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And of the dead

Harness my magic

Follow my mark

Heed my voice

Be my dark.

My enemies are yours,

Your flight be true

And make this night

One they will rue.

It has been many years since I’ve said this verse—my oldest poem, the one that first carved itself onto my calf as a child, long faded into thin, pink lines. When the words slice themselves anew, it’s like shards of glass cutting into me, pain so deep I can’t help the scream that wrenches from my throat.

But the siphons—they’re screaming too.

I have only once seen what Cavendish and Caldwell become, what they really are in their true form. Surging from my shoulders, they expand till they are larger than a man, wingspans spreading across the hall. They are more vapor than avian now—glittering, terrible Darkness. Nightmares with claws.

And they shred the siphons to ribbons.

I close my eyes, folding my arms over my head. I try to block out the screams. The voices are still familiar, ones I’ve heard in classrooms, laughing in the dining hall, talking with friends in the common room. I’ve unleashed this terror on them.

My curses are controlled, executing one action, one judgment. But my ravens . . . I have no control over them.

The screaming slows and I lift my eyes from my arms. The hall is strewn with bodies, icy siphon blood spilled all over the floor. Death is everywhere. I turn to look at Lonan, pressed into the wall at my back. His shirt is torn and bloody, swaths of raw skin and open wounds exposed to the night air. But he’s breathing.

Cavendish and Caldwell swirl through the air, and when there is nothing left to kill, they ascend to the rafters, perching there, two nightmares the size of gorillas resting on the beams with gleaming eyes peering down at us.

I push myself to my knees. “Come back,” I call to them, my voice cracking from screaming. “You’ve done what you needed. Now stand down.”

“Stand? That’s human talk,” one of them calls—Caldwell. I can hardly tell it’s him in this form, but there are two glimmering eyes, and only one phantom foot is perched on the wooden beam.

Cavendish’s laugh cackles through the hall. “We do not stand. We fly. We terrify.”

I get shakily to my feet. “But you’re done now. You need to be done now.”

“Darling girl, you’ve unleashed us. Don’t regret it now,” Caldwell calls.

This is what I was afraid of.

“What . . . what are they?” Lonan murmurs from where he’s slumped against the wall, eyes fixed on the phantoms above.

I swallow. “My nightmares.”

The things a little girl created when her mother disappeared, when she was left all alone in the terrifying wide world. People think my Darkness, my cursed poetry, my broken heart began when my father died.

But the softness inside me was shattered long before that. My ravens appeared when the nightmares began. When my heart was broken. And before I learned to contain them, before I taught them to sit on my shoulders and minimize their awfulness to snide commentary in my ear, they did terrible things. My mother was gone, and I had more rage and fear than my small body could contain.

I ran away, into the woods to look for her. My father organized a search party. They found me curled into a ball, shivering by the river. They tried to get close, but I would not let them. My mother was coming back. She was coming back. And they were going to take me away. How would she find me if I moved from the spot where she left me? They came too close. I told them not to.

They didn’t listen.

They should have.