The City of Crows

by Bethany Anne Lovejoy

  I put a generous helping of vegetable lo mein and stir-fried eggplant on his plate, throwing on a couple extra cream cheese wontons. The few times I’d seen Leo eat, it’d been a lot. “Leo,” my voice carried through the apartment, yet he still did not come. I sighed, grabbing our plates along with utensils and kicking open the barely ajar door with my foot.

  Leo did not look up, still engrossed in the books before him. There was little change around him, three sketchbooks laid open, multiple young women stared from their pages. It was eerie, each girl having hollow eyes, their mouths set in frowns. Some looked skeptical, others angered, a few looked saddened. But every single one of them was looking out of the page, their eyes trained so that no matter what direction the viewer looked, they would feel them watching them. For a moment, I recoiled. Leo didn’t react.

  But then sense came back to me. I knitted my brows together, lowering myself down to the floor beside him. Helpfully placing the silverware on top of his plate and pushing it towards him, I sat beside him, hoping the smell of American Chinese food and heavy soy sauce would knock him out of it. But even that couldn’t reach him.

  “Leo,” I tried again, reaching for his shoulder. “Are you okay? What happened in there?” I didn’t know what else to do, my thumb instinctually rubbing circles on his shoulder. “There’s still a chance, right? She didn’t tell you anything otherwise, did she?” It was funny to be reassuring him like that when not even I was sure that that was true.

  He nodded as he tore his eyes away from the sketchbooks, turning to face me. I hadn’t realized how close I’d gotten to him until then, his warm breath splaying out across my features as a heavy exhale escaped him. “Yes,” he breathed. “She said there was a chance.”

  “That’s good, isn’t it?” I asked, looking into his eyes for some comfort. He was scaring me.

  He nodded mechanically.

  “So, what are you doing?”

  He blinked, dark eyes closing and opening far too quickly, as if coming out of a trance. Immediately his black eyebrows furrowed together, not understanding my question. His eyes scanned me, then he looked back to his sketchbooks, turning a final page on the one in front of him and then, evidently finding what he was looking for, tucking the other pages beneath it. I opened my mouth to speak again, wanting to ask him what he was doing, but then he interrupted me.

  “My father had crossed your name off, you know,” he informed me, his eyes studying the images below his hands. They were different than his usual style; hard lines pushed down by a heavy, black pencil onto the page.

  “I don’t know what you mean, Leo--”

  “When I wrote your name down, wrote down your address-- I had a small piece of paper from my father, a list of names, the ones that he had already tried to contact crossed out.” His jaw tightened, finger running across the graphite lines. “I wasn’t supposed to write it down. He’d written you off when you were with your mother, said that knowing her, you’d never help us. But I was stubborn, yours was the only name that had never been formally contacted, and I was tired of having people reiterate their previous nos to me. I wasn’t supposed to meet you, and I don’t know why I did it.”

  “Dumb luck,” I mused, tilting my head. “Don’t think too much about it, not now. Leo, you should really eat.”

  “Yeah, dumb luck,” Leo frowned, setting down the sketchbook again. His eyes drifted down to his plate of food, a grimace forming on his mouth that almost offended me. Toying with the bit of eggplant nearest him by prodding it with his fork, he did not lighten up. “They’re supposed to be you, you know. The girls,” he looked to me almost shyly, “they’re what I thought you would look like before I met you.”

  Oh. My eyebrows raised as I lowered the bite of food that I was previously attempting to shovel into my mouth, now far more interested in the sketchbooks than food. I could feel Leo regarding me as I picked up one of the sketchbooks, scrutinizing the girls on the page.

  He didn’t have much to go on before, they looked like my mother. Each had a variation of her raven hair, high cheekbones, and ever-present scowl. Small notes, almost undetectable on the page, wrote theories and observations, things to look for when he was talking to me. He imagined a person, one that he’d never met. The lifeless, dull eyes then made sense, she was a character to him. He’d yet to meet the living, breathing person in front of him.

  “You see why I need to draw you?” Leo said awkwardly. “Not a single one of them looks like you. How will I remember you when this is over?” Optimistic, he assumed that he’d live.

  “You don’t need a picture of me, Leo,” I said, regarding the girls on the page. “You should want to forget it when this is all over, be thankful that another chapter of your life has ended.”

  “Right,” Leo agreed, and I could hear the discouragement in his voice. “Just another chapter,” his fork clinked against the plate, though he’d likely only gotten one bite in. “I’m just another chapter for you too,” I tried to ignore the displeasure in the way that he said it.

  “Hopefully one with a happy ending,” I said. It was hard, though, to see an ending to it all. Leo brought with too much trouble, and now there was no way out. There was no turning to anyone and saying we only wanted one little thing. Somehow we’d gotten embroiled in something big.

  “Rowan will take care of you when this is all over,” Leo informed me. “I’m sure he will. You’ll be able to go back to your life, it’s me that has to worry. If I’m not dead, I’ll probably have to leave the state.”

  I squinted, whipping my head back to look at him. “You don’t know Rowan. There will be no going back.”

  “You’re right,” Leo said, but his voice did little to convince me he believed that. “But you know him well, don’t you?” There was no malice in the way that he spoke, nor bitterness. If anything, there was regret, a desperate wish for reality not to be what it was. Leo seemed to realize his mistake immediately, his mouth gaping at his last word. But there was no way to take it back, no way to divert my laser focus. He tried, a change of topic slipping out of his mouth. “She gave me a list of names, we should--”

  “Leo, what did that old woman tell you?” I interrupted. “And why are you so concerned with Rowan?”

  “Nothing,” Leo shook his head frantically. But that wasn’t true, so he tried to recover, “just those names, that list. The fact that I could very well live and nothing more.”

  “I don’t believe you,” I announced, shooting him a glare. He flinched in response, but that wasn’t enough for me. “Stop lying.”

  “Lyra, I promise that that was all--”

  “But it wasn’t,” I countered, “because you’re mentioning Rowan again, and you know that I don’t like to talk about him, especially not in our current situation. Might I remind you, I was off his radar until you came into my life.”

  “I know,” Leo began, “and I’m sorry. But you need to realize--”

  “You need to realize that you need me,” I declared, the slightest tremble in my voice. “And that, because of that, you need to keep me happy. Mentioning Rowan doesn’t do that. You know, at this point, it would be easier for me to leave this city, let you tell who you want. What ties do I have anyway, other than Yvie? More than that, I doubt you could even do it. I mean, we both know your threats are empty. The only reason I’m here is because I pity you, and that wavers when you keep using my past against me--”

  “What if Rowan is your soulmate?”

  I jerked backward at the statement, food and sketchbooks forgotten. There was so much conviction in the way that he spoke, as if he was sure of it. And yet, a nightmarish probability, one that only existed in bad dreams and faded away in the shadow of the even worse dreams I had begun to have. Awful, crazy, not something comprehensible. If he heard it from the old woman or was led to believe it by her, then she truly was crazy.

  But just one insane statement wasn’t enough for him. No, Leo had to keep talking, stumbling over his words as he conti
nued. “What if I was never meant to meet you, and now everything keeps going wrong because I did?” My stomach churned, but Leo only grew closer to me, an earnestness to his face. He believed it.

  “Leo, if you were never meant to meet me, then you wouldn’t have,” I rationalized. “I don’t know what that old woman told you, but...” I trailed off, swallowing hard. It was funny in its own way, that I would have paid the fortune teller to tell him that we weren’t meant to have met if it were just a week earlier. But now that I knew him, I couldn’t imagine being without him. Over the past two weeks, Leo had become one of the largest parts of my life. “Focus more on reasonable things, the knowledge that she would rationally have. There’s no such thing as fortune tellers, Leo. Watching my mother’s lectures on youtube should have taught you that much.”

  His face didn’t suggest that he believed that, but he obliged me none the less. “Names, she gave me a list of names,” Leo repeated, desperate to change the topic. Yanking one of the sketchbooks towards him, he ripped the page with careless abandon, pulling a pen from the book’s spiral binding. Quickly, his pen moved across the scraps of paper, wide loopy letters scrawling out an array of words on the page. I watched in astonishment, the list growing larger and larger by the moment, no rhyme or reason to it.

  Some of the names were familiar, deeply familiar. There were friends from my past life, people who Yvie and I still talked to. Others were public figures, numerous ones, names of the rich and famous. Pat Lobdel was one of them, I noted, a shiver going down my spine. There was no pattern, and it was impossible to sy what it all meant.

  “What did she say to you?” I asked, my head craning over his shoulder to look at the list. My cheek just barely brushed against his clavicle, my hands gripping my legs as I struggled to contain myself. “What did they do? What are they involved in?” My eyes narrowed, noting a name that sat near the very bottom, one which Leo finished off the page with.

  Lydia Wynne. A red herring, likely the only outlier. Still, I couldn’t pay it too much heed, couldn’t worry as to what it meant for her. My mother was an eccentric person, she got into trouble often. Her name did not mean she’d committed a crime. But the others...

  “I don’t know,” he admitted. “But,” he tapped his pen thoughtfully against the page, “I’d like to know.”

  “Leo, that’s…” I trailed off.

  Leo’s eyes were genuinely apologetic as he looked back to the page, quickly moving his pen as he realized what name it was. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean-- Not him. That’s an accident, I wouldn’t-- No, definitely not him. You don’t worry. ” Taking in my sickened look, he quickly added, “There are some familiar names on there, and I think I could work with a few. I could talk to Pat. Maybe she would be more willing.”

  “Pat Lobdel won’t tell you anything,” I mumbled, ripping the paper out of his hands. My finger ran over the drying ink, my mother’s name smearing with it. I stopped just short of the indicated name, squinting at it. It shouldn’t have surprised me; Landon had already said that he was involved in strange things. Still, seeing his name amongst so many others, names that Leo shouldn’t have known. It was all the confirmation that I needed. I found myself wishing we’d never gone to Lacus, that we’d never visited the Lobdel house, and that Leo Hoang had never walked through that book shop door.

  But more than anything, I wished that Rowan’s name was not on that paper.

  “Leo, I could--” I began.

  “No,” Leo stated sternly, taking the paper out of my hands. “You couldn’t, and you shouldn’t. You stay here, just leave it to me.”

  16

  For Your Sake, Not Mine

  Sunlight poured through the large windows that looked over the city in Leo’s apartment, darkening skies signaling the end of another day. It’d taken Leo a week to get an appointment with Pat, the woman acting like she was far too busy to be bothered every time he called her. He reassured me that that was typical of her, and there was not much to worry about. Still, I couldn’t help but feel uneasy. Through all of Leo’s reassurances that he knew Pat and that she was a harmless person, I couldn’t bring myself to trust her.

  Leo’s hands worked at the knot at his neck, tying and retying his red tie as he tried to look presentable. He’d told me before that he didn’t usually dress up for the Lobdels, but today he felt like it was necessary. However, it was evident to anyone watching that he wasn’t well versed in the ways of formal dress.

  “No sweater today, huh?” I asked him, finally giving up and rounding the couch. I moved his hands out of the way. He blushed in embarrassment as I leaned forward, hands quickly looping and re-looping until the tie fell completed from my hands. It was far from my first time doing such a thing.

  “I just figured I should look nice if I want something from her,” he said, his voice hesitant to admit it. He lifted the tie from underneath my hands, examining the perfect knot with wonder.

  “Yeah, well, you do,” I admitted, pulling the tie down and patting it against his chest. “At the cost of looking like yourself.” Previously I had only seen him in various handknit garments, it felt strange seeing him without the bulk of a sweater or cardigan.

  He sighed, shaking his head in response to me as he walked away, disappearing behind the room divider. I heard the drawers creak, knowing fully well that he was now looking for one.

  “You know, you are the warmest person I know,” I said, allowing myself to fall back against his couch. Though I visited my apartment, I’d still not formally gone back. Yvie didn’t take it as an insult. Instead, Gigi had practically moved in since I’d been gone. It was just more convenient to stay with Leo, especially when nearly every day was spent together in search of answers. His couch-worn back might not have agreed, however. “It’s funny that you always wear sweaters,” I smiled.

  “That’s how I stay the warmest person you know,” Leo joked, reappearing from behind the divider wearing a beige cardigan. Though the past few weeks had been tough, he’d grown happier recently, believing that Pat Lobdel would be the key to it all. I had my own opinions. “My grandmother on my mother’s side actually knits them,” Leo informed me. “Believe it or not, I used to be a little bigger, and she’s convinced the weight loss is from the cold breezes that break through the city. I think I’ve gotten a new one every month for the past few years, sometimes two.”

  “They suit you,” I admitted, my eyes scanning him up and down. It was more like him, closer to Leo. Of course, the tie would go if he aimed to be authentic, but I could stand it for the moment. “You know, every time I see a sweater in a store after this, I’m going to think of you.”

  “And every time I see a bouquet of dead flowers sitting uselessly on a table, I’m going to think of you,” he joked.

  “Complaining about my bedroom again?” I snorted, allowing my back to fall against the cushions of the sofa, disappearing out of his view. “Don’t mock me and my tokens of loves long past.”

  “Tokens of loves long past?” Leo asked, looming into my view. He leaned over the back of the sofa, eyes looking down at mine with a half-smile. “I’m sorry, I was never formally given that reason.”

  It was way too easy to melt under the warmth of his gaze and way too embarrassing to admit my past behavior. “You’re not allowed to laugh,” I stated, “only my friends and close personal relations are allowed to laugh at me.” The twinkle that crossed his face told me that he was now even more determined to laugh. I groaned, turning away from him.

  “I won’t laugh,” it sounded nothing like a promise.

  I looked over my shoulder at him, unsurprised to see the way that he loomed closer to me than previously. He was draped over the couch, crossed arms resting against the back as he gazed down.

  “I think we’re friends now, aren’t we, Lyra?” Leo asked.

  “We’re two people who are in an unfortunate situation,” I informed him. “And are currently looking for a way out of it.”

  “And,” Leo sai
d with a hint of amusement, “you feel friendly towards me.” I was going to inform him otherwise, but then he added, “you said it yourself; you’ve gotten to the point where you don’t want me to die. If I were such a great disturbance in your life, you wouldn’t have said that. We’re friends.”

  All of a sudden, it felt like I’d hit a brick wall. “We’re not friends-- I just--” What were we at this point? I’d slept in his bed. We’d almost died together, he was upset at the thought of me not being a part of his life, and I couldn’t even begin to imagine him being gone. Where had we ended up?

  Leo looked curious to know too.

  But I just couldn’t answer. It was easier to face the other questions that floated in the air rather than that. “I bought all those flowers because I had a crush on the florist,” I admitted, watching the way his face changed. There was no more pressure to define, just genuine interest. That was better, easier. “He was normal, a typical person, someone who I didn’t know much about. It was easy to paint him however I liked and envision this life in which I began to date him, indulging in the normal. Of course, I added flourishes but-- I wanted him because I knew so little about him that I could change who he was by the day.”

  I didn’t even want to think about what Leo might think of me then. “What’s he like in your imaginary world?” God, he always had to ask the worst questions.