Sing Sweet Nightingale (2 page)

J.R.’s eyes are wide, and his skin is pale. Too pale. He’s not crying, but his breathing is getting worse. Like the air is being blocked by something. Something wet.

Before I reach the sidewalk, a cop car zooms past, directed in their chase by a lady on the other side of the street frantically pointing south. She looks up and sees me. Screaming for help, she rushes over.

She nearly screams again when her eyes lock on J.R.

“The cops are already here—an ambulance should be here any second.” Her words spill together in a rush, and her dark eyes fill with tears when she sees what I already know. “Any second” may already be a second too late. I can’t even try to stop the bleeding because I can’t risk moving the knife. It’s too close to his lungs. His heart.

The woman closes her eyes, her dark hands pressing against my arm. “Oh Lord, help us.”

He’s getting lighter. As though the blood dripping onto the pavement is all there is of him, and as it drains, he’s actually fading out of my arms. Fading out of existence.

The hilt of the knife is sticking out of his chest, his little hands holding onto it.

“Hu’son?” He smiles a little. It’s a smile I recognize—the little grin he always wears when he’s going to sleep thinking about something happy. “I saved you,” he says.

My knees buckle. Only the stranger’s hands on my arm make it possible to sink instead of fall. The sun is shining overhead, and the sky is clear. It’s a warm spring day. A few cars have stopped to see what’s wrong, and a circle of strangers is slowly surrounding us. Beyond that, life is going on like nothing has happened. But J.R.’s blood is running over my hands, staining the sidewalk red and warming my skin when everything else has gone so cold.

I hear a siren different from the others—the ambulance finally arriving.

It’s too late. His labored breathing has fallen silent.

Swallowing, I try to answer. To say goodbye. To say anything.

It takes a minute before I finally manage to tell him, “Yeah, kid. You saved me.”

But I should’ve been the one who saved him.

Under Calease’s guidance, I spent four years learning to dam up my anger, control it, and release it. She taught me in the name of helping me. She kept me out of trouble and made sure I earned my way back home.

Four years of work vanish the moment I feel J.R.’s life flicker out.

The one time I
really
needed help, Calease failed me. The promise I made wasn’t supposed to stop me from protecting the people I loved. It
shouldn’t
have stopped me. But as soon as I tried to, I lost everything.
Everything
.

Only hours have passed, but it feels like years. I can’t go home. There isn’t one to go back to anymore. When my mom got home from the hospital, she expressed her grief by throwing all my shit onto the front lawn and trying to start a fucking bonfire. I barely got there in time to stop her.

Pacing the narrow motel room, I wait. Every night for four years, Calease has found me. No matter where I was at midnight, she could find me. I’m betting it won’t be different tonight.

When the light comes, the first thing I notice is the color. It used to be white. Always white. It’s not now. It’s the same deep orange my pendant has been glowing since… since.

Wider and wider, the doorway opens until a solid lasso of light shoots out the center, straight for me.

I dodge, but it follows me like it’s locked onto my scent. It wraps around my chest, and I tense, waiting for it to burn. Nothing happens. At least, nothing that hurts. Instead, the light sinks into my head, locks around my mind, and pulls.

It feels like peeling a huge patch of skin off a sunburn, but magnified a million times. I grit my teeth and wrench back, holding on to everything. It’s been a long time since I’ve been awake when the doorway opens. Is
this
what she does to me every night? Rips me in half to drag me into her world?

Trying to pull free, I look down. The lasso is going straight through the pendant hanging around my neck. I yank it off, and the noose lightens. Gathering strength, I focus on what I want from her, why I’m physically stepping across the border between our worlds tonight.

J.R.’s face when the knife plunged into his chest.

His smile when he reminded me he saved my life.

The utter anguish on my mom’s face as she screamed at me.

Rage, black rage I haven’t felt in years, burns through my veins. It heightens the adrenaline already coursing through my body, making my muscles tremble.

I start shaking, and the lasso of energy vibrates with me. Blue lines appear in the orange rope of light like fractures in cement. Small chunks break off. Larger ones. Faster and faster until finally it shatters with a
crack
.

For the first time since the first time, I physically step into the world I visit every night in my dreams. There’s a slight buzz against my skin as I pass through the glowing doorway of orange light. I shudder on the other side. It’s cold. Colder than it’s ever been before.

At first glance, it looks the same—evenly spaced wood pillars and reed-mat floor, the boxing ring in the distance, and the mountains as a backdrop to it all. Then I look closer. The pillars are cracking, and the floor is missing half its reeds. I was standing there just last night, but now the boxing ring looks like it’s been left to rot for decades.

I catch the state of it all in a second. It’s strange, but I don’t give a shit. The single part of this world I want to see tonight is the woman facing me. The one who kept me from saving my brother.

Calease stands there like a warrior queen, not showing a hint of the decay surrounding her. Her curves are on display more than usual, hugged by a leather outfit straight out of
Xena
, and her white hair, normally loose and hanging down her back, is pulled tight and braided in a crown atop her head. She stares at me, her chin raised and her ice-blue eyes steady. Her eyes used to remind me of the sky on a crisp, clear autumn day.

Now the color reminds me of J.R.

“You broke your promise.” Her voice, once so soft and serene, now bites. It grates more than the smirk that lifts the corner of her full lips. “Well, you tried to.”

“To save my
brother’s
life!”

She arches one eyebrow. “You should have run. Have I not taught you there is nothing to fear in running? Battles are not worth the fight, Hudson.”

“
This
one was!” My hands clench so tight the leaves of my glass pendant bite into my skin, and the sharp edges I’ve never noticed before now dig in so deep I might be drawing blood.

“
No
battle is worth the price. If you value one life over another—take one to save another—you will become what you were when I found you: a dangerous child on his way to becoming a monster.”

It’s not the first time she’s reminded me of my past, but it is the first time those words don’t quite ring true. Those guys in the park knew me. Did I know them?

Something sparks in my mind, a little burst like a bolt of static electricity.

I
did
know them. I know all three, but I haven’t seen them since my testimony put them in juvie for assault and battery. Those guys today, they weren’t after me to avenge some wrong I did. They were after me because I’d
helped
someone—an old man who couldn’t fight back when three fifteen-year-old gang wannabes attacked him late one night.

That one memory cracks the dam I didn’t know existed.

More memories—thousands of moments from my own life—flood in.

Looking at the scars on my arms, I begin to remember the fights that marked my skin. Standing up for the deaf kid in third grade who didn’t understand why the fifth-grader kept pushing him down. And the girl from the projects who came to school in the same dress every day—I kept her from ending up in the hospital when three girls from her neighborhood jumped her. One by one, I remember all the people I’ve known over the years, the reasons I couldn’t keep myself out of trouble. Not because I went looking for it, but because I didn’t know how to stand back and let shit happen.

The memories hit me like blows until I’m struggling for breath. My vision doubles.

“What have you done to me?” I gasp around the burning in my chest.

Her eyes begin to glow, their color shifting darker and deeper. The brighter they glow, the harder it becomes to look away.

“I saved you from a meaningless existence in service to mindless idiots. They would have used up whatever will you possessed and spat you out broken and bleeding.” I’m folded over as she walks forward and runs her hand over my short hair. Her touch is icy and sends shudders through my entire body. “At least this way you will die young.”

My chest aches. My lungs burn. My head pounds. Until I remembered, part of me hoped today had been some awful mistake. That something had gone wrong and Calease would help me find a way to make it right.

It wasn’t. Trusting her was the mistake.

Her hand pressing against the back of my head, she bends down until she’s eye level with me.

“Humans really are pathetic creatures. Shining talents trapped within worthless, weak shells.” She shakes her head and frowns, but her eyes are bright. Happy. “What do I care if one more of you dies on any given day? This child was not one of mine. Humans are just talents for the taking, and I am almost done with yours.”

J.R.’s face swims up before me. The burning in my chest beats back the ice of Calease’s touch. I straighten, my hand shooting out to wrap around her throat.

“Give me back my brother.”

She doesn’t flinch at first, doesn’t even blink. But when Calease realizes she can’t break free, she trembles. Her blue eyes—dark and glowing—widen as she gasps for air.

“I cannot!” She grabs my wrist, digging fingernails as long as claws into my skin until blood runs down my arm.

“You
have
to!” I shake her so hard that only my hand keeps her head from snapping back. “Give me back J.R.!”

“It cannot be done!” Her face is turning red—
bright
red—and her claws dig deeper until they finally hit bone. I flinch and try to pull away.

I can’t.

The olive-wreath pendant is trapped between our bodies, fusing my hand to her throat. I can move my fingers, but my palm is stuck to Calease’s skin as sparks begin to fly.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

Calease’s mouth moves, but all that comes out is a strangled cry.

The more I fight it, the stronger the energy shooting through my palm becomes. It zings up my arm like an electric shock, and my body locks as the current zips up my neck and jolts straight into my head.

No.
No!
I will not let her destroy me.

She cries out, and the color leaches from her skin until her face is as white as her hair. Light flashes, and her once-blue eyes are milky. In that same moment, light bursts behind my eyes. A web of lines stretches in every direction. Calease doubles, triples, quadruples—each version of her dressed differently. The world is sketched in black and white. I see everything and nothing as the colors keep flashing past.

No, no,
NO!

I wrench my hand free. The pendant explodes.

The blast pushes me backward, knocks my feet out from under me and sends me flying through the air. My vision blurs. I slam into something that holds for a second before it tears.

I keep falling.

Falling.

Falling.

Knock, knock, knock.

The noise is persistent and pounding, each beat pulsing through my head.

“Housekeeping,” a bored voice calls. Seconds later, a key slides into the lock and the door begins to open.

She sees me before I can say anything.

“Sorry. Should I come back later?”

I try to open my eyes, but the light pouring through the open door is brighter than headlights at midnight, and everything I’m seeing blurs and shifts. Lines run across my vision, reminding me of a screwed-up laptop screen. Somehow, I’m lying across the end of the bed, my head toward the door.

“Yeah. Looks like you had a night.” The girl laughs and backs out of the room. “Sleep it off, dude.”

The door closes, and the room plunges into darkness again. But it’s not dark. Not completely. Because my hands are glowing. Like I’m a fucking nightlight.