I have two pieces of advice for you, Raven Girl,” says a lush and warbling voice that could be either male or female.
I open my eyes, my tongue parched, my soul famished, and discover two yellow orbs with enormous black pupils peering down at me from overhead. They belong to a face, half-human, half-screech owl—a curious visage with the bone structure of a woman and a fuzzy covering of mottled brown feathers. Two tufts of feathers stick up from her round head, giving the impression of horns.
“One,” says the owl through a pair of small, gold, human-shaped lips, “do not let young Mr. Poe near a bottle ever again. This is vital. Do you understand me?”
I blink but cannot speak.
The owl creature bends closer with a rustle of the feathers at her throat. “That boy sends you into stupefying slumbers every time he sips the juice. It happened even when you were still incubating in the shadows. I’m surprised you don’t remember.”
I sit upright on a mattress that crinkles with hay, discovering myself in a room not much bigger than a shed, furnished with the bed, a washbasin, and a small chest of drawers. Wreathes of dried flowers hang from the bare planks of the walls, and the air carries the hickory wood scent of Moldavia’s kitchen.
“Where am I?” I ask, my pulse drumming in my ears.
“Two,” says the owl, and she smacks the back of my head with an arm swishing with feathers, “move on from this vulnerable, mortal-like stage of yours—now! What were you thinking, prancing around for all to see?”
“I don’t know who you are, but I’m magnificent. I want the world to see me.”
The owl creature scowls and tuts. “You vain, prideful creature. Most of us would never even think of entering this showy form you’ve inhabited. We don’t care about proving how magnificent we are. We simply evolve.”
I cast a look of doubt. “I don’t believe that.”
“Believe it, greedy girl! The pleasure of orchestrating art is all we need to flourish.”
I rub the back of my head and eye this odd, judgmental owl person, who sits on the headboard of the bed in a body the size and the shape of a woman’s. From her neck to her ankles, she’s draped in a thick cloak of feathers that mimics the ragged browns and grays of the barks of trees. Around her neck hangs a necklace strung with small bones, perhaps the femurs of mice.
“Who are you?” I ask.
She stretches her neck. “My artist calls me Morella.”
“Who is your artist?”
She drops down to the pillow, where she sits with her knees pulled to her chest beneath the whoosh of plumage. “My artist is older than yours—far wiser than yours—and she’s terrified for you. She saved you from freezing to death and hid you here in her cabin, so you owe her respect. Most of us hide in the shadows and firelight until we feel the shift.”
The owl again tuts. “This is why you don’t run around pell-mell! You know nothing.”
“What is the shift?”
“The sacred moment when our artists commit themselves to us. When they finally declare, ‘Discouragement be damned!’—and they pledge in their hearts to follow their passions until their dying day. That’s when we evolve into our spiritual form.” She leans closer, her planetary pupils expanding beneath a pair of eyelids with ghostly white lashes. “And then no one can kill us, not even our artists. But by strutting around in this poodle-like stage of pomposity”—she flicks the back of my right wrist—”you’ll be dead within a week.”
Hunger stabs at my stomach. I bend over at the waist and clutch my belly. “I’m starving.”
To my shock, Morella shoves me off the bed.
I land on my back with a thud and a grunt.
“What is the matter with you?” she asks. “I’m speaking to you of matters most urgent.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying. How am I any different than you?”
“Aside from my artist, mortals can’t see me the way you’re seeing me now. They think I’m a simple bird. They only hear my owlish trills, but more importantly, they listen to me speak through my artist’s stories.” Morella crouches down on the floorboards beside me. “And no one can kill me, because I’m fully formed. My artist will forever hear me, feel me, and need me, even when she’s lying on her death bed, gasping her last breaths. That’s how powerful I am. I waited to evolve until she was just as ready as I.”
I snort. “My artist will never be ready. He’s too concerned about the opinions of his damn father. I’m famished!” I roll over on hands and knees and crawl toward the door.
Morella tackles me from behind in a tangle of arms and legs. Elbows clunk against floorboards, and my left cheek smacks wood.
She lodges a knee into my spine. “My artist has taken care of your artist for years,” she says into my right ear, her voice buzzing through my skull and my teeth. “She loves him like a son, even though he’s not her flesh and blood, even though her bondage is barbaric, unnatural, and stifling to the soul. Respect my artist, even if you do not respect your own. She wants you to stay in this room and avoid getting killed until the young gentleman leaves for college. She will feed you stories of graves and ghouls far more delicious than anything Eddy Poe can offer—for her tales are a part of his.”
I stop squirming and go still, intrigued, for I think I know the tales of which she speaks.
Morella loosens her grip and takes her knee off my back. “You are too wild and naïve, Raven Girl. You don’t appreciate what you have.”
“I’m neither a raven nor a girl.”
“You’re obviously meant to evolve into a raven.”
I sit upright and rip a splinter out of my thumb with my teeth. “My artist named me Lenore.”
Morella chuckles. “That’s too pretty for you. You’re the ugliest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Ugliness is beautiful.”
Those golden lips of hers break into a smile, and she smooths down the tufts of feathers sticking up from her head. “Then I must be Helen of Troy.”
I snicker and allow this beauteous, bizarre being to help me to my feet, lulled by a soft trilling in her throat and the clicks of the bones hanging around her neck, which are almost as decadent as my necklace of teeth.
“Will you promise to hide?” she asks, her hand warm around mine. “If you survive, if you do manage to evolve and devote your existence to art, I promise you, you will be able to slip into realms fit for a god. You will roost in a sumptuous world wrought from your artist’s imagination and experience unprecedent spiritual pleasures, of which no mortal has ever dared to dream.”
A small sigh leaves my lips, and I stand up taller. “Is this true?”
“I do not lie, Lenore.” She kisses my cheek, and for the breadth of a second, my blood thrills with the thrum of the ecstasy to come. “Survive this week without dying, and you shall soar forevermore.”
“I’ll hide,” I say, even though my hunger sears.
“Wise choice.” She raises her arms and swallows me up inside her wings.
Within the folds of that earthy cloak, against the sturdiness of Morella’s feathered chest, I hear whispers of stories I remember from the shadows of Eddy’s childhood—stories that a woman with beautiful black skin and a voice like velvet told in front of a kitchen fire—tales of demon visitations and ghosts that grabbed the arms of little boys in graveyards at night, pulling them down into the cold and musty ground. And the music of the children’s screams in the stories strum through my head like a Viennese waltz.