Black Bird of the Gallows(12)
His song starts. Reece’s head whips up. He looks at me from across the room, and I feel it like a touch. His teeth flash white in a smile that sends a pleasant tingle straight down to my toes. It’s all I wanted, his eyes on me. His smile, for me.
In that moment, there’s nothing else. Nothing but flashing black eyes and a slow smile and the hectic thud of my pounding heart.
But prowling in the back of my mind is another scene.
Reece surrounded by inky feathers and curved talons. Long, sleek beaks caressing his cheeks, playing with his hair, plucking gently at his coat.
“Black Wing.”
He smiles then, too.
5-the watcher
The small employee parking lot behind The Strip Mall can be creepy. Anyone could be lurking in the thick trees behind it, and although no one ever has been, my paranoia is always wondering if someone is. The peeling white and red paint and the big loading doors where trucks once backed up to are the only reminders this really was once a strip mall. What had been a moldering eyesore is now a lucrative exercise in building revitalization. If I remember what Deno told me, the main dance floor was an office supply store. The stage was the custom printing lab.
Deno and I break down our equipment in companionable silence. I’m not mad at him anymore. In fact, I would consider thanking him if he wasn’t so likely to gloat. On the floor, the under-agers filter out and the over-twenty-one crowd gets fresh drinks. I run some ambient music through the house speakers while Anton, the DJ for the eleven p.m. to two a.m. slot, sets up. Deno hauls the equipment to his van while I wrap up cables and tuck little, expensive bits of equipment into their cases.
“All packed up.” Deno meets me by the door to the parking lot. “I’m gonna collect our money.” He tosses me the keys.
This is what we’ve done all winter: Deno packs the van and I warm it up while he gets our pay. Since he’s the only one who knows this labyrinth of a building well enough to actually find the owner in her back office.
Maybe it’s because of the vibe tonight, the tense bouncers, or Reece, but this night feels compressed, thick with something other than air. I’d rather wait inside. The words are there, coiled on my tongue, but I swallow them back. Deno doesn’t seem to think anything is off. Maybe I’m overreacting. “Okay,” I say. “See you in a few.”
I step through the metal door and into the parking lot. Cold claws through my coat like icy talons. No surprise there. It’s eleven thirty at night in February. The dumpster smells like vomit. The lighting is terrible—just one yellowish lamp and far too many shadows. A dark shape shifts on the dumpster’s lip, and I suck in a breath and tense up. A puffed-up crow stares back at me, eyes like shiny red beads. It tosses its beak in the air, like a greeting, and stretches its wings. One long white feather gleams among the inky plumage. I’d bet anything it’s the same one that left me the earring.
Crows are everywhere these days—lined up on telephone wires, sitting on the sign at school. This one, with the white feather, seems way too attached to me. I don’t like this—this crow hanging around all the time. This feeling of being watched. I shiver, but not from the cold. My rubbery fingers fumble through Deno’s key ring.
It’s a bird, Angie. I purposefully ignore it. The van’s only ten feet away. I head for it, but my wildly impractical shoes hit an icy patch and I go down hard, glasses flying. My hip and shoulder take the brunt of it. Nothing’s broken. That’s all I should be worried about, but I’m suddenly and acutely aware that I’m in a vulnerable position and I’m alone. Instincts turn my senses sharp and blunt at the same time. I scramble to my knees and grope for the van’s bumper. Damn these platform shoes. They’re like stilts, and they render me as agile as a newborn giraffe.
The crow opens its shiny beak and shrieks as a strong hand closes on my upper arm. Adrenaline numbs the pain from my fall. Blood rushes to my head. I’m not alone out here.
I turn to see a guy in a wool hat and a puffy jacket. He looms above me, silhouetted by that one crappy light, but I can see well enough. It’s him. The guy Reece talked to at the bus stop three days ago. He’s wearing the same clothes, giving off the same pungent smell of honey, but his face is different. Again.
My bones turn to rubber. Fear punches my lungs inside out, robbing my ability to scream. “You,” I say on a gasp.
The crow begins to caw. Its noise is grating, repetitive, scratching the inside of my skull.
He pulls me upright with such speed and force, pain shoots through my shoulder. For a slender man, his strength is immense. He turns, setting his face in the light, and my whimper turns into a gurgle of fear.
Like a mask that can’t decide what it should look like, the man’s face is morphing, constantly. Thin nose, broad chin, narrow face, brown eyes, broad nose, pointy chin, wide face, green eyes… The shifts are subtle and blurry. Sometimes the features are female. Mostly, they’re male.
The slightest of smiles curves his mouth as he holds me still and waits as I watch the horrors of his face unfold. He wants me to see this. Wants me to know I’m not being held by a human being. To know I could die by his hand at any moment.
Reece knows this thing. He knows, he knows, he knows. And in this moment, I fear him as much as the creature holding me, because surely Reece knows what this man-thing is and what it can do. Knows there’s no fighting free of it. Anger breaks through my paralyzing fear just long enough for air to charge into my lungs. I let out a pealing scream that would impress Alfred Hitchcock.