AlcyLeyva_AndThenThereWereCrows_EbookFormatting_Nook

by And Then There Were Crows (retail) (epub)

  “Ah.” He smiled. James’ smile was funky. The edges of his lips came up to such a degree that it smoothed his skin. It was like laughter made him twenty years younger. “We are reaching out to communities. Getting to know people as part of outreach. Pure chance I chose this building. Just fate.”

  “And what’s the real reason? You flew all the way here for advice on sleep?” I kept myself from staring at the gun.

  James didn’t seem like the type of guy I could get a rise out of. He was oh so patient, even taking the time to listen and digest fully what I said before responding. I would call him a saint but … I won’t go there.

  “The vision is said to have been passed down from the age of Christ, from Christ, you can imagine. It is chronicled in his walk in the desert. When he saw his death. It is called, in our circles, Sancta Sedes.”

  A lump grew in my throat. “Death.”

  “And life,” James added. “You can’t have one. There will always be both.”

  “And why tell me?

  “Yes, you. You Amanda Grey. I’ve seen what you’ve done, but only brief flashes. Only minutes. Only decisions.” He turned his head to the side. “I want to know your story.”

  I sighed. “If you know all of the juicy details, what else is there?”

  “I don’t know. How about everything else?” Seeing that I wasn’t going to respond to that, he asked, “Have you thought about seeking confession?”

  “Confession? No, no way. I don’t mean this as an insult, but me talking to a guy who is sitting there judging me, won’t save my soul from eternal damnation.”

  He seemed amused by this. “Fine, fine. I won’t presume to know what you are going through, but I will offer you a suggestion. You may not want to tell me your story, but you need to tell someone. The confines of a confessional may not heal your situation, but it may help other things.”

  And with that, James stood up.

  I wasn’t the only one stunned. Oswalt’s face turned sour and drawn. He asked something of the older man in German. But James wasn’t having it. He ordered the young man to retrieve the pistols and conceal them as he walked himself to the door.

  I headed him off. “Whoa, whoa. You’re leaving? That’s it? A chat about dreams and some life advice and now you’re gone?”

  “I came to meet you. We met. I will tell your kind mother to phone you the address when we arrive. I would really like it if you were there.” James shot me a thumbs up and tried to walk away. But I wasn’t the only one floored by the whole thing. Oswalt started shouting in German and pointing at me. James, still calm, responded and set his hand on his shoulder. But this only enraged the young man more. He swatted aside James’ hand, stormed over to the small table, and turned one of the pistols over so fast that his arm was a blur. The opening of the gun pressed so hard against my forehead that it was obviously leaving a mark.

  “Sie müssen sterben. Teufel! Teufel!” When he saw that those words meant nothing to me, he gritted his teeth and jammed the gun in harder. “You are evil.”

  “Oswalt, right?”

  The young man’s hand shook.

  “How did you—”

  “Here’s something you need to drill into your head about me, real fast. This has been the most difficult month of my life. Probably the shittiest month on the face of this planet. I’ve been strangled until my eyes wanted to burst from my head, sucker punched, and swallowed by a possessed hand puppet. To top it all off, the only place I’m going if you pull that trigger is hell. Signed and sealed. No connecting flights. So if you think for one goddamned minute that shoving a gun in my face is going to make my life crappier than it is, you’re out of your mind, asshole.”

  I snatched the gun right out of Oswalt’s hand and he backed away. It was one of those moments that I should have been a badass, but secretly I was hyperventilating. A hand slid the gun out of my grasp. I never saw James move toward me.

  He smiled and put the weapon back in his waist. “I guess you’re right. Who needs to talk about their problems nowadays? Though I could have done without the cursing of my God.”

  “In the moment,” I grunted. “Like, sorry and stuff.”

  James asked his lap dog, who only stood there, pale and out of breath, to wait outside. Instead of arguing, Oswalt spun around and hurried out of the door.

  James tapped his chin, a gesture that told me that even though he smiled through the entire thing, the confrontation had rattled him. “You two are alike. It’s a shame he doesn’t see that.”

  My jaw trembled as I tried to speak. “You know that much about me to make that statement?”

  “I know that you blame yourself for all of this mess. I know you’ve been fighting to put your life back together.” Taking a long breath, he came and stood beside me. His eyes: the pressure was gone. He looked tired and worn now, as if he had aged years in my apartment. “So you don’t want to talk about your life. That’s fine. But take it from someone on the outside. A kind observer. Your life and the decisions you make are your own. Up until now, you’ve been fighting tooth and nail to get it back to the way it used to be. You just want your life back. But time cannot change. You are now forever different.”

  “That’s been a recurring theme today,” I remarked, remembering the matching sentiment of one Angel of Death.

  “So maybe you’re going about this all wrong.” James threw his hands up. And then he said, as if to himself, “‘The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.’”

  “Don’t tell me. Reservoir Dogs?”

  James—the Pope who was standing in my living room—laughed. Then his brown eyes grew distant. He wanted to say something but I could tell that he was trying his best to shape the words. “I used to read this poem over and over again as a boy. It was my favorite poem. I felt for the person in the story because he was me. I felt important but was told by the world that I was one of billions. I wanted to be loved. And when I realized, when I really realized, that the man I had been reading about was Lucifer, when I took in the weight of his crimes and the reach of his ambition, I only loved the poem that much more.” James opened my front door and, with his hand still on the knob, told me “That is the bitter part of evil, Amanda Grey. It’s far easier to laugh with the Devil than cry with God.”

  As the door closed, I walked over to the window, shaking. There was something turning in my gut. A pain? An emotion? I needed air and slid onto the windowsill to have a breeze hit me.

  He didn’t kill me. He didn’t even kill D. But why? Because he liked him?

  Below I could see Oswalt holding open the door of the black SUV called to whisk the Pope away. Just as he appeared, a homeless man walked over to the passenger side. He was large and wore a thick sweater and sweatpants with stains all over it. I couldn’t see his face. Oswalt tried pushing him away, but James calmed him down, pointed with his hand to pay the man, and jumped into his ride. Oswalt did as he was told and got in on the other side.

  If I would have known then what I know now, I would of hung out in that window for longer. Instead, I picked up the phone and called Petty.

  CHAPTER 36

  An hour later, Petty showed up to the apartment with Cain in tow. I was so caught up in what happened that I had forgotten all about the former Angel of Death. Not expecting her, I slammed the door shut on her face before she could step in. A light rap later, I let her in and, uncaringly, she slinked her long body on to the couch. This time though, the news that the Pope had showed up had made her stern-faced. Petty was almost delirious.

  “What did he say? Did he say anything? What happened to Mom and Dad?”

  “Slow, slow, slow. One bit at a time.”

  “No,” she said and kept saying over and over. “No, no, no.”

  “I kinda sorta told her you were going to hell,” Cain explained in perfectly tailored dea
dpan.

  My sister grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me. “We. Have. To. Talk!”

  “Look,” Cain said, standing up, “I’ll just show her. Would be infinitely easier.” She flipped open her bag, drew out her blade once more, and looked at my television set.

  Remembering what she did to the last one, I waved her off. “No! You can’t break that. No way.”

  “Ease up,” the angel scoffed. From out of the handle, she drew out three cords and plugged them into the back of the TV. “HDMI makes everything so much simpler.”

  Like last time, she leaned the scythe back and forth until ghostly blue cords appeared in the air. She went one by one, cursing her luck after her tenth or eleventh try.

  And just like the last time the three of us were together, another knock at the door interrupted us. Flustered, Petty stomped over to check.

  “You need to know something, Grey. Something important. Something maybe Barnem failed to mention.” Cain’s face was stern.

  I croaked out a laugh. “Barnem’s honorary title is ‘Seraph of the Forgot to Mention’.”

  I could hear the sound of Petty sliding open the peep hole cover. “Hello? Can I help you?”

  “You’ve come this far just watching your back for demons and crazies.” Smirking, she leaned forward. “And you’ve done one heck of a job with that. I’m impressed. Honestly.”

  “And?” I said, pushing her to get to the point.

  “Hello?” Petty asked again. I glanced over at her and she shrugged when no one responded.

  And then an image on the TV snapped into focus.

  It was D, standing with his hands in his hoodie. The space he was standing in was wrecked, and it took me a really long time to piece together where he was. But judging from the tipped over florescent light tubings, the medical supplies on the ground, and the tiled walls, it was most definitely a hospital. Not just any, either: St. Francis, the hospital Barnem was staying in. His room, actually.

  At first, I could only see D. But what lay at his feet stood out to me more and more. I thought at first it was just strewn about garbage and then a lumpy black garbage bag. But then certain details leapt out at me. Fingers. Hair. That was someone’s body. And the blackened skin, the long hair, the exposed breast sitting outside of the torn blouse. The corpse was Petty.

  D stepped over her body and I suddenly came into view, standing a few feet from the both of them, blood soaking through my shirt, my fist bared to protect myself. Then D exploded with energy, and his legs and arms seem to stretch out and grow. Black tendrils of dark power burst through his skin and quickly swallowed me up.

  “D did this?”

  I felt like I was spinning, falling into darkness. There was a slight turn in my gut, as if someone had taken a handful of my intestines and balled it up into a fist. Her words hissed into static and I felt like the room, the people around me, hell even the chair I was sitting in had just melted away. All of it. All of the colors ran. All of the jagged lines, the circles, the dimensions. All of it.

  Until I was left in a white space.

  The same space I was in only once before.

  And this time, the whisper—the half-growling behind what sounded like sharp fangs—told me two words.

  Better run.

  “Don’t mean to interrupt the doom and gloom stuff,” Petty said nervously.

  Her voice snapped me into reality again. I was back. Back in my seat. Back in my skin and bones. Cain had stopped speaking and was looking over at Petty.

  “Problem there, beautiful?”

  “Right … so. The same homeless guy in a trench coat that knocked on my door back at the hotel. He’s knocking on this door. So it’s either a severe perv alert or a friend of yours? He wouldn’t be—”

  She didn’t get to say the rest.

  A muscular arm burst a hole in the door with a fist that hit my sister like a freight train. She flew passed us, corkscrewed, and after a seismic shattering of glass, for the second time in a week, Petty flew out of a window.

  What stepped into the apartment was not familiar at first. I didn’t recognize it as the man on the train D and I saw when we rode back from the hospital. Not until he was up in my face. It was massive and the arm hanging out of the torn trench coat reached up and tore the rest of its clothing off. Over its toned, taut gray skin, it wore an armored chest plate with gold writing on the front. The writing didn’t stay still. It writhed and waved, looking more like tongues of flame than sentences. The jeans it wore were bursting around the knees and thighs with gray flesh. Everything was at least close to human—a highly steroid-infused human, but human nonetheless—except its face. Its veined neck was topped with an angular box with flat edges. If this were its head, it sported no eyes or other facial features. It was all skin and boxed skull.

  “Mind if I step in?” Cain pushed me aside. She had somehow retrieved her scythe and turned the large weapon behind her back before slicing the floor. Wood broke and beams buckled, tipping that entire section of my parents’ living room right into the apartment below, with me along for the ride. I crashed against a far wall as the current occupants scurried for the door, the woman screaming down the hall. Several pipes had ruptured and water shot out of the wall next to me.

  Cut off from what was going on upstairs, I needed to check on Petty and get some distance to try and regroup. All I could think about was the destruction of my parents’ home. I had fought long and hard to save it, but in the end, I still saw it destroyed. My childhood home was now ground zero. I’m just glad my mom and dad weren’t around to see it destroyed like that.

  I knew I had to lock this loss away quickly. The demon was coming for me, was challenging me to end this, but I worried that letting it go might come to bite me in the ass. I scrambled down the hallway, banging on the closed doors of the building I grew up in, shouting for everyone to evacuate. Fire. Earthquake. I basically yelled them all. It didn’t take much convincing. The explosions and the rattling foundation if the building put everyone in a panic.

  I only got as far as the end of that third floor hallway before the ceiling came down, sending dust and wood and plaster toppling onto my only exit. But it didn’t come alone. The creature was there along with it. I heard Cain scream and a flash of metal, but it was quickly followed by a loud crunch of bone and something wet hitting the ground. I didn’t turn around to find out what it was.

  I backed up as it swung its tree trunk sized arm at me and struck the front of the elevator, instantly caving in the metal. Retreating back with a small family, we ducked into an apartment and locked the door. The creature took the scenic route through the wall, catching me by surprise. The force alone knocked me over, folding my small body around the legs of a desk in one of the rooms.

  It was after me and that was easy to see. I wanted to get it as far from the innocent family and their kid as soon as possible. They ran with me to the back, but I shoved them into a closet and then cut to another room. By the looks of it, it was a nursery for a girl. Scared, I checked the crib but found it empty.

  Sighing a deep breath of relief, I ran to the window. The whole thing was facing the back corner of the building. I could see the neighboring community garden which meant that Petty had landed somewhere down there. Three stories, no obstructions. Jumping from that height, I recognized that I would hit the pavement both fast and hard.

  I looked around the room for anything to use for a weapon. But then I caught sight of something that made me forget that a hellish demon was close to finding me. It was my reflection.

  The mirror was broken, maybe after one of the serious explosions that had gone off. But I could see my face, my entire face. There was something wrong with the right side. The cheekbone was raised. The skin was flaky, like a log whitened in a fire. And my eye was a perfectly black shell.

  Just as I screamed, the door flew from its hinges and st
ruck me. The force sent me flying and like a ragdoll; it blew me right out of the window as thousands of tiny shards of glass sank into my skin. I must have corkscrewed in midair because I saw the pavement then the sky, the building, the ground again. I couldn’t feel my limbs moving; I could only watch them wave in the air in front of me as my free fall picked up speed.

  I felt that I was falling for years. I wasn’t sure if my body had hit the pavement or if it would hurt went I plowed into it.

  All I did know was that though I wasn’t ready to die, a part of me had let go; had slowly begun to give up. Reality was speeding toward my face and I was racing to meet it with one splattering finale.

  “Hell is waiting,” I think I whispered just as I hit the concrete.

  CHAPTER 37

  Walking around the hospital Barnem was situated in was nerve wracking. It always seemed like everyone had somewhere to go, someone to save, someone to see die right in front of them

  I guess that’s what freaks me out the most about hospitals in general. It’s a space where most people just up and die. Sure you got the bullet wounds, the axes to the head, and what I want to guess is the usual vibrating toy issue here and there. But you also have cases of people who walk in with colds and never walk out. In my head, there were dead people all around me all of the time in hospitals.

  One of these dead people, a nurse, stopped me in the hall. “You look lost.”

  “I am. I’m looking for …” I drew a blank. What was I here for? Barnem? Was this his hospital? And even if it was, how did I get here? The last thing I remember doing was … The last thing I remember. It was a sound. The sound of … shattered glass.

  Seeing the discomfort in my face, the nurse patted me on the back. “Oh, honey. You’re supposed to be downstairs,” she said in her thick Caribbean accent. “Take the elevator down. Bottom floor.”

  “Bottom floor?”

  “Bottom of the bottom.” She gave me a dainty shove in the right direction and ran off.