Black Bird of the Gallows(13)

Changeable brows draw together. “No one’s listening, my dear.” His voice is low and garbled, as if run through distortion software.

My heart twists with the truth of his words. Anton’s set is in full swing, and angry techno pounds through the concrete walls. Rivulets of cold sweat slide down my back. I can’t stop shuddering.

Where is Deno? If this guy wasn’t impossibly strong, I’d be willing my friend to come bursting through the door and help me out. Aside from the hair, there’s nothing delicate about Deno. He’s big, tough. He was a force to be reckoned with in the few schoolyard scuffles I’ve seen him in, but this man holding me is clearly not a man at all. I don’t want Deno near this creature.

“Wh-what are you?” I ask. Not that it matters.

The grip on my arm loosens. He glances at the shrieking bird, then angles his head toward me in a way that suggests I should know its significance. Of course, I don’t.

“He watches you.” My question is ignored. His voice sounds as terrifying and wrong as the rest of him.

“W-who?” Who!

The face, or faces—whatever the hell it is—smiles. “He: scavenger, cleaner of bones, a black bird of the gallows.” He leans his terrible face close. Way too close. “He watches you. Why?”

My heart smashes against my ribs. His nightmare face is inches from mine, but no breath comes from that changing mouth. No puff of white in the cold darkness. Only the disorienting scent of honey and a skin-crawling drone that sounds an awful lot like bees. A lot of bees.

“I don’t know w-what you’re talking about.” Tears ice my cheeks. I’d like to wring that bird’s neck. It’s screaming like it’s the one about to die. Between the crow and this awful buzzing sound, I’m going to lose my mind. “Please, just…”

I fall silent as a new mouth and nose appear on the creature’s face. They’re female, and familiar in a way that makes my ribs contract around my heart. Full pink lips and a delicate nose with a little mole under the right nostril. The eyes are someone else’s but…

I know that mouth. I know that mole.

I saw it every day for the first twelve years of my life.

“Mom,” I rasp. Pain, fresh and devastating, unravels throughout my body. This is madness—fear driving me to hysteria, or some perfectly logical nonsense—but no. Those are her features. I know them as well as my own.

Without realizing what I’m doing, I reach for her mouth on this creature’s face. He rears back, and the instant before my fingers brush skin, my mother’s features fade and morph into a stranger’s. The mole disappears. I’m staring up at this creature who, frankly, looks as confused as I feel.

The face-shifter parts his lips and something crawls out. It’s a bee. From his mouth. More and more come. Dozens. Hundreds. They engulf the lower half of his face in a writhing, buzzing mask. He doesn’t blink. I let out another scream, but not because I expect help. This scream is a reflex, an expulsion of primal fear, as impossible to stifle as breathing.

Footfalls slap on the chunked-up pavement, fast and sure, approaching from the long rear wall of The Strip Mall. The man-thing’s head turns. His grip on my arms goes tight. Bees slither back into his mouth.

“Hey!” a male voice shouts. “What the hell are you doing?” It’s not Deno. It’s not a bouncer. But I know this voice.

The face-shifter’s hands fall away so fast, I stumble backward onto the pavement.

The crow goes silent.

I look up at my rescuer and juggle an ugly mix of unease and relief. There’s the chestnut hair, the high, chiseled cheekbones.

Reece. Of course it’s him. He came all the way around from the front of the building—no small feat for The Strip Mall. But how did he know? Anton’s earsplitting volume ensured no one heard me scream.

Reece stops a few feet away, his body a tense line. “Get away from her.” His voice is firm, lacking fear. Lacking negotiation. I knew it—he knows this creature. I dread to think what that makes him. I shrink away from both of them.

My attacker backs up a step, but he sneers at Reece. “I have as much right to be here as you.”

Reece bares his teeth. “I’m here because I have to be. You’re here because you choose to be.”

“None of us are here because we choose to be,” the man snarls back, spitting bees into the air. “This town is marked, making her marked. Both are fair game.”

“Are you unhinged?” Reece asks him. “That’s not how it works.”

“How much time is left?” it asks.

Reece looks far older than an eighteen-year-old boy should look, and not at all civilized. “I don’t know.”

How much time for what? This is like listening in on one side of a phone conversation.

The face-shifter laughs, a terrible, warbled sound. His eyes tilt toward me, then back to Reece. “You know you are not permitted to interfere. Look what happened to the last one who tried.” The creature chuckles, a leisurely sound. “You cannot save her, harbinger.”

Color drains from Reece’s face. His nostrils flare as his black eyes bore holes through the creature he’s squared off against. “Just stay away from her,” he says through clenched teeth.

The face-shifter seems unconcerned with the malice being leveled at him. He gives me a mock bow, complete with a grotesque smile, then slinks into the dark trees behind the dumpster. Bees follow him in a lazy, disorganized cloud.