Night Owls: Chapters 14-18

“You just want to kill her.” They both ducked out of the way as the doors briefly opened and two boys with claws for feet tripped over themselves, laughing loudly as they barreled out onto the sidewalk. Clara scrunched her nose. She had no patience for the sheydim, certainly not ones that made drunk humans seem like positively delightful company.

“I suppose this hardly impresses the two of you. Bird’s-eye views being commonplace for you both.”

She could practically feel the indignation radiating off of Molly, but she said nothing.

“Not my purview,” he said.

For a fleeting moment, Ashmodai appeared to genuinely be considering her.

“One, I have the decency to wear socks,” said Ashmodai.

“Dybbukim, they are no ordinary occurrence, yes? The dead are meant for the World to Come. But there are places where the space between worlds is thin, people who can cross too easily, who disrupt the fabric of things.”

“It takes little to rend the seams,” he said.

It had been so long since she’d been forced to memorize a phone number, and she realized with dismay she did not know Anat’s number by heart.

Tonight, she just made sure the film was set for the eight o’clock entry in the Winona Ryder retrospective before carefully ducking out.

The urge to throttle Boaz was suddenly very strong.

But saying as much would have prompted far more questions from Boaz than she was ready to answer, not with Anat in trouble.

Her curls fell in a thick curtain down to her chest, the thin veneer of life and color vanishing from her face, her eyes.

But Molly was on the warpath and would not be stopped so easily. She tore through their apartment in a rage, pushing aside the salvaged set pieces they’d turned into furniture and pacing wildly, as though she was looking for something to tear apart.

Her sister’s entire demeanor stiffened, and Clara realized too late that she had crossed a boundary she ought not to have crossed.

The air smelled cold and hard, and she could practically taste exhaust and grit, the perfect late afternoon punctured by incessant car horns and an ambulance siren.

It was cool, but as he had explained to more than his fair share of disappointed ghosts in the city, his Yiddish was confined to the stuff that found its way into Hebrew and whatever else he got via osmosis after a lifetime of being a Jew in a Jewish day school in New York City.

One would be remiss to neglect the greatest unsolved mystery to strike the Yiddish stage, the fate of Molly Lewis.

Her confidence, theatricality, and the ease with which she inhabited both male and female characters had drawn comparisons to the great Sarah Bernhardt herself.

The resemblance was too uncanny.

Those usually ranged from eye-roll inducing to mildly convincing, at least in the sense that some people simply had that kind of face, and that despite the infinite variety of humanity, sometimes people just looked deeply alike.

His mom had taken a bigger role at his grandparents’ catering company in the last few years, and had been trying relentlessly to get Boaz to work there instead, not understanding why he insisted on commuting all the way into Manhattan to work for strangers when he could instead make his grandparents happy answering endless phone inquiries from stressed brides about the status of their kosher certification and what dishes on their menu were free of nightshades.

Surely one of that gaggle of karaoke-loving girls had reported her disappearance, or someone in that immersive theater class of hers, or a professor.

Even more powerful than her ability to inspire pure terror was her ability to disarm powerful men with a smile.

The security guard did nothing but nod at her curtly as she passed him by on the stairs.