The Murder of Crows | Book 1 | See These Bones by Tullbane Chris

Author:Tullbane, Chris [Tullbane, Chris]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Post-Apocalyptic | Superhero Fantasy
Publisher: Ghost Falls Press
Published: 2019-11-05T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 43

There’s a saying you hear sometimes, mostly from old people like Amos or Bard: time heals all wounds. I’m pretty sure it comes from before the Break, when Healers weren’t a thing, and when doctors spent less time trying to save lives than they did sleeping around, faking their own deaths, and blaming one-armed men for murder.

Sometimes I wonder if Dr. Nowhere really broke the world. From what I know, it was pretty broken even before his dream.

But even in a world of Capes and Black Hats, there’s something to be said for time. After a few weeks of classes, the dark clouds that had followed the first-years since Shane’s death began to fade. In some cases, they blew away entirely. Even Vibe regained her smile, though at first it was a small and fragile thing, easily banished by a stray thought or memory.

Maybe it was the comforting familiarity of the Academy’s rigid schedule. Maybe it was because that same schedule left us too tired to do much beyond eat, sleep, and—for the particularly brave—drink at The Liquid Hero. Or maybe those pre-Break philosophers had gotten something right, and time itself was a sort of Power. Either way, it took far less than a month for the class to recover from Unicorn’s death, for gossip and competition and drunken one-night-stands to again be the order of the day.

Guess it won’t surprise any of you that, once again, I was the lone man out.

You’d think someone whose power was rooted in death—who’d seen as much of it as I had even at that age—would be the first to recover. Normally, you might even have been right.

But what the fuck did normal ever have to do with my life?

I don’t talk much about Mom’s ghost. After nine years, she sometimes just felt like part of the fucked-up scenery of my life; a faded, silent, specter that floated through each day without affecting it or being affected by it. When she first came back, I’d thought I was going nuts, but the revelation of my powers had ended up hitting me way harder than Mom’s ghostly presence. By then, I’d had years to get over her dying. I’d done my grieving, such as it was. I’d taken my bruises and shed my tears, and there was a part of me that her ghost no longer knew and couldn’t reach.

It was different with Shane. I’d barely begun to mourn my friend when his ghost showed up. How was I supposed to move on, to find my center as the still-absent Ms. Stein had called it, when Shane was always there, always angry, always prowling about the confines of my perspective like some kind of pale predator?

Gingers weren’t even supposed to have souls. How was I being haunted by one? More importantly, why was he mad at me and how the fuck was I supposed to get him to go away?

I’d tried talking to the dead Healer, but that was one of the few things his ghost and Mom’s had in common; neither made a sound or reacted to my voice.

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