When Devils Sing(54)

“And your lucky pick?”

Ajay twirled the marble-green pick between his fingers, like a magic trick, then slid it into his pocket. “This’ll stay with me,” he’d said with a wink. “Maybe for your next birthday, I’ll let you have it.”

As it was, the Yamaha was the last thing he ever gave her. A lifeline thrown out to her as Ajay’s own came to a horrifying end. In a tragic way, it had been easier to accept then—that her uncle had taken his own life. The alternative had been too cruel for her to consider.

But what if he had truly been murdered, and his death was covered up by the police? What would that mean for Neera and her family and this awful place they called home?

No one is coming to save us, she thought. It’s all on me.

Discarded cicada shells crunched beneath Neera’s feet as she walked through the woods behind the Colonial. The Yamaha was a broken, useless thing cradled in her arms. Her tenuous connection to Ajay, the only good memory left of him, was sustained by the single guitar string that had not yet snapped under Nanaji’s wrath.

Neera felt that fairness did not fit in the vocabulary of her life. There would be no justice. There never had been, so why would the universe start now? She had spent the past three years treading water, waiting for the hand that would pull her to shore, but of course, it never came. The guitar had been the only thing keeping her head just barely above the surface. Without it, she would drown. She felt the truth of it as cold, emotionless fact.

And so, once again, Neera Singh walked into the dense pine woods with a tearstained face and a desperate prayer on her lips. She shifted her grip on the broken guitar pieces, hefting them more securely in her arms. It was full dark now, but her bare feet were steady and sure on the forest floor. Lightning bugs danced in an unsteady rhythm around her, winking in and out of existence.

The first time Neera had met the devil, she’d been a weeping child.

What was she now?

Desperate? No.

Hungry.

She walked with no direction or destination. Only farther, deeper into the trees. But her strides were purposeful, her eyes sharp and searching. Neera splashed across a cold, babbling stream, not even bothering to step over it. The cool water clung to her feet. She barely felt it. Overhead, the canopy grew so thick it blotted out the night sky above.

Still, Neera was unafraid.

Moved by an instinct she couldn’t name, she slowed her pace. Quieted her footfalls. Around her, the ever-present katydids and tree frogs had fallen silent. Neera lowered herself to the ground at the base of a sprawling live oak tree, its thick, gnarled branches spreading in every direction. She laid the mangled guitar tenderly in the soft grass.

“Crow?” Neera called out the devil’s name only once.

She waited, kneeling in the dirt.

There was a prolonged, heavy silence.

As a musician, Neera usually found a lack of sound uncomfortable. Unnatural. But this was different. She could feel the silence in those woods. It wrapped around her and held her close, like it had chosen her. As if every animal, every living being besides her, had frozen, waiting for the devil to appear.

The first sign of Crow’s arrival was a quiet wind, cutting through the stillness. It rustled through the oak and pine trees, the towering giants swaying high above her.

Then came a familiar voice, like that of the earth and the trees. “Neera?”

Three years ago, on a humid night much like tonight, Neera had gone looking for Crow as soon as she and her mom arrived to the Colonial. She had run into the forest, away from the harsh glow of police car lights and the sorrowful wails of her grandmother at her back. She was unaware of the briars burrowing into her skin, the thorns in her feet. There was no physical pain greater than the sudden loss in her heart.

Ajay was dead.

“Crow!” Neera had screamed once she had gone past the stream, spinning in dizzying circles. She ran through the dense woods, clambering up the trunks of trees, searching, pleading to find the creature that had made her a promise. “Crow! Bring him back!”

A promise, Crow had said, that was greater than love.

Hours had passed before a fifteen-year-old Neera collapsed to the ground, sobbing with a force that terrified her. “I’ll do anything,” she cried into the night. “Please, bring him back. Please.” Her desperation was ferocious and all-consuming. A wildfire burning up everything within. With each tear that fell, her hope went with it.

Neera had wept, alone in the dark, until there was nothing left inside of her.

Now, at eighteen, Neera looked at Crow, the massive avian creature that lingered in the shadows of the wood. Lightning bugs surrounded his head like a crown, illuminating in flashes the length of his long beak, the blacks of his eyes. His folded, spindly wings dusted the ground, leaving a pool of black liquid where they grazed the earth.

“You’re really here,” Neera breathed. It wasn’t just relief she felt, but anger.

Crow nodded once. “As promised.”

Neera shook her head. “Where were you when I needed you three years ago?” Her voice cracked.

“It was not time.”

“Why?” Neera whimpered. She was a helpless child again, weeping at the taloned feet of a feathered devil.

“I rise only with the cicadas,” Crow said. “It is my curse.”

Neera blinked her stinging eyes, struggling to understand. “Your … curse?”