All Annie wanted to do was help where she could. This year, that meant finally being trusted with helping deliver orders. To have Ed come along and laugh as he tripped her, making her scatter all that hard work into the dirt, was more than she could stomach.
Carefully dusting off the last paper-wrapped loaf of bread with her gloved fingers, she straightened up. Her mama charged her with a job, and by Blight, she’d do it.
“Why do you let him do that to you?”
“What do you mean?” The bag crinkled as she placed the loaf inside and rolled the top back up, keeping the baked goods from the snow drifting lazily down on their heads.
“Why don’t you make him stop bothering you? I see him doing it at school. He’s very annoying.”
Annie snorted. Climbing to her feet, she replied, “He’s twice my size. If I fought back, he’d beat me to a pulp.”
“He’s beat you?”
Something in Silas’s voice made her look up sharply. The hair rose on her arms and the back of her neck when she looked into his familiar face.
Folks said he was a pretty boy. He took after his healer daddy, with his freckles and his nice smile, but he had his mama’s dark horns and eyes. His chocolate curls fell across his forehead in a way that she envied, since her hair was the same color and about as interesting as under-baked bread. But his good looks didn’t hide the thing that made all those rumors swirl.
Silas was scary.
Shadows crept along his body at all times, more alive than any she’d seen, there was a light in those amber eyes that often seemed unnatural, and, of course, he spoke to ghosts.
The dead sought him out, she heard old folks say, usually followed by a quick prayer to the Merciful One. They lingered around him, attracted to something strange and uncanny in his soul, and that was why his shadows were so different from everyone else’s.
Outside of the clan and in the schoolyard, people said that he was crazy. She didn’t respect it. If they felt a certain way about hisimaginary friends, they ought to say it loud. But they were scared of Silas, so when they smeared Grim’s mud across his name, theywhispered,too afraid to tease him in a louder voice.
And they were wrong about his friends being imaginary. She knew that because she’d seen them. She was one of the very few cousins who dared spend any time with him after dark, when the wraiths came alive.
So when Silas looked at her like that, with that flat, predatory stare as his shadows licked across his face like a hungry snake, she knew enough to be truly afraid.
It was a confusing thing, feeling a deep and instinctive fear of someone she’d shared baths with.
Annie loved her cousin to the bone. They were a loyal sort, demons. Once you got in their hearts, there wasn’t much to be done about it save surrender to it.
But she was afraid all the same.
“Yes,” she whispered, hugging the bag close to her chest. Her own shadows were a nervous flutter beneath her skin, like a second heartbeat. “He corners me on my walk home. Usually he just throws rocks and things, but sometimes he pulls my hair or hits me.”
Silas blinked slowly. “Are you headed back home?”
Brows furrowing, she replied, “Um, after I drop off these orders. Why?”
“Can you take my book bag with you?”
“...Sure, I s’pose,” she agreed. “Why? You stopping somewhere? If you wanna get your parents a Moon Gift, you ought’ve done that already. The corner store’s nearly out of everything good.”
Slipping the strap of his leather bag over her shoulder and carefully adjusting the weight to account for her full arms, he said, “I already got my mama earrings and I made my daddy a pair of bookends.”
When his bag was all settled and she adjusted her grip on the baked goods, she gave him a curious look. “So what are you doing, then?”
Silas gave her one of those smiles that made folks talk about how he wasn’t quite right. “Get on home now, Annie. Tell your folks I said hi, all right?”
Giving a jaunty salute, he turned on his heel and began trotting in the opposite direction of home. Snow caught in his curls and the top curves of his horns as he stuffed his claws in the pockets of his overalls.
Stomach sinking, she called out, “Si, don’t do anything too bad, would you?”
“I never do bad,” he replied, as calm as anything. “I only do just right.”
Annie wasn’t so sure about that, but she didn’t have time to be worrying about what Silas might or might not do. Even if she could’ve stopped him from doing whatever it was he got into the space between his horns, she had deliveries to make.
