Not a Number

Nothin' To It

Mon, 07 Sep 2026 00:00:00 -0400

He was driving a car. It wasn’t the Wraith, nor was it the Cavalier, but it was all the same a perfectly ordinary car.

Hell if he knew where he was or what the traffic was like, because that wasn’t on his mind, so he didn’t see it or know it or think anything about it. And because he wasn’t thinking about it, he just kept driving.

Cedric liked driving, and maybe it was true he didn’t prefer to drive the Wraith, though that was the only car he’d driven lately, but he’d gotten used to it. When Davian asked him to cart the two of them around town, he did it gladly.

When Cedric was driving the car, he was just part of the machine, and that felt right because he had a job to do, and he had a very real place in it. And maybe he wasn’t completely in control, because Davian always always had an opinion about where they should go and how fast and what side of the street one should drive on and when to cross over and where and when he should and shouldn’t make a turn because this street was one-way and that other one was two-way but was really too narrow to be a two-way so he shouldn’t—

And in this strange car, a car he didn’t recognize but knew how to drive anyway, he just kept going.

He didn’t really know what was outside the car, but he did know what was inside the car, or at least he thought he did. The seats were cloth—

[ they get dirty ]

No the ones in the back were leather weren’t they even if the ones in the front were cloth.

And maybe he was gonna tune the radio, because sometimes almost anything was better than silence, sometimes, so he took his hand and raised it up and went toward the buttons and numbers where he should have had something saved—

[ one two three f… ]

Someone else had set the stations, hadn’t they or maybe they were set for a city or town that was really far back from here, and if he pushed the buttons all he was gonna get was s-s-static because they didn’t match didn’t match and he hated the static got away from the static so he didn’t even p—

[ push it push it ]

But he didn’t want to push it, so he didn’t and he just kept driving but he didn’t stop looking and because he didn’t stop looking he noticed there was a collar around the rearview mirror.

[ “dog” ]

But he didn’t put it there.

[ what ]

And since he didn’t put it there, he didn’t think he should take it down either because it probably definitely belonged to someone else. So he didn’t take it down, but he didn’t like it there either, because it hung down and obstructed the glass and made it so there was something in his field of view when he was trying to see out the front windshield and he needed to see out the front windshield because dammit that was how he had to drive the car and if you couldn’t see then—

And the collar was getting bigger, wasn’t it?

[ one two thr… ]

There were holes in the collar, and they were counting

No, he was counting them

And he knew he was counting them because they kept going and growing and the collar had to get bigger and bigger because the collar didn’t fit anymore and he had to make it fit he just had to make it fit because otherwise

Which way were the holes going? Which way was he counting?

Cedric hadn’t put the collar up there. But he knew he was the only one who could take it down.

He just had to find it first.

[ one two ]

find it.

[ one ]

“Hey Cedric. How are you? Are you feeling any better?”

Cedric drew air into his nose because he was attempting to sniffle: a reflex to her question, an instinct to prove… something. But he got air because although he could certainly still remember having been sick, his nose wasn’t running anymore.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m doing better than I was.”

“Glad to hear it,” Eloise said. “I was worried about you. For a while there you seemed pretty hard up.”

Somewhere on the second floor of the house, Friday erupted in laughter. And because they were on the first floor, Cedric didn’t have any idea what she was laughing at, but the sound she made filled the house for a second or two and then it stopped.

“I was wondering, since you’re feeling better,” Eloise said to him, “if you’d come to church with me today.”

Although he tried to appear nonchalant, that question hit him like a gut-punch.

“Me?” he asked. “Uh…”

He didn’t really know what to say, and his voice was low. He didn’t usually do such things on Sundays, or any other day for that matter, and that was the way he liked it. But here she was, asking him anyway, doing something she’d never yet done in the time he’d lived here.

“I don’t really think they want someone like, uh—” he stammered, “like me in the church.” He thought it was obvious what he was trying to say, but she didn’t seem to understand his implication.

Eloise’s face was gentle. “Ced…” she said, as if she were talking to a little child. “They don’t check your card at the door.”

She was making a joke, and it embarrassed him, so his lips flattened against themselves involuntarily.

“Everyone has doubts, and none of us have all the answers,” she said. “Not anyone. And sometimes it’s the people who say they’ve never had problems being faithful that you shouldn’t trust.”

He still didn’t want to go. He still… didn’t… want to go.

“You should read Augustine,” she said. “Confessions. It’s long, but it’s worth it.”

She added, “It’s one of my favorites.”

Cedric thought about the bookshelves that lined the house, and the titles, and how many forbade his comprehension because he couldn’t do the things that they could do.

“I can’t—” he said timidly, “translate.”

Her eyes were soft, and turned up a little at the edges, because she was looking at him and trying to make him feel better.

“If you’d read it,” she said, “I’d find you a copy in English.”

Cedric was not a fan of singing in church.

He hadn’t thought this would be expected of him — heck — he hadn’t thought much at all if he were being completely honest. He had gone with Eloise because she so rarely asked things of him, and when she did, he thought she must have asked because it was important to her, and if it was important to her, it was still more important that he didn’t say ‘No, thank you’. So when they sat down on the pews and didn’t say much to each other, because he supposed that wasn’t what they were supposed to do on an occasion such as this, he looked at her through the corner of his eye and Eloise was looking completely relaxed and content and even cheerful, like she’d been here a hundred times before.

Like this was the place she’d waited all week to be.

Eventually they turned away from each other and looked stiffly forward — or, at least, Cedric felt that rigidity and tension and resistance within his muscles — and there weren’t many people in the church but when the few that there were looked away and toward the front, it was easy for Cedric to pretend, if only for a moment, that it was just the two of them, she and he, there in the church on the street in the borough that held some several other million bodies. And despite it all, everything was going just well and fine and dandy until she didn’t hand him the Bible.

The Bible? He was prepared for the thees and thou art or whatever that text had to offer him. He figured either Methuselah had been some other asshole Mage who’d found the holy grail, or someone had falsified the accounting in a time and place where no one else could present their own version of the story. And a falsified account was one thing.

Singing was quite another.

When Eloise put her hand into the little wooden pocket and removed the other burgundy book, the one that didn’t describe itself as ‘holy’, it struck him. And she passed the book to him, that tattered hymnal, and he took it, though it was the last thing in the world he figured he wanted, and he stood, though he didn’t really want to do that either. He thought that maybe he could just mouth the words and make a pass at playing pretend and since no one was looking directly at him, no one was going to poke him in the side and chide him for what he didn’t know. He’d done it before, he thought, and he could do it again.

No, he realized; here, he couldn’t do it again.

Sure, he could read the words, he guessed, though they were making allusions and references to stories and scripture that went over his head. So the shape of his lips was right and some words came out, but the notes were all wrong because he had never been taught how to read sheet music. For all he knew, they could take the A, B, Cs and skip to an F, because that’s about as far as he would get, even if he’d heard a while back that Ds got degrees.

Eventually, the singing was over, and it was time to sit back down, and when everyone else sat down, the two of them did too. And at first he felt relief because he was sitting and listening and still and he didn’t have to do anything and Eloise wouldn’t hear him sing off-key because he was being silent and keeping his mouth shut.

She turned her head to look at him with her eyes and her nose and her hair that was a little shorter this year than it had been in the past, and Cedric saw some stained windows behind her that made the blues and purples in her dress brighter than they had seemed in the old dusty house from which they’d come. She smiled a little at him, and he tried to return her expression, but when the lecture began, she looked at where the words were coming from, and he felt a little like he’d been cut off.

He listened to the sermon, but not really, so his gaze wandered, and he looked again to the not-so-holy-book, now closed, sitting on the back of the pew behind him.

And he thought maybe the whole thing wasn’t so bad after all.

Eloise wanted to take the long way back. So they went west on Ditmars and Cedric followed Eloise, so they walked on the north side of the street and when they had passed a few streets going up on the right, and a whole bunch of cars had passed them on the left, she eventually took a right-hand turn and she seemed like she knew exactly where she wanted to go.

Cedric had learned a while ago why sometimes the air in Astoria smelled rank, as some would say but he would not, not anymore, like ‘fire and brimstone’.

A long time ago, when not so many people lived here, the people who made decisions decided that on the water, somewhere between Queens and Rikers, was just as good a place as any to build a sewage treatment plant. And perhaps that wasn’t so much an option but a necessity, because every day there were more and more bodies in the city that never slept and even if they didn’t sleep, there were other things they still did and even if they did not or could not clean up after themselves, someone else would have to do it for them eventually.

So they collected the money together and built a place that had huge holding tanks that held all the water and muck that had to be treated and cleaned and sanitized before it could be used again. And the cleaning came by way of making it even more putrid first because they poured in chemicals and solutions and populations of microscopic organisms and all kinds of things that were even more vile than whatever the human beings had excreted as waste and flushed down the toilet.

And when the wind changed and swept all these scents into the air, someone might make a joke and say double double toil and trouble and that somewhere a witch must be brewing something really foul in her cauldron and if it were a full moon, and even if it wasn’t, they should all keep an eye turned over their shoulders because some old lady with green skin and warts and hair like hay might be trying to slip them a fast one.

And by now, Cedric wasn’t old, but he wasn’t young anymore either, so he knew better.

“I hope it’s not too macabre,” Eloise said, “but I really like cemeteries.”

Cedric looked at her but said nothing, because she was smiling a little, and looking up and toward the sky, and he knew she had more things she wanted to say. He liked to listen, and he liked to listen to Eloise because she picked pretty words, and simple words that were still more pretty, and she arranged them like flowers in glass on a table.

“This one’s very special,” she said. “There are people buried here that fought in the Revolution; people who died a long, long time ago. People that—”

They stopped, because she stopped, and she looked up at the wall that forbade their entrance because the cemetery was on a hill that was far older than the street or sidewalk on which they stood, and when he looked up at the fence, there was barbed wire all around.

“People that don’t have anyone to mourn them anymore, because everyone who knew them are long gone too.”

“But I like to think that’s OK,” she said a little brighter, before the heavy things settled. “Because maybe somewhere, somehow… They’re together again.”

Cedric didn’t say anything, because he didn’t have anything to say, and the things she was saying were painful, though he was trying to think through the pain. Even if he liked to listen to Eloise, sometimes the things she said made him very tired, and he had an instinct to hide from those things.

“I don’t think I believe in eternal damnation,” she said, suddenly, and Cedric just looked at her, searching.

“I think it’s just a story, a fairytale made up by people,” she said. “A story to scare people into doing what’s right, because sometimes people need a good kick in the pants.”

She laughed, weakly. “I don’t know if doing a good deed because you’re afraid of being punished is still actually a good deed, but… Sometimes people need a little help; instruction, maybe. Encouragement.”

“I read Dante,” she said, looking somewhere else. “And it was a fun read, but—”

Cedric listened, but knew there were holes between what she said and what he could receive.

“I don’t think I believe in Hell. I don’t think God would want His creations to suffer, because He’s good; He must be good,” she said.

“Purgatory…?” she added quickly, laughing a little and looking around. “Well that one might be real — too real — but I think… I think…”

Her eyes were like stars, burning white-hot amidst the darkness, and casting their own light through the shadow of the graveyard. “I think we all end up reunited in Heaven eventually, once we learn what we needed to learn.”

“El—” he said; her name, because he saw her then, because he didn’t know what else to say, because he liked the way it sounded, and because his heart was getting tangled in tiny little tight pieces; ribbons that had been pulled so tight he wasn’t sure he could ever get them flat again.

“I’m going to leave soon,” Eloise said, looking at him with her eyes. “I have a little money saved up, and it’s not much, but it’ll last me a few months and that should be enough for me to figure out what I’m doing.”

That look hurt, and he wanted to look away, but held fast.

“I don’t think I’m going to move in with Zahra,” she said quickly, before he could get out a word. “She’s got her own thing going on, she’s making friends, she’s studying… If I go there…”

She frowned a little, and continued. “If I go there, it won’t be much different from what Myrtle would do. She’d fuss and wring her hands and worry about me and she’d never get anything done.”

Cedric did something then, and it was a stupid thing he hadn’t thought through, and because it was so stupid he afterward regretted it for years and years but once he’d done a thing, it was done, and it couldn’t be taken back because Mages and Shifters and even Mortals could do a lot of things but the one thing they couldn’t do was change the stones that were laid on the road that trailed behind them.

He took her hands in his.

“We’ll go together,” he said, looking at her though it hurt him. “You don’t have to work; I’ll work. I’ll get a job and—”

She pulled her hands out of his grasp and looked down and away and said, “No.”

And when she did that, there was a shattering between them.

“No, Cedric,” she said again. “I can’t let you do that.”

And then he did a thing that was far and above even more stupid than what he’d done, because she wasn’t looking at him anymore, so he should have known better but he was in pain, and when he was in pain sometimes he did more stupid things that didn’t make any damn sense but when he was in pain he just cried and writhed and tried to get away from it.

He was then a dumb creature, not like a human, but something smaller and weaker and far more brutish, a thing that bites back when it’s kicked.

And so he said, to the side of her face, while she couldn’t look at him, “Eloise… I love you.”

And for the third time that day, because he was a damn fool, and because he was a stupid kid who did stupid things, he added the worst thing of all because he was trying to plead and bargain with her and he added, “You don’t have to worry; I — I’ll take care of you.”

She broke, then.

“No!” she said, forcefully, but still not looking into his eyes, “I don’t want you to take care of me!”

“For once I want to take care of myself!”

Eloise walked away, following the trajectory of the path they had been taking but stopped along the way, and when she left, Cedric just stood there, still more stupidly, next to the wall of brick and mortar and cement that had kept them from entering one of the oldest graveyards in Queens.

Cedric wasn’t crying, exactly, but his face would twist up in a knot from time to time and if it had been a rag he might have taken it in his hands and used his strength and wrung out the water that was otherwise refusing to flow.

But as hard as he might have wished, his face was not a rag, and, like his heart, didn’t do what he wanted it to do when he wanted it to be done. So instead, he got on the subway and left and when it careened out of the station and headed south, he might have been looking at things but he probably wasn’t seeing much at all.

He wasn’t any better by the time he got to Times Square, and because he was weary and tired and hurting, he wasnt walking like he normally would have, and was sort of lilting about and having a hard time going at an even pace, and when he wasnt seeing straight, he was in the tunnel and ran into someone somewhere and the guy looked back at him and said, “hey asshole look where the fuck you goin next time!”

Cedric was convinced that Davian might have changed the locks.

Those words hung over him like fog, like chains.

‘Get out,’ he’d said. ‘Get out of my house,’ he had said, quite clearly, with force, with emphasis, with perfect diction.

And he was right, wasn’t he? It was his house, and maybe, at some point after that bitter exchange, Davian would have remembered. He would have remembered that it was his house, and he didn’t need any boys or friends or anyone at all, and least of all the one named Cedric.

But that wasn’t how it happened, because when Cedric got to the house in Manhattan with the green doors and the vine-covered scarlet brick and the purple car out front, he put his key into the lock and it turned just as easily as it ever had.

And Cedric walked right in.

First Degree

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

The next morning, Cedric woke to the sound of screaming. That terrible sound came up through the floorboards and echoed through the house because it was Davian — Davian was screaming.

Cedric threw off his covers and went downstairs. The stairs that went from the third to the second story had a turn in them, and Cedric was in such a state of shock that he might not have laid down a single foot when he made the rotation to reach the floor where Davian slept. He passed one quiet room on the right to get to the next, the room where the Mage, when he would, did lie down his head.

Cedric put his hand on the doorknob and opened the door, and there inside was Davian, and he was tearing apart his bedroom.

The curtains of the four-poster were partially pulled down and the bedclothes were askew. Davian had put a moderate chest, normally kept on the rug, atop the far side of the bed, and he was rifling through the contents and repeating small words of panic to himself, “Where is it?” and, “where in God’s name did I put it?”

He had barely noticed anyone had entered the room because his head was still buried in his task and he muttered to the objects, “it couldn’t be…” and then he looked up at the boy, bearing wild eyes, and said strangely, “You?!” but then he mumbled and returned to rummaging behind the upturned lid and Cedric heard him mutter just audibly, “no, not him,” and then, “not him, couldn’t be him…”

Cedric knew the man was looking for the Dreamcatcher, and he thought about his own room and the nail that had sat alone for days, a week, perhaps, and though he was sure he had no hand in this, he couldn’t help feeling a pull to help the Mage out of his frenzy.

He looked above the Mage’s bed, at the same position where the post had been hung in his own room to serve as a ward. And then Cedric looked back to Davian.

“Wouldn’t you… have hung it up?” he asked.

Davian stopped then, and just looked plainly at Cedric. And the muscles in his face twisted a little, as if he were formulating a rebuttal, but then his face relaxed and went back to the way it had been.

“Yes…” he said. “You’re right; I would have hung the thing above…” and he looked first to the left, and then to his right and toward the window.

The Mage raised his hand, and when he did so, the dark blue curtain was roughly pushed aside and the light of day streamed anew into the room, and when it did that, some of the dust motes in the air were illuminated and Cedric saw them but looked away.

Davian stared at the window for a moment, arm still raised as the curtain settled into rest. And it was an odd gesture, as if he were frozen; frozen because a cruel conclusion was rising to his mind.

When he brought his hand down and toward his body, it was a slow, twitching motion as realization spread like ice and like fire all at once. He brought his hand into his short hair and grasped at it, pulling against the root in a gesture that made Cedric wince to see.

“They stole it…” he said, doling out his condemnation as tiny knives. “They stole it from me, the bastards; the savages!”

He was crazy, and he kept on screaming.

“The soothsayer and his little pet; they stole it from me!”

Cedric heard what he said and remembered the black bird, and the leg that had been bloodied, and how ever since that night, Davian had never stood up quite as straight as he had on the days before, and when Cedric looked at him sometimes, he noticed how he put his weight more on one side than he did on the other, but instead he just stuttered and asked meekly of the Mage, “W-who?”

Davian looked at him with vitriol and spat, “The Negress and her witch-doctor, who else?!”

Cedric sank as Davian continued raving.

“Frauds, phonies, Pharisees!” he chanted with increasing bile, eyes searching wildly. “Said they were friends; said they were friends of…” and he looked down again in disbelief and started rooting again through his trunk. “S-S-Shit, no, NO!”

“It has to be here!” he ranted. “It has to be!”

Cedric was afraid. Afraid because when Davian started talking like this, he knew the Mage had lost control. Afraid because yet again he could not trust in the walls of this house.

And still more afraid because he knew exactly who Davian was talking about.

“W-wouldn’t it make more sense to be… A-Adam?” Cedric posited uneasily. “He already—”

“Do you take me for the type to simply leave the back door open?” Davian said. “After I’ve already been bitten once?”

Cedric just bit his tongue and said nothing, because he knew what the words meant but—

“No, Cedric. I don’t allow such trespass,” he said, looking over his nose at the youth. “Not in my domain.”

Cedric just swallowed, and it was bitter, the way Davian looked at him with absolute disgust. And he didn’t have any way to console the Mage.

“They’re shifters, Cedric,” he said with a patronizing drawl. “Werewolves, for lack of a better term. Animals.”

Cedric was sweating, and utterly uncomfortable, standing in the entry of the bedroom.

“They change their form according to their whim. Birds, bats, bonobos — whatever crude imitation they think is good enough to fool the foolish. And no one set foot on the floor of this house.”

Cedric saw him then, eyes completely surrounded by white.

“They. Flew.”

Cedric brought his fingers together while they hung from hands useless at his sides, trying to find something, anything, to soothe and stop the twitching, and the fear, so he protested weakly, “Adam can fl—”

“It wasn’t Adam!” he screamed angrily. “Dammit Cedric!”

“I still have the Book,” Davian said, attempting to regain control through reason and evidence. “Only the two of them would have known I had the… But they—”

He looked at Cedric, whose heart had fallen into complete and utter helplessness and despair.

“They found… you.”

And then he snapped, because he looked right through the boy.

“What did you tell them?!”

Blood drained from Cedric’s face. “Nothing!” he said.

Davian sneered, one side of his face pushing up against a nostril. “So you did meet them. Or they met you. And they used you to get to me.”

“Where?” he demanded quickly. “Where was it? After one of your courses on underwater basket weaving?”

“I…”

“Dammit Cedric! What did you tell them?”

“Nothing!” he said again. “I didn’t say anything to them! They just asked…”

Cedric paused, remembering, and adding in a small voice, “…if I was healthy…”

“They don’t give a damn about your health, Cedric! All lies!”

Cedric looked up again as the Mage shouted at him.

“It was all an elaborate facade! They wanted you to get to me!”

“But I didn’t say anything about you!”

“All they had to do was follow your sweet little face here! And you didn’t have the wherewithal to look behind you once in a while!”

Cedric felt his eyebrows draw together in tension at the hateful remarks, but his mouth, albeit closed, hung slack in desperation.

“Maybe it wasn’t them,” Cedric insisted. “How could they get through your—”

“It’s your fault they found me; now we’re going to find them and take back what they owe me. They couldn’t be far, yet,” he said. “Not a second to waste.”

“And this time,” Davian added with menace, “I’ll make sure this never happens again.”

And Cedric, mind almost but not completely blank, remembered their faces. And though he could not see them, he thought, or tried to think, and closed his eyes to shut the world out for a moment. And after not much more than that moment, he opened his eyes to take in light while looking mournfully at the ground, and he said, “I don’t think it was them.”

Davian pushed air out of his face in a mirthless attempt at laughter.

“So you fancy yourself a bloody detective now?” he retorted scornfully. “Elementary, my dear Cedric?”

Cedric blinked and looked at him.

“You gave them the damn key!” Davian screamed. “You may not remember it — how very convenient for you — but you gave them the damn key!”

Cedric frowned, and he felt his face get heavy.

“No,” he said. “No, I didn’t.”

“Get out,” Davian replied. “Get out of my house.”

As Cedric walked on the sidewalks, he did not look up, but he knew it was threatening to rain. The sky was bright, but it was also grey, and every so often, the wind whipped through the chasms between the skyscrapers and it made his cheeks and neck cold but it did not penetrate his black leather jacket. And when he first started, he walked quickly, as if in escape, but after a while he slowed down because his calves hurt.

This used to be a habit of his, he reflected. And one of the first things he’d learned, something the city had taught him but never expected to learn, was how quickly one wore out shoes from walking through the streets. And that wouldn’t have been such a travesty if the weather had always remained fair, but invariably water, or worse, snow, would fall from above, and when that happened, the heat would leak from his socks through the holes he’d worn in the soles that scraped against the pavement step after countless step.

Cedric didn’t need a map anymore, and hadn’t needed a map for some time. He knew if he kept going uptown, the sequence would stop getting interrupted and the streets would proceed as the numbers promised but rarely delivered in the catty-corners downtown.

So he just kept going. And he kept going even as the rushing wind picked up and the sky began to do more than just spit and he shoved his naked hands in his pockets and wondered what he should do next. And eventually, he reached a place he didn’t know he was going, and not because he could feel a stone in his shoe, but because he heard the roar of faraway thunder, and his hair had become damp against his scalp, he knew it was time to stop.

And when he stopped, he was in Lincoln Center.

“One ticket for Pulp Fiction, please.”

“Sorry, that’s all sold out. Opening weekend. How about Forrest Gump? That’s supposed to be a—”

“No thanks. Saw it already. Watching Tom Hanks pretend to be a retard for two hours is not something I need to go through again.”

“Something funny then? Might I suggest Exit to Eden? I saw it and loved it. Supposed to be—”

“No, I don’t do Rosie. Nope. No thanks.”

“Hmm. Well there’s—”

“Quiz Show then. Whatever, I really don’t care. I just want to sit down. I’m tired.”

“Sorry, sir, it says that one’s sold out too.”

“The hell? Do you have anything left in the whole damn theater?”

“I’m sorry, sir; it’s raining. It’s always like this when it rains. Sometimes we sell every seat in the house.”

“Okay…” he said, trying to feign patience. “Can you just look at your listing and find me a movie, any movie I can see? I don’t really care at this point, I’ll wait; I just want a ticket to a movie. That’s why I came in here. I’m wet and I just—”

She looked at her computer screen. “Oh this one might suit you. It’s based on a King novel if I remember correctly, and it stars Morgan Freeman opposite—”

“Yeah yeah that’s fine, whatever; just give me a ticket. Frankly, I don’t give a fuck.”

Inside the theater, the room was dark. He found a seat in the back, and though the venue began to fill up, no one sat to either side of him and the seats were left in the upright position.

He watched the film for a while and the room smelled like popcorn. And sometimes there was a cough or two and someone turned to someone else and whispered a secret even though they were not supposed to be talking. But Cedric did not attempt to make them quiet. He just leaned back in his seat and watched the movie and he put his hands in his pockets and there was a ticket stub there and he felt the one side where it had been ripped and it had little nubs where the cardstock had been perforated.

And though it was strange, and though he’d never done it before, he drifted off to sleep in the cushioned chair despite the bright light, and despite the volume of the dialogue moving through the chamber.

“I guess I just miss my friend.”

Funny Honey

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Cedric was sick.

He suspected that he had come down with something when he laid down in bed and found he was having trouble breathing through his nose. So he opened his mouth, though he hated to do so, and he did it, but only because it was what he had to do.

Later that night he woke when the sky was still dark and his cheek was wet because he’d been sleeping in a puddle of his own saliva that had fallen from his mouth. Frustrated, he flipped the pillow to the other side and tried to get back to sleep.

But he still could not breathe easily and after a while his throat was dry and sore and sometimes he spasmed and spat out a cough or two but that just made him all the more miserable.

So when the Sun rose in the sky, Cedric did not leap out of bed. And though he did not get up, he did not sleep either, and he just laid there with his eyes closed until he heard Eloise’s voice. And when he heard her voice, he knew there was a silver bell ringing alongside it, because there always was, but between the door and the air and the fluid in his head, he could not hear that.

But he did hear her voice, and though he did not want food, and though his reactions were slow and sluggish, he rose when he heard her call,

“Breakfast!”

“You didn’t eat very much,” Myrtle said with concern.

They were in the library, and Cedric had only gone there because he was weary of the walls of his bedroom and he didn’t know where else he wanted to hide. Despite the largess of the old manor, sometimes it seemed there were very few corners where one might successfully remain in shadow.

Myrtle had found him after breakfast; a breakfast at which he’d left his plate practically unsoiled.

“Yeah,” he said. “I’m not feeling well.”

He knew he could ask her to alleviate the symptoms. And she knew he knew that, so she didn’t insult him by stating the obvious. He had seen her do this for the others, and the offer sat in plain sight like a biscuit in a bowl, but he did not want it. He did not know exactly why he did not want the remedy, a remedy she could grant with the wave of her hand, but the thought made him ill.

“I think I’m gonna stick around the house today,” Cedric said, and afterward he sniffled, and reached toward the tissues on the table to his left and took one for himself.

“How are your studies going?” she asked after a while.

Cedric blew his nose and then said, “Well enough, I guess.” The circle around his nostrils was raw and painful when he brought the paper against it.

“Though I’ll be missing lecture today,” he added. “I don’t feel like it.”

She didn’t respond immediately. “I’m afraid I can’t be of much help. Not with what you’re studying.”

“It’s—” he responded gently, seeing the old woman and her careworn face. “It’s okay.”

“I do okay,” he said, trying to dispel her worry.

They just sat there for a minute, and Cedric had a lot on his mind, but he didn’t have any idea how to best frame it.

But he tried.

“Can I—” he started to say, though his voice was muffled through the congestion. “Can I ask you a question?”

She looked at him, and her face softened. “Of course.”

Cedric had been mulling over many things, but he was also tired, so trying to parse through his thoughts was like wading through mud, and because he was exhausted, that was a difficult labor. But, he noticed, gratefully, that for once the house was not shaking underneath the footsteps of teenagers and children, and the whole thing had become quiet, and what few words he could summon to his mind, he could parse clearly.

“I heard that—” he took a breath, and jabbed awkwardly on the initial consonant, “—Davian used to come here and give lectures to the other kids, before… Before I got here.”

Her face was still, and yet, he thought she was frowning, even if only just.

“Is that true?” he asked.

“…Yes,” she said carefully. “When the children were younger, he used to visit. I asked him, years ago, and he came from time to time.”

Cedric did not say anything because he was imagining it, and thinking what the house was like then, and how things were now.

“I thought it was a good thing for him to do that,” Myrtle said. “I was worried about him for a while. Quite… Worried about him.”

Her voice took on a different quality, and it was clear, remorseful, and her own. “A man becomes different,” she said, “when he lives on his own: when he forgets what it is to live with a wife, with children, with — family.”

“I met him,” Cedric said suddenly, and Myrtle turned her head in surprise.

“Who?” she asked. “Who did you meet?”

“Adam,” Cedric said.

“I…” she said, slowly, as if trying to read his temperature. “I see.”

Cedric wasn’t sure if he should have said that thing, but it was a relief to say anything at all. “It wasn’t exactly a happy meeting.”

“No,” she responded. “I can’t imagine that it was.”

The air was still and heavy for a moment between them, because in carefully chosen chains lay kernels of truth.

“I wish he would reconnect with his daughter,” Myrtle said.

Cedric did not understand what she had said, thinking of the last time he’d seen Davian watching the images from the Dreamcatcher, so he sat there quiet until—

“Kira has all his Talent and little of his pride. But perhaps that’s the very reason why she’s now on the other side of the world, estranged from him.”

“It—” she said, looking as if her eyes might hold water, “is a tragedy to see families once united fall into tatters.”

And if he’d been holding his breath, he wasn’t anymore, because his confusion melted into curiosity.

“Kira?” he asked.

And Myrtle saw something then, and when she looked at Cedric, she looked wistful so she refocused her eyes, clarified her statement, and said, “Kira is his daughter by his first wife, born some time ago in India.”

“I met her many years ago, when I went overseas… to—”

She stopped short, with words unsaid. And Cedric knew what she meant, or thought he knew, and on this, intended to ask no questions. Whatever she was willing to say would have to be enough.

“I didn’t want to leave,” she said. “I waited, in this house. I waited, stupidly.”

“I waited until doing nothing was as dangerous as drawing a gun.”

She was looking somewhere Cedric could not see.

“The year was 1939, and I was convinced that winter had arrived before a single flake had fallen onto the grass. I do not know if the numbers in the mercury read anything different than they had in any other year, but it felt different to me. And I remember that no matter how many layers of wool I covered myself in or countless logs I laid upon the fire, I was cold; and I knew I was cold because the cold was coming from within.”

“My father had been gone many years at that point, and when the basket came to me every Sunday, I gave. And when the women bearing crosses came to knock on my door, I emptied my pockets and sometimes I went into my quiet house and gave them still more. The coins were cold and the metal was heavy, so I surrendered them and hoped my heart would be lighter and make me warm.”

“But I was still cold.”

Her lips trembled while Cedric watched her wander through places she knew and kept within her, places where the color would never turn to sepia.

“So I did not wait until the first snow, though the glistening white always reminded me of happier times. I left because I knew I could give and should give, and I knew that I had not yet given enough.”

“I was near forty then, and I suppose I more or less appeared as such. I knew little of longevity and had even less desire to seek it out; I knew if I were in the wrong place at the wrong time, I could die just as easily as anyone else, and maybe that was an end that did not frighten me as much as it should have.”

“Davian was my senior by several decades, but wore a face that betrayed none of those years. And I had grown up mostly in isolation, so I did not know to question why or how that was, even from a Mage, but then, one day, before I even thought to ask, he told me.”

“He called it,” Myrtle said, “Amrita. He called it Amrita because that’s what his wife had called it when she’d given it to him many years before, years before I had even been born. Her name was Maya, he said, and she must have loved him to give this to him. And she had told him that it could not be given to the self, and could only be given to others, and she had been gone many long years so he offered it to me.”

“Although I had lost the evidence long ago and my fingers were bare, my heart belonged somewhere else. I could not take what he offered, not from him, not while the world around us was crumbling, and not while so many others would never see such a boon.”

“I…” she said, almost whispering. “I could not.”

Cedric was listening while she shifted.

“Kira came to join us shortly afterward,” Myrtle recounted. “And I was glad for what I had refused because I believe he gave what he had and knew to her instead, perhaps thinking it his last chance, his last will, his last testament.”

“When I came home, I knew I had to build something with what I had left. All the time in the world would mean nothing if I could not free my heart from the poison I was willfully ingesting.”

“I had to nurture the hearth before I could receive the warmth.”

She was quiet for a moment, because she didn’t want to speak about that anymore.

“Davian is strange when he is alone,” she said. “He is at his best when he is serving, when he is teaching. That is when his generosity and strength shine through.”

“And I thought if I left him alone…”

She trailed off and did not finish her statement. And she was still looking away, and Cedric did not know exactly where his thoughts were. But he knew he was sick and he felt lightheaded, and if he laid down in his bed, he would find it even more difficult to bring oxygen into his lungs.

And without any images at all, and with just raw feeling, his memories floated piecemeal at the edge of his consciousness. And those memories joined hands with ghosts he had never known, and the foreign became familiar.

“When—” Cedric began. “When did he have the dog?”

He asked again. “…Sam?”

Myrtle did not say anything for a moment, as if she had to strain to remember.

“It was not too many years ago,” she said. “Four, five, six, perhaps. That Sam passed away.”

It hurt to hear her say that, and he thought of things he didn’t want to think of. And all of a sudden, a passion rose from his innards, because the dog hadn’t passed anything, or become past, or ever really gone away.

He had died, and he was dead.

Cedric did not do much for the next couple of days. It quickly became apparent to him how many things he was leaving undone, as opposed to the very few things he was actually doing.

He didn’t bother taking a shower because he could not stand even the thought of entertaining that heat. And because he wasn’t bothering to bathe, he wasn’t shaving either, and when he saw himself askance in the mirror, he looked very tired and unkempt and disheveled. So when he had to leave the room, he didn’t inspect himself because he knew what he wouldn’t find.

He showed up for meals but didn’t eat much and said even less. He tried to drink, but most of the time it was only enough coffee to wash down a few bites of bread. The emptiness inside growled at him from time to time, but the lumps of undigested food lingering resistant in the acid within were even less tolerable. When his eyes stuttered and caught on the gaze of Eloise’s anxiety over the table, he pushed his face into a weak smile and said something to the effect of, “it’s just a cold,” because he did not want her to spend her energy on him.

And because Cedric did not want her to spend her energy on him, he went further inward, and took a book or two from the library and then went back to his room for the night. Fiction, because fiction was the only thing that made sense. And even that left him with guilt because his textbooks messily stuffed with paper had remained closed for longer than they should have. He knew if he left those things for too long, the dust would collect and he would forget everything he was supposed to have learned. But all he wanted was for something to feel closer than the distant stars.

After a while, the words that had been swirling and unreadable started to settle and he was able to move and take in something of sustenance. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to start the ignition. He stood and cleaned up his face, and when his nausea was behind him, he took a book in his hand and left the house for Manhattan.

When the double-doors painted deep green were closed, Cedric deposited the key into his right pocket. And when he did that, he thought maybe he should move it to the left, but didn’t, because he wasn’t sure he had any reason to. He thought he usually put his keys on that side, but he was unsure.

And so he thought again, and did it anyway, moving the keys, and then put his book down on the little table in the hallway, and he put it face-down in an instinct to hide whatever it was he was reading from the person who lived there, because he was sure whatever it was was never going to be good enough.

Davian was not in the front room, but that was not surprising because he rarely was. So Cedric walked through the hallway and found him in the study on the first floor in the back of the house. And maybe he’d already had dinner, or maybe he hadn’t had anything at all, but at any rate he was sitting on the taupe stuffed chair and he had a short glass about half-full with a golden liquid, a liquid that was filling the small and poorly ventilated room with the smell of alcohol. And Cedric did not really like to sit in this room as they usually did here, because the chair opposite to Davian was a rocking chair, and because it was such a chair, he could not recline without it forcing him backward at an angle that left him feeling prone.

So he sat down and leaned forward and put his feet flat on the floor.

“Cedric,” he said. “It’s good to see you.”

Davian looked at him, and said what he always said next. “Care for something to drink?”

“I’ve been sick,” Cedric said hesitantly.

The Mage laughed a little and smiled, satisfied. “A good spirit in you is just what the doctor ordered.”

Davian lifted his glass and gave a quick whistle, and when he did that, an exact copy of his own appeared and hovered in the space between them. The man in his plush burgundy robe and dark brown eyes pushed the crystal in his hand up and toward Cedric and his green, so Cedric took the glass and accepted the toast.

And when he did that, the three ice cubes that had been alone clinked against the glass because the three had become six, and Cedric knew Davian always favored an even pair.

“You do look to be on the mend,” Davian said, taking a sip. “This will help.”

“It was worse a few days ago,” Cedric said, the smell of booze making him a little heady as he drew it closer to his mouth.

He wasn’t sure if he really wanted it, but then, repulsive too was the idea of absolute sobriety, so he took a drink, a drink that fell like fire upon his thickened tongue.

“It’s been quiet here without you,” Davian said.

Cedric wanted to put his drink down, but he couldn’t, so he just held the cold in his hands. “Heh,” he said. “Thanks.”

And he thought back to his conversation with Myrtle, how he’d heard about the daughter and asked about the dog, and how he’d attempted to pry knowledge from her instead of asking the man himself. It had been a small thing, he supposed, but still—

Davian lowered his drink, and the liquid inside had yet become lesser than when he’d summoned the facsimile. “Cedric,” he said with a gleam. “I want to show you something. I’ve been trying to keep busy.”

He put his glass down on the little table to his right where also lay a small chest of trinkets. And Cedric did not have anywhere to set his own, so he did the only thing he could do; he lightened his load.

Davian raised his hand, pinched two fingers together, and let loose with a snap as his thumb struck the palm of his hand. And there, in the flourish, appeared the Dreamcatcher held between the Mage’s taut fingers.

“I found something caught on the strands between,” he said. “Something on a vertex, on the intersection of two strings I hadn’t thought to check.”

“You must have brought this forward,” Davian said with gratitude, eyes shining at Cedric. “I hadn’t known this was here. Whether I left it there, or it was drawn in and became intensified by your use—”

Cedric saw Davian tear his eyes away and down toward the Dreamcatcher, but it was a glad expression; a smile was spread across his face and he looked as if he might cry.

“I haven’t seen this in years,” he said. “I thought it had been lost.”

Davian paused, and then continued. “So precious, and few, these moments.”

His face, serene, was lit up as he pulled an image from the artifact. And Cedric was not watching the Dreamcatcher so much, because he had seen this bit of magic many times before, but instead he was watching the Mage, who wore a rare look of peaceful bliss.

“We should have traveled more,” Davian said, watching the mirage coalesce between the two of them. “These are the kinds of mistakes you make when you think you have all the time in the world.”

Cedric felt his lips draw together in mourning while his mouth remained closed.

“Yes, I should have taken her to see more things, but we did—” Davian paused, taking a breath when the cloud before him turned to blues and bright greens, “we did go one spring to the Falls.”

And they just looked for a while before Davian elaborated on the bright spot that broke up the darkness in that small room.

“We were cooped up that winter,” he said. “Cabin fever. By the time the weather broke, I think we were all on the verge of going stir-crazy.”

Cedric was looking down. None of what he pulled from the Dreamcatcher ever threw out sound. But as he looked into the Mage’s memory like film, his imagination brought a sensation to him that he couldn’t distinguish from fantasy. It was the sound of gallons upon gallons of water rushing through a massive river and falling in a torrent to mix and froth into white against the rocks below.

And though Cedric knew he’d never seen or heard such a sound in the flesh, and thought maybe he’d only ever seen such a thing on television, when he looked into the moving picture, it was just as real as anything he could ever claim to have experienced.

“I had promised to take her to High Force because she so loved the water, even when she was very tiny,” he said, a twinge of wistfulness underlying the admission. “But I don’t know if she ever remembered that.”

“She was just two when we left England.”

The Mage pushed air from his nostrils in an effort to keep his composure.

Cedric looked into the moving lights, and it was something like Davian’s memory viewed as if conjured from his own mind, because although he did not appear, when Lila, clutching a clumsy teddy bear, looked back, he knew she was looking at him because of the way her face overflowed with joy. She still had one hand wrapped around the bear, who looked a little scraggly and unwashed with limbs that were hanging loose from the body. But the other hand she raised and pointed at the falls in a gesture of awe, and Cedric could see that what the Mage had said was true.

It was daytime in the memory, though outside the cloud was darkness split by lamplight in an enchanted house in the West Village. And Davian kept watching and seeing and reliving that place, a place contained in that cloud of memory summoned from the recesses of his accumulated experience and made shared.

And because he was still smiling a quiet and tender smile while Cedric continued to watch, the young man knew the older was not seeing exactly what he was seeing, because Cedric’s eyes drifted, and there at the edge of the scene was a man who couldn’t have then been too much younger than himself. He was standing with his yellow hair strewn messily about his face, obscuring his expression but not his stance and certainly not the fact that his arms were crossed and he seemed rather dour and unhappy. And though the eyes were hidden, and he’d only met him once, Cedric knew the identity of the third.

Whatever Adam saw, it was not worn on his mentor’s face, not then, and not now, and it was still not the splendor witnessed by the child, and truly he stood somewhere else and might not have been seeing the waterfall at all.

“Have you ever been to Niagara?” Davian asked, watching the little girl in the white dress and ribbons in her hair. “We should go.”

Cedric was still watching Adam, and he did not blink for a while, so his eyes went dry and out of focus and several seconds later he wasn’t seeing or hearing anything at all. He remembered his drink because the cold water was collecting on the side of the glass and taking the warmth from his skin, and when the booze passed his lips, it did not burn and he did not flinch and he said, “No, never.”

Razzle Dazzle

Wed, 29 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Cedric sat bolt upright in bed.

He’d been having a dream. He rubbed the sand from his eyes and tried to remember what he’d seen. He looked behind him to see the Dreamcatcher, which was hanging about a foot and a half above where his head would lay on the pillow. It was suspended by a thin piece of leather tied on either side of the circular frame. The leather was bent at an angle where it hung from a thick iron nail that had been hammered directly into the paneled wall.

Cedric had to look to see if the Dreamcatcher was there because he was not accustomed to seeing images while he laid in the bed on the nights he slept at Davian’s flat.

The Dreamcatcher was brown on the frame, and the strands that formed the inner web were white. And when Cedric looked at it, he remembered what he’d seen.

It had been a dog. And the dog was reddish-brown, and there must have been sunlight shining on the short fur because Cedric remembered that color very distinctly. And the dog had short little ears that folded over themselves and covered up the canal and he had a serious brow, a very serious brow if Cedric remembered correctly, and there were wrinkles in the brow that made deep creases so that the dog had a face that looked not just at him, but into him, with eyes of longing, and sorrow, and—

“Cedric…?”

Cedric realized the alarm clock was still ringing.

“Cedric?”

It was Davian, and he was in the hallway outside where Cedric slept.

“Cedric! Are you okay?”

Cedric turned his body and let his hand fall on the button atop the alarm clock, which shut it off and made it quiet.

“Yeah,” he said through the wall. “I’m up.”

Cedric put on a pair of socks he’d left on the floor. Though Davian happily trod through his own house unshod, Cedric did not like the feel of dust beneath his feet, however seldom that occurrence in a house cleaned by a spectral hand.

When he opened the door, he found Davian leaning forward on a bench, where he was lifting a dumbbell with his right hand, and when he extended his arm, he put it down and looked to Cedric and said, “Good morning.”

Cedric was still a little dizzy and said, “‘Morning.”

Davian shifted in his seat and prepared to do another set, so he was looking down while Cedric stood there, in a white tank and flannel pajamas, just watching him readying to pick up the weight.

And he was still watching when Davian lifted it up and lowered it.

The third floor was the top floor and perhaps it was rightfully called the attic because things up here were not like the rest of the house. And sometimes, like today, when he found Davian at the weight bench, he wasn’t a Victorian, he couldn’t do magic, and he too had to tear his muscles before he could put them back together.

“Davian?” he said, after he’d done several curls.

The Mage was still looking down, with his bicep in the corner of his eye.

“Yes?”

Cedric did not say anything for a moment, because he was watching, and wondering if Davian was counting, which, he had to have been.

“I think…” he said. “I think the Dreamcatcher still has something in it from when you were using it.”

And Davian stopped then, because he must have been done with his set, and he just let the iron hang for a second or two from his extended arm and didn’t move.

He brought his arm up just slightly, because maybe he hurt to hold the arm like that, and he needed to compress the muscle to make it stop hurting. He was still looking down when he said, “Why do you say that?”

He put the weight down and looked up.

“You have to hang it over the bed. It doesn’t work if you don’t hang it.”

They were then looking at each other.

“It’s right where you put it,” Cedric said. “I didn’t move it.”

Davian was very still.

“I saw a dog,” he continued. “A dog that—”

“There are a lot of dogs in the world,” Davian said simply, seeming to look Cedric up and down. “Born every minute.”

“I know, just, it—” he said. “The dog was… looking at me.”

Davian raised one eyebrow, just slightly, and when he did this, one side of his mouth brought his lips closer together, and they became thin.

They were just looking at each other, and Cedric felt cold, so he returned to his question, and asked, “Could it be your dog?”

Cedric thought Davian went a long time between blinking, and he desperately wanted the Mage to hide those eyes.

“No,” he said. “It’s not my dog.”

And then he closed his eyes and moved his head, and the chin followed, the chin that never had a single hair on it.

“I don’t know what you saw,” Davian said. “But it wasn’t my dog.”

Cedric looked at the treadmill, the bike, anything else, because he had the instinct to wander.

“Bring it to me,” Davian said. “Let me see it. Perhaps it’s reached the point of saturation. Perhaps—”

“Perhaps that’s why it failed you last night.”

So Cedric went back to the bedroom. He slipped the leather over where it was hung, but he did not touch the nail and left it jutting out from the wood at the thirty-degree angle with which it had been wedged into the wall. And when the Dreamcatcher was free, he brought it to the Mage, who took it in his hand and stopped looking at Cedric and looked at it instead.

Cedric saw that the man had a pensive expression on his face, and looked worried, and his brow was drawn together.

The room went dark then, because Davian held the Dreamcatcher flat in his left hand and his raised his right over it. And when he did this, he brought his forefinger against his thumb, and it was this action that took the light from the lamps and made the room dim. Slowly, he motioned as if he were pulling a thread from the face of the net while it lay in his hand.

Cedric had seen this before. This was how the Mage pulled the images out of the Dreamcatcher. And when they were pulled from where they had been caught, a small thing like a cloud appeared, and on the cloud were dancing colors that formed pictures, little pictures that flashed and moved but never made a sound.

When Davian saw her, because he smiled and relaxed his face, he knew it was Lila. And she had auburn hair and she was smiling too and she was probably something like seven years old. And as Davian watched her, his expression softened and tiny lines appeared from the corners of his eyes.

The little red-head twirled around, and when she did so, her blue dress spun out and wide around her knees, and she had on black shoes that were round on the toes and had the strap over the top and the buckle on the side, and those white socks that flared out at the cuff into lace or waves or—

Davian closed his eyes, and the light came back into the room because the image suspended over the Dreamcatcher stopped.

“Thank God,” he said, quietly. “She’s still there.”

Cedric didn’t say anything, but he felt something within his chest, because it was his heart, and his heart was pushing against its restraints, and every second or so it felt as if it might break the rest of him.

“I need to fix it,” Davian said, still not looking anywhere at all. “I need to take it and fix it.”

Somewhere, Cedric thought he wanted to protest. Because if he didn’t have the Dreamcatcher, he thought, the nightmares would return. And if the nightmares returned, perhaps he would return to when he wasn’t sleeping because he was waking up before the Sun, restless, and lost.

But Cedric did not say anything, because Davian was still holding the Dreamcatcher and he wasn’t looking at Cedric anymore and hadn’t looked at Cedric for some time. He stood there for a while, and then his mouth was dry and he was desperate for leaving, so he said, unsure of himself, gesturing with his hands though the Mage’s eyes were still cast away, “I’m… I’m gonna get something to eat.”

And when Cedric turned to go downstairs, Davian was still sitting and looked very much like he had no desire to get up.

‘When calcium loses an electron, it behaves spectroscopically like an alkali metal, forming features in the spectra of cool G, K, and M class stars. Three of these absorption lines are found as a NIR triplet at 849.802, 854.209, and 866.214 nm. Where would these lines appear in a spectrum measured from Betelgeuse, if Betelgeuse is receding—’

“Cedric?”

He looked up and when he did so, his eyes passed over his coffee, a spare pencil and eraser, and landed on Daisy, who herself was standing next to a tall man with jet black hair. They were both dressed unseasonably; Daisy’s clothes, top and bottom fraying in places, included a floppy t-shirt and oversized shorts that hit just above the knee. Cedric tried to look at the man with her, but his eyes fell instead on the strands of colorful beads, numbering at least ten, strung loose about his neck.

“I hope we’re not being untoward; I see you’re working on something,” Daisy said. “Do you have a couple of minutes? I wanted to introduce you to my good friend.”

Cedric looked at him then, and he looked back.

“His name is Benjamin.”

Cedric had the instinct to stand, but that felt weird, so when he hesitated, he did nothing, and reached out his hand while remaining seated at the undersized table in the coffee shop.

Daisy spoke over their introduction, saying brightly, “I hope we can help you. Ben’s got a lot of experience diagnosing many things, but especially… Dreamlessness.”

And then she added, “It’s important to know what you’re dealing with.”

Cedric opened his mouth to protest, because he felt seen, and because he knew he’d never said anything to that effect to the woman. But he choked and the eldest present spoke first.

“Cedric,” Ben said, hands warm, neither wet nor dry. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you. Daisy has spoken highly of you.”

Cedric took back his hand and felt stupid. And then he realized it wasn’t just that broach of etiquette that was making him feel the fool.

“I don’t know what she’s talking about,” he said. “Last—”

He was being defensive, and he knew he was revealing a position of weakness. And he hated himself for it.

“Do you mind if we sit down?” Daisy asked.

They hadn’t bought a coffee, nor did they look as if they had any intention to purchase a bagel, with or without a schmear. Cedric wanted to flee, but his curiosity got the better of him, and because he was still looking, he said, rather skeptically, “…Sure.”

“We won’t be long, really, I promise,” Daisy said, and, without so much as a second breath, turned to her companion and said to him with renewed brightness, “You sit, I’ll grab a chair.”

And Ben sat. And maybe he was oversized for the little metal chair, or maybe he was unaccustomed to sitting at such small tables, but at any rate, he looked very much like he did not belong.

But that is not to say he looked at all uncomfortable.

Instead, it was Cedric who sat there dumb while the din of the meeting-place echoed around them. And there they sat, quiet amidst the noise, and the student searched his thoughts, desperate to speak, and feeling as if he were playing an anxious game of chicken.

“When was it,” Ben said to Cedric, and over the neglected problem set, “that you saw the Dream as the problem?”

There it was. Cedric had known the guy all of two minutes and already he’d delivered to him a swift kick to the shins.

And he wanted to fight, and say it wasn’t anyone’s damn business but his own, and whoever these two were, they didn’t know him, didn’t really truly give a shit about him, and no matter what they said, he wasn’t ever going to open up his wallet or give them a dime, much less a dollar.

But instead, Cedric just kind of squinted, and tried to think, though the sunlight was filtering through the window, and it seemed as if the chaos in the coffee shop had increased.

Daisy returned with a third chair, and she put it down and sat, somewhat less strange looking, somewhat far from the table’s edge. And, though he didn’t realize it, maybe it was the way she’d smiled and laughed at him on the first day, practically unbidden, that convinced him, despite instinct, to tell the truth.

Cedric said, while no single dream rose to his memory, when they all flooded his nerves simultaneously, “When I couldn’t tell the difference between what was real — and what I’d made up.”

Ben did not move, but he seemed to be listening, and after a while he said, “Which scared you more?”

That ‘you’ struck him, and it was an enormous word in a deceptively diminutive package, and his memory stuttered on it, like whatever he had heard wasn’t what Ben had actually said, and maybe his attention had lapsed and missed something very important.

“I think what Ben is trying to say,” Daisy spoke up, “is that sometimes what we’re afraid of tells us a lot more than what we should flat out avoid.”

Cedric just looked at her.

“It’s kind of like your stars, right?” she asked. “That’s what you’re studying? Starlight?”

He was looking at her, but he wanted to be back in the lecture hall, where instruction came toward but never at him, where no one called on him or asked him questions because no one knew his name.

“It’s not real,” he said then, quietly. “So why does it matter?”

But by the way his voice had become soft, whatever question he had attempted melted into despair.

Daisy wasn’t smiling anymore, and she looked all of a sudden very concerned, and she might have considered to touch him, or at least Cedric predicted that this was when someone else would do such a thing, but she did not, and just looked at him with open eyes.

“It’s as real as you make it,” she said.

Cedric received the care, but it hurt, and he snapped back.

“Real? You know what’s real?” he said, voice climbing. “The fact that I don’t fucking sleep.”

“I lay my head on the pillow and it doesn’t matter how tired I am and how much I want — and need — to sleep, after hours I’m still laying there like a fucking moron,” he continued. “Normal people sleep. Normal people get tired and lay down and when they close their eyes, they fall asleep.”

He pushed his back against the chair and leaned back in disgust. “That’s not how it works for me.”

Neither of them said anything, so Cedric kept talking.

“And, y’know, sometimes I do fall asleep. And the first thing I see in the darkness is something so gruesome that I wake back up and look at the clock and it’s been fifteen or twenty minutes and I know fat fucking chance for me for the rest of the night.”

He knew he’d lapsed and drifted, and he knew he was semi-incoherent, but he didn’t care. He just frowned, and couldn’t really look at either of them because he was stewing in his own rage and shame, and he let them linger at the edges of his vision because he knew a real man would have kept his mouth shut.

Ben said something then, but Cedric wasn’t sure if he heard it.

And soon after, the two of them left Cedric alone, but not completely alone. And when he was still in the coffee shop and too exhausted to pick up the pencil, he knew he hadn’t remained ignorant to what the man had said to him. He knew, because the words stayed with him, and he realized very well that he had heard the healer, and he’d heard every word.

‘What you see is not the wound.’

Although the sky had been blue when Cedric left the University, by the time the train crawled out from beneath the Queensborough Bridge, as far as he could see, it was black.

The lights from the chamber were covered with a dirty plastic that made them amber and orange and speckled where the dust collected, and the platform had lights that flickered and buzzed and made him uneasy. And soon he left the northernmost reach of the elevated train and continued further north and further east by way of his aching feet, the only way he could hope to stop the perpetual motion.

He opened his eyes and looked up into the inky night, which was getting blacker still, and he knew it would be hours until he could see the white heat of a faraway star.

Inside the house, the smell of food wafted into his nostrils and even from several yards away, he could hear silverware clattering against dishes. He bent down to remove his shoes but his eyes drifted toward the clock, whose hands had moved into a position that was somewhat more advanced than he would have preferred. So he took a breath and tried to accept what he could not change.

Cedric walked into the dining room, where there were six people sitting around the table because Zahra had come to visit and Myrtle was missing.

And his own plate was white and empty.

“Hey Ced, welcome back,” Elmer said. “You thirsty? Suyon and I found a recipe in one of the Matron’s old cookbooks.”

He must have been talking about the carafe on the table, because it was filled with greenish liquid and several large ice cubes.

“It’s kinda like fruit punch,” he said. “Except it’s—”

“Cedric,” came Friday’s interruption, impertinent and dripping with sarcasm. “It’s nice of you to join us for supper. You know…”

“Ever.”

Cedric looked at her.

“But we didn’t bother fixing a plate for you. Figured you were too busy to show up for dinner at the poorhouse. Or maybe, more likely,” she said, getting more theatrical the more web she spun, “you didn’t want meatloaf because you were expecting beef Wellington.”

“Really, Friday,” Zahra said, unamused. “Enough.”

“I just want to know why we bother setting the table for someone who can’t bother to get his ass in the door for six,” Friday said, eyes practically embers. “Someone who isn’t in his bed half the time, who clearly has somewhere else he’d rather be.”

And Cedric heard Owen’s voice come as a predictable encore, mumbling without raising his eyes, “And it was my room first…”

Cedric didn’t really know what he wanted to say. He frowned and looked at Friday, who looked back with a grimace on her lips that was completely unrepentant.

He held his tongue until he could not, when the twitching in his face was too much to bear. And though his gut burned in fury, he remembered Suyon, and Elmer, and the dining room table, so he just said, measuring his words preciously, “I was held in the tunnel.”

“Oh!” Friday said with false brightness, mocking him. “Do you hear that, everybody? It’s not Cedric’s fault that he’s late! Isn’t that nice?”

Cedric lowered his eyelids and tried to remain cool in spite of the violence. He hated to look at her but he would not back away from the one who tried to bore into him with her face and her voice and her hate.

She said, glaring through him, tone darkening, “It’s never your fault.”

“Friday,” Zahra said, volume rising slightly, but still restrained. “Please have some respect.”

She scoffed and turned away. “Respect? Respect?! Yeah that would be nice,” she said. “We should all show some respect for the Matron and what she does for us. Especially when she takes us in and shelters us instead of making us go out and get a job like a real adult would.”

“But then again,” she said, bringing her finger to her jawline to sarcastically imply consideration.

“I guess you don’t need a job if you’re always going back home to your sugar daddy.”

Cedric threw up his hands and walked out of the room.

“You do understand why she’s angry, don’t you?”

Cedric just sat there for a moment and felt Zahra’s gaze on him. He had gone upstairs to the music room, and he had just sat there, silent, dwelling in the vain hope that he could pretend he didn’t exist.

But the world, as usual, would not go along with that farce, and Zahra had left the dining room and followed him, peeling back a curtain to find him no more than three minutes after he’d tried to hide.

“Cedric?”

He just hoped, wherever she was, whatever she was doing, that Eloise… Eloise wouldn’t get caught in the crossfire.

“No, I don’t,” he replied carefully. “I don’t know why she hates me. I have no idea. All I know is that she’s had a massive chip on her shoulder ever since I first walked through that door.”

“She’s always hated me,” he said, remembering. “And no matter how much I try to stay out of her way, it just seems to make her hate me even more.”

“I don’t—” He was meandering. “I don’t know what I ever did to her.”

Zahra paused after that, and it was warranted, because what she said hit Cedric like a ton of bricks.

“She’s jealous.”

But Cedric could not accept what he heard, and because he was taken off-guard, he almost laughed.

“Jealous? She’s… jealous?” he asked, incredulous. He added, “…Of me?”

“Yeah. She is. She’s jealous that you go to an Ivy League school—”

“Go to an Ivy League school?” he said, defiant. “I don’t go to an Ivy League school. I sneak into the back of lecture halls and pray no one notices I exist. There’s a big fucking difference.”

“Jealous that—” she began, but he intercepted.

“If that’s what she wants,” Cedric bargained, “she could easily get accep—”

“Jealous that Davian likes you so much, has always liked you, from the first moment you got here, and meanwhile—”

“Davian? She’s jealous over Davian?” He could not believe what he was hearing, and though he didn’t want to feel it, or feel anything at all, his blood began to boil.

“Before you got here, believe it or not, he used to show up once or twice a month and give demonstrations and talks and teach us things. He came alone and he left alone. And she hoped if she worked hard enough and proved herself, that he might someday pick her to take with him.”

Cedric listened, statuesque.

“And when you showed up and he took an interest in you,” she said, “All that stopped and the only reason he came by was to pick you up and take you somewhere.”

“You’ve been a part of the secret boys’ club since you got here, and for years Friday had been working like mad, day and night, and after all that, he just looked right over her head as if she’d never been there at all.”

He was silent, because he knew what Zahra would say on her next breath.

“All because she’s—”

Cedric broke character and cut her off.

“All because she’s a girl, right?” he accused. “Is that what it is?”

Zahra just looked at him with impassive eyes.

“Yeah, well, there’s not a damn thing I can do to change that,” he spat.

“And y’know what? She’s got her whole life ahead of her. If she wants Davian so much, she can have him.”

He repeated himself, “She can fucking have him.”

Uh-uh

Sat, 11 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Davian was examining himself in a mirror when Cedric descended the stairs and found him on the second floor. The house had been quiet for a while, and wherever Adam had been thrown, he did not attempt to reenter. Davian was looking at the cut on his left cheek, examining it from several angles, and obviously displeased at what he saw.

Cedric crossed over, invariably appearing in the reflection while he walked behind Davian, but then stood off to the side and watched the Mage inspect where the glass had flown past his skin and left a mark.

He was tired, so though he tried to stand, after a while he sat in the plush blue chair that was in the hallway. Cedric looked at Davian, who was still looking at himself and had not yet addressed the wound on his right calf. It was no longer bleeding actively and the blood had dried so that it caught around the hair in places and the broken skin and streaks of blood mostly obscured where there was a tattoo of a word or phrase in a foreign script that was beyond his interpretation.

Cedric was silent and just watching, and then he looked up at the Mage’s back and said, just barely above a whisper, “D’you want me to get something for your leg?”

He frowned intensely, which Cedric saw reflected by the silver.

“Don’t you think you’ve done enough damage for one evening?”

Cedric felt shame seep into his heart and he looked away just as Davian turned around to look down at him in the chair.

“I thought we had these chaotic outbursts of yours under control,” Davian said sternly. “Have you been using the Dreamcatcher?”

His follow-up was pitiless. “I’ll take it back if you’re not going to use it.”

Cedric was still looking at his knees, so his voice was guilty as it was quiet, but the Mage was perfectly capable of hearing his plea.

“I…” Cedric began, and his eyes twitched and threatened to let forth with tears he did not want. “I have been using it, and it helps—”

He searched for somewhere to hide his eyes.

“I’m just so tired when I get out of bed in the morning,” Cedric said weakly. “I don’t feel like I’ve slept… at all.”

“I don’t give a damn what you feel like!” Davian retorted. “That’s part of growing up! Get used to it!”

Cedric’s eyes were open and wet and an uncomfortable amount of air was flowing unbidden into his tear ducts but still they did not release.

“You had gone months where you were able to keep this at bay and tonight you lost control at the worst possible moment! Do you have any idea what we could have lost?”

He held up his fingers and made a gesture that hurt Cedric to see, and he pushed his lips closed while the Mage spoke.

“We were this close to losing everything we’ve been working for.”

Cedric did not say anything at first, because he was trying to focus on not letting his face fall into tears and when he finally had a grip on himself and he thought he could speak at an appropriate volume, he looked up and tried to make eye contact.

“Davian, I’m… sorry.”

“‘Sorry’ doesn’t cut it! ‘Sorry’ doesn’t repair my library now in shreds and ‘sorry’ doesn’t do a damn thing to give me back the time I’ve spent telling you the same damn thing over and over again.”

“‘Sorry’ is merely a word until it becomes action.”

Davian turned back toward the mirror.

“It will take me days to repair the damage that’s been done. I could have sent him back to the hole from which he crawled.”

“But, no,” he said. “You were afraid.”

Cedric did not look up because it was true.

“What you’re afraid of truly baffles me,” Davian said. “The way you quiver and shake, one would think you had never been brought into the light, lifted out from the darkness.”

“You’re like a trembling leaf; afraid of your own shadow.”

He turned away from himself, but only half of him was toward Cedric.

“I taught him, Cedric. He is what he is because of my mercy, because of the choices I made on a night long ago.”

Cedric looked up then, and saw the blackness in his eyes.

“I gave him life,” Davian said. “And I can just as easily take it away.”

And Cedric did not really know how to respond to that, but he noticed how very still his body had become because he was hearing the Mage.

He had heard, and he remembered to do something, and he wasn’t sure who or what had told him to do that, but he opened his mouth and did it anyway.

He asked a question.

“What was he looking for?” Cedric asked, slowly, as if he had to endure pain to do so.

Davian lowered his eyelids to blink and remoisten his eyes, quiet for just a moment as he considered the question posed by his pupil. The air was heavy when he began to speak, and the past bore down its weight upon the living men.

“When I adopted Adam as my son, I had been alone for many years after the death of my wife. I had loved her so completely that it took me a long time to regrow what I had given to her and lost after she died.”

“I had to learn again that there was still beauty in the world,” he said, mournfully.

“Adam was a dutiful boy, sharp as a whip, and for many years we were very happy,” Davian said. “He lived here, with me, in this house, a house that had not yet held the sound of the laughter of little children.”

“I was away from him for a time because I had to see to what remained of my family estate in England. It was a difficult journey and a matter that had to be treated very carefully, as I could no longer claim I was the ninety-year-old man to whom the land and title rightfully belonged.”

“I surrendered the inheritance, but what I brought back with me was far more valuable.”

He was glowing then, as if the ghosts were dancing in the room before them, and they were playing music only Davian could hear. “Lila was the light of my life; her very presence plucked me up from falling into the deepest pits of despair. I would have loved her even despite mortality, but to find that she possessed a keen and effortless way with any task of magic put before her—”

“And Adam was glad to have a sister, and loved her too,” he said. “I don’t think that anyone who knew her could have not loved her. But he was of a tender age, and perhaps it was in part my own fault for not seeing it, for forgetting what it is to be a young man, and a young man who was torn in tragedy from the circumstances of his birth.”

Davian’s face wore something different then. “Something very contemptible forms in the mind of a man who finds a rival to his mind within the body of a woman.”

Cedric shifted a little then, because his mind was tangled and he felt uncomfortable.

“I had a very special book in which I wrote down all the wonderful and beautiful things about our little family,” Davian said. “Because I had already seen enough of the world to know that when something makes your life worth living, you must hold on to it tightly, and cherish it, so that the light can endure even though the darkest night.”

He paused. “We were both devastated when she passed. A flower cut short just as it had begun to bloom.”

Cedric was listening to Davian, who continued. “I fell into my studies and became reclusive. In that way, yes, I failed him because I had failed myself. And when I turned away from the light of the world, he turned away from me, and sought from others what he could not find within himself.”

“He came to me many years later, and I was gladdened to receive him, and for a brief moment of time, we were a family again.”

“And I—” Davian laughed then, a little laugh that punctuated his self-deprecation. “I was in my cups one night, a vice if I ever had one, and I told him of my diary.”

Cedric sat still and watched the Mage, seeing the face, and the skin, and the blood he had not fully wiped from his cheek.

“Some men cannot see a girl as a girl, a woman as a woman, or a mind as a mind,” Davian said. “They see their own weakness reflected, and they think if they take the conquest before them and refashion the woman as their own—”

He stopped then, because he was suddenly done telling his story, and he quickly looked very tired and morose.

“My apologies, Cedric,” Davian said. “I am quite spent and I have a long task ahead of me to get my affairs in order.”

Cedric looked at him, and he looked back.

“I must rest and regain my concentration. We will get back to where we were. Please do not think me too rude to turn you out at the late hour, but—”

“I will call for you.”

Cedric waited for a moment, and tried to place everything he had seen and heard and witnessed in his mind because he did not want to forget. He went downstairs and put on the black leather jacket he’d been wearing when he entered the home that night.

The air was cold, and part of him was glad to be alone, and glad that the Magicademy would be asleep when he returned at the end of his journey. But when he got to the end of the block and descended the stairs to get to the underground platform, he was still shifting the collar beneath the neck of his jacket because try as he might, it just did not feel quite right.

Cedric took every problem set that was offered to him, but not once had he ever turned one in.

And because his name was never to be found on a class roster, he had never received a grade and he had no way to know whether he actually understood anything he was being taught.

Even though his work would never be dashed in red pen, he still made an attempt at the procedures presented by the professors. But he often purchased the older and cheaper versions of a textbook, if he had one at all, so that sometimes the handouts referenced figures that weren’t there, or sections that were moved or missing entirely.

When he encountered enough roadblocks, because he knew he wasn’t even supposed to be there, and though he didn’t want to, he got tired and gave up.

And sometimes, even after he’d sat through several hours of lectures on standing waves and redshifts, he left the University feeling like he wasn’t any wiser than he had been that morning. And he thought this was probably his own fault, because sometimes he caught himself thinking about magic instead of mathematics and he knew he was caught between two worlds and not fully engaging with either.

Cedric had started going to the University a little over a year ago. Davian had complained to Myrtle that Cedric was not being properly attended to, and that a man of his age needed money to manage his own matters, rather than always needing to come to her begging for a handout. So she obliged and opened her wallet and gave him a twenty when he asked, but soon that was not enough either, and Davian took to making sure the boy always had enough change to finance a trip to Manhattan.

And when Cedric did not have to fear feeling the lint at the bottom of an empty pocket, he allowed himself a treat every now and then and what he liked most of all was seeing things that he had never seen before.

When he crossed through the turnstile and entered the tunnels, the first thing he did was look at the map posted on the wall, and if he had enough time before he had to return for dinner, he picked a place he had never been and went there, stepped into the Sun to see something new, and walked through the streets until he again wanted to sit down.

And that was how he found the University.

Because he was not too young and not yet too old, no one asked him any questions when he went through the iron gate and found his way to the back row of a lecture hall with a hundred other faces that didn’t look too much different than his own.

Sometimes, when he was thinking about integrals instead of invocations, he forgot all about the things that troubled him about where he was going and what he was doing with the strange gift of a life that he found himself living.

On one Thursday afternoon, when he was feeling somewhat lighter because he had forgotten about the fact that he had not heard from Davian in several days, a strange woman with hazel eyes approached him as he walked into the brisk fall air.

And after she said hello, she said her name was Daisy.

“I’m… Cedric.”

“Hi Cedric, I’m Daisy.”

He looked at her and squinted his eyes a little because he’d already heard her say that.

They were walking away from the lecture hall and down a walkway and there were twenty students walking the same way as they were and they were talking to themselves and not looking at them.

“Have you had any good dreams lately?”

Cedric looked at her, and she was smiling and calm and did not look anything like the other students he had observed and he made an assumption about what she wanted from him and looked away from her.

“I’m sorry—” he said. “I’m an atheist.”

She laughed then, and it was strange because it had been a long time since he’d heard someone laugh like that.

“You’re funny, Cedric!” she said. “I like you.”

He did not say anything.

“What was your class about today?”

Cedric thought, and he thought maybe she was another student, and though he hadn’t thought that before when she’d opened her mouth, maybe he’d been wrong, and she was trying to flirt with him, but then he had a stomach ache and he noticed out of his peripheral vision that the clouds were grey-white and it could be threatening to rain so when he said a thing, he wasn’t really sure if it was true or not, but he said it.

“Stellar parallax.”

“Oh!” she said, and he looked at her for only a split second, because it was hard to look at her. “Is that like The Starry Night?”

“I—” he said, nonplussed. “No, I don’t think so.”

He didn’t know what her game was, or what she was trying to pull or get out of him and he really just wanted her to go away so that he could be—

“Well, Cedric, keep looking up!”

Daisy disappeared then, fading into the crowd without pushing anyone because she was gliding and dancing between more than she was marching through.

There were only seven people living in the Magicademy now. Zahra had left a couple of months ago because she’d begun her freshman year at one of the colleges in the city, and she had moved into an apartment so that she did not have to commute to school.

Zahra had never been one of the loudest voices in the creaky old house, but when she left, there were two that made up for it tenfold. Owen, now fourteen, was finding his voice, and when the cords in his throat squeaked and jolted to find their proper pitch, it was even more discordant because he was usually directing it in deference to Friday Perkins.

And Friday had recently turned thirteen, a fact that she did not let anyone forget. When her self-proclaimed growth spurt went on for months, she claimed one of the corners of her bedroom as the chart that should have been kept since her birth, and every month she took a blade and carved a new mark on the wall.

With Zahra gone, the chain of girls shifted, and Friday abandoned the bunk above the desk and proclaimed the bed set on the floor as her own. And she told Myrtle that she thought it was time Suyon stopped sleeping in Myrtle’s room and she said it was because at ninety-four years old, the woman had earned some peace and quiet.

But Suyon still did not say a word.

She had struck up a bit of a kinship with Elmer, who, though one might never know it, was only three years her senior. And usually, in the evenings, when Owen and Friday were off somewhere making racket enough for eight, Elmer and Suyon were moving chess pieces set on velvet so that they made hardly any noise at all.

Cedric was outside, and though it had been an unseasonably warm day, there was a chill that was rising because the heat of the Sun had moved somewhere else on the Earth. He liked to cut his fingernails outside, and he preferred to keep them short and clean because he didn’t like it when the ends scraped against the things he touched or got dirty or broken.

And he never chewed them.

He had seen someone cutting their nails on the subway once, and it had made him somewhat more angry than the transgression probably deserved. The act had seemed wrong in a way he could not fully articulate, in part because he knew someone else would have to sweep up their leavings at the end of the line, but further still because he was not so sure that the clippings should be destined for the garbage. So when he cut the nails outside, he was enjoying the fresh air and he was freed from the compulsion to chase after the ones that missed the can and landed on the carpet, and yet, he was not so completely sure that they belonged in the garden either.

And he could not finalize the conviction or question of whether humans were more like Earth, or more like plastic.

“Hey Ced?”

It was Eloise, and she had come to find him in the backyard, where he was sitting on one of the steps that led from the deck to the grassy plain. He looked back and up at her, and a gentle breeze was moving her hair around her face.

“Is it okay if I sit down?”

Cedric blinked and said, “Sure,” and then he moved a step down and off to the side, because sometimes when he was too close to Eloise, he felt a sort of field around her, something like gravity, except that it compelled him to move in the opposite direction.

Then he looked up at her and she didn’t say anything and was just staring at the grass and it seemed very unlike her.

“You… alright?” he asked.

She sighed, and it was a heavy thing, and even though she let the breath out of her lungs, she didn’t seem any better.

Eloise didn’t look at him. “No,” she said. “I guess… I’m not alright.”

She moved, and she smoothed her skirt, which didn’t matter so much because she also had dark grey leggings underneath. She was wearing the red flats that she wore sometimes, which Cedric liked because she often didn’t wear outfits that had much color, but then, neither did he.

She looked like she was going to say something, but couldn’t, and she just sort of erupted with an awkward, “How are you?” and he knew it was weird because she said it too loud for it to follow from what she said before.

“I…” he said. “I’m okay.”

“You’ve been home a lot this week.”

“Heh,” he said. “Yeah, I guess so.”

“Everything okay?”

In his mind flashed the memory of burglars, broken glass, and blood. But all that seemed like small potatoes when he looked at Eloise’s face pulled with worry.

“It’s okay enough.”

She laughed a little, and he thought she was laughing to keep from doing something else.

“Ced, I…” she said softly. “I want to talk to you about something. And I told Zahra and she freaked out, so I guess I have to ask you not to totally freak out too.”

And because she was already trying to stack the deck in one direction, he tried to lean to the other.

“…What’s up?”

She brought her hands together, probably because the warmth of one hand against the other was the only safe and predictable thing she had in this moment.

“I want to move out,” she said.

And Cedric’s heart dropped a little, but he was not so entirely blind about where he’d been going night after night.

“That’s alright,” he said. “You’ve been here for a long time, right?”

Her eyes were askew and she smiled a bit, but she wasn’t exactly happy in the remembering. “Yeah,” she said. “Since before I can remember.”

“Maybe it’s good then,” Cedric said, trying to bolster her spirit. “You do more than your fair share around here.”

“I thought maybe I’d move in with Zahra,” she said, and then she stammered. “I mean, I don’t know if that would work out, exactly, but maybe if one of her roommates moves out, or wants to leave at the end of the semester or something…”

She trailed off.

“I’ve always been…” she said, and he looked at her. “I’ve always been here.”

“You gonna get a job?” Cedric asked quickly.

“I, uh—” she said. “I guess I’ll have to.”

“I know it’s not glamorous work,” Cedric said, trying to encourage her. “But I bet you could find a job waiting tables. It’d be like what you do here, except—”

And they both tried to talk at once.

“Except you’d be getting paid.”

She laughed again, but it was that quiet laugh that wasn’t really a laugh, because it was actually very sad and she did not want to look at him, and then she talked but he did not.

“We’ll see, but…”

And when she said this, he just looked at her, and waited, and he remembered how Davian had chided him, so he tried to put on a good face.

“I just want to get out of the house,” she said. “And I’ll figure out a way to get the money, and I don’t know if I’ll be able to hold down a job, but maybe I can find some other way to make it work, I don’t know, I just—”

Cedric held his breath.

“Cedric, I—” she said. “I could die.”

And he did not know what to say, so he—

“I’ve been told that it’s not a death sentence, and maybe I have five, ten, who knows how many years, but…” she said, quietly. “I just don’t know.”

He didn’t say anything for a second or two or three but he was desperate to say something and it was hard even to say her name but he tried, and he just said “El—”

“It’s not like it used to be,” she said then. “I’ve been taking the medicine and doing the treatments and—”

“It’s lupus,” she said. “I have lupus.”

And it was a word he’d heard, and at the time it had gone over and through and beside him because he’d had no reason to pay attention. And now he suffered in ignorance.

“Does—” he asked. “Does Myr—”

“No,” she said. “No she doesn’t.”

And for the first time, they caught each other’s eyes, and then they fell away again.

“And I don’t want her to know either. I’ve been seeing an outside doctor.”

“But—” he started.

She interrupted him, because maybe she knew what he was going to say. “There’s nothing she can do for me,” she said. “Heal a scratch, a cut, a broken leg; okay—”

“But this isn’t that kind of problem.”

And he just looked at her, and he knew he was pleading.

“That’s why I have to move out,” she said. “Because if I stay here and she finds out, then I’ll never be able to leave.”

And though he tried, he felt his nerves quiver, like they did so often, and when they did that, he often lost sight of the distance, and only existed in that shaking.

“Does what they give you…” he said, slowly, “actually work?”

And he looked at her, and he knew she was concealing because of the way she looked away, and how her voice changed.

“I guess I’m a little sleepy more often than not, and I have to pee in a cup and give blood every now and then to make sure my levels are alright and—”

“You should tell her,” he said, and it was more resolute than he planned, and when the words escaped him, he thought he’d kicked too hard and he regretted it, because she just looked at him and didn’t say anything and her eyes were heavy and sad.

“I can’t, Cedric,” she said finally. “I can’t tell her.”

“What do you mean you can’t tell her?” he asked. “She could help you, actually do something that matters; more than some regular asshole who went to Harvard and thinks he has any idea what the fuck he’s doing.”

Eloise didn’t say anything for a minute.

“I just want to know what it’s like to be free,” she said. “What it’s like to be on my own.”

Cedric did not say anything because everything felt like barbs he didn’t want to throw.

“It’s not today,” she said. “I’m not even leaving tomorrow. Just… maybe someday.”

Somebody Everyone Knows

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

“You’re late.”

Cedric was out of breath. He’d woken up early that morning to help Myrtle and the kids make repairs to the treehouse on the second lot, so he’d been late to his lecture at the University. And when that too had gone past the hour, he’d made a break for the train, but—

“The ‘1’ was running express,” Cedric explained. “And I didn’t notice until it went by the station. I had to wait at Times Square to get on an uptown—”

“If we’re late, we don’t get seated,” Davian stated coldly. “You know that.”

Cedric felt sweat dampen his button-down as he endured the man’s rebuke. “Well…” he reasoned, trying to offer consolation. “Won’t they do another seating at intermission? They did that for—”

“And miss the Doll Song?” he asked, pitch rising. “Olympia’s aria is the whole damn point of Hoffmann! We might as well not even go!”

Cedric felt shame burn his cheeks.

“You knew we had tickets for this,” Davian reminded him. “And just what were you doing uptown?”

Cedric did not say anything because he knew his mentor knew the answer and he did not want to repeat it.

“You’re not even a student there,” Davian said with dismissal. “You’re asking to bring the wrong kind of attention to yourself. That place attracts the very likes of those who’d undo us. You don’t belong there and I told you to stop going.”

“They don’t even notice me,” Cedric said, trying to look at Davian. “I sit in the back and don’t talk to anyone and no one talks to me either.”

“There are far more useful things you could be studying,” Davian said, punctuating his assertion with something like the strike of a gavel. “None of their rules apply to you, not then, not now. Newton was a quack.”

Cedric did not say anything because he could not change the facts, but he’d sat for introductory mechanics last year, and it was over now. This fall he was sitting in for—

“We’ll go somewhere else, then, and have a drink,” Davian grumbled. “God knows I need a drink.”

The man in the navy cloak and top hat, looking very much like an antique from a bygone era, began to walk away from the opera hall, and Cedric, still hung with guilt, followed him. The worst of the man’s rage had been vented, but his pupil knew it would be some time until he stopped gritting his teeth and returned to normal.

One drink, Cedric thought. Maybe two.

“This was the last matinee of the run, and our seats were fantastic. Grand tier: front row. Front row! We could have had a lovely time. Such a waste.”

When the waiter brought out the steak, it was still sizzling, so he took a second in porcelain and turned it over so that it was face-down on the table. He laid the offering on the plate, but only one corner, so that the butter in which it had been cooked dripped down on one side and collected in a brownish pool at the bottom lip of the plate.

He put a silver spoon into the butter and ladled it over the steak before he used a set of tongs to place four cuttings before the man who’d ordered it.

Cedric was just watching, and he noticed how the meat was seared almost black in some places, but red in the center where it was just warm.

“Waiter!”

Davian called the man back as he, now unencumbered, made to return to his duties in the kitchen.

“I do hope you’ll be bringing something for the young man?”

Cedric looked at the waiter to try to find a reaction, but he seemed to be elsewhere.

“Yes, sir, sorry sir.”

He left then, and Davian lowered his arm and turned his body to face Cedric, whose eyes were watching the man in the apron saunter back toward the back of the restaurant.

Cedric imagined Davian was not impressed by the man’s laconic pace because he was frowning and not looking at the steak.

“You can go ahead if you want,” Cedric said after a while. “You don’t have to wait for me.”

Davian did not really respond to that, because he was looking into the air, but he did take a drink, and when he put it back down his expression was a little less aggrieved than it had been a second before.

“Yes, well.”

Cedric’s hope that Davian was going to relax and recover and forget about the opera that had been pulled from beneath his feet was not going quite as he had wanted. Most of the restaurants around Lincoln Center had closed for lunch and not yet opened for dinner, so when they’d arrived at the last one they’d tried, a restaurant that was fashioned as a windowless speakeasy, Davian was still in his short temper. He grumbled and frowned and entered, almost against his will, and launched into a tirade about the lewd and inappropriate nature of jazz while hanging his velvet cloak on a hook.

Now a couple of drinks in, the two were in a dim room with few people and a candle between them. Davian was slowly returning to his usual self, and for Cedric, it could not come soon enough.

There was a stage set below them, and the red curtain was illuminated as if it were waiting to be drawn, but it had not so much as rustled since the pair had entered the establishment. Every so often Cedric looked over at it, because the bright color was hard to ignore, but he wasn’t sure what he expected to find.

“Drink was restricted during the war,” Davian said after a while, and it was sent toward Cedric’s ear, so he turned and found the Mage with his fingers around the foot of the chilled glass. “Certain hours you could drink, and certain hours you couldn’t. But we were not so foolish as to think it was something to get rid of entirely.”

“See what we saw in the war,” he said, darkening, “and it would be a real cruelty to begrudge a man his whiskey.”

Davian lifted his fork and knife.

As the muscle was severed in two, blood from between the fiber ran into the butter on the plate, but the two would not mix, and Cedric found it difficult to look at the man who was talking so he just watched the steak instead.

“Even after the worst of it was over, there were those fleeing Volstead who came to England. I’d be remiss to say we didn’t profit.”

Cedric smelled the molten butter, and it hit him and he thought he was hungry but he wasn’t sure, so he looked up and finally found the face of the Mage, and he was chewing the soft steak and smiling a little bit as he looked toward something beyond his pupil.

“The friends you make along the way,” Davian said after clearing his mouth, “make the rest of it worthwhile.”

Though Cedric was looking at him, those eyes were wandering in another world.

“Seemed we were always running into each other,” he said of a shadow. “Always had something interesting to say, a curious way of thinking, a sense for what evaded the rest.”

“When you reach a hundred or so,” Davian said boastfully, “you find it tiresome to hear the same stories retold over and over again so the ones that rarely repeat themselves are a breath of fresh air.”

He laughed, but it was a subtle mourning. “Of course, that’s not to say we agreed on everything. A teetotaler, that one; a fact I often lamented. What I wouldn’t have paid,” he said, musing, “to see a real drink in that hand. He was—”

And then, suddenly, Davian’s smile fell because he remembered something, and he was quiet for a moment and cast his gaze astray.

“Anyway. One cannot legislate desire any more than command the lack of it. Any effort merely drives the truth underground. Can I offer you a piece of steak?”

“Your nova, sir.”

Cedric looked to his left, and the waiter had reappeared and was holding a plate heaping with boneless pink fish, decorated with the little green berries he’d come to recognize as capers.

“What is that?” Davian said as the staff was lowering the plate toward Cedric.

The waiter stopped moving and looked at Davian, who did not permit a response. “He was supposed to have the lobster Newberg.”

Cedric was looking at the food, and remembering the last time he’d had the sour buds, which had been the first time, the only time, and he’d liked the way they’d tasted and—

“I’ll eat it,” Cedric said, looking at the waiter. “It looks—”

“It’s a starter, Cedric,” Davian said as a matter-of-fact. “They brought you a starter.”

Cedric did not really want the lobster and had never wanted the lobster because he knew he would humiliate himself trying to eat it and if he were really honest with himself, he had never really preferred to eat with his hands so he made an attempt to protest while he was still looking at the pickled flowers atop the fish and said, “I know, but…”

“Send it back,” Davian said, raising his glance as poison to the waiter. “I don’t give a damn what you think I asked for. I ordered the lobster; I want the lobster.”

“Have some self-respect, Cedric.”

Davian had turned back to the boy and their eyes caught for a moment before Davian whipped them away and toward the waiter who was returning to the kitchen.

“Two more,” Davian called after the refused. “A White Lady for myself, and another for him. And do get that one right this time?”

Cedric pursed his lips together without thinking, flinching, though he tried to resist it.

“They bring you what you didn’t order,” Davian commanded, “You don’t accept it.”

Cedric was quiet for a moment before he spoke, and when he did speak up, it came out meek. “It… just seems like a waste,” he said. “They’re going to throw it out.”

“That’s not your problem,” Davian asserted. “They make a mistake, they can fix it.”

“This whole place is a farce, a fantasy,” Davian said. “A veritable masquerade.”

“Prohibition didn’t work, would never have worked, and when the women shed their girdles and shook their bare legs on stage for any man who held up a fist full of dollars, it was all a distraction from where that money was coming from.”

“And then you had men like Capone, a butcher wrapped in brandy, who were more than happy to pick up the slack. Did you ever hear what he did to Fats Waller?”

Cedric was silent.

“He kidnapped the man at gunpoint, brought him to a piano and made him play for three days straight, like an automaton; stuffing his pockets with blood money after every number.”

“A thug,” Davian said. “A thug and a vulgarian who got what was coming to him. Died imprisoned, penniless, mind gone. Better than he deserved.”

The waiter appeared then, and he had nothing to show for his time in the kitchen.

“Regrettably, sir, we seem to be out of the lobster.”

Davian tore money from within his suit jacket and slammed several hundred-dollar bills on the table and he did not even look up when he exclaimed, “Then why’s it on the damn menu?!”

He stood and spoke at Cedric without really looking at him.

“Come Cedric, I’ve had quite enough of this circus for one evening. I knew it was a mistake to come here.”

And he muttered and made for the door, and Cedric hesitated for a moment, looking toward the waiter, but not exactly seeing him, and then following the Mage, who was furiously donning the cloak he’d left on a peg by the entrance.

The waiter did not return to the kitchen, but instead went behind the bar, which, at this early hour, had only one individual seated in the chair closest to the edge.

Cedric had his back turned because Davian was already in the doorway and headed toward a darkening sky.

“Course Reviver,” a customer said to the bartender, hesitating for a moment before adding, “Number two.”

“Excuse me,” replied the barkeep. “What was that you wanted?”

Cedric zipped up the black leather coat and adjusted his collar so that it lay comfortably unfolded beneath. Alone in the entry, he took a breath and looked at the door, which had a large pane of colored glass suspended in a wood frame. He stepped toward it and he was about to be gone when he heard the man behind the bar, shuffling glasses, comment just audibly, “They say the soup kitchens he stocked saved more from starvation than ever died at the other side of his gun.”

And just as Cedric was letting the door close behind him, he heard the other voice, the one who ordered the drink that didn’t exist. And it said something, and it seemed louder and clearer and warmer than it should have and it said, “Yes. I have heard that.”

Davian was inebriated but he was not yet incoherent and he climbed into the driver’s seat of the Wraith without so much as a word. When he went to push the key into the ignition, Cedric was watching out of the corner of his eye and though he thought the man might miss, he did not, and the metal went into the impression and he started the car.

Behind the wheel, Davian started to calm down, and Cedric could feel the tension release amidst the controlled chaos that were the streets of Manhattan. When the lights told him to stop, he slammed his foot on the brakes because that is what every lawful driver should do, and after a while Cedric noticed the forcefulness with which he accelerated afterward seemed a little less severe.

It had become fall again, so the Sun and the clock disagreed about whether the night had yet begun. But the light was low because the source had fallen behind the horizon and some of the streetlamps were getting brighter than they had been.

None dared park in front of Davian’s flat, and at some point, Davian had explained the mechanism. When people drove past, he said, they saw things that weren’t truly there, whether it would be a fire hydrant, orange traffic barrels, or a motorcycle leaning on a kickstand. So when a Mortal came through looking for a place to rest their rusty old jalopy, they kept riding past because they didn’t think they could get what they needed.

Once or twice over the past two years, Cedric recalled, he’d come through and seen a car he didn’t recognize in the spot. Whether they’d seen the hydrant or simply ignored it was beyond his comprehension and he saw nothing to gain from asking too many questions.

Tonight, the spot was empty, and, as always, no longer or shorter than was strictly required to fit the Wraith, which from bumper to bumper was at least a foot longer than most of the vehicles to be found in the West Village.

Davian parked the car, but he was making a strange face as he did so, and his eyes were fixed with attention on the windows of his apartment, somewhat elevated above street level.

Cedric did not say anything at first, and just watched the Mage, who looked something like a dog who was smelling the air because he’d heard the leaves of a bush shake. Cedric waited and he thought and he was about to open his mouth when Davian said, quietly, “Someone’s in there.”

Cedric looked at the apartment, and then back to Davian, and his heart dropped a little because that was not what he had wanted the Mage to say.

But the very corners of Davian’s mouth turned up just slightly, and his eyes were gleaming with satisfaction as he looked toward the emerald door of his house.

“And I do think I know exactly who’s come to pay us a visit.”

When Davian took the keys from his pocket for the second time that night, it was unusual.

It was unusual because the two of them usually pulled up in front of the apartment but rarely walked on the street because the street was dirty and the air sometimes smelled foul and Davian preferred to keep the dust from clinging to the bottom of his fine cloak. So it was far more typical that, with one of the men in the front seat and the other beside, the Mage raised his hand and impressed his will upon the world that the two of them should be in his living room or his study or wherever else in the house he would prefer to be. And because Cedric was following, he was taken along with the gesture and simply appeared in the house without ever having to place a hand on a doorknob.

But what was more unusual was how slowly the Mage removed his keys from his reserve, and though he hadn’t missed the slot in the car, he certainly wasn’t going to miss it here, and he took his time to carefully insert the key into the lock and when he turned it, Cedric thought he had applied a certain kind of quick and immediate pressure that made it click a little louder than it probably should have.

And then, when they were both in the house, Davian took off the blue velvet and draped it on the hatstand. And when Cedric had done the same, Davian had still not said a word, but he turned to Cedric slowly, with the same careful composure he had possessed since returning home, and he held a finger to his mouth to keep the boy from saying a word and then pointed through the ceiling.

He looked very much to be savoring the moment as he leaned forward and whispered to Cedric, “I think our little friend has sprung a trap in the library.”

His brown eyes were reflecting the light in the hallway when he said, “Let’s go see if we can’t make his stay more comfortable, shall we?”

Davian’s library was toward the back of the house and it was spread across several floors so that it could be entered from various places in the home. But Cedric followed Davian wordlessly up the stairs and they entered through what was perhaps the most grand of the entrances, and here there was a corner that could host a reader or two and sometimes Davian sat for many hours and nursed a drink and smoked a pipe that made the whole room smell like tar and burnt cherries.

But they walked right past the chair and the chest because there was a man in the library and when Davian saw him, the Mage seemed to stand up a little straighter and move with energy and he was pleased that his suspicion was confirmed because the man who had come to visit was just the one he’d been expecting.

Cedric hesitated in the doorway while Davian strode forward toward the bound man. He was almost completely wrapped in silk bandages that held him standing yet completely immobile. It was an unnatural pose, one the bindings had likely forced him into, and he was still faced toward one of the library shelves that was completely encased in glass. And yet, though his body spoke of his trespass, his head was hung low in submission and his long blond hair hung over his shoulders and obscured his face.

Davian was a few feet from the intruder when he stopped. And he brought his hand into the air and without so much as a flourish, the man bound was facing Davian. And for a brief moment, he was taller than he who owned the library, and he looked at Davian with burning blue eyes that might have struck fear into a different man.

But Davian was not afraid.

Still on the other side of the carpet, he lowered his hand and so too did the knees of his captive knock against the floor and he was kneeling and sitting on his heels but not once did his gaze fall from Davian.

Cedric could not see Davian’s face because he stood between him and the blond man in the silks, but he knew he was satisfied with himself because he brought his left hand to his hip with a bent elbow and he stood with a swagger as he snapped with his right hand and the binding, in a deep purple, fell away from his mouth. He was thin and his face was gaunt, with cheekbones almost as sharp as the eyebrows that held a quiet rage.

“Welcome back, son.”

For the first time, the blond tore his eyes from Davian, and he only did so because he looked at the ground and spat on the floor.

“I had thought you would return,” Davian said. “So I waited to change the locks.”

The man looked up again, and when his straight blond hair parted around his face, it was unrepentant.

“You were never my father,” he said. “Never was, never will be.”

Davian took his left hand from where it had perched, and used it to pull at the finger of the glove on his right, and then he removed that one too, and slipped the gloves into the pocket of his coat.

“Good boys don’t go poking their grubby little noses where they don’t belong.”

Then the man opened his mouth and bared his teeth because he was yelling.

“None of this belongs to you!”

Davian let a little air escape his nose and he turned his head at a slight angle so that Cedric could see the side of his face, and his eyes went backward toward the door, and then quickly back to the blond before him.

“No, Adam,” he said with articulation. “That is where you couldn’t be more wrong.”

Davian did not move his body, but he did raise his chin, sort of jutting it or flicking it to one side and he called, “Cedric!”

And Cedric did not say anything for a moment and just stood there in the doorway, and he noticed that he was sweating despite the fact that the air had become cold.

“Won’t you fetch our guest a little something to make himself at home? I do so pride myself on being a gracious host.”

Cedric was a little stupefied and he twitched in the direction of the chest where Davian kept the bottles and the glasses and the booze but he did not want to do it and he just looked at Adam, who for the first time looked at him but did not say anything, and Cedric saw that those eyes were bluer than the sky, but not yet like the deep ocean.

“Since you’ve already proven yourself to have abandoned the manners you’ve been taught, I’ll do the honors. Cedric, please meet my wayward apprentice Adam, who I found on a cold winter’s night clothed in rags, trying to suck the marrow from bones he’d wrestled from a stray dog.”

Adam did not look at Davian, but he was not anymore really looking at Cedric either.

“Adam; Cedric.”

Cedric looked at Adam, who looked back at him, and Davian continued his introduction while their eyes were locked, and what Davian said rose with an ominous shadow, “Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial.”

But Cedric did not really hear it so much as it went over and through him because he was still staring at Adam, who looked back and seemed to plead as his eyes grew and there was more white around the color than there had been.

“This is what he does.”

“Cedric!” Davian said, cutting off Adam’s weary claim. “I do so tire of the pleasantries when we’ve not even had a damn thing to drink! He’s come from so very far and I simply cannot abide—”

And Davian made to turn his body around, so Cedric was hastened to action, but he was still sluggish. He made his way to the stores where he knew he would find the squarish glasses and the sherry that was always filled near to the brim by the next day heedless of how much had been drunk the night before.

Cedric couldn’t really look at Adam now because he was focused on his task, a task he didn’t want to do because he didn’t want to be here in this room between the Mage and his son or adopted son or whoever the fuck this guy was supposed to be, and his hands were shaking but he put a glass on the table and found where the ice was always lingering and always cold and he took the tongs and put a cube in and then another and then Davian, who was watching, said, “I think an even four would be perfect.”

“Some things, they say,” he said while Cedric could not look at him either, “are best served cold.”

And the last cube fell into the glass indelicately because Cedric’s nerves were quaking and he was having trouble keeping his body still. He put the tongs back on the ice and laid the lid on top, but it was tilted because the silver was sticking out to one side.

“Save the thirty for another time,” Davian instructed. “I think the twenty will do just fine.”

And Cedric knew what he meant, but when he lifted the decanter, it was heavy because it was full and his hands were shaking and he could feel Davian’s gaze like lead upon him and when he tried to grip the glass neck, his hands were still shaking and his palms were wet and before any of the sherry could hit the ice, he lost his hold and it fell from his hand.

And when the container hit the table, it shattered.

When the noise of breaking glass ricocheted off the shelved books, Cedric had his eyes closed because the noise was something he did not expect.

It wasn’t until he opened his eyes that he first saw Davian, who was staring at him with a flickering blaze that Cedric did not want to recognize. And because he could not look into those brown eyes, he looked past them, and saw the blue, which were following a shard that had gone through a thick curtain hung over a window, and behind the curtain that was sliced, another glass broke and the barrier that divided the outside air from the inside was broken too.

And Cedric saw that there was a pink cut on Davian’s cheek, and it became darker and began to seep red blood.

He looked, but the red disappeared from his vision because Davian whipped his head around toward the broken window because there was a third sound, and the third sound was even more surprising because now there was someone else in the room.

A black bird flew in and let forth with a triumphant “CAW!” and the sound, like the broken glass, echoed off the walls and shook the hearts of the three between the walls of books.

For one, that shaking was reunion, because the bird with a wingspan smaller than any of the three men clipped her claws into Adam’s silk bindings and tore his hands free, and when he was free, he rubbed at his naked skin where the cloth had left marks and when he stood, the silk fell off his legs too, and he raised his arm above his head, where the bird perched, and he brought his forearm down until it was just level with his shoulder.

“Having stood the test,” Adam said, resuming from where Davian had left off, “shall the loyal receive—”

“Nothing!” Davian screamed, and he lunged forward and sent a stream of fire erupting from his hands, aimed straight for Adam. “They receive nothing!”

Adam sent a cloud of dust out of his hands and it stopped the flame with a hiss and Davian was soon standing where Adam had been, but Adam was not there.

He appeared upstairs, on the third floor, and looked down upon the other two. Cedric did not know where the bird had gone.

“I just want to return one thing to She from who you stole,” Adam said, and he looked at Cedric. “I can’t do much about the rest.”

Davian flew then, and as he rose, another stream of orange-red fire poured from his hand, aimed at Adam, and he bit at his former apprentice with a furious yell, “I never should have told you anything!”

They were both on the third floor, and Cedric was still on the second, and he could hear them throwing things at each other, and something that was probably a spike of ice from the Mage went thump into a bookshelf and Cedric could hear the wood splinter and break and tomes fluttered as they fell from their shelves.

“Just like you to keep secrets, Davian; stick to what you’re good at.”

Cedric could hear objects disturbed by their feud, tables and chairs overturned, but he had his eyes on the banister that was feeding fire that had caught when Davian’s evocation had missed its target.

He could not fly, nor could he shoot water or wind from his fingertips, so instead he ran over to the curtain that had been cut by the flying glass and with a single strong yank, he pulled the thing from the rod and left a brass rod and several broken rings. And he went back so that he was beneath where the third floor could be seen above and he threw the inky black curtain upward. He pushed it with his thought so that it went up and open and further than it would have without him, and when it was spread out all the way, he pulled it back, but just a little, so that it landed on the fire and smothered the licking flames.

“You were jealous!” Davian called out. “You were jealous of what she was and what she was to become!”

More glass shattered, and Cedric thought it was likely one of the locked bookshelves.

“I loved her!” Adam said forcefully. “More than I could say for you!”

Cedric heard a screech from the bird, and then a jostling of feather and wing. And he was not sure if he had any place in this fight, but when he heard Davian call out in pain, he dashed for the hallway outside the library and climbed the stair to the third floor where he sometimes slept when it was too late to go back to Astoria.

He practically threw himself upward to get there as fast as he could because he heard the bird’s talons ripping at clothing and the Mage was screaming in fury.

When Cedric reached the top of the stairs and entered the library from the top floor, Davian was on the floor and his pantleg on one side was torn and his leg was bloodied.

Adam had a wicked smile on his face as he stood over Davian, and he reached a hand up, and when he did so, the bookshelf on the wall made like it was going to topple over and crush Davian.

Cedric stepped forward and reached out with both hands, and when he did this, the bookshelf slowed its fall, and the books would have come out if Cedric had not stopped those too. And he stood there, staring at it, because he knew if he stopped even to blink or think or doubt, then the whole thing would come crashing down.

Time was flowing like syrup, and Adam’s satisfied grin was weakening, but not yet completely gone. Davian, spared the worst of the thickened clock, turned toward Cedric slowly, and when he saw him, he looked back with darkness covering his face, and he said, carefully, but with precise bile toward his student, “Do you think I’m an invalid?”

A wave of force came from the Mage then, and a gale pushed the bookshelf back, flung Adam through a window, and Cedric back through the entrance and into the hallway from whence he’d come.

Whatever Happened

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 00:00:00 -0400

In front of a large cardboard cut-out, there stood a strange man. He was not old so much as he had become weathered. His skin was deeply wrinkled from a long life beneath the Yellow Sun, but still his long black hair shone in the light.

( “What does this say” ), he asked his companion.

They had descended the boat at South Ferry together, but anyone who was really looking would have known they’d been traveling together for far longer than that.

She smiled at him, because she loved him and his questions.

( “It says Caardvark” ), she said. ( “It’s a play with words — they put the word ‘card’ in front of ‘aardvark’ and mash them together — Card-vark — C-Aardvark” )

Then she added sweetly, ( “It’s supposed to be funny” )

The man with the old skin was confused, but he did not sneer. He looked at the cartoon and asked, ( “And the clothing — Is that supposed to be funny too” )

Daisy rolled her eyes in quiet delight. She took his hand in hers and tried to lead him away.

( “C’mon Ben — We could be here all day — but we really ought to get going” )

If anyone walking the streets of lower Manhattan had stopped the two to inspect them, odds were stacked against one who thought they could glean the truth from a second or third glance.

The woman had a smooth face and bright hazel eyes and hair that was cropped short so that it only curled around once or twice before it found its way to an end bleached by years roaming beneath the open sky. And though she was younger than him, none would have taken him as her father because a New Yorker would have said they looked nothing alike.

But maybe, sometimes, even an ordinary city-dweller who had no reason to think he knew anything at all might look into their eyes and think they had some ancestor in common. And maybe that city-dweller would be right.

Daisy had been roaming the land for a long time, but not nearly so long as her friend. And sometimes when she looked at him, she knew only part of him was able to look back at her. When his eyes were dark and his pupils were tight, she knew he was hearing the cries that the air had borne before the dying had become the dead. When she saw this, she would smile at him to try to bring him back to remembering the things that were still growing on the Earth.

Still other times, she knew the world was changing.

Many long years ago, when she had been small, life had not seemed so bad. The ones that owned the house into which she’d entered this world let her live in it, and they also had her read and write and work her figures. But after a while, she did not like the things they told her to read or the things they said she had to do to earn her keep. So she took to hiding in the woods and trying to get the smell of the kitchen out of her clothes. And when she got wet and tired and hungry, she came back because she had to. Because she’d been trying to find the place where the rabbits hid from the sound of gunshot, her dress would be covered in burrs and thistles so they removed it and covered her in scars instead. She did not learn what they were trying to teach.

One day, she ran into the woods again, and this time, Ben was there. And he looked at her and asked if the scars still hurt her when she touched them, and when she said not really because she didn’t usually touch them, she saw that he was crying, and he brought his fingers to his face and gave the tears to her. And where the crying dampened her skin, she felt the pain again, but she was not afraid anymore.

She went with him, and followed, with nothing in her hands but the letters that danced in her mind.

Daisy had never been on the Manhattan island before. Ben had, but it had been many long years, and sometimes he used a place-name that was more legend than language. The path of the Sun was familiar to him because every year it still made the same sort of an arc across the blue sky, but now there were tall structures of steel and glass that reached toward the clouds and the trees he had known had long been felled and he didn’t always know where he was. So he let his companion take the lead.

Headed north from where they had left the boat, the pair wandered through the city for a while. Daisy had seen many places where people gathered in great density, and each was alike in some ways while having their own ways and mannerisms. But people were what interested her most of all, and the sounds they made were their own kind of music. But the truth was that it did not take people long to figure out that there was something very peculiar about them, more than just the way their eyes shined, and when the people became afraid, they were quiet and frowned and did not sing anymore.

So when the people would not open their mouths and talk to her, she found the words they left behind and listened to what the shapes had to say because they were never silent unless she stopped looking.

Ben could read the way a leaf had been broken where a creature had strode past, and he knew how long a vine had been climbing by how it gripped a tree, but when it came to the symbols men had invented to give their voices life that lasted when the sound had long faded, he let his companion do the talking.

( “It says ‘Liberty’” ), she told Ben.

They were standing in front of a tall iron pole and looking up at an arrow that turned with the wind.

( “It says here” ), Daisy said, now reading an inscription that lay beneath, ( “That it is the fifth of its kind — the English tore it down once twice and yet again — and still the Sons put it —” )

( “It wasn’t iron then” ), Ben said cryptically, looking at the letters above.

( “Nineteen twenty one was when they put this one up” ), Daisy replied, still reading the paragraph at the ground. ( “So — seventy-three years —” )

( “It was seventy-four” ), he quickly corrected.

Daisy did not know why he said that, but she knew that the place was thick with spirit, and when they were in places where the living things had been made to bear what they should never have been made to bear, Ben heard what she could not. And then sometimes he was a Conduit, and she knew she did not understand, but she thought she might someday, so she listened and remembered and took it with her.

She had brought him here because she thought the cars and cement and chatter had made him tired, but she saw that he did not want to rest because he wanted to keep going.

( “Have you ever noticed how the wolf looks at his kin and can speak with his eyes while his mouth remains still” )

She was still young in her memory, but she was then, as always, a quick study.

( “I’ve never seen a wolf” ), she admitted. ( “We had dogs, and cows; pigs, and cats and —” )

( “The dogs can, but they look up more than they look out” ), he said.

( “What about the cats” ), she asked.

( “Some of them feel the wind in their fur when they chase the vole — others are too tired to hunt and sleep by a conjured fire, but even they retreat to Dream” )

( “The speech is in the twitch of a whisker — the turn of a tail” ), he told her. ( “You will learn it too” )

And he added, humbly, ( “And you will realize that you never learned anything from me because it was already in your heart” )

( “What if I want to get you something for your birthday” ), she asked. ( “And what if I don’t want you to know what it is” )

He smiled when he looked at her and said, ( “What could you get for me that I don’t already have” )

There were still things on the island that grew from soil and Sun. When the smog left ash in his nostrils, he tried to find what had not yet been burnt. In some corners there were bags of refuse, and still other things that had been discarded lay on the sidewalk in plain sight.

What the people didn’t want, he knew, would feed the skittering and crawling creatures that hid from the daylight. Where there was more than was needed, there would those arrive with open mouths and desperate hands.

Daisy had never been here before, so he let her find the way. She had a sense of what she was looking for, and though it had been many long years, he knew she would never make a wrong step.

She told him the place was called Washington Square Park, and that didn’t mean much to him, but he remembered the sound because what he would have said instead wouldn’t have meant anything to most anyone else.

The people were many, and they were doing all kinds of things that seemed familiar. The littlest ones were bouncing about like tiny deer, and the ones who were larger still had put machines below their feet so that they could move even faster. The biggest and oldest were burning things that made them remember what it was like to be young and forget what it was like to be old and altogether the place was, in that way, not very different from how it had been.

At one place in the park, there was a very old elm, and they waited for a while and watched it, and while they did that, there weren’t as many people around because they were occupied with other things.

( “This tree — it reminds me of someone” ), Daisy said, and she was smiling because she knew he knew who she was talking about.

Ben was lost in Memoria, and when he was lost in those paths, he often misread what she said to him, and his response was somewhat flat.

( “I don’t see the resemblance” )

( “It’s Grandfather” ), she said, and he felt immediately embarrassed to have her say that.

( “I did not know what I was saying when I said that” ), Ben admitted sheepishly. ( “I do not say that anymore and I wish you wouldn’t either” )

( “You only said that then because you were young and you knew the ones who had seen the rise and fall of many Suns were called Grandmother — And because you had never known a Man to live so long, you said that” )

He liked it when she repeated his stories back to him and tried to soothe him because sometimes it worked, and he was just silent to hear what she would say next.

( “I am sure the honor you intended was the one that was received” )

Sometimes it was hard for Ben to remember the things he’d learned long ago, but that wasn’t to say he ever forgot.

For a long time, before he knew Daisy, before he knew how to find what he needed in the Wild That Gives, the oldest and wisest of the mothers taught him how to make the Dreamcatcher.

And he could not anymore shape the exact story she had told or the pictures she had drawn or the pigments she had chosen, but what little he could understand of the old tongue was something he thought about often, because he wanted to carry on what they would have wanted him to carry on.

The Dreamcatcher was medicine, he knew. And medicine was like any tool — a knife could make a serving of food nourishing, and it could slit a throat.

And the medicine was valuable not because it delayed death, because there were many things that could do that. The Dreamcatcher was valuable because it captured the things that frightened men and made them believe that they were better off dead.

Once it had not been so difficult to find the things he needed to make the Dreamcatcher. Each one was different, and when one broke, he used the old to make the new. That was how he had been taught. When the threads became weak from holding the Dream, the ones that remained were carefully cut and woven with what was supple and young from the wild places.

But it was becoming more and more difficult to find the things that grew because they had been brought by birds instead of by men.

And he could not make another Dreamcatcher because they were a lineage, and, some twenty-four years ago, that lineage had been broken.

Ben knew the Sphere Who Gave The Light was one thing, and She Who Would Not Turn Her Face was another. But she reflected that light when she could, and she was always reflecting even if that light scattered away from the Earth below.

And the people of Earth took it for granted that they had one Moon, and their Moon looked the same size as their Sun, and when the two danced in the sky, the oceans danced with them and the creatures sang but did not know why they were singing. Some marked some twenty-nine or thirty days between the darkest shadows, and a few paid attention but most didn’t.

And still some of those shadows were different, and if a man stood beneath the Moon while the Sun was hidden behind, most of the starlight was hidden, but some still went around and through the Moon, and when that happened, as seldom as it was, the creatures below were different for a while.

There were things Ben felt he should have done. Maybe he should have kept the medicine under lock and key, though he hated to be untrusting. And maybe he should have kept the Dreamcatcher away from the people, but he hated to do that because the people were of the Earth like the old mothers were of the Earth, like the vines and threads and beads were of the Earth and he did not like to separate those things or keep secrets.

But maybe, if Ben had made different choices, he would not be chasing after the Dreamcatcher because he would still have it, because he would not have been stolen from in those quiet moments when the sunlight curved around the Earth’s sister and some of it went through.

When on that day the Moon entered the realm of the Sun, he was one man, and when it left, he was different.

Ben found something fresh in the moving wind and was glad, so they stood for a while and looked at the tree and its darkening leaves, and then they moved on.

( “I’m sorry” ), he said to his companion. ( “The tree is not what we came here to see” )

Daisy did not laugh, exactly, because laughter was a sound that could not move through their minds because it could only be dispersed in air, but he knew she was at ease because she paused a moment before trying to comfort him.

( “Maybe not, but it’s exactly what we needed to find” )

They were walking, and those that were native to the city and those that weren’t ran around them and past them but never through them because they walked at a pace that only they understood.

( “So many bright colors” ), he remarked of his surroundings. ( “The children of Earth make so much noise” )

Daisy let his judgment percolate, and then she added, ( “The ones who aren’t human make a lot of noise too” )

Ben remembered when the plain had been free and the animals ran from place to place underneath the warm Yellow Sun. And he remembered when the men came and hollowed out the Earth and severed the tree from the root and laid their corpses in criss-crosses that went from East to West. And he did not yet mourn, because he thought there was something good in the many eyes seeing something they had not seen before and finding things they had not yet found.

But he knew it was one thing to wander, and still another to conquer and pillage. And when he felt the empty spaces of the Earth across the wide ocean and knew the men were making a new kind of war, he knew he had to go and see what he could do.

Daisy had come with him, and he’d been glad for it, because she was a bit of light that would not go out. The people were fashioning the metals into weapons, weapons that had never been seen before, so the men fashioned names for them too. And when he heard the words and things they had made, he wept and wept and feared he too might dry up and wither.

When Ben saw his old friend, he had to make an introduction for Daisy because they had never met. Ben was glad to see the old stranger again. Even after a hundred years, the mane of silver hair was exactly the same as it had been, each strand glossy, like curved silk floating as feathers upon shoulders clothed in black. Perhaps the only thing Ben had forgotten was the blue of that gaze; the way the eye that was not obscured by a patch of hand-stitched leather looked out beyond the face. That eye was cerulean in some lights, and grey in others, but it always reflected a world Ben thought he could see but knew he could not.

They exchanged their greetings, and it was good to hear the voice he had not heard in many long years; this one could hear the things they thought at each other, being from an Old World, but they had long ago learned the mistakes of staying silent.

“My friend, countless joys to see you; blessed is the wind that brought us to meet again — but the pleasantries must wait. I despair over an acquaintance who lies at Death’s Door.”

There were many who lay in beds whose bodies and minds and souls had been broken. And Ben, too, was in despair because he knew he could not help all of them, and he knew that even as he tried, there would be scars because some things could never be put back together the way they had been.

“I am afraid,” the ancient one said. “I am afraid he has seen something he cannot name.”

Ben looked into the eye that looked at him, and it was grey, the same grey it had been many years ago when he had stopped saying Grandfather. But he saw the fear, too, and then he was afraid. And he hated to leave the sides of the many he had come to help, but when he saw how the ancient was afraid, he had to brace himself to not also shake with the same fear.

( “Take me to him” )

( “Garibaldi” ), Daisy said, reading the words at the base of a bronze and copper structure. ( “Eighteen —” )

( “It wasn’t like that when it was made” ), Ben said suddenly of the man’s posture. ( “It couldn’t have been and it wasn’t” )

It was harder to hear the metals sing when they had been worked by human hands, but still they resonated when the rest of the world shook.

( “I think it was important that he did not sit atop a horse” ), Daisy said after a while.

( “He is not ready because his sword is not drawn” ), Ben said. ( “And his feet face wrong” )

Daisy did not say anything, because Ben was displeased, so she was quiet until she heard him again.

( “I am ready to go” )

The man at Death’s Door was called by some Sir Davian Winchester, and when Ben saw him and his wild eyes staring empty past the beauty of the world around him, and still more ignorant of the gunshot and bloodshed, he knew he was right to be afraid.

“He’s been fighting with the others,” the ancient said of Davian. “But I think this sickness in him is even older than the wound in his chest.”

Ben knew that what the Mages did was wrong. And he did not know why or how it was wrong, but he thought what the Mages did was not so different from what the day-people did when they tore the soil and carved out the deep Earth and did not fill the emptiness they left behind them.

He knew there were some Mages who felt the reflection from the Watcher Who Would Not Look Away and kept calendars by a name they had given her. And every night the wolf howled and the dog bayed and the Mages called out to her as Mother, but Ben had never once heard her speak.

Once the Mages learned what their words could do, they did not think they needed to listen anymore. So Ben found the Mages noisy because they spoke many words but said very little. And though he did not like the Mages, he saw that what lay before him was no Mage in his fever, and had become again a man.

( “Where will we hide when we get there” ), Daisy asked, reminding him of what was past and what was present.

He kept his mind quiet for a moment, and then laid his thought out for the taking, ( “Where he will not think to look” )

When Ben and Daisy left the park in the shadow of the island’s oldest tree, they headed west and north. The closer he became to the old threads he had woven with younger hands, the more he could feel the strain of the weight they bore, like a spider’s web after a storm at dawn. He could not know what was dissolved in the skyfall, but he knew it would not be long until the net could not hold.

They wandered, getting closer. Ben wandered in Memoria, in Dream, as he walked and remembered this Mage, remembered him from long ago, and remembered his feverish pale skin, covered in sweat, crying in fear of the monsters that crept into his mind when he slept…

( “I do not know if I can reach him” ), Ben had said. ( “The weave is old. It wasn’t made to catch —” ), and Ben’s thought stuttered, because he did not want to let the war into his mind.

“Shh… Shh…” the ancient one said, reaching out a hand with skin the color of a summer glacier. “I fear he will succumb to the wasting, but a few more days can be a new life in the hands of the dying.”

Ben had laid the Dreamcatcher above his head, and the monsters that once bared their teeth became rabbits in the grass; rabbits that ate the green things in the soil. And when the rabbits did war, the Dreamcatcher caught them too, and a good fairy let them dance in the forest and the laughter of little children could be heard.

And for a while, the Mage slept and slept and slept. And when he woke, he smiled with his teeth and bowed deeply and offered items from his coffer. But Ben shook his head because he did not want repayment. The little child with his eyes closed had reawoken and he went back to the battle to try to enforce the Rule and the Law.

But inside him was something that did not come from the Dream. Ben did not know what it was because sometimes it was light and sometimes it was shadow, but it always pierced his eyes when he looked at it. It came from somewhere else, and when he went away, Ben knew there lingered within that Mage something he did not understand and that his medicine could not touch.

He tried to remember that Mage, the Man in the Mage who had needed help. He tried to remember the feverish child yearning for release when the knowledge again rose in his memory of that very Mage committing theft against him. Far from an act of impulse, he’d realized: committed against him when the Yellow Sun was hidden by the shadow of the Watcher; when her face could not be seen.

And he knew the Mage who had been standing and watching and waiting for the curtain of night to fall over the day.

He could feel pity for the Man who was so sick he could not ask and would only take. And he remembered the thing that was so bright it forced his eyes to look at the dark and it hurt when he thought about what he hadn’t seen. And he feared maybe it had been his own doing and weakness, and he had not healed as he should have healed, or protected what he should have protected and maybe he should not have let the sick man roam back into the world.

He was resentful that the Man had taken from him, and somewhere within he wondered if he should have accepted the gifts, but he knew he had not wanted them and could not take them, and he wondered if it had been he who invited the transgression when he dared step into a world where he did not understand the symbols.

But what he could not forget were the innocent. And he feared that the sickness would spread and his tears would be many but still not be enough.

And so, he did not forget that he had been stolen from. He knew that when a secret was in the world, it could no longer be kept, and that was the price of revelation. And he could not forget the face of the Man he did not heal.

The Quiet

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Cedric had always been an uneasy sleeper. Even as a child, he’d never been able to fall asleep in cars, or in chairs, and only very rarely when the Sun was arched high in the blue sky above. He had long been accustomed to waking into a sort of semi-consciousness when his body began to stiffen and ache in the darkness, and when that happened, he rolled over to the other side and tried to go back to sleep. Sometimes this happened several times in a night, even when he had been young, and he had never thought too much of it because he could not know a different way of life.

What he was not accustomed to, however, was waking in the very early morning and feeling very much like he could not, or would not, sleep until sunrise.

And though it was Christmas; Christmas Eve, to be exact, somehow or other, he woke just the same.

When Cedric rose from bed, the first thing he did was slip his bare feet into a pair of slippers. He had dry feet, and they rarely smelled sour, but sometimes they were liable to get cold on the floors that were naked between the rugs.

Both his bedroom and the bathroom had a radiator, but the one in the bathroom was louder. Sometimes when he went in there, it was banging and hissing, and it had taken him a while to realize that the noise was perfectly expected for such a device. The sudden violence from the heater was enough to make him leap from his skin when he wasn’t expecting it, but he’d quickly realized no one else in the house thought a thing of it, so he feigned nonchalance.

It was clanging when he entered the bathroom in the dead of night on the morning of Christmas Eve. He relieved himself, washed his hands, and looked into the mirror.

His first thought was that he needed to shave, and his second thought was that his hair was too long and the ends were making the tops of his ears itchy, and his third thought was that even if he did not do so at this very moment, he needed to clean himself up and make a pass at appearing presentable because he was expected for dinner at Davian’s house in Manhattan.

His fourth thought, and it made him cold to linger upon it, was what Eloise had said yesterday when he’d extended the invitation to her. Cedric hadn’t wanted to go alone, and he’d had a pleasant picture in his mind when he imagined getting a chance to talk to Eloise outside the walls of the Magicademy.

If he tried hard enough, he thought, maybe he could conjure a joke that was funny enough to make her smile.

But instead, when he’d mentioned the Mage’s event, she had made a sort of grimace and scrunched up her nose, though she might have been trying to hide her true feelings. She had been polite, as he saw she always was, and she’d paused and said, ‘no thank you, I’d rather not,’ and while her lips were thin and still pressed into a frown, she had added, “I… don’t really like Davian.”

And when Cedric stepped out of the bathroom door cold, he felt many things but none of them bold. And he thought and he thought and he found his cheeks hotter, so he went back for water without any Who daughter.

All of the children in the house, with Suyon as the only exception, slept on the third floor. There were four bedrooms there, and with the sole addition of the bathroom and a dusty bookshelf at the end of the hall, the floor had little entertainment to offer except a quiet place to breathe.

So when Cedric did not want to remain in his room, he had to enter the hallway and prepare to descend the staircase.

Even in the night when the beds were heavy and still, the house groaned and moved and spoke to itself. The clattering radiators were the most difficult to ignore, but they were not the only ghost in the walls. The floorboards shifted with the weight within and the windows creaked when the wind pushed them in their frames. Every hour, the towering clocks, one on each floor, announced the passage of time. And in the minutes between, when Cedric passed by the grandfathers, there was a pendulum of brass that was moving from left to right and back again and prodding forward with a patient clonk, clonk, clonk from the mechanisms inside.

So when he passed by the clock in dark wood and gold inlay on the third floor, that was the first thing he noticed.

It was stopped.

Cedric didn’t know a damn thing about these sort of clocks but he imagined they needed to be re-wound every so often, and they kept on tick tick ticking because of the energy stored on springs or on suspended weights behind the glass.

And when he saw the clock, the instinct he had was that it had been forgotten. It had been forgotten because its function was quiet and assumed and taken for granted until it could not anymore perform its essential task.

It had stopped, and he looked at the time and read 3:17, which immediately made him think of a day in March, but he knew it was wrong and he shooed it away.

And he realized it was not entirely 3:17 at all because the hand had not quite reached the marking for that minute and had instead run out of energy just short of the line. And he couldn’t get a thing intelligible from it regarding the current time. Had it stopped earlier this morning, or had it been dead yesterday? Could he have gone this long without realizing the halted timekeeper?

Cedric left the clock with his questions lingering. And he tried to find solace in the fact that none of it truly mattered; the orphans woke when they woke regardless of what the clock read.

The stairs were carpeted in deep red with a sort of yellow-gold trimming the edges. Like so much of the ornamentation of the home, it had initially struck him as needlessly ornate, even baroque in its attention to detail. And yet, as the weeks wore on, critique had become consideration, and nothing in the house felt accidental, and even the turned wood of the columns at the side of the staircase felt somehow deserved.

On the second floor of the house, Cedric found the inset in the wall where the candelabra idled while off-duty. Still afraid to probe the rules of his broken universe, he had pocketed the box of matches and brought it with him. He took a single match from the stores and struck it, and it fizzled brilliantly as he brought it toward the wick of the single black-grey candle. The wick had been left carbonized from its last use, and it resisted ignition, but only for a moment before it erupted in flame and cast diffuse light into the hallway.

He had fully intended to step into the library and read in silence for however long it was he had left until sunrise; he even imagined avoiding starting the fireplace in order to minimize announcing his presence, even if it meant sacrificing the boon of ambient heat. It had become a quiet habit this month, and he welcomed the solitude, a blessing he was not often afforded in a house where lived seven others.

But he was not to have that today.

When Cedric stepped into the library, the light from his candle fell upon a canvas suspended on a dark easel. The height of it was such that the top of the canvas was no higher than his own crown, and the bottom, mostly bare, was far below his waist. So when he looked at it, the only part that had been painted atop the sketch beneath hit him on the level, and looked right into him.

Looked — because they were eyes.

Little else had been painted, but the eyes that had been given color had been done so in unrivaled detail. They were eyes, dark, like pools of shadow that opened onto a soul he could not touch, and he knew those eyes because they belonged to the eldest of the Matron’s charges.

Someone had seen Eloise, and someone had brought her eyes into the paint.

Cedric did not know how long he stood there, because when he saw her on the canvas, his body was frozen and he just stood there stupidly. He couldn’t find words to form questions, so he just kept looking, and by the time he realized he’d brought his left hand up to his face, he might have been there for a minute or more before the sudden appearance of the orphan Matron brought him back into the present.

She did not walk past him, rather, she simply appeared when Cedric involuntarily blinked, and she moved with haste he had never before seen from the old woman.

Myrtle raised her hand and tore the canvas from its support, brought up her knee, and broke the canvas in half over her thigh. And when she did that, his contact with the eyes was severed and the fabric was ripped and he knew the paint must have been fresh because the smell of oil went into the air.

Cedric was afraid then. Where he had been staring at the eyes that he thought he knew, he realized that he didn’t know them any better than he knew the old woman, the old woman he had never seen destroy or break or cut anything but a loaf of bread.

And when she left, disappearing as instantly as she had appeared, she took the portrait with her. And even though she was gone, the image of her lingered in his memory. She had looked at him through the side of her face, and the look was black: black like the dress around her neck, black like the coat and gloves she wore when she was outside, and black like her hair had been in that photograph taken all those years ago.

Cedric went back to his room and he thought about showering but decided against it because he still didn’t know the time and he didn’t want to risk seeing anyone on his way out of the house.

He put his clothes on in a hurry, clothes he had never worn before so they were deeply creased. He had a blue shirt, a tie that was a deeper blue still, and khakis that were somewhat paler than he might have preferred. He opened the drawer to his bedside table and took several subway tokens but left the box of matches. He took his wallet, what little use it was, and slipped it into a back pocket that was too small to hold it comfortably. And when he was done mulling over what he could not plan for, he left the house.

The tired Sun rose late at this time of the year, but it always invariably would wake, and likewise it had begun to send streaks of purple and gold across the heavens.

It was majestic, and Cedric noticed it, but kept his eyes drawn downward as he made his way through the streets of Astoria.

It was early yet, and he might have liked some breakfast, but he’d run from the house without so much as pausing to steal a croissant. And he thought it might have been nice to get an egg sandwich once someone opened up, but he didn’t have money for a haircut he desperately needed, let alone change to waste on food he could get for free somewhere else.

At Ditmars, Cedric ascended the stairs and entered the station. He dropped a token into the turnstile and sat inside a train that was waiting. He knew once it started moving, no one would pay him any mind and he could keep going until it was time to get off.

Finally, surrounded by strangers, he was alone.

[ “always crying” ]

He was running, and he was crying. He was in pain, but from what, he could not tell.

[ “quit your bawling” ]

He hadn’t heard that voice in a long time, but when he heard it again, it was a knife with an edge that could split to the bone.

[ “weeping, wailing, carrying on” ]

He was young when he heard it, and he kept running in the dark because he could not find her.

[ “what are you, a sissy” ]

She had said these things to him, and he had tried to hold back his tears because he knew that she was right. And now he was looking for her because he hurt and he was in pain and she was all that he had.

[ “Mom?” ]

That one was his, the question he couldn’t forget. His voice was small, but familiar because it was the one he’d had first.

[ “Mom? Where are you mom” ]

He kept going, and he thought her voice was getting closer.

[ “he always makes so much damn noise” ]

That was when he saw it: the Chair.

The chair that was hers, the one that reclined with the lever on the right side, the one that was plush and a sort of brown-green that couldn’t be named, the one he was never to sit in because it was not for him.

It was faced away from him because he’d walked in through the door. And though it swiveled on its base, it was faced away from him because that was always how it was when he walked into that room.

He reached his hand toward the corner.

[ “you wanna cry, kid?” ]

The sound was not hers, but it wasn’t his either.

[ “i’ll give you something to cry about” ]

His hand was still reaching, so he let it continue. He touched the chair on the far left, and when he pulled, he could move it, and it was something he had never done and his heart fell a little because he did not—

Her legs were sticking out straight because they were short and could not fold over the edge. The hair was a crown of brambles and her eyes were that color, that color that burned because it was unlike the others.

Because they were red.

[ “So, Junior, what’re you going to do?” ]

It was her, it was Friday, and she looked at him with the eyebrows that fell down over her eyes because she was looking right at him.

[ “Are you going to hit me go ahead hit me” ]

And she was looking at him and it hurt to look back.

[ “Go ahead Junior hit me I dare you” ]

He just kept looking and maybe he clenched his teeth but then he wasn’t really sure where he was at all and didn’t know if he had any.

[ “I double-dog dare you hit me just hit me” ]

He was tense then, because he wasn’t moving and was trying to do something else.

[ “Junior?” ]

And because she was sitting and she was eleven or twelve or thirteen or whatever, when he brought his fist up and swung, it was at—

“Hey, kid?”

Cedric’s eyes flew open and he was in a subway car and someone had touched him on the shoulder.

“Kid, you okay?”

Cedric blinked a few times because the light was bright and he realized that he must have been asleep and he felt ashamed and confused.

“I—” he tried to say, the nightmarish afterimage still pressed over what was in front of him.

The man had a kindly face; he was balding, but with a generous moustache, and his face was wrinkled in places.

“Just don’t miss your stop, eh?” he said before standing. “You get some rest tonight. Sounds like you need it.”

He took his newspaper from the seat next to him, folded it once more, and left the train at the next station.

“Compliments of the season!”

Cedric presented himself at Davian’s flat when abject hunger would let him wait no longer. Sometime around midday, he’d realized his stomach had passed beyond the threshold of mere complaint, and he’d felt light-headed when he’d moved around and when the light from the subway car pressed into his eyeballs.

“So good to see you, lad; it’s not yet three—” Davian began, but he was anything but disappointed. “Have you had lunch?”

Cedric had been inside the train system for hours, and at some point, it had become tiresome. And, ad nauseam, he’d recalled that Eloise hadn’t wanted to come, and he’d lamented that reality for hours.

“Sorry I’m so early,” Cedric said, lingering awkwardly on the stoop. “I didn’t want to be late, and I didn’t know how the trains would be running because of the—”

“It’s no matter,” Davian said. “Come in, come in.”

Cedric stepped into Davian’s home and it was quiet; the kind of quiet that meant no one else had arrived first.

“May I take your coat?”

Cedric removed his jacket and gave it to the Mage, who draped it over the staircase railing. He looked toward the sitting room, thick with the smell of evergreen, but did not enter. In the room had been erected a generous pine, and it nearly touched the ceiling, excepting of course an angel who stood atop the highest bough.

“I do hope your commute was not too much trouble.”

Though the tree was decorated with ornaments and bulbs, there were no gifts laid on the skirt around the tree. Cedric turned back to see Davian. His mind was unsteady, and his thoughts momentarily wandered toward the Matron and her sidelong glance, but he tried to steer it back toward the present.

“I—” Cedric said, unsure whether it was appropriate to render his full honesty. “I took the scenic route.”

Davian laughed.

“It is good to be well-traveled,” he said, and his face was cheerful, because he could not hold back the next question.

“Can I offer you a drink?”

When Davian poured plain boiling water into a white mug, Cedric just sat there because he figured the Mage knew what he was doing. And when he let the hot water sit there for a minute or two and then dumped it into the sink, he again remained placid because he knew he didn’t know any better.

Davian, for his part, was watching Cedric while he struggled to bite through an almond biscotti.

“…I assume you’ve never had a hot toddy?” the man asked, and Cedric was disoriented, a little slow to the uptake.

“No,” he said, trying to empty his mouth of the biscuit. “Never.”

“It’s a lovely drink,” Davian said. “Good to keep you warm on a winter’s night.”

“The English have their own interpretations, but the first time I knew it, it was in a warm country very far from this one,” he said, adding dreamily, “How I didn’t know how things were to turn out.” Davian was lost in his imagination, and Cedric knew better than to do much more than acknowledge receipt, so he kept chewing.

“Lemon, clove, honey,” he listed, and as soon as Cedric heard the words, the items were there before them. The honey and clove were in their own wide-mouth glass bowls, and the lemon was whole and reflecting white from the light above where it was not a perfect shade of yellow.

Cedric had a vague fondness for lemons from his years working in the groceries, thinking them sometimes too beautiful to eat, an inclination that required little effort to uphold because he didn’t have a single experience using them in the kitchen. Lemons, like most fruit, were non-essential foodstuff.

Davian, having put the second pot to boil, was looking down at his summoned components. He put his fingertips into the bowl of cloves, chose the first, and then began to ceremoniously stud the lemon one-by-one with the dried flowers.

And this he seemed to enjoy immensely, and he was content to press each spike into the citrus, and when the skin yielded to the pressure, the juice of the fruit was atomized and soon the air smelled bright and clean.

The kettle began to whistle then, so he stopped and removed it from the heat.

He poured amber whiskey into the mug, and then the boiling water hit the wedge of lemon that had been cut and the smell of fruit and spice went even more boldly into the air. And when Davian lifted the cup and gave it to Cedric, it was warm and the liquid was steaming, and he raised it to his lips but he knew to wait until it was drinkable because otherwise he was going to burn his tongue. So he looked past the mug and the drink that was still too hot and he saw the lemon that had a piece removed, only a sixth or so, and the inside was pale where the pulp was exposed.

He blew on the drink as Davian watched, and he noticed how the light reflected off his dark brown eyes and his skin was smooth as it had been on many Christmases before he’d been born.

“Thanks for lunch,” Cedric said, wiping the corners of his mouth with a green napkin. He took a drink of water; water he’d asked for when the toddy had left him feeling uneasy.

“Sorry I couldn’t finish everything.”

Water, more than booze or cookies or chicken, was what he had wanted most of all.

“I’m quite sorry to hear you skipped lunch,” Davian said. “Is Myrtle failing to feed you?”

“No, I—” Cedric said anxiously. “I left before lunch.”

Davian just looked at him.

“I left before breakfast,” Cedric amended, feeling that gaze upon him.

“I didn’t sleep well and when I woke up,” he said, “I—”

He didn’t know what he wanted to say next because he didn’t know where he was going, and he wanted to avoid revisiting what he had felt this morning.

“I just wanted to get out of the house.”

Davian’s face softened and laugh lines erupted unbidden at either side of those eyes. “Yes, well, amidst the innumerable progeny she’s collected, I daresay I don’t blame you.”

“The kids are alright,” Cedric said, though he wasn’t sure he believed it. “It’s not them, it’s me.”

He let his eyes go stray because he was afraid to tell the truth. “I have had a lot of trouble sleeping,” he said. “I’ve been having bad dreams.”

Davian looked at Cedric curiously, and his face was still, quite different from how it usually was, except he raised one eyebrow and searched the boy.

“Bad dreams, eh?” he asked, and then his expression collapsed into its usual confidence, marked with an amused smirk.

“I have a fix for bad dreams; have you on your feet again, right as rain.”

Davian took his left hand and put his finger on his skull to point toward the mind within, as if he were indexing what it held. Cedric found the gesture uncharacteristic, so he squinted his eyes and he thought he blinked too long because the lights seemed to flicker but he knew he had felt that before.

The Mage lowered his hand. “Another time though. It’s Christmas.”

And as he said it, it was heavy, and Cedric was not sure what to make of it.

“Speaking of Christmas!”

Whatever cloud had surrounded the Mage, it evaporated.

“I have a small gift for you.”

Davian left then, and for a brief moment, Cedric was alone. It was strange to be in the room by himself, and he looked at his plate, where he’d left half of what had been offered to him. He took the napkin and folded it, as it had been presented to him, and placed the fork again on top, and soon the Mage reappeared, and in his hand was a small box, squarish, and Davian gave it to him expectantly.

“A token of my affection.”

Cedric took and slowly opened the box.

For a moment, he didn’t say anything. There were two pieces of jewelry laid on an off-white cushion, and they were absolutely encrusted — with diamonds. He didn’t have a clue how he was supposed to wear such a thing.

Cedric looked up at Davian with an apologetic crease between his brows.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and spoke with slow remorse. “I don’t have… pierced ears.”

Davian’s head whipped backward, eyes closed and mouth open in pure joy. He was — laughing. It took him several long seconds to come back to normal, and he put his hand on Cedric’s shoulder.

“Cedric my dear boy!” he said in one breath. “You truly light up my life.”

Cedric’s cheeks were turning scarlet and he was trying to resist frowning so he just looked at the box.

“They’re cufflinks,” Davian cheerfully declared. “You wear them in a shirt that deserves them. And don’t worry yourself at all over the cost; I didn’t pay a penny.”

Guilt pulled him to look down and attempt to render gratitude. Little nubs of silver held each piece in place, and not a single setting lay bare. There were a hundred edges to the inlaid gemstones, and where the surface was clear and flat, the split light showed tiny rainbows dancing and reflecting back on the recipient. Cedric was uncomfortable and returned his attention to the man.

Davian’s eyes were still full of delight as he looked at his charge, but the corners of his mouth fell just enough for Cedric to see something else. And he kept looking.

“They were my father’s.”

Cedric was sure he looked the fool.

“…Thank you…” he said, remembering what he was supposed to do, and he looked again at his half-eaten meal and put the box next to the dinner plate.

He wasn’t even looking at Davian when he offered, “Are you sure you’d not like something else to eat? I don’t want to be a poor host.”

“I… I’m not really very hungry,” Cedric said, and slowly, he took the lid of the box in his hands because he wanted to cover up the scintillating stones.

“Perhaps a little fresh air will settle your stomach,” Davian said, adding genially, “Let’s go for a drive.”

Cedric left the lid where it was and looked at the Mage.

“I have just the excursion in mind. Myrtle has an old house out east she never uses. Sits there and collects dust while the mice scavenge for crumbs. I’ve tried to convince her to spend more time there, have a nice holiday; but alas. Women and their ways.”

Cedric did not say anything.

“Come, let’s take the Wraith,” Davian said. “You can drive.”

He was unsure, and his instinct told him to retreat.

“I’m a little tired, I don’t know if—” he said quietly, but Davian would not have it.

“And I’m a little worse than that,” he announced. “Cup of coffee and you’ll be on your way.”

He added, as an almost muttered aside, “I could use one as well…” and he put his right hand into his pocket and withdrew a set of keys, which he quickly tossed underhand to Cedric.

Cedric, bewildering even himself, caught them.

He looked down at the keys, bright and silvered without a speck of stray dust in the corners.

“But…” he protested, raising his face. “What about—”

He thought he was being polite. He thought he was being considerate and kind and respectful to remind the Mage of something he might have forgotten between the fine wine and hors d’oeuvres. Cedric had imagined tens of recipients of invitations not too unlike the one he’d read last week: Mages, Mortals, and who-knew-what. And he thought they’d all be disappointed to knock on the door that evening and find an empty house, but then he saw Davian and the reality hit him like a wall of bricks.

“Yes?”

Cedric was at a table for two.

“Uh,” he said, swallowing the spit pooling in his mouth. “N-nothing.”

Davian lowered his head just slightly to look at Cedric. “Right then,” he replied. “Let’s get going.”

Cedric hadn’t driven a car in months, and he’d never driven anything like Davian’s Wraith.

The purple car was enormous, and the feature that seemed the most exaggerated was the nose in front of the driver. The roof of the cabin extended over his line of sight, so the windshield was far in front of him. The car sputtered and chattered from time to time and the steering wheel was large and thin.

Cedric assumed the car was mostly accurate to however it had been made, save the coat of flashy paint, but then, it was an automatic.

And still some further details couldn’t have possibly been stock, namely the addition of a holographic arrow that floated semi-transparent above the dash, quite obviously the handiwork of a man who had no desire to pull over to the side of the road to unfold a map.

“So how’s life with the old broad treating you?” Davian asked. He was seated in the passenger seat, and he’d set the seat so that he was leaning back at a slight angle, and with a golden flask in one hand, he looked very much to be enjoying a moment of leisure.

Cedric was carefully watching the traffic on the Long Island Expressway.

“It’s going fine,” he said, and he thought about the campfire in the backyard and the marshmallow, but decided instead to remain nonspecific. “The kids have taught me some things.”

But his attempt at humility felt dishonest, so he added, “I’m making progress.”

“Glad to hear it,” Davian said. “There’s little to gain from sitting and waiting for enlightenment to come to you; rather, you must reach forward and seize it before it slips from your grasp, lest the opportunity leave you forever.”

“Life is too short for that kind of sloth,” Davian delivered while Cedric sat at the wheel, noticing how strange it was to feel his hands forced so far apart, and though his right hand felt bored and idle, he could not yet justify letting it go slack.

He thought he ought to say something, but Davian was the first to break the silence.

“She doesn’t push the children enough; in part because she has taken in too many, and in part because she has the wrong approach.”

“She’s become soft in her old age,” he said. “She wasn’t like that when I met her.”

Cedric kept driving because that arrow was still pointed ahead.

“The year was 1940, and I remember it clearly. She’d come to do war against the Germans, like so many Americans who fancied themselves our saviors,” Davian recounted. “And she presented herself as Myrtle Soo and though her face had already begun to show her age, she wore no wedding ring and never said a word about where her heart lay.”

“Though she was cagey and private, I took to her immediately, finding her charming and capable, intelligent and cunning; a woman who knew better than to reveal the cards she’d been dealt when there were yet more hands to play. And still she danced around questions about where she had come from and who she’d left behind; always answering supposition with supposition.”

“She worked in potions and poultices, claimed they were more palatable to the soldiers, scared them less, left them less likely to condemn our feats as works of the Devil below.”

“And many refused her anyway, and some died to things they didn’t have to die to. Quibbling over the interpretation of the source material is good fun when you’re well, but barring that, I’ll save your life first and we can later discuss the barriers between your soul and salvation.”

“Either way,” Davian continued, “it may be a bitter pill to swallow.” And when he gave his claim, Cedric could hear the liquid in the flask slosh around because Davian took another swig.

Cedric was not really enjoying the conversation, but he supposed it was better than the pain of awkward silence.

“She gave me the keys to the house in Riverhead years ago,” Davian said. “After all the years since I’d come here, I thought it meant something to come from her, but I soon realized it meant nothing of the sort because she doesn’t live in the same world as the rest of us.”

“We’ve no business taking as a talisman what is truly a trifle.”

“I believe she keeps a man to look after the place,” he said, changing direction. “But I’m sure he will be no trouble.”

Davian took a breathy pause, and then added, “He wouldn’t, because it’s Christmas.”

And Cedric kept quiet for a while because he didn’t have anything to add. Davian went quiet too, and Cedric thought he was just looking out the window or perhaps morose about his time on the battlefield long ago, but when he looked to his right, he found the Mage was asleep.

So Cedric looked back to the road and he kept following the little arrow that pointed far and away from the darkly-bricked house in Queens.

Weird

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 00:00:00 -0400

“Did you bring these in the house?”

Cedric was tired, and his head was hung low and he was looking at the surface of the island in the center of the kitchen. Several of the children were rummaging through the cabinets looking for sweets after dinner, but he was not interested. He was sitting on one of the stools wondering when it would be appropriate to go back to his room. He had been waking up very early in the morning for several days in a row, unable to get back to sleep, so by the time the sun had set, he was very tired and he did not feel at all himself.

“Cedric?”

“Huh?” Cedric snapped to attention when it was apparent that Friday had been directing her question to him. Only half her face was visible, but he did see her roll her eyes.

“Was it you who brought these into the house?” she asked again.

In her right hand, she held a bag that was printed upon in several blocks of bright color. Through transparent windows of plastic, he recognized the contents.

It was a bag of marshmallows.

“Davian bought those,” Cedric said wearily, and lowered his head again.

“…Disgusting,” she said, and turned and threw the bag back into the cupboard and said again, “Absolutely disgusting.”

“Hey, gimme those!” Elmer called out. Cedric was looking down again and settled a little further into the cushion of his chair, exhausted.

“I like them! They’re tasty!” Elmer said.

Friday removed the bag from the shelf and Cedric could hear the material wrinkle as she squeezed it. She tossed it toward Elmer. “Yuck. Not even food,” she said with disdain. “All yours.”

Elmer opened the bag and put one in his mouth and bit down on the soft, sugary sweet. His mouth was closed, but Cedric could hear him chew.

“Hey, can I have one?” Owen asked, walking behind Cedric and toward Elmer. “They’re alright.”

Myrtle came in too, and Cedric knew because she did not walk at all like the others. Cedric was thinking about sleep and he did not immediately look up. She probably stood there for a moment, watching the children make a fuss, but Cedric had begun to doze and was paying little attention to the passage of time.

“Cedric?” she asked him.

He raised his neck a little, but mostly just turned his face toward the sound of her voice. “Yeah…?”

“You received a letter,” she said, and laid it on the countertop and pushed it into his field of view.

15th December, 1992

My dear Cedric,

I trust this missive finds you in tolerable spirits and your lodging has been proving to your satisfaction. Mrs. Marscapone informs me that you have been applying yourself with admirable diligence to your studies, though I must confess I take such reports with the customary grain of salt, knowing her time and resources must be stretched quite thin over the full house.

It is my very great pleasure to extend to you an invitation to spend Christmas Eve in my company. I shall be receiving a small gathering of acquaintances — nothing grand, mind you; merely a handful of the more tolerable specimens one accumulates over the years — and I should be most gratified by the addition of your good self to the company. I should also immensely enjoy to hear about your academic pursuits personally, ‘straight from the horse’s mouth’ as I’ve heard some say. Gossip and hearsay belong to the realm of lesser gentlemen.

Dinner will begin promptly at eight, though I rather hope you will arrive somewhat in advance of that hour, as I find the prelude to such occasions infinitely more agreeable than the events themselves.

Should Miss Eloise wish to accompany you, she would of course be most warmly received. I am given to understand the two of you have struck up something of a friendship, and I should be sorry indeed to deprive her of an evening’s diversion on account of a mere oversight in correspondence. Do convey my regards.

I shall not press you for a reply by return of post, as I know how these things are at your age: one’s elders may become tiresomely earnest when chasing after a youth’s scant time. Send word when it suits you, or, failing that, simply present yourself at the door on the appointed evening.

Yours, with the warmest regards the season permits,

P.S. Do dress for dinner. The season warrants a certain degree of ceremony and I find I am increasingly intolerant of its absence.

“Hey, they’re actually pretty good,” Owen said with a mouth half-full with the fluffy treat.

Cedric read the letter again, this time lingering on certain words. It was undoubtedly English, and he could read it, but as for the rest of it—

Suyon came in and reached her open hands up toward Elmer and he handed her one of the marshmallows. It was too big for her mouth, so she took a bite to divide the thing in two. It was lightly shiny where it had been severed and she held the second half in her hands while she chewed.

He looked down at the Mage’s ornamented handwriting in blue and the lines were uneven in places, and he wondered idly about the writing implement that had been used to pen the letter, and whether he’d been drinking more of that fancy wine. But it made him faintly dizzy to trace the ink and so his mind wandered.

Cedric looked up from the note to search for Myrtle, but she must have slipped out of the kitchen while he’d been reading. Zahra entered instead.

“What’re you all eating?” she asked with her customary affect. It was dry, but there was a subtle warmth that Cedric wondered if he had imagined.

“Maws-meh-woes,” Elmer said with his mouth full.

It occurred to him how very strange was the scene, and part of him was drifting and floating above it. Cedric could smell the thickened sugar that had become white, and he could hear them mashing the things in their mouths and he thought he could smell the syrup becoming moistened by their eating. He looked at Suyon, who had just popped the second half into her mouth.

He thought he should go to bed, but at the same time, he saw them through the corner of his eye and tried to ground himself—

“Y’know,” Cedric said with effort. “They’re even better if you toast them.”

The yard behind and around the Magicademy was simultaneously kept while also being lost to time. The story told was that over the years, parcels of the original land had been sold off when money had been tight, and where structures and flower beds were now found were not necessarily where they had originally sat. But there was no clear marker where decades became a century, so the orphans donned their coats and strode upon the mud and hibernating grass.

Zahra led Cedric to a shed partially done in panes of glass. Where the glass had apparently broken, it had been patched with large slabs of wood, but the door was still intact and it creaked on its rusted hinges when they opened it. The whole thing had a musty warmth that was unexpected for the month of December and it felt to Cedric one of the most ordinary things he’d encountered on the plot since he’d arrived two months ago. He saw that the Mages did not spend much time where they could be spied upon by the rest of the world.

“I really don’t know what’s in here,” Zahra said. “So I hope I’m not sending you on a fool’s errand.”

Cedric took to his self-appointed task with unexpected vigor, moving aside pieces of cut timber and gardening supplies that felt as aged as the old woman herself. His response to Zahra was a little muffled amongst the bric-a-brac.

“We need a big steel bowl or something, I don’t know,” Cedric said, disturbing the dust of decades as he rifled through the shed. “Something we can use to make a big bonfire; a firepit. I know it’s winter but I still don’t think it’s a good idea to try to do this on the ground.”

Zahra was just standing there watching, arms folded against the chill, and then she remarked with a dubious tone, “We can’t just do this inside?”

He let her skepticism sit for a beat and then responded with a quip, “Now where’s the fun in that?”

She let him continue digging in the fading light, and soon he located an enormous basin, round and deep such that it formed a near-half sphere with a lip around the top. There wasn’t a seam that indicated it had ever been welded, and the process by which it had been made remained a mystery. It did, however, have two large handles on either side that had been wrapped in wood.

“This’ll do great,” he declared, and put the thing outside the shed.

Cedric continued to search around the backyard and he found several spare bricks, seven if he’d been counting, and laid them in a regular shape to hold the enormous bowl in place. He wiggled it back and forth to test the structure and then filled it with wood: some that had come from the grocery store, and some that had been stored beneath a small shelter outside. Zahra, Owen, Suyon, and Elmer had all crowded around the thing while Cedric was bringing down chairs from the back porch. He realized that there were only four, so he gave one to each of them and took the largest log to be a seat for himself.

He sent Owen and Suyon to find sticks fallen from the tree on the second lot and he sent Elmer back inside to fetch the bag of marshmallows. Zahra had sat on one of the chairs, and when Cedric sat down on the log, he was almost on the ground looking up at her, and his knees were pointing up at the grey sky so she raised her eyebrows and looked at him curiously.

“You sure you’re okay with that?” she asked with one eyebrow arched. “That can’t be comfortable.”

Cedric shrugged and his face was relaxed.

“Doesn’t bother me.”

The sticks Owen and Suyon offered were a little wet from the snowmelt, and if he’d still had his buck knife, he’d have used it to clean off the wet bark and expose the smooth part beneath. But his buck knife was long gone so he used his nails to scrape off what he could and then gave to the other four their implement.

Suyon saw what he had done and started to pick at her own.

They each took one of the large marshmallows, and, following Cedric, pierced it at one end and made to hold it toward the fire Owen had lit. The fire was getting larger as it ate the wood, and the wood cracked noisily when it found a vein of water in the fuel that had been stored near the snow.

Cedric was last to puncture his sweet, but he was the first to hold it into the fire. He held it just where the flames licked the air and were so disperse they were yellowish and almost transparent.

“You catch the thing on fire,” Cedric instructed, watching the fire caress the white treat, “and it quickly cooks the marshmallow.” His feet were on the ground, and he was cold where his jacket did not cover him — except for where the fire was throwing heated air on his face.

“It will get seared on the outside,” he said when the sugar finally caught. He pulled it out and watched it for a while. “And it’ll get molten on the inside.”

When it was warm and toasty, pale brown with tiny bubbles erupting, he breathed on it and put it out. “Everyone likes it different, and it’s all about getting it just the way you like it.”

He looked at the steam coming out of the surface, and remarked, “If you let it go too long, you could burn your mouth, but some people like it when it’s all melty like that. It’s up to you.”

It was not long for the marshmallow to cool in the winter air, and after a moment, he put it in his mouth and ate it and it made him warmer than he was before. They were watching him like a curiosity, but he was inside a memory that was new and bright. He was still clearing his mouth when Owen spoke.

“Can I light it myself?”

Cedric paused for a moment, looking at Owen until he could say something.

“I don’t see why not.”

The central fire was throwing off generous heat and the five of them forgot for a while that the solstice was only days away.

Cedric watched each of them as they looked at their marshmallows and lit them one right after the other. Owen, Zahra, and then Elmer lit their sweets ablaze and doused the flame with the power of their thought. And when it was done to their liking, they ate it and it was gone.

Cedric watched Suyon, too, because he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her work this feat, and in the cold air he forgot to blink and when the fire rose on her stick just as he expected, he found his eyeballs had become a little chilled, so he had to close and reopen them several times.

And then they looked at him. And he looked away, glancing first at the fire, and then at the second marshmallow of the night, on the dark grey stick that was a little crooked in the middle and he knew what they wanted him to do. And he thought he should just give up and not even try because he was done being the fool and the invalid and he was tired of people watching him fall. And he thought back to the house and the magic and about all the tools behind the doors and realized nothing there could help him.

In the deep recesses of his mind, in a place he did not wander often, was a small voice, and when it spoke, it spoke without words and he did not know what he was hearing, much less understand whatever it was trying to say.

[ be brave ]

[ be tough ]

And he was looking at the marshmallow then, while they all were looking at him.

[ be you ]

And when he opened his eyes again, they were all clapping for him.

Cedric found himself in the Cavalier. And it was a good homecoming, and it felt good and warm and happy and all the things he associated with the car that had been his first real taste of freedom.

He did not think about whether it was real or not because somewhere he knew if he inspected it too closely, the whole thing would fall apart. Yes, he knew that the Cavalier had been drafted into service, or perhaps she’d been stripped to her components, and her muffler and catalytic converter and whatever else were strewn against a fence in a bodyshop in Brooklyn or wherever else. Or maybe even… melted.

Somewhere in his mind he knew that, so he tried to look elsewhere so what he had now that felt nice and pleasant didn’t collapse while he had it in his hands.

The steering wheel was what he had now, and it felt good to have his left hand on the top of it, and he had a loose hold on it, letting his fingers grip the leather while the thumb went flat and out or in or whichever way it was going.

And it felt good to put his right hand on the gearshift, and he pressed on the clutch with the other side of his body and everything was balanced and he was going at an easy speed and the engine wasn’t making that sound it did sometimes so he knew he was driving it well and right and just the way he was supposed to.

And it all went like that for a while, and he was very aware of that tan interior and how it felt warm and brown and —

[ toasty ]

Then he looked, because he couldn’t make any other choice, and then he was worried and the path broke.

On the passenger seat were blocks, blocks, blocks he recognized and knew belonging to the little girl with the black hair and big eyes who was sweet and friendly but never said anything. And she didn’t say anything but she also never said anything that hurt either.

[ her name her name what is her name lost her name ]

The blocks were falling on the seat and sometimes they were falling on the floor but he must stop them from falling on the floor so he leaned over the center of the car to stop them from falling but when he did that he knew he wasn’t watching the road and he knew he absolutely needed to watch the road because if he didn’t watch the road, if he neglected to hold the wheel and watch the road—

[ CAR ]

And when he didn’t catch the blocks and he didn’t watch the road either, he blinked and the Cavalier was gone.

He thought he woke up, because he didn’t have the car anymore and it was gone, but when he looked around he knew he hadn’t woken up because he was flying.

[ flying? ]

Cedric was not used to flying or even imagining that he was flying because he knew he couldn’t so it was easier just not to think about it because if you don’t think about the things you can’t do or the things you don’t have then you don’t have to think about the things you don’t have,

So it was strange for him to find himself flying, but something, too, was not so strange at all and he very much felt like he knew what he was doing but that was probably just imagination too but he let himself keep going because it was a simple thing to do and he found he very much enjoyed the view from above and he did not find it difficult to do so he kept doing it and he was alone until he very much realized that he was not.

That was when he looked at the ground and saw the thing he did not expect to see because he was not used to seeing things that were not real.

When he dreamt things, he saw places that he had been to and people he had known and sometimes they were backwards or diagonal or criss-cross but still the little pieces that made them them were laid in an order such that he always knew what he was looking at even if the colors were inverted. But when he looked at the ground and saw what was chasing him, he did not know where it had come from.

[ zombie ]

Shambling, scrambling, lumbering were the corpses and where he had once felt he was flying perfectly, suddenly it was not fast enough because he was afraid. And he had not realized before that he was in a jungle but he was in a jungle and there were tens of the corpses coming out from amongst the ferns and leaves and trees. And the further Cedric went and the faster he tried to go, the more of them appeared as he realized he didn’t know how to go any faster than he was already going and maybe there were a hundred but he couldn’t look back to know.

They were a mass of tangled bodies that covered every exposed inch of the ground and he kept going because he thought if he kept going and flying then he could eventually get away but then one of the rotting corpses did something different than just running through the path and like a thing made of rubber instead of flesh, it flung itself into the air and hurled itself at Cedric.

And Cedric dodged the first, and the second, but then more of them got the idea that they could do that so they were launching themselves into the air and when Cedric moved in one direction, it was like sliding on ice and his flying was hard to stop and he moved closer to one as he moved away from another and it became ever more difficult to evade them until he failed altogether.

The skeleton from which the flesh was suspended wrapped itself around Cedric’s leg and when it did this, he was heavier than he had been before and he found he could not fly like he had been doing before easily or easily enough so he became afraid and he tried to pry the body away from his own and become free again but the more he struggled, the more difficult it became and his desperation became rage.

He was encumbered, and his anger made it hard for him to focus and he hated them and he hated their grasping and in his singular thought to wrest himself back from the clutching undead, he let another, and another mass of flesh catch him in the air and scrape at his body. And those fingers were like claws and they dug into him and something inside faltered because he thought this was the end and he had lost and the dead things that walked and crawled and would not stop and tore into his body and tried to take it from him had won and when he thought they had won, the voice spoke because the despair had become rage and when the rage made his insides quake, the nails they were using to crawl on him had not severed the throat and he knew the throat was all he had left and then he heard

[ “Faggot!” ]

And when he heard it he wasn’t sure where it had come from because he could not notice the direction so much as he felt that word like glass he had swallowed that had become lodged in his throat and then the rage disappeared because the bodies did too and Cedric was completely alone in the darkness. The jungle was gone and the zombies were gone and the air was silent and he wanted to feel relief but he could still hear the echo of that shattering and even if the air had stopped and become still and black he could still hear that word.

And he knew the shard was his own.

He only saw darkness but he knew he was still flying and when he looked around he did not know why but he felt there was something in the darkness that he could not see but he knew that he had been heard and he had not been alone because he had been seen and the darkness that was not nothing but was something and very much something had heard the word just like he had.

He was afraid. But the darkness was reflecting, and pleased.

Light in furious packets struck the surface of his eye and the pupils became constricted in an effort to reduce the incident pain but still photons of every color went through and hit the retina and he knew he was up.

Cedric knew he was up, and so, he was awake.

He was becoming not so ill-adjusted to rising before the winter Sun. It had been days that he’d been waking like this in the early hours, and where at first he had felt disoriented and uncertain of the time, curious of the hours and the minutes like reflex, slowly the routine was becoming him, and he was becoming it.

When he was no longer tired, he rose, and when that happened, he rose into a quiet house with doors shut where even the mice did not expect his footfall. And when the children were asleep in their beds and he was not, he felt warm and glad and satisfied behind a curtain that had fallen on the last show of the evening.

‘Fire,’ he thought, remembering the night before and what had transpired outside.

When he’d needed the act, the act had risen, and they had seen what he had seen and he had shaped the real.

What had once been impossible was no longer that.

As he stirred from slumber and considered the day ahead, he looked at the candle on his bedside table. And the glimmer of something he was not used to feeling stuttered in his heart and he wasn’t sure what it was at first, but then he realized what it was and he let himself feel it.

‘…Hope.’

And he tried to stay in it for a moment longer, but he was still not accustomed to standing still, so his mind changed and he thought he should try to set the wick to flame. And still again he was not used to sitting with his own thoughts, so then he stepped back and resolved that he wasn’t ready to try again because he knew what could happen.

‘Not yet.’

Cedric’s hair was still wet when he left the third floor. And because his hair was still wet, he could smell the shampoo that had left some of its fragrance behind. He had found that he liked to use the bathroom in the early morning because he never found a child in the hallway waiting their turn while draped in a towel. And when he knew there was no one waiting for him to finish up and get out, he could wash himself at a pace that suited him instead of someone else.

The first time he’d taken a shower here, he’d found the scent sharp and flowery and overwhelming. And he thought for a while that he had no other options, so he’d assumed it was just something he had to get used to. Free is free, he had told himself. But then, one moment where, for whatever reason, he hadn’t been rushed, he’d looked around and found a container of another soap that wasn’t already on the shelf and it smelled round and it did not slap him in the face because the shape was full and deep and a little quiet, sort of like wood or pine and yet still unlike any tree he’d ever smelt, and he liked it, so he took it out of the cabinet and used that instead.

Cedric needed a haircut and whenever he passed by a mirror in the old house, he thought he looked rather disheveled and even younger than whatever age he could usually pass for. The summer in Newburgh had been oppressive and when he went to the barber he wanted to save a few bucks so he had them cut his hair shorter than he actually liked it because he wanted to get an extra week or two out of it. And that had served him well, because now it had been months that he’d been in Astoria and he didn’t know where to get a haircut and he didn’t have a dollar to throw at it and he knew he was going to have to ask eventually but it always seemed that if he had waited this long, one more day wasn’t going to make much of a difference.

So when he went downstairs, his hair still smelled like old trees and crushed grass and it hung lower over his forehead than he would have preferred.

Eloise was in the kitchen, and by the looks of it, she had just poured sugar into her tea because he could hear the spoon clinking gently against the sides of the cup and when he came in, she was leaning over the liquid and looking into it and she didn’t look up until he spoke.

“Hey,” he said plainly. “Morning.”

Her head whipped up, seized away from whatever it was that she’d been thinking about, but she seemed to have spent too much energy on that involuntary gesture, and the gaze she returned was foggy, like she was looking through him rather than at him.

“Good morning,” she replied with her best effort, eyes changing somewhat curiously as she considered him.

“…This is getting to be a habit for you, isn’t it?” She smiled when she asked, and her teeth were shiny, but she could only manage to gesture with part of her face and she looked rather tired.

“Yeah…” he said, and brought his hand to the back of his head to seek the safety of his hair, but when he found it was cold and wet and damp, he realized how stupid he looked and he put his hand back down and into his empty pocket. “I’ve been having bad dreams.”

“Oh,” she said, forlorn; voice dropping a little. “Every night?” she asked, looking at him again.

He didn’t like it when she was sad because of him, so he tried to return that half-smile. “Not every night,” he said, shrinking. “Most nights, I guess—”

“Yeah,” Cedric said then, truth leaking out. “More nights than not, but I don’t know; it could be worse.”

He moved fully into the kitchen and made like he was going to sit across from her. “I know they’re not real,” he said. “So even when I have a bad dream, I wake up, and I know it was just a dream, you know?”

He was asking, but she didn’t respond because she was trying to figure out the state of her tea. And when she was stirring the tea to see if the sugar had finally dissolved, he thought he should just keep talking because the silence made him wince.

“Last night was a bit of a doozy though,” he said. “Kind of just…”

He struggled to find words, and she looked at him while he thought, which made him feel cold and he found it more difficult to say whatever it was he wanted to say.

“Just came out of left field. Nightmare, sure, but…”

Her eyes were dark and dilate and looking right at him.

“Worse than that,” he said. “Something… different.”

She blinked, and again she was looking toward him, but he felt her two eyes were converging on a point that was somewhere beyond wherever he was standing. “I—” she said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Cedric was remembering, and he didn’t like what he was thinking about, so he didn’t say anything.

“You’re right that what we see there isn’t real,” Eloise said soothingly. “But the fear—”

She paused for a moment, and then continued her claim when Cedric caught her eye. “The fear we feel when we see those things: that is real.”

Cedric finally sat down.

“Those feelings,” she said, “Our reactions… Just because no one else can see what we see doesn’t mean it’s not important.”

Cedric’s thoughts were a little muddled and he could not look at her, so he averted his eyes and started talking.

“I don’t normally have dreams like that,” he said. “I know lots of people have dreams with monsters or whatever; y’know, dreams that they’re Superman and stuff like that. But that’s not usually my thing.”

“Usually it’s places I’ve been or people I know,” Cedric explained. “Like I’m walking through my memories, and little details might be changed, but I don’t usually find that I completely make stuff up.”

He was trying to figure out what to say, and when something from the past rose into his mind, he chuckled a little, because he did not expect it, and because there were a lot of things adjacent to that memory that were heavy to hold.

He looked toward her, and maybe they saw each other, and maybe they didn’t.

“D’you ever seen Return of the Living Dead?”

She looked at him and searched, and she was quiet for a moment, and then she asked with an awkward smile, “Is that… a movie?”

Cedric looked away and he had the instinct to bring his hand to his hair again, but he tried to resist and instead laughed a little as he descended into his memory.

“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a movie.” He took in air, and his tone changed. “Came out a while ago now I guess; I was a kid at the time.”

She was watching him, but he found it difficult to see her at the same time he was remembering.

“Sixth grade was tough for me,” he said. “New school. I didn’t have a lot of friends.”

She nodded.

“I had one friend, but he was in the eighth grade, so after that year was over, we weren’t going to be going to the same building anymore.”

Her eyes were dark and open in the dim light of the kitchen.

“His dad owned a little movie theater downtown,” Cedric said, and then veered off, raising his hands in defense. “Now, downtown there wasn’t like downtown here, but… anyway—”

“His dad had him work in the theater, y’know, nothing major: taking tickets, sweeping the carpet, shit like that.”

She looked like she was enjoying herself to listen.

“So I used to hang out there and talk to him; guess I was probably a bit of a hanger-on but I thought he was really cool, y’know… part of being twelve, I guess.”

“He used to get me into movies for free,” Cedric said. “I saw a movie or two a week that whole summer.”

“This one, though—” he said, “Scared the living daylights outta me.”

“I dunno what it was, exactly. I’d seen a lot of horror flicks, blood and guts; it wasn’t that exactly. There was just something about that movie, not the gore, but the kids, and the ending—”

He trailed off then, because when he looked at her, he saw that her eyes were glassy like she had no idea what he was talking about and was just humoring him by listening. So he didn’t say anything else and put the memory back on the shelf.

When the air was quiet for a minute, she changed the topic.

“I don’t want to seem like a gossip,” she said, warming to him. “But a little birdie told me about yesterday with the marshmallows.”

His cheeks became a little less pale than they had been before, and he was blushing.

“Yeah, uh, about that—” he started.

“I think it’s great,” she said, beaming. “You don’t have to be modest. I was hoping I could see, because I missed it.”

His heart dropped because he thought of the candle from his room and he wished he’d made a different choice, because the universe was forcing his hand and she was looking at him and her face was bright and cheerful and he couldn’t say no, so he just took a breath and said, “…Sure.”

“Zahra told me,” Eloise said when they were outside. She had taken the bag of marshmallows from the cabinet and they were very nearly gone, but a few still remained behind the plastic.

And then Eloise addressed another matter entirely. “The Matron knows what she’s doing,” she said. “She doesn’t bring anyone here who doesn’t belong.”

Cedric could feel that he was cold on his face, his hands. But beneath his jacket, sweat was leaving his shirt damp, and he hoped that she couldn’t smell his nerves.

The four chairs from yesterday were still there, but they only needed two, and they each sat in a chair, and the chairs shared a side.

“I had a marshmallow the other day,” she relayed. “I’ve had them before, I suppose. But it’s probably been years. We don’t usually have those kinds of things in the house.”

“Davian bought them,” Cedric said, defensively.

“…Oh,” she said. “Okay.”

The wood was burning and Eloise opened the bag of marshmallows but she stopped for a moment and put her nose in the bag and scrunched up her face.

“They smell funny, don’t they?”

Cedric felt strange and he was afraid and his mind was blank just watching her and he forgot to react, so she just shrugged and took one from the bag to give to him.

Her lips parted and she smiled when she was presenting it but when he put his fingers up, she let go because she thought he had it when he didn’t, and the white cylindrical thing fell to the ground.

“Fu—” he said as his gaze fell, stopping himself just short of the thing he didn’t want to say in her company.

He was quick, so he’d already grabbed it from the ground when she said, softly, “No.”

And he looked at her.

“Don’t eat that. Don’t eat things that have been on the ground.”

And it was something new, and something he hadn’t heard before, and though it seemed miles away, the fire was crackling and splitting the wood through the center.

“I’ll give you another one.”

And he was sure for a moment that he didn’t even breathe.

Game & Watch

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 -0400

Cedric was in the sitting room reading a book in front of the fireplace when there came a knock upon the front door. He brought his head up from the lines on the page and looked about himself.

The others were deeply engaged, so he took the liberty to answer the call. The door had no way to look through it, so he took the knob and pulled.

“Cedric, my dear fellow!”

Davian came into the foyer, announcing, “Just the lad I wanted to see!” as Cedric closed the door behind him. He shrugged off his long woolen coat and hung it on the rack.

Still sporting a bright blue necktie, Davian stepped toward the sitting room, supporting himself with one hand on the wooden frame and leaning forward to let his head into the room to observe the ones within. Cedric lingered behind.

Davian found three orphans there, but they were not what he was looking for, so he addressed them. “Afternoon, children; I do hope you’re keeping warm. Is Miss Eloise around?”

Elmer and Owen looked up from the painted marbles on the six-pointed star to spy the guest, but Friday kept her nose in her book. She spoke for them, peering over her nose:

“She’s upstairs.”

“Pity,” he said, and then realized Cedric was still in the entry. He waved his hand in an attempt to usher him inside. “Come, come, Cedric, have a seat.”

Cedric stepped past him into the room where the curtain was peeled back and despite the white-grey clouds, light poured through the window. He stood with his hands on the back of the sofa, but he did not sit.

Davian took a breath and his chest rose, and so too did the silken splash with which he’d adorned himself.

“Gird yourselves and batten down the hatches, children,” he sounded. “There’s a fair bit of snowy weather headed your way.”

“Joy of joys,” Zahra said, having slid down the stairs into the entry without so much as a peep. She moved closer, but took a place inside the doorway, where she leaned against the frame.

“I’m sure it will be no trouble at all, and you have a few hours to be ready,” he said. “But you should be ready.”

Suyon ran in then, scooting around Zahra and running toward the window, where she placed her hands on the sill and stood on her tip-toes to look up at the sky expectantly.

Davian saw her and smiled, and then looked back toward the others. “A roaring nor’easter; and she promises to be a grand one. A foot or more, perhaps two if my senses do not fool me.”

Cedric was a bit puzzled, and he asked, “…A northeaster?”

The mage had a smug look on his face. “My dear boy, this isn’t simply a contraction from the Old Kingdom or a Britishism, if you will.”

“A nor’easter,” he repeated and raised his arms, weaving them around while looking up. “—Is quite the meteorological predicament.”

He looked at Cedric sideways. “I suppose you don’t have these where you come from.”

Cedric looked at Davian, and then saw that the light in the room was becoming dim, and above their heads were clouds laden with water. Davian was looking at his magic. And the air was cold.

“When the wind comes in from the North, it’s acquired a dastardly chill.”

When Davian moved his hands through the air, the breeze surged past them and moved their hair.

He was getting theatrical, and he was enjoying himself. “But when the polar jet stream meets the warm ocean; that is to say: our warm ocean,” he said as the winds began to mix and swirl, “that is when a sort of a cyclone appears, a twisting thing full of ice and snow—”

He raised his hands to intensify the scene, and Cedric looked down at Suyon, who was watching with rapt attention as white flakes began to dance around the room.

“Sleet and hail—”

The girl’s eyes were taking it all in and her mouth was open in a sweet and unsuspecting awe, completely unfazed by the cold. She raised her arms to mimic his gesture, reaching out and toward the ceiling.

Davian, not seeing her, delivered his thesis with dramatic pause, “—And rage.”

And in an instant, the entire storm vanished. The candles returned to normal and the orange blazed in the fireplace, and the temperature returned to what it had been.

“Yes, well,” Davian said. It took a moment, but his face soon wore his usual brightness, and he turned toward the one who’d been watching.

“Can I take you for a drive, Cedric? We can go into town and procure the necessary supplies; make sure you’ve got everything you need should you become snow-bound.”

“Uh…” Cedric said.

He looked at the pile of wood on the floor and said, “Sure,” before turning back to Davian.

“Capital. Let’s get going, then. No time to waste.”

Cedric followed Davian back into the foyer. He stretched the laces and slipped his feet into his shoes, and when he was done, he saw that Davian was holding the door open and the heat was leaking away. Beyond him the antique idled at the curb, and Cedric noticed he’d left it running.

“Is that all you’re wearing?”

But Davian’s suggestion went unheard as Cedric gave another look into the house.

The last thing he saw were the worn soles of Friday’s socks as she ran up the stairs.

When Cedric opened the door of the car, Davian was walking around the elongated nose of the front and approaching the other side. There was a pair of gloves on the seat, and when Davian entered, he picked them up and slipped them on his hands before sitting down.

The gloves bore cloth on the back, off-white: woven so that holes let the skin breathe. And when Davian pulled them over his hands, there was brown leather that covered the palm and the part where his fingers would touch the wheel. It was a curious thing, and it gave Cedric pause, and he just watched the man’s hands for a while, and was quiet.

Davian engaged the motor and threw a glance through the center, and then turned his eyes back to the road.

“Fuel for the fire,” he said, composing a grocery list. “That one’s not so trivial to render from thought.”

Davian looked over again, seeking the boy in the passenger seat and inviting him to join the exercise. “…Anything else you can think of?”

Cedric’s mind was blank for a moment, and he imagined being back in the foundling home, and then the desire solidified and he spat it out before he could hesitate.

“Matches.”

But he quickly realized he’d admitted his handicap, and he looked out the window and wished he’d said nothing.

“Right,” Davian said. He was concentrating on the road, or, at least, pretending. Then he added dreamily, “Be prepared.”

Cedric’s mind was condensing like the darkening clouds above, heavy with the fear of what was to come, and the purring engine was the only noise between them.

“…If these storms are so destructive,” Cedric began after a silence, “Why don’t you make it so it doesn’t form? Or—” he thought, and hypothesized, “You could just make it go somewhere else.”

He wasn’t sure if he liked what he said, but he had to endure it.

“What, a sprightly young man such as yourself doesn’t enjoy a snow day?” Davian asked. “Are you already too old to construct a man in a cap and a carrot nose on Christmas?”

Cedric looked at the road because he didn’t want to respond.

“We can, and do, change what our corner of paradise presents us with,” Davian said. “But when you stack the deck in your favor, the victory is awfully hollow, wouldn’t you say?”

“Isn’t it better when the storm arrives on the day you hadn’t planned on leaving the house? When you get the thing you wanted wrapped with a ribbon beneath the tree without having to say a word?”

Cedric blinked, seeing that Davian’s mood had changed quickly; as if he had completely forgotten the somber moment that came before.

“My brother was home from Eton that month,” he began, and veered into backstory. “Tell me: have you ever heard the phrase ‘the heir and a spare’?”

Davian looked away from the road, and Cedric looked back.

“Yes, that’s the way it was at the Winchester estate. An heir and a spare. And I was the spare.”

Cedric looked at him again, but Davian was watching the road.

“My brother had received a dog from my father that year. Lovely little spaniel: liver and white like all the prettiest ones were. And my father handed it to him and said something about it being the biggest and best bitch in the litter.”

Cedric was still looking at Davian, as he had both hands on the wheel.

“But my brother. My brother. You know, he put up a nice face as we all knew to do, had to do. But I knew what was going on. He smiled at my father and told him ‘thank you father’ as he should have, as he’d been trained to do since we were little children.”

“He was going to call the dog Captain, he told me. He’d told me this years ago, long before he went away to school. He had dreamt of the dog for so long, and when father dropped the little red bitch in his hands—”

Davian sighed and turned left.

“I would have been happy to have a dog at all. But he wanted a boy dog. Nothing else would do.”

He paused. “I didn’t give a damn whether it was a girl dog or a boy dog. I just wanted a dog.”

The light was red, so Davian stopped, and Cedric thought he should have changed the shifter, but there was no shifter to be found.

“The dog ended up getting called Nell. And Nell was a good dog, damn good dog if I do say so myself. And she sat when she was told to sit, and she came to heel whenever my brother said come.”

“It didn’t snow much in England anymore, you see,” Davian said, derailing a bit. “You might be tempted to think, after reading too much about Ebenezer, that winters in England were always covered in a foot of powder.”

Davian used his rearview mirror.

“But that hadn’t been the case for decades. The cold times were long done, and they were the stuff of legend by the time I was a child.”

“Winters in the old houses weren’t like they are now. Fires were in the hearth in each room, and the hallways were cold. We ran from one warmth shuddering, hoping to find another beyond a frigid expanse. When we went to bed, we shut the doors and crawled beneath our blankets and hoped the coal wouldn’t go black before our eyes were closed.”

“I woke on Christmas morning, and I was cold. I opened my eyes and saw the door was open — damn! — the door was open! So I opened my mouth to call for the help, and when I stretched out my legs to get a good position—”

Cedric looked at him, then.

“I felt something pressing at my feet.”

Davian looked at him briefly, but then turned back to the road.

“It was the dog, Cedric. It was Nell, the dog, my brother’s dog.”

Cedric kept watching.

“My brother’s dog had opened the door, pulled the latch; my brother’s dog had refused him and come to me and crawled in my bed. My brother’s spaniel, trained to root out the pheasant from the grass and fetch the weasel from the hole — that was the dog I found curled up at the end of my bed to keep my foot warm.”

Davian used his mirror and moved into the left lane to the sound of the clicker.

“That was when I knew it was going to be a good day, Cedric. Sometimes, you let the weather come to you, and wisdom isn’t to refuse your good fortune.”

Cedric didn’t know quite what to say, but he said something.

“She sounds like a nice dog.”

Davian laughed a little.

“Nell was a good girl, obedient and tame. Loyal and well-bred. Quite ordinary in the best way, if a bit beautiful and easy on the eyes. That’s rather the point of them.”

Davian cut a very peculiar figure at the little grocery store in Queens. Cedric followed him, feeling ill-at-ease, feeling as if everyone there were watching them, and he thought if he turned his back they might point at them and snicker and comment that they did not belong.

But that did not happen.

Davian took a steel shopping cart and, this time still wearing the gloves, pushed it around the store while Cedric followed feeling oddly idle.

He took two bundles of firewood that had been shrink-wrapped in plastic, and the display was left bare behind him. He took items from the bakery, he took lettuces and potatoes and vegetables of several types. He ordered a large pot roast from the butcher and had it wrapped in paper, and several pounds of boneless chicken breast. When he was done filling the cart with foodstuff, they walked down the aisle that didn’t smell like the rest of them. And when he found what he wanted, he took the largest box off the shelf and gave Cedric what he had asked for.

Cedric looked down and saw they read, ‘Waterproof’.

When they got to the register, Cedric watched the man scan the items through the red light and listened to the beep… beep… beep… beep… as each passed through the laser. And the man weighed the greens and counted the onions and did not turn his attention from the task at hand.

He did not say anything until he read out the total, and Cedric held his breath at the strangeness of it all, as if this was where the circus would finally end.

“Nice to see you again, Baron; you look well. That’ll be $444.44.”

Davian smiled and removed a leather wallet from within his coat pocket. He took the gloves from his hands and licked his fingertips so that he could sort through the bills within.

And he paid with perfect change.

After a while, Cedric was left to his own devices. Owen was still in the front room but he was laying on a sofa taking a nap. His face was relaxed and his lips were askew and slightly shiny where the saliva was falling from his mouth.

Cedric took care to make little noise and sat down on the couch in front of the fireplace. The flames were low and just holding on, but even they were subject to whip to either side when the wind came over the vent.

Sometimes, when there was a particularly strong burst, a whistling could be heard from afar.

Cedric had the box he’d been given still in his hands and he turned it over and read the words printed on the label. He wasn’t sure what he expected to find, being well-versed in the technique, but he looked at it anyway because he did not know what else he wanted to do.

Suyon ran in and approached the window, so Cedric raised his eyes and watched her. She looked at the white flakes falling from the sky and emphatically pointed at them and turned back to seek reaction from Eloise, who had trailed her into the room.

Eloise smiled at the girl and nodded. She added gently, “Yes, it’s snowing! Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Suyon went back to observing the weather and Eloise sat on the other end of Cedric’s couch.

“Hi,” she said with an open expression. “How are you doing?”

Cedric looked up at her. “Doing alright.”

“What do you have there?” she asked plainly.

He blushed a little and had the instinct to withdraw. “Oh,” he said, shifting his glance. “Just some… matches.”

He looked at Suyon, but it was not easy, and he felt he could not.

Eloise looked at his hands, and then at him. “Here,” she said. “May I see them? I want to show you a trick.”

He looked at her and tried to put on a good face while reluctantly handing her the large box. The contents jostled and chattered when he released his grip and gave them to her.

“It wasn’t so easy for me either—” she said. “When I first learned.”

She took her thumb and pushed the box open so that visible inside were a hundred or so thick matchsticks. She took one out and he saw that it was covered about halfway with an orange coating, and the top was dipped in black where it was intended to be used.

She used her four fingers to push the cavity closed and then she lowered the end to the side of the box with delicate care until she suddenly struck the match against the rough strip. There was a spark and a fizzing, and the thing was quickly set ablaze.

“Here,” she said, handing him the wood now alight. He accepted it and she removed another from the box.

“One of the things that helped me when I was just starting,” she said, looking at the fire he held, “Was to look at the thing I wanted, and to imagine that I was trying to capture it.”

“I looked at it, and I took it into my mind’s eye, and I really tried to understand the thing I wanted. I felt it, and watched it, and knew it, and—”

She held her new match up, but kept it distanced from his. “Once I understood what the fire was,” she said, “That was the first step to move it somewhere else.”

And Cedric watched as a small flame appeared on her stick. It made no noise; it was not violent; it was a small tiny thing that grew and grew until it was the size it should have been.

There was a shadow cast beneath her eyes by her nose, and she appeared very sweet in the low light and her lips were soft and pink and reassuring.

She closed her eyes and looked down while she shook the stick to douse the flame. “Here, I’ll get another,” she said, and started to fish in the box.

Cedric was watching her, but not the match in his hand, and there was a sudden influx of heat where the fire ate through the wood and started to burn his fingers.

“Ow!” he said, involuntarily throwing the thing from the pain. It fell on the floor, completely blackened.

“Oh, never mind,” she said, looking at the spent match. “We can try again.”

Owen was stirring, and behind him, Cedric could hear the boy bring his mouth closed to remoisten his tongue.

Eloise gave Cedric a dry match, and then she lit another, but this time she held it.

“Just quiet your mind,” she instructed. “Think of nothing but the fire. Watch how it moves, think about the shape it takes, and how sometimes it makes little crackles in the things it burns and—”

Cedric did as he was told and he watched the fire before him. He stared at it and concentrated and saw how it was round where it consumed the chemical, and sharp where the color became pale and he thought sometimes he saw it dance. But he did not understand what exactly she had meant by ‘mind’s eye’ and his thoughts flickered and he realized that if he had been asked to explain how the fire worked, he—

There was a sudden poof of breath and the match went grey and a trail of smoke drifted up into the air.

“Su!” Eloise chided. “That wasn’t very nice!”

Suyon looked at them with a simple expression; she seemed altogether quite satisfied with herself, and then she ran away, and Eloise chased her, calling into the hallway, “We were doing something! You don’t just interrupt people—”

Cedric’s eyes refocused on the room, because they had become a bit crossed from staring at the matches.

“C’mere,” Owen said, evidently having observed what had transpired. He took the box of matches and removed another. “Let me show you how it’s done.”

He sat down where Eloise had been. “It’s not really about the fire,” he said, holding the new match between the two of them. “It’s about you.”

“You look at the match, and you stare real hard,” he said, eyes intent. “And you think about everything that’s ever really pissed you off.”

There was a sizzle, and the thing lit.

“You don’t have to know anything about fire to know what it feels like inside.”

Owen’s hair was astray from where he’d been laying on the pillow. His blue eyes were wild, seeing his miracle.

He turned from Cedric then. “And when you get real good,” he said, toward the fireplace, “You can make the world feel the way you do.”

He made no gesture and the flames that had been quietly licking at the surface of the logs rose and manifested, casting a new wave of yellow and orange into the room.

He was still watching the fire, and said with resolution, “It’s not that hard once you get the hang of it.”

Eloise had Suyon gripped on her ribcage, carrying her beneath her armpits when she reentered the room. She plopped the girl on the floor and released her, and Suyon looked at the freshly dancing flames.

“I wouldn’t worry too much, Cedric,” Eloise said, turning to look at the two on the couch. “It just takes time. You’ll get it.”

But Cedric was watching Suyon, who extended her arms and straightened her elbows in a single motion. Her hands were splayed and her fingers extended and her palms turned toward the fire.

An assertive whump was sent into the room as a thick pile of snow fell from the chimney and muffled the fire. The wood was completely covered in snow as the blaze was instantly snuffed.

“Suyon!!”

Soon, the Sun was falling, and so was the snow. Cedric was not sure he wanted to eat, but he also knew he could not completely abstain, so he took one of the cranberry scones Eloise had made the day before. When he bit into the bread, the pastry was sweet because she’d coated the outside with coarse sugar granules and when the soft yellow bread collapsed in his mouth, there was a little crunch to remind him of what he was eating. The berries had taken in moisture from the dough and become round in the baking, and there were little bits of sour contrast strewn inside the treat.

And when he was done, he didn’t feel much like dinner, so he went upstairs.

The only bedroom on the second floor was Myrtle’s. Aside from that, there was a library, a study, a music room.

The music room was a curious thing, because he was not so sure that any of the orphans played instruments or sang songs. And the room was often dark and because Cedric found himself shirking from having to use the matches, he usually walked right past it.

But tonight, he saw Myrtle at the piano.

She had only one candle there, sitting atop the black instrument, a shining grand piano. And the candle, of black wax, was a squat thing, and if he did not already know it was magical, he might have thought it would extinguish and wink out before he got too close.

Cautiously, he entered the room, and Myrtle’s eyes were drooping and her neck was low and she very much looked like she might have been falling asleep.

“Myrtle?” he said, quietly. “…Are you awake?”

She opened her eyes slowly, but otherwise hardly reacted to the sound of his voice. She was not caught flat-footed; she had not been asleep at all.

“Yes, hello Cedric,” she said. “I hope you’re enjoying the snow.”

It was a strange pleasantry, and he didn’t want to say something untrue, so he looked at her and asked a question instead. “You play piano?”

She looked up at him and her eyes were weary and the candle cast a shadow that made her look very old.

“No,” she said. “No, I don’t play anymore.”

Her face changed, like she was trying to smile, but also like she was thinking of something that made her terribly sad. “I used to play when I was younger, many years ago.”

Cedric looked at her, and she was mournful, and old.

“Let’s not sit in here,” she said. “It’s very dark and my eyes can’t see well in the dark.”

“Let’s recollect in the library.”

Myrtle took a seat at one end of a generous couch, and Cedric took the other. In the library, there was more light, and it was warm from a fire that lingered but would not go out.

“What was all that fuss downstairs? There was quite a lot of noise for a little while. I hope the children were being kind to you.”

Cedric thought for a moment, but what he wanted to say rang out like a bell. “Yes, everything was fine. Everyone’s very nice, just—”

He paused. “…They were trying to teach me how to make fire.”

Her eyes moved, and saw him, and let him speak.

“Well, move it, I guess, not exactly make it. I don’t know. I couldn’t do it. Seems all the rest of them can, and can do it easily. And they showed me how and said—”

“What did they say, Cedric?” she asked, and her words were simple, but direct.

Cedric went the other way. “I—” and he looked away in shame. “Myrtle, you’ve been very kind to me, and I like it here and the kids are nice, and I don’t want to go away, but—”

She listened.

“I’m not really sure I’m a mage at all. They can all do it, and they make it look so easy. And when I see what they can do, I feel somewhere, somehow, that I should be able to do it too. It doesn’t feel strange to me, it feels familiar, and I look at the fire and think I could do it if I tried hard enough, but when they put the match in my hand—”

He trailed off, and became despondent.

“Maybe you made a mistake about me,” he said. “Maybe I’m not really a mage at all.”

Myrtle did something strange then, stranger than all the magic he’d seen that day. And it made him a little warmer than the breeze rising off the ocean, or the friction that had lit a spark in the sulfur, or the color that made embers in the hearth.

She touched him on the shoulder.

“Cedric, I don’t think I’m wrong about you. I’ve been wrong about a lot of things in my life, but this is one thing that I am quite sure about.”

He looked up at her.

“Be patient, Cedric. If you try to go too fast, you’re liable to miss landing right where you need to be.”

She sat back and took her hand and put it on her lap, and he saw that her face had softened, as if she was drifting somewhere else, where the smell of grass was in the air and the wind was making the green leaves rustle against themselves.

“I don’t think I’ve ever told you about how we started the school.”

“No,” Cedric said. “I don’t know.”

She closed her eyes, as if she needed to shut out this world to remember where it was that she had been.

“I was a young thing when I married for love,” she began. “Just a step out of girlhood. People will marry for all sorts of reasons. And maybe it works for them, and maybe it doesn’t. And when we’re young, we don’t always know what we’re doing. We think we’re doing one thing, and we’re actually doing another thing entirely. But I married—”

And she took a breath, “Because I knew he was the death I wanted.”

Cedric felt quite small to hear this.

“My husband had worked as a lawyer for a long time when I met him. One might say he had a silver tongue, but I wouldn’t, because sometimes things don’t sound right on the other side, and I don’t want you to think the wrong thing about him. But my husband had an effortless faculty with words and how to wield them as sword or salve as he saw fit.”

“But the years had not been easy, and he was falling ill. He couldn’t work as much as he had, and he had very little money.”

There was a little glimmer in her eye, then. “But the early times were more than worth their weight in gold.”

Cedric smiled a little bit, because she was too.

“When my father died, I decided to sell the silk business,” she said. “It was hard to get rid everything of he’d tried so hard to create, and it had sustained him since he’d come to America. But I knew I couldn’t do it.”

“I didn’t have my mother’s hand with the needle,” she lamented. “And I didn’t have my father’s gift.”

“When my mother was alive, she made the dresses. And when she died, we sold the silks. My father had a tongue that bloomed lotus flowers. He sold to the East and I sold to the Westerners who spoke in English. As soon as the supply came in, we’d bring it out and put it in the window, and when the people came in, they wanted to touch it with their hands. So when they came in, they felt it folded on the bolt, and if they liked it, they wrapped it around their bodies and admired themselves in the mirror and asked how many dollars it took to bring it home.”

“He was one of the richest men in Chinatown. And when he died, I was one of the richest women in Brooklyn and I wanted for nothing.”

Then she stopped. “Well—” she said. “Almost nothing.”

“My husband and I wanted to help the children who didn’t have a way in the world. In those days,” she recalled, “when your parents died and your aunt couldn’t or wouldn’t take you, you moved into an orphanage and you stayed there and you got fed and washed and learned your letters. And when you came of age, perhaps you became a governess, or perhaps you stayed back to take care of the little children like the older ones had taken care of you.”

“But—” she said, becoming cloudy. “Then the war happened, and I went to help those in need.”

“And when I came back, I was changed, and I wasn’t ready to take care of the children yet.”

“But I waited, and the children came to me,” she said, smiling weakly.

She placed a hand on his that had been curled on his lap. “Just you wait, Cedric. Just be patient.”

And then she withdrew, but her face was calm. “Your magic will come to you.”

“And when it does, you will be glad you waited.”