Born in the Dark of the Year

Weston turned the phone over on the fourth buzz. He looked at the name for a second and then put it on speaker and set it on the mattress between them, face up, so she could see it too. Father. No picture. Just the word.

“You were in my house,” Samael said.

His voice was rough. Eva had heard him angry, in the study, and this was a man who had been asleep twenty minutes ago and hadn’t bothered to sit up yet. She could almost hear the pillow.

“I didn’t go,” Weston said. “He went.”

“I know who went.” A pause. A breath let out slowly through the nose. “Is she all right?”

Eva hadn’t expected that to be the second thing he said. She looked at Weston. Weston looked at the phone.

“I’m fine,” she said.

“Good.” Something in the line eased. “It wouldn’t have touched you. I want you to know that. I’d have woken first.”

“I know,” Eva said. “I told him that.”

There was a silence on the other end, long enough that she checked the screen to see if the call had dropped. It hadn’t.

“Then you understood it better than he did,” Samael said. “Azrael. Listen to me for once without arguing.”

Weston’s jaw set. He didn’t argue.

“The thing inside you is getting too strong for its own good. It’s been feeding on her for half a year, and every time it feeds, it grows. Faster than I’d have guessed. Faster than mine ever did.” The sheets rustled on his end. He was sitting up now. “And you aren’t growing with it. That’s the problem. It isn’t that it’s strong. It’s that it’s strong alone.”

“He’s not an it,” Eva said.

“He,” Samael allowed, after a moment. He didn’t sound like he was humoring her. He sounded like he was writing it down. “He is strong alone. He went into my dream tonight without you, son. Without your say. Without your knowing. That isn’t a rider testing a leash. That’s a rider who’s found out there isn’t one.”

“I’ve never put a leash on him.”

“I know. I watched you not do it for seventeen years.” Samael’s voice dropped. “You named him. You talk to him. You call him brother when you think nobody’s listening, and I’m always listening. And still, every time he moves, you say he did it. He went. He took over. As if he’s a dog that got out of the yard.”

Weston didn’t say anything.

“Until you start seeing him as the same as you,” Samael said, “he will keep acting on his own. Because as far as he can tell, he is on his own. You keep telling him so.”

Eva felt Azra go very still. It was the stillness of someone is listening hard to something they already knew.

“That’s how you did it?” Weston said finally. His voice came out low. “With yours.”

“Mine nearly killed me. You saw.”

“I saw you win.”

“I won because I didn’t let go. Three days,” Samael said it plainly, the way he’d said fate in the study. “I didn’t fight to throw it out. I fought to keep it, all of it, until it understood there was nothing in me that wasn’t already it. That’s what winning was. You don’t have to do it my way. God knows I don’t want you to. But you have to do it some way, Azrael, and soon. Because the next dream he walks into might not belong to a man who’d wake up for her.”

Eva put her hand flat on Weston’s back. His skin was warm again. Hot, almost.

“I’ll think about it,” Weston said.

“Think faster.” A pause. “And Eva.”

“Yes?”

“The rider said you weren’t afraid of it.” He didn’t say my rider. He didn’t say mine. “It hasn’t met anyone who wasn’t afraid of it since my mother.”

The line went quiet. Then, very carefully, the way someone sets something down they aren’t sure will hold: “Goodnight.”

The call ended. The screen went dark between them on the sheets.

Eva didn’t move her hand. Under it, Azra was still listening.

* * *

“He sounded different than he normally does,” Eva said as she turned to her nightstand and took out a notebook. Weston lay back down beside her to watch. She always wrote down every dream they shared together. “Like he actually cared for once.”

“He was half asleep.” Weston commented. Part of him didn’t want to argue with her. But he had spent most of his life with the version of his father that didn’t speak gently. This one seemed like a fluke.

“That’s what makes it believable to me. That man always performs for the room and I hate it. There was no performance today.”

She started writing. He was quiet.

The notebook was the cheap kind, spiral-bound, the cardboard cover gone soft at the corners from being opened and shut so many times. It was the third one. He’d seen her buy the second at the corner pharmacy with a pack of gum, and she’d started this one the week of the attack. She dated every entry. She wrote fast and small and slanted, and she never crossed anything out. When she got something wrong, she just wrote the right version underneath it and kept going.

He lay on his side with his head propped on his hand and watched the pen move. Yard. Frost. Ezekiel, white fire. Samael 12 or 13. Noelle on the steps, cup, bangs, cards. Tower on top. She drew a small rectangle in the margin and wrote XVI inside it.

He had never asked to read them. She’d never offered. He’d always figured that if she wanted him to know what was in there, she’d tell him, and she usually did, eventually, over coffee or in the car, in pieces.

“What was your grandmother’s birthday? Do you remember?” She asked after a little while.

“She was a Capricorn.”

Eva looked up from the page.

“That’s all I’ve got,” Weston said. “I was seven. There was cake once with snow on the windows, so it was winter. And she used to say she was a goat, stubborn, born in the dark of the year. She thought it was funny. My grandfather didn’t.”

“A goat,” Eva repeated softly.

She turned to a clean page. She wrote Noelle at the top, and under it Capricorn, and then she sat there with the pen against her lip, not writing anything.

“What?” he said.

“Every sign has a card in the major arcana,” She said it without looking at him. “Capricorn’s is the Devil.”

Weston didn’t say anything. Something cold moved through his stomach.

“It’s not a bad card,” Eva said. “People think it is. It’s not evil. It’s chains. Two people chained to a thing bigger than them, and the chains are loose enough to slip off, and they don’t.” She tapped the pen once against the paper. “It’s about what you stay bound to because you chose it. Or because you think you have to.”

He thought about a woman kneeling in the frost beside a dead boy with her hand on his chest. He thought about her coming down the basement stairs barefoot, already knowing.

“She chose it,” he said.

“I know. That’s what I mean.”

Eva wrote one more line under the name and turned the notebook toward him so he could see it, which she had never done before.

She knew every time. She went anyway.

He read it twice. Then he reached over and took the pen out of her fingers and, under her line, in his own blocky print that looked like a child’s next to hers, he wrote: So did you.

She looked at it for a long moment. Then she closed the notebook with the pen still inside it and put it back in the drawer, and lay down facing him in the gray before dawn.

“Go to sleep, Azrael,” she said. “Both of you.”

“You don’t know tarot. But you know Capricorn,” Azrael said anyway, because his mind was already awake. It was hard to turn off.

“You know why.”

“You’re a Capricorn moon, mars, venus…” He trailed off. “I forgot the other placements.”

“Uranus. Neptune. Midheaven.”

“The midheaven doesn’t count.”

“I know it doesn’t count. Go to bed.”

She pulled the blanket up to her chin and shut her eyes to make the point. He hadn’t forgotten. He’d wanted to see if she remembered. He watched her shut her eyes. Her mouth stayed set for a second, stubborn, and then gave up and went soft.

He’d known her chart since the first day she walked into his class. It was in her file, the way every student’s was, and he’d read it the way he read all of them, once, for the elements. He hadn’t studied it until a night in January, when she’d wanted more context than he could give her from memory. They’d sat on the kitchen floor with their backs against the cabinets and her phone between them, and she’d walked him through every placement, and he’d asked questions until past one in the morning.

He hadn’t known why it stuck until now. Capricorn, all through her. Goat, stubborn, born to keep climbing whatever was in front of it. And his grandmother on the back steps with her cup, born in the dark of the year, saluting her son across a frozen yard.

He didn’t say that part out loud. Eva would have called it a coincidence and then written it down anyway.

Her breathing slowed. Her hand found his wrist under the blanket and stayed there, the way it did most nights, two fingers resting on the inside of it.

Weston lay on his back and looked at the ceiling.

The room was going from black to gray. The window was still cracked, and the air coming in had the wet smell it got right before the birds started. In a few hours he’d be at the academy, standing in front of a room full of seniors three weeks out from graduation, pretending he’d slept. Marisa had Eva at ten. Ren was coming over after. There was a cake tasting on Thursday that he had agreed to and already regretted.

Ordinary things. He’d never had this many of them.

You’re still awake.

Weston went completely still.

It hadn’t come from the room. It hadn’t come from Eva, asleep with her fingers on his wrist. It came from under his sternum, low and close and plain, in a voice that had never once in his life said a word to him while he was awake in his own body. In the gray, yes. An hour ago, in a place that wasn’t anywhere. Not here. Not in his bed, with the window cracked and the birds about to start.

For sixteen years there had been heat. Hunger. A pull toward things he shouldn’t want. Then Eva, and the heat had turned into something he could almost read. But never words. Eva had heard him tonight. Weston had only heard her answer.

He didn’t move. He was afraid that if he moved, it would stop.

You can hear me, Azra said. Slower now. Testing. Can’t you.

“Yes,” Weston whispered. His throat was tight. “Since when?”

Since the gray. A pause. I didn’t have words before. I had what I wanted. She gave me the rest.

“Eva did.”

Every time I fed. There was something almost shy in it. I didn’t know I was keeping them until I needed them.

Weston stared at the ceiling. His father’s voice was still in his ear, rough with sleep. Every time he moves, you say he did it. He went. He took over. He’d said it himself an hour ago. I’m not doing it. He is. He’d meant it as the truth. It had been the truth. It was also, he was starting to understand, a line he had drawn himself, every time.

Sixteen years of it, of the thing, before Eva. Then he. And even he had always meant someone else.

He tried it differently, and it felt like putting his weight on a leg that had been broken. “We went into his dream.”

Azra didn’t answer. Something in Weston’s chest went still and warm.

“We saw her.” That came easier. “We saw our grandmother walk across the yard.”

Yes, Azra said, very quietly, as if more would make Weston take it back.

Weston didn’t take it back. He lay there in the graying room with Eva’s fingers on his wrist and let it sit. It didn’t fix anything. Tomorrow he’d probably wake up and say he again out of habit, and Azra would let him. But it was there now. He’d said it once, out loud, and something had answered.

Eva shifted beside him without opening her eyes.

“You’re thinking loud,” she mumbled.

“Sorry.”

“Both.” Her fingers tightened on his wrist, then loosened. “Sleep.”

He closed his eyes. The birds started outside, one, then a few. He was asleep before the third.

Weston felt Eva stir at the sound of his voice. He went quiet so he would not wake her a second time. He closed his eyes, and he used his own thoughts.

Why did you give her my name when she asked for yours?

Azra answered with a knowing. Not words. That was the kind of communication he was used to. But then he used words anyway.

We’re the same. But you want to be different. So I call you brother. So you can be what you want to be.

The knowing had come first, and it had already said all of it. It arrived the way it always had, whole, a weight settling in the chest that he understood before he could have put it into sentences. Their first shared dream, the first night Azra fed on her, and Eva in the middle of it with her chin up, asking what lived in him what it was called. Azra answering with the only name he’d ever been given, because he had never been given one of his own. Azrael. And her saying it back, and then later, in front of his father, cutting it short. Azra. As if she had looked at one name and seen room in it for two.

The words came after, slower, and they were careful. Weston could feel how careful.

Brother, he thought. I always thought you said that to get under my skin.

It did get under your skin.

He almost laughed. He held it in, because Eva’s fingers were still on his wrist and her breathing had only just evened out again.

I didn’t want to be you, Weston thought. It was true, and it was ugly, and he made himself think it all the way through. I didn’t want to be what he was. I thought if I kept you on the other side of a line, I’d never turn into him. So I called you it. The thing. I kept you in the basement of me.

I know. No anger in it. I was there.

And you let me.

You were twelve. A pause, and the warmth in his chest shifted, settled lower. You needed somewhere to put me. I went where you put me.

Weston opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling. It was almost light now. He could see the crack running from the corner of the window frame, the one he kept meaning to have someone fix.

Then she came, Azra said, and she didn’t put me anywhere. She asked my name.

And you gave her mine.

It was the only one I had that was worth anything.

Weston didn’t have an answer for that. He lay there with it until it stopped hurting to hold.

He thought about his father in the gray, the rider standing with its back to them at a grave that wasn’t there. I miss my mother every day. Samael’s grief in that thing’s mouth, because there was nothing in Samael that wasn’t already it. Forty years of that. One voice. No line.

He didn’t want that. He knew he didn’t. But he thought, for the first time, that maybe there was a third way, between the line and no line at all. Two names. One body. A brother he didn’t have to keep in the basement.

I don’t know how to do this, he thought.

Neither do I, Azra said. We’ll be bad at it together.

Weston let out a slow breath through his nose. Beside him Eva shifted, turned her face into his shoulder, and went still again.

The alarm on his phone went off at 6:40, and he reached over and killed it before the second tone. Seniors at eight. He sat up carefully so he wouldn’t disturb her, and stayed sitting for a second on the edge of the bed with his feet on the cold floor.

Morning, he thought, testing it.

Morning, Azra said back.