NABERIUS: The Pact

There is a particular quality of silence that exists only in places built to punish children, and it was into this silence that Evol Gemini was delivered on the night of his thirteenth birthday, though no one present knew it was his birthday, and he would not have told them if they had asked.

The detention block smelled of bleach laid thin over something older — urine, fear, the ozone tang of a fluorescent tube dying by degrees above the intake desk. A guard with forearms like ham hocks logged his name, his height, the peculiar heterochromia of his eyes — one green as pond-water, one already, even then, beginning to gild itself at the edges, though no one remarked on this, because no one yet had cause to look closely — and walked him down a corridor whose ceiling wept a slow brown stain in the shape of a continent no cartographer had ever charted.

They put him in a cell alone. This was, the intake officer explained without looking up from his clipboard, a mercy, on account of Evol's age. The boy did not think it felt like mercy. He sat on the steel shelf that passed for a bed and looked at his own hands in the dark and thought — not for the first time, but for the first time with the flat, exhausted clarity of a mind that has stopped bothering to lie to itself — that no one was coming.

His mother was not coming. She had made that clear in the particular grammar of absence, which does not require words, only the accumulation of doors closing at greater and greater distances. His father was a rumor, a shape sketched in the negative space of every question Evol had learned not to ask. The court-appointed woman with the tired mouth had murmured about *options* and *programs* and *given the circumstances*, and Evol had understood, in the animal part of himself that had been understanding such things since before he had words for them, that circumstances were a story adults told about children so they would not have to say the truth, which was: *no one is coming, and you already knew that, and we are only confirming it.*

It was in this hour — the hour when the last guard's footsteps had diminished to nothing and the building itself seemed to hold its breath — that Evol became aware he was not alone in the cell.

He did not hear it arrive. That was the first wrongness. The sound came *after* the presence, the way thunder arrives late to a lightning strike already scorched into the retina. A voice, when it spoke, seemed to originate not from the corner of the cell but from the soft tissue directly behind his own eyes, as though something had reached in through the aperture of his skull and taken up residence in the very apparatus of his seeing.

*You smell like a struck match,* the voice said. *Sulfur and possibility. I have been looking for you for a long time, little king.*

Evol did not scream. He would consider this, later, one of the great mysteries of his own character — that a child raised on abandonment and locked doors should meet the presence of something ancient and unspeakable in his cell and feel, above the fear, something almost like *relief*. Here, at last, was a thing that had come looking for him on purpose.

"You're not real," Evol said, which even he understood was a foolish thing to say to a darkness that was, at that moment, folding itself out of the corner of the room like a crow unfolding from an egg too small to have contained it.

*Realer than the woman who signed the papers that put you here,* the voice said, and there was, underneath its silk, an amusement so old it had worn smooth, like a stone in a river that has forgotten it was ever a boulder. *Realer than the father who is a blank space on your birth certificate. I am Naberius. I do not lie about what I am, though I will admit I am selective about what I choose to say.*

The shape resolved by inches. Feathers, but wrong — black going to bruise-purple at the edges, arranged not quite the way feathers should be arranged, as though something had studied a crane from a description rather than from life. A head that was almost avian and almost was not, the throat working with a sound like a door easing on a hinge that has never once been oiled.

"A demon," Evol said. It was not a question. He had read things. He had read the things that unhappy, unwatched children read at two in the morning by the light of borrowed screens, and something in him — some cold, clear river running under the ice of his fear — recognized the shape of what he was being told.

*A prince,* Naberius corrected, with the mild affront of a man whose title has been carelessly demoted. *Of a very particular office. I teach what men forget they knew — the arts, the sciences, the exact geometry of a lie that will be believed. I restore what has been lost. And I make monsters into lords, Evol Gemini, when the monster in question is worth the making.*

"What do you want."

*Direct. Good. I dislike wasting centuries on children who cannot ask a straight question.* The crane-shape settled, folding its wrongness into something almost companionable, the way a large dog will fold itself smaller to fit beside a bed. *I want you. Not your soul, boy — that is a peasant's transaction, the sort of thing sold at crossroads to men who have run out of better ideas. I want a Pact. A Life Pact. You give me a door into your years — I ride behind your eyes, I lend you what I know, I keep you from the small, stupid deaths that swallow children like you before they are old enough to be interesting — and in exchange you give me the only thing a thing like me cannot make for itself.*

"What's that."

*A life worth watching.*

Evol sat very still on the steel shelf, thirteen years old, an orphan in every sense but the paperwork, and understood with the terrible instant comprehension of the very young that he had, at that moment, precisely two futures. In one, he remained in this building, and the buildings after it, growing into the shape the system had already cut for him, a shape with a number instead of a name. In the other —

"If I say yes," Evol said, "what happens to me."

*You change,* said Naberius, and something in the dark that was almost tenderness moved through the words. *I will not lie to you and call the change small. But you will never again be a child that no one comes for. I will come for you. I am already here.*

The boy who would one day be called warlock, who would one day wear a black braided mohawk like a war-banner and a gold eye like a coin paid to something that never gives change, who would spend the whole architecture of his adolescence loving people who used him as a door rather than a destination — that boy looked at the crane-shaped dark folded into the corner of a cell that smelled of bleach and old fear, and said the word that every horror in every story ever told has been patiently, patiently waiting to hear.

"Yes."

The word left him like a held breath. And the dark came the rest of the way in.