The grate was neatly hidden by shadows on the other side of the shop. She pushed it aside and dropped soundlessly into the blackness of the sewer hole, sliding the grate back into place above her head. She knew these tunnels better than anyone, and their darkness and close walls comforted her. She had played in them for as long as she could remember. This one would lead her safely home.
You’re a sewer rat. We should toss you in the fountain, wash off the stink. She angrily brushed away tears as she dropped to the floor and padded silently forward, her eyes already picking out dim shapes from the faint light that filtered down from the grates above. She would not let them get to her, not like this. She had endured the odd looks and jeers most of her life, feeling like she did not belong, and today was no worse than others.
But in the end, it was not the boys’ taunts that stuck with her; she could not get the image of the old man out of her mind, the haunted sound of his voice, and the black-eyed crow peering at her from the gutter as it bent to feed.
Its beak tearing at dead flesh.
Something terrible is coming.
What that might mean she did not know, but she felt its arrival like a foul stench on the wind.
By the time Leah emerged from the sewers and reached her home, the last of the day’s light was bleeding from the sky, and the air had cooled enough to make her shiver. The boys had given up the chase long ago, and she had calmed down enough to begin to question her own sense of doom. Today was like any other; the beggar was a crazy old man, nothing more.
But when she opened the door, her mother was waiting, her eyes holding that glittering edge Leah had come to know and dread. Gillian snatched her arm and yanked her inside. “Where’ve you been, child?” she hissed, shutting the door and throwing the bolt. She looked around as if expecting someone to jump out at them. “Playing in those damned sewer tunnels again? You’re filthy. You can’t go wandering around at night alone!”
“I—I’m sorry,” Leah mumbled. “I was visiting . . . Jonah.” This was the owner of the small shop where they got their eggs and milk; for a moment, Leah was afraid that her mother would realize that she had returned empty-handed, but Gillian didn’t seem to notice. She had always been absentminded, and some in town might even say she was crazy, but her strange ways hadn’t used to feel so unsettling. Lately, though, things had changed. Leah rubbed at her arm where Gillian had gripped her with fingers like iron and thought of the crow again, talons razor-sharp and clutching at raw, reddened flesh.
Gillian cocked her head, listening to something out of sight. She muttered under her breath and pulled Leah farther into the room, backing them away from the door as if waiting for someone to come through it at any moment. “They’re watching,” she said, suddenly dropping to her knees in front of the girl and gripping her arms forcefully with both hands. “They’re everywhere.” Her voice dropped a notch. “They want you, Leah, and if they find you, you’re never coming back from that. Never. Understand?”
The urgency of her pleadings made her sound more pathetic than dangerous, but Leah was frightened, all the same. This was different than the boys outside, but it was no less worrisome.
The air in the room had cooled, and a charge seemed to run through them both. Leah nodded, clenching and unclenching her fists, although she didn’t understand anything at all. Who is watching? Those boys, or someone else?
Gillian shuddered and dropped her hands as if they had been scalded. She stood up, putting a hand to her head, wincing in pain.
“Shut your mouth!” she shouted, whirling, her rage directed not at Leah but at something unseen, unheard. “She’s just a girl. She doesn’t mean for it to happen!”
The chill deepened. Something rattled like plates on a table. Gillian turned back to her, eyes wide and frightened. She grabbed Leah again by the arms and shook her, hard enough for the girl’s teeth to snap together. “Stop that!”
“I—I didn’t—”
“I don’t believe them,” Gillian whispered. “What they’re saying. You’re a good girl, Leah. Aren’t you?”
Leah nodded again, looking around the shabby room with its weathered table and chairs, soot-encrusted fireplace, and threadbare rug, so worn and dirty it had lost all color. There was no help to be had here, nobody to hear her scream. Her tongue probed a raw spot where she’d bitten her cheek. She felt something building within her, as if a strange and unknown part of her had been asleep but had begun to stir, and she thought of the dreams that came to her in the middle of the night of a world that could not be real yet felt as vivid as any place she’d ever seen with her own eyes.
“The dead are restless,” Gillian said. “The demons, ready for blood. They want it, Leah. They bathe in it. They—”
The lantern hanging in the kitchen flared brightly. A bowl tipped off the table and clattered to the floor, puckered green apples rolling across bare wood before coming to rest at their feet. Gillian jumped away from Leah, arms out as if warding off a blow. Then her mouth set in a hard line, and her eyes flashed with anger. She grabbed Leah again and pulled her roughly out of the room and down a short hallway to Leah’s bedroom. “I won’t have that happening in my house, you understand me?” she snapped. “I won’t have it. You stay in here until I say so.”
“Mother, please—” Leah felt tears welling up in her eyes.
“Sometimes I think you’re a demon too,” Gillian whispered, but her eyes were unfocused, and Leah didn’t know whether she was talking to her or to someone else. Then she slammed the door, and Leah heard the bolt slide shut.
Leah rested her head against the cool wood and wiped her tears away. She could hear her mother rattling pots in the kitchen, muttering to herself, but the words were too muffled to make out. She did not know what was going to happen to her. But Gillian did not return. After a while Leah lay down on her bed, curled up on her side, and closed her eyes.
Some hours later, Leah awoke to darkness. The house was silent at first, and she did not know what had made her stir. Through her window the moon was fat and full, a bloated yellow tick hovering above the city’s massive copper domes in a cloudless black sky. She had a vague memory of more unsettling dreams, monsters chasing her through wild lands full of fire and magic. Her mother had warned her about these dreams, saying she must not confuse them with what was real, but the stern voice she used had always made Leah uneasy. Perhaps Gillian was afraid of the madness that was slowly creeping up on her.
Going crazy. That was what was happening to her mother, wasn’t it? Hearing voices, talking about demons and blood and death. Gillian had taken an abrupt turn for the worse, and for the first time, the girl wondered what might happen to her if her mother could not take care of her anymore. She had never known her father, and Gillian refused to talk about him; for all Leah knew, she had been born without one, and no other family had ever come to visit them in Caldeum. She didn’t know much of anything about where she had come from; she knew only of some distant tragedy in her mother’s past that had led them many miles from where they had been, unmoored and alone.
She heard a creak from somewhere down the hall. A faint line of light under her door brightened and then faded again, as if someone was moving around out there with a lantern. She got up and passed silently to the door, pressing her ear against it. Her mother was arguing with herself in a harsh whisper that was getting louder; her creaking steps became faster as she paced back and forth. Again, Leah could feel something building both within her and without, a crackling energy that was so terrifying she could hardly breathe. She shrank away from the door as the light brightened under the crack, climbing up onto the narrow bed, clutching her knees to her chest and rocking.