Black Bird of the Gallows(40)
I tap my fingertips to my lips. “So Rafette’s increased stinging is his way of putting pressure on you, to get harbingers to take their curse? So they can be free? That doesn’t make sense.”
“No, he stings to generate chaos and fear, because Beekeepers consume that. We need death energy, but they need negative energy from the living,” he says. “As for freeing himself from his curse, there’s no proof of any curse being broken. It’s a false rumor.” He shakes his head. “I’m sorry. All this is hard to explain. It must be nearly impossible to understand.”
“It is a lot to take in.” I look up. “Am I ever going to see you turn into a crow?”
His eyes go wide. “No.”
“Why not?”
He looks slightly ill. “It’s not a pleasant thing to view or experience.”
“But it must feel good to fly.”
That gets a small, but brief, smile. “Oh, it does. But it’s at such a cost.”
My first thought is, I can’t imagine how awful it must be to live in such conflict, but that’s not true. “It’s not exactly the same, but I know what it’s like to need the thing you hate.”
He looks up in surprise.
“My mom.” I look down, pick at a ragged fingernail. “My childhood with her was pure misery. School was sporadic and we moved a lot. I was made fun of for reeking of smoke and wearing the same clothes every day. I hated the drugs, the constant moving, the weird men. You were right when you said I experienced sadness and pain. And death.” A shudder trembles through me. I clench my teeth to keep them from chattering. This is so much emotion—so much stuff just tumbling out like an overpacked suitcase. Feelings crammed in boxes and stacked in the attic of my mind, falling over, spilling their contents. I’ve never known what to do with it all.
But this boy can’t judge me. He’s got boxes, too. Bigger, heavier, weirder ones. “My mom’s one real boyfriend was nice to me—without, you know, being creepy about it. He probably saved my life by telling the police about me.” I continue. “They came for me and were pulling me away from her. She was screaming and crying, and I clung to her like she was the best mother in the world. When they finally separated us, it hurt like my skin had been ripped away. She overdosed only a few weeks later.” My breath comes in short, ragged breaths. I look up, meet his dark, liquid gaze. “Am I defective because I didn’t want to leave her? That I hated the police who took me away from her?” I choke back a sob. “That sometimes, I miss her still?”
He’s quiet for a moment, then a gentle smile softens his face. “You are the opposite of defective.”
I screw up my face in disbelief. “Don’t even think of telling me I’m perfect.”
“Oh, you’re totally not,” he says with a grin. “But you see the good in people, even your mom. You forgave her, and you clearly love your dad. I just told you I consume the energy of dead people, and you haven’t kicked me out. That makes you pretty amazing.”
I have a snappy retort all queued up, but it fades away. “Thank you,” I say, surprising both of us.
He tells me about his life—hurricanes, tornados, terrorist attacks. Mass shootings, ravaging fires. And then there were the wars… His harbinger family made the trip across the ocean to experience World War II. There was so much horror, the largest harbinger groups converged on either Japan or Europe and stayed there for about a decade.
I let out a shaky breath. “So what’s the earliest thing you remember? You said you’ve been like this for two hundred years.”
He shakes his head. “My first memory as a harbinger is the Civil War. You have to be dying at the same time a harbinger crow is executed or dies. The curse finds only the dying, and my memories before that are fuzzy. No one clearly remembers their real life after the change, but I looked myself up after the fact. I totally shouldn’t have.”
“Why?”
He grimaces. “Because I was hanged for stealing a horse.”
“Oh.” I let out a giggle, not that this is funny. At all. “You were a criminal.”
“Apparently.” A grin creeps around his mouth. “Are you going to judge me now?”
“I’d say you’ve served more than a fair sentence.” I scoot a little closer. “So, are there any records of you in history? Could I look you up?”
“Not likely,” he says with one eyebrow raised. “We change our names regularly. Lucia isn’t really our ‘mom.’ Whoever happens to be of parental age gets to play that role, and we make sure we stick to our roles when outside people are around. It’s very important that we can pass as a typical family. Sometimes, however, the family structure gets unconventional, when more than one of us are grown. Lucia is up as the parent this round so we’ve taken her last name. A few times we’ve taken my last name.” His lips pull into a wide, devilish grin. “I’m not ready to tell you what that is.”
“I thought we were done with secrets,” I reply with a grin of my own.
“I have to maintain my air of mystery.” He reaches out, tweaks a lock of my hair, before letting his fingers slide through the strands. My breath catches. “I wouldn’t want to bore you,” he murmurs.
“Sure,” I say with an eye roll. “That’s a valid concern. So can you tell me what’s going to happen in Cadence? A raging wildfire? Nuclear war? Or is that another secret?”