Every current of air brushing Sidney Grey's skin is a ghost. They trace the contours of his tense arms and his nape, raising downy gooseflesh where they pass. Eyes exert their pressure from the farthest corners of the hall, where even Sid can't see—congregating in the shadow-drenched places, submerged beneath a dark film. At night, he is aware of how very long the hallway is, and how each double-hung window opens up to the sky behind the curtains. He feels exposed, vulnerable, and his jaw has been set for so long that the ache has lodged into bone.
If they come, he will—what? Fight?
The clock on Addison's bedside table had read several minutes after three o'clock when he'd finally looked. How long he'd been lying awake before that, staring at the ceiling or turning his head to watch Ady sleep, he isn't sure. Only that his eyes feel pried awake, dry and gritty. They feel the way his legs do when all the class has to run a mile in P.E. Overtaxed. A settled-in soreness. Heavy the way his mind is heavy, because insomnia robs Sidney of his clarity and makes him feel clumsy.
Certain things remain in sharp focus—like the compulsive need to finish what he'd started, and make the rest of Tommy Brighton's face resemble the pulped and bleeding mash to which Sidney had reduced his nose. The feeling of Ady's skin and her bones cradled against his as she slept. And the movement of the chalk between his fingers as he scrapes it beneath the nearest windowsill.
He has already marked Addison's window, and her door. That should be enough for tonight, but Sidney cannot sleep, and the thought keeps intruding that maybe he's not doing it properly or the strange man is too strong, and that if he places them in layers, one over the other, she should be safe. It should keep him out. And so Sidney kneels in the dark, folded over himself like adolescent origami, lanky muscle and bone. A cocktail of apprehension and restlessness floods Sid's bloodstream and makes his movements sharp. Jittery.
The light through the curtains is just enough for Sidney to discern what he's doing as he moves to the next. The stub of chalk rests poised between his long fingers, and he slips his hand beneath the next sill to scratch a small symbol on its underside, where you wouldn't see the careful, dusty white lines unless you knelt and craned your head to look toward the ceiling:
It is formed by drawing two overlapping triangles, each pointing in opposite directions. He used to think of it as the Star of David, and it reminded him of awkward Jewish kids and incomprehensible holidays and black skullcaps. Then he'd seen it scrawled in some of the older books inside the Grey library, inked onto brittle yellow pages.
Now he thinks of it as the Seal of Solomon.
He has marked half of the windows, forcing himself to work slowly and avoid mistakes, before Sidney notices the breeze. It is not the kind of draft that always seeps into old Greek Revival houses like this one, which has stood for a century and a half and sheltered generations of the Grey bloodline. The air slips in cold and bracing. Fresh. It enters from outside and carries the smell of springtime. He recognizes jasmine, and his fingers clench.
The chalk makes a scraping sound as he pulls it abruptly from the underside of the latest sill, leaving a straight line like a clean incision. White. He turns his face in the direction of the wind, feels it against his face. His forehead and brows, his cheekbones and his mouth. Sid realizes that he has been feverishly hot only after the air starts to cool him, and then he plummets toward the opposite extreme, shivering. At the far end of the hall, the thick curtains blow back slowly in the dark. There's the dry sound of fabric rustling.
“Taking up witchcraft like your sister. Should I commend your cleverness, Sidney Grey?”
He startles, and it's hard to breathe. Part of him has been waiting for that voice, preparing for it, but his chest still aches from the irregular violence of his heartbeat. His ribs feel fragile beneath the t-shirt he'd pulled on after leaving his sister's bed. This must be what Ady feels—this stumbling erratic pulse—opening your mouth or flaring your nose to draw in gulps of oxygen, but there's only a thin trickle. And then he thinks:
Bastard.
The short stick of chalk begins to crack between his fingers. Fracture, splinter. Sidney carefully begs, coaxes his hand to relax. It's the only weapon he has.
“When Suleyman saw me,” the thing that calls itself Julien March murmurs, “he offered up a prayer for protection against me, and exhorted me to embrace the faith, and to submit to his authority.”
Sidney can only vaguely follow the words, and his attention is painfully occupied by sifting through the shadows that drape the hallway. Layers of dark—ink, sable, charcoal. March must be hiding somewhere, but he can tell that the farthest window, which stands almost completely open, conceals nothing behind its billowing curtains.
“But I refused,” it continues, voice a quiet grating noise from no direction in particular, “upon which he called for this bottle, and confined me in it, and closed it upon me with the leaden stopper, which he stamped with the Most Great Name.”
Sidney's tongue sit dry in his mouth, and his throat feels like sandpaper. But he makes himself speak, trying to keep the monster engaged in conversation for as long as he can, his brain thinking fast and sharp and painful like broken glass.
“That's—that's—from The One Thousand and One Nights. I—read it in the library.”
“They're wonderful stories,” March says with a hint of low, throbbing laughter. “Solomon wasn't stupid enough to insist we swear fealty to Yaweh—” Adonai. Allah. “—and only the real idiots ended shut away. Still, you get the idea, Sidney. You're putting the Seal to good use. But you only needed her window and door.”
Yeah. Figures. Fuck.
Sidney moves his eyes toward the other side of the hall, and he doesn't need to search long. He is unable to completely focus his eyes on the thing that perches in front of Addison's door. It suggests an enormous bird, and it is gazing at him, first with one set of gleaming eyes, and then with many, too many, and a crawling sensation spiders its way along the boy's spine. The pinion feathers are sleek, so glossy that their surface seems to move like an oil spill across the ocean. Slick.
When it speaks, the creature doesn't move the viciously curved beak. It uses the voice of a man, a voice that sounds hoarse but warm, saturating the air as softly as the summer-garden fragrance that fills the hall now when it shifts its wings.
Sidney presses the chalk to his chest, his hand shaking as he starts to draw the first triangle in the Seal across the battered, thin cotton of his shirt.
“Very good. You're both calm and intelligent,” March's voice murmurs, and near the door, the strange crane cocks its head. The gesture is distinctly birdlike, attentive. One can imagine the amusement on the man's face: the way his expressive lips would twist slightly to one side, a glimpse of his teeth shining perfect white as he smiles. “But if I wanted to hurt you, or Addison, I could have done it easily.” Gentle: “Did you know that we were watching you sleep? She's—”
Pause. The way a man hesitates to take a breath. To sigh.
“—so beautifully in love with you.”
“Y-you,” Sidney says. You. Shaking. He doesn't blink, and the tremble of his muscles is neither fear nor cold. Searing hot tension rushes along the muscles of his shoulders and his neck, and he has to pry his own clenched jaws apart by force of will. “You can't have her.” The chalk lines he draws across the fabric are imperfect, distorted by the folds of cloth and the contour of his lean chest underneath. But they're good enough, he thinks, when he has finished the second triangle and completed the Seal. If he had been watching himself at a safe distance, he might have laughed at how it makes him look like a Hasidic Superman.
“I already have her, Sidney.”
The boy thinks of Tommy Brighton. Someone else trying to make Addison his. In one way or another.
“No.”
“—But that doesn't mean I've intended to take her away from you. You already belong to many things. A town, a country, a social group, maybe a religion. When you're older, you'll belong to a political ideology. And as you know very well,” March's voice seems to purr, murmur without a throat, “you belong to a family.”
“What—what're you—” What're you saying, what do you mean? He has a vague apprehension of what the creature is trying to tell him, but Sidney's only able to stare at the bird, which shifts its wings as if to fly. It only melts into the darkness around it, but he can still feel the weight, the gravity of its presence.
“I'm not taking her away from you, boy.” The voice drifts through the air for a moment, disembodied, before the sound seems to solidify at the opposite end of the hall. Sidney whips his head to follow it, the way you can track the rumble of an eighteen wheeler as it roars down an interstate highway. “I'm the only thing that can keep you two together,” March says, as the man, tall and lanky in his disheveled charcoal suit, angles his head down to regard the elder Grey twin. Sidney carefully rises from where he'd knelt beside the windowsill.
“Folklore muddles things, you know. Time and oral transmission wreak havoc on the details. Devils become jinn, Solomon becomes an idiot. But there's a little fact that the Muslims got right.” March smiles. There is scarcely any illumination in the stretching corridor, just the feeble rays of ambient light that manage to slip past the row of windows and their curtains. But in that dimness, March's ivory skin glows ghost-white. Luminous, bright like the deep violet eyes that lie riveted on the Grey boy as he says: “We can grant your fondest wish.”
Silence. Sidney tries to get himself under control. Then: “In exchange for our souls.”
“You're already going to Hell for fucking your sister,” March reminds him, saying it like he—like he somehow relishes the idea. Approval. Envy. “All because it doesn't fit with Yaweh's plan. You step outside of the established order, and you're screwed. He doesn't care that you love her. He doesn't care that her heart's giving out because it never fit together to begin with. That's not how He made her. Everything's going according to plan, and you're going to watch her die.”
Sidney is quiet for a long time. He isn't looking at March, but has let his crystalline, gold-flecked eyes drift in the direction of Addison's door. He exhales.
“—Can you really do it?”
“Do what?” March asks. But the Marquis is smiling, because he already knows.
“Don't... don't bullshit me,” Sidney hisses, snapping back to look at the man, his hair falling wildly across his face, framing the sudden look of anger that tightens his mouth and makes his eyes into hard sapphire stones.
“I can do many things, within reason. I can let you witness the past, though I can't change the course of time. I can persuade, coax, and charm others into doing what you wish, though I cannot violate their free will. Whatever it is you want,” March says, raw voice flowing like an inexorable stream that picks up words and carries them along in a turbulent, pure flow, “you have to say it.”
Sidney is standing with his spine straight, watching the devil even as the haze of its wings staring back at him makes him want to be sick. There's a certain pride in the angle of Sidney's jaw. Steadiness. He remembers the feel of Addison's silly button between his fingers. Smooth and cool and hard. Fix it.
“Her heart. Can you fix her heart?”
“Of course I can. It's taken you this long to ask? But you already know what I'm going to ask in exchange, Sidney Grey.”
Quiet. Then:
“I know. I know.”
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