Chapter 9
“Don’t you dare fucking scream.” It’s Cassie.
She drags me over to the van, slides open the side door, and pushes me inside. My head smacks against Theo’s car seat, clattering a set of plastic toy keys.
Evan and Wyatt crouch in the back. Luke is up front, phone in his hands. Tanya is passed out in the passenger seat. The disturbance of my presence, punctuated by the sound of the van door closing, jolts her awake.
“Where…where am I?” Her words vibrate with fear and confusion, every breath she takes clipped and desperate. “Where’s Ravi?”
I’d prefer it if she were still unconscious.
Her head slumps forward, hair falls to one side, and I can see that she’s got a cut on the back of her neck. It’s festering the way that Danny’s did.
“The van won’t start?” I ask.
“No, we’re just parked here for fun,” Evan says. “Hanging out.”
“Ev,” Wyatt says.
“What? Sarcasm isn’t going to be what kills us.”
A raven lands on the hood of the van, eliciting a collective gasp.
“I hate these fucking birds, dude,” Luke says.
“Steph and Jace. Where are they?” I ask. “Are they all right?”
The van goes silent.
“No. Not again.”
“What do you mean again?” Tanya asks, turning around to look at me. Her pretty eyes are wide, her pupils dilated. Her tone sharp. The audacity.
“Nothing,” I snap.
“Can we keep the volume down?” Cass whispers. “Jesus Christ.”
“What happened?” I ask, lowering my voice.
Cass sighs. “The birds came in through the windows. They started attacking. Then this guy appeared. We got out through the back but…”
“I’m not entirely convinced we’re not on an acid trip,” Evan says. “Or collectively hallucinating.”
“This isn’t like any trip I’ve ever had,” Luke says.
“The police are on their way,” Cass says.
“We just need to stay low and shut the fuck up. Can you manage that? Mm? Or do you want a raven to swoop down and peck out your eyes and then have that Victorian ghost man suck your life force out of your empty sockets? Because that’s what’s happening here, whether we want to believe it or not. ”
Another moment of silence.
“When you put it that way,” Evan mutters.
“The cops are coming?” I whisper.
“Yeah,” Luke says. “Took a lot of convincing. Multiple calls. They thought I was messing with them. A prank.”
“Some of the other guests must have gotten through as well,” Wyatt says.
I should be relieved that some form of help is coming for us, but what are the cops going to do? Taser hundreds of demon birds, take a phantom into custody?
And even if they do somehow manage to thwart the soul-sucking ghoul and his legion of ravens, what then? If I don’t die tonight, or if I don’t fall sleep, will I make it through to tomorrow? A tomorrow without Steph and Jace? Without Danny? Maybe without Ravi?
A second raven lands on the van. A third. They step closer to the windshield, their talons scraping the hood.
Tanya suddenly folds into herself. She coughs, spewing black goo onto her lap, ruining her pretty pink dress.
“You okay?” Luke asks.
“I…I’m sick,” she says. “I don’t know what’s happening. What’s going to happen. The police can’t help us. You know that, don’t you? Not here. Not now. I should…I need to go.”
She reaches for the door handle.
“No!” Cassie yells, ignoring her own rule of quiet.
“You don’t understand.” Tanya turns her attention back to me. Her pupils leak into the whites of her eyes. “Something’s wrong here.”
“Astute,” Evan says.
“The ravens are poison,” I say. “The same thing happened to Danny.”
“I should’ve left,” Tanya says, shaking her head. She sounds sleepy, dazed. “I need to leave. I need to get out of here…I need…”
“Ravi asked me to look after you, Tanya,” Luke says. “And that’s what I’m gonna do.”
“What if it’s transmittable?” Cassie asks. “Sorry, Tanya. I have a son. Did anyone else get clipped by a bird?”
“No,” Evan says, at the exact moment Wyatt says, “Yes.”
Wyatt pulls up his pant leg, and there’s a gash across his shin.
“No! No. That’s not, no,” Evan says, leaning over and pulling Wyatt’s pant leg down, hiding the wound. “No. How did that happen? You can’t—”
He’s interrupted by the first blow. Beak against glass.
“Willa…” I hate the way that Tanya says my name.
I hate that she’s here. I hate that her beautiful face is warping with rot, with that inky feather-like rash.
I hate how she’s looking at me, like she wants something from me.
I hate that whatever it is, I wish I could give it to her. I wish I could save her.
She erupts in another coughing fit.
“Fuck.” Cassie clenches her fists, stressed and helpless.
“Willa, what happened to Danny?” Wyatt asks.
“He’s…he’s dead.”
“No!” Evan kicks the back of my seat. “No. Wyatt, you’re not dying. You can’t die. Not happening.”
“Danny didn’t die because of…It was the man in the top hat. He got to us. Danny was too weak to run.”
“So you left him?” Cassie asks.
“I…There was nothing I could do. I couldn’t stop it.”
The raven hits the windshield again, and it cracks.
“Luke!” Cassie screams. “Try the engine!”
He presses the start button, but nothing happens. “C’mon, c’mon, c’mon.”
Without warning, Tanya opens her door and spills out onto the gravel. She turns back, about to say something when the ravens descend.
All the screaming doesn’t drown out the spew of violence—a vicious, sopping disassembly. Blood and black goo spatter onto the passenger door, the seat.
“Let’s go,” Luke says, climbing in the back and grabbing Cassie’s hand. He opens the side door, and they’re running, making toward the road.
“Close the doors,” Evan says. “Wyatt can’t run. We’ll hide in here.”
“I can try,” Wyatt says.
“Don’t be stupid. Save your strength. Willa! The doors!”
“But…” I stare out into the fog, past where Tanya’s limp body is getting picked apart by the ravens. We’re dead if we stay here. We should follow Cass and Luke. We need to go. We need to run. We need to try.
“Willa! Close the fucking doors.” There’s such urgency in Evan’s voice, it should spring me into action, but instead it drags me back to last night, when the three of us were in the field and I left them to be killed by the Eyeball Man.
I should stay with them now, no matter what. I shouldn’t repeat that mistake.
So you left him?
Cassie knows the truth about me. She sees me.
I see you.
I leave. I abandon ship when things get hard. I’m selfish. I’m a failure. I want too much.
Ravi’s face floats before me, an apparition.
It all goes by so fast—blinking away the days, the weeks, the months, years vanishing, rotting as quickly as beautiful ripe fruit, just gone, over, disappearing into that mysterious outer space beyond the reach of memory so it’s like they never even happened.
I was terrified of wasting any more of my life being unhappy, of postponing the same sad conclusion, but maybe I should have tried harder, compromised more, endured. Maybe I should have given it more time.
Tick tick tick tick tick tick.
I shut the back side door, then climb up front, reach for the passenger side handle.
“Willa!”
“I’m trying!” The door drips with blood, and with that dark, toxic substance. What will happen to me if I touch it?
I see you.
Red eyes float in the fog.
He’s here.
“Tick, tock. Tick, tock.”
“It’s too late,” I tell them. “It’s too late.”
The driver’s side door rips open.
I scream.
“It’s me.” It’s Ravi. “Get out. Come on. It’s not safe here. Let’s go.”
“Can you move?” Evan asks Wy. “Can you—”
“I got it,” Wyatt says, stumbling over the middle row, over Theo’s car seat.
“This way,” Ravi says.
I follow his voice, climb over the center console and fall into his arms. This is the first time we’ve touched in so long that I can’t even remember, and it’s déjà vu. The brine of his sweat is familiar to me. His deodorant, his cologne, his fucking pH—the scent of a former life, of a dead future.
He pulls me out of the car.
He lets me go.
He doesn’t want to touch me anymore.
“I’m sorry I lost you,” I tell him. “I turned around and you were gone.”
“Willa…” That feather-like pattern has taken over his whole face. His right eye is black.
Tick tick tick tick tick tick.
Evan and Wyatt are out of the car.
The ravens fly low; I catch glimpses of their dark wings through the fog.
We can’t outrun them. Wyatt won’t be fast enough, even with Ravi and Evan helping him.
If I stop running, is it giving up? Or is it a noble sacrifice?
Ravi’s back is to me. He doesn’t check to see if I’m following. Maybe he doesn’t care. Or maybe he just assumes that I am. Wouldn’t be the first time. We always assumed we were going the same way, headed in the same direction, and look where that got us.
My guilt, my doubt, it’s tormenting me, and I’m letting it. I’m surrendering to it. I’m not strong enough to hold it anymore, buckling under the weight.
“Your time is up.”
The tendril of fog coiling around my neck is slimy and cold. It lifts me into the air, spins me around so that I’m face-to-face with the phantom in the top hat.
His beak teeth are so much worse up close. So confusing. They go on forever. Rows and rows, spiraling back into his throat. There are bits stuck between them—pinkish ribbons of soul. His serpentine tongue laps at my chin. He exhales. His breath is a funeral.
I know what’s coming, and I know I can’t stop it.
All I can hear is the caw of the ravens, and the specter’s sharp inhale.
It’s a ferocious tug, akin to vomiting. But it’s more painful.
More cutting. And it itches. It burns. Burns deep with an explicit, frenetic sting.
The pain evolves. Escalates. My vision blurs and now all I can hear is my own screaming, and inside it the echoes of every time I’ve ever broken down in tears, every moment in my life that has brought me to my knees, the sound of my hurt in breaths and whispers and shouting matches and slammed doors.
The time my mother slapped me across the face for talking back—the time I told Ravi about it, and he said he was sorry, and it was wrong, and that I didn’t deserve it, and I wasn’t sure if he was lying to be nice or if he really didn’t question whether I deserved it or not.
Because maybe I did. And maybe I deserve this.
The last thing I see will be these two red eyes and this open mouth drinking me in.
The last thing I feel will be pain. Pain and emptiness. Dying is so lonely.
I reach out just to feel something, anything else, and my fingers graze the feather in the phantom’s hat.
The rope of fog around my neck tightens. Squeezing, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing, until SNAP.
My time is up.