Mother of Crows Read online

  Abby had no idea where the bottle came from. One moment she was listening to the banter of people she scarcely knew yet felt closer to than anyone else in the world, and the next she was watching it move down the line. It was about the size of a man’s hand and full of sloshing brown liquid. As each person took it, they unscrewed the cap, took a swig, winced in some kind of agony, put the cap on again, and then leaned to pass it to the next person down the line. No one hesitated when they took it, either. Everyone had a drink. If a single person refused it or simply passed it along without uncorking it, she might have been able to do the same.

  Abby could smell the bottle as it drew closer and closer. It was acrid, as she expected, but there was an undercurrent of something warm and sweet in the scent of it, like cinnamon and sugar melted in an oven. Her tongue prickled with the taste in the air.

  She couldn’t drink. She was fourteen years old. Her mother and grandmother had been very clear on the subject on a number of occasions. Plus, there was the fact that one drink could lead to alcoholism. She didn’t want to be the town drunk. Arkham was still small enough to have one of those, and Mr. Gage was handling it just fine on his own.

  Delilah Cutter passed her the bottle. It was half-empty, and the label said it was some kind of honey bourbon. She didn’t know what that meant, only that she had never seen it before. Harwich Hall had a modest liquor cabinet-stocked for the guests-that remained locked at all times. Abby’s grandmother enjoyed the odd glass of sherry, a drink Abby lumped in with her abstract understanding of all alcohol. She’d seen it and smelled it a few times. She didn’t remember it being as pungently sweet as this bourbon.

  Abby realized that she had been staring at the bottle long enough for it to be weird.

  “You gonna drink that?” Sindy asked. She was sitting at the very end of the line. Nate was sandwiched between the two of them. He stared at the bottle with undisguised horror.

  “Um. I don’t know.”

  “Come on, Abby. It’s just booze. It doesn’t bite.”

  Abby pictured her mother’s stern face. “No,” she said. “I’m good.”

  “Oh, give it to me.” Sindy held out her hand. When Abby didn’t fork the bottle over immediately, Sindy waved her in, like a traffic cop signaling her through an intersection. Abby had a flash of a word she’d heard in Health Class-‘enabling.’ This seemed like a textbook case. She felt the gazes of the assembled upperclassmen on her and she knew she was letting them down. Without letting herself think any more, she put the bottle in Sindy’s hand.

  Sindy uncapped it and looked past Abby to the watching group before she tipped the bottle up and took a swig. She winced and coughed as the group erupted in cheers. She did a little seated curtsey and went for seconds.

  Abby heard Eleazar laugh, “Now that’s my kind of woman!”

  Sindy took her third swig and then handed it to Abby with a flushed smile. “Come on, Abby. It’s pretty good after the first drink. Just go slow.”

  Cold dread worked its way up Abby’s spine. “I said no, Sindy.” The undercurrent of anger in her voice took her and Sindy both by surprise. Sindy’s smile faded and she began to apologize. Ben and Hunter spoke over her as they started a rhythmic chant:

  “Abby! Abby! Abby! Abby!”

  Abby’s face flushed with anger and embarrassment. Blood pounding in her ears. She saw Nate was trying to say something, probably to intervene on her behalf. The older boys immediately drowned him out. She turned to the rest of the upperclassmen, and saw the hungry anticipation on their faces. She understood it. This was an initiation. If she did it, she was part of their group. If she didn’t, she would just be that nerdy freshman whose name was on everything. Her resolve wavered. One drink wouldn’t be that bad. Not enough to get drunk, just enough to shut them up and get them off her back. But was that who she wanted to be? Her grandmother always said that you teach people how to treat you. If she buckled under the pressure now, she would set a precedent for the next four years and possibly beyond.

  But Hester wasn’t here. Neither was her mother. Abby thought about jumping across hot lava onto a bumper car. She was on the verge of snatching the bottle out of Sindy’s hand when she looked at Bryce. His perpetual smile was gone. The lights of the carnival glittered in his eyes and something flashed behind them. As she put her hand to the cap, he shook his head imperceptibly.

  “She said ‘no.’” The words came out like a whisper but they cut through the sounds of the distant carnival and the chanting like a shout. Everyone looked at Bryce in stunned silence. His eyes never left Abby’s.

  “She said no,” he repeated. “If she doesn’t want to drink, she doesn’t have to. Lay off.” The underclassmen looked at each other, unsure of how to proceed. It was obvious that they weren’t used to anyone, let alone Bryce, reining them in. It was also obvious that they didn’t care for it.

  The pounding in Abby’s skull was becoming deafening. She wondered if it was possible to suffer an embarrassment aneurysm. On the one hand, she adored the fact that Bryce had stood up for her in front of his friends. On the other, she was now the queen of all buzzkills. School hadn’t even started yet. She felt a throbbing behind her eyes and silently willed herself not to cry in front of these people. It would just make it worse. Nate’s hand brushed at hers.

  “Hey, Abby. Don’t worry about it. We can-” He stopped as she yanked her hand away. The last thing she needed was another boy coming to her rescue in front of these people.

  “You know what? I’m not feeling so well. I’m sorry for… whatever. I’m going to take a walk.” She got up and gave Sindy and Nate a deliberate look. “Alone.” Sindy held onto the bottle with one hand and nervously pushed her hair back with the other. She didn’t know where to look. Nate shook his head, clenching and unclenching his fists. Then he reached over and snatched the bottle from Sindy.

  Nate glared at everyone, took his own swig, and immediately descended into a violent coughing fit. The upperclassmen laughed. Hunter pounded the smaller boy on the back as he cheered him on. Nate took another drink and then passed the bottle back up the line. It continued like a bucket brigade, but instead of putting out the fire, it only fueled it.

  Abby walked away, listening to the restored revelry behind her. Even through the pounding in her head, she could easily tell that Bryce’s voice was absent. She wondered how long his eyes followed her as she wandered back to the outskirts of the carnival.

  3

  Not The Most Funhouse

  The heat of the moment faded. Abby wiped at her eyes with the sleeves of her sweater, hoping the night air would cool the flush from her cheeks. What were they saying about her now that she was gone? She could have just taken a small sip and passed it down. No one would have been any wiser. She’d turned what could have been a small issue into a giant production on the day right before school. Was there a better way to make new friends than to have Bryce yell at all the cool kids during their last hurrah party?

  Abby wasn’t quite sure how to feel about her would-be rescuer. On the one hand, she was thrilled Bryce cared enough to face down his friends for her, that she mattered enough to him for him to care at all. It was always nice to have someone stand up for you. Maybe it was extra nice when that someone was pretty enough to wink the habit right off a nun.

  On the other hand, Bryce had made her a target. His friends weren’t going to hold him responsible for all of this. He was Bryce. They were going to blame her. Whenever they saw her, they’d remember how she ruined their fun. And who the hell was Bryce to think she needed rescuing? She wasn’t some little wilting flower. She was a Thorndike, for Christ’s sake, raised in the same house “where dwells the iron maiden called Hester”. She wasn’t going to be intimidated by a bunch of pubescent WASPs. In any other situation, they would have been kissing her butt in the hopes it might improve their status.

  Abby grimaced at the thought: it wasn’t really her own. Her mother and grandmother had always taught her to not show weakn
ess. It was expected that one day she would take over the Daughters of Arkham, like Hester. No one would respect a leader who could be bullied by her followers. Lip service, Abby used to think, but maybe she’d inherited more than her red hair and green eyes from her grandmother after all.

  Abby sighed, tired of trying to sort out all of these feelings. A small sip of Honey Bourbon and she could have still been enjoying a fun night with her friends.

  Except, she hadn’t been enjoying herself. She didn’t like how Sindy kept pressing her to drink when she said no. She didn’t appreciate the expectation that she would buckle just because they were the cool kids. She knew a great deal of how she felt had to do with the endless warnings from her mother and the dangers of upsetting her grandmother, but those kids had tried to back her into a corner to get their way. She just couldn’t allow that.

  “Well, as I live and as I breathe! Is a face of true royalty that has graced my humble chamber of entertainment, indeed!” a loud and boisterous voice called to her. Abby startled, looked up, and found herself in front of “Leviathan’s House of Fun and Fantastic”. The funhouse was decorated with all sorts of underwater creatures, both real and fantastic, cavorting across a cheerfully-painted ocean. Massive sea serpents twined around rendered reefs and stones designed to draw the eye to the funhouse’s entrance, a narwhal with a gaping maw. Its iridescent horn sparkled with hidden lights, and there were large mirrors mounted all around it.

  A diminutive woman of no more than four-and-a-half feet stood at a makeshift ship’s helm with one hand on the wheel. “Please forgive me for startling you, Your Ladyship, but it isn’t often that one of your stature comes me way.” Her accent was odd, but her smile and energy was contagious. Her skin was ageless, with tiny crinkles at her eyes whenever she unleashed her giant barker’s grin. “My name is Virginia, the captain of all you see before you, if it pleases milady. Allow me to formally invite you to partake of the festive frivolity within! On the house of course. Your Royal Highness’s gold is no good here.” She bowed deeply at the waist and tipped her huge swashbuckler hat to Abby with an impressive flourish.

  Abby couldn’t help but smile at the woman’s antics. Virginia’s enthusiasm helped beat back the shadows clouding Abby’s mind. “I think you might have me confused for someone else, Captain. I’m not royalty, but I do have some tickets left.” She reached for her purse, but Virginia waved her hand.

  “You don’t have to hide here, milady. Captain Virginia can spot a royal at three hundred paces and smell them within four hundred. And royal is what you be, for certain…” She smiled again, and her eyes actually twinkled. “…a true American Princess.” Maybe it had been a trick of the light.

  The words lingered in the air for a moment, like the soft thrum of harp strings fading away. Abby felt them echoing through her entire body. She looked again at the whimsical entrance to the funhouse, the yawning mouth of the narwhal. Movement in her peripheral vision startled her for a moment, then she realized she had just seen her reflections in the mirrors around the narwhal.

  Abby stepped closer to the entrance. Six doppelgangers, created by ripples in the mirror, paced toward her, becoming larger and more distorted as she approached. The mirrors were supposed to create fun caricatures of the viewer but there was something not quite right about these. Her pounding headache returned.

  “Yes, Princess, look into the glass. You will find all that you like to see in their faces. But I warn Her Worship, she might not like seeing all that she finds.” Captain Virginia’s voice had taken on a hollow and distant quality. Abby’s throbbing headache distorted the sound like the funhouse mirrors distorted her face.

  Her face. What was happening to it? She stepped closer and looked into the first mirror. It stretched her face, but not in the way she expected. Her skin wrinkled and sagged, as if she had aged one hundred years in an instant. She put her hand to her face and nearly shrieked when she felt withered, leathery flesh.

  She spun, but the mirror was behind her now. And to the side… all sides. She was in a cell of mirrors with no visible escape in any direction. Abby continued to spin. Her head was swimming. When had she stepped inside the funhouse? She had been outside with Captain Virginia, she’d never gone inside… Abby closed and opened her eyes again and again, trying to wake herself from the terrible dream. She moved forward and slammed into the glass.

  “This is no dream, Abigail,” her reflection said.

  Abby screamed. Hag-Abby grinned at her with toothless malice. She spun again, slamming into another mirror.

  “It’s a nightmare.” A wicked-looking preschool version of Abby glared up at her. “And you can’t scream your way out.”

  Another voice chimed in. “You can’t buy your way out.”

  And another. So many reflections. Not one the same, not one really her.

  All sneering. All taunting.

  “The sins aren’t yours, but you carry the blood of the sinners.”

  Abby crumbled to the floor, clutching her head. The headache hammered at her temples and tried to beat its way out through her eyes.

  “Only blood will right the scales.”

  Abby sobbed around the pain in her head. She couldn’t speak; she couldn’t think. She just wanted it to end. She clawed her way forward, slapping at the mirrors. She screeched as a hand in the mirror clutched hers.

  “Let me go! Let me go!” Abby wailed, reeling backward, but her own terrible reflection held her fast. This one was precise in every way, except for the murderous scorn in her eyes and her distended belly.

  The reflection’s lips parted in a black scowl. “Long live the American Princess.”

  A searing pain erupted through Abby’s stomach. The sensation exploded outward and tore through her. Abby jack-knifed forward, snapping her head into the ground and sudden, blissful darkness.

  4

  First Day of School

  Abby forced her eyes open. It felt like they’d been gummed shut with some kind of industrial-strength superglue. She was face-down on her bed, plowed into her blankets. Her legs hung out over the side, except for her right foot, which was uncomfortably contorted on her nightstand. She had nearly knocked her reading lamp onto the floor.

  She moved and regretted it. Her head felt like it had been packed with cotton balls, then doused in kerosene and set on fire. Whenever she moved, something rattled around in there, setting off tiny points of agony. She cradled her head. It barely helped. She felt around blindly until she found her glasses half-wedged between the mattress and the footboard.

  Looking down at herself, Abby looped a strand of hair behind her ear. She was still wearing her clothes from last night, shoes and all. Her window was open. Sharp gusts of autumn blew into her room, rattling the pages of a few open books that had been knocked to the floor, along with some bookends and an old stuffed giraffe. Did I climb in here? she wondered as she stood up. The cotton reshuffled itself in her head and touched off more sparks of pain. She waited for it to stop before taking two ginger steps toward the window. She looked down.

  Harwich Hall was a Georgian mansion. Its brick walls were sheer except for the tiniest white strip of a ledge between first and second floor. A maple tree grew close to her window, but unless she had somehow climbed it and jumped… How did I get up here?

  Abby figured the memory would come back. She remembered leaving the drinking party. She remembered the look on Bryce’s face when he defended-slash-embarrassed her, and then the funhouse. Another hot stab of pain behind her eyes made everything grow hazy. She sat down, regretted that too, and mused about how unfair it was to have a hangover without drinking.

  She chuckled, but stopped when it sent another bolt through her tender head. All of her drug and alcohol awareness classes at Mather Primary hadn’t done much to protect her from last night. It was one thing to understand peer pressure intellectually, and another to experience it. Her night-the first time she’d really spent with Bryce Coffin-was a big, blank, embarrassing spot. She
felt that something was in the back of her mind, the way you can sense another person in a darkened room, but there was no way to make out any details.

  Abby kept thinking. There were the images of the sea creatures outside the funhouse, and then there was the hall of mirrors… No, those were two separate memories. Had she gotten lost? She felt like she’d been in there for days. Had it been minutes? The faces. The reflections. Was that real? It couldn’t be real. She touched her forehead, expecting a bruise or a knot from slamming her head into the floor, but it was smooth and unmarred.

  She stripped off her tights and shoes. Her feet were sore, so that pointed to some walking. In fact, her muscles were sore all overher abdomen and shoulders especially. She moved her arms experimentally and found a twinge in her right elbow. A wide bruise marred her left thigh. As she catalogued her injuries, nothing was too disturbing but she couldn’t remember how she’d gotten any of them.

  Walking, though. The faint soreness in her feet reminded her of leaving the carnival with her friends. She had rejoined them at some point. It wasn’t all of them, though. The group had shrunk. It was her, Sindy, Nate, Bryce-she was happy to see that-Eleazar, and Delilah.

  No, there was running. She was in the woods. They looked like the ones that stretched out all around the rolling hills of Arkham, enflamed by autumn. There hadn’t been many dead leaves on the forest floor. She’d run silently, her breath flashing in her ears. She had the sense of something out there, maybe following, maybe just there.

  Crashing surf? Was that before or after the running? She had no idea. She remembered the taste of the salt spray in her mind. The sea churned angrily in the moonlight. Someone spoke to her in a low and reasonable voice. She felt as though she should be able to understand this voice and even respond, but the sounds were past her knowledge. Was it another language? Or had her addled mind just lost the ability to process English? She had no way of knowing.