Tell the Wind and Fire(32)

If I crawled, nobody could see me through the windows. Just in case someone was watching the apartment.

When we had come to Penelope and Jarvis’s, I had been constantly on edge, relentlessly terrified that someone would show up to take back the pardon and take Dad in to be tortured, so terrified that I had burned Dad’s books on Dark magic and the very few letters Aunt Leila had sent. I had never written back to her, and she had soon stopped writing. I spent my time back then, whenever Dad was drugged into calm, scraping away at mortar until I could pull out a couple of the bricks.

If someone looked at this wall, they would have noticed two bricks that were obviously displaced. I had taken a fork to the crevices between those two bricks, and the mortar around them had a slightly gnawed appearance.

The real loose brick was seventeen across and five up from the bottom, in the shadow of the wardrobe. I slid the brick out, feeling its rough edges nip into my palm, to reveal a tiny hollow space. I shoved the pouch almost to the very back, then crammed in ashes, hoping the dull brown of the bag would be entirely obscured even if someone took the brick out.

Although I had burned Aunt Leila’s letters and Dad’s books, I had kept one thing: the pendant necklace with the single jewel my mother had worn and worked magic with in the confines of our home. I didn’t deserve to have a keepsake of her, but I had not been able to leave it or get rid of it.

I had never hidden anything else in there, until then.

I slid the brick back into place, stood up, stepped away, and surveyed the innocent expanse of the wall. Then I came out of the bedroom, pulling the door open and closed as softly as I could, and went to sit on the sofa. I put my guilty head in my ash-stained hands and sat there for what seemed like a long time.

I do not know why I looked up to the silver square of the window, its pale reflection cast on the floor at my feet. Perhaps it was a strange noise, or perhaps it was something the Light Council says all Light magicians have: an innate sense of when the darkness approaches and encroaches on the illumination we give out.

A dead streetlight stood in my line of vision, its magic failed, staring like a socket in which the eye had been put out. As I drew closer to the window, I saw the windows of the buildings across the street, all glossy black save for the sharp lights of cars reflected as they went by. The city was indifferent and distant, as close to sleeping as it ever was.

Underneath my window, my devil was waiting, wearing my true love’s face. The moon bleached that face and the street beneath, so Carwyn looked as if he were standing on a ray of moonlight, a shining silver expanse that stretched from the sky to his feet.

His face was so pale, the color of alabaster or pearl, the poetic peaceful color that people turned in stories when they died. But I had seen the dead in their cages, had seen them livid and ashen, and I had learned long ago not to believe in stories.

The dead are defeated, the dead are lost. But this, I thought, with all the whispers about doppelgangers I had ever heard suddenly crowding my mind, was something that had been sent back from the land of the dead. This was a shadow of a person. This was death triumphant, walking among the living.

And I had set him free.

He had not changed position or expression as he looked at the window. All he did was stand beneath the window and stare, but I knew he saw me. His eyes looked dark and empty, in contrast with his salt-white face, like holes burned in a sheet.

I do not know how long I stood at the window.

I do not know how long my pallid companion stood looking up at me before he seemed to dissolve away, slipping from the moonshine to mingle with his fellow shadows.

I did not know if it was a warning or not. I didn’t know if he was telling me that he’d had something to do with the spectacle at the Green-Wood Cemetery, or that I was guilty by association, if he wanted only to frighten me or to ensure my silence with fear.

It was a wasted trip for him. I had seen the blood in the streets and on the wall, and I had told nobody what I had done. I had made my decision. I had hidden the collar. I could not betray him without betraying myself.

All the streets could run with blood, and I would not go to the authorities. They had taken my mother forever, taken my father, and I had only gotten him back through being able to lie and pretend we were somehow different from the other victims. Only a few days ago, they had tried to take my Ethan.

I needed no apparitions in the night to urge me to evil.

I had made the decision long ago: better to be safe than good.



The next morning, I got up early and made everyone breakfast. I tried to cook and clean as regularly as I could. Jarvis, Penelope, and Marie might care about us, might feel sorry for us, but it was smart to make them like me. The last time I ever saw her, my aunt had advised me to make myself useful.

Be clever. Be careful. Remember they are not like family, she’d said. Wait for me to come and get you, she had added, but I’d known she was dreaming, and I was on my own.

I forgot sometimes, with Penelope especially, but I tried to remember. I didn’t want to be stupid or careless.

Now I had been stupid and careless, and I had to make up for it by trying even harder.

“You’re a treasure, Ladybird,” Penelope declared, coming into the kitchen to snatch a piece of bacon and patting Marie’s cornrowed hair. “What we’ll do when you go to college I can’t imagine.”

Nothing would change when I went to college. I was going to college in New York, of course. My father couldn’t manage without me.