I WATCHED THE children silently playing, going through the motions with methodic intent that belied the usual boisterous chaos of youth. A scream sliced the air, and a tawny, pale bird shot like an arrow from the north tower of the hospital. A squirrel near the trees stiffened, its front paws splayed, its body frozen with indecision.
I watched the bird of prey descend. The dead children I had raised stopped their pretend play and turned to watch as well—what I focused on, they focused on. Their living parents, not privy to our connection, followed their offspring’s eyes.
At the very last moment, the squirrel somehow mustered the courage to run; it feinted left then darted right, toward the trees. The bird—an awlspring—changed course, wheeling in the air, heading deeper into the forest. The squirrel zoomed around a tree and the awlspring, so focused on its prey, slammed into the trunk.
We all heard the crunch of its broken neck.
“Stupid bird,” Torva, one of the mothers, muttered, turning away as the tawny feathered body dropped to the forest floor, motionless.
My father used to say much the same thing. Awlsprings were vicious hunters but notoriously myopic. Papa saw two collide in midair once, both so intent on the same prey they had not seen the other.
I strode forward. One by one, my child revenants followed me into the trees, filing behind me as surely as if the awlspring had been a new corpse for me to raise. I felt the revenants inside the hospital drawn to me, but I mentally pushed them back; this would not take long. A few of the parents jogged to catch up with us.
“What is it?” Torva asked. There was fear in her voice. Odd. It was just a bird.
“I have an idea,” I said to no one in particular as I bent and scooped the still-warm body of the awlspring in my hands. My revenants watched me, a dozen childish eyes that knew too well what I planned to do. They expressed fear, too, but unlike Torva it was not painted on their faces, but hidden in the whispers through our mental connection. Unlike Torva, their fears were valid.
I could not experiment on the living; the thought of doing so felt wrong. And I did not want to risk hurting my revenants by experimenting on them. I knew they would let me—they could deny me nothing—but that made it worse, somehow. How could I risk harming someone who trusted me with their soul, someone who I knew so intimately? I had tried to turn my powers on myself, but that . . . I shuddered. Not only had it cost me a piece of my soul, but it had pushed me deeper into the very darkness I did not want to succumb to. That power had felt addicting, but also blinding. No. I couldn’t do that.
But here was a fresh corpse—not human, true, but dead—and perhaps I could learn something from it.
Go play, I ordered the children. Let your living believe the lie.
They returned to the ball and the swings, the maypole and the sandbox. Their parents, comforted by the facade of normalcy, followed.
The dead awlspring was lighter than I’d supposed it would be. The feathers made it deceptively large, but I could feel the thin, bony body through the down. Its head flopped, and I shifted my hand so it looked as if it were sleeping in my grasp. I cradled the bird as I mounted the iron spiral staircase leading to my clock tower.
And behind me every step of the way was Ernesta.
If she were really here, really herself, she would be mourning the dead bird. She loved animals. She’d held a funeral for the barn cat Papa had refused to name. She would have cried at the awlspring’s senseless, sudden death.
As I laid the bird’s body on my worktable, Nessie stepped back into the corner, unblinking, uncaring.
I spread the awlspring’s wings out, exposing its breast.
Animals did not have souls, but they had a life force, which was much the same thing. I shifted my vision as I reached with my shadow hand to touch my crucible. While human life wove like golden light, animal life had a deeper color, more bronze than gold, and the wilder the animal was, the darker the light. This was no pet dog or work animal. The freshly killed awlspring had just a glimmer of dark bronze streaming from its chest.
My hand clenched. I wished I had more books. I should have been able to study necromancy as much as I’d studied medicinal alchemy. But the only texts I had were old and worn, two solitary books that did not answer the questions that shrouded my necromantic curiosity.
I pulled my iron crucible from the chain I wore around my neck, letting the little bead rest in my shadow hand. It was easier to see the darkness swirling in the heart of it. Was that because I had seen it before and knew where to look, or was it because the inky depths were spreading?
I tipped my shadow hand to the side, letting the necromantic crucible fall into the palm of my hand made of flesh. Stretching out the shadow arm, I twined the threads of bronze light from the dead awlspring through my incorporeal fingers, tugging it up.
A human soul had thoughts and memories and something of the essence of the person it emitted from. An animal’s life force was not so clean. Feelings flitted through me, matching what the bird knew—flight, taste, hunger, rest, hunting. This bird lived its life with wings at the ready.
The bronze light dripped through my shadow fingers, leaking down, trying to escape my grasp. I plunged the light into the iron crucible, watching as the threads of it swirled down, spiraling into the dark center.
Cold shot through me like lightning. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Ernesta. I had taken some of the light from my soul and given it to her, and for a moment, she’d woken up. Would the life of a dying bird give her a minute more? Could I somehow channel it through my crucible and into my sister?
The bird’s life force touched the darkness that swirled in the base of my crucible. I could pull it through and raise the bird from the dead, simple enough. Instead, I fed the light of the bird’s soul to the blackness, pushing it toward Ernesta’s soul. The black overflowed from my crucible, spilling toward the bird, filling the little dead body, replacing the light that I had taken.
Like frost spreading on my village’s fishing pond, cold crackled out, fracturing fractals spreading impossibly up and up. The bronze threads of light were no longer wispy like fog, but hard and brittle. And black. The glowing life of the bird seemed to cave in on itself, turning into a nothingness that absorbed warmth and light. As it crackled up out of the crucible it curved around, the edge of it sharp as a blade as it pierced the lifeless body of the awlspring.
Still I pushed the bird’s light through my crucible toward Ernesta, willingly trading what remained of its life for a moment of hers. The bird’s body was now consumed by the black.
One claw twitched.
I straightened, focused on the bird’s body. The other claw moved, then a wing. The darkness didn’t sink into the bird’s skin; it crackled over its corpse. The tawny white spines of the bird’s larger feathers turned black with crimson seeping from the veins.
The bird’s eyes were already onyx beads, but they seemed harder now as the awlspring blinked slowly. It righted itself, the move somehow graceful despite the awkward position in which it had been laid. The claws—now obsidian and serrated—scarred my wooden table.
I did not take my eyes off the bird as I reached for a knife.
The awlspring cocked its head, staring at me. I was connected with every living thing I had raised, but this was different.
Sunlight gleamed off the bird’s feathers, each one razor sharp. Its curved beak could have been made of steel, the tip sharpened more than that of a sword. The awlspring opened its beak in a silent scream, and a forked tongue flicked out.
I glanced behind me. Nessie stood where she always stood, but her face did not seem so impassive as before. Had the experiment been successful? Had the lingering energy within the bird reawakened my sister’s soul? My heart lurched. There was true expression in her eyes.
But it was fear.
I turned around. In that brief moment, the bird had moved silently closer, its talons gripping the edge of my table, the wood cracking from the impossible force. The bird craned its head closer, its onyx eyes boring into me.
I reached out with my connection to the dead for the bird. As before, I sensed only emotions, no concrete thought. But the feeling from the bird was no longer varied and touched by its life. It felt only one thing.
Hunger.
Ravenous, bone-deep starvation. Its only desire was to feed. Its entire being was insatiable.
Entranced, I stared at the blackness that slimed its way through the awlspring’s now razor-edged feathers.
The hunger started to fill me.
The bird clucked, a sound of motherly affection.
My crucible was still in my shadow hand. I lifted it up. The black spiraled at the base, flickers like flame licking at the light. The dark energy was infecting me, corrupting me. I wanted to devour, consume the light, the life, the souls swirling in my crucible, and leave nothing at all behind but the dark.
I licked my lips and tasted copper. Blood smeared my teeth—I had not even realized I was biting my lip so hard.
“No.”
The word was whispered so softly that I almost didn’t hear it through my starved focus. But I knew my sister’s voice.
In my shadow hand was my crucible. A feast beckoned me, begging me to succumb to the darkness and destroy the souls I had so lovingly gathered. They were all right there, in the crucible, strings of light I could devour and be filled with power.
But in my other hand was a knife.
Before I could hesitate, I slammed the knife through the core of the bird, pinning it to the wooden table, acting on instinct more than knowledge. If I had truly raised this bird from the dead, the blade would not kill it. The dead cannot die. But the awlspring’s life energy had burned up in Nessie like oil in a lamp, and now it was nothing but a puppet of the dark, a toy easily broken. I wished I understood more, could do more than simply kill this experiment gone awry.
The thing screeched with an otherworldly scream, its beak opening impossibly wide, its claws spread and grasping, its wings twisting and curling like burned paper, the black gore beneath the blade staining the cracked wood.