Lord Maleficit Evervood's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

The raven hopped from the porch rail to the rotted floorboards. Broken glass crunched under his claws. The black cat did not move. Its pale blue eyes tracked him the way a scholar tracks a page. Maleficit had ruled Everwood for a thousand years. He had knelt to nothing. Tonight he stood in a dead man's parlor, wing bleeding, begging a stray. "Speak your need," the cat said. "I will hear it once." "The girl," Maleficit said. "My blood in her veins. I must reach her without the wolf reaching me. I need a shape that will pass the moss line. I need the words of the old ritual. My own memory of it is torn." The cat's tail curled once around its paws. "I know the ritual. I know three shapes that cross her threshold. I will trade for both." "Name your price." "A true name. Yours. The one your mother used before the crown." Maleficit's feathers lifted. A true name was a leash. Given freely, it let the holder call him, bind him, unmake him. He had killed men for whispering it. He had buried it under six centuries of titles. "No." "Then something equal." The cat rose and stepped closer. "A drop of the blood you carry now. One drop. Freely given." Blood. His blood was the ritual's spine. Every drop spent was a rung he could not climb again. And the wound in his wing already leaked into the floorboards. The cat had smelled it from the start. It had asked for what it could already take. Maleficit weighed the offer. The girl. The wolf. The moss line. Without counsel he would circle this ruin until Kane found him. With counsel he might still walk through her door. He stepped onto a warped board and pressed his hurt wing down. A bead of red welled at the broken quill. The red haze around his feathers flared, then thinned. He shook the drop free. It struck the wood and hissed. The cat lowered its head and drew the drop up with its tongue. Something in the room shifted. The air grew colder. The cat's eyes brightened, blue to nearly white. "Now the counsel," Maleficit said. "Now my name," the cat said. "Lucien. You will need it to call me back. And you will call me back. What you gave me was not a fee. It was a tether. You bled into a spirit, old king. I hold a thread of you now." Maleficit lunged. His beak struck floor. The cat was already at the doorway, tail high, unhurried. "Come at dusk tomorrow," Lucien said. "I will teach you the shape that crosses her moss. The price for that will be higher." The cat slipped into the dark. Maleficit stood alone in the ruined cottage, one drop lighter, and bound.