash. “That’s the you I know.”

  “Oh, please, Nick,” Crash said. “I didn’t mean it. I don’t mean it. Honestly, I don’t. It was only a joke. Imagine if the only people you ever really saw were dead people. It’s lonely down there and frankly, the isolation does weird things to the mind after a fashion. I’m trying here.”

  “Yeah, I see that,” Nick said, not sure if he saw any such thing. “There’s still the question of why you’re trying here. What the hell do you want with me, Crash?”

  “I want to be your friend,” Crash said with a smile. “I’ve told you that as well. Have you forgotten?”

  “God, no,” Nick said. “You want to fuck me, too, I also remember that.”

  “Well.” Crash pressed his lips together and rolled his eyes in thought. “Maybe I went about that in entirely the wrong way.”

  “No, no, you were really charming about the whole thing,” Nick said.

  “Sarcasm. I get it,” Crash said. “I’m being serious here, I assure you. I went about things all wrong and now the only way to try and repair the damage is by making amends.”

  “You sound like you’ve been going to some kinda ten-step program.”

  “Never,” Crash said. He leaned forward and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Ten steps just wouldn’t be enough for me.”

  It surprised Nick when he laughed, the sound bursting out of him without the slightest tickle of warning. Crash raised his eyebrows and rocked back on his heels.

  “You’re one screwy dude,” Nick said around another ripple of laughter.

  “And how,” Crash agreed. “Mommy didn’t love me enough, Daddy was never there, I had a goldfish that died when I was five and I’ve never really recovered… The list goes on and on.”

  “That’s taking a dead goldfish really badly,” Nick said as he sat back down on the tailgate.

  “I was really attached to that fish.” Crash tipped his head and beetled his brows. “Poor Doctor Fishy. I think that was his name anyway.”

  “Yeah, man,” Nick said. “Your grief is palpable.”

  “That’s a big word,” Crash said.

  “What can I say?” Nick said. “I got me some fancy book learnin’.”

  “Where did you go to school?” Crash said.

  “Sparrow Falls High,” Nick said. “Go Wings.”

  “Wings?”

  “Yep.”

  “That’s dumb.”

  “I know. At one point though they wanted to name the team the Sparrow Falls Friendly Fliers.”

  “The what?”

  “You heard me.”

  “Dear Christ,” Crash said. He pushed away from the side of the truck to stand in front of the tailgate. “May I sit?”

  “As long as you promise you don’t have cooties,” Nick said.

  “Alas, I cannot make that guarantee,” Crash said. He sat down and bounced once, making the old shocks squeak faintly. “So, I heard there was a newcomer to the Sparrow Falls Walking Wounded League tonight. Is this true?”

  “How am I supposed to know?” Nick asked. He did know, but that wasn’t the point. He was reluctant to say much to Crash even though he was making a concerted effort to behave himself.

  “You’re a janitor,” Crash said. “Everyone knows that the janitors know more about what goes on here than anyone else on the staff.”

 
“Eh,” Nick said, but he didn’t deny it. He scratched his forehead and leaned against the side of the truck bed. “Okay, fine. Yes, someone was brought in tonight.”

  “You seem bothered by it.”

  “Thank you, Doctor Freud.”

  “Just call me Sigmund,” Crash said. “But really, you do. I noticed you seemed rather glum when I first spied you with my little eye.”

  “He’s… an acquaintance,” Nick said.

  “A close one?”

  Nick thought about Wes and the way he’d looked strung up on the bedposts, the glitter and the gleam of the tinsel around his bound wrists. “Close enough,” he said.

  “All right then,” Crash said. He sucked the back of his teeth. “Rumor has it that he was mauled by the Sparrow Falls Ripper.”

  “Is that what they’re calling that freak?” Nick said. He turned to look at Crash who was watching him with keen interest, grey eyes bright in the ugly orange light of the sodium arc lamps. “Besides, I thought you only saw dead people.”

  “That’s what I’m calling him,” Crash said. He held up a finger, a little smile playing at the edges of his pretty mouth. “Ah-ah, I said I only mostly see dead people. Not like that kid in that movie saw dead people, mind you, but I digress. What I mean is that I also see the living people that deliver unto me the dead.”

  “Deliver unto you…” Nick muttered. “Uh-huh. Sure.”

  “I get tidbits of info, that’s all,” Crash said. “And this bad boy around town lately is of great interest. He’s a burning topic of conversation. Ken-the-Orderly told me all about it when he brought down one Ms. Yolanda Young.”

  “If he told you all about it then you already know the details,” Nick said.

  “Fuck me,” Crash said with a shake of his head. “You are cagey as hell about this. You must really like this poor, mutilated fellow.”

  “He’s nice,” Nick allowed. “Weird, but nice. And yeah, I guess I do like the guy.” He picked up his lunch sack, looked inside it then put it down again. He still had no appetite though he knew he should eat. “It’s sad to me, in a way.”

  “What is?”

  “That I’m the only person he could think to call.” The words tumbled out of Nick’s mouth without thought and Crash’s eyes lit up with greater interest.

  “So you talked to him.”

  “Fuck. Yeah, I did,” Nick said.

  “Pray tell, what did he say?”

  “You talk funny,” Nick said.

  “He said no such thing,” Crash said. “I’m certain I have never met the man in my life.”

  Nick smiled at Crash’s attempt at humor. If he wasn’t so preoccupied, he would have thought it was funny. “I think you talk funny,” Nick said.

  “I know I do,” Crash said. “I accept it.” He lightly poked Nick’s upper arm. “Now, out with it. I want to know what he said. You’ve got the hottest scoop in town, Nick. By tomorrow, cops will have come and gathered his information and that newspaper guy will have leaked it to the entire town by nightfall most likely. What did he say?”

  Nick rolled his eyes and leaned forward to prop his elbows on his knees. “It was a lot of babbling nonsense,” Nick said.

  “I adore babbling nonsense,” Crash said. “That is to say, I will not be dissuaded.”

  “Damn,” Nick said. “All right.”

  Crash made a humming sound of expectancy and leaned closer, hand cupped around his ear.

  “He said it was a werewolf,” Nick said. “That’s the most outstanding part of the crazy talk anyway.”

  “A werewolf?”

  “A werewolf,” Nick confirmed. “A fucking werewolf.”

  Crash hmm’d and swung his feet, toes of his shoes scraping against the concrete. “Maybe it was,” he finally said.

  “No,” Nick said as he sat up straight again. “Absolutely not. There is no such thing as werewolves. Wes has seen too many fucking movies and his brains got scrambled out there tonight. That is all.”

  Growing up in Sparrow Falls, Nick had become well and truly accustomed to weird. He would not hesitate to go so far as to say he was more open-minded and willing to accept odd, uncanny and outright fucked up things as at least being possible. A person didn’t live in such a town without developing a healthy appreciation for all manner of oddball things. However, werewolves were another matter entirely; things that were up there with Bigfoot, yetis, chupacabras, skinwalkers and other assorted cryptozoological entities that he simply could not swallow.

  “Pfft,” Crash said. “Just because you can’t see it—or haven’t seen it—doesn’t mean it isn’t there or doesn’t exist. You can’t see flesh-eating bacteria or those lovely little brain-eating amoebae we have in this neck of the woods either, but they’re very much real things.”

  “But they’re not werewolves,” Nick said.

  “No, but that’s not the point I am trying to make here,” Crash said. “My point is that you can’t see those other things, you have never seen them, but they’re still real.”

  “Werewolves are impossible,” Nick said. “Amoebae and bacteria and viruses and whatever the fuck else microscopic menaces there are are possible. This shit has been proven by science and crap. Show me the science that says werewolves are even a possibility and I will say maybe, but until then just… dude. No.”

  Crash snickered, sound ratcheting up into a full, deep-throated, pleasant laugh. He slapped his knee and rocked on the tailgate like a human teeter-totter he was so amused. “Okay, okay,” he said. “If you say so.”

  “I guess you’re telling me you believe in fucking werewolves,” Nick said.

  “I believe in the possibility of werewolves,” Crash said. “If there can exist on this corporeal plain a fungus that turns ants into zombies and cuttlefish that can disguise their own gender, effectively cross-dressing just for the chance to fuck some lady cuttlefish so they can hurry up and be the first of their brethren to die… Well. Yeah. I can dig that werewolves might, possibly, maybe be real things as-yet undiscovered.”

  “Excuse the hell out of me then, Professor Crash,” Nick said. “I’ll make sure to add the Wolf-Man to my favorite unseen biological life forms.”

  “Do you have such a list?”

  “No.”

  “I find that somewhat disappointing.” Crash frowned exaggeratedly and gave Nick his best kicked puppy look.

  Nick raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. “I excel at being a disappointment,” Nick said. He checked his watch; lunch break was over. “Give me time and I’m sure to let you down on an even bigger scale.”

  Crash leaned back to look up at Nick when he stood, a pleased smile on his face. “So what you’re saying is… I’ve got time now,” Crash said.

  “Consider it a probationary period,” Nick said. “Now get off my tailgate. I need to go back to mopping up all manner of fluids.”

  “Can do,” Crash said. He stood and put his hands in his pockets, lips pursed. “You know, mopping up all manner of fluids makes you sound like the maid at a snuff party.”

  “A what?”

  “I will tell you… later,” Crash said. “What with us having time to talk and all since you’ve granted me leave.”

  “Whatever you say,” Nick said. “Have a decent night, Crash.”

  He walked away, aware of the weight of Crash’s gaze on his shoulders like a questing touch. There was a sound behind him, something like a grating laugh or a rough purr, the sound rolled and rumbled through the silent night even though it was soft.

  “Goodnight, Nick,” Crash called.

  Nick hunched his shoulders instinctively like he was shielding himself from an icy, knife-edged gust of wind; the sound of Crash biting his name out like that sending unwanted tendrils of unease winding through him. He turned to look over his shoulder, knew he would find Crash still standing beside the truck, staring at him with his frozen laughter eyes and an almost feral smile.

  The parking lot was empty, the only sound that of a piece of broken glass s
craping across the pavement as the wind shoved it along.

  16

  Christmas Eve was a slow, uneventful day. The Lange family didn’t open gifts until well into the night, after they all ate. Most families celebrated Christmas on Christmas Day, but the Lange family did their gift-giving and dining to excess on the night before Christmas. The actual day was usually spent nursing epically bad hangovers and drinking more to combat the problem. Leftovers were always good for gorging on post-bender and they took great advantage of that.

  Nancy’s parents were coming down from Tennessee where they had been living since they retired, but heavy holiday traffic had set them way behind schedule. They had called ahead to let her know that they probably wouldn’t be there until later that night and to go ahead and start drinking without them. It was the first Christmas holiday Nancy had taken off in years and she said she intended to make the most of it. Which essentially meant she was going to drink her liver into submission, eat a lot of pie and likely end the night by trying to dance with the Christmas tree unless someone had the foresight to steer her away from it.

  Nick left her getting started on her rum-and-coke binge to go visit Wes in the hospital. He took him a plate of food and a badly wrapped gift of a holiday-themed scarf that featured Bigfoot in place of the standard reindeer. Both the food and scarf cheered Wes, which made Nick feel better about having to leave him again later.

  When he was done eating, Wes said, “My aunt and her husband are coming down after the holidays. I finally called them.”