Keeper of Crows (Keeper of Crows #1)(65)

“Wes, get me away from him! He’s going to kill me!” I screamed, taking hold of the wheels and pushing them forward and up the concrete.

Father put his hands out beseechingly. I moved my eyes from the door, to him, and then back to the door. “I’m not going to hurt you, Carmen,” he pleaded.

He had the audacity to act hurt. Fuck that. He wasn’t hurt. He was the one who caused pain. “Get away!” my voice shrilled.

He stopped walking and stood back, hands on his hips as Wes and his friend wheeled me inside the glass double-doors that opened with the automatic button I pushed.

“Let’s get her inside and then-” Wes told my father.

“Don’t help him! He’s evil!”

Wes’s eyes went wide. “Okay.”

Good thing he was smart enough to be afraid of Malchazze. If he could raise himself from the dead… Wait. Was he really alive, or was this just his skin? The one my father possessed? “Was he really out there?” I whispered.

“Yes,” Wes answered, leaning down to me. “I saw him.”

He was kind. Wes was kind and nice to me, so I didn’t claw his face. The lady behind the glass window in the lobby? She was a horrible bitch. She nagged poor Wes to death as they tried to explain that I was being transferred. She had no record of such a transfer, blah, blah, blah. But when the bitch checked her fax machine…boom. There it was. Hallelujah. We’d just witnessed a miracle.

A male orderly appeared through a security door. “I’ll take her to her room and get her settled,” he said with a smile.

I looked up at Wes and a tear fell from my eye. “I’m not crazy.”

He shook his head. “I know you’re not. You’ll be okay. These nice folks will help you.” I couldn’t place his accent, but it was southern and soothing. I nodded, wiping my nose on the back of my hand. I’d morphed into Pamela, but I wasn’t even in Purgatory anymore. I was on Earth. I woke up.

I came back.

My soul found my body and time was erased, and this… “Wes?” I yelled as he pushed the door open to leave.

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”

He smiled slightly, his cheeks glowing red. “You’re welcome, ma’am.”

That afternoon, when the steel door slammed behind me, I made a decision. I would fake the hell out of this until they let me go. I would turn to steel—just like the door that held me in. And then I’d waltz out of this place and never, ever look back.





30





Doctor Stein was more clinical than Doc Coleman. The diplomas and certificates on the walls in her tidy, pristine office showed that she was a psychiatrist. There were no pelvis-shaped ink blots anywhere in this place. The halls were empty, washed in white, like everything else—even the clothing they provided.

She had a permanent crease in the center of her forehead despite the tight, ebony ponytail that pulled her hair away from her face. She wasn’t friendly; she didn’t bullshit and didn’t care or pretend to care. The dark frames of her glasses overwhelmed her delicately featured face, but somehow it worked for her. There were no clocks on any of the four walls, and she kept the blinds drawn in her darkly painted office, a comforting shade of brown-gray.

She kept the blinds closed for me. I had issues with windows, they said. They were wrong. My issues weren’t with the windows; my issues were with the doves that perched on the sill, cooing happily. Gabriel sent them. Their feathers matched his. He must be the Keeper of Doves. It made complete sense. But Gabriel had yet to show his face. It had been over two weeks and he hadn’t visited me on Earth, or in this place. Pissed off didn’t even begin to describe how I felt about that. I knew Michael couldn’t come, but Gabriel was my friend. He should at least check in on me.

She stared at me with her arms crossed over her chest, waiting. This was her way. She didn’t push. She asked a question and even if it took the entire session for me to answer, she waited patiently for it. For some reason, the comfort of knowing I had all the time in the world to answer, or the freedom to tell her to go to hell for asking made me more loose-lipped than I’d imagined was possible.

“Your father came to see you today.”

I shifted in my seat. He had come to see me. Sure. That’s what he wanted them to believe. I knew the truth. He was either trying to kill me – Malchazze returned – or he was just a stranger’s skin that my father occupied for a time. Either option was bad. I didn’t want anything to do with him. Why couldn’t they understand that?

“Do you want to harm him?”

“No.”

“Did you think of harming him or killing him at all?” Her lips pursed, sharp, dark eyes waiting for an answer.

“He’s not my father.”

“He is your biological father,” she corrected.

“But he isn’t the one who raised me. I have no feelings about him whatsoever. He’s a stranger to me.”

She jotted a note. “There are pictures, family portraits of you, him, and your mother. He isn’t a stranger.”

“Yes, he is.”

“You still hold to your story? That you killed his soul in Purgatory and sent it to Hell?”

I smiled. I had done that. Even the medicine, the dosages they kept increasing, couldn’t squash the memory of Malchazze, of those feathers embedded in his chest, the look of shocked surprise on his lips, in his eyes.