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CHAPTER TWO
FABIEN
The ravens are so thick on the ground, I hardly get past them. In the alleyway, a chill falls that has nothing to do with the winter winds blowing through Chicago.
It's a crisp night, and the moon is nothing but the thinnest crescent in the sky. Kyran tucks his long rabbit ears into a knit cap before leaving the car to join me. Soren and the others hang back.
The Sluagh are coming.
"Have we really fallen so far?"
Kyran, my second in command, looks at me and grins.
"You're being morose, my lord."
"Gods, don'tcallme that, Kyran."
"I’m required to call you that by your father, for as long as I serve your royal family."
He says it with a straight face, but I know his crooked grin is hiding just beneath the surface. Like most of our kind, Kyran is long lived. He is just over three centuries old. Impressive for someone in our line of work.
Organized crime, as the humans dare to call it.
He’s tall, almost as tall as me, but reedy and thin. He has a wiry strength and he’s fast as lightning when he wants to be. His fur is tawny and soft, and he has big, gray eyes shining out from heavy lids.
You’d think he’d have a hare’s teeth, but he doesn’t. He has fangs that can rip and tear. Claws too. But my second in command prefers to use guns.
He never misses.
The trees near Lincoln Park have turned golden with the coming of fall. Ravens line their branches. An army of them, black shadows hiding in the trees. They’re evident to the humans who pass by, only by their sounds.
One such couple walks past, and the woman startles at the sound of so many birds. The man is there to protect her, and gathers her in his arms. Obvious joy fills him at so simple a protective duty. And he's glad, of course, that it isn't something darker or more dangerous. When he heard the wings beating, it startled him, too, but he hid it well.
It's when he notices more and more of them that he becomes afraid. So many ravens in so many trees. His eyes dart to the power lines, where the ravens sit shoulder to shoulder, jostling for position. Then to the banks of the river, where they drink in large groups, pausing only to watch the couple go by.
Many of the ravens do that. They stare at the couple. Black eyes shining in the dark like so many marbles.
It spooks the man and he leads his lady faster.
"Let's get a cab," he suggests.
She agrees and they vanish into the night.
For too many millennia, the ravens have followed humans from battlefield to plague and back again. I feel their dreams, like a river flowing through the huge flock.
Somewhere among them is the deathless one. I feel him.
A large raven who wears a tiny hood and carries a bell that rings for no man's ears. He's out there. Among them. But where? Even my dream sense can’t pick him out of the shadows. It's only by the gift of the Old Blood that I know he's there at all.
"The deathless one is among them."
"You're beingverymorose, my lord," Kyran says, pursing his lips. Even he is unsettled by so many ravens in one place. They eatourdead as well. "Surely the Sluagh should be here by now. What are they waiting for? More ravens?"
"The Sluagh have been here," I tell him, "for a long while. The ravens wouldn't have come otherwise. They’re drawn to the scent of death like nothing else.”
"So they're just making us wait? They disrespect us..."
“Relax, Kyran. The Sluagh are always slow to rise above ground. They hate any task that takes them away from the moist depths that soothe their dead skin."
