I started keeping the feathers where I could see them.
Two black feathers, standing in a cup on my desk like the world's strangest bouquet. I told myself it was evidence — that if they were real every morning when I woke up, then I was not crazy, and if one morning they were gone, then maybe I had dreamed the whole mad thing and I could go back to being a girl whose biggest problem was a pink dress.
They were real every morning.
At school, I did what any normal girl would do. I did my homework. I laughed at Tessa's jokes at our cafeteria table, which was somehow already our table. I wore pink, and then I wore blue, and then — carefully, testing the water — I wore a black tee with my jeans on Friday, my own clothes, and nobody laughed, and Tessa said, "There she is," like the real me was someone worth waiting for. My new life was working. On paper, my new life was everything I had begged for in my old town.
And every night, he watched.
Not always at the window. Sometimes just the feeling of it — that prickle on the back of my neck on the walk home, the dark shape on a rooftop that was gone when I looked twice. He was patient. Whatever he was, whatever he wanted, he was in no hurry at all, and somehow that scared me more than the tapping had. A thing that is in no hurry has a plan.
On Saturday night my mom went to bed early with a headache, and I waited up.
I sat at my desk with the lamp off, in the dark, watching the yard the way he must watch me. Moonlight. The fence. The empty grass. My heart was going so hard I was sure it was loud. I did not know what I was going to do if he came. Scream, I supposed. Throw the lamp. I had no plan at all, and I sat there anyway, because I could not stand one more night of being the only one who did not know what was happening to me.
He came out of the sky without a sound.
One moment the yard was empty, and the next the raven was on the fence with its wings still spread, and then it was folding them as it dropped to the grass, and he was rising up out of the landing like a man standing up out of deep water. Tall. Dark. The feathered cloak settling around his shoulders. My breath stopped in my chest, and by the time I remembered how to breathe he was at my window, close, closer than anyone had ever stood to me in my life, with only the glass between us.
"Serena." His voice was low, and rough at the edges, like it did not get used much. "You are not sleeping. Three nights running now, you watch for me as I watch for you." He tilted his head, the bird's movement on the man's face, and I could not look away from him. "Why do you not run from me, little beauty?"
"Why do you keep coming?" My voice shook, and I hated it for shaking. "What do you want with me?"
His eyes — dark, older than his face, older than any face had a right to be — moved over me like he was reading something written on my skin that I could not see. "What I want," he said, "is to be in time. There is a thing in you that you do not know is there, and there are others who would take it out of you with knives, given the chance." A sound came from the trees across the street then — a crack, a settling of weight on a branch — and his whole body changed, went hard and sharp, and for one second I saw the raven in him completely, wild and furious and ready. "They are already looking, Serena. I have been between you and them since the morning you came to this town."
"I don't believe you," I whispered.
"You will." He stepped back from my window, and the dark seemed to rise up around him like water closing. "Sleep now. I will not take you while you still have a choice. But hear me — the night is coming when I will not be asking."
Then there was only a raven on the fence, and then there was nothing at all.
And in the trees across the street, something that was not him shifted in the branches, and was still.