by Cole McCade
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
EPILOGUE
Autumn
A CROW CITY SIDE STORY
COLE MCCADE
Copyright © 2017 by Cole McCade
Kindle Edition
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher / author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the author at the address below.
Cole McCade / Xen Sanders
[email protected]
Cover Artist: Les Solot (www.fiverr.com/germancreative)
Edited By: Sabrina Favors, N. Armstrong & K.N.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
The author acknowledges the copyrighted or trademarked status and trademark owners of the following wordmarks mentioned in this work of fiction:
Lysol, Disney, Apple iPhone, Martha Stewart, Queen Anne, Kiss Me Kate, Saran Wrap, 3M Post-It Notes, edX, Tupperware, Ziploc, Google, Keds
For you.
Because I fucking hate missing you.
But that’s how it has to be, when some words can’t be taken back.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Trigger Warning: A Word from the Author
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Epilogue
Afterword
Acknowledgments
About the Author
The Crow City Series
Other Books by Cole McCade
Writing as Xen Sanders
TRIGGER WARNING: A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR
THIS MIGHT BE THE FIRST Crow City book I’ve written that doesn’t require an extremely graphic trigger warning, but it requires one nonetheless.
Over the course of this story, two queer characters, one physically disabled, work through things they’ve done and said that hurt each other. Some of those things involve ableist and homophobic slurs and actions, sometimes directed at each other, sometimes at themselves. This story looks at something that happens far too often in real life: how we hurt each other across our marginalizations, and how we can be better to each other while striving for better from those in privileged positions at the same time. And while these characters discuss in depth to make the pain in those slurs clear, simply reading those words in any context can be harmful and triggering for some. I won’t minimize that by pretending it’s less important than triggers for abuse, rape, and violence.
There’s also the fact that I do write a great deal from the POV of a physically disabled man, without being physically disabled in the same way myself; while I have personal issues with chronic illness, injury, chronic neuropathic pain, and being neurodiverse, those can’t equate with the varied experiences of living with multiple sclerosis. Disabilities aren’t interchangeable; our experiences aren’t identical, and even two people with the same disease or disability can have wholly different outcomes. And while I tried with all my power to handle this with sensitivity and realism, if I’ve made a mistake and this portrayal has in any way hurt any of my readers, I’m sorry. Deeply and wholeheartedly. And I am always, always open to feedback and critical commentary on how to do better. It’s not anyone’s responsibility to educate me but my own. But an equal responsibility is the responsibility for me to listen, when someone offers the kindness, favor, and emotional labor of sharing their voice.
If this is difficult for you to read, it’s okay to walk away. Take care of yourselves…and as always, be good to yourselves.
-C
CHAPTER ONE
TO REPLAY THIS MESSAGE, PRESS 5.
For the hundredth time today, Joseph Armitage pressed 5.
That was what the voice on the line told him to do: this oddly cheerful and yet cheerless android whose words lilted up when they should go down, and whose vowels clipped when they should stretch long. To replay this message, press 5.
So each time and again and again, he pressed 5.
The phone made its odd little bubble-pop sound as he lifted his finger from the touchscreen. He closed his eyes, while his baby girl’s voice chirped from the speaker—so close that as long as he didn’t actually look, he could pretend she was right there in that bedside chair where she’d sat so often and read by his side, night by night in the sweltering summer heat.
Joseph had always hated summer in Crow City. Summer came down on concrete streets like punishment; like a hard yellow rain, determined to beat every borough and building down into a broken and burning rubble, it created a concrete desert where nothing could survive but the crows and the ants and the dry, sere grass clinging in the cracks of empty lots, in the cornerstones of buildings, in the spaces between the sidewalk and the road. Summer brought misfortune as if it had been foretold by a turn of the tarot, and sometimes he thought of summer as the fortuneteller in the circus where he’d first seen Miriam Gallifrey, soaring high with her legs so perfectly straight and her hair streaming behind her in a splash of crimson paint.
They’d snuck behind the fortuneteller’s tent to kiss, two wild young things who’d known each other all of ten minutes but already knew this summer would change their lives. He still caught whiffs of the slightly burnt scent of fresh raw peanuts, when he remembered those days; caught, too, the stronger scents of patchouli incense, and something that had risen from Miriam and Miriam alone, thick as pheromones. Something high and heady, raw as the scent of sweat between a woman’s thighs. She’d been practically naked in her leotard, and holding her was like holding fire—and when the old bruja had hissed from inside her tent, parting the cloths with the beads and silvers around her wrists jangling in wind-chime whispers, he and Miriam had giggled like children as she’d given them the evil eye.
We’re in a turning-time, the old woman had said. Have a care the sun’s eye doesn’t turn your head.
And summers were a turning-time. Always had been. Always would be. A time when his body turned on him and left him trembling with muscle spasms in a heat that made him sweat and lock and cramp, and wish more than anything for a moment’s peace from the pain. From his thoughts. From the memories of Miriam, of the wildness in her blood that he’d at once loved and hated and fooled himself into thinking he could tame.
Nothing could tame Miriam. Nothing could hold her down. And summers had been her turning-time, too, the time when that restless, carnivorous look had prowled around the lines of her face, turning her into a lean, starved panther waiting out the dead season until her prey became plump and fat. He’d lost Miriam in so many summers, even after Willow had been born.
And now summer had taken Willow from him, too, a thief as brazen as a blue jay—and left him alone with the spiders crawling in the rafters. Alone with the creak of wood expanding in the boiling, humid temperature; alone with the cloudy smudges on windows he didn’t have the energy to clean. Those windows looked out on a ghost-town yard overrun by dry-smelling grass that nearly swallowed the shed he kept meaning to rebuild, the stepping stones making canyons in the tall yellow-green walls, the desolation so complete he might as well already be gone, a shade haunting the hallways of his own memories.
But more than anything, summer left him alone with the sound of Willow’s voice, summoned to remind him he had nothing left for summer to steal.
“Hi, Dad,” Willow’s voice said. If he was a ghost, then so was she, this darkling call coming down the line from an otherworld he could never reach. His baby girl might be dead, for all he knew. “It’s me. Just wanted to let you know I’m on my way home. Just need to make a couple of stops first. Call me if you need me to get anything on the way.”
Then that sound, that sort of faint crackle, like paper wrapped in cloth. He’d never understood why anything people did on the other end of the phone—from fumbling with the screen to digging in a purse—always made the exact same sound, strange and rolling as if someone had dragged their knuckles against an old-school radio mic. He wondered, as he had wondered so many times, what that motion had been. Willow dropping her phone in her bag as she ended the call. Her shirt scraping on a brick wall as she rounded a corner with that typical absentmindedness that often had her so caught up inside her own head, she missed her surroundings.
Or maybe nothing but a breath of air. The last living breath he would ever have record of, when he didn’t know if his daughter was even alive.
She’d left that message the night she’d been kidnapped. He’d only heard her voice one more time, one last time two weeks ago—begging Please, Daddy. Please. Please forgive her, please understand, please let her go.
Let her go.
The police hadn’t stopped looking for her. He knew that. But now instead of a kidnap victim they were looking for a suspect, a redheaded woman last seen on traffic cameras speeding southbound behind the wheel of a car he didn’t recognize with a man he’d never seen before. What they’d said his Willow had done, she couldn’t have done. What they’d said had happened, couldn’t have happened. What they wanted him to do, positively identify the woman in the videos, wouldn’t happen.
As long as his daughter might be alive out there somewhere, he wouldn’t betray her.
To replay this message, press 5, that terrible, unfeeling voice said again…and Joseph Armitage pressed 5.
“God damn it, boy.”
Joseph jerked. For a moment he’d thought that intruding voice came from the phone—but no, the phone still hissed tinny and quiet in his ear, reciting Hi, Dad, it’s me in whispered afterlife echoes.
While the voice that had overridden it was very much real, filling the room and cracking a hole in the quiet of his solitude.
Maxi stood in the doorway, her arms folded over her chest, her round brown face set in a deep scowl, one that almost made him smile. She always scowled that way, as if she could hide the lines of concern etched into her face, as if she could pretend she didn’t give half a damn as long as she screwed her face up enough and consigned her emotions to the mysteries of the patterns tattooed on her skin. He’d always wanted to ask her what those patterns of swirling dots meant, but he’d been afraid. Some things weren’t for him to know. He’d learned that early on, in Crow City. That even though he’d been born here, he would always be, in some ways, an outsider.
Some things the hinóno’éí told no one but themselves, and people like Joseph learned better than to ask. Sometimes, he felt as though there were two Crow Cities.
One for those who belonged, and one for those who never would.
“I,” Maxi said, “am going to chuck that goddamn phone out the window and dare you to go and fucking find it. Fucking dare you.”
Joseph flushed and tapped the End Call button on the phone, cutting it off mid-recording even if that simple tap practically kicked the trapdoor out from under the hangman’s noose, killing the sound of Willow’s voice. “I’m not a hundred percent bedridden.”
“Not even fifty percent, but you been making a damned man-shaped trench in that mattress anyway.”
“It’s hot. Getting up makes me sweat.”
“Don’t you feed me that line of bullshit.” With a snort, Maxi dropped herself into the chair at the bedside. Willow’s chair, Joseph thought, but it wasn’t Willow’s anymore. Maxi’s presence filled the space with different shapes, colors, a sense and an aura that erased the ghostly imprint Willow had left in the seat. “You grieving like she’s dead. She ain’t. She ain’t dead, it ain’t your fault, you ain’t killed her, and there’s no need to go through this five stages shit or act like it’s time to lie down and die, just because Willow ain’t here.” She leaned back, kicking her feet out and crossing them at the ankles, sucking at her teeth with a sound that made Joseph think of twilight insects with their scree-scree-scree sound in the grass. Her shrewd cat-eyes watched him, as if she saw the heart of his weakness. “I never pegged you for the codependent type, but it’s been right under my nose this whole damn time. The way you couldn’t let Willow go. The way you always thought Miriam was coming back.”
Miriam’s name on someone else’s lips turned as sour as a curse. Joseph looked away, glaring up at the ceiling. He knew this ceiling by heart, every splinter and groove in the peaked wooden rafters, every clot of dust clumped against the looping cobwebs, the patterns made by sluggish air currents pushing swirls of dust through midafternoon sunlight.
Sometimes he wanted to reach up with his will and his shaking hands and pull it all down, until nothing remained but wreckage and the ruin of a life gone to rot.
“Did you come in here for the sole purpose of needling me?” he bit off.
“No, but allow an old woman her pleasures.” Maxi braced her hands on her thighs and levered to her feet. “Came to tell you I gotta go. I need to open up shop. You gonna be okay here?”
Baby me a little more, he thought, but bit it back. She was trying to help. Everyone always wanted to help. As though multiple sclerosis had turned him into a vegetable, instead of just making his life increasingly inconvenient. Sometimes a thin line stood between helping and completely infantilizing him, and sometimes not even he knew where that line was anymore.
He was just tired of there being a line at all.
Tired of all of this. Of the bad days when his legs didn’t want to work and his hands shook and everything hurt; of the shots that made some things better but made other things infinitely worse; of the good days when he could pretend nothing had changed and his body belonged to him and not this damned disease, because every second of freedom was only a countdown for when it would be stripped away again. He tried not to look at it that way.
But it was hard, when he couldn’t forget that every reprieve was only temporary.
Maxi still waited, and he dredged up a faint smile. “I’m fine.” When she squinted at him, he chuckled. “I don’t need anything, really.”
She glanced over her shoulder, toward the door. “You know that ain’t what I’m asking.”
He knew. He knew, when down the hall came the faint sounds of movement in the kitchen: nervous bustling, the sound of someone making noise just to be doing something when there was nothing to be done.
Nothing to be done for many things, including crimes long past but unforgiven.
Joseph fixed his gaze on the ceili
ng again. “It’s fine.”
“He’s your brother-in-law. Don’t kill him.”
“Miriam and I aren’t married anymore. He’s nothing to me.”
“I thought I told you no bullshit.” Maxi sucked her teeth again, scree-scree-scree. “You’ve gotta forgive him some time. Seriously, I better not come back to no damned bloodshed. He’s pretty spry for all that he’s nothing but sticks and bones.”
Joseph ground his teeth, closed his eyes. Let it go. “If there’s blood, it won’t be my own.”
“Look at that. You still got some fight in you.”
A hard thump made Joseph open his eyes; Maxi stood with her fist thudded against the doorframe, eyeing him sharply.
“And if you take it out on him,” she said, “I’ll take my damned bat to you. See if I won’t. You don’t want to get on Coraline’s bad side.”
“Every side of a baseball bat is the bad side when my skull is involved. Naming the damned thing doesn’t make it any less assault and battery.”
“Damn right.” Maxi grinned; her gold tooth flashed in the afternoon sunlight. Fool’s gold, he thought, and ’ware the fool who thought that smile meant Maxi was anything less than ferocious. “I’ll be back tonight.”
“There’s no need.”
“Maybe not, but maybe I want to. Ever think of that, dumbass?” That fool’s gold disappeared behind a harridan’s scowl. “Maybe you’re my goddamned friend, and I’d like to see you more’n every now and again.”
Fuck. Fuck. He couldn’t take this right now—this kind of emotion, when Maxi had been his only constant since Willow’s disappearance. Since before then; since Miriam’s disappearance, and somehow this bizarre, cantankerous woman had shown up on his doorstep holding Willow’s small hand in his own and asking if he knew his damned daughter was going door-to-door from one shop to the next with a crumpled photo of her mother and a question no one could answer. Maxi hadn’t had any answers either, not back then, but somehow she’d always known what to say when Joseph had called in a panic because sometimes he didn’t know what to do with a little girl all alone.
