The wings have lost their sheen. There is still a hint of golden highlights in the snowy feathers, but some of the feathers are broken and sticking out at odd angles. Also, blood is splattered and congealed all over the wings, making the feathers clump and shrivel.
“If you help me find my sister, you can have these back. I saved them for you.”
“Thanks,” he croaks, surveying the wings. “They’ll look great on my wall.” Bitterness tinges his voice, but something else is also there. A tiny bit of hope, maybe.
“Before you and your buddies destroyed our world, there used to be doctors who could attach a finger or a hand back onto you if it happened to be cut off.” I don’t mention anything about refrigeration or the usual need to reattach a body part within hours of being severed. He’ll probably die anyway and none of this will matter.
The tense muscle in his jaw still stands out on his cold face, but his eyes warm just a fraction, as if he can’t help but think of the possibilities.
“I didn’t cut these off you,” I say. “But I can help you get them back. If you’ll help me find my sister.”
As an answer, he closes his eyes and appears to fall asleep.
He breathes deeply and heavily, just like a person in deep sleep. But he doesn’t heal like a person. When I dragged him in here, his face was black, blue, and swelling. Now, after almost two full days of sleeping, his face is back to normal. The dent from his broken ribs has disappeared. The bruises around his cheeks and eyes are gone, and the numerous cuts and marks on his hands, shoulders, and chest are completely healed.
The only things that haven’t healed are the wounds where his wings used to be. I can’t tell if they’re better through the bandages, but since they’re still bleeding, they’re probably not much better than they were two days ago.
I pause for a moment, thinking through my options. If I can’t bribe him, I’ll have to torture it out of him. I’m determined to do what it takes to keep my family alive, but I don’t know if I can go that far.
But he doesn’t have to know that.
Now that he’s awake, I had better make sure I can keep him under control. I head out to see if I can find something to hold him.
CHAPTER 7
When I walk out of the corner office, I find that the dead man in the foyer has been messed with. He seems to have lost all dignity since the last time I saw him.
Someone has arranged for one hand to be propped on his hip while the other hand reaches up to his hair. His long, shaggy hair has been spiked as though electrocuted, and his mouth is smeared drunkenly with lipstick. His eyes are wide open with black felt lines radiating like sun rays from his eyes. In the middle of his chest, a kitchen knife that wasn’t there an hour ago sticks out like a flagpole. Someone stabbed a dead body for reasons only the insane can fathom.
My mother has found me.
My mother’s condition is not as consistent as some might think. The intensity of her insanity waxes and wanes with no predictable schedule or trigger. Of course, it doesn’t help that she’s off her meds. When it’s good, people might not guess there’s anything wrong with her. Those are the days when the guilt of my anger and frustration toward her eat away at me. When it’s bad, I might walk out of my room to find a dead-man-turned-toy on the floor.
To be fair, she has never played with corpses before, at least, not that I’ve seen. Before the world fell apart, she’d always been on the edge and often several steps beyond it. But my dad’s desertion, then later the attacks, intensified everything. Whatever rational part of her that had been holding her back from diving into the darkness simply dissolved.
I think about burying the body, but a cold part of my mind tells me that this is still the best deterrent I could have. Any sane person who looks through the glass doors would run far, far away. We now play a permanent game of I-am-crazier-and-scarier-than-you. And in that game, my mother is our secret weapon.
I walk cautiously toward the bathrooms where the shower is running. My mother hums a haunting melody, one that I think she made up. She used to sing it to us when she was in her half-lucid state. A wordless tune that is both sad and nostalgic. It may have had words to it at one point because every time I hear it, it evokes a sunset over the ocean, an ancient castle, and a beautiful princess who throws herself off the castle walls into the pounding surf below.
I stand outside the bathroom door, listening to her hum in the shower. I associate this song with her coming back from a particularly crazy phase. Usually, she hummed it to us as she patched up whatever bruises or slashes she had caused during her crazy phase.
She was always gentle and genuinely sorry during these times. I think it might have been an apology of a sort. Never enough, obviously, but it may have been her way of reaching back to the light, of letting us know that she was surfacing out of the darkness and into the gray zone.
She hummed it incessantly after Paige’s “accident.” We never did find out exactly what happened. Only my mother and Paige were in the house at the time, and only they will ever know the real story. My mother cried for months after, blaming herself. I blamed her too. How could I not?
“Mom?” I call out through the closed bathroom door.
“Penryn!” she calls out through the shower splashes.
“Are you okay?”
“Yes. Are you? Have you seen Paige? I can’t find her anywhere.”
“We’ll find her, okay? How did you find me?”
“Oh, I just did.” My mother doesn’t usually lie, but she did have a habit of being vaguely evasive.
“How did you find me, Mom?”
The shower runs freely for a moment before she answers. “A demon told me.” Her voice is full of reluctance, full of shame. The world being what it is these days, I might even consider believing her, except that no one but her sees or hears her personal demons.
“That was nice of him,” I say. The demons usually took the blame for the crazy, bad things my mother did. They rarely got credit for anything good.
“I had to promise I’d do something for him.” An honest answer. And a warning.
My mother is stronger than she looks, and when given the upper hand of surprise, she can do serious harm. She’s been contemplating defense all her life—how to sneak up on an attacker, how to hide from The Thing That Watches, how to banish the monster back to hell before it steals the souls of her children.