I did not open the window.
I want to say that I was brave, that I marched over there and demanded to know what a bird wanted with me in the middle of the night, but the truth is I pulled my blanket up to my chin like a little kid and I stayed exactly where I was, and the raven stayed exactly where it was, and for a long time we just looked at each other through the glass.
Then, like it had decided something, it spread those enormous wings and it was gone into the dark.
It came back the second night. Tap. Tap. Tap. Same time, same place, same patience — and I was angry this time, more than I was scared, because two nights of this and I was exhausted and I had school and I was supposed to be having a normal life. I got out of bed and I stood on my side of the glass and I whispered, so my mom would not hear me losing my mind at a bird, "What do you want?"
The raven tilted its head. And I swear — I will swear this to anyone who ever asks me — something in its face changed. Not the shape of it. The expression. Like it understood every word.
It came back the third night too. But the third night, it did not tap.
The third night, I was not even in bed yet. I was at my desk, pretending to study, when movement out in the yard caught my eye, and I looked up and my whole body went cold in a way it never had before, not even at the fence, not even at the school.
The raven came down out of the dark and landed in our yard, in the pale square of light from my window. And then — God help me, I know how this sounds — then it was not a raven anymore.
A man stood where the bird had been. Tall. Dark-haired. Dressed in black that did not look like any clothes I had ever seen, with feathers worked into it like a cloak, and shoulders that still held the shape of wings folding away. He stood there in my yard, in the light from my window, and he looked up at me, and there was nothing birdlike about his eyes at all. They were a man's eyes. They had always been a man's eyes. I had been looking into a man's eyes since the morning I put on a pink dress and tried to start my life over.
I must have made a sound, because his head tipped to one side — that same slow tilt, the one from the fence, the one from the windowsill — and the smallest smile touched his mouth, like he was pleased I had finally seen him.
Then my mom called up the stairs, "Serena? Who are you talking to?" — and I spun around, and when I spun back, the yard was empty.
Empty.
Except for the feather sitting on my windowsill, on the outside of the glass, exactly where he had been looking in.
I had put the first feather in my drawer.
I had never opened that window.
And there was a second feather on my sill.