He handed me a neatly wrapped gift. I opened it there, the bonfire shadows dancing around us. It was the skull of a crow, the head maggoted to perfect whiteness, its plague doctor beak still black with keratin.
Something Peter would’ve given me.
“Thank you,” I said, but Sebastian was already walking away.
Alone on the trainto New York the next morning, I texted him:
I’ll always keep your secrets.
He began to type something in return, but the dots soon disappeared.
I remembered my last trip to New York City, eight years before. My cousin Thomas had just turned nine, and I was leading him on his first nightwalk. Uncle Orrin dropped us off at midnight, on the steps of a library larger than the Great House, two stone lions flanking its entrance. Per tradition, we had to visit all four of the family’s city properties by noon the next day.
Walking toward Brooklyn on the dark streets, we were quiet, a little nervous. It was our first trip away from home since Uncle Max’s visit to the woodshed. My own first nightwalk had been guided by slight, doomed Yvonne, and her last screams haunted the city’s squealing brakes, the subway shudders under our feet.
Gradually, though, New York’s scale began to soothe me—the hundreds of fire escapes beckoning to be climbed, the bridge towers brushing clouds as we crossed over to Brooklyn and back.
I made it exciting for Tom, letting him steal our food. We built a small fire in Central Park to ward off the cold, the cliffs of skyscrapers pressing at the edges of the trees. Our only real challenge was the ordinaries worried about a pair of underdressed kids wandering alone.
A tall twelve, I told them I was sixteen and to fuck off.
Our nightwalks taught us that no metropolis was more dangerous than the forests we’d explored as children. The landscape here might have different rules, different threats, but it was easier to be invisible in a city than in the listening, watching wild.
When my train arrived at Penn Station, the early summer afternoon didn’t match my dark memories. New buildings loomed everywhere, their glass sides angling the sun around corners.
I walked down to Garrett’s, my wheeled suitcase rumbling on the ragged sidewalks. He lived on an elbow-shaped street in the West Village, leftover from before Manhattan was a grid. It was one of the Mortons’ original New York properties, and I remembered checking in during my last nightwalk. Waiting on the stoop, Garrett had given Tom a bottle of water and told us to keep moving.
Today, his greeting was equally terse. He opened the door and looked me up and down.
“Only one suitcase,” he said. “Good.”
We wentthrough my clothes first.
“No. No. Definitely not. With the right jacket, maybe.” He pulled out a kilt in blue and yellow tartan. “Color at last! Whose was this?”
“Uncle Merwin’s.” I turned to Aunt Arabella. “Didn’t you wear it, your freshman year?”
Arabella, who was looking on in silence, gave me a fractional nod.
She lived here too, overseeing Garrett’s enterprises. He ran the gallery and its money manipulations, but he’d never killed anyone. A blooded Morton was a necessary presence, even if she was only twenty-five.
“Love the blue,” he said, tossing the kilt on the four-poster bed. “That’s proper vintage.”
I looked at the discards on the floor. “This is all vintage, Garrett.”
“But it’sinherited.” He waved a dismissive hand. “Sedate, moneyed, decorous. It fits together too well, like a family portrait.”
“It is.”
“Butyou—JessicaAnderson—are an impoverished grad student, freshly arrived in New York. Your clothes are from musty thrift stores, rummaged from the castoffs of a small city with a design college.”
“Savannah,” I said. “We discussed this.”
“So your wardrobe has to be charmingly chaotic, a mirror of your as-yet-unformed self. You must appearunfinished.” Garrett hurled more clothes on the floor. “And not like the exquisitely tailored product of a centuries-old murder dynasty.”
I held up Uncle Orrin’s waistcoat. “This?”
“Out. Everything Morton is out. Including your monosyllabic answers.”
