Bowie spent most of the day as a bird. It was as a bird that he felt the pull toward the building where the one called Anabin was waiting.
He hadn’t meant to smash through the window. He had, in fact, forgotten that windows may be opened, not broken. But once he was inside the room and in the body of a boy again, he’d felt a kind of great calmness. Here was a place where doors opened and windows could be smashed and bodies bled. Pissing, too, was marvelous.
Anabin wanted a birthday present. Bowie felt sure both of these were things he had once been familiar with. Presents were things you made for someone. Out of cloth or carved from wood. Ribbons or even a sharp thing like a knife. You gave someone something because it was pretty or because they had a use for it. Birthdays were for the children of the rich so they knew their birth had value to those around them. Their life had value. There were many days for the living, and some of them belonged to the harvest and some belonged to holy saints. On some days there were feasts. The idea of a birthday drew out these random scraps of knowledge Bowie had once possessed, as if joined each to each like a chain of paste jewels. Even though Bowie was quite certain he had never had a birthday, it made sense the birth of one such as Anabin had been marked. Now Bowie must discover what might be of use to Anabin. He wanted very badly to be allowed to stay. He did not want to go back where he had been.
To this end, he spent some of the evening as a crow, following Anabin. By doing this, Bowie acquired more information about grocery stores and ATMs, if no better sense of what Anabin might desire as a present to mark his birthday. There was even a theater where many people including Anabin sat in pews as if in church and watched a story about people fighting in a style Bowie had never seen before, projected like a shadow play but all in colors and at a monstrous size. There had been words on the screen, too, telling what the people said to each other, though Bowie found that even though the language they spoke was gibberish to him, he could nevertheless understand because he desired to understand it. He could read the words on the screen, too, although before his death he thought perhaps he had not known how to read. Reading was a thing like birthdays. Whereas being a witch had been something that anyone could lay claim to, but most likely it resulted in the church imprisoning you or hanging you by the neck. Bowie, who was now a witch, had seen people hanged by the neck. Sometimes a cut was made in their belly first, and their entrails drawn out. This screen was better entertainment.
Had Anabin known Bowie-as-crow was there, at the back of the theater? No doubt he had.
When the entertainment was ended, Anabin went home, Bowie following. But he did not wish to go into Anabin’s dwelling place. After his experience with the woman and her baby, he preferred to enter no more dwelling places.
He spent some time coasting on the warm currents of air that rose and fell high above Lovesend. There were no doors in the air. He was a nightjar now, plucking insects out of the air. Bats flitted around him, half choir, half dance. The ocean, stretching, creeping, stitched itself to the rotten fabric of the shore, and there was something else as well. The boy whose face he knew. There he was at water’s edge, fumbling with something that reeked of Bogomil. As Bowie watched, he threw the Bogomil thing into the water.
Having done this, he began to make his way along the beach. Bowie did not know who he had been. But this other did. Bowie had seen it in his eyes. And this boy, like Bowie, could do things he shouldn’t. He was turning the weather. Drawing the cold out of the water and from somewhere else, too. He was drawing cold from the moon, pulling it down.
Bowie could almost see how he went about it, like reeling in a net. You could see that this person and the moon were old acquaintances. The moon condescended to do his bidding as he did hers.
Bowie became a boy again, accepting as he did so that these actions were those of a fool. Had he been such a fool when he was alive?
He stood barefoot on the sand in front of the other one, his poor human legs prickling with the cold.
“Who are you?” he said. “Do you know me?”
“Who am I?” the other one repeated. He looked as though Bowie, suddenly appearing, had driven a knife into his side. “Do you know me?” The thing upon his face was a mirror to the thing that Bowie felt.
There was enough moonlight that he could see how much they resembled each other, he and this other one. A name came to him. “Thomas.”
The boy said, “Kristofer?”
“I know that name!” Bowie said. “Am I he?”
Thomas clasped Bowie’s hand in his own. With his other, he turned up Bowie’s face and examined it carefully. The moon was bright enough that Bowie could see the moment the other’s expression changed. He pulled his hand back from Bowie’s as if the touch burned.
“Avelot,” the one called Thomas said.
That name, too, he knew. Grief welled up in him, thick and cold and endless. “Avelot is dead,” Bowie said.
“My brother Kristofer is dead,” Thomas said. His look of astonishment had become something watchful and avid. “And Avelot who killed him stands before me in his shape wearing his face, but I know you by your eyes. Avelot. One blue and one green. For three hundred years I have hunted you. Do you truly not remember yourself?”
Bowie said, “I have been in Bogomil’s realm. There is not much left of what I might have been. When I required a body, this is what Anabin made of me. Bowie was the name I chose for myself. Avelot I may have been, Bowie I am now. What were you and Kristofer to me that I know you when I do not know myself?”
The night was growing colder, a wind beginning to blow. Part of Thomas’s concentration had slipped, Bowie saw. Cold air poured in syrupy currents around them, the sand growing slick as grains of ice congealed beneath Bowie’s bare feet.
Thomas laughed. He shook his head. “All this time,” he said. “I sold myself to the devil so however long it took I might find you and make you render payment for what you did to my brother and me. And all this time I have no doubt Bogomil has made you suffer a thousand times more than ever I would have managed, and now I am to kill you when you do not even remember what you have done.”
“Tell me first what I have done,” Bowie said. “Let me remember.”
“No,” Thomas said. “But I will not kill you while you wear the body of my brother.”
He made a gesture, and Bowie felt how she was now transformed, both slighter and heavier. Poised to change and flee again, only Thomas held her fixed in place.
“God curse you, Avelot,” Thomas said, and raised his hand.
Power collected around them both, squeezing Bowie like a vise. But as she struggled to breathe, Bogomil was suddenly there. He was neither a wolf nor a hare but a man not much taller than Bowie.
“Hold, Thomas,” Bogomil said.
Anabin, too, stood nearby, his back to them. He faced the sea and did not speak.
“It is my right,” Thomas said. “I am the agent of Malo Mogge, and this is the thing she promised me. Shall we bring her here to make a judgment?”
Bogomil looked at where Anabin stood, facing away. He said, “When I realized in this last short while what was about to transpire, I came to your mistress and we had a conversation. It’s been some time since we talked. I’m so very bad at keeping in touch with my friends. Much like Avelot here! But I’m afraid Avelot is once again a candidate in the trial you and she and your brother failed so spectacularly the last time round. We all hope this time she colors within the lines.”
“It is my right to kill her,” Thomas said again.
“Take that up with Malo Mogge,” Bogomil said. “In the meantime, understand I am just as vexed as you. This one did no small amount of mischief to me, brought to nothing all my plans, and then, to add insult to injury, hid under my nose in my own realm in the dark like a flea! All I felt was the slightest itch. Remarkable girl, really.”
He flicked his fingers at Bowie dismissively. “You should go,” he said. “Before your old friend here does something and then Anabin and I must do something, too, and it all gets very boring.”
Bowie (who was Avelot?) found she was free to move again. She became a gull and flew away crying, “Who am I oh who am I I I I—”
When she circled over the shore because she could not help herself, Anabin and Bogomil were both vanished and the one named Thomas stood alone with the tide running over his shoes and back out into the darkness. A sodden black stuffed lamb rolled in and then was carried away in the surge, dragging a rock along with it. All the shore of Little Moon Bay was white with the water that ran down the sand and became the sea again, and whoever Kristofer had once been to anyone, he was dead and a long way from this place.