“Abel. Abel, hey. Fuck, I told you not to make this messy.”
The voice sounds to have been calling for a while. I recognize it, I think.
“Kid, come on, you can do this. Get them pretty blue eyes open.”
That dead cat is the first thing I see. He’s about all I can see, staring bottle green eyes and black nose close. Beyond that is the sideways tilt of the street.
The cat speaks again to say, “Abel, hey — sweetheart, you awake?” A furry head bumps into my forehead.
I think I hear something else, but it’s all buzzing except for this cat’s dead voice that isn’t a cat at all. I don’t think the buzzing is really buzzing either, but thinking is rather hard. I just got hit by a car.
“You’re dying, kid. I’m sorry. Trust the dead thing on this one,” the cat says. He bumps into me again, insistent and hard. “Tell me your name, Abel, your real name. You don’t have much time.”
I’m pretty sure I can hear Aidan, which makes sense. He hit me with his car — no way. That’s all I can think, Aidan hit me with his car, this is really happening.
He will be in therapy forever. His life is over. He will never be able to handle the fact that he just vehicular manslaughtered his best friend. He barely kept it together when we watched someone’s lost cat get hit by a car, and now his best friend is the one flopped over against the road not moving. I have made this the worst day in his life.
It was completely my fault. I flew right past that stop sign and cut the turn tight so that I went right into his car. Doesn’t even matter that I deserved it because Aidan’s going to implode under the guilt of killing me. He already gets picked on enough at school, now he gets to be the boy who killed his best friend.
I wonder if they’ll have a school assembly. Oh, my parents are going to have to have a funeral. That big empty house they bought for me, it won’t even have me inside it anymore, just painful memories seeped into the walls. They’ll probably sell the house. My mother is going to cry.
“I don’t want to die,” I say.
All I can see are these bottle-green eyes, these dead eyes with pupils so black as midnight, the fur a dense dark abyss of eternity, everything gone except this.
“I won’t let you,” the cat says. “I’ve been looking for you too long just to watch you bleed out in fucking suburbia.”
“What’s your name?” I ask. “I’ll tell you mine if you tell me yours.”
“You can call me Cain, if you’re going to be Abel.”
“That’s not your name.” I’m barely even too-bright buzzing now, barely even broken limbs and blood. I see this bright glow and darkness, it’s one and the same of bottle-green everything. “What happens if I tell you my name?”
“Lots of things. Your shrieking little friend won’t have to live with the fact he killed you, for starters. You’re not going to like the rest, but you’ll be around for it.”
“Am I going to regret telling you?”
“Definitely,” he says.
There’s a low, chuckling laugh that makes me feel warm. A rough rasping streaks through the cold oblivion I’ve become, what little I have left besides this voice. It’s the velcro-scratch feel of the cat’s tongue. The cat licks again at my cheek. I hear a rumble, feel a vibration, it’s warm, dense fur pushing against me.
“Don’t die, kid. Don’t die a stupid stubborn fuck.” It sounds almost like pleading. “What do you really have to lose?”
“Ethan.” I tell the cat. “My parents named me Ethan.”
The dark bright glow comes closer, becomes everything more than it already is everything. “Sorry, Ethan,” the voice purrs. “You’re really not going to like this.”
My eyes open without having closed, and I see again the sideways tilt of the street. From within me comes a rumbling that shakes through my shattered bones. Agony rips over my muscles as my limbs contort back into shape. I stifle a scream only because I need to draw breath, and I feel my fractured ribs straighten out with a distinct crack-pop cringe-inducing horrorshow of a sound. Only once that’s happened can my lungs spasm into breathing with a ragged-hot rhythm, but I still can’t scream. Nothing seems right, every inch of my body is a broken stranger returning to me as glittering shards of pain.
I hear above that Aidan’s hysteric, “Stay there! Girls stay in the car!” Him screaming at his little sisters, that explains the high-pitched shrieking. It’ll all just been buzzing before.
It didn’t hurt before either, and now I shudder and retch from the sheer onslaught of just how much this hurts. I claw at the asphalt to get onto my hands and knees and see blood, I see so much blood, it’s over my hands and soaked into my shirt, there’s a puddle of it in the street where I’m trying to crawl upright. There’s a dead cat, too, some stiff-still lump of black fur that must have chased me down.
Aidan’s knelt beside me, phone in hand with the call to nine-one-one still going even if he’s given up on listening. He’s twisted around to look at the car and his two little sisters who were screaming about how he’s just murdered someone but have now switched to just incoherent squealing because I’m a dead thing moving around.
“It’s fine,” I say. “Stop your screaming.”
Or rather it’s my lips that move, my throat that vibrates, but the voice is not mine. It’s the dead cat, Cain, inside me speaking this way. This dead thing that found me is using my body. I didn’t want to kill anyone, but I’m the dead thing. I can’t believe this is happening.
Aidan has the exact same sentiment all over his face as he snaps around at me. Tears blot and dribble over his cheeks as he stares at me, sorrow and panic giving back to sudden fear and then cold, desperate horror the more I move around. His trembling fingers press to his lips as he chokes on a hard sob.
I shove up from the street, all the wrong ache and numb fading as my body contorts the broken parts back together. I stand there and roll my neck as vertebrae settle into place. I remember the cat’s pleading, this voice belonging to someone begging me to live —
Cain?
“Yeah,” I say. Or, he says. My body again, now in use by Cain — the once dead thing that called to me, this reanimated roadkill of a cat. This voice telling me to kill people, has become me.
Aidan rushes to his feet because I’m on my feet. “Ethan, oh my God. Oh, my fucking God –” He’s trying to cry through his shock, but it’s just him shaking and tears tumbling fast and thick. “Maybe – maybe you should sit down. The ambulance will be here, I – I called nine-one-one, the ambulance is coming…”
“All’s good here, sweetheart.”
Cain speaking again, from within my body and surely he sounds like me to Aidan, just like how the cat sounded like meowing and I could even hear it, the overlaid treble trill of a cat tangled together with a brash, masculine voice.
I only hear him, Cain, I hear him use my body to say, “I’m fine as can be.”
“I just hit you with my car! Oh, my God, sit down — you have to sit down. You’re bleeding! ” Aidan decides to grab for me. He takes the bold step of snatching my hand, but Cain pulls my hand away. I’ve lost control of my body. I don’t even know what to do. Cain’s inside me, moving my dead body around — but I’m still here.
Am I dead?
“No,” Cain says.
My head turns to take in the scene of the accident. My bike’s twisted into the front of Aidan’s car with a bent tire and snapped chain. I’m a good twenty feet away, with Aidan and the cat. I’m covered in blood. My brows are thick with it as I scowl, as my body does all these things without me.
“You should go to the hospital,” Aidan says. “Ethan? Ethan, please, sit down. Okay?” He pulls at me. “God, I am so sorry — I swear I didn’t see you. I didn’t see you until –”
Cain pulls the other way. “I’m leaving,” he says. “Don’t worry about it. Fuck, is the bike wrecked?”
I get closer to the car. Aidan’s two little sisters are staring at me from the backseat with huge eyes and pointing fingers. I crouch down and jangle the broken bicycle. I stand and kick at it instead, scowling. I turn and start walking, shoulders hunched against the chill cut of the wind.
“Ethan?” Aidan calls after me. His voice grows shrill and terrified. “Ethan!”
“Fuck off!” Cain shouts back. “I’m fine!” In my voice, just like how Aidan heard the cat meowing, he’s going to hear my voice shouting. I am so fucked. This can’t be happening.
Can you hear me?
Cain’s voice grumbles under my breath. “Yeah.”
Am I dead?
“No, shut up.”
My gaze flicks back over my shoulder to where Aidan’s gone to corral his sisters, because the oldest is halfway out into the street. They’re ten and eight, always a handful, and screaming and shrieking about how cool that was, now that I’m not dead. Aidan turns to stare after me with tears smeared all over his face, and then I look away. I’m walking fast through yards to take the most direct path home, or at least I hope I’m going home.
I hear the soaring wail of the ambulance siren. I hug along fence lines and cross through the drainage path between yards. Aidan’s going to tell them where I live. If Cain doesn’t realize that, then I’m not sure I should tell him. Or he can read my mind, but I don’t —
I stagger to a stop beneath a power line pole and sink into a crouch. My arms go over my chest as I hunch to pant and shiver. Now that I’m not moving, it’s splitting torture as my broken body beats and breaths. My forehead goes into my arms with a groan.
“Fuck,” Cain whispers. My eyes close, my fist clenches, I’m not sure I can feel the pain as intensely as Cain does, but I’m really not sure of anything. I’m not really sure if I am anything.
I sit there breathing hard and shivering for a while longer. Gradually I settle more comfortably into my own body, or Cain does into mine, but either way it’s easier to be in this strange moment.
Maybe I should go to the hospital, maybe I should try talking Cain into finding the ambulance or at least talk him into going back to Aidan. I was just struck by a car. My ribs, that horror-snap twist of them mending together, I think about that and how much blood I left behind for Aidan to stare at and cry. I might puke, I even heave and gag as I recall striking the car, colliding into metal and bone shattering, pain — what is happening? How am I not dead?
Help me, where I am — am I dead? Am I dead? Did I die?
“Stop it,” Cain grits out. My teeth are clenched. I’m shaking, shivering, trembling so wretchedly that it’s nearly spasms. “Abel, stop it. Calm the fuck down.”
I want my body back. I want my body if I’m not dead then how come I can’t move, how come you’re —
“Shut up!” Cain hits a fist into the dirt. “Abel, just shut the fuck up.”
….my name is Ethan.
“I’m calling you Abel. You’re calling me Cain. We’re not using real names, haven’t you learned fucking anything?” He breathes hard through the shaking until it lesses, until I become calm so my body does as well.
“I’m not any happier about this than you are, princess,” Cain says. “When I said I wanted a body I didn’t mean yours. What good are you to me like this?”
I don’t know. I don’t know what that is. I don’t know —
“Shut up,” Cain snaps. He opens his eyes and leans back into the pole, so I see the stretch of hazy February sky above the undulating rooflines of the surrounding neighborhood. His voice softens, sounds more like my own without the sharp bite of his anger. “I know you don’t know, kid. Just shut up for now.”
He sits there for a while longer in my body, fist clenching and unclenching so that I pay attention to the rise and fall rippling waves of suffering torment. I only see where Cain puts my eyes, and he just keeps looking at the sky and then closing his eyes through the worst of the anguish. I guess it’s not easy getting my near-dead body put back together like this.
I don’t hear the wail of the ambulance siren anymore. I wonder what Aidan’s thinking, what he must be thinking. I bet that dead cat’s still back at the crash scene, too, so that he’s going to start questioning his own sanity except for his little sisters squealing and shrieking about him killing me. How am I going to explain this? Am even going to be able to explain it? As in, will I get my body back? Am I dead? I must be dead. I can’t move, Cain has my body, this dead thing that’s found me and taken my body doesn’t seem in a hurry to give it back.
“Abel, you’re fine,” Cain growls. As my fingers flick over my cheeks, I feel tears that don’t seem like mine — or don’t seem like Cain’s, rather. They are mine, not his, that’s right. I’m making better sense of this now I think. He says again, “You’re fine.”
I don’t really think this is fine.
“You’re not dead. What more do you want?”
My body back, I guess. My life back, I want my life back. I want to be normal. I want you to go away.
Cain chuckles. Low, dangerous, and not all amused. “Too late. You’re my bitch, now. That’s what you get for giving your real name to a demon.”
My shoulders push against the pole for leverage and support as I stand. My head rolls limp and heavy with a groan as I set a hand against the pole as well, turning into it like a drunkard clutching the wall. My knees quiver as Cain grits back a hissed curse and swallows, because I think both of us are fighting queasiness at the dizzying roil and heave of the ground. I’m fighting panic as well, because did Cain just refer to himself as a demon?
I think I understand more of this now, I think I’m making better sense of what’s me and what’s him, even if I don’t know what he is. He can’t be a demon. I can’t be a necromancer. None of this can be happening, I would rather just be crazy. Crazy and in shock, so that I’m up and walking around like this despite being hit by a car. It happens, people can do all kinds of unnatural and weird things while it still being real and not demons and necromancers and handsome men in eye patches, those are clearly just my delusions, my hallucinations, I am obviously crazy. I am a crazy seventeen-year-old developing schizophrenia or acute psychosis or any other whispered thing to make my mother cry again.
“Abel,” Cain groans. “Abel, calm down. If you fight me then we’re both going to get fucked up worse than we already are. I’ll give your body back, just get your shit together.”
You will? You’ll give it back?
“Yeah, sure. Just shut up.” Cain pushes off from the pole and staggers forward. Each step falls into place with less weaving and swaying the further he walks in my body — as he walks. He’s got control of things, so I try to stay calm like he says.
He does get steadier, seems stronger and more sure of how to use my feet to get moving. I fade further, become just observations on what’s happening as Cain starts walking again. It’s between yards and around fences, shoving through hedges and walking along the top of a rock-walled garden. I’d bet anything this was the path Cain took as a cat trying to chase me down.
All my suspicions prove correct as Cain wanders to my street and there’s two police cars waiting. They’re parked crookedly at the bottom of the drive with the officers nowhere in immediate sight. I might hear Aidan shouting my name, I might hear the police shouting my name, except I’m not sure Cain can hear my name so I can’t really hear anything at all. It’s still confusing, but I try to be calm about it.
“Well, fuck,” Cain says. He stops and looks at my house, at the police cars. “I’ll let you handle this one. Remember to stay calm.”
What?
I only thought it hurt before, but a split-second shatter of brilliant agony spreads over every nerve just like striking into the front of Aidan’s car all over again. I feel cold air suck into my lungs with a gasp, and then I feel more — such small things, so many things I was missing without realizing it, indescribable and insignificant pieces of myself that latch into place as if magnetized.
My eyes open without having closed, and it’s me who blinks the wet sting of tears and gasps again in a way that’s shuddering and desperate. I crouch down and then set a hand into the grass of my neighbor’s yard. I lean forward struggling to catch my breath, struggling to catch my balance, my body my own again to move as I want.
I have to stay calm. I latch onto that before confusion can rip me apart again. I need to stay calm and focus on everything that’s me, everything I can feel, everything that’s mine and not dead, not this dead thing I know is still with me — still inside me.
Got it, kid?
Cain, that’s Cain, his voice inside my head now whispering at me all rough and near-amused, mocking even though I think there’s a hint of concern there as well. I have a sense of him, in this so-strange way where now our positions are reversed. I’m the one moving and he’s only this whispering voice. I need to stay calm about this, which is almost asking the impossible except I just got hit by a car and now I’m up and walking around fine. I painfully am aware of just how possible the impossible has become.
“Cain?”
Right here, sweetheart , he says. There’s a laugh to it that rumbles around inside me almost pleasantly, almost feels warm. He’s calm about this, at least one of us is calm about this.
“What should I do?” I turn my head some toward the sound of my name — definitely Aidan screaming for me, echoed by the drifting call of a male voice I don’t recognize. One of the police, or the paramedics, everyone trying to find me because I just got hit by a car.
“Cain, what do I do?”
Whatever the fuck you want, princess. It’s your shitty life that I just saved. Have fun with it.
“That’s not very helpful,” I mumble.
I pull the bloodstained fabric of my shirt away from my body and look down the neckline at the smooth, entirely normal-looking skin of my bare chest. I feel along my head where there’s dried blood sticking my hair into stiff clumps, but I can’t find any spots that are tender. I find the bumpy scar from where I hit the railing on the boat years ago, but I don’t find from where all this blood spilled. It doesn’t hurt much, that’s nice at least, I can’t believe how much it doesn’t hurt. I can’t believe I’m not dead.
“Thanks,” I whisper softly. “Cain? Thanks. I didn’t want to die.”
Yeah, no shit. Dying sucks.
I sigh, square my shoulders, and walk toward my house. I don’t know what else to do except find the people are trying to find me — all these living people who are going tell me what to do. I need to find Aidan, find the police, find the paramedics who I’m going to confuse so terribly because I’m covered in my own blood but unharmed, unbroken, undead.