AlcyLeyva_AndThenThereWereCrows_EbookFormatting_Nook

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

  It already had most of her chest cavity open and there were wing flaps coming from inside. Petty hung motionless, arms and legs dragging on the floor.

  I felt defenseless against that thing.

  And that’s when the whisper started up again.

  “Shame. So shameful.”

  “Sister being eviscerated right in front of you like an old doll and the only thing you can do is watch.”

  “Unless you want to kill.”

  “Let’s kill it.”

  “Let’s murder it.”

  Seeing the angel slowly mutilating my kid sister, I had to agree. “Let’s murder it.”

  Inside of me, I felt this sudden rush of adrenaline. I ran right at the angel, set back a fist, and threw it with all of my force. The way my arm cut through the air boomed like an airplane flying overhead. All of the nearby windows shattered instantly as the angel with the mangled head caught the fist within its giant palm. But the force behind it was too much and the whole thing tore right out of its shoulder socket. Somewhere on the twentieth floor of the nearby building, that discarded limb landed.

  The second punch I threw landed right on its waist. The blow was so clean that even though its torso was blasted off into a nearby parked car, its legs were still standing there.

  Exhausted, I collapsed to the ground. I didn’t know if it was going to come back, or if there were more in the vicinity. I just knew that this one was as dead as possible for the time being.

  Righting myself, I tapped Petty who was lying face down on the concrete.

  “The hospital, Petty. We have to get to the hospital and check on Barnem and Donaldson. C’mon.”

  She didn’t reply.

  “Petty. Stop playing. You’re not dying here, remember? You can’t die. Just … come on. Get up. Mom and Dad are flying out tonight. They’re safe. You were right, okay? I couldn’t do this by myself. I couldn’t.”

  I tried picking up her arm, but it was dead weight.

  I can’t tell you how long I stood there. I didn’t really feel like I was in my body at all. It felt like I was looking down at something happening to someone else. Complete disconnect. Even when I rolled her over and saw what the angel had done to my sister. She was completely torn in half, the tear running from her stomach to the tip of her chin. Her white eyes were still open.

  “Petty? The hospital, Petty? Mom and Dad. Mom and Dad, Petty?”

  I remember that I kept talking, I kept saying things. But all of it was disjointed. They were just sounds I was making.

  Even when the crow poked its head out of her chest, my hands grabbed it by the neck and wing without me asking them to do so. Only instinct was carrying me through this; was showing me what needed to be done.

  I pinned the bird down on the ground with my knees, never looking away from the sister I would never get to see again. The sister I had now lost three times in one lifetime.

  In that moment, I felt every pain all at once. And it was so wide, so deep, that it left me unable to see or sense what I was doing. So looking down, at the crow flapping violently in my grasp, I didn’t think twice about what I had to do.

  I grabbed it by the neck and sank my teeth into its black feathers.

  CHAPTER 40

  I’m not sure how long it took me to get there. I walked for a long time, semi-directionless at first, at half step most of the time. My leap from the ambulance had torn open blisters on my chest and my neck was scarred up. I put Petty’s body on one of the rolling stretchers and kept it with me because there was no way in hell I was going to leave her there.

  So I walked all the way to the hospital, shambled all the way there, I should say. I walked right in the middle of the street as only a few people were driving. With all the shit going down, the city had become a ghost town. You would expect that thousands of New Yorkers would be fighting and clawing to get out of the city, but I barely caught a few people even running fast. I guess it made sense, you know? Where are you going to run when the world is ending?

  The automatic doors to the hospital didn’t work. A man’s corpse was caught between that and the wall, causing the constant thump of the actual door nudging up against his chest. I took the side door.

  There were no angels around, but the entire place had been torn apart. There was no one alive. Doctors, nurses, patients, janitors—all of them were strewn about like garbage.

  With Barnem’s room on the fourth floor, I pressed the button for the elevator. The door slid open right away, even though there wasn’t a car in it yet. And then like a comet, the whole fiery thing flew passed and exploded on the floor below. In a daze, I blinked at it and decided to take the stairs.

  Heaving Petty’s body up and climbing those stairs all on piggyback was nothing I’ll ever recommend doing in your life, and I can’t even explain how I was able to do it. I collapsed on floor three and stayed down for maybe five or ten minutes before continuing my journey.

  Opening the door, I saw a man’s body sitting up against the wall with his head down, chin buried into his chest, and a round halo of blood outlining the area he had been impaled to. Seeing Donaldson’s lifeless body like this made me grow even more numb. Part of me had expected to find this, to come against my worst fears, but not so soon. I walked passed him and made my way to Barnem’s room.

  The entire place was in ruins, more so than any other place in the hospital. The whole right side of the room was missing and I found myself staring out at a city that was no burning in the night air. Scores of angels flying in rigid formations floated around the skyscrapers. Whoever had come to purge this hospital obviously had this room as its main target. And something told me that this wasn’t the work of any angel.

  I had to step all the way to the back of the room to see this because it was obstructed by a bed turned on its side. But it was there: my worst fears were confirmed.

  Barnem, the only being capable of slaying the Beast, was lying on his stomach in pool of his own blood. The blood was easy to trace—the body was missing its head entirely. I choked back the bile and stumbled backward. But more than this, it seemed that he had one last thing to tell me, because at the end of his two bloodstained fingers, the Seraph had managed to write one single letter out on the floor.

  D.

  “Yo.”

  His voice blew the muteness right out of my body as a cold jet flushed through my skin. Standing in the doorway, my roommate watched me turn around slowly.

  Even though I was scared half to death, I tried to swallow my panic as D strode into the space. His face and eyes, the way he stepped both within view but with a perfect space between us, told me that he was suspicious. He was on high alert and wasn’t going to be taken by surprise. Not by me and not by anyone else in the world now that he had taken care of Barnem. I knew that I needed to tell him something before he ended my life. I needed to stall, for some reason. Any reason. This was all proof that D had been just biding his time to tear the last Shade out of me, and now he had come to collect.

  I lay Petty down and stood over her.

  “What happened to her?” he asked.

  I felt sick. “One of the angels.”

  He didn’t respond. I could barely make out his face in the shadow. His hands were conveniently tucked in his crimson hoodie. Then he asked, “The Shade I put in her?”

  “I have it.”

  “You have it?” D took a step closer. “I saw your parents.”

  My arm shook. “You what?”

  “Getting on a plane. Getting out of here.”

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I told you. Nothing.” He slowly pulled out one of his hands. “I can take you to them, though.”

  This enraged me. Giving no fucks, I slapped his hand away and stepped so forcefully forward so that we bum
ped chests. Hearing that he had been anywhere near my parents flipped my “Flight” to an almost permanent “Fight”.

  “C’mon. I’ll take you to them.”

  Everything in my body was telling me to run as hard and far away as possible, but I stood my ground staring into D’s black eyes. I never noticed, but there seemed to be violet clouds churning in the center. Looking into them was like staring into an alien planet.

  “Barnem is dead―”

  “Good riddance.”

  “So I guess the only ones left are just you and me. What are you going to do now?”

  A black aura, as thick as smoke, billowed out of the Shade and started to fill the space around me. I backed away as the wind bursting out of him pushed me back and pressed me against the farthest wall.

  D’s body began to change. His horns spiked five feet into the air. His legs curved back and grew black thorns. Veined wings shot out of his back. With eyes glowing a deep purple, he pointed a black claw at me and growled, “You know what has to happen now, Grey? The end of the line. And I’m not going to make it painless.”

  Something dark awoke inside of me as well. I went blind in my right eye. It was like a pen had burst and ink was streaming down the eyeball until my vision was completely gone on that side.

  And the whisper came.

  “It’s either you or him now, Grey.”

  “Rip his face off!”

  “Bite off his arm. His leg.”

  “Punch his head clean off.”

  “Now’s your chance.

  “End it.”

  “End it.”

  “Grey!” D’s roar sounded like an explosion. My fist felt heavy and I glanced over and saw black tendrils wrapped around my knuckles. The shadow was thick like armor, yet I could still bend and flex the joint. Looking at the form D had taken—an eleven-foot goliath—I knew that I was going to die. But this hadn’t stopped me when Gaffrey Palls beat me bloody. Or when Mason’s parrot swallowed me. Or any of the other deaths I was booked for the last couple of months had been cancelled.

  It took everything to will my legs to move. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. But I did. And the next step came easier. And the next.

  Soon as I was jogging.

  Soon I was running at full speed.

  Quickly, I dashed across the broken room and found myself right on that hulking beast as D breathed fire. His wingspan was jutting out into the other rooms and the hallway. My fist came crashing down around its flaming skull with such a force that the most of the floor buckled under our feet. My entire shoulder slipped out of the socket right on contact.

  D’s head snapped back from the force but it didn’t seem enough. He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t beaten. But at least he knew that I had the last word.

  This is what I was thinking as suddenly, D’s massive body dissipated into black wisps of smoke, and the male body that I knew hit the floor like a sack of wet garbage. The punch sent him sliding for about ten feet, tearing up the floor tiles, before coming to a hearty crash in the hallway.

  Sliding my shoulder back in place, I got to my feet, leapt over the broken wood, straddled D’s splayed body, and raised my fist to cave in his face.

  But I stopped.

  Out of my left eye, through my hazy vision and the only good eye I could see through, I saw two things that stopped me cold. One was that D was actually afraid of me. And the second, and probably most shocking, was that he was crying.

  “Finish it,” commanded the whisper.

  “Finnnish iiit!”

  Hesitating for just a moment gave the demon the opening to grab my wrist. Back on the offensive, I tried to wrench him loose and land the killing blow. But instead of resisting, D tried to drive my fist down on purpose.

  “Do it!” he screamed. “Do it already. Kill me. Just know that I went down fighting. Fighting for what I believe.”

  “Um …”

  Sensing the loss of my resolve, he said, “What? This is what you wanted, isn’t it? This is what all of this is for, right?”

  “Uh …”

  “What the hell is wrong with you, Grey?”

  “What’s wrong with me? That’s my line,” I shouted back. “You can’t take my line.”

  “It’s not your line. You’re the one trying to kill me.”

  “What?” I fell back onto my ass. “This isn’t making sense. You’re the one trying to kill me.”

  “Why would I do that? You’ve already been through some shit already. Like … like Petty.”

  I could tell just by the way he looked at my sister’s body from where we were lying that he was highly emotional about the whole thing.

  “Wait! So if you weren’t trying to kill me, then what was with that uber demon transformation you just whipped out?”

  D wiped the tears from his face. “I was trying to protect myself from the power hungry monster you’ve become.”

  “Oh! Oh! That’s rich coming from the demon bent on global domination.”

  “I am n— No, wait. I am on paper. Okay. I am. But … just not now. None of this, Grey None of this shit was me.”

  And for some reason, maybe it was the last of my sanity ebbing away, but I believed him. “You didn’t do this. So … so who killed Barnem? And Donaldson?”

  “Jeff?” This took the Shade completely by surprise. He clenched his chest and slumped over on his side. “Jeff! Someone … Jeff is dead?”

  So much of this was hard for me to process. D was actually mourning Donaldson? Like actual feelings? Like more than me.

  After a few seconds, he sat up. “You! You thought I killed him?”

  “I—”

  “Why would I kill Jeff? The guy was cool. Way cooler than you, Ms. ‘Seek and Destroy Every Demon Hunter’. Don’t think I didn’t know what you and that Seraph were planning. Going to fatten me up and leave me last.”

  I looked back at the room. “So is that why you killed Barnem?”

  “I did not kill Barnem!”

  “But you said—”

  “I said ‘Good riddance’ because the man was a pain in my ass. God! Stop saying I killed people that I didn’t kill.”

  The building was suddenly struck by something that sounded like a mortar blast. D and I looked at each other as four and then five more explosions rocked the hospital.

  “Angels. We gotta go, Grey.”

  “But wait,” I said as he took my wrist and pulled me down the hall. “You said you saw my parents. Is that true?”

  “I did. Thought you were there. Saw the kid helping your parents board a plane and he told me that’s where you were headed. Hold on.” Leaving behind the bodies of my sister, my upstairs neighbor, and the only guy I could call a friend, D dragged me by my neck through the nearest window and took flight with me across the Queens rooftops.

  CHAPTER 41

  Flying from what was left of the hospital room allowed me to see how much of New York had been destroyed. There were large fires burning everywhere, sending thick plumes of black smoke into the air. I saw insects larger than horses respecting traffic lights as they scuttled about the streets. I saw purple storm clouds filled with locusts dump millions of the little critters on DUMBO. I saw angels in full armor patrolling the streets. It felt like I was living a nightmare.

  I’ve never flown before, so D whisking me across the city clasping nothing but my wrists as my legs just dangled above streets and rooftops made for a rough trip. It didn’t help that my pilot seemed to lose control ever so often.

  “You can put me down now!”

  My roommate’s breathing became labored and once or twice, when he looked down to see if I was all right, his eyes rolled to the back of his head as if he were slipping out of consciousness.

  “D!”

  “I’m up,” he groaned, shaking his head and adjusting his
flight pattern. “You just kinda clocked me a bit … hard …”

  We suddenly dropped into a sharp nosedive. In the chaos, I couldn’t tell which way was up, but even as he was partially unconscious, D wrapped me up in his arms as we managed a sloppy barrel roll and burst through the side wall of a building. The force dumped me into the rubble of a living room and sling-shotted D head-first into a kitchen partition, bounced him off the ceiling, and halfway through the back wall. He let out one muffled “Ow” as the fridge tipped over on him.

  “Made it,” I heard him say as he slumped over.

  My ears ringing and left cheek cut open, I dragged myself to my feet. It took me a few seconds to realize where D had “landed” us. The floor on the entire left side of the apartment was slanted due to it falling into the lower floor. Water was cascading down from the apartment above and I could still smell smoke from something burning nearby. My front door was nothing but a pile of splinters. The wall facing the street was completely missing and open to the crimson night sky.

  My home. This was my home.

  I wiped the blood with my sleeve and sat in the rubble. Holding my aching arm, I picked up an old picture frame that used to house a picture. The frame was broken and the picture itself was missing. Everything in this place was just dust and shrapnel now. Just lost.

  “This is what I was fighting for,” I mumbled to myself. “I did this all to save the home I grew up in and … it’s all gone now.”

  The neighborhood was in worse shape, if you can believe that. Most of the streetlights were out, but that didn’t matter—there was only wreckage to look at. The night sky was now completely red, giving the world an unnatural, sinister glow. The building was abandoned, no one was on the street, and most of the city was as silent as a corpse, minus a few police sirens wailing in the distance. Burly’s across the street was on fire.