Feather Bound (9 page)

“Then you rip them out.”

“That's enough, Dee.” Ade reached for the laptop but I blocked her hand.

“No wait.” There was a link. Of course there was. My gag reflexes were already on alert. But I needed to know. Ade must have known it too, because she didn't stop me.

It routed to an uploaded video of a couple of kids standing around in what looked like some pre-teen's bedroom.

The two kids certainly looked around that age. And there was a third; clearly someone had to be holding the camera since it wobbled every few seconds. Sunlight gave the girl's dark hair an almost violet hue before she skipped up to the window and shut the drapes. Her friend flicked the light on before taking his shirt off.

Ade gagged. “Jesus, is this kiddie porn?” I would have laughed at the face she was making except I was making the same one.

I braced myself with my finger on the mouse pad, the cursor poised over the X at the top right of the screen.
Please let this be relevant
.

The girl's friend grinned at the screen and said something in a language I didn't recognize. German, maybe? It sounded German-ish. He turned to show his back, his friend pointing to it unhelpfully with a ridiculous, mugging grin on her face. Next they showed the knife: a tiny, pocket switchblade that popped out of its holster with one clean slice. The boy sat. The girl smiled.

And shoved it into the boy's right thigh.

My hand had clamped the yell before I even realized I'd done it. Blood oozed out of the wound, dribbling down his leg and staining the pink sheets red as he writhed around on the bed. When the girl stuck her finger into the wound, my trigger-finger twitched, but I couldn't close the window. I skipped ahead in the video instead, stopping when I suddenly noticed the sheet of white draping him. I let the video play.

The girl was already wrapping a bandage around the boy's lacerated leg. The good that would do; the white turned red in a matter of seconds. But it was the feathers the girl was after – she eyed them almost hungrily as the boy dragged himself onto his feet.

The camera zoomed in on his back, panning slowly down its length. The feathers were thinner than mine were; long and almost oval with a faint black line stretching up the vein. They came out of his shoulder blades, just like mine had, draping down half his back, but I could see more of them peeking out of the skin itself, all the way down to his underwear. They were matted to his back in one continuous unit.

The girl chattered throughout the close-up in a frighteningly upbeat, tour guide-esque tone as if this were some sort of educational video appropriate for middle schools and bondage rooms everywhere.

It was like pulling a carrot out of the ground from the stalk. She yanked the feathers from the main stems and they all came out together. With a hand, she smoothed the cape over her forearm as it dangled there, limp, luscious and pristine. All the while her friend gazed up at her. The light was gone from his eyes.

“Turn it off,” Ade said in a voice so small I figured it was the last time she'd have the energy to tell me. I did.

9

CAPTURE

 

“Deanna? You OK?” My dad hesitantly opened my bedroom door Tuesday evening and came in with a bouquet of flowers.

“This is a first.” I turned over in bed and sat up. “Usually when you feel guilty about something you buy us donuts.”

Dad hunched his shoulders and scratched his head, clearly avoiding my eyes. “Well, uh.” He cleared his throat. “It's not from me.”

“It isn't?”

When Dad tossed the bouquet onto my bed, a white envelope slid out from between two posies. It was from Hyde. Dad stood there awkwardly as I let out an ugly sigh. Hyde had been calling nonstop since Anton's party. So he's moved on to flowers, huh?

It wasn't that I didn't appreciate the concern, but I just wasn't in the mood and there was something particularly vile about a guy who refused to take a hint.

“Thanks Dad,” I said and threw the bouquet in the trash.

But that was just Tuesday.

 

“Hey, Dee, someone's stalking you.” It was Ade this time, because it was Wednesday morning and Dad was at work. I looked up from the couch and had to throw out my arms quickly when Ade tossed the bouquet of flowers at me.

“Another one?” I flipped over the card. “Ugh.”

Ade shrugged. “Well, he's persistent,” she said before scouring the cabinets for another bag of chips.

 

Hyde certainly was: he sent three more bouquets throughout the day and upped the ante with chocolates Thursday morning.

“Wait!” Ade said as I began clicking on my phone. “Don't call him!”

I frowned. “Why? He can't keep doing this.”

“Are you mad?” She waved the now empty heart-shaped box of Belgian truffles in my face. “Chocolate! Let's just… wait and see where this thing goes.”

We did. The next day brought Adrianna much joy: chocolate boxes, this time carts of them. Giant teddy bears, enough to fill a small storage room. All this capped off with DVDs of all the most popular movies of the past year. Of course, Hyde couldn't have known what I was into so he was probably just covering all the bases.

“Nice to see he's making good use of his dead adoptive father's money.” I lay back on the couch while Ade debated which comic book movie to put into our brand new DVD player.

“That kid did always have a soft spot for you, Dee,” Dad said once he came back from work and saw our new treasures.

Sure, except his soft spot had the tendency towards creepy obsession.

 

Friday followed along the same track: cupcakes from that shop on Utica Avenue I used to love as a kid and more flowers – a garden of them. I didn't think he could top himself after the DVDs. That was before the bell rang that evening. Wearily, I crept up to the door while Ade bounced on her feet behind me.

The Mariachi band started playing as soon as I opened the door: “
Deanna, please forgive me! Whatever I've done to offend youuu!”

“Has he…
has he lost his goddamn mind
?” After slamming the door, I collapsed against the frame while Ade laughed so hard, she tumbled over the arm of the couch. I could hear the band members shuffling down the front steps, muttering their complaints on the other side. This had gone too far.

I strode to the kitchen and plucked my phone off the table.

“What are you doing?” Ade started, but I put up a hand to silence her before dialing Hyde.

“Deanna! You called! Are you OK?” Incoherent chatting and techno music bleated in the background on the other end of the receiver. And yet I could still hear the elation in his voice.

“You're a psychopath.”

“What? I can't hear you,” he shouted. “What did you say?”

“
You're a freaking psychopath
!”

“Bad at math?” OK, now he was just shitting me for the fun of it. The little laugh proved it. “Deanna, you
are
OK, right?”

Yes: the “OK” that people usually are after a soul-sucking, traumatizing event. “Yeah,” I lied. “But–”

“Good… in that case I'm going to have to call you back. Sorry, it's just that this is a really bad time.”

“Excuse me? You've been calling me for days and now suddenly ‘Oh sorry, totes busy, ttyl?'”

“I'm at the cover party for
Bella Magazine
.”

“Oh, well,
lah-dee-friggin-dah
.”

My hand was shaking. I didn't think it was possible for one human being to piss me off so… so
completely
. As if the feathers weren't enough to deal with.

“Deanna,” Hyde said, his voice suddenly clearer. The music was harder to hear. Probably found a quieter spot. “I know I don't have the right to say this but… I want you to be careful from now on.”

I sat on the arm of my couch and scowled, sorry he couldn't see it. “What the hell do you mean by that?”

He paused. “Anton. He's here too, with his stepmother. And he's being unusually friendly.”

Anton. The mere memory of the venom in his drunken snarl as he'd tried to grab me raised the hair on my arms.

“Friendly? After you fired his dad and beat him up and humiliated him at his birthday party?”

“Exactly. And he asked about you.”

I swallowed. “So?” I tried for nonchalant and would have gotten there too if it weren't for the tremors in my voice. “Why wouldn't he? The way you were all over me at his party, it's no wonder he's curious.”

“I don't like it. I don't know what it means, but, please, just take care of yourself.”

I considered his words, considered the quiet panic lacing them. I thought of him standing there in his crisp suit, hobnobbing with the very people he was apparently out to destroy. “My life has nothing to do with yours,” I said finally, more for myself, as if it were a promise. “Not anymore. Remember that, because this is the last time I'm going to say it.”

“But Dee–”

“And the next time I find a Mariachi Band ready to belt out
your
apology I will castrate them all without hesitation. Then
you
. Got it?”

That was pretty much a conversation-ender.

 

Live footage of Beatrice Hoffer-Rey and Hyde striding into some Manhattan “it” club told me where Hyde was. This time Beatrice's white-blonde hair was long, draping down the back of her fur coat. Of course, if one had to ask why a human being would wear a fur coat at the end of June in New York, then one was very clearly an unenlightened plebian who had no right to look upon the transcendent radiance that stained the ground after every step Beatrice Hoffer-Rey made on the undeserving asphalt with her snip-toe pumps. Or something like that. I was only half-listening to the reporter's yammering. This was Fashion TV after all.

Said reporter narrated her dramatic entrance while standing a few feet away from the pandemonium. Every time the door opened to let more people in, the music seeped out, shaking the streets. According to the reporter's excitable prattle, Hyde was looking “dapper.” Nice to see he was staying busy.

“But one can only guess at the kind of reception the new head of Hedley Publications is currently getting at the cover party, especially from Beatrice, third wife of former executive Edmund Rey, who was fired just this morning.”

So Hyde was off to a good start firing Anton's dad and making enemies. But maybe that was a part of his plan. It was his father's company after all. His legacy. His by right the second his dad had bought him for aid space.

There was something more to it, though. The way that Hyde had stared at Anton – and at Edmund, too – at the reception: a gleeful sort of malice. There was something I wasn't getting.

Shaking my head, I turned off the TV. It was not my problem. If Hyde wanted to play out some revenge kamikaze drama, then that was his prerogative.

“Hey, Deanna, I'm going to
Flex
tonight with the girls.” Ade put her hair up in a ponytail while coming down the hall. “It'll be fun… you in?”

“No, I'd rather watch people have fun on TV, to be honest.”

Ade's shoulders drooped as she sighed. Running her finger down the two foot pile of DVDs on our table, she stopped at one and slipped it out without toppling the rest. “Here, watch this, then. It's about a seventeen year-old drama queen who opts out of life and consequently spends the rest of her days old, sad and alone.”

“Is it in 3D?”

Ade threw the DVD at me and left. It was a children's movie – and it
was
in 3D. Or at least it was now. Certainly it wasn't when Hyde and I had first watched it in that busted old movie theatre over on Coney Island Avenue. Afterwards, he'd taken me to one of the best bakeries in New York where I'd had my pick of everything and anything I wanted. Even sixteen year-old Ericka, who hadn't come because she wouldn't be caught dead running around New York with a bunch of kids, had been crazy jealous when I came back home in a sleek, white limo. Hyde had always been a little over the top.

I lay down on the couch, running my finger down the plastic casing of the DVD. Why had he latched on to me so strongly back then? Because he was lonely? He'd told me he didn't have any other friends. He didn't have any parents either, not really. Taken from your home to live with a strange new family you know deep down doesn't really care about you. Caged in a hollow home. Alone.

He was still alone, even now.

But it didn't matter. There was nothing I could do at this point. This was Hyde's battle. And my life had nothing to do with his anymore.

I put in the DVD. Just a few minutes before the penultimate animal sing-along at the end, my phone rang. Ade's number?

“Hello? Ade?”

“Hello, is this… Deanna Davis?”

It was a voice I didn't recognize. Male and adult, though young enough to make me think he was college-aged.

“Who's asking?”

“My name's Paul. I'm the bartender at Stylo.”

“OK. Why do you have this phone?” Wasn't Ade at that other club? Plus, it wasn't like her to leave her phone somewhere. The last time she did, she nearly freaked out and we had to walk all the way back to the movie theatre where she'd left it.

“There's a girl here who definitely looks like she needs someone to come get her. Brunette, tall, skinny, pretty.” Paltry descriptions, but each one made my heart thud that much louder. “She's barely conscious–”