Chapter Fourteen – Faith

 

Sam’s lips were soft against mine, but still insistent. And, God, his hands felt just as good on my body as I’d imagined they would, the way the calluses of his palms clashed so exquisitely with the softness of my skin as they ran up inside the back of my blouse. His tongue was hot on mine as they danced together, both of us groaning into each other’s mouths.

And then, just as I began to unbutton his shirt and pull the fabric away from his broad chest, I heard it. The flapping. The flapping of wings.

I looked to the left, the world swimming before my eyes, and I saw them. The birds. Thousands of them, black winged harbingers. They seemed to overlap and fill the void, stacking and stretching all the way back. I looked right, the same thing. Birds upon birds upon birds, a thick miasma of silky, ebony feathers that seemed to occlude every bit of light in all directions. A whole flock of them, a whole murder of crows.

I turned back to Sam, to this man of my literal dreams, and watched as he drew his pistol from behind his back with one hand, and drew me against his body with the other, pressing the side of my head to his chest.

“I got this,” he said, his voice rumbling in my ears. “Don’t worry.”

I woke with a start, panting, a cold sweat plastering my PJs to my body as I sat up in bed, frantically looking around.

God, it had just been a dream. Sam wasn’t really here, had never been here. It didn’t matter that I could still feel the heat of his lips on mine, or could perfectly remember how his hands had felt as he tightly held my body against him.

I glanced over at the alarm clock on my nightstand, with its bright green digits shining out the time. Just after two.

I flopped back into bed, groaning. Not tonight of all nights. I had a super early day in the morning, and something told me it would pay to be on my A game.

As I lay there, staring at the ceiling, a rustle of something shook me from my thoughts, bringing me back to reality. After another flutter of movement, I realized what it was that was distracting me so.

The sound of flapping wings.

I looked to my window. Just outside the glass, sitting on the sill, was a crow, as black as the night around it, its eyes shining brightly in the starlight as it peered in at me.

I would have screamed if the breath hadn’t caught in my throat at the sight. Instead, panicking, I jumped out of my bed with pillow in hand and ran at the window.

“Hey!” I shouted, storming across my bedroom, nearly tripping over my shoes I’d left out from earlier in the day. I caught my stumbling self, though, and stayed on trajectory for the window. “Hey! Get out of here!”

The bird looked at me, its head twisting around, its beak opening and closing. It didn’t make a noise, just seemed to take my measure as our eyes locked, its head shifting from side to side so it could look at me first with one eye, then the other.

Hidden in those shiny little orbs, though, there was intelligence.

My aunt Marianne, my mother’s sister, had once had a bird like that. A cockatoo she’d named Raymond after my dead uncle. She’d always joked that her little white feathered friend was going to be the creature to see her through life, that he was going to keep her company through to the end. And besides, she’d point out, he was more intelligent than Raymond had ever been. More talkative, too. Raymond would find his birdseed wherever she put it, even in cabinets. He’d get butter knives out of the dish rack and use the flat of the blade to pry open the lids from the plastic storage containers she used for his seed. She even taught him how to play tic-tac-toe.

This crow on the other side of the window? He was smarter than that, the glint of his eye brighter and more frightening than anything I’d seen in an animal’s eyes before. If Raymond could do parlor tricks like play tic-tac-toe, this crow was doing theoretical physics and putting crow-kind on the moon.

The skin on the back of my neck crawled like a thousand ants were running over my damp body. I wanted that thing gone, and I wanted it gone yesterday. “Hey!” I shouted again. “Bird! Get out of here!”

It cawed, loudly, its shriek piercing the still air of my bedroom, and hopped, flapping its wings as it changed position on the windowsill. Almost like it was trying to decide if it really wanted to leave or not.

“Go!” I shouted again, raising the pillow as if I was about to strike, the sack of down back over my shoulder, primed to come crashing down through the glass if that’s what it took to get this weird creature out of here.

It cawed again as our eyes stayed locked for another long moment, its eyes boring into me like a drill going through butter as it seemed to dig into my depths. I felt it, I don’t know how, going into me.

I stepped back, goosebumps erupting on my flesh as I broke free of the weird spell this creature had seemed to put on me. The weird fugue it had put me under.

Maybe it finally got the message, because it turned around and, with a flap of its wings, lifted into the air and flew off over the little pasture just beyond my window.

“And don’t come back!” I shouted, hefting my pillow again at the backside of the retreating bird. “You hear me?”

Standing there, though, I suddenly realized just how ridiculous I must look as I shook my pillow at the crow that had interrupted my somewhat wonderful dream.

I hoped I hadn’t woken Veronica. The last thing I needed after that wild nightmare was for her to come in here, poking around, asking me questions about what I was screaming at. Not that she would, of course. She was more than just a little drunk, and was probably sleeping as soundly as a stone in her bedroom. Or even on the couch out in the living room.

I glanced over at the alarm clock on my nightstand. “Great,” I groaned as I shook my head. “Three o’clock? Why tonight, of all nights?”

I went around to the opposite side of the bed I’d crawled off and flopped down on the dry part of the bedding. I’d wash the sheets in the morning, or tomorrow afternoon.

Right then, I needed sleep.

But as I lay there, sleep wouldn’t come. Instead, I tossed and turned, trying to reason out the dream I’d just had.

Sam was there. So it hadn’t been all bad. But how weird was it that the crows, or whatever those black birds had been, were both in my dream and outside my window when I awoke? Eyes closed, I shook my head on the dry pillow, trying to dismiss these weird thoughts.

For whatever reason, though, it never occurred to me to wonder where my missing hour had gone, or how it had been stolen.