Free The Lazarus Heart by Poppy Z. Brite

her, the glare meant for the bird. She thinks maybe she can see hell locked up in those eyes, the pupils dropping straight down forever.
    "I'm right, aren't I? It doesn't know, any more than the goddamn police knew."
    "The crow is doing what it was made to do, Jared. Whatever else is going on here, it's just a crow and there are limits to its..." and she pauses, knowing how she must sound to Jared, pragmatic, irreligious Jared, that this is all just a bunch of crazy voodoo nonsense to him.
    "There are limits to its powers. There's something else going on here, something that's getting in the way, that we have to figure out and get around."
    Jared buries his face in his hands and she thinks that he's about to cry again.
    That would be better than the anger, something she understands more intimately. She's spent all her life since her brother's death in the company of sorrow. She has become sorrow's most cherished concubine.
    "I don't understand any of this," Jared says.
    "And you mustn't waste your time trying," Lucrece replies, hoping that there's at least a little solace in her voice now. "You can get lost if you spend too much time trying to understand how this could be. You have to simply accept that it is."
    "How do you know these things, Lucrece? Can you just tell me that? Can you tell me why you understand what this fucking bird is saying?"
    She pauses again, knowing the answer but afraid to turn it loose, faced suddenly with her own fears and self-doubts. Knowing that her response will bind her to this mystery with knots that no fingers, mortal or undead, can ever unravel.
    "Yeah," she answers at last as she takes her hand from Jared's shoulder and begins unbuttoning the front of her dress. "I think that maybe I can." She pulls the dress down past her thin white shoulders, revealing the severe black silk corset underneath. Lucrece turns around so that Jared can see her bare shoulders.
    "I had it done about a month after Benny's funeral," she says. "I hoped that the pain and the healing would help me begin to heal some..." Her voice trails off as she feels his eyes on her back, tracing the intricate pattern of scars there. The picture the scalpel drew into her skin, the cutting that she meant to be a raven, after Jared's photograph.
    But the artist only had a picture of a crow to work from and didn't confess that he'd cheated on the design until later, after the gauze and surgical tape were hiding his fresh, weeping work.
    "I think that's why I can hear your crow, Jared."
    "Oh, Lucrece," he says, and his fingertips graze the crisscross of puckered white tissue.
    "It helped a little," she says, and pulls her dress back up, hiding the cutting. "Maybe it's going to help a lot now. Maybe it's going to let me help you."
    Jared rises and stands above the crow, and the bird cranes its neck to look up into his face.
    "If you brought me back here for nothing, you bastard," he says, "I swear that you'll die very, very slowly."
    "I think it's time to cut the macho bullshit, Jared," Lucrece says, her fingers working the last of the dress's pearlescent buttons. "And if you care, it's a she."
    Jared glares down at her, uncomprehending, and the crow caws softly. "The crow" Lucrece says. "It's a she."
    Jared rolls his eyes. "Pardon me," he says.
    The crow tells them that there's a little time then, and so Jared rests awhile in Lucrece's arms and listens to the rain, coming down harder now, playing the roof of the building like a perfect and soothing percussive instrument. He closes his dead man's eyes and tries to pretend that these are Benny's arms around him instead of Benny's twin's. She strokes his hair with her long fingers, fingers like Benny's grown softer and more hesitant, but close enough for the game in his head.
    "I want to get this awful jacket off you," she says. "And this shirt." He is still in his funeral clothes, slit up the back for the morticians' convenience. "And then I'll find something else for you to