Crow’s Row (24 page)

A moment of wordlessness passed between us. I looked at him, and I realized that I already knew the answer, and that I wished I didn’t.

“The night I got here, Rocco said to Carly that she wasn’t supposed to use real names.”

“Carly’s temper gets her in trouble a lot.” Cameron breathed a short sigh. “Nicknames are insurance. We come into contact with a lot of people every day. Anyone of them could snitch on us, sell us out. It’s a lot harder for cops to narrow their investigation down on some guy called Bubba or Tiny or Kid.”

I thought about this. “What’s your nickname?”

He shrugged. “I never really got the chance to get one … but your brother used to call me Kid.”

This touched one of the strings of my heart that were attached to my tear ducts. I glanced away. The sun had set behind the black clouds. Other than the eerie blue screen glow of the TV, the room was quite dark.

Cameron started the movie and, in another unexpected move, put his arm around me. In the almost darkness, it wasn’t as awkward, I wasn’t as nervous anymore. But I wasn’t paying attention to the movie either.

He had killed someone before—I had witnessed it with my own eyes. It had never really occurred to me that the man in the cemetery hadn’t been Cameron’s first … kill. I started wondering about those people—who they were, what they might have looked like … then I stopped myself. It was too disturbing to think of Cameron in that way.

I closed my eyes and nestled my head, inhaling my favored fragrance. I could hear his heart pound, quick beats at first; after a while, the booming in his chest steadied and sounded more like a lullaby.

The next time I opened my eyes, everything was dark. I couldn’t see a thing, yet I felt surrounded. Slowly, as my eyes adjusted to the darkness, the half-moon shapes of tombstones appeared around me. I was in a graveyard, and Cameron was standing in front of me with his back turned. He was looking at something on the ground. I approached, putting my hands on his shoulders and standing on the tip of my toes. I peeked over him to see what he was looking at. There was nothing there.

Cameron swiveled and faced me. He smiled. When I smiled back and reached out, his face started to change. It became deformed, monstrous. A gun materialized in the monster’s hand. I could hear someone screaming behind me.
Run, Emily!
I couldn’t move. My feet were stuck in the mud. I heard gunshots—and nearly fell off the couch.

I woke up, gasping for air. Cameron was holding me by the shoulders, trying to prevent me from falling face first into the coffee table. Burning tears were streaming down my cheeks.

I twisted—there were no monsters, just Cameron’s panicked gaze. “Emmy … Jesus! You were screaming.”

Apparently the person screaming behind me in my dream had been me. I looked at Cameron, and, while the daze of my nightmare wore off, I could feel the flow of tears involuntarily increasing. Cameron clasped his arms around me and held me while I buried my head.

“It was just a dream,” he shushed, almost abrasively.

I recovered slowly and lifted my head. Embarrassment colored my cheeks, and Cameron looked ill.

“Sorry,” I sniffled. “I didn’t mean to scare you like that.”

Cameron’s lips were pressed together in an unconvincing smile. “Well, looks like we’re good at scaring each other.” There was no humor in his voice. “No more talking about what I do, otherwise you’ll never sleep again, and you’ll give Meatball a heart attack.”

Meatball was stationed by the coffee table with his ears flat to his head. I called him, drumming my knee, and he pattered over. I reassured him with a rub of the ears.

“Cameron, this had nothing to do with you … I dreamt that I was falling out of an airplane,” I lied in vain.

“Don’t worry about it,” he reassured while the dark veil was expanding over his face.

He fingered his watch but didn’t look at it. “It’s getting late.”

He got up, hesitated, and listlessly grazed my shoulder. “Get some sleep,” he ordered.

Without saying good night, he left the room. I heard the door gently click behind him.

I rubbed Meatball’s ears until he was well recovered and sat in the darkness of Cameron’s room.

 Chapter Thirteen:
 Therapy

I saw a plane today. I happened to walk to the window and looked up, and there it was—a little white dot spearing through the clouds. It triggered something that had been buried deep inside me: a fading memory of that other world, the one that must still have existed beyond the sweeping forest, beyond the hidden farm, beyond Cameron. The house in the slums of Callister, the closet-sized bedroom, the cycles of school and work and surviving … I wondered at which point that life had started to feel like someone else’s. I wondered how long it had been since I had left that other person’s life—the days, the weeks were becoming blurry to me. I wondered if anyone from the outside even noticed that I was gone.

I slowly—very slowly—climbed down the stairs, attempting to drag out the inevitable. I was still horribly, utterly mortified by my banshee screaming episode of the previous night. Foregoing sleep, I had spent a good chunk of the dark hours concocting stories that would better explain my wimpy reaction to Cameron’s confessions. The rest of the night was burned up searching for ways to make myself look and sound convincing when I would have to lie to Cameron’s face. All I could hope for was that Cameron had forgotten; but from the wounded expression on his face before he ran out on me—a picture that was now cruelly engrained in my brain—hope was fruitless.

I let Meatball out of the house. He raced full speed away from my misery while music pulsated in the distance. Griff, who was standing guard at his usual spot on the property, looked as miserable as I did. I considered further delaying the inevitable, going out there and merging our gloom. But I didn’t. It was too hot outside, I was entangled in enough turmoil, and Griff had glowered even more the second he had noticed me standing in the doorway.

The drama boiling in the kitchen only firmed up my decision to not deal with Griff, postponing another unavoidable. I closed the door and followed Rocco’s loud and agitated voice into the kitchen.

“This is stupid. I’m not doing it!” I heard Rocco yell.

“As long as you stay here, you will do what you’re told.” It had sounded like Cameron, except that the tone was unforgiving.

I shivered and stepped through the threshold just as Rocco was whizzing by, almost crashing into me.

He halted in front of me, his eyes slit.

“You put him up to this,” he accused me.

While the list of things that I could have done to wrong Rocco ran through my head, my eyes sought silent assistance from Cameron, who was sitting at the large table, absorbed in the paperwork in front of him.

He glanced up, barely looking in my direction, and went back to his papers. “Emily had nothing to do with this, Rocco. You will do this. End of discussion.”

Rocco stood affronted and huffed. I stood recovering from Cameron’s use of Emily versus Emmy.

Rocco stomped down the hall, slamming his bedroom door.

I gathered the papers strewn by Rocco’s recently vacated seat—forms of some sort.

“Did I miss something?” I was surprised by how quiet my voice sounded—like my vocal cords were walking on eggshells.

“I did some research while I was gone—Rocco’s fifteen years old and dropped out of school a month before coming here,” Cameron told me, his voice, his expression still bland.

“Yikes! You mean he’s not even close to being full grown yet? He’ll be a monster by the time he’s eighteen. Are you sure you can afford to keep feeding him?” I tried a little harder.

I thought I had seen Cameron’s lips bending up; but whatever semblance of a smile might have been coming, it was gone by the time he lifted his eyes; in its place was a cold stare.

“He’s getting his GED if he’s going to stay here. I won’t have him spend his days rotting in front of the TV and doing nothing good with his life.”

I swallowed hard while he collected his papers.

“I could help him,” I offered uneasily. “With homework and stuff.”

He pushed his chair back. “Whatever keeps you busy.”

I felt the sting.

“Cameron, about last night—” I started, making a split-second decision on which story I would go with, but his daggered eyes interrupted me.

I lost my voice; he looked over my shoulder. Spider and Carly were in the kitchen doorway with files in their arms.

“What is it?” Cameron snapped.

“We’re ready,” Spider said to him, completely impervious to Cameron’s mood—unlike me, and unlike Carly. Her eyes veered between Cameron and me, and she gave me a weighted smile. I couldn’t manage to give her anything back.

“I’ve got a lot of work to do. This will have to wait,” Cameron said to me in passing, never actually looking at me.

They left me standing, battered in the middle of the kitchen. After an intense session of staring down my bowl of cereal, I fiercely pushed it down the table—it tipped and spilled over. I went to the kitchen to get a dishrag. When I got there, I kept walking.

Outside, the morning sun was already steaming the waterlogged lawn, making the air stifling. No wind blew through the trees. No birds chirped. I could see Griff’s shape blinking in the waves of heat, like a mirage, and I was sweating before I had even reached the halfway point between us, soaked by the time I actually reached him. The scowl on his face hadn’t improved since I’d last seen him.

“You’re making it really difficult for me to ignore you,” he grumbled.

“Oh? Were you trying to ignore me? I hadn’t noticed,” I retorted, sarcasm heavy.

Griff rolled his eyes and scanned the scene, a valiant effort to continue to ignore me. He looked cool.

This irritated me even more.

“You know you have no right to be angry at me for getting in trouble with Spider for not doing your job while they were gone,” I told him.

“Who said I was angry at you?”

“You just admitted that you were trying to ignore me.”

“Ignore, yes. Angry, no—never with you,” he said with sincerity.

“Same difference,” I snapped.

“Huge difference. I’m just trying to protect you.” This seemed to be the common explanation for everything that aggravated me. “I’ve been told to stay away from you, or it’s lights out for me.” Griff put his hand to his throat and pretended to slice his neck from ear to ear. “I figure I can’t keep you safe if I’m dead. So I’ll stay away and keep an eye on you from here.”

“I think the only way Spider can convince you to do your job is by threatening you,” I reasoned, still amped for war. “Anyway, I can protect myself. You don’t need to protect me from anyone, and you definitely don’t need to use me as your excuse for not working. There’s no need to be overdramatic about this. Spider’s just doing his job.” Cameron’s words echoed through my voice.

“I’m being overdramatic?” he repeated incredulously. “What world do you live in? These guys have killed better people than me without even blinking. So far, they seem to like to have you around. But, believe me, once they have what they want or they get sick of you, you’ll be in big trouble too.” Griff looked around and lightly grabbed my arm, tugging himself toward me and whispering, “I won’t let them do anything to you. They’ll all die before they hurt you.”

He let go of my arm and took a step back, his eyes flicking over the grounds.

Of the few guards that I could see through the heat waves, all seemed as preoccupied as I was with keeping cool.

“So you’ll just keep ignoring me. And then what?” I asked, my irritation evaporating. Griff was genuinely scared. I couldn’t be angry with him for that—though I was slightly disappointed that I wouldn’t get the chance to air out my frustrations.

“I don’t know,” he admitted wearily. “I haven’t figured that out yet. Do you know why they’re keeping you alive?”

I wondered if Griff noticed that I didn’t flinch while we discussed my life—and death. I had no reason to be scared. I wanted to tell Griff about Cameron, but I couldn’t. I wanted to tell Griff about Bill, but I didn’t. I was suddenly afraid that he would see me differently. So I simply shook my head in response.

“Do your parents have a lot of money?” he asked me.

“What does that have to do with anything?” I said, my irritation surfacing again, for different reasons.

He shrugged. “I thought maybe these guys were trying to collect ransom in exchange for you.”

His voice trailed, suddenly distracted. A silver Mercedes had driven up the road and was stopped at the entrance. One of the guards had his arm coolly resting on top of the car and chatted through the downed window. The other guard stood closely behind him, at times standing on his tippy toes, trying to catch a glimpse of the car’s occupant.

From the stupid grins on the guards’ faces, I guessed who was in the car—a guess that was confirmed as I glimpsed a flip of the occupant’s blond hair.

Frances eventually drove through the male barriers and got out of her car.

“Looks like long-legs is back.” Griff exhaled.