Crow’s Row

  I screamed through my tears at Cameron. “Cameron, do something! Don’t let them do this. Please.”

  Cameron glanced at me with eyes of pain, and then he took a breath, his jaw tightened and he looked away. His face became expertly unaffected as he stared back at Spider’s gun, waiting. I was in a nightmare. I needed to wake up. But the throbbing in my chest was too real for this to be a dream.

  By the time Tiny had dragged me to the door while I kicked and screamed, the first shot rang out. I watched in horror as Cameron fell to the ground. Tiny had jumped too and momentarily let go of me.

  I ran back to Cameron and crouched to the ground, putting myself between him and Spider’s gun. I looked down. The shoulder of Cameron’s shirt was already soaked through with blood. His eyes found me, but they were dulled. Life was sapping from him and dragging me with it.

  “Get out of here, Emmy,” he said too calmly, like he didn’t feel the gushing wound in his shoulder.

  “I won’t let him do this to you. I’m not leaving you. Why are you letting them do this?”

  “I have no other choice,” he said. “It has to end this way.”

  “I won’t say good-bye to you,” I resolved. “You can fight. Why aren’t you fighting?” I was furious that he was giving up so easily. “Don’t let him win, Cameron.”

  I could feel him vanishing. I put my hand over his wound and turned his face, forcing him to acknowledge me. Tears were burning my cheeks.

  “I love you,” I told him in a desperate whisper. My eyes homed in on his, but Cameron had squeezed his eyes shut. It, love, was no longer enough.

  Cameron pulled my hands away and yelled, “Get her out of here!”

  Tiny had come back and, this time, picked me up off the ground, threw me over his shoulder, and carried me out.

  The last time I saw Cameron, he was staring at the ceiling and a tear had rolled out of the corner of his eye.

  I was still screaming and crying uncontrollably when Tiny finally set me down. He wiped the sweat off his forehead and held onto me with one arm while I continued to fight him off.

  “There’s nothing you can do, Emmy,” Carly’s shaking voice said. She had been standing next to us outside.

  Three more gunshots successively fired from inside the warehouse and then all was quiet.

  Carly put her hands to her face. I lost myself and fell to my knees.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine:

  The One Who Holds the Gun

  In that moment, when the last gunshot rang, I felt Cameron leave me. I snapped, like a wishbone. Cameron was the lucky part that was broken off; left behind was the unlucky part, just hollowed marrow, sucked dry. There was so much pain around me. It was as if someone were stabbing me and slashing my skin open. I wanted to be dead. In a way, I already was—without Cameron, there was nothing left.

  My face was damp. My hair was sticking to my cheeks. I was still screaming, wailing. But inside I felt and heard nothing. My voice was not mine. In my head, everything had gone silent and black, a dark hole that I would never crawl out of. The old Emily had gone down with Cameron; what emerged from the hole was some sinister thing.

  When I looked up, when the Shadow-of-Emily looked up, I saw Carly. She was staring at me, her waterlogged eyes terrified. She had reason to be scared—I was going to kill her, and the rest of them. Hate and vengeance had spread through my veins, my heart, my brain, my skin, like a cancer.

  I lunged for Carly. Tiny was holding me back, with difficulty. Carly stood still in a stupor. I was the caged animal waiting for any opportunity, and she was the prey that stood by the bars, entranced.

  “How could you do this?” The voice that escaped my mouth was hard and violent. “How could you betray him like that?”

  Carly was pale. She was shaking through her tears. “This wasn’t my decision. I didn’t want this to happen. Not like this.”

  “Spider worships you. One word from you and he would have changed his mind,” I yelled.

  She started sobbing, and I hated her more for it. She had no right to cry for Cameron. She had caused his death. I wanted her to suffer.

  “Is that what you did to my brother? You had him killed when he found someone else? Someone who was prettier and nicer than you? He fell in love with Frances, and you and Spider couldn’t control him anymore, so you had him put down like a sick dog.”

  Carly’s face turned to despair. “Emmy, please don’t—”

  “Don’t call me that! You have no right!” I spat.

  Spider had calmly made his way back to us. He glanced at Carly who was sobbing uncontrollably and angrily turned to me. “Carly had nothing to do with this. None of this is her fault.”

  The man who had been holding the gun had conveniently decided that I was to blame for Cameron’s death. A fury of adrenaline raged through my body, and I lunged forward, evading Tiny’s grasp. My fist connected with Spider’s face, and he stumbled back from the blow. I managed to throw another punch, though with less force, before Tiny grabbed me by the shoulders and lifted me from the ground. I kicked my legs, and one of them caught, clipping Spider’s shoulder. He swore. Carly stood by his side, between us, in a panic.

  “Put her in the car!” he ordered Tiny.

  While I continued to fight off Tiny, Spider turned to Carly, pinching his bleeding nose and making stretch circles with his injured shoulder. “Go back inside. Make sure the mess is completely cleaned up.” They glanced at each other for a half-second, and Carly made her way back into the warehouse. In the meantime, Tiny had called for reinforcements, and three men forced me into the back of a black car. I was made to sit in the middle, with my seatbelt tightly strapped to my waist as extra backup, while Tiny and another guard flanked me. Spider sat up front in the passenger side, and the third guard jumped into the driver’s seat.

  “I want to see Cameron,” I demanded whipping the never ending tears.

  “You’re in no position to be making any requests,” Spider said nasally, his head leaned back on the seat and a bloody Kleenex stuffed up his nose.

  He was right. I was squeezed into the seat between two very large, armed men who were nervously watching my every move. I had no energy left to fight them off—the adrenaline had boiled out of me.

  We peeled away from the warehouse. We were somewhere in an industrial zone outside Callister. There were gravel pits and rusty abandoned bulldozers, half-submerged. The car was dangerously speeding on a sandy road with the shocks threatening to sever every time we hit fissures in the uneven road. So much sand was being kicked up from the speed that we were enclosed in a fog of our own dust. I turned back toward the warehouse, where I imagined Cameron’s body still lying on the cold, cement floor; I could see nothing but a cloud of brown dirt. My throat was collapsing into itself, like a trash compactor, squeezing the air out from each end. I could barely breathe—but then again, breathing was by that point overrated, just another luxury that I didn’t want.

  “Where are you taking me?” I managed to croak out.

  No response.

  “Where are you taking me?” I asked again with more force.

  “Shut up,” Spider said with irritation. He had removed the tissue from his nostril, and his nose started gushing blood again.

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  “Can’t you keep your mouth shut for two seconds?”

  “I don’t care if you kill me,” I blurted.

  Spider swore. “If you don’t shut up I will kill you, with my bare hands, in this car. Keep quiet.”

  I started sobbing. I wanted it to be over.

  He sighed. “I won’t kill you, all right?”

  “Why not?” I asked him, looking for a different answer.

  “Because I can’t kill people like you without other people like you noticing,” he said angrily.

  Spider’s words had hit me like a gunshot through the heart. Cameron died while I cruelly had to outlive him, for no other reason than the circumstances I had been born into, which
had put me in a different world than him. Yet Spider, who belonged in no one’s world, was still sitting there, alive and mostly unharmed. There was something despairingly unjust about that. Hate boiled in my veins.

  “You must be happy now that Cameron’s out of your way,” I surmised.

  Spider fleetingly glared to the rear before turning his eyes to the road ahead of him, without offering response. Everyone in the car was stifled.

  I had a captive audience, so I continued, “Looks like there’s conveniently no one else left alive but you to take over the reins. First my brother, now Cameron. How many people do you have to kill before you figure out that you’re not smart enough to lead anything or anyone?”

  Spider’s jawbone protruded as he clenched his teeth together. Even if he coolly tried to ignore me, I knew that he was listening to my every word. I was on a path to self-destruction—if he wasn’t planning on killing me, I would make him change his mind or make him regret his decision to let me live.

  “What you did won’t change a thing. You’ll never be anything like Cameron or my brother. You’re just another power-hungry street thug with more gunpowder than brains.” My voice was acidic.

  Spider’s lips were stretched thin. “You’ve got a pretty big mouth for a little girl stuck in a car with four guys who aren’t afraid of using their guns.”

  “I’m not afraid of you.” There was nothing else that Spider could ever do to me that would change this. “I won’t let you control me like you did Cameron.”

  Spider huffed crossly. “Control Cameron? No one controls Cameron except for you. You’re a parasite. If it wasn’t for you, none of this would have happened. Things started going wrong from the day you got here. You took Cameron’s focus away—and the business started suffering because of it. If we didn’t do this, you would have gotten all of us killed.”

  “We?” I asked incredulously. “I only saw one person holding the gun.”

  Spider turned and pointed his finger at me. “You didn’t see a thing. And if you know what’s good for you, you’ll keep your mouth shut and stay the hell away from us. Or I swear to God, I will hunt you down and squeeze the life out of you myself—rich girl or not. I’ll take your whole prissy family down too if I have to. None of this ever happened. Forget we ever existed.”

  I wasn’t scared. There was a hole in Spider’s plan, and I was happy to bring this to his attention. “What am I supposed to do when Victor comes knocking at my door? Pretend I’ve never seen him before?”

  “I don’t care what you do,” he spat back coldly. “Besides, Shield won’t come back. You’re no longer useful to him now that Cameron …” He didn’t finish his sentence.

  I looked at him carefully. I had noticed something change in his face as he had said this. He was hiding something.

  “You and Victor were in on this the whole time,” I said.

  When Spider uneasily shifted in his seat and turned his face as far away from me as possible, I knew I was on the right track. I thought back at that day, in the church, when Spider had finally convinced Cameron to leave me behind. This had provided Victor with the perfect opportunity to take me.

  The Shadow-of-Emily pounced. “You were setting Cameron up to fail so that you would have enough to take him out without getting in trouble with the leaders. This was your plan, wasn’t it? To force him to come after me and show that he was a risk because of me. That’s why you let Victor go today.”

  Spider chuckled nervously, but refused to look at me. “You don’t know a thing, girl. That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. Cameron was becoming a risk, but it had nothing to do with me and everything to do with you. We had to recruit other gang factions because you were stupid enough to get yourself caught by Shield. With half our fleet dead, it was the only way that we would be able to overtake Shield’s guards and get you out.” After a moment, he added, “As far as I know, you and Shield were the ones who were playing all of us. He was your uncle, not mine. I had nothing to do with Shield.”

  I was far from being convinced. Spider would have been ecstatic to have Cameron show his weakness by going to other gangs and plead for their help in order to save a girl. This had only enhanced Spider’s chances at getting Cameron out of the picture and taking his place at the head of the table without too much huff from the leaders. I glared at the back of Spider’s head. If looks could kill, Spider would have had a stake through his neck by now.

  “I’m going to kill you,” I promised. The coldness in my voice left nothing to doubt that I had meant this with every fiber of my being.

  Spider didn’t look back. “I’d like to see you try.”

  It took me a while to realize that the car had stopped. The third guard had pulled up next to the unleveled sidewalk in front of my house. I had no idea how I had gotten there—everything had been a blur up to that point. But looking at my house was like the nightmare had suddenly poured into my reality, or at least the reality of the old Emily.

  The new now being connected with the familiar had only heightened the pain—Cameron hadn’t been just a dream. He had been a real person whom I loved and who had, inexplicably, loved me. Now he was gone because of love, because of me. I was the one who was supposed to die. Not him. There was no waking up from that nightmarish feeling of pain and utter desperation.

  Tiny slid down the seat, grabbing my arm, and dragging me out in the process. The breeze as I stepped out of the car chilled me to the bone. My face, hair, and clothes were still drenched with my tears.

  Spider opened his door and peered at me without getting out of his seat. “We’ll have your things delivered to you,” he said in a businesslike manner, like nothing had ever happened. “Keep your mouth shut and stay away from us.”

  I had expected him to threaten me profusely, like maybe dragging his index finger along his throat or pointing a fingered gun at his head, pulling the thumbed trigger. But there was none of that. They left without another thought. I stood on the sidewalk shivering, watching them drive away.

  Chapter Thirty:

  Passing on the Crazy Torch

  It was a while before I could muster up the courage to walk up the walkway that led to the house. For the longest time, I was a statue on the sidewalk, afraid of what I was going to find beyond. After being plucked out of my former life and thrown into someone else’s reality, after making that reality mine, going back to normal was an impossible option. Though I still had no idea what normal meant.

  There was an old lady in our neighborhood who spent her days pushing her rickety walker forward while mumbling to herself and making her rounds around the same block. She did this every day, like clockwork. She had become the local legend with my roommates. Rumors about her past were conjured up over bottles of beer and pizza boxes. The better story was the one where she was hunting for stray cats and hiding them under her flowered muumuu. She would take them home and train them for the day when she was going to take over the neighborhood, but first sent them back into the world to await the hiss of her orders. The sleeper-cell cats got fat off our garbage in the meantime.

  When the crazy lady passed by me today, she looked at me like I was the crazy one. She wasn’t far off target. I wondered what gossip would be made up to account for my madness. Whatever the stories were going to be, I was sure the red hair would make them all the more imaginative. The lady’s glance at my expense had been meaningful, but swift. She went back to her psychobabble and pretended I was never there. People in these parts were ingrained to keep to themselves, lest they be dragged into their neighbor’s misery. They had enough of their own troubles.

  By the time I decided to move forward, the lady had already inched her way down my street and disappeared around the corner. Holding my breath with dread, I turned the doorknob and pushed on the front door, almost wishing that it would be locked. It wasn’t.

  Walking into the house felt like I was walking into a sarcophagus. The dusty curtains were pulled shut, casting an eerie shadow on the m
ismatched furniture, and the air was stifling. The house was as dead as I felt. This was a slight comfort to me. When I heard the sound of kids playing somewhere outside, I slammed the door behind me, shutting out all signs of life.

  I stood in the darkened entryway, unsure if I was going to fall down crying, start screaming at the top of my lungs, or both. I did neither. The only thing I wanted to do was get Victor’s spit off my skin, as if his touch had left behind his microscopic bugs to crawl and find refuge within my pores. I robotically went upstairs to draw a bath, not even bothering to touch the cold water faucet. I would burn him off me.

  The washroom quickly filled with steam. Water droplets from the rolling vapor attached themselves to all surfaces, like the first snowfall of the season. I was now free to roam about the bathroom without fear of catching a glimpse of myself in the fogged mirror. When I got undressed, that’s when I spotted it: all the blood. My hands and forearms, which had grabbed onto to him as I begged him to fight for us, were covered in Cameron’s blood. And while I had leaned over him and he had looked up at the ceiling with defeat, my kneecaps had also been doused in his blood.

  Water was raging up to the surface.

  With my hands shaking, I hurriedly took my clothes off and stepped into the tub before I could fall apart. I sat in the water, barely feeling the burn against my skin. I was careful to tuck my knees into my chest so that my hands and knees stayed out of the water. The red stains on my skin were a reminder of everything I had lost.

  I was rocking back and forth, numbed, staring at the palms of my hands while tears washed my face.

  This, his blood, was all I had left of him …

  I sniffled and, with every muscle of my body resisting my brain’s orders, struggled to bring my knees down into the water. I was sobbing, deep convulsing sobs. I brought my arms and hands down next and watched his blood swirl in a haze, dissipating into my bathwater. I lay down and ducked my head underwater, silencing my cries.