And the rest of me?
Well, that’s a little bit more complicated, isn’t it?
•—•—•
“How did you find me?”
Sally had arranged herself primly on a suddenly vacant bench, her delicate face turned up to the night sky, small mouth barely open as if silently laughing at a joke I couldn’t hear. At my words, she turned those cavernous eyes in my direction.
“The same way they did.” The endless ranks of ghosts around us shivered as if a stiff wind had blown through them. “I heard the call, and came to see who was making it.”
I frowned as her meaning hit me.
“You’re saying I’m the reason they’re here? I called them?”
“It certainly wasn’t me.” She patted the bench next to her with a lace-covered hand. “Take a seat and tell me your name.”
Her words were quiet, the voice almost sweet, but when Sally Cemetery tells you to do something, you do it. I sat next to her, far enough away to avoid the folds of her black skirt, and stuck out my hand. “Damian Banach.”
She looked down at my outstretched hand and something cold and dark crept into her smile. “You don’t want me to touch you.”
I let my hand fall away.
“Which is just as well,” she continued in that same empty voice, “as I don’t wish to be touched.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Men always are.”
It was my turn to shiver, though there was nothing cold about August in Los Angeles.
•—•—•
I don’t know how much time passed before she spoke again. The moon seemed fixed in place, like the ghosts ringed about us, like Sally herself, on the far side of the bench.
Finally, she stirred, a porcelain statue coming back to life.
“Someone died recently.”
“Yeah.” Shane’s ghost was still in the front ranks of the dead, but Mom was nowhere to be found. “How did you know?”
“It’s how these things go.” Sally regarded Shane’s ghost for a long moment. “Necromancy isn’t like other powers. It takes more than control or practice for a Crow to tap their potential. It takes death.”
“Death?”
Sally’s eyes, mud-brown and torn, met mine, and she cupped her hands together in front of her to form a bowl. “This is the power you were born with. Each death fills the vessel a little more, turning potential into ability. Sometimes, that progression is small, almost unnoticeable. Other times,” she nodded at the ghosts surrounding us, “it is less small.”
I thought of Shane and the men Her Majesty had killed on the road to Los Angeles. I thought of the suicide at Mama Rawlins’. Most of all, I thought of Mom.
“How many deaths?”
“As many as it takes. Your strength is fixed. Only the ability to wield it changes.”
“I’m just a Low-Three.”
“Lucky you.” Her smile twisted.
•—•—•
“Is that why Shane is angry? Because I used his death as some sort of power boost?”
The moon was still fixed in the sky and refusing to move, but it felt like I’d been on that hill for days already, like I’d been born there and would be there until the day I died.
“Is he angry?”
I followed her gaze to the motionless ginger. “Not right now… not with you here, but yeah. I thought it was because of how he died, or that I wasn’t able to convince Ishmae to stay, but—”
Sally was already shaking her head.
“The dead have life within them, but they are not living. They are here only because you called them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“If the boy is angry, it’s because you think he should be. If he will not leave you alone, it is because you don’t want him to go.”
“That’s impossible.” I gripped the edge of the bench so tightly the stone bit into my palms. “I don’t even know how to use my power.”
“And yet here we are.”
It was my turn to shake my head. “You don’t understand. I’ve tried to use it. I tried to send them all away, but it didn’t fucking work!”
Sally’s smile was cold and quiet and sharp as razor. “Show me.”
•—•—•
I’d drawn so heavily on my anger back in the dorm room that at first it failed to come at all. I sat there in silence, struggling to grasp the tattered shreds of the rage I carried with me. I could feel Sally’s eyes on me; her gaze both weight and whirlpool, pinning me to the stone bench even as it threatened to pull me under.
I wasn’t sure if she had come to help me or to kill me, but disappointing her seemed unwise.
I turned to the memories I usually kept locked away, to limbs splayed wide across the tiles, to carnage that smelled like blood and apple pie, and the way Mom’s eyes went flat as I fumbled uselessly at one of her many gaping wounds. People say there’s a light that leaves the eyes with death, but I’d seen only darkness, spilling out in waterfalls and streams, staining whatever it touched.
I thought of Mom and her murder and felt my anger reignite. I fed that flickering spark the last memory I had of the man who killed her, hands chained behind him, his own grey eyes red-rimmed as if he’d dared to shed tears for the woman he’d stabbed eleven times. I added in everything that had happened since that day; the Jacobsens and Mama Rawlins, the first-years and the Academy. And when I could feel the anger roaring again inside me, like a fire scorching my organs, I took hold of it, I gathered my will, and—
“No.”
One word, delivered by the quiet voice of Sally Cemetery, and all my gathered rage fell away, slipping through my grasp like water, to leave me shuddering and spent on the bench.
It took a minute, or maybe ten, but eventually, I cracked one eye open, and looked at the Crow who shared my bench.
“No?” Even my voice was cracked and hoarse, as if I’d spent the past hour screaming, and not focused inward, stoking the anger I needed to call my
