The Priest's Graveyard Read Free Page B

California.
     But that’s how it worked out.
    The plan was really that simple: Move to the land of opportunity, get a job waiting tables, and start looking for a way into
     acting. I wasn’t stupid enough to think landing a role or modeling job would be easy, so I would be responsible and learn
     to cut hair as a backup.
    Shaking in the alleyway, I couldn’t begin to remember how I’d gotten from there—on top of the world with fifteen thousand
     dollars in my pocket—to here, enslaved by the most powerful pusher south of South Central, in three years. The last year of
     hard drugs had fogged my memory. My descent mostly had to do with running out of money and hooking up with a girlfriend to
     sell a bit of weed on the side. Was that it? Yeah, I thought so.
    Like a magnet I had been drawn to my true, useless nature, as if subconsciously determined to justify my father’s disappointment
     in me.
    I pushed myself up off the concrete again, and this time I managed to get one foot under me.
    A voice yelled out. I knew the voice well and didn’t have to look back to know that a black town car, window down, was at
     the alley’s mouth. I’d seen Cyrus take out a woman’s teeth with his fist. I’d seen worse than that.
    But it wasn’t Cyrus that terrified me. It was the voices.
    The alley was closing in on me and the monsters—real monsters—were after me. Why they scared me more than the thought of Cyrus
     beating me, I don’t know. Maybe because I had never heard them before. They weren’t just in my head, right? They were the
     only detail in my world that was crystal clear.
    I pushed off with my foot and lurched ahead.
    “Around, around!” Someone was yelling again. “Go, go!” They’d seen me.
    He’s gonna step on you and break all your arms like you deserve.
    My bare toes scraped the rough concrete, but the narcotics in my system numbed the pain some. I had to get out of the alley
     because the creatures there were reaching out of the darkness to grab me and pull me down.
    And then I saw it directly ahead of me: a light hanging in the night sky, surrounded by soft sparkles of rain. I fluttered
     for that beacon of hope like a moth with wet wings. Deep inside I must have realized it was only a streetlight, but at that
     moment it was the promise of rescue.
    The parking meters were there like sticks in the ground; cars were parked beside them like boulders, but my eyes were on that
     streetlamp looming. Nothing else mattered to me, only that warm halo of heaven in the sky.
    I was in the street before I noticed the twin beams of a car rushing toward me from my left. More light? Closer light? And
     coming toward me. It stopped me dead in the center of the road. Maybe I was dying and this was the tunnel to heaven.
    The choir sang, a high-pitched squeal like tires on asphalt, somehow beautiful. The lights swerved. The moment before the
     car hit me I remember thinking it wasn’t the tunnel to heaven; it was a car.
    The impact threw me through the air and landed me on my butt ten feet from the car, which had screeched to a stop. All I could
     see were the lights, glaring at me, and I thought this was the end, because it had to be Cyrus and he was going to break my
     arms and legs then give me to the gangbangers.
    “Are you okay?”
    The world was spinning and I was trying to crawl away. But my hands refused to cooperate. They clawed at the wet asphalt.
     I began to retch.
    I fell to one elbow, threw up on the street, then toppled over, still heaving. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that heroin
     is the drug of the gods. It has far more to do with vomit.
    The driver of the car that hit me was frozen in his headlights. A screech of tires from far behind him reminded me that Cyrus
     was still coming after me.
    “He’s…kill me…,” I managed. However unintelligible, the driver seemed to understand. He spun back, saw the car sliding around
     the corner, scooped me up as if I were a crash-test dummy, and ran