The Sinner by Emma Scott

 

 

One

I didn’t think my day could get any worse and then I found the dead body.

Work had been terrible for a Friday. The E train was late, which made me late, which set my whole day off-balance. At our morning meeting, Guy Baker mistook me for the intern who brings the coffee, despite us working together for nearly two years. Which meant he still didn’t know I existed. On the way home, the train was crammed, bodies pressed to bodies. A few feet down from me, a young couple was taking advantage. She clung to him, he held on to her, and they gazed at each other as if there was no one else in the world. Their happiness was beautiful to see but made my loneliness feel sharp by contrast.

To top it off, there was the aforementioned dead body in the empty lot behind my apartment.

Technically, the lot was more like my front walk. My building in Hell’s Kitchen had been chopped up in the 1970s to make the most of the New York City real estate boom. My tiny studio was hardly a functioning apartment, but more of an appendage—an elbow chopped off from the body. It stuck out at the edge of the second floor, and the only way in was by walking to the rear of the building, through the trash-littered lot, and climbing a rickety set of stairs. The interior wasn’t much more than a shoebox, but it had one large window. Even if the view was mostly the next building, the light was lovely in the morning.

And it was all mine. In Manhattan.

Every time I locked my three deadbolts and looped my three chains in at night, I reminded myself I didn’t have any roommates keeping me up, or eating my food, or hogging the tiny bathroom…or to chat with in the morning over coffee. Or to huddle with on the tiny couch and watch Netflix while we talked about our hopes and dreams. Like my hope that Guy Baker would finally notice me and take me around the world with him on his fifty-foot sailboat as we continue our work at Ocean Alliance, the nonprofit where we’re both employed. We’d fall deeply in love, the kind of love you find in the romance novels I read every night. The kind of love that felt like a promise that’s never been fulfilled.

Which was kind of dramatic, I know. I was only twenty-three; I had my whole life to fall in love. But the loneliness that wracked me felt a lot older than twenty-three years.

That late afternoon in April, on my walk from the subway, I tried to erase my crappy day with my favorite daydream. The one where Guy and I are sailing around the Rock of Gibraltar or the coast at Cape Town…doesn’t matter where. We’re on a mission through Ocean Alliance, both of us passionate and tireless in our work. In this particular fantasy, Guy and I return to his boat after a grueling day on the trawlers and garbage scows, hauling tons of plastic trash from the water. He looks at me across the tiny cabin, tired but happy, and we fall into each other. He kisses me desperately, then holds my face in his huge, rough hands. His light blue eyes are intent on mine, as if it’s impossible to look away.

“Lucy,” he says gruffly. “I never want to do this without you.”

I swallow hard, choked with emotion. “You’ll never have to.”

My favorite exchange. We’d made it a thousand times in my pathetic imaginings. Lines I could’ve pulled from one of the hundreds of romance novels that crammed my studio. They took up most of one wall where I didn’t have room for one thing to take up anything.

I rounded the corner to my studio. In my mind’s eye, Guy and I were falling onto the bed that was just big enough for the two of us, the sea cradling us in a soft sway, when I stopped short, a gasp catching in my throat.

He’s dead.

The words popped into my head before my eyes registered what I was seeing—a man’s legs, long and lean and sculpted with muscle. Naked of clothing and alabaster white. The white of porcelain or marble. As if Michelangelo’s David had tipped over on the asphalt.

I glanced around in the dim twilight. All was quiet but for Mrs. Rodriguez on the third floor watching Telemundo with the window open.

I took one step. Then another. My phone was in my hand, ready to call 911. But my fingers wouldn’t cooperate, my gaze locked on those legs that were too perfect to be real. Surreal.

Maybe it’s a mannequin. Don’t go calling the police because a department store dumped their trash in your backyard.

If that got out at work, I’d never hear the end of it. Silly Lucy, Abby Taylor would say, shaking her head, her camera’s video eye recording everything. Not that word would get out. I barely talked to anyone at Ocean Alliance unless it was during meetings, and then it was to agree with what everyone else agreed on. Even if I didn’t actually agree. Even if I had ideas of my own.

Now I was close enough to see that it was definitely not a mannequin but a man, his body just as flawless as his legs. Unblemished. No scars, no freckles, no hair except for the thick mop of black curls on his head. Hair as black as his skin was white. He lay on his stomach (I averted my gaze from the perfect, tight roundness of his butt), eyes shut, his head pillowed on one muscular forearm. The other arm—his right—was stretched out on the ground as if he’d been reaching for something when he…

Fell?

I stepped over one of his wings—Oh my God Oh my God Oh my God—and stood as near the man as I dared. His face was mesmerizing. Like a Renaissance sculpture with full lips, angular cheekbones, and thick brows as black as ink. He had a Grecian nose and a jawline that was so straight and perfect, it wasn’t quite human.

‘Not quite human’?Silly Lucy, how about those wings?

I forced my eyes to accept what they were seeing.

The man wasn’t partially wrapped in a blanket.

The twilight shadows weren’t playing tricks on my eyes.

Two huge wings, covered in long, glossy black feathers, sprouted from between the man’s perfect shoulder blades. Each was easily as long as his body—their tips likely brushed his ankles when he walked. By my calculations, that would give him a wingspan of more than twelve feet.

He has a wingspan.

A little cry escaped me as the man’s full lips parted and then he made a sudden, torturous gasp for air, as if he’d been holding his breath for a long time. He moaned on the exhale, a sound that sent a shiver dancing down my spine, equal parts dread and a strange, tantalizing thrill.

Whatever this creature was, he was alive. I fumbled for my phone.

Who are you going to call, 911 or Animal Control?

A crazed laugh tried to burst out of me when the man opened his eyes. My laugh morphed into a strangled scream and the phone fell from my shaking hands.

His eyes were pure black. No irises, no whites. The pupils—if he had any—were lost in the inky black spheres. In those few seconds that felt like an eternity, I had the fevered notion that his eyes weren’t black at all but an absence. An absence of color. Light. Heat. Warmth.

Everything good in the world…

It was impossible to tell if he were looking at me, except I could feel that he was. He saw me. Those onyx orbs seared through me like an icy blade. I shivered and swayed, feeling myself pulled into that endless black. An abyss from which there was no return.

The man’s outstretched hand lifted off the ground, his long fingers reaching. His breath cut a harsh whisper, “Help me…”

I staggered back. The back of my head hit a brick wall and the blackness swallowed me whole.