Chapter Sixteen

A Conjuring from My Dreams

Woods—especially at night during a storm—have a way of making you feel like someone's watching you. We run a little faster to the only place I know no one will come looking for me.

Breathless, I stop and peer up at the old cave Adaire and I used to explore. Exposed tree roots finger like a thick brow over the cave's opening, a dark eye. Kudzu vines string down the hillside, an endless flow of green tears. Rain runs down the mountain, creating a thin veil over the opening.

My hand grips the top rung of the chain camping ladder Adaire and I left hanging here years ago. I look down behind me. Before I can ask Rook if he's coming, he leans forward, his body shrinking into a dark blur, then shifting into the feathered form of the crow. One becoming the other before he can even come close to touching the ground.

Incredible.

A wisp of wind and a flutter of wings swoop past me. There's a dark gap as he shifts back. Rook stretches out his hand for me.

"Show-off," I mumble and take ahold. His grip firms as he hefts me up with one swift pull.

Face-to-face, we stand there. Only the drizzling rain and our ragged breaths keep us company. Years of scattered moments is all we've ever had. We stare at each other, getting a good look to hold us through the next lapse of time.

I marvel at the man standing before me now, towering. Moonlight shines on his pale skin, a fine marble. His jawline smooth yet angular. Strong. There's a depth in his eyes, like he's lived centuries from the few souls he's carried over.

He's a conjuring from a dream. Desire fully imagined and alive.

The drum of my heartbeat jumps as he reaches up and pushes the wet strands of my hair out of the way. My breath hitches at the slight touch. That Mona Lisa smile of his twinges at the corner of his mouth.

A clash of thunder punches the night, splitting the sky. It sets off a cascade of loud squeaks and shrills above our heads.

"Shit!"

We duck as a colony of bats flap and flutter erratically around us. Rook bows himself around me, protectively. One by one, they dart for the cave's opening, shrieking out into the night.

Once the chaos quiets, still cowering as I search the ceiling, I ask, "Are there any more?" Barely any light filters in the cave. The dark a fathomless hole to nowhere.

Rook tugs from his pocket a glimmer of silver and flicks it to life. The flame, a dancing wick, instantly shrinks the cave's illusion of depth. He scans the lighter near the ceiling, and two more stragglers take off.

"I think we're good now," he says after finding no more. Feeling confident enough, he straightens to his full height.

"Shoes don't shift but a Zippo does?" I nod to his bare feet.

He shrugs. "I think the crow just hates shoes." He pans the light around.

The shallow space of the cave is not more than twenty feet and a hell of a lot smaller than my ten-year-old memory recalls. The rock ceiling slants so you have to duck lower on one side. The scent of moss so heavy it tastes like earth when you breathe in. The stone floor only allows the vines to grow in between the cracks. Leaf litter claims everything else.

An old puppy and kitten poster curls on the stone floor, long faded. A cracked vanity mirror we used to play dress-up in front of leans against the back wall. The purple velvet of an old Wicked Witch costume crumbles between my fingers.

"This place is... Wow," Rook stresses, really taking in the space for what it was.

"Yeah," I say, just as breathless.

From under a clump of weeds, a rusted candelabra pokes out. Rook pulls it free. Dried wax bleeds down the ornate arm. He squats in front of the raised slate of stone, setting the candelabra upright. He heats the wax in one of the sconces until it's soft enough to hold the stub of a crumbling candle.

The flame flickers a jagged dance across his face and the room comes alive. All of mine and Adaire's childhood litter is strewn about the space. A flood of memories comes blazing back to life.

Rook inspects a rusted Welcome Back, Kotter lunch box where we kept the arrowheads and Indian beads we found in the creek bed.

"We used to come here after school and on Saturday mornings," I say, then rummage through a milk crate with old toys, moldy magazines, and a Polaroid camera crammed in the bottom. I click the button a few times and nothing. Corrosion crusts over the batteries. I use a plastic pick-up stick to chip the white flakes away, then reinsert the batteries and flip it over—

A spider skitters over the camera lens, and I squeal, dropping it. The camera cracks against the stone floor, and a bright flash ignites inside the cave. Rook shields his face, blinded.

"Shit. Sorry." I pick the camera up as it grumbles a motorized complaint and spits out a photo. Stuck partway in the shoot, I rip it the rest of the way out. Only half an image forms as I fan it to life. Mostly of my shoulder.

I pick up a plastic pencil box filled with worthless treasures: stretchy colorful bands of nylon to make pot holders, a few Barbie shoes, a fluffy ball key chain with googly eyes. I shake it and watch them dance, then settle at the bottom.

Another Polaroid, which I forgot existed, hides at the bottom of the box. Taken from down below, it's Adaire and me, sitting at the cave's opening, feet dangling, our arms draped over each other's shoulders. We're grinning ear to ear, like the world was ours for the taking. I can't recall who took the picture, but I remember it was the first day of summer after third grade. We were both sporting fresh Dorothy Hamill haircuts.

"We loved this place." My voice a whisper. Here, we were queens of our own world. No adults to tell us what to do. Just living in our imagination and having a blast doing it.

"I miss her," I say, not particularly to him, but it fills the silence. I close my eyes. I can almost feel Adaire here. Smell that cheap Brut cologne she stole from Papaw to spritz up the cave so it didn't smell so musty. Never was she conventional.

I catch Rook quietly watching me. Self-conscious, I tuck the photo in my jean shorts back pocket and turn my attention to a stack of magazines.

"I want to show you something," he says, and I turn to him as he blows out the candle. He gently grabs my hand, and we stand. "They never completely leave me. All the souls, I mean. I want you to see it."

The whites of his eyes turn black. An energy builds in his palm and pushes into mine. A soft glittery blue light swims its way up my arm into my chest. My vision tunnels to black until it pops! Illuminating light crackles in the air surrounding him. Floating iridescent dust particles. I reach out to touch one. It tingles the tip of my fingers with a soft electrical buzz.

"It tickles," I say, giggling.

Rook's body is alive with these glimmering fragments.

"Soul remnants." He waves his arm back and forth in the air. They seem to cling to him like staticky bits. He releases me, and the illumination douses.

I blink in the darkness until my sight adjusts.

"That's incredible. How are you even...you?" I ask.

A light smile plays on his lips, and he shrugs. "You should know, you're the one who made me."

I huff a laugh. "True." But I don't know how I did it. Well, I know how—I whispered the secret scriptures of a Death Talker to a dead boy. What I don't understand is how that extra part of me brought him back to life.

"Do you remember the day we met?" I ask. The silence of the night gobbles up my words.

"I remember you said you kissed me." I hear the smirk in his words.

I chuckle. "Of course you do." Silly how I'm blushing over something that innocent. "For the record, it was more like a life wish or a prayer for life or—"

"Mouth-to-mouth?" he says, and I want to sock him.

I do my best to tuck in the grin wanting to slip out. "I believe what you mean to say is thank you. So...you're welcome." He laughs at that.

"I remember the beginning, though," he says. There's a pensiveness to his voice that gives me pause and I look at him. Really look at him. He relights the lone candle in our crooked candelabra. He seems to sink into his memories as shadows play on his face. "I remember being hungry. So hungry." His hand absently moves to his stomach as the ghost of the feeling sneaks over him. "I didn't know my name or where I was from, but I was alive. It didn't make sense to me how knowing that mattered, because I couldn't remember dying. Just knew that I was alive. Again." He lifts his head. "Because of you."

His words strike me, in a good way. The gratitude in his voice thick. It makes me see how much more important my gift could be in the right hands.

He empties out the milk crate and flips it over, setting the candelabra on top.

"Was the crow always with you?" I ask.

He scrapes the leaves off the stone ledge, making a place for us both to sit. I bunch up the pile of old costumes and a dingy quilt for our backs.

"I think so. I didn't quite feel whole to this world, if that makes sense?" He scoots back, stretching out, ankles hanging off the edge. I sit beside him, cross-legged. My bare knee presses into his thigh. There's something about our touch that feels deeper than anything I've felt before. It's like we're part of each other. That day forever bonding us. A Death Talker and a Soul Walker.

"Where did you go?" I ask him. I don't remember what happened afterward. I woke up a few days later, after the death flu had run through me. I tried to ask Papaw about it, about what had happened to the boy, but he wouldn't say. Only that I should never try to talk the death out of the dead again, and I haven't since.

Rook pulls at a dry leaf that's tangled in the fringe of my cutoffs. He twiddles it between his fingers. "I found myself wandering along a highway. Lost. The sun disappearing behind a truck stop. I felt no sense of direction toward home or if I had one. But hunger pushed my young feet forward."

I swallow hard. In all these years, I never heard his half of the story. I soak his every word into my bones.

"This woman—Alma I think her name was—found me. A scrawny child hidden away in a dingy truck-stop bathroom in the middle of the night."

The thought of it breaks my heart. I squeeze his hand, a silent sorry.

"She eyed the empty lunch box I'd stolen from the mechanic's garage. It only had a crust of a sandwich and a capful of cold thermos coffee. It barely dented the ache of my hunger. I'm sure it alarmed her, but she acted like happening upon me was all in a day's work."

His amused smile eases my guilt a bit.

"Half hour later, with a clean state of Georgia souvenir T-shirt and belly fully of pancakes, I was snoozing away on the red bench of a booth. Until the voices of law enforcement came to collect the ‘runaway.' That's what I heard them call me. I couldn't say I was a runaway, but I also knew I no longer had a home.

"Then came this nudging. It was urgent and pressing. Something from inside myself told me to get up. To go outside. It wasn't my own voice, but it came from within. So strong, I couldn't deny it. The lawmen chased after me, out the diner's door. They tried to stop me. Acted like I was a wild animal about to bolt.

"The pavement was freezing underneath my bare feet. My breath puffed white from the cold. Stars littered the sky, and I yearned to go there." Rook pats his chest where the desire lay.

"The officer told me not to be scared, that I was safe now. I opened my mouth to tell him I wasn't scared, but instead a caw came. A cry so loud it felt unearthly. And in a wink, my vision tunneled until the lawmen disappeared, and my mind slipped into black."

"The crow." My words a whisper in the small space.

He nodded thoughtfully. "That's how it is every time, just before I disappear from here. I'm grateful for him, though. The crow. He got me through that first winter."

An errant firefly wanders into the cave, like the pulsing light of a stray soul.

Rook's story weighs heavy on my heart. His, too, it seems, as he sits there, letting his thoughts swirl a bit longer. I think he had to get his story out of him, as much as I needed to hear it. It reshapes everything I thought about him, how I brought him back, what it meant afterward.

And what it means for the way forward.

What if he's trapped in this life because he is this half version of himself? A slave to the souls he carries. Do they keep him alive, those souls? But if he's not a Soul Walker, he wouldn't exist at all.

But what if there was a way to set him free? To release him of this duty? I made him, when I talked the death out of his dead body. Maybe I could set him free. But would he return as the boy I'd saved or as the crow? Or neither.

"Don't do that," Rook says. His hand comforting mine. "Don't let your mind wonder if you could have done this or should have done that. This is where we are now. Live in the now. It's all we can do. Okay?" He tips my chin up when I don't look at him.

"Okay," I say back to him, trying to push away the guilt that lingers.

"Besides..." He scoots forward, sits up taller. "Look at this incredible paradise you have here." He fans his arms wide as if marveling over this gift he's been given.

"Ack. Don't call it that. It's just a—"

"Treasure trove, a time capsule to your childhood. What's this?" Rook mocks an overexaggerated surprised face. From the corner, he pushes aside a pile of leaves and unearths the old crank-style record player Adaire and I played with. The cracked wood lid lies helplessly on its side. The nest from some animal clogs the front where the speaker doors open. He pulls the debris out.

"Oh, wow, it's still here!" I hop up and help him move it. "I think I can get it to work." We set in on the stone ledge. I fiddle around with it a minute until sure enough, I get the old Victrola's handle to crank. Some record, the label worn away by the elements, sits on the center stem.

Warbly muffled music pushes through the front. The sound a scratchy static until it hiccups as the needle hits a melted bump in the vinyl and skips to another part of the song. It hits the dip on the other side, starting itself over.

"I think that's Dolly Parton," I say, and I strain an ear, trying to focus on the woman's voice before the loop jumps and repeats again.

"Go ahead," Rook urges me. "Sing me something terrible. You know you want to."

"You are an asshole, you know that." The album finally gets past the warped spots, and I let loose. Crooning to "Jolene," begging her not to take my man, even though she can. I'm pretty sure Rook's sides are about to split from laughter.

"What are these awful lyrics?"

"They're about a floosy of a woman trying to steal Dolly's man." I try to sound indignant on her behalf. I flip the forty-five over to play the B-side.

Rook gently grabs my hand after I drop the needle. His thumb and forefinger fiddle with the gold initial R ring on my pinky. I know what he's thinking without saying it. I feel it, too. How much time do we have left before the crow makes him leave? Maybe he's only here long enough to help me with Adaire's death—a restless soul with unfinished business. Eventually he'll be gone again. Something I'm not ready to think about.

I don't remember when we finally fell asleep, but it's the chattering of birds that wakes me. Not a soft musical twittering, but a loud squawking at odd intervals.

It takes my brain a stretched second to register where I am. The early-morning sun streams through the tree canopy. A filtered light plays along the cave's stone wall. The night's rain layered on top of the earthy smell.

The rattle of the chain ladder shuffles back and forth against the kudzu vines. Quickly, I turn on my side and find Rook is not there. I prop myself up on my elbows, about to ask him why he's climbing up instead of flying, when Davis's head pops up.

"I've been looking for you everywhere." He sounds like an indignant father, and I feel like a teenager who got caught sneaking out to see her boyfriend again.

I sit up, rubbing the sleep from my face. "Yeah? You going to turn me in for some kind of reward?" I pull out a twig tangled in the ends of my hair.

He rolls his eyes unnecessarily.

"Yeah." He sets a to-go carrier of coffee from Clementine's at the top. "Because I buy coffee for all the people I send off to jail." He pushes himself over the edge into the cave. A spider's web catches on his head. He swats at it, almost spilling his cup.

"Okay. You wouldn't be that kind of an asshole." I stand, grateful for the coffee even if he forgot to bring sugar.

Davis pops the top of his Styrofoam cup and blows over the top to cool it. His eyes scan the scattered objects around the cave. He softens at the sight of it all. It's only mine and Adaire's old playthings. But from his point of view, it's a welcome reminder of the woman he still loves.

"So then why are you here?" I ask, trying to loosen my words so they don't sound so snippy.

"Well," he says in a thoughtful way, "because Raelean told me you were an idiot and went to the cops." He lets that sit in the air. I grit my teeth. "So I decided that, one—" he ticks of a finger "—I should check to see if you needed me to bail you out. And, two—" he ticks off another finger "—I figured if you were stupid enough to go to jail over this, then maybe you were right."

I raise a questioning brow.

"Maybe Adaire was trying to tell you something."

I hold back my victory, Yes! and settle for, "Okay. So now what?"

"I've been thinking about what you said."

"I've said a lot of things. I'm curious which one stuck."

He scowls at me a half second. "There's only so many repair shops in a fifty-mile radius that work on Firebirds," he says, snagging my full attention. "So I made a few calls."

"And?" I say, when he doesn't elaborate.

His eyes dip down to my bare feet. "Get your shoes on, I'll tell you in the truck."