Before the Crow’s Nest opens, the woods are louder.
It’s early in the afternoon. The coffeehouse doors are locked, the parking lot empty. There’s no one here but me to hear the trees roar.
I sit on the back stoop. Behind me two broad steps lead up to the Crow’s Nest’s kitchen door, set back in a frame of scarred gray wood. Moss and mushrooms and tiny white flowers sprout from the earth on either side. My bike leans against the wall nearby. It’s shady here. It smells like coffee and pine.
The wind pulls my hair. The trees shake. They would like to lash out and brush me away.
I should be at school right now. History class. Second to last row, right-hand side. Mrs. Wilder probably won’t even notice that I’m gone.
The thought of Anders being there alone makes my chest tighten for a moment. But being here mattered more.
This morning when I went into the living room with the coffee tray, I found Aunt Mae half unwrapped from the wadded blankets. She was shaky and dew-drenched with sweat, whispering, “No. Not too late. No.” The TV babbled in the background.
I sat down on the edge of the couch. There was some whiskey left in the bottle. I poured a slug straight into her coffee. Then I helped her sit up and curl her fingers around the cup. The oily surface trembled.
“So hot,” she muttered, her eyes still shut. I was ready to take the coffee back, to pull away the loose cocoon of blankets. Then Aunt Mae went on. “It melts the glass.”
She didn’t mean the coffee. I watched her face. “The glass where?”
“A kitchen. A little room.” She shivered. “At the back of a bigger place.”
I found her bony leg beneath the blankets. Rubbed the spot below her knee. “What else?”
“Too late for him. Standing right there at the stove. He’s one of the good ones. And they know it.” Aunt Mae’s eyelids twitched. “Skin gone. Shirt charred to his body.”
There was a little trail of drool leaking down Aunt Mae’s chin. I patted it away with my sleeve. “What else?”
“Spreading. Out into the big room. Bottles bursting. Bags of coffee beans. Pop pop pop.”
I felt it. The hot breath on the back of my neck.
They’re getting closer. They’re nibbling away at the edges. They want to leave me nowhere to hide.
“The Crow’s Nest?” I asked, although the answer already sat heavy inside me.
Aunt Mae’s eyelids flickered upward. She looked out at me. Watery eyes, blue on red. “Yes,” she breathed. “That’s it. Yes.”
“Do you know when?”
“Soon.” Aunt Mae squinted. “Afternoon. The sky outside the windows is light.”
I squeezed her leg again. “I’ll take care of it.”
Aunt Mae gave me a grateful look. Another long sigh. Then she blinked down at her coffee, seeing it for the first time.
I watched her take a careful sip. “Do you think it’s an accident?”
Aunt Mae just looked at me. More sharply now.
“I’ll be there before they open,” I told her.
And I am.
The Crow’s Nest opens at three on weekdays. Most of its customers are at school or work or asleep until then. I’ve been waiting since one. Sometime around two o’clock Ike Lawrence’s big gray truck rumbles up the road that’s slashed through the oaks and pines like a paved wound. He veers across the empty parking lot, stopping at the far end.
He climbs out of the cab. The trees hush.
He saunters toward me, face unchanging, one hand swinging his ring of keys.
Ike is well over six feet. His face is like carved oak. His black T-shirt strains around his torso. The Crow’s Nest doesn’t need bouncers.
But Aunt Mae is right. He’s one of the good ones. You can see it, deep down, under the black T-shirt. The light.
He stops, standing above my spot on the stoop. He looks down. I look up.
“There’s something wrong with your stove,” I tell him.
His face doesn’t change. “Well,” he says. “Let’s see about that.”
He unlocks the back door.
I follow him up into the kitchen—a small room at the back, lined with wire shelves of paper goods, seasonings, bulk food bins. The smell of gas is faint. Easily hidden behind the rich hum of coffee, the lingering harmonies of chocolate, muffins, toasted bread.
Ike throws me a look.
He grasps the sides of the big gas stove and yanks it out, one corner at a time, onto the scarred black-and-white checked linoleum. He cranes around it.
“Huh,” he says.
Then he turns to the nearest window and opens the pane wide. Forest air blasts in. I hear the woods roar. Ike opens another window. I step in to help. As I pass the stove, I can see it, too: a crook in the blue hose winding out of its back, the crack like a wrinkle in thick skin, letting out the explosive gas.
Ike heads to the basement to shut off the gas main. When he comes back, shoving through the swinging door into the main room, I follow. He leaves the lights out, striding through between the empty tables and upturned chairs to the patio entrance. Throws the doors wide.
Leaf-tinted light. More cool, piney air.
Ike walks slowly back to me. “Guess we won’t be serving hot food tonight.”
I nod.
He tips his head to one side. It’s only a few degrees, but for someone as stony as Ike Lawrence, it’s a tip. “How?” he says.
“My aunt Mae. Mae Malcolm. She—”
“Yeah,” he cuts me off. “I know Mae.”
There’s weight to the words. He knows. Lots of people in this town guess or whisper or imagine, but there are also a few who know.
Ike looks at me for several seconds.
I almost never look at myself. I try to imagine what he sees. Scuffed sneakers. Jeans with holes in each knee. Black thermal shirt, men’s, secondhand. My favorite old flannel, also made for a man, hanging loose and soft around me. The hair. White blond, flyaway, with wide curls. Unfashionably long.
“You know how to grind coffee?” he asks.
Not what I expected. I nod again.
“I’ve got an old hand crank around here somewhere. We’ll wait until the place airs out before we start any electrics.”
Ike turns, his broad back disappearing into the storeroom beside the kitchen.
He sets me up behind the coffee counter with a stool and a hand crank and a sack of roasted beans and a metal container to dump the little grinder drawer into each time I fill it.
I’m still there, turning the crank, when Janos crosses the room.
He stops. Does a dramatic double take.
“It’s like seeing a statue climb off of its pedestal,” he says, starting to smile. He pats the stool at the very end of the counter. “Aren’t you supposed to be sitting here?”
I smile back. “Not all the time.”
“Gas leak,” says Ike to Janos, coming out of the kitchen. “Repair guys are coming. We’ll just have drinks and baked goods for tonight.”
“Sounds good to me,” says Janos. He grins at me again. “Grilled cheese and I could use an evening apart.”
Ike goes back to the kitchen. Janos steps behind me, checking the cooler’s milk supply, sliding empty trays out of the bakery case.
“How was school this afternoon?” he asks.
“It was good,” I answer. “I’m guessing.”
Janos smiles wider. He begins arranging a row of biscotti on a sheet of waxed paper. I knock another heap of grounds out of the drawer.
“Think we’re in for a storm tonight,” says Janos in a moment, in a way that doesn’t tell me whether it’s a statement or a question.
I stop and try to feel the air. Here, inside the long, scarred-walled room, it’s cool and shifting. Changing. Changeable. A faint sourness of gas still hangs beneath the scent of fresh ground coffee. The open windows are gray. The sky beyond them, behind the trees, is too dark for midafternoon.
“Maybe,” I say.
“Oops,” says Janos, with a stagy twist of one hand. “This one is broken. We’ll have to eat it.”
He holds out half of a snapped biscotti. I take it. Give him another smile.
For the next hour Ike leaves every window and door open. The woods breathe into the Crow’s Nest, touching everything greedily but unable to carry any of it away. A work crew thumps into the kitchen. Heavy footsteps, the rasp of appliances pushed across the floor. Janos lets me help him take down the chairs from the tabletops, refill sugar canisters and stir-stick cups. It’s Friday. Which means Last Things. Which means the place will be packed, and soon.
People start showing up right at opening time. Janos plugs the steamer into its socket. He switches on the coffee machines. Dark streams pour into their carafes.
Ike strides back with a handwritten sign to tape to the register: Kitchen Closed Tonight. Then he steps over to the corner where I’m wiping the backs of the old wooden chairs.
“Here,” he says in his gruff voice. He holds out a folded twenty between his first and second fingers.
I don’t touch it. “You don’t have to pay me.”
“Come on,” he says. “I owe you for the help. And I don’t like being in debt.”
I still don’t touch the money. “Anybody would have told you about the leak,” I say. “If they knew.”
Ike narrows his eyes just a little. “I’m not paying you for that. I can’t, and I know it. I’m paying you for the prep work and cleaning you’ve done. Now, are you going to take this or am I going to have to mail it to your aunt?”
He sets the money on the table in front of me. Twenty dollars. I don’t know when I’ve had twenty dollars of my own to spend.
“One other thing,” says Ike, already stepping away. “That money is no good here.” He gives me the tiniest one-cornered smile. “Anybody who literally saves my ass gets their coffee for free.”
I pick up the money. There’s a second twenty folded inside the first.
I slide the bills into my pocket and smile at Ike’s disappearing back.
Janos has finished making flavored mochas for three freshmen girls when I walk up to the counter. He raises an eyebrow at me. He overhead everything.
“So,” he says, “what can I get for you, miss?”
“A cappuccino. Please.”
Janos gives a little bow. He turns to the steamer, packing espresso into the little basket, picking up the metal milk pitcher. When he’s not looking, I slip one of the twenties into the tip can.
I take my cappuccino out to the edge of the patio. Three other outdoor tables are already taken by people with dark clothes and bright tattoos. I don’t recognize any of them. The wind through the trees is blowing harder. Spatters of loose leaves click across the pavement.
Janos has made a leaf in the foam on top of the cappuccino. It’s pretty. Brown-veined and delicate. I whirl it into a smudge with my fingertip.
Far off to the north, there’s a rumble of thunder.
The crowd grows fast. People from school, people from town, people I’ve never seen. They lounge at the edges of the parking lot, smoking. They crowd around the coffee counter. They stake out spots near the edge of the stage.
Around five-thirty Jezz and Patrick pull up. I can see them park from my spot at the patio’s edge. They climb out of the rusty pickup and begin to unload. Patrick’s face is hard. Harder than usual. Even Jezz, who’s always joking about something, looks like someone who’s just witnessed a car crash.
A few minutes later Anders pulls in next to them.
He steps out of the little white car. He’s wearing faded black jeans. A gray T-shirt that fits tight around the tops of his arms.
“Hey,” says Jezz.
“Hey,” I see Anders answer.
Patrick doesn’t say anything.
The people around me have taken notice. The regulars, the kids from school, the newcomers who recognize Last Things from pictures they’ve seen online. They’re all watching the band, trying to pretend they’re not watching. They’re noticing the heaps of cables, the hard black cases, the way the band swings into this wordless routine. They probably don’t notice the tension strung between them, invisible and strong as spiders’ thread.
But I see it. The woods see it, too. They’ll use it if they can.
The guys carry their equipment to the far door. Jezz and Patrick and Ike begin the drill they perform every weekend. Placing stands. Checking wires. Anders carries loads back and forth from the parking lot, keeping his head down. He avoids the stage like it’s something hot.
More car doors slam.
More and more.
I slip inside, through the patio doors, into the very back of the room.
The band gathers for a quick sound check. Anders keeps his back to the room, his head down. He tests a mic, a handful of chords, then disappears through the backstage door. A few minutes and a few notes later, Jezz and Patrick follow.
Soon the Crow’s Nest is fuller than I’ve ever seen it. Bodies and voices ricochet from the walls. I see most of the senior class. Frankie’s friends, in a tightly orbiting cluster. Frankie herself, wearing a halter-neck dress that makes one guy walk straight into a table and spill his coffee. I spot Flynn, Anders’s guitar teacher, halfway up the room’s right side. He doesn’t usually come to the shows. I try to look closer, but he’s already lost in the crowd. More schoolkids. More people in expensive boots who’ve driven up from the Cities. More and more and more.
When Last Things finally takes the stage, the screaming is so loud that it shuts out the thunder. The guys position themselves. They’re stretched wires. Flying sparks. They look ready to explode.
Anders gives a nod so small only the band and I can see it.
They launch into “Blood Money.” Then “Frozen.” “Come Out and Play.” “Dead Girl.” There’s barely a breath between songs. The music feels as tight and hard as ever, but there’s a new texture to it, something that cuts deep. Anders’s hands move so fast they aren’t hands at all. They’re just a pale blur of sound streaming out of that black guitar.
They play “Hitting Sleep.” Everyone in the room seems to know this one. I scan the crowd. People are jumping in time, combat boots and Converse low tops pounding on the scarred hardwood floors. The Crow’s Nest is one huge, pulsing heart.
Knock knock knock
until you wake me
Pound pound pound
until you break me
There’s another smash of thunder. Closer this time. Even it seems to rumble to Patrick’s rhythm.
And that’s when I see her.
She’s perched on a high stool at the very edge of the opposite side of the room. Tight black pants. Tight black jacket. Sleek, short hair.
She’s older than high school, older than college, but far from old. She’s watching the stage with an expression I recognize. Like Anders is the only real thing in the room.
I let my eyes focus, the way I usually only do when I’m alone in the woods and no one else will see. Because I know what my face looks like when I do this. I know what happens to my eyes.
The room goes gray. There are flashes of light around me, bright beacons burning here and there. But I’m not looking for those.
I stare at the woman.
She ripples with blackness.
It seeps out of her in pools and tendrils. Too much to be held inside. It climbs up the wall. It drips from her feet, pools on the floor. It slithers in and out as she breathes.
She’s one of them.
She’s here to take him away.
Blood surges into my chest.
I keep still. Wait. Wait.
Watch the stage.
Watch her.
Watch him.
Last Things tears through “Bleeding Out” and “Minotaur,” and, finally “Superhero.”
By the time it ends, there’s something in the room with all of us. Something that makes the air as combustible as a gas leak. Something that pulls the crowd’s pulses into its dance.
The woman is sitting perfectly still at her little table. But the music affects her, too. I can see it. The darkness seeping through her is wilder, thicker. It climbs above her, stretching up the walls, reaching toward the stage like vines or veins.
But I can’t move. Not yet.
The sky outside the windows is pure black.
The final chord dies. The crowd screams.
Last Things leaves the stage.
They don’t usually play encores. Everyone knows “Superhero” is the end. But tonight no one leaves. No one turns around to pick up their bag or weaves out between other people’s sweaty bodies. The screaming goes on and on and on. Everyone is on their feet. I can’t see through the crowd anymore. There’s only a wall of bodies between me and the stage.
Finally, amazingly, the band steps back out.
Jezz and Patrick wave. Jezz grins; he does a little hop, clicking his heels together in midair. Patrick smiles. They know how incredible tonight was. They feel the thing in the air. The strange, flammable, crackling thing.
Anders crosses slowly in front of them.
His back is straight. The guitar hangs loosely from his shoulder. Emotions glance off his face, trying to break through the smoothness. He leans toward the microphone. Smiles with one corner of his mouth.
The light in him is dim. It’s almost gone.
“I guess you guys want some more,” he says in that deep voice.
The screams explode.
Anders leans toward Jezz and Patrick. They whisper. Nod.
They turn around. Assume positions. Then they whip into a cover of Prince’s “I Would Die 4 U” so hard and hammering that the tables beside me vibrate.
There’s more screaming when they’re done, but this time the band doesn’t reappear. The crowd is delirious. Shouting. Laughing. Shoving.
I crane through the bodies toward the woman. Toward the spot where the woman was. Because she’s gone.
I climb onto a stool. Scan the crowd. There’s nothing. No sign.
No.
No. No.
How could I have lost her? How could I have let myself lose her?
Blood thunders through me. My head starts to roar. I keep my eyes clear.
When the crowd dissolves at last, rivulets of people dribbling out the doors, I look at the stage. Jezz and Patrick are there, chatting with a few fans who’ve clustered at the edge.
Only Jezz and Patrick.
No Anders.
I scan the room again. He’s not here.
No. No. No. I rush out to the parking lot. I have to fight myself to keep my steps unobtrusively slow.
Anders’s small white car is just bumping out of the gravel onto the road.
I can’t lose him now.
I grab the blue bike. Throw my leg over. I rush forward, into the woods.
The first raindrops start to spatter as I plunge into the trees. I’m moving so fast that they turn into streaks as soon as they hit my skin. My hair whips behind me. The trees are just flashes.
Thunder shakes the sky. Black sky, black trees, shades of black on black.
The bike’s tires leave the ground. I fly.
The wind is strong. Leaves tear from twigs. Branches strain like bones about to snap. But the woods are laughing. I can hear them laughing.
I keep within the trees, following the curve of the road as it heads toward town. In the distance, to my right, I can see the taillights of the white car, leaving their red smears on the road. Rain fogs my eyes. Branches groan. A bolt of lightning shocks the woods, bleaching everything. I blink fast, but my vision is dulled, my focus lost. Darkness plunges in, thicker than before. I hit a root and nearly fall.
But I won’t let them take him.
Thunder. Another flash. A roar.
Something huge and black and monstrously heavy lunges in front of me.
I wrench the handlebars to the side.
The smoking tree trunk crashes down inches from my bike. Falling branches swipe my face. Needles lash my arms.
The bike tilts. I catch myself on my left foot, just managing to stay upright.
Another few inches and the bike might have been crushed.
I wipe the rain from my eyes.
And that’s when I see it. Just for a fraction of a second.
It’s crouched on top of the fallen trunk. Limbs long and dark furred and strong. Face like an elk’s skull, but with a carnivore’s jagged teeth. Crown of black antlers. Long fingers. Claws.
Its eyes are like hailstones. Empty. Dead white. They stare down at me.
I don’t move.
I stare back.
But the spattering rain finally makes me blink.
And it’s gone.
I scan the woods. No sign of it now. Of anything. The road is only a vague blur in the distance. The beacon of Anders’s taillights has disappeared.
I breathe deep.
They’ve made their move.
I’ll have to make a move of my own.