Black Feathers (3 page)

All sorts of people.

Glancing over his shoulder, Harrison took his notepad out of his breast pocket and flipped it open. The name was scrawled on the top of the third page back, behind the scratched details of a domestic disturbance, a public intoxication and a car theft complaint.

Cassie Weathers.

He typed the name into the green search box on the computer screen and waited a few seconds. Nothing.

He tried
Weathers, Cassy,
looking over his shoulder again as he waited.

Nothing.

Weathers, Cassandra
brought up a missing persons report.

The paperwork had been filed by the Pressfield detachment of the RCMP on November 15—nearly a month before. Mary Weathers, the girl’s mother, had reported her daughter missing from the hospital, where she had been under observation following a house fire. The mother had returned to the hospital the afternoon after the fire to find Cassandra gone.

There was a short description and a school photo.

“Whatcha got there?”

Jane Farrow was almost leaning over his shoulder, looking at his screen.

“That girl from this morning.”

“The one we ousted from the doorway of the bookstore?”

Harrison nodded. “She’s a runaway.”

His partner snorted. “No shit. What did you think she was, a reporter?” He could even hear her smirk.

“No, but I thought we should get some details. The report’s about a month old, out of Pressfield.”

“Where the fuck is that?”

Harrison shook his head. “In the Interior somewhere?”

Jane straightened and put her hand on the top edge of the cubicle. “We’ll pick her up the next time we see her,” she said matter-of-factly.

“Not much point,” Harrison muttered, reading through the description. “She turned sixteen in October.”

Sixteen was right on the line. Legally, a sixteen-year-old wasn’t a runaway. Although still minors, they were considered old enough to live on their own, to make their own decisions.
Usually renting an apartment or setting up a hydro account required parental consent at that age, but there was nothing wrong—legally—with a sixteen-year-old living independently.

They could pick her up, try to convince her to go home to her family, but there was nothing they could do to force her, no legal grounds to hold her or send her back.

“Well, good luck to her,” Farrow said, somewhere between genuine and bitter.

“Yeah.” Still distracted by the computer screen: sixteen years old, a younger sister at home.

It was hard to make the images match up—the smiling girl in the school picture with the groggy, defensive girl in the doorway that morning. It was more than the clothes and the dirt and the unwashed hair that separated them. There was something fundamentally different in her face, something that had shifted and changed the smiling, happy student captured in the photograph into the girl living on the streets.

Harrison scrolled through the notes in the file. An investigation by the Ministry of Children and Families when she was nine. A psychiatric hospitalization when she was twelve. A fire that had destroyed the family home in mid-November, just before she ran away.

Maybe there wasn’t that much of a change, after all. There was something there in her eyes in the photo, like her smile didn’t quite reach them.

Or maybe he had been looking at the picture too long.

“So listen,” Farrow said, and Harrison jumped. He had forgotten that she was there. “A couple of us are going out, getting some beers. You comin’?”

Harrison shook his head. “No. But thanks. I’m gonna finish up here, head for home.”

“Another busy night with the wife and kids.”

“Yeah.”

“All right. Flip side, then.”

He was already lost again in the computer screen before she walked away.

The streets were deserted. It was early in the week—Cassie wasn’t sure what day—and the moment the offices shut down and the stores closed, downtown cleared out. There were still cars on the streets, racing from point A to point B, but the sidewalks were empty. Their voices seemed to echo in the darkness.

“Here,” Skylark said, coming to a stop and slinging her knapsack onto a bench, flopping down beside it.

“Here?” Cassie looked around. She thought she had gotten to know the downtown area, but in the darkness it was unfamiliar. “What’s ‘here’?”

Skylark gestured at the building behind her. “That’s City Hall. And through there”—“there” was a covered breezeway at one side of the building, brightly lit with orange lights, concrete pillars holding up the roof—“is Centennial Square.”

Through the breezeway, Cassie could see a flat expanse of concrete with a few raised, empty planters, pools of street light and sharp, deep shadows. In the distance was a dark patch, maybe a lawn, with a huge pine tree in the centre, lit up with Christmas lights blinking blue. Between the breezeway and a building on the opposite side of the square were three stone monoliths in the centre of a low, circular barrier of white concrete. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing.

Skylark turned. “That’s the fountain,” she said. “Well, not right now. They’ve turned off the water because they’re worried about it freezing.” She shook her head. “Brother Paul, he told us last night that the temperature when they turn off the fountain is actually five degrees higher than when they open the emergency shelter beds. And they keep the fountain turned off all winter. They only keep the shelter beds open until the temperature goes up a degree or two.”

Her expression and her voice were laced with disgust.

Skylark’s explanation allowed Cassie to ask the question that had been on her mind their whole walk. “Who’s Brother Paul?”

Skylark’s face lit up. “Brother Paul—I guess you could say he’s …” She stumbled over trying to find a description, her eyes taking on that faraway look again. “He’s the leader, I guess. But that doesn’t really … He doesn’t … You just have to meet him.”

Before Cassie could speak, a battered van pulled up in front of the statue in front of City Hall, belching smoke and backfiring. The van was covered in graffiti, layers of bright spray paint, images and words over words and images.

“Right on time,” Skylark said, leaning forward on the bench.

Two men and a woman, dressed in jeans and T-shirts despite the cold, hopped out of the van. As they opened the back doors and began to pull out a folding table, the empty sidewalks filled with people. There had been no signal save the arrival of the van, but a crowd quickly formed around the back doors.

Cassie recognized some of them from outside McDonald’s that morning. Unlike that pre-dawn crowd, though, everyone waiting around the van was quiet. There was no shouting, no pushing, nothing louder than scattered, hushed conversations. People milled about a little, but they quickly formed into a
single line that snaked along the sidewalk to the table. “Come on,” Skylark said, standing up as the two men lifted a huge pot onto the table. “We should get in line.”

“What is this?” Cassie asked as she followed Skylark, who high-fived a few people as they moved through the crowd.

“The Outreach van,” she said as they joined the line. “Soup and bread, sometimes clothes. Condoms if you need them.” Skylark shrugged. “They come every night. And hey, if you’re here at Christmas? I hear they do turkey.” There was a bitterness in Skylark’s voice that Cassie hadn’t heard before.

But she understood it all too well. Christmas was a week and a half away, but it seemed a lifetime. The thought that she might still be out here, sleeping on the streets, begging for change, made her almost hunch over with pain.

But where else would she be?

From the cold of the concrete park, he watched.

He stood in the shadow of the fountain, the Darkness watching out of the dark. He wasn’t hiding; he didn’t need to hide. People would see him, but their glances would slip off him, not really registering him.

He was perfectly camouflaged.

It was all part of the hunt: concealment, observation, tracking.

Watching. Waiting for the perfect specimen.

She was easy to see against the backdrop of the crowd milling around the back of the van. She shone with a strength that was dizzying.

Her inner light separated her from the herd, drew the Darkness to her.

He watched as the girl took her bowl of food, her piece of bread. Her smile, even in the distance, was dazzling.

She led another girl into the breezeway adjoining City Hall, and they both sat down with the group of people already there.

The other people in the breezeway barely registered to him; they were dull, drab things, the little light left within them guttering like pale candles, brighter when they laughed, quickly fading.

The girl, though …

He had been watching her for several nights, following her movements. It hadn’t been difficult: with a light as bright as that, she could be seen for blocks.

He had watched, and he had waited.

He could have taken her any time, but he was pleased that he had waited. The girl was shining more brightly than he had seen before, arcing white as she leaned against the girl beside her, almost blinding as she laughed.

And the girl she was with …

The new girl was like nothing he had ever seen.

There was a rich orange light to her, and it took him a moment to register: This new girl was like a banked fire. She didn’t shine—she burned.

A crow descended, arching black against the curve of a street light, and landed on the concrete edge of the fountain.

It too watched the girls.

The bright white of the first girl

—
Skylark,
the crow said—

Skylark, and the slow, deep burn of the new girl …

He looked at the crow, but the bird had nothing to say.

The two of them, these two girls.

It was almost too much for him to bear.

“Not yet,” he whispered, and the words were like smoke from his mouth.

He drew his collar up tighter around his throat and turned away.

“Not yet,” he repeated.

It wasn’t just the kill that was important; anyone could kill.

It took a special man to hunt.

When Cassie and Skylark reached the front of the line, the man behind the table was scraping the inside of the huge pot with a metal ladle. “I’ve got enough for one more bowl of soup,” he said, shrugging. He was wearing a knit cap and a hoodie over an old concert T-shirt.

“That’s okay,” Skylark said. “We can share.”

“I’ve got a couple of bagels, though,” the man said as he passed the bowl to Skylark. He smiled like it was something he didn’t do very often; his teeth were worn brown nubs.

“Thank you,” Cassie said quietly as he handed her the bagels.

She followed Skylark through the knots of people slurping soup on the dim sidewalk and into the breezeway.

The space was crowded with people sitting on the ground in small groups, talking as they ate. Their laughter echoed brightly off the concrete and bricks.

It was a sound that Cassie hadn’t heard in … she didn’t actually know. The sound of people talking quietly, just talking. The sound of laughter, honest, heartfelt laughter.

How long had it been?