Raven's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Every night since Raven was born, a shadow stood in her bedroom corner. She was twelve now, and she still knew nothing about it. It came at midnight. It vanished before she could count to ten. She had blue eyes sharp enough to read in the dark, but the shadow gave her nothing to read. Last night she tried a candle. The flame died the moment the shadow appeared. The night before, she tried a mirror. The glass showed only her own black hair and the empty corner. She wrote notes, set clocks, held her breath. Every plan failed the same way. The shadow arrived, stood, and left. Raven decided to ask the one man in Thornwick who might know. Father Vincent had once been an exorcist. Now he lived alone with the shutters closed. Children whispered that he had seen things in bedrooms that made him quit. He opened the door before she knocked. His white hair stuck up. A small cross hung against his black shirt. He looked at her the way a man looks at bad news he expected. "You have the corner-shadow," he said. Not a question. "It won't stay," Raven said. "I can't see what it is." He rubbed his tired eyes. "They never stay. That's how they keep their secret." He almost shut the door. Then he sighed and stepped back to let her in. His kitchen smelled of cold coffee. He set a cutting from a rosebush on the table. The blossoms were deep black, the stems thick with thorns. "This grew in every haunted room I ever cleansed," he said. "The shadow feeds it. Hold a piece at midnight, and the shadow is bound to it. It cannot leave while you hold the stem." "For how long?" "Long enough to see its face." He wrapped the cutting in cloth. "But listen. When it can't run, it stops hiding. It looks back at you. Some children could not bear what looked back." Raven took the cutting anyway. She carried it home in both hands. At midnight she gripped the thorny stem. A thorn cut her palm. She did not let go. The shadow rose in the corner. It leaned toward the door, then stopped, as if a chain had caught it. It could not leave. For the first time it stood still. Raven stepped closer. The shape had blue eyes, exactly like hers. It had black hair, exactly like hers. She was staring at herself, but older, and wrong, with a mouth that opened too wide. "Finally," the shadow said, in her own voice. "You held on. Now you have to hear what I came to tell you." Raven's blood dripped on the floor. The shadow had a face now, and it was talking. She had wanted this. She could not take it back.