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.
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.
Reece releases a breath. His face clears of anger, but his features are still pinched. The crow flaps its wings, but remains silent, watchful. It starts preening its feathers.
Reece rubs his eyes, a weary gesture, or maybe a resigned one, and turns to me. “Are you okay?” He squats down, places a light hand on my shoulder. “Were you hurt?”
I pull my shoulder away from his touch. “I’m fine.”
Reece withdraws his hand, tucks it against his ribs. “Can you stand?”
I feel liquefied and shaky. Drained of everything that made me solid. I use the van’s bumper to push myself to standing. Still, my shaky knees buckle the instant I get upright.
He slips his hands under my armpits and catches me before I crumple to the pavement. “I’m sorry,” he says gruffly. “I don’t want you to fall.”
One hand slides to my waist—no, Sparo’s waist. We stand there, his hand a warm pressure on my waist, steady and chaotic at the same time. I don’t like him touching me, but I like the way his touch makes me feel—like listening to good music. Our mouths are close.
“You shouldn’t be out here alone,” he says. “It’s dangerous.”
“What was that thing?” I ask. “Don’t say you don’t know.”
“Okay, I won’t say it.” His hand falls away, and I sag against the van. “What did he want from you? Drugs?”
Is he on drugs? He’s so obviously evading, it’s insulting. If he said he couldn’t talk about it, for whatever mystical, made-up reason, I might have respected that. For a while. Maybe. But drugs?
“No! You…that-that thing—” I stick my finger right at his chest, making contact with firm muscle. “What is he? He’s not human.” My voice heats, along with the rest of me as I replay my conversation—if you want to call it that—with the creature. Even my own freshly made memory looks false. My mind stretches for an explanation, aches when a rational one doesn’t surface. “And the bees… My God, those bees.” I press my hand to my mouth to stifle a sob. I hadn’t imagined this. It was as real as the bruises I’d wake up with and the ache in my shoulder where it was wrenched. That was… I can’t even comprehend what I just experienced. I want to go home so badly.
Reece bends down. So calm. He picks up Deno’s keys and my green sunglasses. I tense up with a new sort of panic. Oh crap, I’m exposed. Even with the wig and the makeup and the extra six inches in height, he could recognize me now. I hold my breath as he studies the keys, then hands them back to me without a flicker of recognition. I nearly gasp in relief.
“I’m glad you weren’t hurt.” His eyes are tight, restless, and they don’t meet my gaze. His words are final.
“Hey! What was that thing?” I rasp, but he’s already heading back the way he came.
“Be careful, Sparo,” he tosses over his shoulder. “Stay away from the bees.”