Alexandra
The newspaper said that Edgar Poe died four days later. They called his condition “mysterious,” as he appeared to have been the worse for drink. No one had seen him in days, and the only word he uttered before he slipped into unconsciousness was my name, “Reynolds.”
No one knew it was my name of course, as no one knew that Mr. Poe and I had spoken just before he hurled himself out into the street. The man with the club had fled, and even Mr. Timmons had left the scene rather than be associated in any way with Mr. Poe’s injury. Passersby carried Mr. Poe into Gunnar’s Hall, and I heard from Bess, who mopped floors there, that a doctor friend of his was called and they took him away.
I had moved Mathilda and her daughter that very night rather than risk the return of Mr. Timmons, but he hadn’t come back, and since then, three more women had come and gone on their journey to leave Baltimore and the institution of slavery behind.
Slavery itself would stay with them, I knew, as it had done my mother. She carried it in her posture, in her refusal to meet the eyes of any man who wasn’t my father, and in the quiet timbre of her voice. She froze at every knock on our door and taught me silence in the face of pain so as not to draw attention to us. She also taught me to stand taller than she ever could, and to speak up when she would have been silent. I had not been a slave, but I was a freed slave’s daughter, and I felt the responsibility of it to my soul.
I had other memories of my mother from my childhood – family murmurings in the dark between Mama and Nana, when the child I’d been was meant to be sleeping. Whispers about Descendants and sentences with words like ‘power,’ ‘family,’ and ‘war’ were layered in my memories from the time before I was taken into Grandmother Alexandra’s big house.
Mr. Poe couldn’t know, of course, how impactful his words to me had been. He had not realized that in all my years with Grandmother Alexandra’s books, I’d searched the stories, the myths, the legends, looking for anything that revealed the secrets of the Descendants.
There were stories hinted at in the books, but the more I looked, the less certain I became that they were anything other than whispers in the dark – until the preacher came.
He began with a nighttime prayer group at the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal church up near City Hall, and then, a couple of years before I met Mr. Poe, he brought instrumental music into the Sunday evening service. Not much was known about him until his name began to be whispered by Railroad conductors and at Depots along the line. They called him the Shepherd, and the people he sent north were his flock. The silent birds in my nest began to whisper that he was a Descendant, and that he had power to grant if one were brave enough to seek it.
Immortality, they said.
I did not believe them.
But Mr. Poe claimed he’d known me a century in the future, and then he died before I could ask him how. But the whispers of time travelers and seers, shape-shifters and those who could not die had drifted through Descendant stories like smoke, and here in Baltimore was a man who might be one of them.
It was chilly, that night in October, 1849, when I attended service at Bethel and sang my love of Jesus and prayed for the freedom of my brothers and sisters. The Shepherd was tall and far too handsome, and his skin was light brown or dark white, or maybe red or tan. I thought he could pass as any race he chose, and wondered that he was choosing to live as a man who was only three-fifths of himself in the eyes of the government and barely a man at all in the eyes of the law.
I waited in the shadows outside and saw him draw the collar up on his coat against the cold. When I fell into step next to him, he didn’t look surprised to see me.
“I am sorry I kept you waiting,” he said in a rich baritone with a faint accent that sang with rolling hills, grapevines, and summer heat.
“They say you are a Descendant,” I said, without pausing to think how strange that sounded.
He smiled. “They say you keep the birds of our flock safe in your nest.” He nodded and the smile remained in his voice. “I am a descendant of my mother and her mother before her.”
“Was her name Death? Because that is who they say you are from.”
He might have hitched his step just a little.
“Her name was Elena, and she died long ago.”
I swallowed against unexpected tears. My mother’s name had been Lena, but she called me Alexandra so my grandmother would know me.
“My mother whispered about our Descendant blood, but she is dead now too. If you would teach me, I would learn to use our power to help our people to freedom.”
The Shepherd was quiet a long time, and our stride began to match as we walked toward the river. He sounded thoughtful. “To which Family do you belong?”
“Family?” I asked. “I told you, my mother is dead.”
He looked sideways at me. “Time, Fate, Nature, War, and Death. Which of their Families was hers?”
Something that had been buried between the layers of whispered memories sharpened into focus. “My mother once told me I was a child of War. I thought it was because my father was white.”
“War,” he mused, his voice drifting away in the wind from the river. “Well, that could be useful indeed.” I heard the smile return to his voice.
We continued on in silence, and he seemed to be weighing something in his thoughts.
“What is your name, little bird?” he finally asked as we crossed the street to the building my grandmother had been left by her father.
“Alexandra Reynolds.” I stopped and turned to him, offering my hand to shake.
“Hmm. A small brown wren with the courage of an eagle,” he said, peering at me. “My name is Sebastian Tousi. I shall call you Wren,” he said, “and you must call me Bas.”
I heard the name ‘Ren’ in my mind. It was the name Mr. Poe had called me. I decided that I would be Ren now as I stepped forward into my life.
“Tell me, Bas,” I said as I studied his face, “about the power of Death.”
He was silent a long time, and when he finally spoke, I had the sense there was sadness in his words. “Death,” he said, “is immortal.”
“Is that what you are?” I asked, searching his face for something to fear, but finding nothing.
“I am love.” His smile was very faint, and there was sadness in it. “And I cannot die.”
I turned his words around in my mind, looking at them from every angle.
“What is my power, then? If I come from War, what can I do?”
His silence was thoughtful, and his words carried the weight of a cloak around my shoulders. “Decide what you fight for, and then choose a side. Your power will come with your choice.”
I scowled. “Choice doesn’t seem like much of a power.”
“No?” he asked as his eyebrows rose in challenge. “Tell that to the person with none.”
My skin flushed with embarrassment, but Bas put a finger under my chin and lifted it, so I met his eyes. “When you choose to fight, there will be few who can stand against you.” He burned the words into my mind with his gaze, and I believed him. When he spoke again, he searched my eyes for understanding. “I know little else of your Family’s gifts, lovely Wren, but when you truly come to understand the cost of immortality, it is a gift I can share with you if you choose it.”
The words wound their way into my heart where they twined with Mr. Poe’s plea to save myself, for I would save him, and there they sat, growing wings until they took flight and set me free.