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“I… I know who you are,” I told him, almost defiantly.
“Do you? Tell me.”
“Y-you’re the thing they all talk about. The Darkness.”
The Gray Man laughed, a grating screech of wings and clicking pincers. “I am not what they talk about. I am what they fear to talk about. I am the unspoken word, the omitted terror, the whispered suggestion. If they really knew me, they would never dare to conjure a thought of me.”
“But… what are you?” I asked, the question bursting from my lips with childish impatience.
“I am unknowable, Little Bird. I am older than the rocks and deeper than the sea. I have always been and I will always be. My name is lost to the ages, and so they call me the Darkness. They fear me, because they know that I could turn their hearts to me with a whisper. I bend all to my will and gorge myself on their despair.”
A wave of terror broke over me, and it was all I could do to stay on my feet. Perhaps my mother felt me stagger because she let slip a soft moan. The sound steadied me again.Don’t forget why you’re here,I told myself.
“You aren’t as powerful as you think you are,” I told him. “The Vesper witches bound the deep magic of this place from you. They defeated you. That’s why you’re doing all of this. That’s why you want my mother. You want to break the Covenant of the Three, so you can have this place again.”
The Gray Man laughed again. “There is no defeating me, Little Bird. The tide of power may have turned in their favor for a time, but time means nothing to a creature like me. What is a day, a year, a millennium to one such as I, a thing eternal and unchanging?”
“Time might not matter, but this place does,” I said. “If you’re so powerful, why stay here? You could go anywhere, do anything. But you don’t.” A thought popped into my head, and I knew it was true before it fell from my lips. I spoke it as a revelation. “You need this place. You’re tied to it.”
The Gray Man stood still and silent in the moments after I spoke, and I felt his anger on the air like a sour taste on my tongue, but it did not terrify me like it ought to have done. Perhaps I’d already reached the pinnacle of terror—perhaps it was impossible to be any more scared than I was already—there was something perversely comforting in that thought, and I clung to that comfort as I went on.
“The Covenant of the Three bound you here. You can’t leave, but you can’t access the deep magic either. You’re trapped. That’s why you want my mother. She’s the third Vesper witch. She’s the one standing in your way.”
“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong. I do not want your mother at all.”
This pulled me up short. “What do you mean, you don’t want her? You told Bernadette to kidnap her. You were seconds away from putting Sarah’s ghost into her body.”
“I see. Little Bird does not yet understand. Would you like me to explain?”
No, I want you to go straight to the depths of hell where you undoubtedly came from, and rot there, I thought savagely. Aloud, I said, “I’d rather leave.”
“Oh, but you can’t leave. You’ve only just returned. I’ve waited entirely too long for this.”
I stamped my foot in frustration, and my mother mumbled incoherently on my shoulder. “You don’t make sense. You took my mother. Now you don’t want her. So I’m taking her with me.”
“You misunderstand me. I did not take your mother because I wanted her. I took her because I needed her. I needed bait, to lure you here.”
I shook my head. “That doesn’t make any sense. My mother is the third Vesper witch. If she renews the Covenant, you spend another generation bound here. I don’t have anything to do with it.”
“Oh, my sweet Little Bird. You have everything to do with it.”
“I’m not your Little Bird! Stop calling me that!”
“But you are mine. You have been for a long time. Don’t you remember? You already know me.”
I looked at the Gray Man, and he gazed eyelessly back, waiting.
“I know you tried to take me into the sea when I was just a child. I know Asteria used her magic to protect me from you all these years. What I don’t know, is why. Tell me,” I finally said.
“I can no longer access the deep magic here, but I can listen to it,” the Gray Man said. He took a step toward me, and I dragged my mother a step closer to the perimeter, away from him. “I listen to its song, a song that ebbs and flows like the tide, but in familiar patterns. I listened for many hundreds of years, searching for a deviation that might present me an opportunity. I was patient… so very patient. And then I heard it. A counterpoint—a deep and powerful new melody in the song. It spoke of great power. I gathered what strength I had, took this form, and followed the song to a garden behind a cottage, where a small girl played with a cat in the flowerbeds.”
I was shaking my head, like I could erase everything he was saying with the simple motion. He ignored it.
“I stood outside the gate and watched her. The song grew stronger. It rose up under her, wrapped around her like a blanket, followed her steps like a familiar. She was the key, the song whispered. If I could command her, I could escape the cage in which I had been imprisoned.”
He took another step. I could not move away, or perhaps I didn’t want to; I was too caught up in what he was saying, a fly in a web.
“I could see that the child was, for the moment, unprotected. The door to the house was open—she had, through machinations of her own, engineered her temporary escape into the garden. The chance was too good to miss. I took it. Had I my full power, I could have consumed her and her power in less than an instant, but in this form, all I could do was coax her. I approached the gate and called to her.”
