City of Night

The Witch-girl opened the door and peered out into the damp night. The street was deserted, a matte black ribbon cutting through the cold cement of the city. A slight smile curled the corners of her mouth. No one had followed her here, no minders, no concerned friends. She had even slipped her brother’s watchful eye.

Cautiously, she stepped through the doorway. Thin strips of moonlight shimmered against the silver fabric of her dress. Her eyes, blue like the streaks in her black hair, moved restlessly up and down the street. Still no signs of life, not even a rat, not even one of the small, dirty brown sparrows that dared nest this far into the Night. She was completely, gloriously alone. The feeling was heady enough to let her pretend that she had never tried this before.

A few more steps and she let the doorknob slip from her grasp. The sound of her boot heels on the cold pavement echoed. It seemed deafening in the midnight silence. She shivered.

“You don’t scare me,” she whispered.

She looked back. The doorway made a white triangle of light against the gray-black of the city around her. It was comforting, a bright umbilical to the illuminated world that lay behind her.

“You don’t scare me,” she repeated confidently, now speaking instead of whispering. And again, “You don’t scare me!” Now she was defiant, grinning, drunk on her own courage and on the knowledge that this time was it, this was the moment. This was the night that Morgan Silver walked out into the dark and was not afraid.

And then a gust of wind blew the door shut with a sharp crack, and all the light went out.

Her words choked to a stop in the back of her throat. She looked up to the moon, but it was a thin crescent, mostly obscured by black ribbons of cloud, and it wasn’t enough. She brought her hands up in front of her face, to prove that she could still see them, and she could, but just barely, only barely.

“You don’t scare me,” Her voice came back to her, but it was different now. Not a declaration but a plea. “You don’t scare me. You don’t scare me you don’t scaremeyoudon’tscare…” rising in panic and then dropping to a terrified whine, her voice faded out with the light.

It was then that the shadows came, bits of black within that circled closer and closer. No one believed her when she said that this was what it was like, like they were living things attacking her, but she could feel them melting inside her, moving through her mind and pulling at her memories. It wasn’t long before her fifteen-year-old self was ripped away from her, and she was ten years old again.

It was dark and quiet, terrifyingly silent in a place that should have been filled with happy noise. A dull, warm breeze moved through her fingers, carrying what felt like dust. Or ashes. The strongest sense coming from the void in front of her, though, was the smell. Awful, ugly smoke, and blood so strong she felt as though she could taste it, and she choked, stumbling blindly through emptiness until she tripped over something that was soft under her shoes. Suddenly, she found herself lying beside a body, a body that was cold, unmoving, and bent in all the wrong places. She was close enough to see it, and she recognized the face.

She screamed, a blind animal wail of horror and pain, clawing at her face as if she could tear away the smell and the face and the awful, awful dark.

*  *  *

“Morgan!” Toby Silver called out into the echoing dark. “Morgan!” It was the third time this month. The third time he’d opened her door and found her bed empty. The third time he’d run out after her into the night, alone, unable to feel which way she’d gone, tired and helpless and filled with an anger he could neither direct nor repress. It was the third time this month that he’d felt his stomach fill with cold terror at the feeling that this time was it, this was the moment. This was the night that Morgan Silver walked out into the dark and did not come back again.

A sound, then, a voice in the darkness, and he was running toward the screams of a little girl. The dark, empty streets, normally so familiar, so comfortable, were suddenly menacing as they rushed past. Every corner was the same, dirty monochrome towers rising out of cracked pavement, and he didn’t seem to be getting any closer. His mind raced as fast as his legs. So many people who could find her out here, alone. The other gangs, grown cocky by his lack of a presence on these outer streets. The police, with their guns and their false ideals. So many people who could hurt her.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a vague shimmer. Hadn’t she been wearing her silver dress, the family colors, when he’d seen her last, quiet and restless in the lobby that evening? A few more steps and he saw her, a thin spectre coming into focus out of the dark. She was alone, and that should have been enough to calm him, to let relief flood through his worried thoughts. But it was just the opposite, because Morgan didn’t know she was alone. She screamed and lashed out into the night, fighting off something only she could see. As he ran to her she turned on him, fingers curled like claws, as though he was one of the ghosts that haunted her waking dreams.

“Get away from me! Get away!”

“Morgan, it’s me!” he said, backing away, “It’s only me.”

Finally, the ghost of ten year-old Morgan let go its hold. She looked up at him, and he was caught off guard by the depth of his inability to understand her. He couldn’t understand why she did this to herself, week after week, bruising herself against the walls of an old fear, but more than that, he couldn’t understand the fear itself. They were Witches, he and Morgan, meant for the gloaming, meant for the thin twinkle of stars across the sleeping city. But Morgan Silver was afraid of the dark.

*  *  *

“Shh, it’s okay now,” Toby murmured, and she watched him looking down at her as if she were a child just woken from a nightmare. He brushed the tears from her cheeks, and then, with a low, tuneless song on his breath, drew his fingers over the scratches she’d raked into her face, and brushed those away too.

She would never tell him, but at times like these his resignation hurt her. His thin, desperate belief that this was normal, just a brother caring for his sister. The way he clung to the last possible threads of hope that his sister wasn’t mad.

When her tears were dried and scratches healed, her breathing slowed to normal and her mind firmly back in the present, he pulled her into a quick embrace, and then lifted her up as if she were still a little girl. She buried her head in his shoulder and didn’t cry, just like she hadn’t cried in that parking lot five years ago, after the body she’d clung to and tried so desperately to keep finally gave up its dust to the stars. Toby started murmuring under his breath, as if she couldn’t hear. As if she didn’t know she was too old, too heavy for him to carry, so much that he had to sing a spell to keep holding her like this. He still did it, though. Every time he found her like this he carried her home. She was too heavy, but still he carried her.

Chapter One, Part Two